Uriel at Cambridge

Can you objectively recall experiences involving yourself? Can you rely on your memory of events in your life? Can you remember your past without distortion — without underplaying some elements or enhancing others?

I was aware that Enlightenment values are on the wane in our modern world, that reason and rationality are in retreat, that relativism wins more converts each year, that cellphone ringtones are sounding the death knell of contemplation and thought. But even I never thought I'd be the last man on earth who would answer yes to such questions.

Never, that is, until my recent immersion in Cambridge University.

In vain did I canvass among my 120 fellow students in Cambridge's summer literature program, seeking a like-minded soul with faith in the integrity of his own thought processes. I finally came to suspect that the species to which I belong — an order of homo sapiens possessed of a belief in truth, rationality, impartial inquiry, and the possibility of reconciling opposing views through the use of reason (a process referred to in former times as "the marketplace of ideas") — may, once I expire, be completely extinct.

That event — my expiry, and the termination of the species I represent — won't necessarily cause insurmountable grief to all the wonderful people I encountered at Cambridge. My native proclivities brought about no small degree of consternation among many of the folks I met. And even among some I never met. Dr. Fred Parker, for example, the director of the literature program, responded as follows when I dropped him a note requesting an audience:

I would rather not meet with you, for I might find it difficult to remain polite.... Nevertheless, I assure you that I will give serious thought to your criticisms.

I had indeed enclosed, together with my request to meet, some comments I'd written about the program's "plenary lectures." (The so-called plenary lectures were daily lectures to be attended jointly by all the literature students. The courses, on the other hand, involved smaller groups, as 4 or 5 alternative courses were given in each course time slot.) But that didn't seem to adequately explain Parker's refusal to meet even once with a student wishing to discuss the program for which, as director, he presumably bore some responsibility. Many students besides myself had quite negative opinions about various aspects of the program. Had no one told Parker?

Students were urged to fill out and submit feedback questionnaires at the end of the program each year. Had last year's students been markedly more satisfied than this year's? Or did the reigning view, that memories are always self-indulgent, correctly describe Parker's recollection of comments received the year before?

Or — another possibility — did Parker perhaps prefer to confine himself to the uniformly joyous expressions of student pleasure exhibited at the summer school's website:

Enthusiastic and excellent! ... Well presented, lively, interactive discussion.... Very realistic and interesting presentations.... Speaker very dynamic, humorous and knowledgeable.... The lecturer did a great job of fitting loads of difficult, detailed info into such little time without confusing jargon.... Excellent in every way.

There certainly seemed to be some kind of disconnect between the program organizers' conceptions and the reality observed on the ground. This year's designated theme for the plenary lectures was Conversation. Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the summer literature program experience was the paucity of real conversation — indeed, the failure to recognize basic tenets of conversation.

One might consider conversation with oneself — specifically, the self-querying involved in the process of recollection — to be the most elementary form of conversation. But how satisfied should one be with that conversation if the memories it produces are biased and distorted? One could say that at Cambridge, even conversation with oneself was viewed as a very iffy venture.

Then there was conversation between distinct individuals. Not once in this literature program did I witness an actual classroom debate between proponents of different interpretations or ideas, although our class sizes, at 20 to 25 students, were well suited to discussion.

One emblematic classroom exchange, in a course taught by Adrian Barlow, involved Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement. Most of the novel is a novel-within-the-novel, authored by a character named Briony. Briony's novel is a story about herself and other characters in her life, including her sister. But, as she acknowledges to the reader, she has altered the story to give it a happy ending. She also informs the reader that her novel cannot be published so long as an evil character named Paul remains living, because he would use legal measures to block publication and prevent harm to his reputation.

One idea that was dear to the hearts of most summer program participants was that one could really never discern truth at all — that it was scarcely a meaningful concept. Catering to this notion, Barlow stressed how questionable Briony's entire account was, how there was little the reader could firmly depend upon, how any part of the story might well be her invention, how it was all really rather ambiguous and murky.

But Briony's story is actually sharply defined, and she appears to have personal integrity. Of course appearances can mislead, and any story can contain distortions and lies. But I could see no basis for suspecting this of Briony's story, apart from the altered ending which Briony herself openly acknowledges.

I raised the question: "What hint does the text offer that anything besides the altered ending is untrue?"

This question was unwelcome, suggesting as it did the idea of accurate, unbiased depictions of an objective reality.

A student rejoined: "The story was published, even though she said it couldn't be published because of legal obstacles."

