War of the Encyclopaedists
Page 8
“From a Darwinian perspective,” said Professor Flannigan, turning to the class, “professors will possess those traits that ensure the highest likelihood of survival, tenure for the professor and department funding for the species. As such, we English professors have, over time, ensured our own usefulness by creating texts so dense with inclusive language that only a member of the elect can decipher them. The university bureaucrat may wonder whether studying Derrida or Hegel truly does enhance a student’s intellectual understanding of the world, and to whom does he turn for an expert opinion?”
“That’s how the clergy survived for centuries,” said the old guy at the end of the table. “They kept Mass in Latin, acting as translators for God.”
“Exactly, Mr. Fulmer,” Professor Flannigan said. “In this sense, then, professors don’t have jobs because there are difficult books requiring explication; rather, difficult books exist so that professors can have jobs! That’s assuming our enterprise is inherently useless, as Mr. Corderoy suggested. I submit that it is not.”
But how could it not be? Montauk was preparing for war—maybe a war based on bad ideas, but regardless, what Montauk was doing had real risks, real consequences—and here Corderoy was, talking about fucking books.
“When we apply various theories to a particular text,” Professor Flannigan said, “we learn something about the text and about the theory we are looking through, adding depth and intricacy to the body of our collective knowledge. Let’s have an example, yes? Ms. . . .” He looked toward a girl who had a Swede’s complexion and a Boston accent.
“Chelsea Harrow,” she said. The Yale girl.
“Give us a text, Ms. Arrow.”
“Ulysses?”
“Has anyone not read Ulysses?”
Corderoy had not read Ulysses, but he remained silent. A fat guy and the semi-cute brunette both raised their hands.
“Let’s see if we can find something we’re all familiar with,” Professor Flannigan said. “Any cultural item whatsoever.”
Corderoy racked his brain. Huck Finn, maybe? Of Mice and Men? The brunette asked if it had to be a book, then mumbled some suggestion. Her nose was too narrow.
“Remind me of your name again, dear,” Professor Flannigan said.
“Maria Sardi.”
“Thank you, Ms. Sardi. Has anyone not seen the Star Wars films?” He pronounced it filims, with an extra vowel.
Wait, what?
No hands were raised. “Perfect.” Professor Flannigan stood and began pacing in front of the blackboard. “We’ll begin with New Criticism, which argued that a literary text ought to be regarded as autonomous, that the intentions of the author and the historical circumstances in which the work appeared are extraneous.”
Corderoy felt violated. Star Wars didn’t belong here. It wasn’t meant to be taken apart by the cold intellectual grip of academics. He thought back to the last time he’d watched The Empire Strikes Back. With Mani. She had stared at him lovingly as an uncontrollable child’s grin had overtaken his face. Star Wars was the one place in his life where he was totally sincere, without a shield of irony.
“Thus,” Professor Flannigan went on, “when Han Solo says that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, a unit of distance, not time, New Criticism would say that the ignorance of George Lucas is irrelevant. The work stands alone. The Kessel Run, perhaps, can be accomplished in varying distances, the more difficult or dangerous routes being shorter.”
Corderoy had been staring at the dust motes in the sunlight, but now he gave his full attention to the professor, who was scribbling on the blackboard as he said, “Archetypal Criticism, based on the work of Jung and Campbell, sees literature as instantiating patterns and mythic formulae present in the collective unconscious. Any fool can see that Star Wars fits Campbell’s hero-quest framework: boy leaves home, boy finds mystic guide, boy rejects destiny, finds magic sword, loses mystic guide, accepts destiny, travels to underworld, meets father, transcends father, kills father, redeems father, et cetera.”
Corderoy could feel his pulse increasing.
“How about from a psychoanalytic perspective?”
Sandy Bigjaw suggested that the Dark Side was pure id. She misquoted the Emperor’s speech to Luke: “ ‘Give in to your fear, take your weapon, strike me down.’ ”
“Brilliant,” Professor Flannigan said. “And the Jedi are the superego, constantly self-monitoring, making the sound moral judgments for the good of the Republic. A Jedi would rather die than give in to temptation. How about Marxist theory?”
