SOURCE: Trachtenberg, Stanley. “Desire, Hypocrisy, and Ambition in Academe: Joyce Carol Oates's Hungry Ghosts.” In The American Writer and the University, edited by Ben Siegel, pp. 39-53. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

“The difficulty with stories, even true ones,” one of Joyce Carol Oates's characters complains, “is that they begin nowhere and end nowhere.”¹ In place of recognizable structure, Oates has relied on just such narrative aimlessness to project the obsessive confusions troubling midcentury America; these include “a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge … an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience and the ultimate surrender.”² Though Oates has claimed that violence is always an affirmation, she is disdainful of the isolated private figures commonly projected by the modernist imagination along with what she has called “the atrocious Id-pouring of much contemporary poetry.”³ The demonic struggles in her fiction are offered as hypothetical possibilities with which every artist must test reality and which must then be submitted to society for judgment.⁴ Accordingly, Oates has been astonished when critics, who want to “linger lovingly over every image, every punctuation mark,” refuse to recognize the essential cheerfulness of her characters, even the vicious ones. “Criminals,” she has commented acidly, “have a right to happiness just as much as staunch, well-educated tax-paying reviewers and academics.”⁵

At the same time, Oates has acknowledged that art may be limited to the ego's struggle to address a deeper self, a struggle serving as a means for purging the ghosts that haunt the writer's own consciousness.⁶ This conflict between the artistic functions of private exorcism and public record is paralleled by contrasting roles Oates has alternately envisioned for the artist. These roles take the form of someone who shapes fantasies into an external structure that celebrates the life force and of a passive figure who transcribes the text rather than initiates it. Seldom, however, are those opposing roles or the fictive impulses to which they point allowed to contest each other in Oates's fiction. Instead, disembodied voices—shrill, insistent, terrified, urgent, dazed—rehearse the difficulty of making contact with others, of being understood, of understanding what is happening around them. Women sense obscurely sexual assaults, as much desired as feared, finally yielded to with erotic satisfaction. Men—more shadowy still—appear at once threatening and indifferent; their centers are fixed outside the fevered consciousnesses that attempt to imagine and so possess them. Oates's characters surface chiefly in indeterminate settings—cities that have no streets or buildings, countrysides with only empty fields, abandoned automobiles. Frequently given only first names, these figures are fundamentally generic rather than individual; they are identified chiefly as husbands, wives, parents, children, and defined chiefly within the web of family or, on its periphery, as lovers. Unspecified anxieties are announced in fairy-tale cadences, marked by the absence of thematic closure. The oppressive daily events, no less than the acts of sudden violence into which they erupt, appear blurred, even hallucinatory. These acts merge finally into a single texture that refuses to distinguish between what is important, what inconsequential.

Oates has been particularly sensitive to critical attempts to see in these menacing situations any correspondence with her own life. Writing of D. H. Lawrence, she has remarked that most critics “assume that their subjects are ‘subjects’ and not human beings, and that their works of art are somehow crimes for which they are on perpetual trial.”⁷ Similarly, she has seen John Berryman as the victim of the familiar attempt to associate the writer with fixed meanings in his work and so to isolate him from a sustaining social and literary culture. “When the writer believes his critics in such cases,” she charges, “he has no course left but suicide.”⁸ Such suicidal ghosts are exorcised with satiric exaggeration in Oates's stories about academics.

Uniformly portrayed as egocentric villains, these academics are comically frustrated by their inability to impose a subjective vision upon the solidity of experience. Their single-minded efforts to do so result in joyless lives, shaped by the funneling of desire into an increasingly narrow vision. Malicious, petty, self-serving, pompous, frightened, they frequently conceal the shallowness of their thoughts behind inflated claims of importance for obscure literary figures with whom their scholarly reputations are linked. Few seem aware of the disparity between the manic intensity of their efforts and the worth of the advantages they seek. Fewer still evidence concern for the humanistic nature of their vocation; instead, they disguise mean self-interest by pious professions of concern for some ennobling ideal. Typically ineffectual, they find that their inability to control or even influence events only intensifies the anger that is their most authentic emotion.

