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KINGSLEY WIDMER
academic novel reveals marked similarities to certain recent sub–
genres of institutional portraiture about the military, Hollywood,
advertising, and similar technological bureaucracies. No doubt the
fixed order of a battalion, a studio, an office or a college tends to
provide some sense of definition in an amorphous mass society
and pluralistic culture where any distinctive rhythm of life and
heroic code exist mostly by their absence.
The longing for unlimited power, says Aldridge of his slightly
fictional university, replaced all heroism. So, also, with those other
semi-intellectual institutions concerned with advertising, research
and public display, where an insecurely prestigious and uncertainly
diffused power dominates. In fact, almost all academic novels are
concerned with power, and rarely with ideas, forms of sensibility,
or explorations of new experience. Though usually literary in their
dramatis personae
and manners, academic fictions remain political
in point. That the game is played and paid for with intellectual
currency changes nothing, except perhaps the authenticity of felt
thought, which in any case is now used only to qualify status,
production, place and the rest of the shifting power situation. Pas–
sionate intellect in recent decades has become increasingly greyed,
though less because of some change in the nature of intellect than
as a result of the needless use of intellect in all its forms for institu–
tional protective coloration.
Some treatments of academic power approach it pietistically,
as in Carlos Baker's decorous moral fantasy,
A Friend in Power
(1958), in which the slightly literary professor ascends to the
presidency of an Eastern university by being only modestly dis–
honest, trivially scrupulous, and nearly totally imperceptive. With
even more ponderous moralism, Theodore Morrison described
the same process of academic power as a justification of the
"higher middle class" in
The Stones of the House
(1953). Such
fictions, as we can see in conjunction with their betters (the basic–
ally similar but tougher-minded analysis of bureaucracy of C. P.
Snow's
The Masters,
or, going back in time, certain nineteenth–
century portraits of the clergyman in the Establishment), perform
an old and somewhat tedious function in the Anglo-American
novel: to document social realities while providing a genteel
audience with moral edification. The never-questioned aura of
