Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis, Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, Psychoanalysis of teaching and learning, politics in the academy, Psychology
As a recently retired college educator, this was a tough
book to get into. It is taking potshots
at a place that I am trying to hold onto as having value. The cringing that I experienced, though, was
not without its base in my lived experience of the academy.
This book criticizes the self-importance of the academy
itself and it eviscerates those who take themselves so seriously that they have
no idea how tiny and insular their worlds are and how vulnerable they are to
ridicule. When Dante placed the
pederasts and the academics on the same ring of hell it was because neither
were capable of producing anything, and it seemed as if he had the subjects of
this book in mind.
The reluctant son’s steady recommended John
of John in the spring, a deeply moving book about a father parenting a son,
and gave me Lucky Jim for my birthday in August. This second book was about being an academic-
an additional valued part of my identity.
My thanks to her for both!
Lucky Jim is the fourth novel about academia that I have
posted about. It is in the mold, though
it was preceded in being published, of Straight
Man. Both emphasize the immaturity
of the protagonist, but also of a system that supports immature actors as they
promote the intellectual and, presumably, moral development of their charges. What
We Can Know is a pre and post-apocalyptic view of the academy and the
people that inhabit it, and it, like the first two books, casts a rather
jaundiced eye on those who live within its walls. The most recent read, before this one, Stoner,
has a very different, ultimately hopeful view of the academy as a place where a
person can develop across the course of their life and ultimately achieve some
measure of the promise of the institution; both for themselves, but also for
their students, though for a long time we questioned whether the protagonist had
any potential that he could live up to, and we wondered a bit at the end if he
would have been better off to stay on the farm, as lifeless and enervating as
that life had been.
None of these books is particularly hopeful about the
culture or the inhabitants of the institution.
Lucky Jim, in particular, follows the course of James Dixon’s life
during the first (and what proves – luckily for him – the last) semester of his
tenure at the University – a spoiler that I apologize for giving without
warning, but, to be fair, the title suggests that this is a comedy – and it
becomes increasingly clear across the course of the book that this would not be
the case if he were to remain a vassal of the kingdom of academia.
When I was hired at my University, my father was
puzzled. “Why would you want to work in
academia”, he wondered. I responded that
I had seen what corporate politics did to him and I wanted to go to a place
that was apolitical. He just laughed and
laughed.
Jim spends an inordinate amount of his time trying to get
into the good graces of the person who will decide if he is hired back for
another year, a man he despises, but whom he constantly butters up including by
always refer to him with the title that he uses for no one else, “Professor”
Welch. Welch presides over two very
small, but to Jim essential provinces: the department and the Welch family.
Welch assigns numerous inane tasks to Jim, and Jim takes
them on with disdain and disregard for their ultimate value. Publishing a paper on an obscure and
inconsequential topic is something that Welch bird dogs – and somehow we are surprised
that the person who has agreed to publish the work has, instead, plagiarized it
and published it elsewhere. Everyone in
this world is out for themselves – we shouldn’t have been surprised.
Jim also butters up Welch by being a guest in his home
where inane, outdated madrigals are sung by the guests – and Jim’s tone
deafness seems to be much less of a hindrance than one might think as the
guests can’t seem to stick with Welch’s agenda, which he does not seem to worry
about or lead. Meanwhile, Jim becomes
enamored of Welch’s son’s girlfriend, while loathing the son – supposedly an
artist, but also a two-timer who is seeing a woman married to another faculty
member.
Jim may be lucky, but he is hard to like. He seems to want the world to be a better
place, but he is very happy to be scoundrel in a world that is filled with
them. As much as he despises Welch’s
treatment of him, he is every bit as callous towards the student who wants to
study with him and who seems to be an earnest and diligent fellow. Jim is lazy and his wit is acerbic.
Jim does have principles.
In fact, he is hedged in by them.
He is loyal to a woman he doesn’t particularly care for, and stands up
for her when she is jilted by another.
They seem ill-matched, but they are matched, and so he will, it seems for a while,
follow through with an unrewarding relationship. I think it turns out that she is as cunning
as Jim, but it gets expressed in very different ways, in part because she is a
woman in a man’s world.
So, Jim may be lucky, but he is not happy. As mentioned above, this is a comedy, and Jim
is saved from the muck by someone who recognizes virtues in him that he has not
seen himself. His psychopathy can be put
to good use in other arenas, and he is saved from becoming Welch, someone
he would surely have devolved into becoming very much like and he would have ended up despising himself as much as he despises Welch.
If leaving the institution is the saving grace for Jim, it
doesn’t really help the institution. It
will still be a haven for those who use it as a bully pulpit, serving palaver
to their students. It is interesting
that the author, Amis, did not follow in Jim’s path of going elsewhere. According to the introduction, he became a man of letters in the Merrie Olde
England preserved in the academy that it is apparent that he despises. How are we to understand this?
I think that the attitude of Jim towards the University
speaks to the enormity of the task that the academy has set for itself. Creating new knowledge while retaining and
teaching the old – all towards the goal of both educating “leaders” and
advancing the scope of knowledge collectively - leaves every individual at the
institution wanting. We cannot achieve
the task we have set for ourselves as a community and certainly not as
individuals, even if we end up being leaders in our fields.
Why would we undertake this Sisyphean task? In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker
Palmer suggests that the teacher’s role is a spiritual one, one that is based
in faith that we can have influence even if the student is actually the one who
must become active in his or her learning.
Lucky Jim helps the students become active learners when he becomes
drunk before an important lecture and mocks the academy. They must make sense of his looney behavior
and are moved to question – surely the first step towards learning. It is no wonder, then, that in this
anti-intellectual book the academic authorities insist that Jim’s head must
come off.
And is it Amis’s intent, by mocking the institution, to have
us appreciate the value in it – not as it is, but as it could be? And is he saying that he, as a product of
that institution, is not the person to look to for curing its ills? Should we be seeking out people like Parker
Palmer?
Surely we should, but Palmer’s idealized vision of the
school – and I have been privileged to graduate from an institution that embodies
Palmer’s approach to and engagement in the learning process (and I think we do
that at the Psychoanalytic Institute where I teach more often than not) – is one
that we should realize is in tension with Amis’s.
I think my adoration for my undergraduate alma mater may have
blinded me to some of the political issues that were alive in my institution,
and led to my being unprepared for the complexities of the academy when I joined
as a faculty member. Similarly, my
psychoanalytic institute turned out to be a much more complicated political
community than it appeared when I was a candidate at it.
Some of our current faculty at the Institute want to shield
our candidates from the workings of the institution. Their position is that they should be free to
immerse themselves in the learning. I
suppose that I reluctantly agree with Amis.
If we are going to educate the whole person, we should let them know
that the idealized version of the school is partly fantasy. We are aspiring to greatness – something that
is much harder to attain that our fantasies would lead us to believe. And if we are to survive, we need to help those who would transition into running our institutions understand the funtioning of those institutions so that they can improve it.
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