In The Hungry Ghosts, a collection of seven short stories, each of which deals with some aspect of academic life, even the titles subtly suggest the lack of originality that characterizes the academic mind. Subtitled “allusive comedies,” several were changed after initial publication in periodicals to echo works respectively by Bunyon, Nietzsche, Blake, Tocqueville, and Booker T. Washington. The satirical judgment implicit in these imitative titles is reinforced by the contrast between the furious motion of the characters and the uninflected tone Oates adopts toward it. The lives of her academics are consumed with longing. Oates explains the reference of the title in an epigraph. “A preta (ghost),” she writes, “is one who, in the ancient Buddhist cosmology, haunts the earth's surface, continually driven by hunger—that is, desire of one kind or another.”⁹ In “Democracy in America,” Ronald Pauli's desire is to publish his manuscript, a 385-page study of the twentieth-century criticism of the works of Tocqueville and Grattan. The bulk of the manuscript and the contrasting narrowness of its subject suggest a comic disproportion of effort and value that is emphasized by Ronald's admission that the work is not even meant to be interesting. Its publication will simply help him keep his job.

When a part-time copyeditor at the press that has accepted the work dies suddenly with the manuscript still in his possession, Ronald nervously rushes to the man's apartment to reclaim it. The earlier loss of the only copy—at one point Ronald will paranoiacally insist it was stolen—has increased his anxiety, and when he discovers no clue to where the manuscript may be in the copyeditor's filthy apartment, he nears hysteria. Markedly fastidious—he is at first most afraid of finding roaches—Ronald forces himself to plunge into the mess; he painstakingly begins to assemble his scattered pages buried among insurance forms, overdue library books, dirty clothes, half-eaten food, crumpled balls of paper, mimeographed notices, and pages ripped from a phone directory. That the manuscript is almost indistinguishable from all this junk confirms its lack of value; in addition, Ronald's desperate search suggests the indignity to which an academic will submit in attempting to advance his career.

In the midst of his search, Ronald discovers that a number of pages belong to someone else's manuscript, one written with greater assurance and authority. Confirming his worst fear, this discovery persuades the increasingly panic-stricken scholar of his own terrifying insubstantiality. As the manuscript grows more important as a surrogate for his own ego, each solid object in the room seemingly resists his efforts to assemble his work. A wall bed, a quilt, a lamp, a bathtub, even the copyeditor's clothes, prove almost willful obstacles. At one point, Ronald becomes convinced he is being haunted by a ghostly presence, perhaps the phantom writer of the other manuscript, perhaps the copyeditor, we are never sure which. In either case, the ghostly sensation ironically echoes his own condition. Miraculously, he does recover his entire manuscript, whose destruction he had come to equate with his own. “I'm still living,” he whispers with relief. Once out of the room, however, he retreats in childlike terror when a sympathetic neighbor reaches to comfort him in a gesture obliquely sexual and at the same time reassuringly maternal.

Academic pressures similarly lead to the displacement of individual identity in “Pilgrim's Progress,” when newly appointed lecturer Wanda Barnett arrives at Hilberry, a small Canadian university near the border, which serves as the locale for several of Oates's academic satires. Almost at once Wanda comes under the influence of Saul Bird, a charismatic instructor whose radical politics mask a preoccupation with his own career. Theatrical, abrasive, peremptory, intense, Saul is an academic bully able to experience pleasure only in the exercise of power. His wife, Susanna, also a teacher, serves as a physical as well as intellectual complement to her husband. Where Saul's face is mobile, his manner nervous and demanding, hers is blank, unsmiling, like “a stone with the moss of her dark hair around it.” The metaphor, with its associations of dampness and concealment, qualifies Susanna's scholarly achievements and, by extension, that of all academics. More successful than her husband, she produced a book on Proust and their son Philip in the same year, a conjunction by which Oates slyly suggests the boy is merely another credit on her vita.

Though an English teacher, Saul has little interest in literature, and he contemptuously dismisses the value of scholarship. His obligation, he maintains, is to liberate students as human beings. Saul's political activism is brought into sharp relief by the myopic dedication to scholarship of Erasmus Hubben, a shy if somewhat clownish figure whose dissertation on Ernst Cassirer ran to 800 pages. Overwhelmed by Saul's intensity and exhilarated by the dramatic atmosphere into which he is drawn, Hubben, like Wanda, soon becomes part of a clique that surrounds their volatile colleague. Subsequently, Hubben agrees to take part in a campus demonstration that Saul organizes but in which he characteristically declines to participate. During a confrontation with campus police, Hubben has a breakdown and subsequently is institutionalized. To protest Saul's treatment by the university, Wanda resigns her job. Only then does she discover that Saul has found a new position and has abandoned his exploited disciples without a word. Their surrender of ego has brought these forlorn academics to the edge of violence, but without an ideological base of their own they are unable to find in their actions a cathartic release.