A student with neatly parted hair and black Gucci eyeglasses cleared his throat. “We could analyze the struggle between the proletariat Rebels and the bourgeois Empire as a form of dialectical materialism,” he said.
Professor Flannigan scrawled dialectical materialism on the blackboard. Corderoy suddenly felt small and excited, like a child at an amusement park, not tall enough for any of the rides. Here they were, in grad school, talking about Star Wars! And it wasn’t terrible at all. It was like seeing it again for the first time, but through his adult’s eyes. Though everyone else seemed to have a leg up on the proper lingo.
“Post-colonialism,” Professor Flannigan said, “might examine the Jedi as an ethnic group in Diaspora. Yoda and Obi-Wan and the few remaining Jedi having fled the galactic center for the remote planets of Dagobah and Tatooine. How about existentialism?”
Maria Sardi said, “Han Solo.”
“Go on,” Professor Flannigan said.
Corderoy stared at Maria Sardi, prepared to judge the living shit out of her for whatever minor interpretive flaw she might apply to this sacred fictional personage.
“At least in the beginning,” she said with the ghost of an Italian accent—een the begeening—“Han Solo could be seen as an atheist existentialist. He’s a mercenary by trade, and for him the world has no inherent truth or meaning. The Empire is no worse than the Republic.”
Maria Sardi: officially cute.
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons,” Corderoy said to her.
“Excellent,” Professor Flannigan said. “And from the phenomenological point of view, the Force can be seen as an expression of yearning for a world not reducible to the phenomena of conscious experience. A desire to be certain of more than merely our perceptions. Obi-Wan tells Luke to put down the blast shield on his visor, to not let his eyes deceive him, to trust his feelings.”
A round-faced Korean student chimed in. “I was thinking about Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model of mass media. That all sources of information are biased. Maybe that can explain certain inconsistencies. Like, why are the storm troopers, highly trained shock troops, incapable of hitting the heroes with a blaster shot?”
“Brilliant, Mr. Lee. The movies themselves are a form of Rebel propaganda, with a Rebel bias. Is anyone familiar with semiotics?”
“The study of signs,” said the old guy, “and how they signify.”
“Exactly. We could look at the significance of light saber colors (blue/green versus red), the shapes of starships (the Empire’s are angular, the Rebellion’s rounded), and the various ritualistic phrases (May the Force be with you or What is thy bidding, my master). And on a macro level, the binary opposition that gives each element meaning, for there would be no Dark Side without the Light.
“The structuralists might say that upon breaking Star Wars down to its mythemes, the component parts of the larger mythos, we see that the actions of Luke, the orphaned hero, are significant only in the larger mythical structure, which contains the frail king and hidden father (Vader) and the prophecy (bringing balance to the Force), which itself is a kind of structure that binds everything together. And post-structuralism and deconstruction are what allow us to inhabit all these interpretations simultaneously.
“That was fun, yes? I hope so, for your sake, because that’s wh
at we’ll be doing this semester. Is it a waste of time? We could be carpenters or pornographers, after all.” He nodded toward Corderoy. “And chances are you’re not going to be Aristotle. But I offer you this to ponder: the search for human meaning—what could be more important?—must happen through intellectual investigation that is not tethered to empirical knowledge or scientific progress. Where would we be if we didn’t have a million people searching for the truth?”
Professor Flannigan handed out the syllabus and said, “That’s it for today. And one last thing. Some of you were silent during our discussion. I hope you’ll learn to participate. If you weren’t familiar with Star Wars, you should have spoken up. I’m looking at you, Mr. Corderoy.”
Corderoy drew back, astonished. He, of all people? Of course he’d seen it. He wanted to explain that he’d been enthralled, but the words caught in his throat.
“There’s no shame in not having read a book or having seen a filim.”
Corderoy nodded and threw his spiral notebook into his messenger bag—the only thing he’d written all class was Lit Crit I at the top of the first page. As he stood up and shuffled out of the room, he decided to buy a copy of Ulysses on the way home.
