On Disappointment.

Sometimes a class goes really poorly. One you’re teaching, one you’re in. Sometimes an entire semester of a class goes really poorly. Sometimes it goes fine, until something breaks.

I think something broke in one of the classes I’m taking this week. A highly genderized fight broke out about a book we’d read: The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem’s pop-culture-meditation/memoir, in which he traces his obsessions with comic books, Star Wars, the Talking Heads, and so on, and the way in which these things came to substitute for a sense of self at times. I say the fight was genderized, not because people seemed to think that Lethem is anti-feminist or anything, but because the class had just two men in it on Tuesday night and we were pretty much the only people who liked the book. The discussion turned into an argument, and ultimately into a catastrofuck.

It’s interesting, because as I was reading the book it never occurred to me that the reaction to it might be this divided. It seemed possible that some people might find it boring — Lethem spends a lot of time with very specific authors and movies, and if you don’t know them it can be a little difficult to care — but I didn’t anticipate that people would find the book offensive or arrogant, which seemed to be the consensus among most of the people in the class. But then I got to campus Tuesday morning, and as I was talking with people in the offices about it — English grad students share offices in the basement of a bunker-like building at UMN — it began to emerge that pretty much everybody had disliked it to one degree or another. As the day went on and I had conferences with my students, a certain amount of pre-class tension was building.

It doesn’t help that I share my cubicle with the only other guy in the class, and one of two people who liked the book other than me. He would go out and gather intelligence, and then report back, “J- didn’t like it either. C- thought it was obvious. K- seemed mystified by how much I liked it.” And then he and I would wring our hands over how class was going to go.

It went exceptionally badly. There’s a sequence in the book in which a person, upon hearing that his girlfriend doesn’t like a John Cassavetes movie, begins to shout something like, “YOU CAN’T LOVE ME IF YOU DON’T LOVE THIS MOVIE! THIS MOVIE IS ME!” Unfortunately, that’s how my cubicle-mate feels about this book, and when people began to attack it, he began to get increasingly upset. It didn’t help that the initial line of attack was a sort of picayune matter of its not being PC enough — Lethem wonders if he might have been “a little bit autistic” in his relationship with books, movies and music, especially after his mother died. Several people declared, “I was offended.” One person wondered whether one can actually be ” a little bit autistic”. (It’s a room full of creative writing grad students. I would posit that none of us are actually qualified to answer this question. I have also noticed, however, that there are degrees of impairment that come with autism. Anyway, that’s how it seems from the outside.)

Aside from the fact that this kind of holier-than-thou crap is exactly what has destroyed the credibility of American academia over the last forty years, the real problem was this: we were arguing over an extremely asinine question of semantics. Nothing, nothing, nothing substantive was being said about the book. I made the mistake of dropping the word “normal” into a comment I made, to which someone loudly responded, “What does normal even mean?” That’s when I checked out. I was on the verge of yelling about how not everybody was a beautiful and unique snowflake. Actually, I was on the verge of telling this specific person that she was not as much of a beautiful and unique snowflake as she seemed to think she was, which would have been unfair and hurtful, but also kind of satisfying in the moment.

After I quit talking is when the charge of arrogance came up. One cannot deny that Lethem portrays himself as arrogant at times in the book. But it seems to me such an obvious and fundamental misreading of the book to assume that this arrogance is just accepted, a matter of his being smarter and more dedicated than his reader, because it’s obviously not. Lethem portrays his own arrogance ironically, as a foible to be corrected, as an obvious character flaw that he has been trying to grow out of. That essentially everybody in this class somehow missed this struck me as incredibly strange.

Maybe the class was just too filled with too many beautiful and unique snowflakes in general, because they also missed the irony in the book’s ending, in which Lethem says something about asking to be pitied. This is so obviously meant in jest, as a parody both of the standard memoir and of his own self-regard, that I would have had a hard time figuring out how to even defend the book if I had had to. Can entire group of people suffer from mass folie a tous about something so fucking simple and obvious? It seemed that way to me.

There is, of course, more to this. Personal dynamics and so on. It’s probably not best to go into those in this space, but let it suffice to say that not everybody in that class is getting along with everybody else right now, and that might be what turned the atmosphere angry and poisonous. Honestly, I’m glad that I managed to keep myself from talking any more than I did, because it just would have been f-bombs, insults and hurt feelings if I had. But something feels broken about that class. It’s like the animal of personal animus has escaped the zoo, and is now pounding around the room, clawing at our faces.