The inability even to recognize the destructive consequences of self-absorption becomes evident in “Up From Slavery.” Frank Ambrose willingly trades on his blackness to obtain status in the liberal, white academic community. Sexually restless despite his success with students, Frank's apparent assimilation only intensifies his unease until his sense of loss becomes almost physical, “as if he were actually hungry for something without knowing what it was” (p. 64). Frank's hunger leads him to mistake the intentions of Molly Holt, a young teacher he is instrumental in hiring. A feminist who complains about being exploited as a woman and, at the same time, about the difficulty of getting her husband to continue child support, Molly sees in Frank only another victim of social prejudice and indignantly rejects his sexual overtures. In his anger, Frank drops his cultivated Eastern accent to revert to a richer ethnic idiom. “There's anything I hate,” he tells her wildly, “it's a woman who talks too much.” “Go back to your honky wife,” Molly replies contemptuously.

At first Frank is rendered uncertain of his own judgment by this response, but he quickly reassures himself by persuading the sanctimonious chairman of the department that Molly's professional commitment is questionable. In a ballot taken hurriedly to allow the faculty members to make their next class, Molly is dismissed without any real chance to defend herself, or even to understand the vague charges leveled against her. Though she is the one fired, Frank, as her sponsor, is seen by his colleagues as the injured party. Frank feels no guilt at his vengeful deception. Instead he merely frames the incident in a self-satisfying melancholy that confirms his self-image of sensitivity.

Another departmental confrontation argued in terms of principle but resolved purely by self-interest occurs in “A Descriptive Catalog.” Up for tenure with only minor publications to his credit, Reynold Mason responds to an unintended slight by Ron Blass, the departmental poet, by bringing charges of plagiarism against him. In contrast with the characteristically worried Mason, who paces the corridors before mail deliveries looking “distracted, anxious, ghostly,” Blass is an affable and popular teacher. He is also the department's most frequently published member. His need to continue in that role long after he has anything to say has led him, however, to submit with only minor stylistic revisions the work of other poets. “It could be anything,” he confesses miserably to a departmental committee, “because nobody reads it” (p. 94).

The work of the committee members, however, proves only slightly more substantial. The chairman lists on his vita mimeographed memos to the faculty senate, speeches made at local PTA meetings, and brief contributions to a highly specialized newsletter edited by his former students. Other committee members publish only brief notices attacking the discoveries of other scholars, or they confine themselves to feuding over inconsequential issues. When Ron confronts them with documented evidence of their own questionable practices, they abandon their pose of ethical concern to exonerate him. Forced to resign his own position, Mason has a breakdown. Neither he nor the incident leaves any lasting impression on the university. Academic integrity, Oates makes clear, constitutes only a pose of rectitude that masks a hypocritical venting of personal spite.

In “The Birth of Tragedy,” Oates mixes ridicule with anger at pedantic faculty members who substitute exhausted scholarly concerns for vigorous commitment to their subjects and who use their tenured positions to tyrannize those attempting to enter the profession. At the last minute, an insecure Barry Sommer is hired at Hilberry as an assistant to Robinson Thayer, a senior professor whose lectures are repeated year after year without change, after having initially been copied from obscure literary sources. After unsuccessfully attempting to intimidate his terrified young assistant into spying for him on the indifferent students in his class, Thayer makes Barry the object of a shabby homosexual advance. When the overture is rejected, the professor drunkenly reveals the hypocrisy that pervades the administration. Along with other doctoral students, Barry has been admitted solely to maintain enrollment, though the university has long been planning to drop the Ph.D. program. Called upon to lecture on Hamlet to Thayer's class, Barry is led through his terror to the ecstatic truth that the meaning of tragedy is the exploitation of the living by the dead. Hamlet's problem, he decides, “was that he didn't run like hell to some other country when the ghost showed up” (p. 129). Like others haunted by the ghostly scholarship of hungry academics, Barry must free himself from its curse by accepting the challenge of life without an advanced degree. The sympathy with which Oates here views the need for individual fulfillment is seldom displayed in her writing. More commonly, the isolation of the individual from the community results only in tragedy. This isolation can be overcome only by a violent emotional reversal—that is, by witnessing the destruction of “self” and the breaking down of the barriers between human beings and the concomitant release of passion.¹⁰