10
* * *
When Corderoy arrived back at the apartment that evening—it didn’t feel like his apartment, not yet—he was feeling high, congenial, horny, even. Since leaving Seattle, leaving Mani, and arriving in a foreign setting with a host of new romantic possibilities, he had been as prone to erections as his eighth-grade self. And the exhilarating discussion in class that afternoon, combined with his incipient crush on Maria Sardi, had made him antsy. His roommate, Tricia, was sitting on the couch, watching news coverage of some protest. A bottle of Johnnie Black sat on the coffee table in front of her.
“What are they protesting?” he asked.
“The RNC. They’re saying it was almost half a million people today.”
“The what?”
Tricia laughed. “The Republican National Convention. In New York City. Where have you been?”
Corderoy gave a whimsical shrug.
“Want some whiskey?”
“Sure,” he said. He went to the kitchen and rinsed a glass from the sink. He got some ice and looked again at the refrigerator magnet he’d scoffed at the day he’d arrived, FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE.
He sat down next to Tricia and poured his whiskey slowly, listening to the ice ping and pock. Then he refilled her glass, neat, while Tricia took her pack of American Spirits from the table and lit one.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly was saying there had been nearly two hundred arrests for disorderly conduct, that nine people were charged with felony assault on officers.
“I knew a cop who worked the WTO riots,” Corderoy said. “Got to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas at people.”
“That’s awful,” Tricia said, turning to face him. “Shooting people with rubber bullets sucks for the cops, too. You talk about it like it’s cool.” Her cat, Smokey, leapt up on the couch and curled her head into Tricia’s scratching fingers.
Corderoy didn’t know how to respond to that. In the three days he’d known Tricia Burnham, he’d stumbled into arguments about social welfare, about the justness of war, about heteronormativity. Each and every time, she’d stymied him. He knew that if they got into it now, she’d be better able to point to an important book or a particular theory to justify her position. “I actually read The Road to Serfdom,” she’d said in their last argument.I He wanted to win, to beat her, and he couldn’t do it with wit or charm. That, more than anything else, made him want to fuck Tricia Burnham.
She was certainly cute. And she maintained herself well—her bangs were neatly cropped, her eyebrows plucked, her nails painted. She was wearing a black skirt that emphasized her trim waist.
He knew the basics, that she was getting her Ph.D. in International Relations and Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School (“The what?” he’d asked, feeling stupid. “Oh, it’s Harvard”). That she was from New York. That she had expensive tastes (Johnnie Black). That she was even more left-wing than he was. That she was sharp and sincere. Most of all, that she was single.
“Have you been in any protests?” Corderoy asked.
“February last year. In New York.”
“I think I’d feel dumb holding up a sign in a crowd of signs.”
“I saw a guy on stilts dressed as the Grim Reaper, wearing an American-flag cape—to protest nothing less than the organized killing of human beings. But hey, if looking stupid and holding a sign draws attention to an important issue . . .”
“Never thought of it that way,” Corderoy said. He leaned forward, made eye contact, and the conversation moved to more personal topics.
Tricia Burnham, surprisingly, was only twenty-one. He’d thought from how she talked, how she carried herself, that she was at least twenty-five. She’d started at Barnard at sixteen with AP credits and had graduated by nineteen, taking summer courses. She’d spent a year as an intern with a documentary team on a First Nations reservation, making a film about Native American adoption and child welfare. Then she’d entered the Kennedy School. She was a pescetarian, a bisexual. She smoked only American Spirits because they donated their profits to the Native American Rights Fund. She’d rowed crew her freshman year at Barnard, but she’d stopped to focus on her studies. Since the summer, she’d been volunteering for the Kerry campaign, organizing bus trips to bring college kids from Boston and New York to canvass in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She was leaving Saturday morning on a twelve-hour bus trip to Meigs County, Ohio, an important swing county for a crucial swing state. And did he want to join her? Lie and say yes? No, the truth: that wasn’t really his thing. And did she want another drink? Yes, she did. She was Jewish—her mother’s maiden name was Meyer—and she’d grown up in Westchester. Corderoy didn’t know what or where Westchester was, but he was pretty sure it meant privilege. He wondered if all her humanitarian activities came from a place of guilt. She had a “marking” (tattoo) on her shoulder blade: the tribal symbol from the Oglala Sioux, a circle of nine tepees representing the nine districts of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Her shoulder was pale and pocked with small freckles. He wanted to touch it.
