Irony all the way down, or, why English departments can't have pub nights
A truth — though whether universally acknowledged or not, I don’t know — is that English departments don’t have pub nights.
When I was a graduate student at Yale, students in the English department would try, every year, to set up a weekly pub night. We’d start on the Green early in September. And if we were lucky, make it to the beginning of October. No matter what we did, it never stuck.
It wasn’t the people: we were all sociable enough and the group I was in in Medieval Studies had no problem setting up a weekly lunch; and it wasn’t the pub: one year the Historians chose the same pub and they managed to keep going all year.
The problem, I think, was us. I.e. as a collective of English grad students.
At the time I used to say that it was because it was so hard trying to gauge just how ironically detached one was supposed to be. If the reason for having the pub night is simply that we are students together in the same program, and I show up knowing that, can I also be genuinely interested in participating? Or does the fact that I know that you know that I am performing sociability in a structured way in order to make friends somehow vitiate the entire process?
You can imagine how exhausting this all was. As so like most new year resolutions involving intense exercise (the attempt to set up pub nights came at the beginning of each academic year, in September), the department’s attempts to organise social events ground to a halt after a couple of weeks.
I was recently remind of this in reading Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction. Early on in his book, an account of the impact of conglomeration on literature, he discusses his own origin story as an English professor.
It all began, he explains, with a love of books in his family (this all comes from pp. 23-25): his parents loved reading — mass paperbacks and middlebrow trades in the terms of Sinykin’s book — and an important tradition each year when they headed to the cabin near the Canada/Minnesota border was a stop at Barnes and Noble, where each kid could buy up to $25 in books. Sinykin’s father had been part of the Babyboom Tolkien rage, and Sinykin himself fell in love as a tween (it sounds like) with Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. Then, as he aged, his parent recommended the authors they loved: “Conroy, Crichton, Follett, Grisham, King, Michener, Uris, Vonnegut, and Wouk.”
Young Dan, however, found his parent’s tastes too middlebrow, and went for what he felt was the “East Coast… Europe[an]… sophistication and worldliness” of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Heller and Salinger. Later still, in AP English, it sounds like, he discovered Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the book, he explains, that “gave me everything I needed to become, years later, an English Professor: a talismanic object, with its teal spine and blueprint design, later to be held together with a strip of duct tape; a lesson in how to distinguish myself from others based on my taste; a fondness of liberatory politics; and a love of challenging prose, lush language.”
This is indeed the kind of story that leads many people to become English professors, and, mutatis mutandis, professors of most other disciplines as well. I too fell in love as a teenager with the “sophistication” and worldliness — and, to my adolescent eyes, manliness — of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Heller, and Salinger: when I was in my teens, I treated Franny and Zoey as a religion, and my group of friends in high school used to buy boxes of wine and sit up by the tracks pretending we were living The Sun Also Rises (we even got in trouble for using the line “it’s sort of what we have instead of God” in an article in our school newspaper describing the important of a space invaders machine at the local coffee shop to the graduating class at our Catholic school). And I too read Michener on my father’s recommendation (I loved The Tell and Bridges at Toko Ri) before deciding that he was far too commercial to be any good. And while my talisman was not Gravity’s Rainbow, the duct-taped symbol I carried around was my Wheelock’s Latin and Klaeber’s Beowulf: being an initiate into the “difficult books” club as as important to my self-definition (and self-discovery) as a scholar as it was to Sinykin.
So, so far so good… until, as Tolkien might say, “the Pub night comes.”* In other words, having explained his Eureka moment — the thing that made him a professional scholar and teacher — Sinykin goes on to undercut it all by getting into the exhausting game of second guessing himself:
It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic education not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again. (25)
With whom he probably — also conforming to type — failed to set up a standing pub night.
Nothing Sinykin says here is wrong. He was a type — and, as the fact that I shared almost all his precursor faux-sophisticated poses twenty years earlier and was also a cocky young white man who went to graduate school and became a professor for much the same reasons demonstrates, a classic one.
But the ironic — and nowadays racialised and gendered — self-critique is also conforming to type. English departments are full of people who are self-conscious about their privilege, and about the performative nature of their intellectualism, and about the degree to which their work is socially situated. In fact, being at least superficially aware of this is almost a job requirement (on the other hand, I’m also actually always amazed at the degree to which English professors — and other types of humanities and Social Science professors — can critique the socially constructed nature of power and privilege on a daily basis in their scholarly work, and yet not recognise the same dynamic when it plays out in the classroom or in their committees). Feeling slightly embarrassed about the naiveté of one’s early attempts to mimic sophistication is, in fact, almost as much a “talisman” of being an English Professor as carrying around a tattered copy of Pynchon is for an undergraduate honours student.
What I think is that we all need to go a lot easier on ourselves. In the last few years, for a different project, I’ve been reading a lot of teaching memoirs, and, if there’s one thing that bind them all together, it is what I call the Eureka moment that every author seems to have had at some point in their undergraduate career: the moment at which they internalise something they have learned and make it their own — stop consuming knowledge produced by others and start creating it for themselves according to their own system. For somebody who became an economics or political science professor, it might be realising that you can do Marxian readings of the material in all your classes; for somebody who became a historian, it might be suddenly recognising the constructed nature of all accounts of past events and attitudes; and for somebody who became an English professor, it might be suddenly seeing the joy and artistic pleasure in the “difficult” text: the degree to which you — I mean you, the undergraduate with literary pretensions — can genuinely read a text like Gravity’s Rainbow or The Waves for something other than plot — and belong, as a result, to an interpretive community who have the same approach to reading.
That such Eureka moments are going to be embarrassing to the subsequent scholar seems to be almost an axiomatic necessity: the Eureka moment is the moment when you begin to see yourself as potentially becoming a grown-up researcher and teacher and, for the same reason kids pretending to do their parents jobs are kind of cute — which means embarrassing if you’re the kid having to watch your toddler self at some family video night — there’s a necessary degree of cringe about the construction of the baby scholar. You don’t have anywhere near the sophistication to really operate at the top of your field, because you aren’t yet at the top of your field. You’re only beginning the process, grasshopper, and that’s why you still have to go to graduate school, get a PhD, and start publishing. But you won’t be able to do any of the other things if you don’t go through the nestling phase first.
What’s remarkable about English, however, is the degree we seem to fixate on developmental moments like this: bringing the entire analytic power of our subsequent training to expose the naiveté of the moment we first thought that maybe we could do it do. It’s like we all sit around at cocktail parties showing baby pictures of ourselves and critiquing the fact that we once needed diapers. In a certain sense I’m glad we are too naive in those early days to see the spectacle our later selves will be embarrassed about: if every beret-wearing undergraduate with pretensions to sophistication could only see themselves with their subsequent eyes, we’d have no English professors at all.
Which would at least alleviate the problem of trying to set up a pub night.
* “Until the dragon comes.” From the end of Tolkien’s famous essay arguing (in essence) for a literary and new critical, rather than historical reading of Beowulf in “The Monsters and the Dragon” (In keeping with the theme of this essay, I hope it is not ridiculous for me here to explain the allusion, given how important Tolkien-the-fantasy-author is to Sinykin’s personal and scholarly story; Tolkien-the-Anglo-Saxonist was to me like Pynchon to him.