No occasion parodies that release more than the carnival atmosphere generated in the university by the visit of professional writers who look to it for support. They become the subject of Oates's examination of desire in “Rewards of Fame.” Now in his fifties, the poet Murray Licht has never fulfilled his early promise. With several ex-wives and a number of children, he leads an uncertain existence by means of a series of one-year, nonrenewable contracts, night courses, and lecture-readings whenever possible. At one of these readings, held at a small midwestern college, Murray finds faculty and students alike more interested in the reputation of the panelists than in the quality of their poetry. Oates leaves no doubt about Murray's stature both as a man and as a poet. His pocket change consists mostly of pennies. He is concerned about the fickle affections of his current mistress. Most of all, he is intimidated by the discovery that among the panelists will be Joachim Myer, a former schoolmate and rival, whose failed career as a poet was transformed into critical stardom by his New York Review essay on Marshall McLuhan.

For the increasingly dazed Murray, who imagines himself a ghostly figure, the numbing sameness of the poetry circuit takes on the quality of a nightmare. Only the surprisingly youthful-looking Myer, who arrives late, appears to have any substance in this spectral scene. Stringing together a senseless jumble of references to fashionable philosophers, meaningless statistics, and cant phrases, Myer cheerfully attacks both the work of his fellow panelists and the very idea of literacy. “I bring you freedom!” he cheerfully announces to an enthusiastic audience, “total liberation! and the flood of the polymorphous-perverse cosmos denied you by your parents and by our arch-oppressor, Poetry” (p. 169). Though Myer then leaves, viewing the entire proceeding as something of a joke, Murray is sustained, even transfigured, by a condescending reference the critic had made to him as once having been famous.

In “Angst,” Oates makes clear that even the most casual involvement with academic pretensions is costly for a writer. Despite her anxiety about intimacy in any form, Bernadine Donovan is persuaded by her longtime suitor, Herman Geller, to attend a convention at which her finely crafted writing will be the subject of a seminar. Geller is an academic with the usual mixture of envy and self-serving praise for his colleagues. His interest in Bernadine's fiction, like theirs, derives exclusively from a desire for self-advancement. He does not even attend the session at which the humorless panelists distort Bernadine's intentions and meanings and even question her originality. After an embarrassing interruption during which Bernadine tries ineffectually to expose an attempt by a flamboyant graduate student to impersonate the author, she is left with only a near-mystical glimpse of the harsh realities of academe. Yet Bernadine's vision, like the frantic convention atmosphere, lies outside the scope of her imagination, and she is unable to use it even as a source of material for any future work she may do.

Oates has again written of Hilberry University in “The Transformation of Vincent Scoville” and in “The Liberation of Jake Hanley,” both of which appear in her 1976 collection, Crossing the Border. Anxious to begin what he hopes will be a normal faculty life—one of love, friends, marriage—Vincent Scoville is given the opportunity to establish his reputation by editing a group of letters written by a distant relative by marriage of Rudyard Kipling and now owned by the university. He soon recognizes they are worthless as literary documents and, in fact, were donated by a wealthy widow in the hope of embarrassing her husband. Still, Vincent finds himself under pressure from a partially senile university president who sees in the letters a chance to vindicate his otherwise lackluster administration. Vincent desperately attempts to establish some connection, however tenuous, between the letters and the famous author. At first an embarrassment, the project becomes in time a consuming passion and ultimately his life's work. The once-balanced teacher is almost hypnotically transformed into an obsessive pedant, isolated not only from the world but also from the classroom he had earlier considered the last anchor of his sanity.

The seductive appeal of academic isolation similarly accounts for Jake Hanley's escape from the disorders of everyday life. Having impulsively confessed to his wife an affair with a former student, Jake is forced out of his house. He spends more and more time at his office, where he discovers an underground faculty that literally has taken to living there. Among its members is Frank Ambrose. Like Jake, Ambrose is separated from his family and finds in this unreal retreat a perfect atmosphere in which to indulge his recently awakened interest in scholarship, with its endless cross-referencing, archives, and special-collection rooms. Like Frank Ambrose, like Vincent Scoville, like Wanda Barnett—all of whom haunt the office corridors at night—Jake also moves into the office. After a time, he can no longer remember how he got there or that any other world exists. He is content at last.

