The man is determined to lose.

Jack Cashill — the man who claims his literary sensibilities rival those of a latter-day Auerbach — proves yet again, again, to have problems being intellectually honest. In “Obama Does Best When He Says Nothing,” Cashill compares the President to “Chauncey Gardiner, [who] is the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 prescient satire, Being There, which was later made into a movie of the same name, co-scripted by Kosinski.” Because his ethos, such as it is, relies so heavily on the impression that he is a man of letters, he neglects to inform the reader that the quotations he draws from Kosinski’s “prescient satire” are not, in fact, in the novel. They are, however, in the film. As I am the last person about to denigrate film as a medium, my point here is not to belittle Cashill for quoting from a film, but simply to note that, like most disreputable literary critics, he believes his credibility relies on always being the first to “lose” a game of Humiliation.*

*From David Lodge’s Changing Places:

He taught them a game he had invented as a postgraduate student, in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn’t read, and scored a point for every person present who had read it. The Confederate Soldier and Carol were joint winners, scoring four points out of a possible five with Steppenwolf and The Story of O respectively, Philip in each case accounting for the odd point. His own nomination, Oliver Twist — usually a certain winner — was nowhere.

“What do you call that game?” Melanie asked Philip.

“Humiliation.”

“That’s a great name. Humiliation …”

“You have to humiliate yourself to win, you see. Or to stop others from winning. (96)

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/01/the-man-is-determined-to-lose

Comments

[Karl Steel]

isn't the story that the greatest winner of the game lost her job by confessing she'd never read Hamlet? Or am I misremembering (i.e., inventing)?

[SEK]

You're remembering mostly correctly: it was a he, Philip Swallow, who is alluded to have lost his job in Small World.

[tomemos]

Actually, I think both of you are misremembering. I think what Karl is thinking of is the Malvolio-esque (and male) American professor, Ringbaum, who in Changing Places is driven by his desperate need to win to admit to never having read Hamlet. Then, he's denied tenure because the committee feels they can't in good conscience give tenure to someone who's never read Hamlet, and he's still smarting about this in Small World. I don't think Philip Swallow ever loses his job--in Nice Work he's still at Rummidge, as chair.

[SEK]

I do believe you're correct, Tomemos. I'm not sure why I pegged Swallow, despite having the book in front of me. That said, the reason I felt obliged to quote the passage at length was because I feared not everyone knew from "Humiliation." I thought it was an English in-joke, but I take it I'm in the wrong there too?

[tomemos]

Oh, I think it probably is an in-joke--who knows if I ever would have read any of those books (all of which I enjoyed) if Nice Work hadn't been assigned to me in English class…

[Karl Steel]

Thanks all!

I can't even imagine the kind of self-indulgence a proffie would have to, er, indulge in to assign a 'professors doing things' novel to his/her students.

[Martin Wisse]

Oh, this injoke has long since escaped into the wild.

[Ahistoricality]

I don't know, Karl. If you're teaching about satire, and want a topic that your students will actually identify with, a satire on academic life would require a lot less explanation than, say, the usual Jonathan Swift, or random McSweeney's droppings.

[Karl Steel]

except that David Lodge/Jane Smiley/Mary McCarthy/Randell Jarrell/Kingsley Amis/Francine Prose/A.S. Byatt campus novels are about professors, not students, at least not primarily. If students dig jokes about academic conferences, departmental meetings, fights with the provost and dean, &c., then more power to them, but I think these are jokes that primarily appeal to me and my ilk, god help us.

For students and satire, there's always The Onion.

[tomemos]

This was definitely a strange class. It was on comedy, but after Aristophanes, Plautus, Juvenal, Shakespeare, and Moliere, our reading list got very strange. No Swift, no Wilde, no, I don't know, Louis Carroll or H.L. Mencken—we read The Red and the Black, and then Lucky Jim, Nice Work, Philip Roth's The Counterlife (hardly the funniest Roth book), Stoppard's Arcadia, and we watched Animal House. That's right--three works on campus life. It was most odd.

[Karl Steel]

Wow. No Chaucer either, then.

[tomemos]

Nnnope.