The Debt To Pleasure

      Not too long ago I was asked-- again, for the umpteenth time over the years-- whether or not a student, this particular one ambitious and fairly bright, should apply to graduate school to do an M.A. in English.   In my early years as an instructor, I generally encouraged my students to apply, usually with the notation that, at the very least, the MA is a short degree and good test of one's genuine interest in a field. The MA is usually a baptism by fire, and I remember how many of my colleagues when I did my Master's degree fled from academic study with a fugitive's fear, or with the "thank God it's over" response typical to some women who, having just given birth, decide that one child is quite enough, thank you very much.   In short, I used to say roughly the equivalent of "try it, or you'll never know."   When asked, though, this question in more recent years, I've become more tentative, and certainly more awkward, in part because I'm no longer certain how much graduate school really offers anymore, at least to the student of literature.   I try not to let my own disaffection for the current state of the academy to colour my response, but it's inescapable.   I stuck to my old answer, but I felt vaguely dishonest about encouraging this student to pursue grad studies.   More to the point, I wondered-- in fact, worried slightly-- that I may have directed said student toward the gallows.

            Read on with this niggling?

      When I was younger (and stupider), I thought, as young idealists are wont to think, that grad school and life in the academy was the place to cultivate one's love of field.   Natch.   My recent thinking on the matter is that the academy is now the place where passions go to die, like elephants lumbering towards their ends.   I'm struck more and more with each year that passes how many of those people seem to lose any real interest in literature, and how many (especially those groomed by those professors in their late thirties and early forties) develop an intellectual smugness that is very often just a form of guised antipathy.   I've always chagrined these sorts of "scholars," because more often than not they tend to inculcate in others a sense of superiority over literature, by which all one's hard-learned apparatuses become more relevant than the intimate study of (heaven forfend!) literature qua literature.   Watching so many of my colleagues over the years, I've been struck by the extent to which thinkers either become so ensconced in their own senses of ironic sophistication as to end up as platitudinous vessels of the same-ole-same-ole criticism of little value except to one's c.v., or they end up pretending to be discussants of literature while talking about everything but, from hip-hop to Gallo-Germanic philosophy to political prognostication.   As more than a few of my colleagues have admitted to me in private conversations over the years, a lot of today's and tomorrow's teachers of literature really don't like literature very much, confessions I found alarming when I first used to hear them but which I now find par for the course.   And there it is, the disturbing, lamentable rub, that I've become cynical about the astonishing cynicism of so many of my colleagues and former instructors, and of so much of the academy as a whole.   I wish I knew better how to respond to this, but I don't.   It's almost become a truism that advanced study has become a process of stultification: far from teaching the disinterested study of a subject, it very often, at least in recent years, inculcates uninterested study-- or, just as bad, over-interested study that is really just ideological zealotry given a subtler face.   (The uninterested and the over-interested very often bleed into one another, folded into a single party and accepting a constitution of babble.)   Through it all, I guess I've become something of a despairing Quixote, the (Not-So-Good) Doctor of the Sorrowful Countenance.

      I've been thinking about all this a fair bit lately, partly occasioned by that student's question, and partly occasioned by a kind but certainly untrue compliment from friend at the university who said that I was "the most truly academic person he's ever met."   (This friend has been around said university for the better part of thirty years, so it's not exactly a light statement on his part.)   The irony here, of course, is that in an older context, I'd surely be considered "very" (not "most" by any stretch of the imagination) academic, but by current standards I'm surely considered one of the least academic.   It's a strange paradox, one by which I'm more unsettled than I perhaps should be.   I think I understand what he meant-- that I love what I do and what I study in a way that is different than the norm-- but it's that word "academic" that bothers me.   I can't help but feel that word has been worsened over the years, or redefined in ways that make it seem so pedantically-determined as to exclude some of its once-crucial dimensions.   Advanced study, for this dog at least, has lost most of its last vestiges of nobility and sincerity, only to replaced with ever more components of calculation and cynical contrivance. Soemtimes I'm inclined to wonder if graduate study isn't just for those precious few that aren't quick enough to learn the first time, in their undergradling stages, how to become good little paradigmatic thinkers.   And, for God's sake, don't love what you study. Or, at least, don't love those hairy, hoary, silly, unkempt, goofy humanistic dimensions of what you study that were drummed out when they finally got Matthew Arnold out of print.  

      Gar! There it is again, my own cynicism about the cynicism of others, which I guess is rather a lot like having a superiority complex about those with superiority complexes, and must surely be a hypocrisy of some sort.   No wonder it gets so difficult to seperate the paradoxes from the oxymora.   Damn and blast, damn and blast, damn and fucking blast.

      I guess what bothers me most-- however cynical or romantic this may be-- is the extent to which I fear young people will have their love of what (and how) they study neatly checked by our pretensions toward "awareness" and "knowing." By no means a religious man, I do still believe (ugh, there's that word, "believe") a little deference and an appropriate sense of one's capacity for mystification can keep one honest.   (And, oh yes, humble, a quality I unfortunately seldom see in academic circles anymore.)   Good teachers teach, as if by measure of their adequacy; great teachers demonstrate why they do what they do, and they impart at least a sense of their purpose, a sense of the voice in one's vocation.   Or, as E.M Forster might have said, they evince the passion beneath the prose.   Or, if not the passion, then at least the pleasure, even if, like the oaken taste of good Scotch, it's not one's own idea of pleasure.

      Right now, though, I'm uneasy with what I said to that student, wondering if I have given bad advice and sent that care and that ambition to be hanged-- or, worse, subjected to dehydration, that space upon which those gallows stand being arid and so very often isolated.   But I find myself increasingly frustrated by the sense that the academy tends not to think it owes a debt to pleasure, to the joy that might sustain our brighter and more ambitious minds through their darker nights of the withered, overworked soul.   We all need our checks and balances of faith, lest we walk away, cynical and abjuring, or lest we persist as poseurs of hackneyed and milquetoast (or would that be melba-toast?) thought.   I guess, at the end of things, I hope my awkward advice hasn't sent a student, with that undergradling energy increasingly rare these days, toward a place more mirage than oasis.