In contrast with a satirical stance grown so broad in the later tales that it comes to border on fantasy, Oates's earlier stories with an academic setting rely on more subtly ironic, and even melodramatic modes to depict the shallowness of the university environment. In “The Expense of Spirit,” she shows its shabby lives and failed ambitions, its lack of interest in ideas or in values, its exclusion of any life that might challenge its own intellectual pretensions. A young instructor's anxiety about his wife's leaving him causes him to pursue a beautiful undergraduate, whose vacuous social manner dissolves into near-hysteria when she accompanies him to a faculty party. The party proves a grotesquerie that shatters her naive fantasy of the graciousness of academic life. She finds only a strained attempt at nonconformity, marked by prepared expressions, facial tics, scatological references, and attempts to control conversations. No one is concerned about or even aware of anyone else except as an object of sex or envy. One instructor, Cowley, who is pointedly described as having come from the East, exemplifies Oates's contempt for the falseness of the university environment. Hiccuping violently, he drunkenly complains about the nonrenewal of his contract while acknowledging that the indolence of campus life has so spoiled him for any regular work that he now longs only to write scholarly papers.

In “Archways,” which appeared in Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories, Oates's second collection of short fiction, Klein, a withdrawn graduate assistant, finds he is unable to interest his students in remedial composition or to convince them that he does not pose a threat to their career goals. The ruthless poverty of his own background, his social unease, his sense of the ugliness of his life, all drive him close to suicide. He is rescued from his depression when one of his students falls in love with him, despite—perhaps because of—her own insecurities, which mirror his. At first Klein, too, believes that he is in love, but the girl's wholehearted commitment to him triggers a feverish interest in scholarship, which leads him callously to abandon her. “He understood matters like that between the girl and himself happened often, perhaps daily at this great university.”¹¹ Even Klein's ultimate discovery that he is only a mediocre teacher does not reveal to him the extent of his loss. He contentedly settles for an undistinguished career and the physical conveniences and satisfactions that signal a conventional existence.

The sterility of the university environment and the emotional rigidity it fosters result in more tragic consequences in “In the Region of Ice.” Sister Irene is a woman in her early 30s with “hard gray eyes and a face waxen with thought.” She is an instructor at a Catholic university where academic life is as anonymous as the inviolable convent rhythm to which she once dedicated herself. “Each day [was] dissociated from the rest with no necessary sense of unity among the teachers: they came and went separately and might for a year just miss a colleague who left his office five minutes before they arrived, and it did not matter.”¹² The chilling sense that things do not matter, either to her cynical colleagues or to her indifferent students, leads Sister Irene to submerge her own personality in classroom attempts to communicate facts. When a mentally unstable Jewish student appeals for an intimate human relationship, she can make only a tentative response. The aggressive insensitivity of the boy's father causes her to back away even from this, and she withdraws into the safety of her academic routine. Only when she learns that the boy's unrelieved suffering has resulted in his suicide does she come to understand something of her own lack of feeling. So destructive is the effect of environment on her character, however, that Sister Irene realizes also that she is helpless to act upon her new insights. She retreats to a dreamlike self-absorption, more relieved than saddened by her experience.

An equally destructive self-indulgence takes the contrasting form of an excess of feeling in “Through the Looking Glass.” Father Colton, a liberal seminarian, is a popular teacher on a small but crowded urban campus. Though he is exhilarated by his work and genuinely fond of his students, his concern for their welfare leads him to take over their conversations with his own monologues. In the unhappiness and suspicion of one student, Frieda Holman, the good-natured cleric sees a rare opportunity to test his own patience and humility. His obverse pride proves fateful. Giving up his vocation to marry her, he finds himself deserted when Frieda's indecision proves symptomatic of a serious neurosis. Father Colton is left without support of any kind. The experience, he recognizes, has led him to cross some border of the spirit into the loveless world. He can return only after the discipline of a self-imposed exile among the harmless distances of the Midwest.

Distance, then, rather than intimacy proves a necessary restraint upon the academic unwilling to acknowledge the hostile independence of the human personality. Loving or not, such figures struggle ineffectually for self-fulfillment in Oates's fiction. They are defeated by a life-denying aridity whether they reject the claims of humanity or attempt to respond to those claims. In “Accomplished Desires,” the penalties for transforming the world into an instrument for the fulfillment of personal desires are distributed among all who attempt it. These include narcissistic Professor Mark Arber, his self-effacing wife Barbara, and the calculating student, Dorie, who becomes his mistress. Preoccupied with his career, Arber is unwilling to cancel his scheduled appearance on a panel even to drive Dorie to have an abortion. So completely has his wife submerged her own personality in his, however, that she is unable to resist the emotional needs of the younger woman and commits suicide to allow Dorie to marry her husband. Though Dorie thus accomplishes her desire, she finds herself excluded from Arber's life which, she comes to see, is governed by words “growing like weeds in his brain and his wit moving so rapidly through the brains of others that it was, itself, a kind of life.”¹³ Unable to escape the deadening domestic routine that follows her marriage to Arber, Dorie sits at a battered desk that reflects the condition of her own ego. She is trapped both by the existence she has manipulated others to bring about and by her emotional inability to deal with it.

