A friend recently asked me for examples of the “campus
novel”, especially local ones – and I couldn’t think of many. Internet sources list dozens from elsewhere –
David Lodge’s satirical novels pre-eminent among them – but for South Africa I
could only recall J M Coetzee’s grim novel Disgrace,
which features its disgraced professor but is only partly campus-set; and
there’s Graham Lang’s Clouds Like Black
Dogs, set in the art department of my own university. I’m told there are one or two others, but
none that I’ve read.
I don’t know that we have anything on the scale or density
of Jane Smiley’s new novel, Moo. Some years ago I was hugely impressed by her
Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres,
a Midwest-America “rewriting” of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The fictional Moo
University is also located somewhere on the flat Midwestern plains, and is an
institution with a strong agricultural-research element. Hence there’s a lot about pigs (or “hogs”, as
they prefer), chickens and cattle, and the eating thereof. But also so much more about the inner
workings (I’m tempted to say “bowel movements”) of a large university: its
pedagogies and its politics, its committees and conferences, its internal
squabbles and eccentric characters.
Indeed, there is no really central character, rather a slew
of personalities, from pompous Associate Vice-presidents to minority-group
students, an influential secretary and a deluded economist, a nutter nursing a
secret revolutionary agricultural machine, a cafeteria serving-lady, and many
more – their lives all intersecting in weird and ironic ways. The whole is so intricately plotted that, having
finished the novel, I enjoyed going right back to the beginning again to
understand just how Jane Smiley manages to draw the multiple strings together. Many of the characters comment on each other,
as does the authorial voice, so your opinion of them never quite settles; it’s
impossible either to sympathise wholly with one character, and almost
impossible not to empathise with even the most obnoxious personages. It’s all very
sly, at times laugh-out-loud funny, highly intelligent, with disturbing
elements of truth in even the most outrageous views presented.
We might feel rather isolated, if not unique, down here on
the southern tip of Africa, but there’s much in Moo that university types will easily recognise; there is a kind of
global “university culture”. Take this
passage:
It was well known among the citizens of the state that the university
had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every
department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called
deconstructionism which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for
emergence at a time of national weakness.
It was well known
among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine
the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large
and nationally-famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to
raising a nest of vipers in your own bed.
It was well known
among the faculty that the governor and the state legislature had lost interest
in education some twenty years before and that it was only a matter of time
before all classes would be taught as lectures, all exams given as
computer-graded multiple choice, all subscriptions to professional journals at
the library stopped, and all research time given up to committee work and
administrative red tape.
This is only
slightly tongue-in-cheek: anyone who has listened to recent pronouncements
issuing from our own ministries would be forgiven for deducing that
universities and academics are regarded by government with grave suspicion, if
not antipathy. Insecure and totalitarian
elements in the ruling party (present à
la past) evidently cleave to the old mantra that a poorly-educated
population is a malleable one.
We literary lot can
be regarded with particular suspicion – the best antidote to which is to class
us as irrelevant. (Many of our current
“development”-driven funding models simply leave literature out of their
categories.) We are not all post-Marxist
deconstructionists, mind: at least some of us would concur with one Moo U character:
Margaret was not fond of recent fashions in literary theory, fashions
that delighted in finding formal or(and) stylistic contradictions in a piece of
writing(text), and used them to prove that the text has no meaning.
Margaret is proud to
be able to deliver a dissenting paper on the subject to the Modern Language
Association (MLA), America’s premier literature-studies talk-shop, but she’s
thoroughly deflated upon realising that MLA conferences comprise “too many
papers on too many topics at too many conflicting times by too many
self-absorbed professors.” Having been
to a couple of MLAs myself, I can confirm the experience!
And at least some of
us must be troubled by the imputation that we belong to a “a professorial
population that was, in general, insulated from the consequences of most of its
own actions by tenure, mandated salary rises, and other perks of university
life.” In this novel, those perks are
being threatened by major budget cuts (as we are in South Africa at the
moment), with the result that universities are shoved for funding in the direction
of commercial corporations. Minister
Blade Nzimande has uttered similar sentiments in the wake of the #FeesMustFall
campaign, ignoring the lessons of the rest of the world that privatising
funding is almost always disastrous for academic freedom and innovation. As Marina Warner has (sorry) warned of
British universities, “the new managers want
to pack ’em [students] in and pile ’em high – and then neglect their interests
by maltreating their teachers”. This is Smiley’s take:
Associations of mutual interest between the university and the
corporations were natural, inevitable and widely accepted. According to the state legislature, they were
to be actively pursued. ... Actually paying for the university out of state
funds was irresponsible, or even immoral, or even criminal (robbing widows and
children, etc., to fatten sleek professors who couldn’t find real employment,
etc.)
One result of
corporate interest is that a certain Dr Lionel Gift – a particularly self-satisfied economist whose
solitary virtue is what he calls “consumer insatiability” supported by rigorous
rationality – compiles a report
supporting the digging of a gold mine under (or rather, through) South
America’s last remaining virgin cloud forest.
The leaking of this report proves one of the novel’s central events,
sparking conspiracy, farcical exchanges, a riot, and a corporate implosion. Dr Gift would come across as quite insane (or
a “piece of shit”, as another character views him), were it not so true to reality.
(Just a fortnight ago television news showed footage of authorities blowing up
illegal goldmine workings in Peruvian rain forest; and South Africa is replete
with instances of mining interests, often supported by university-based
“consultants”, trumping environmental-damage concerns.)
Apart from this
ecological thread, Moo also
encompasses a strong animal presence.
Indeed, it opens with a description of a building named “Old Meats”, now
destined for demolition but once
bustling with activity, with white-coated, bloody-aproned meat science
instructors who formed a tangible link between the animal on the hoof and the
meat on the table. They were men of
great strength and specific physical skills, who could fell an animal and bleed
it and gut it and skin it, then show you the layers of fat and meat, the
marbling that distinguished Grade A from prime.
All the time the blood was flowing, they’d be talking. ... They had no
illusions, those men, about the cost of human life – it was high, and the fate
of domesticated animals and plants was to pay it.
Now, Old Meats contains just one large hog, named Earl Butz,
subject of a renegade academic’s semi-secret feeding experiment. Earl, who periodically gets quite of bit of
interiority from Smiley, is just about the only character we can unreservedly
sympathise with:
Earl Butz was getting monstrous big.
Earl himself felt it
in the effort it took him to heave himself to his trotters in the morning, in
his increasing desire to lie around and have things, like cooling baths,
brought to him, rather than going to receive them. There was a suspicious bulge toward the
center of the pen in the shape of Earl’s toileting area – his characteristic
fastidiousness was beginning to disappear.
He still worked hard at his main occupation of eating. He couldn’t help that; it was bred into him,
but like any variety of genius, appetite was beginning overshadow other, more
individual traits of his personality. He
no longer played with his toys, for example...
It’s impossible to
do full justice to the complexity of this novel in a short review; Smiley seems
astonishingly well-versed in so many disciplines and areas of university life,
all of which are treated with both understanding and barbed humour, and she brings
it all to a spectacular close.
We could do with
another novel like it here – goodness knows we have rich enough material!
Moo is not very new, Dan, it was first published in 1995 :) Can I also highly recommend "Horse Heaven", which is a wonderful story.
ReplyDeleteYou can trust us to be 20 years behind! New to me is 'new', right? On to 'Horse Heaven' it is.
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