“Do you have any tattoos?” she asked.
He did. He lifted up his left sleeve and showed Tricia his. It was a crescent-shaped symbol with a fleur-de-lis-ish point coming out of the inner curve to make a sort of birdlike shape. “I served in the Rebel Alliance,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The Rebel Alliance insignia. From Star Wars.”
“Wow, you are a dork.”
“Nerd, not dork.”
“Okay, nerd.” She smiled and topped off their whiskeys. “So you’re a Rebel supporter, huh?”
“You think I’d support the evil Galactic Empire?”
“Doesn’t the rebellion want a society ruled by the . . .”
“The Jedi.”
“Yeah, the Jedi, aren’t they like a caste of warrior priests? It’s like the worst parts of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran put together.”
He didn’t know shit about Iran—though he really ought to have, after months with Mani—so he couldn’t contradict Tricia. But talking Star Wars was a game he could win.
“This isn’t the messy real world,” he said. “In this universe, the Light Side of the Force is, like, objectively good.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean the movie’s not racist.”
Corderoy was speechless.
“You never noticed? I mean, the evil black bad guy, the blond-haired, blue-eyed hero.”
“C’mon. It’s more like a critique of American imperialism or something. The Jedi are like an ethnic group in diaspora. And Darth Vader, in the third movie, he takes his helmet off, and he’s a white dude.”
Corderoy had a dim awareness that Tricia was doing this just to get a reaction out of him, but it was working too well for that awareness to matter. “But black people—I mean, African-Americans—love Star Wars.”
“Just like they love fried chicken.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, who’s it hurting? If it is racist, it’s to such a small degree that it’s not worth bothering about—the most pragmatic choice is to simply enjoy it for what it is.”
Tricia put down her glass and shook her head in silent laughter. “Hal, chill out. I’m just jerking your chain.”
Corderoy took a deep breath and tried to laugh.
“Partly, anyway,” she said. “I think it’s important to recognize these things, even if they are small. It’s the subtle racism that’s most pervasive.”
Tricia pulled out another American Spirit, put it to her lips, and flicked her lighter. Corderoy stared at her as she took a drag; she held the cigarette out to him. He took it in his hand and hesitated. “No thanks,” he said, handing it back. “I’m still quitting.”
“Heard that before,” Tricia said.
Corderoy turned back to the protest footage on TV. He finished his whiskey. He said good night, then shut himself in his bedroom.
• • •
He was beginning to think that he’d made a mistake in moving to Boston. He realized the foolishness in making such a quick judgment—one should expect some acclimation time when moving across country—but the realization only propelled him further backward through the deterministic chain of mistakes that had led him here. He began obsessing once again about the night he’d left Mani at the party, the night she’d been hit by a car. This was not only a moral mistake but a pragmatic mistake, for it was absolutely clear, at this hour of the evening, alone, in Cambridge, that Mani’s presence was the one thing that could make him happy. He thought of her hair, black with streaks of dark blue, of the small tattoos on her lower back, cello f-holes; he thought of how, when she would sit on his lap at parties, he would rub the skin of her kneecap through the hole in her jeans, with barely perceptible motions, as intimate and discreet as sex in a room with other sleeping people. Corderoy began stroking himself, his eyes closed, his hardness dependent entirely on memory—a skill he’d allowed to atrophy in the age of Internet porn—and it felt good, not just physically but morally, as if there were a purity in the act that somehow mitigated, however slightly, the wrong he’d done. The more he thought of this, though, the more it seemed like a crock of shit, and the dirtier he felt recalling the feel of Mani’s mouth. Cigarette smoke crept under his door from the living room, and his dick went limp in his hand.