Faculty wives are no more sympathetically viewed in Oates's fiction than are their husbands. Without the distractions of classes, campus politics, or even the pretense of literary scholarship, they find it difficult to cope with the stifling banality of academic life. In “Normal Love,” the forty-year-old narrator remarks with unintended irony that, despite a rising crime rate in the quiet college town in which she and her family live, nothing has happened to them. The deadening routine of this environment translates into terror at any sign of her own mortality, and she begins to suspect a sinister design in the most casual social encounter. Even her family, perhaps her family most of all, exerts unbearable pressure on her to sustain its own routine; this pressure, triggered by the estrangement of her vacuous professor-husband, and coupled with his childlike dependence on her, leads to a breakdown.

The deadness of life in an academic community is also partially responsible for the collapse of Ilena Williams, in “The Dead,” a loose reimagining of the well-known story in James Joyce's Dubliners. A part-time university teacher, Ilena becomes famous when she writes a novel about sex and drugs on campus. Though she is assured by her doctor that she is normal, Ilena is strongly attracted to death. Alienated in her marriage, Ilena finds even her love affairs have the grotesque, nightmarish quality of a Chagall painting. Though she has little professional commitment, she assures the loss of her job at a Catholic college by refusing to pass the examination of an obviously incompetent seminarian. The death of John F. Kennedy compels her interest more deeply than does anyone in her life. When one of her students dies of his heroin addiction rather than, as she had believed, in a Vietnam protest, she finds herself sexually stimulated. Her struggle with death, really the pull of self-effacement, finally proves overwhelming; at story's end she sits trembling, on the verge of a breakdown in a hotel room with her lover, as blank as the snow that begins to fall outside.

Oates has little sympathy for the difficulties many academics experience in choosing between the opposing pulls of freedom and safety. In “Magna Mater,” Nora Drexler cultivates a potential for disaster by her inflexible personality. A meticulous scholar, Nora reveals Oates's view that a successful career is often the result of imitative scholarship. Though Nora professes her reluctance to publish critical reviews of her colleagues' work, she takes great satisfaction in the rise of her reputation at their expense. Her professed belief that art stems from a higher consciousness than routine emotional life proves to be simply a fear of change. “I have visions of the floodgates opening,” she protests to a colleague,

our universities vulgarized, destroyed … our programs infested with grotesque “literature” written by all kinds of people … even oral literature, even … even illiterate work. … Unless we're courageous and fight these issues at once, we'll be teaching Pawnee bear songs before we know it.¹⁴

Nora's snobbish emphasis on the background of people who should be allowed to write—as well as her restrictive view of the forms literature may take—reveals the prejudices that often underlie supposedly impartial academic judgments. One rather candid, if cheerfully sadistic, colleague admits both his lack of intellectual considerations and the pleasure he takes in the viciousness of his criticism. Ultimately, Nora is patronized and ridiculed by her friends and ignored by her father, a noted scholar himself, who is indifferent to, when not threatened by, his daughter's achievements. She is abandoned as well by her husband, an academic whose books are acclaimed as revolutionary and at once forgotten, and who, like Nora's father, resents her success. Only her nastily precocious son remains subject to her influence. Though he demands her attention, he has nightmares about being smothered by it. He pleases his mother only by pretending to accept the artificial scheme of order she desperately imposes on experience and by denying his fear of being abandoned. Nora's consequent reassurances to him expose not only the destructive cycle of need and dependence that underlies her relationships but also the general academic environment that fosters it.

