J. A. Bernstein
A Report from the Academy
Rhonda Kayson, PhD
Associate Professor (with tenure)
Babelson College, United States
Dear Members of the External Reviewing Committee,
Ours isn’t one of the premier academic programs in the country, so perhaps it’ll come as less of a shock to know that we admitted the animal in August of 2014, shortly before classes commenced, and without taking into account her grades or standardized tests—all of which were fine, it would later turn out, despite the fact her writing test consisted of random letters and was reportedly mangled, or chewed.
What swayed the Admissions Committee was a line from her chief recommender, a respected primatologist named M. K. M. Günther, who formerly chaired the Anthropology Department (until funding was slashed):
[Denise’s] ability to communicate non-verbally, as well as in myriad ways, including sign language, is simply unparalleled. She’s the smartest primate we’ve kept, and despite a few behavioral issues—she has a tendency to grope playmates, and sometimes trades sex for meat—she’s un- questionably the brightest one in our lab. I have little doubt she would continue her expression and build on what she’s learned by enrolling in your Ph.D. program.
That she hadn’t technically completed a bachelor’s was in fact concerning, though we’ve seen worse in our time and, as my department chair, Tom Haven, a well-regarded Miltonist, remarked, Hemingway never got his B.A. Nor did Faulkner or Yeats. And she would hardly be the first to try to make ends meet outside.
I’ll admit I was a bit flustered the first time I encountered her, slouched as she was inside the graduate student carrels, steel coffee mug in hand, discarded banana peels lining the floor. (Her nook was probably the cleanest one there.) We had slotted her to teach in the spring, which was contingent of course on her first working in the Writing Center, where, it turned out, she excelled. In this case, she was slumped beside her desk, wearing a pair of oversized headphones and staring morosely at a screen. On it, an image of what I took to be Derrida, or some recondite French theorist, was gracing her with wisdom, about which she looked less than enthused.
“Hi there,” I muttered.
“Ee-oo, ee-oo,” she growled. Then she burped and scratched at her chest.
“I don’t mean to disturb you. I just wanted to introduce myself.”
A sulking post-colonialist, who was seated nearby, grimly looked up from his papers. Then he turned back to Spivak or whatever flooded his desk.
The room reeked of Cheetos and fur. “Glad to see you’re fitting in.”
Denise frowned at her screen. She clicked pause with her thumb, then plucked off her headphones. “Ee-oo, ee-oo,” she explained.
“I’m sorry to hear that, though I agree he misinterpreted Freud. You should try Grammatology.”
Denise leaned back in her chair. She played with her genitals and glanced at the overhead lights, which cast a hazy glow over the damp room. Around her, more grad students stirred.
“She’s been temperamental,” a Victorianist whined.
Denise threw her mug on the floor. She slapped her buttocks and gallivanted out of the room, knocking over three bookshelves en route. On her screen, which still flickered, Derrida looked on amused.
It came to my attention a couple of weeks after this incident that several students had complained of mistreatment. At first, I thought Denise was the culprit—it later came to light that she’d almost killed a handler, though the fault, I assume now, was his. Gradually, it became apparent that they were referring to our department chair, Tom, whose introduction to tragic closet drama evidently included more than the canonical texts. After a night of rambunctious drinking, where at least a couple students passed out—Denise was not one of them, and was said to have held her own—Tom purportedly attempted to drive several home, after which he ingratiated himself with one, lambasted two others, and threatened to expel all three unless they kept his revelry quiet, including the coke he was alleged to have snorted off a younger man’s chest, who may or may not have been his Miltonist protégée. In any case, a couple students had since failed their quals, at which Tom had been particularly vindictive, and there were rumors of lawsuits and resignations in the works, not to mention a mountain of coke.
When I told my husband, George, about this imbroglio, he arched a brow. “You should stay away from that character,” he said. George is a sociolinguist and had never been keen on moving with me to the school. He’d given up tenure and, to hear him talk, what was left of his dignity and soul.
“I’ve always kept Tom at arm’s length,” I replied.
“No, the primate,” he huffed, pouring milk in his espresso. It was from a machine we couldn’t easily afford. “I don’t trust her one bit. Nor the rest of your associates.”