Now. There is no indication that Briony's novel has been published in her world — that is, the fictional world created by McEwan, of which Briony is a part. The student was pointing out that Briony's novel had been published in our world — as McEwan's novel, Atonement. Thus, the student's argument went, we could not rely on Briony, because Briony had told us that the evil Paul would prevent publication.

But.... That was an absurd line of reasoning. I responded: "But Paul is a fictional character." The fact that Paul had not prevented McEwan's publication of Atonement proved nothing about whether the fictional Briony's account was accurate in her world.

But the discussion — point, rebuttal, counter-rebuttal — had gone on long enough, because debate was unacceptable. Barlow suavely interceded: "We end up going in circles." Wasn't that the way it always was, his manner projected, when one tried to reconcile different views and get at the truth of something?

There was no further discussion of the issue.

And that was about as far as any classroom debate I witnessed went in the literature program. Debate was a fearsome thing. All that clashing. It made everyone nervous. Even innocent bystanders could get injured.

Debate was equally objectionable with subjects that were controversial in the real world. At one point in another novel discussed in Barlow's class, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, a leaflet comes through the letterbox of the main characters' family home. They are Bangladeshi immigrants, Muslims, living in London. One of the daughters reads the leaflet aloud for her father:

Multicultural Murder

In our schools it's multicultural murder. Do you know what they are teaching your children today? in domestic science your daughter will learn how to make a kebab, or fry a bhaji. For his history lesson your son will be studying Africa or India or some other dark and distant land. English people, he will learn, are Wicked Colonialists.

And in Religious Instruction, what will your child be taught? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? No. Krishna, Abraham and Muhammad.

Christianity is being gently slaughtered. It is "only one" of the world's "great religions." Indeed, in our local schools you could be forgiven for thinking that Islam is the official religion.

Should we be forced to put up with this? When the truth is that it is a religion of hate and intolerance. When Muslim extremists are planning to turn Britain into an Islamic Republic, using a combination of immigration, high birth rates and conversion....

Another student in Barlow's class, Janine, was a high school teacher in Luxembourg. She'd remarked that she intended to use Brick Lane in her own teaching. Barlow commented, in the context of his remarks on the "Multicultural Murder" leaflet: "I'm glad you'll be teaching this novel — it's entirely appropriate for 16-year-olds."

Why would it be appropriate? Surely because it was provocative and would stimulate debate among the students over different points of view concerning these very current issues. Yet Barlow's own class had absolutely no exchanges about these issues.

Nazneen, the novel's gentle protagonist, has a boyfriend, Karim, another Muslim also residing in London. Karim feels alienated in Britain. He is a political activist and could conceivably become a terrorist. Yet Britain is his home:

Karim had never even been to Bangladesh. Nazneen felt a stab of pity. Karim was born a foreigner.... Karim did not have his place in the world. That was why he defended it.

Barlow read out the line, Karim did not have his place in the world, and remarked: "This is true of many Muslim youth today." Then he went on to other matters, offering no opening for student input. There was no discussion of the topic.

Meanwhile, in the world outside Cambridge, controversy was raging in the British news media over issues surrounding Britain's 1.6 million Muslims. British-born Muslims had carried out terrorist bombings in London the month before. An ICM Research poll of Muslims in Britain (pdf document) had found that 5% considered "further attacks by British suicide bombers in the UK" to be "justified." A further 13% said they didn't know whether or not they were justified. Also, 20% reported that in the short time since the bombings, they or a family member had experienced "hostility or abuse from non-Muslims" because of their religion.

But at Cambridge, this tempest might as well have been taking place on another planet. I heard practically no discussion whatever of such topics.

There was another topic that might have stirred discussion (though it didn't), since we were directly confronted with it in several of the plenary lectures: Academic silliness, particularly the kind for which literary criticism is notorious. The topic of academic silliness was also put under our noses by a novel in which it is satirized — David Lodge's Nice Work, another of the works discussed in Barlow's course:

Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that "character" is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. As evidence for this assertion she will point to the fact that the rise of the novel (the literary genre of "character" par excellence in the eighteenth century) coincided with the triumph of capitalism; and that the modernist and post-modernist deconstruction of the classic novel in the twentieth century has coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.

Why the classic novel should have collaborated with the spirit of capitalism is perfectly obvious to Robyn. Both are expressions of a secularised Protestant ethic, both dependent on the idea of an autonomous individual self who is responsible for and in control of his/her own destiny, seeking happiness and fortune in competition with other autonomous selves. This is true of the novel considered both as commodity and as mode of representation. (Thus Robyn in full seminar spate.)

