CENTRE FOR NEWFOUNDLAND STUDIES TOTAL OF 10 PAGES ONLY MAY BE XEROXED (Without Author's Pennission) CRITIQUING THE CAMPUS: ACADEMIC PRACTICE AS LITERARY SUBJECT IN THE CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITY NOVEL by © Meghan Dimmick A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial ful~llment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Memorial University of Newfoundland August 2002 St. John's Newfoundland Dedication For my mum and dad and for Lewis. 111 Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the School of Graduate Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Larry Mathews for his active support and helpful criticism in each stage of this project. I would also like to thank Dr. William Barker for his energetic responses. IV Table of Contents Abstract 11 Dedication 111 Acknowledgements IV Introduction Chapter One Competition and Idealism 22 Chapter Two Corporation and Conununity 73 Chapter Three Uncertainty and Truth 123 Chapter Four TI1e Creative Critic and TI1e Creative Artist 179 Chapter Five Solitude and Civility 226 Conclusion 269 Bibliography 293 v 1 Critiquing the Campus: Academic Practice as Literary Subject in the Contemporary University Novel A Brief History of the Contemporary University Novel1 The university novel as we now know it came fully into being sometime shortly after the Second World War. Novels such as C.P. Snow's The Light and the Dark (1947) and The Masters (1951), Mary McCarthy's Groves ofAcademe (1952) and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) were instrumental in establishing the modern tradition of this unique sub-genre. Before that, in the late eighteenth and earlier half of the nineteenth century, academic fiction by and large represented the university in a much more idyllic light, often centring upon the nostalgic recollections of former students who had a tendency to identify the university with the questing innocence and exuberance of youth and who courted fond memories of daft dons and witty professors. Novels such as Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown at Oxford (1885) and Compton MacKenzie's Sinister Street (1913-4) set the standard for this kind of depiction and determined the larger course for the university novel for decades after their publication. Richard Sheppard, in his study of the "fictional vilification of the learned" (18) over the last two hundred years, identifies this earlier period in the history of the university novel as a time of relative confidence and security in the relationship between the society at large and the university itself. He notes that, 1 For a more extensive history, the studies mentioned herein by Proctor, Lyons, Carter and Rossen are invaluable. 2 Because ofth[e] sense of secure establishment, centrality and divine ordination [experienced at this time], the dons and undergraduates who populated fictional Oxbridge between Sinister Street and the mid-1950s were accorded either a respect. .. or a good-humoured licence ... which would become increasingly impossible after the publication of Lucky Jim. (35) Sheppard makes it clear that, after Lucky Jim, the university novel changed importantly in specific response to the changing image of the university as a social institution. When the university was believed to be representative of society and a locus of culture, when it was commonly (even though perhaps, still, only ideally) accepted that the university was staffed with teachers experienced in all the best that had been thought and written, and trained men to be gentlemen, its place and purpose in the society was relatively secure. 2 But, as this sense of the university's means an~ purpose changed, the questions being directed at the university began to undermine, instead of reaffirm, its place. The result, in stark contrast to the earlier idealizations of the university, is Lucky Jim, a novel that is frankly disapproving, at times, even vitriolic, in its criticism of the academy. Lucky Jim is a fair representative of the clear movement away from the more positive depictions of campus life typical in the earlier half of the century. Indeed, it is generally accepted that at this time "the fashion for novels about politely amusing campus high jinks comes to an end" (Lyons 68), and that, after the Second World War, one "no longer. .. find[s] novels 2 Although the university may have enjoyed a more secure position in the society at this time, clearly, it was only important in, and representative of, the lives of the upper-class men who had access to it. It is, in part, the changing notion of the use of the university that upset this security. 3 extolling the beneficent effects of existence among the dreaming spires" (Proctor 180). 3 Instead, the university novel begins to question the merit and function of the university, and from the soft haze of sentimental reminiscence the university is pulled into a much sharper, and a much more critical, focus, such that, ... the latter-half of the 1960s was to see the beginning of a growing chorus of criticism that became increasingly bitter ... The indictment of the entire university experience, projected by more than one hundred novels [from the 1960s to the 1980s] .. .is painfully exhaustive ... and it is an indictment which continues to this day. (Bevan 102) However, while the criticism of the university that distinguishes contemporary academic fiction from its most immediate predecessors is certainly more embittered and more exhaustive than it generally was previously, it is a mistake to dismiss this development of the sub-genre as a simple regression into personal invective and antagonistic complaint. For the shift in tone from the sentimental to the critical is, also, and notably, accompanied by a general perspective shift that has allowed for an important development in the sub-genre. In the earlier twentieth century novels, the university experience tended to be explored through the eyes of a student, either present or past. Currently, this tendency has been almost completely reversed and contemporary university novels generally are told from the perspective of a professor, as an, at least 3 Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) stands out perhaps as an exception at this time for its use of the university as a specifically idealized place, one that is characterized by the youthful exuberance of its students and by their invigorating freedom from the pressures of the real world. But Waugh seems to be hearkening back to earlier representations of the university just as his main character is hearkening back to an earlier time. The new mood of the university novel, as represented by Snow, McCarthy and Amis, is 4 potentially, more permanent member of the university. This is an important shift because it allows the university novel to become less simply a novel of initiation or nostalgic recollection and more a novel about the process, the value, and the purpose of post- secondary education. While this makes room for the kind of vicious complaint to be found in Arnis' Lucky Jim or the sense of cynical disillusionment one experiences in Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975), it also allows for the much more careful, critical examination of the workings of the university found, for example, in Snow's Strangers and Brothers series (1947-1971). Ultimately, this shift, far from being regressive, has the potential to encourage "the university novel [to] ... overcome the handicaps and limitations inherent in its subject matter" (Proctor 190) and cause it to deal with the real questions that face the academic community. Thus, the current university novel is in a position to ask the questions 'that are most pressing both inside and outside the university itself, namely, "What are the ends of a university education? Or even more broadly, What is a university?" (Proctor 190). In England and the United States particularly, the lure of these questions has caused the sub-genre of the university novel to flourish, and writers like J.I.M. Stewart, Barbara Pym, and Tom Sharpe, in Britain, and Alison Lurie, Vladrnir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, in the States, have all turned their hand to the writing of academic fiction. 4 In characterized by a much more realistic tone, in its closer critical look at the workings of the contemporary university. 4 J.I.M. Stewart (who also wrote under the name Michael Innes) wrote upwards of twenty novels that deal to varying degrees with the university. His last and arguably most accomplished university novel was The Naylors (1985). Barbara Pym has also written several university novels, including No Fond Return of Love (1961) and An Academic Question (1986), while Tom Sharpe's academic satires include Porterhouse Blue (1974) and The Wilt Alternative (1979). For the Americans, Alison Lurie is most readily identified as a university novelist with novels like Love and Friendship (1962), The War Between the Tates (1 974) and Foreign Affairs (1984). Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962) are often cited as among the 5 Canada, the sub-genre has been slower to catch on. Robertson Davies' 1982 novel Rebel Angels, Carol Shields' 1987 novel Swann (which will be treated at length in Chapters One and Four) and John Kenneth Galbraith's novel The Tenured Professor (1990) are the major examples of the Canadian university novel.5 All these books add to a sub-genre that increasingly is attracting to its fold many of the most prestigious and best-known writers writing today. This, perhaps above all else, provides good reason to study the university novel, to provide an adequate critical response to the increased creative attention in the sub-genre. A Brief Overview of Studies of the University Novel To date, the major studies of the university novel have been comprehensive in scope and bibliographical in effect; their primary goal has been to prove that the university novel exists as a discemable and viable sub-genre.