Oates divides the narcissistic academic personality into two figures in “In the Autumn of the Year.” Measured and deliberate, Eleanor Gerhardt attempts to control history; her more expansive, histrionic ex-lover, Edwin Holler, pretends to transcend its limits. Both present and past have become increasingly unreal to Eleanor, who remains convinced of her central importance in Holler's life and of the genuineness of his feeling for her long after their separation and his death. But from his son, now himself a professor, she receives a different view. A failed academic, Holler had been jealous of his colleagues and fearful of their contempt. He had tormented his wife and young son with operatic rages, during which he boasted of his many affairs. He justified his cruelty by attributing it to the passionate vitality of his nature. If less flamboyant, the son proves no kinder than the father. He vindictively confronts Eleanor with letters she had written imploring Holler to marry her. So threatening are they to the emotional shell that enabled Eleanor to cope with her rejection that she now denies, even to herself, ever having written the letters, even as one by one she burns them. The denial of the past allows her to deny as well her responsibility for the pain suffered by Holler's family. It enables her, finally, to cling to an idea of innocence that substitutes the rigid image of self for the shifting realities of experience.

The academic's fragile grip on reality, typically self-protective and marked by a professional immersion in language, dissolves completely in the ghostly “A Theory of Knowledge.” Sinking into senility, retired professor Reuben Weber is haunted by his failure to organize into a definitive system his ideas on the nature of human knowledge. As his fragmented thoughts wander among old grievances, Weber is visited by a strangely silent boy from a neighboring farm. The professor finds himself both excited by these visits and increasingly fearful of what he suspects is mistreatment of the boy at his home. After repeatedly hearing what he thinks are cries for help, Weber makes a fantastic night journey to the boy's farm. There he finds him abandoned and cruelly tied up. In a gesture that suggests both his desire to liberate himself and to reclaim his own imaginary youth, Weber unties the boy. The gesture signals a complete break with the restraints imposed on the intellect by reality. Both the professor and the boy join in conspiratorial laughter, suggesting the madness such freedom may occasion.

Relevant here are Oates's comments on the attenuated process of consciousness in the works of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Their writings, she claims, empty the natural world of much of the range of human experience as it is actually lived and people it instead solely with “spirits without personal bodies [who] inhabit time and space in a ghostly manner.”¹⁵ In contrast, Oates points to the more traditional novels of Fielding, Austen, or Thackeray, for whom identity is defined in terms of social judgment. “Why must art be painful?” she asks. “And if it is deliberately conceived of as a negative human activity, how can its products be anything less than death-affirming, despairing, an unnatural distortion of one of the most joyful of all human adventures, the mysterious flowering of the imagination into conscious forms?”¹⁶ Such objective forms are systematically reduced to nihilistic utterances by the academic refusal to accept mystery over reason. Academic ritual substitutes a desacralizing separation of incantation from sacrifice and so proves incapable of a healing violence. “I believe,” Oates has observed, “that any truly felt lyric poem (not simply some Midwestern professor's attempt to write a Poem, to add to his bibliography for the Head of the English Department) can be expanded outward into a story—a novel—anything.”¹⁷ The geographical qualification “Midwestern” parochializes the academic's pretension to poetry; the capitalization of the word “Poem” suggests a condescending self-consciousness. Combined they limit the approach to imaginative literature within the clearly prescribed boundaries of pragmatic advantage.

Oates indicates how we are to understand and evaluate this conventional performance in her analysis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. At the play's center she finds a desire that never seems justified by the value of the objects toward which it is directed. Neither the dramatist nor the drama is thus able to arrive at any valid affirmation of values. The mockery is universal. Ambition—the assertion of self—is uniformly met not only by disappointment but also by the suspicion that all is hallucination. Those involved are unwilling to accept their fate even though it is the result of their character, perhaps because it is determined by character. We witness in tragedy the necessary submission of private ambition to public limits and so to universal good. Only in art can we realize the marvelous that we desire in life.¹⁸ That academics refuse to realize this may be what Oates finds most disturbing about them. Like Hamlet, whose tragedy she claims is that he cannot accept appearances, they struggle against the obvious. But academics lack Hamlet's faith and only imitate Shakespeare's eloquence. Accordingly they convert delusion to farce.

Structured more as problem comedies than satires, then, Oates's stories with academic settings are never seen against a larger world of which they are satirical offshoots. Even Oates's narrative voice does not maintain its distance. It often enters the consciousness of her characters, shaping itself in terms of their hesitations and confusions. Accordingly, it cannot provide either sudden knowledge or even partial insights. Though Oates conveys an implied judgment of her typical academics, her voice generally sounds neither angry nor impatient with their Faustian intention. Instead, she seems merely troubled by the inability to balance loss of ego with loss of ego control.