“Well, you know we could have stayed at your school. I’d be an excellent barista.”
“Here,” he said, sniffing the mug.
Denise too did her best to stay clear of this affair, confined, as she was, to the stacks, as well as to the care of her handler, who managed a lab in Smith Hall. Where exactly she slept at night, none could say for sure. She listed her residence as her campus P.O. box and was sometimes seen napping in a banyan tree next to the quad.
What I do know is that her performance did not slip. Indeed, it was said that she aced her quals, which Tom himself supervised, including a list of proto-simianist texts, which reportedly contained extensive readings in Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more, along with the “animal turn,” as I guess her theoretical slant was now called. That she actually wrote a dissertation in critical animal studies struck me as hard to believe. Yet I came across sections. They were left in Tom’s box—that is, before he was arrested in June—and that of his replacement, Andrea Shlocker, the Lacanian who began in July. She never warmed to Denise’s work, or so I was told, but begrudgingly accepted the defense. That the bulk of it was conducted in video performance, I later learned, proved to be of minor concern. The biggest issue, I was told, is that Denise didn’t cite Deleuze or Lacan, or even make a nod to the Freudian unconscious, a glaring oversight if there ever was one.
The word “civilization” describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors . . . (Freud, Civ., Strachey trans., 1930)
That I recall fondly from my darkest days at Yale, when I too curled up with Freud’s books, only to gravitate steadily toward feminist writings, particularly Kristeva, whom I edit, and Nancy Fraser, whose work I now loathe. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What needs to be stressed about our program is that, while critical in nature and specializing in interpretation itself, as well as the hermeneutics of thought, it welcomes a diversity of views. We pride ourselves on our tolerance and our open-mindedness towards species of all kinds—putting aside those with more animal inclinations, as Tom, before he was cuffed, sometimes showed.
What made Denise so seminal to us as a contributor was her evident modesty. She would remain silent through the bulk of the readings she attended and rarely proffered her thoughts, even during the Q&As, when most graduate students always seemed to vie for the mic—one time, she did hiss at Donna Haraway, though I can’t say that was entirely without cause. Denise always listened raptly, as if mulling over her thoughts. Then she’d play with her fur, jut out her lips, tug at her nipples, and shriek. Once, she even drew an image of a banana and asked Slavoj Žižek if he could interpret the thought.
Žižek looked at her confoundedly. “An agent of Capital?” he asked.
Denise hiccupped.
“Well, that hardly explains the prior modes of the unconscious.” Žižek scratched at his beard. He clawed his pencil. “Wait,” he explained, “it’s the Lack.”
Denise looked at him knowingly.
Everyone in the audience clapped. I was later told that the lecture was released in three volumes and adapted for Netflix.
I can’t say it came as much of a shock to any of us to learn that Denise was greeted with offers at two or three well-esteemed schools, one of them an Ivy, along with two think tanks. Even Facebook kept calling. She refused to answer them and, when pressed by her advisers—Žižek took her under his wing and even steered her dissertation, since Andrea, he implied, was unequipped, an insinuation I can hardly reject—Denise admitted she greatly longed to return to Western Tanzania, where she had evidently once made her home. That she had been snatched and uprooted, I was told, formed a riveting part of her research statement—on which Columbia was keen—and a memoir she’d contracted with Knopf. How she found time to write, and apply, and defend, none of us actually knew.
We do know that for a program of our size and limited reputation, a Columbia placement was great. So it was even more shocking when Lee Bollinger called to complain she had rebuffed him at every term. “She’ll bring us the renown that we seek, and the academic vigor, and the unusual perspective of the—”
Andrea, who had previously been denied tenure at Columbia and had left on somewhat nebulous terms, hung up on him briskly and poured herself a Chablis. “Now, Denise,” she said,“you’re going to have to make choices in life. The ‘desire for freedom,’” she explained, tilting her glass, leafing through a volume of Freud,
may spring from what remains of the original personality, still untamed by civilization, and so become a basis for hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom is thus directed against particular forms and claims of civilization, or against civilization as a whole.
Denise wetted her lips.
“‘Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do not know.’”
