THE ACADEMIC COMEDY
527
fantastically brilliant and savagely grotesque editor of an academic
little magazine, was, supposedly, once a Southern poet; now, how–
ever, devoted to imperious criticism and to the small-time
calculations of institutional power, he represents "the new
ersatz
accolade of literary success," academic appointment, which
replaced the disreputable but authentic independence of the
"old style literary life." But Aldridge's concern for the significance
of this intellectual history becomes confused as a result of his
narrator's despairing inability to do anything except equivocate
about King Critic. Since the fiction has no dialogue, no other
point of view than the first person narrator, in short, no other
reality than the narrator's constant equivocation, the novel itself
becomes one elaborate equivocation. Is King Critic an impotent
sadist of letters? Or is he the victim of recent intellectual history,
whose "being" consists of parodying himself
in
the "monstrous
self-perpetuated hoax" of academic literary life? For Aldridge's
narrating
persona
the question cannot be answered. Everything
must remain unknowable, each sense riddled with academic
doubt, and therefore, "all life ... is cliche."
Such cliches spiral down amidst the usual scenery of literary
academic life: the nastily decorous party with its verbal castrations,
the predatory academic wives, the literature-hating ambitious young
teacher-critics and the sycophantish, insular young teacher-poets
who populate fashionable English departments. Also appearing,
though rather less probable, is a topsy-turvy queen of learning, a
sexually insatiable lady classicist whose bruised breast, displayed
at the party, ponderously focuses the moral uncertainty about King
Critic: Did he do it in sadism or passion? The answer, which
Aldridge elaborately treats as unknowable, seems so obvious that
his
perplexity about it may embarrass the reader. Aldridge also
weaves in the more amusing confrontations of a semi-male and
a semi-female academic novelist-an identifiable pair of wittily
malicious sentimentalists-and so continues a recent tradition of
academic in-fighting in the academic novel about academic novel–
ists. His essayistic apen;us dressed up with elaborate symbol–
ism, culminate in the final scene in which Buchanan reasserts
himself as the mystifying king of literary academe, and dances
