The Droves of Academe

As an academic in training, I’m supposed to resist broad claims, but I’d like to begin with one: the novel is an essentially educational form. I don’t mean that novels are didactic (though they can be), but learning is built into them, whether the characters learn or the readers or both. Narrative tends to break life into lessons, be they epiphanies, false epiphanies or Aesop-like morals.

In the twentieth century, the post–World War II boom in college education, aided by the G.I. Bill in the United States and similar measures in physically and economically devastated Britain, bred what we now call the academic novel. Two definitive examples, which I’ll write about here, are Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Both these books possess the crucial genetic feature of their inheritors: brutal and caring satire, an element that established the genre and that distinguishes some of the best-known academic novels that have come since: Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jane Smiley’s Moo, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. The preponderance of academic novels has led to several book-length studies, most recently by prominent literary critic Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents.

   Lucky Jim. Kingsley Amis, Penguin, 2000, 272 pp., $17.76.

All academic satires echo in some way the conventions established by Kingsley Amis’s best-known novel, Lucky Jim. Those conventions range from its bitter protagonist, Jim Dixon (bitter about his tenuous, untenured university position), to the social and structural hierarchies within academic departments to the awkward interactions they necessitate. In the novel, unhappy Jim kowtows to the superiors he dislikes, most notably the head of his department, Professor Ned Welch. Against Jim’s own wishes, he takes on as a girlfriend an inelegant colleague who happens to be senior to him in the department and has recently attempted suicide. He hates his subject matter, medieval history, and has produced a paper, “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485,” which remains unpublished. “It was a perfect title,” Jim thinks, “in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” What makes the title and all that it implies—the studied emphasis on far-distant minutiae, Jim’s active distaste for the life he’s chosen—so wonderful is not just that it captures the excessively specialized nature of much scholarly research but also that it suggests Jim’s approach to this knowledge. He works outside his own preferences, erasing himself in his work. He has nothing to do with shipbuilding, no prevailing interest in medieval history. (However, given his dire need for money, he has a deep interest in economics, inasmuch as he needs money to buy his next pint.)

Those conflicts come to a head in various small moments in the novel (Jim creates for himself too many social obstacles to summarize here) and, in the end, in one of fiction’s great scenes of public embarrassment. Welch has contracted Jim to give a talk on Merrie England and the traditions that England should hold dear, which happen to be the traditions Jim hates. He sees the talk as vital to his future employment at the university and has steeled himself the only way he knows how—with alcohol. In a drunken attempt to curry favor with Welch, who has just introduced him, Jim loudly imitates Welch as he barrels through the lecture. Reacting to the audience, Jim then shifts to imitating the college’s principal. Eventually, once he’s alienated just about everyone, he passes out. Later, soberly (in both senses) reflecting on the lecture, the Jim who throughout the novel has created comic faces (his Evelyn Waugh face, his Edith Sitwell face) is “at a loss for faces.” For the Jim Dixons of the world, the struggles of the middle-class scholar require a constant theater in which one must play expected roles...