Early in Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis’s brilliant satire of academic life, the struggling history professor James Dixon reflects with grim selfr-evulsion on an article he’s recently authored, “The Economic Influence of Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.” “It was the perfect title,” he ruefully observes, “in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.”
Dixon “had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse,” and he reproached himself for not having “defiled and set fire to the typescript” of his cursed scholarship.
By the time I finished my MA in history at U of T, this feeling had become quite familiar to me. When I applied to grad school, I envisioned myself studying what I wanted to study, political history, in the way I wanted to study it—researching in archives, finding documents, piecing things together. Was I ever in for a rude awakening. You can imagine my excitement as I cracked open a book on Victorian society, my favourite topic. “Following Derrida,” I read, straining my concentration, “a logic of the ‘supplement’ maintains that entities are not either/ or but both/and. Seemingly opposed entities in fact constitute each other, absence is always contained in presence and presence in absence. ‘Representation’ rests upon its firm foundations, reflecting it in the secondary domain of the imaginary.”
Huh? I read on as the book continued in this vein for 300 pages. Reassuring myself that this bloated monstrosity was a fluke, I reached for another of the six books I would have to read by the end of the week. My eyes lit up as I read the words “French Revolution” in the title. Finally. Guillotines and barricades, here I come.
“One can allow that the subject position occupied by any individual is the consequence of a particular discursive formation,” I read, my eyes glazing over, as I grew more exasperated, “but in positing that there will be a heterogeneity of discourses in any given situation, then, one must also allow that individuals become the site of heterogeneous subject positions constituted by these competing discourses.” Wait, what? Where the hell are my guillotines?
This continued at a rate of five or six books a week, for a whole year. At first, my response to this material was shaped by what I like to call “the Dante principle.” In his Inferno, Dante descends into the most terrifying depths of hell, only to emerge with a superior understanding of the universe. Reading these books was sheer torture, but I expected through this suffering to transcend ordinary perception, achieving a greater, more sublime comprehension of history. I threw myself into the task, stretching to wrap my brain around every concept of spatiality, subjectivity, eventality, and phallocentrality. Needless to say, I didn’t transcend anything.
AT THEIR BEST, THESE WORKS ADDED A THIN LAYER OF QUALIFICATIONS ONTO MY PREVIOUS UNDERSTANDING; USUALLY, HOWEVER, THEY GAVE ME NOTHING MORE THAN A HEADACHE AND THE BURNING DESIRE TO STICK MY HEAD IN THE NEAREST OVEN.
It’s not just that these works were written in a pompous, pseudo-intellectual jargon only vaguely resembling the English language: it’s also what they’re written about. In many aspects, my grad school reading material represented the ultimate veneration of the tedious and the obscure. From the development of miniscule 17th-century Newfoundland fishing colonies to the feminist implications of Depression-era gardening, no insignificant subject was overlooked. Have you ever wondered about counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from 16th-century semi-literate Ashkenazi midwives in southeastern Romania? Me neither.
Given this onslaught of obscurity, you might think that virtually any subject would be acceptable for study, but this is not the case. Your readings, classmates and professors all contribute to the sinking feeling that expressing any interest in Dead White Males is, to quote the American historian Joseph Ellis, “to inadvertently confess intellectual bankruptcy.” You can imagine my discouragement when I learned that my primary interest, so-called “high politics,” had been out of style for 20 years, its practitioners marked as persona non grata. Discussions, meanwhile, tended to fly from facts into the realm of abstract speculation. In class, I generally faced a choice between feigning interest—and, indeed, comprehension— in such issues as “agency,” “space,” “subjectivity,” and various other meaningless postmodern buzzwords, or sitting in stupefied silence. One friend of mine was even upbraided by a professor for his insistence on bringing up those nettlesome and apparently worthless “facts.” I preferred to fight nonsense with nonsense, passing comments like, “one thing I think that the author certainly is conscious of, however, is…” before inserting some completely random observation. Everyone always agreed.
Even with all this being said, grad school, as I experienced it, still faces one final and insurmountable criticism. Before creating The Simpsons, Matt Groening published a weekly alt-comic strip entitled Life is Hell.
IN ONE COMIC, GROENING TRAINED HIS SIGHTS ON GRAD SCHOOL. ONE QUESTION HAUNTS HIS GRAD STUDENT, HANGING OVER THE PAGE IN ENORMOUS BLOCK LETTERS: “WILL YOUR RESEARCH MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE?”
“Yeah,” the grad student unconvincingly replies in tiny, barely legible text, “sure.” Late in my MA program, I attended a conference on sexuality and the law, with the opportunity to meet the lawyer who headed the case that first overturned Canada’s ban on gay marriage. Speaking with someone whose actions had actually changed the lives of thousands, I felt overwhelmed by the breathtaking pointlessness of everything I was doing. How could one more unreadable, jargonaddled article on the subjective liminality of counter-hegemonic sock weavers possibly improve anybody’s life? From then on, faced with some pretentious piece of post-modern gibberish, the voices in my head begun to assume a sarcastic tone, like Dixon’s lecture at the end of Lucky Jim, “spitting the syllables out like curses.” I resolved to abandon the glamorous world of discursive formations and subjective phallocentralities, leaving to more capable hands the job of throwing pseudo-light on non-problems.