Denise grimaced slightly.
“That’s fine. Pomona’s well-respected. But have you thought about the package you’ll need?”
Denise was sprawled in her chair—she’d been given Tom’s office, with Andrea having moved down the hall—and scratched at her forearm. Monkey biscuits littered the desk.
“Have you thought about remaining?”
Denise bit her lip.
“I talked to the Provost last night. We have funds from the College, and the Board of Regents is well aware of your credentials and what you could do for our school. Hell, you’ve been in half the papers this week”— I’d heard rumors that her memoir, a four-volume series, the first of which was just released, had been shortlisted for the Man Booker, the first time nonfiction was considered for the prize—“and we’re looking to revive creative writing in these halls, and we were thinking you’re the person...um, primate for that.”
Denise chomped a loquat and spat its seeds on the floor.
“And yes, your handler can remain. In fact, you could live with our President. He has a colonial not far from Smith Hall—”
Denise meekly sighed.
“And of course you’ll get leave for your tour.”
In retrospect, I can’t say there was anything ignominious about hiring a semi-literate, ground-dwelling, omnivorous animal for a tenure-track position in English with a focus on narrative production—the term “writing” was considered passé. What jarred me were her political leanings. Those I could start to deduce.
During the late Haven Scandal—Tom later ran for Congress, somehow claiming martyr status, as only a man of his kind could—I noticed that Denise remained glaringly silent when issues of behavior cropped up. We all knew Tom had been mistreated by the admin; they wanted nothing to do with his kind and summarily dismissed him when the first inkling of misconduct arose. Yet Denise remained mum, even as a student, hardly paying heed when his detractors roamed through the halls, a vague air of satisfaction creeping over their lips, their nose rings as sharp as their stained vintage clothing and their triumphal coruscating glares. I never suspected she was liberal, but I never took her as a Trumpist, or worse, a budding fascist, like Heidegger, whom she admired. That she was fluent in German, or so I was told, came as something of a surprise—I’d never heard her mutter a full syllable in English. But who was I to complain? Besides, I try to feel sympathy for all the females around me, especially those coping with Tom.
What I never conceived of—and this is hard to say for sure—is that she would leak details of the affair to the press, perhaps through her agent, in an effort to discredit Andrea, Günther, and me—everyone except Žižek, in fact, whose dedicated mentoring, I’ve come to suspect, may have involved more than just signs.
In any case, she testified on Hannity that our department was stacked against males of all kinds, and “free speech” itself was a ruse.
“What is free speech?” I asked, pounding my set. I was watching at home with my husband. “She can’t even talk.”
“But she can communicate,” said George.
“They’re signs. Fucking signs. Can’t you see?”
“Yes, I can see that I should have married a more stable human being. Or mammal, for that matter—”
“Don’t start.”
I neglected to mention that Denise had been promoted and tenured within her first year, moves that were probably illegal under the bylaws and signed off on by regents of all stripes, even the so-called “liberals.” This is the Academy, as it were. And I can’t truthfully complain, since her book sales put us on the map, as did her Pulitzer address, which she delivered from the colonial’s refurbished marble-block steps.
Where I guess I felt miffed was in her insistence that a department of English—if that’s what we are—needed to emphasize communication. Literature, she said, was in cahoots with the supra-human power structure, and the animalistic urges of man, and the speciesist tendencies on which the Academy was founded and through which it continued to thrive, subjugating every creature and living entity in sight. I suppose I didn’t disagree with her entirely—I’d given up meat and was never really one to wear fur, silk, or leather, though I’ve always liked seashells and pearls. Yet I can’t understand her insistence and her edict last week—she was recently sworn in as President, a first for the non-human kind— that literature was cruelty but language, yes, language, was love.
Thus, we stopped teaching literature and stories of all kinds and instead stuck to sign-language commands. How to eat bananas. How to eschew words. How to bang a steel cage, loaf, and grunt. It’s not entirely foreign—I was tenured last week—but a bit of a step down, I suppose.
I often wonder about Tom and the path that he took: if it was an entirely regrettable choice.
. . . the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors . . .
Supra-human structures are what make us what we are. I just wish my stupid husband would return.