Academia

I’ve been back at Grinnell for the past couple of days, though since classes don’t start for another week I’ve had a lot of time to kill on the depopulated campus. Mostly I’ve spent that time running, playing a variety of niche tabletop RPGs, and catching up on the headier reading I picked up at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute. Particularly, I just finished Siri Hustavedt’s novel The Blazing World, a book that I bought purely based on its cool cover art and which inspired a random stranger who happened to see the book to tell me, “Oh, you could’ve made a better choice than that.”

For the most part, that stranger was right: The Blazing World is a tough read. It’s an epistolary novel told by more than twenty different narrators, which tells the story of a woman who secretly creates work for three different artists for a variety of abstract and sometimes confusing reasons. But it’s especially difficult for me to read right now because, in a week, I’ll be in the full immersion of academia that is a Grinnell College education. And if there’s anything Hustavedt’s narrators love, it’s academia. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s academia.

Hate might be too powerful a word, actually. After all, I deeply enjoy most of my classes at Grinnell. But still, there’s something about sentences like, “Nevertheless, the successive real environments may pack a punch that is ultimately more subversive than the accommodating relationalism advocated by Bourriaud” that fires up a instinctive anger inside me, the way that seeing an enormous spider might fire up instinctive fear.  

Grinnell doesn’t exactly coddle its freshman when it comes to teaching them how to write for college-level classes, so maybe the rage I feel at academic writing stems from the time I got back my first paper, in which every use of figurative language, every colloquialism, and every contraction was circled in red ink. I mean, seriously, contractions? Try going a day without using contractions in your everyday speech, and you’ll see how painfully unnatural that is.

And that inauthenticity towards language tends to translate over to an inauthenticity towards life. It seems like the most respected academic writing is the kind that replaces any real feeling that the reader can connect with or evidence they can understand with esoteric quotes and impenetrable logic. It’s more than just that the writing is difficult to understand, it’s that it seems to intentionally remove itself from any kind of understanding aside from a lofty, pretentious understanding that you can only get after you’ve been stuck in a library cubicle for so long that physical sensations and memories begin to fade away. Sometimes it seems like academics make their writing impossible to understand without a PhD in order to keep PhD programs afloat. And if the vast majority of the population will never have the education, much less the desire, to read something, then what makes it so important in the first place?

Of course, everything I’ve written so far stinks of hypocrisy. My writing definitely comes off as pretentious from time to time (and opening this post by talking about a book on the nature of art probably didn’t help that). And I do really like college. After I get over the gag-reflex to the prose, I usually even enjoy the academic writing I read. And I especially like class discussions, because by pooling our knowledge we can usually find some way to pull all the academic nonsense down to earth and explain it using real language, contractions and all. Despite how inauthentic academics seem to strive to make their work, most of it does have important implications on people’s everyday lives. Under all the pretension and philosophy and obscure quotes, The Blazing World is essentially about how ingrained sexism is, not just in the world of art but in the simplest interactions and deepest relationships. And maybe I came to understand that better for all the work that went into piecing it together.

So now I’ve come to the point in the post where I have to make a stand. Either I can go back to my stance that academia has something broken at its core, or I can say it’s all my fault and I just need to work harder. But, in the fine academic tradition of worming out of hard questions, I’m going to say it’s neither. There’s something rewarding about struggling through a dense article, but I can’t help but wonder why it has to be so distant when the ideas are really so intuitive and applicable to real life once you talk them out. I think the best way to communicate and understand the ideas that academics grasp at is through literature (by which I mean real literature, not that literary theory crap). Whether it’s simple writing or purple prose, it always has enough distance between the language and the deeper idea that by connecting the two forces you to engage with it. But, unlike academic writing, the ideas are told through stories that feel real when you read them (at least, if they’re done well), giving you an authentic target for empathy to hold on to as you journey through the story. It lets you engage with deep ideas, the way the best academic writing can, but through something that feels halfway real.

So here’s my current life plan, which I figure I’ll be regurgitating enough over the next few days that it might help to get it straight now: I’m going to get through two more years of academia at Grinnell. I’m going to graduate with an English degree. And I’m going to teach English to high schoolers, so I can engage with all these fascinating ideas without getting knee-deep in phony ivory-tower blather. And, damnit, I’ll use all the contractions I want!