David Lehman
MLA '86
Last December, the Modern Language Association of
America held its annual convention at two midtown Manhattan
hotels, the garishly futuristic Marriott Marquis and the rather more
conventional Sheraton. An estimated 13,000 conventioneers, rang–
ing from full professors and their spouses to job-seeking graduate
students in English and foreign languages, convened for the annual
ritual that ratifies their consent to academe's social contract. Sport–
ing sensible shoes and tweed jackets with their green name tags
prominently displayed, scholars, critics and dilettantes assembled to
talk shop, attend symposia, reunite with old colleagues and former
classmates, visit the book exhibits of university presses and trade
publishers , and ponder the state of their profession between drinks
at such smart New York hangouts as Sardi's and the Century Club.
Bemused ironists, of course, had themselves their annual field
day. Literary journalists, feeling like spies, could concentrate on the
higher ironies, shielded by professional detachment from any unset–
tling display of spite or resentment or envy, which have long marked
the secret life of the academic community, and not merely on the
part of those who are-as one speaker put it-on "the wrong side of
the tenure track." The glee of such observers might have been
tempered somewhat by the knowledge that they could have easily
filed their reports on what happened without really needing to go.
Readers of David Lodge's comic novel
Small World
have already
been there; change a few particulars, and the column that
The Wall
Street Journal
ran in 1983 about that year's convention could do dou–
ble duty this time around . Yet the very predictability of the whole af–
fair could itself prove quite pleasant, at least to anyone with an ap–
petite for Kierkegaard's brand of irony . The MLA convention,
which takes place in revolving cities on the same days between
Christmas and New Year's every year, provides a rare example of
Kierkegaard's concept of repetition and rotation. It's the constant
that allows the spectator to dally over the variables in his own
life-an event that so nearly duplicates itself from year to year that
the time between occurrences seems suddenly to rush at you as from
the wrong end of a telescope.
To get to the Sheraton, where the foreign language sessions
took place, involves a nightmare of gridlock from the Marriott Mar-
