INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
517
dictability than for anything remotely resembling an engagement with
the richness and subtlety of individual poems, plays, and novels. In a
world where virtually everything is a "text"-the backs of cereal boxes,
street signs, and in one spectacular case, the Holocaust itself-what mat–
ters are the (ever-changing) mantras of identity politics . Small wonder
that contemporary graduate students no longer inch their way through
Trilling's densely packed essays; their professors know what butters aca–
demic parsnips and make sure that their students are thoroughly
coached in which players in the game are worth paying attention to.
Many years ago when struggling to teach a required freshman com–
position course at a large state university, it slowly began to dawn on
me that most of the class regarded teaching assistants-of which I was
one-as something of a joke. No doubt part of the trouble arose from
the fact that the university's
Daily Blab
often contained a string of T.A.
jokes designed to tickle undergraduate funny bones . No matter that
these were lame efforts or that most teaching assistants, myself included,
had been the shining lights of their respective literature programs: as a
group, we got no respect.
What to do? In my case, I came up with a plan that never failed to
impress the awkward writers in my charge and, more important, to
make the remainder of the semester slide by on a field of silk. I would
simply ask a fellow teaching assistant to knock on my classroom door
about halfway through a session. I would make my way down the aisles,
open the door a crack, and ask what the interrupter wanted . "Holy cow,
Sandy !" he would blurt out,
"J.
D. Salinger is on the phone and he
wants to talk with you ." He was instructed to announce his message
just loud enough so that students in the back row could hear. And then
came the part with just enough wacky genius that it never failed to
work: I would respond in a calm, carefully measured tone, "Tell Jerry
that I'm teaching a class and that I'll call him later." The whispers–
"Wow! He -knows
J.
D. Salinger!"-would roll up the rows as I made
my way back to the lectern-where that lesson and all the ones that fol–
lowed would proceed on a very different footing . A few years later I
substituted Joseph Heller for Salinger, without losing so much as a beat.
What literary figure, I wonder, could I count on to do the trick with
the current crop of freshmen? Not a single possibility springs to mind–
certainly not old-timers such as John Updike, Norman Mailer, or Philip
Roth, much less a younger, bandanna-sporting David Foster Wallace.
Somebody trying to duplicate my experiment today would find the
name of
any
serious writer falling on deaf ears . Yes, they would have
read a novel by Toni Morrison as required reading. Yes, they would
