GENERAL

genre’s destructive ones have been and are, Elaine Showalter will unlock every roman à clef she can. And she can open lots. It’s a great part of the pleasure she affords. There’s Richard Blackmur, for instance, the ‘Arthur Buchanan’ of John Aldridge’s The Party at Cranton (1960), fabled Princeton biter of faculty wives; and Allan Bloom, right-wing defender of the canon, scarcely concealed as the approved-of hero of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein; and Stanley Fish, above all the egregious Stanley Fish, the boastful critical terrorist who ruined English departments for large sums of money (he liked reminding the poor saps at Hicksville U that the Alfa Romeo in the car park was the measure of his wellmerited stardom). He’s happy to be known as the original of the go-getting Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s Changing Places and its successors. He’s obviously the inspiration for the rabid Zachary Kurtz in John L’Heureux’s The Handmaid of Desire(1996), the terrorising theorist who sews up ‘the multicultural bag’ through his appointments of politically correct minority teachers and campaigns to oust old farts who teach literature because they actually love books. As Showalter’s sad story climaxes at the end of the last century, it’s Political Correctness that proves to be the ultimate demon in the machine: novel after novel – Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, J M Coetzee’s Disgrace, and so on – has good men brought low on faked-up charges of sexual or racial harassment. In American universities you close the tutorial door at your peril. Oddly enough, though she is happy to note moments when she features in the fiction as a right-on feminist critic (in David Lodge’s Nice Workit might be), Professor

Showalter hesitates to assume any responsibility for the troubles these novels frequently complain of. (She observes without dwelling on the fact that a lot of the academic novel’s bad guys are actually named Elaine.) She also thinks these novels are not serious enough. This is her main concluding thought. She claims, by way of illustration, that Nemesis by Rosamond Smith (ie Joyce Carol Oates), a case of sexual harassment based on events in the Princeton English Department, lacks the complexity and force of the realities that she knew at first hand. The Professorroman, powerful though it can be, rather fails, she claims, to cope with the actualities of the awfulness it treats. It trivialises the academic tragedy, in particular by going in for satire and for the repetitive ways of low-genre fiction, the crime-story mode. Which is to miss, I’d say, the real point of Lucky Jim, or Lodge’s carnivalesque Changing Places, or his academicconference celebration Small World; or, for that matter, of Evelyn Waugh; or, indeed, of David Lodge’s wonderful early novel The British Museum is Falling Down(about being a hapless graduate student of English), or that superior black-comic Krimi Death of an Old Goat, by Robert Barnard (about a visiting lecturer bumped off in Australia after getting his lecture notes on George Eliot and Jane Austen hopelessly confused), neither of which is mentioned by Showalter. The point is that the only way to cope with such large tragedies is to laugh at them, laugh them out of court, face them down with the sick joke and with farce. To laugh – as Sterne’s Yorick has it – is the only way to prevent yourself from crying. To order this book at £10.39, see order form on page 78

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006