Her professors, then, end up in much the same condition as they begin. Their small successes are not only seldom satisfying, but also always quickly overshadowed by the difficulties resulting from an exclusive reliance on intellect as a way of perceiving the world. These characters reduce experience to a projection of the self, with a correlative refusal to believe in the existence of others. Internalizing the rage that results from this isolation, they are unable to force into consciousness the perverse and often terrifying conditions that Oates sees informing our time. They are condemned to remain immobilized in the trance of self. This picture of the academic echoes the despair Oates has attributed to Sylvia Plath. In that doomed poet, Oates saw “a furious impatience with the limitations of the ego (which she called the ‘mind‘), a raging self-disgust that, had it not ended in suicide, might have cleansed her of those impurities of her era she had absorbed and allowed her the visionary experience she sensed was a human possibility.”¹⁹

Despite, perhaps because of, her gravitation toward the visionary possibility, Oates offers in her academic fiction no hint of the complex educational or economic problems that currently beset the campus. Nor is there any suggestion in her fiction of how these problems affect or are affected by what was once innocently thought of as the life of the mind. Her academic tales lack characters struggling to develop their personalities in the recognizable fullness of human conflict; they offer no contrasting typological figures. There is in their narrow ironies no kindly if absent-minded professor or stern pedant who sharpens his students' minds by demanding an uncompromising intellectual rigor. There is no suggestion of the poignant self-assertion of Nabokov's Pnin, of the passionate devotion to teaching of Bernard Malamud's S. Levin, or of the rational decency of Lionel Trilling's John Laskell. Equally lacking is the nostalgic serenity with which Willa Cather's Gregory St. Peter thinks of his vocation or the naive idealism with which Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog plunges into the world of ideas as a refuge from his unstable personal relationships. Instability is an occupational hazard for Oates's academics, who refuse to acknowledge the murderous consequences of rationalizing their desires. The conflict between their inner compulsions and an unyielding reality often drives them beyond sanity. Comedy shrugs at this situation; irony indicates its disappointment from a position of superiority. Satire gets even. For academics who inflate their petty concerns into broad moral issues, Oates reserves a special comic punishment—that of ridicule.

She has described the central conflict in Chekhov's comedies of baffled expectation as a ghostly involvement in language divorced from both the images and realities that support it.²⁰ Writers, critics, and teachers in her own fiction similarly shape their fantasies into obsessive concerns that continue to haunt them even as they themselves victimize others. Writer, critic, and teacher herself, Oates seems haunted by these same controlling roles and by the hypocrisies and desires they project. To the degree that her characters' morbid passivity and violent frustrations are enacted in her fiction, she can exorcise these ghostly figures. At the same time, she takes revenge upon them for their attacks on man's knowledge of a shared, universal condition. No matter how ingenious or arrogant, the individual ego, Oates is convinced, can never erase the memory of that knowledge from our collective consciousness. In her fiction it seems to be in the academic nature never to stop trying.

Notes

1. The Assassins (New York: Vanguard Press, 1975), p. 101. This and all other citations are to the writings of Joyce Carol Oates.

2. Remarks on accepting the National Book Award in fiction for them, repr. in Mary Kathryn Grant, The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1978), p. 164.

3. Introduction to The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (New York: Vanguard Press, 1972), p. 6. See also “Transformations of Self: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates,” Ohio Review 15 (1973): 54.

4. “The Myth of the Isolated Artist,” Psychology Today 6 (May 1973): 74.

5. “Transformations of Self,” p. 58.

6. Ibid., p. 52.

7. “The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence,” in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (New York: Vanguard Press, 1974), pp. 45-46.

8. “Myth of the Isolated Artist,” p. 75.

9. The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978). Further references will be given in parentheses in the text.

10. “Forms of Tragic Literature,” in The Edge of Impossibility, pp. 3-8.

11. “Archways,” in Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (New York: Vanguard Press, 1966), p. 183.

12. “In the Region of Ice,” in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (New York: Vanguard Press, 1970), p. 32.

13. “Accomplished Desires,” in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, p. 145.

14. “Magna Mater,” in The Goddess and Other Women (New York: Vanguard Press, 1974), p. 206.

15. “The Art of Relationships: Henry James and Virginia Woolf,” in New Heaven, New Earth, p. 11.

16. “The Hostile Sun,” pp. 39-40.

17. “Transformations of Self,” p. 54.

18. “The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida,” in The Edge of Impossibility,” pp. 11-36.

19. Preface to New Heaven, New Earth, p. 7.

20. “Chekhov and the Theatre of the Absurd,” in The Edge of Impossibility, pp. 119-20.