THE ACADEMIC COMEDY
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literary narrator-perhaps all, willy nilly, become parody. But to
have the academic parody of literature remain literature requires a
more decisive belief in some fuller non-academic reality. The
novel as successful parody of the novel also requires a defter
sleight-of-hand at Chinese box tricks than Aldridge can command,
().Specially when heavily gloved as perplexed moralist of the
literary-intellectual life.
In parodying himself Aldridge poses for us the larger
question of the reason for such novels. They seem to arise out
Qf an odd process of
self~justification
by self-condemnation: once
this was the grandiloquent theme of Hamlet-Faust-Karamazov:
now it has become symptomatic rather than symbolic. There is,
indeed, a kind of teaspooned Dostoevskyeanism much favored by
novelists within the academy. (A recent example, placed in an
academic scene: Monroe Engel's
The Visions of Nicholas Solon
(1959), a murky study of intellectual masochism amid the loss of
intellectual community and purpose. The scene of the intellectual's
involuted unfolding of his self-hatred need not, however, be
academic, and is not in the old bohemianism of Albert Guerard's
The Bystander
(1959), a small and neat study by an academician
of the writer as man-of-resentment, placed in Europe.) The
academic motives of obscure revenge for intellectual emasculation
and labyrinthine perplexities over the loss of literary innocence need
not be reduced to matters of the novelist's biography. The retalia–
tory aspects of the
roman
a
clef
lack relevance. Malicious biography
is widespread in the novel- in almost every work, for example, of
Joyce and Lawrence, in the current fictions of a well-known neo–
naturalist who can't stop elaborating vindictive portraits of his
ex-wife, and in the self-indulgent cult biographies of beatniks.
Biography in the novel deserves only passing interest, and in the
academic novel should appeal only to wives and job-hunters.
We forget, in these over-subtle days, the dependence of fiction
upon social fact. The novel of academic life threatens to become
yet another of those self-perpetuating sub-genres of the American
narrative in search of significant society. Understandably, for
those older sub-genres once rooted in regional realities-the South–
ern novel, the Western tale, the Midwestern Small-Town-Story–
ch).lrn on only at sub-literary levels of counterfeit nostalgia. The
