448
PARTISAN REVIEW
Over the years, Ivar thought, everyone around the universi
ty
had
given free reign to his or her desires, and the institution had, with a
fine, trembling responsiveness, answered, "Why not?" It had become,
more than anything, a vast network of interlocking wishes, some of
them modest, many of them conflicting, many of them complemen–
tary. Ivar himself resisted neither the wishes nor those who offered
funds to pay for them. The most that he could say for himself was that,
from time to time, he had felt obscurely uneasy.
At Moo U. there is not even the cold comfort of knowing that some–
body is behind the curtain, turning the wheels that make the Wizard of
Oz look omnipotent. Rather, what Smiley imagines is an organizational
structure as bloated as Earl Butz and so convoluted that no manager
could possibly manage it. Even the prospect of a serious fiscal crisis is
short-circuited when an eccentric local farmer (who invented a planting
machine) dies and leaves his patent to the university. With agri-angels like
that, Moo
U.
will likely enjoy a long future, albeit one that will d.-ift fur–
ther and further from what a proper university ought to be.
From what William Gass calls "the heart of the heart of the country,"
we move to sunny California and the Stanford-like university where John
L'Heureux's
The Handmaid
if
Desire
is set. Here, we are in the belly of the
English department beast (as we were in Randall Jarrell's
Pictures from an
Institution),
with all its requisite egomania and vaulting ambition . This
time, however, what divides the good old boys (known as the Fools) from
the with-it crowd (the Turks) is not quarrels pitting the New Criticism
against the Old Scholarship, but whether there should be a literature
department at all. Why not simply come clean and admit that "theory" is
much more intriguing-to say nothing of career-enhancing-than going
over the same old dreary texts written by dead white European males? But
deconstructing a department requires votes, and what they have instead is
a paralysis of the deeply divided.
Enter Olga Kominska, a visiting writer/ cutting-edge theorist, who
turns out to be as enigmatic as she is magically powerful. L'Heureux takes
a hard, satiric look at a handful of academic feminists, would-be fiction
writers, and those who think of departmental life as a chess game in which
taking somebody's pawn is part of a larger plan to knock off his king.
Korninska, to her credit, operates on quite other assumptions, manipulat–
ing her colleagues until something akin to rough poetic justice is meted
out and the lives she has touched take on the aura of aesthetic wholeness.
Mission accomplished, she flies off at the novel's end, just as she had
descended from the clouds in the opening chapter.
In
between, of course,