Coincidentally, an idea very similar to Penrose's notion that character is an illusion had been urged upon us by Jill Paton-Walsh in a plenary lecture delivered prior to our discussion of Nice Work. I politely pointed this out in class. But, alas, Barlow immediately moved on to other matters and there was no follow-up.

It would have been worth reflecting upon. Penrose was a fictional character through which Lodge, himself a former academic, satirizes academic folly. Paton-Walsh was a real-life speaker in our summer school program, addressing us in earnest.

Lodge has written that

[a] lot of academic literary criticism and theory ... frankly no longer seems worth the considerable effort of keeping up with it. A vast amount of it is not . . . a contribution to human knowledge but the demonstration of professional mastery by translating known facts into more and more arcane metalanguages.

[Quoted in "Right, here goes," by Scott Stossel, The Atlantic Monthly magazine, April, 1996 issue.]

Lodge's point here was not so terribly different from those "criticisms" of mine which had so outraged the literature program director. But Lodge and I were criticizing different orders of transgression.

Lodge's focus was academic folly within the profession, where the victims are mainly people who, for whatever reasons, have voluntarily embraced a profession requiring them to swim through a soup of "arcane metalanguages."

I, however, had addressed the infliction of this nonsense upon lay people — people like myself. I wasn't a professional; I wasn't an academic; and I wasn't here for career promotion or money. In fact, darn it, I was paying money. The sole point of being here was the pleasure of literature: to deepen my understanding and appreciation of geniuses who have won readers with original and interesting works like Atonement and Brick Lane. I certainly wasn't here to puzzle over "arcane metalanguages" fabricated by people whose only readers were coerced by the imperatives of academic careers.

So why did I have lecturers presenting me with impenetrable items of esoterica like, The implied interlocutor is always assimilated to different categories of silence?

Lodge's criticisms seemed quite reasonable and I wished him well; but I was talking about another category of victimhood. It's like the difference between when a car dealer buys a car and when a simple consumer buys a car. As is recognized by consumer statutes in many jurisdictions, the consumer is entitled to a higher standard of protection against fraud, abuse and misrepresentation.

I wasn't an insider, in other words. I was an innocent. I had done nothing to deserve this.

And what of my fellow victims? What were their feelings? My explorations led to further conversations.

Those "criticisms" I'd written, for which I'd been barred from Parker's ballpark, had been in the form of a short essay I'd titled "The Downside." The piece had been generally approved, even praised, by most of the students in my immediate circle. Outside that circle was another matter. One conversation, with Maureen, an American lady in her 50's, went like this:

Uriel: So ... did you agree, or disagree?

Maureen: Oh, I disagreed. I love the program. The courses, the plenary lectures....

Uriel: Love? Well ... what about the lecture on autism? [That was the one with the inscrutable revelation concerning interlocutors and categories of silence.]

Maureen: Oh, I absolutely loved that lecture. I adored it.

Uriel: Well, I quoted a sentence from that lecture. Did you understand it?

Maureen: Well, you certainly can't expect, in a one-hour lecture, that people are going to pay attention to most of what is said.

And with that, it was plain that Maureen had not the least desire to prolong the discussion.

That was among the more illuminating conversations I had concerning my "Downside." One student damned it as "inflammatory." Another was moved to write me a letter ("Mr. Wittenberg, I take great offence to your essay....") which he had a go-between hand-deliver to me to safeguard his (or her) anonymity. Yet another, a lady from Germany called Bianka Reinhardt, furiously advised me to Fuck off! at breakfast one morning in the St. Catherine's College dining hall, a speech her friend Sarah Wray found so admirable that she raised her hands and clapped in appreciation.

Ah, Cambridge! The life of the mind.

By the way, although Parker never relented in his refusal to admit me to his sight, I did get to speak to Sarah Ormrod, the director of all the Cambridge summer programs. (Confusingly, Ormrod is "director" of all the programs, while Parker is "director" of one of them, the literature program. Also confusing is the ambiguous name given to another of the summer programs — "International Summer Schools" — a label which would fit any of the other programs as well. But that would presuppose that someone might want to attempt the treacherous route from words to meaning.)

Ormrod and I had a courteous and reasonably friendly chat for about an hour. Then, about an hour afterwards, as I was talking with one of the teachers outdoors by the summer school office, she approached to ask to speak to me again. When I went to her, she said:

It's been brought to my attention that you have a website with a very great deal on it. If you were intending to write something negative about the summer schools — like, the Cambridge summer schools are terrible — we would certainly disapprove of that.

I allowed that it had occurred to me to write something. But then I added something completely disarming: "I would not write anything unethical."

What could she possibly say to that?

(Continued....)