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 pparently
I shouldn't expect an Employee of the Month nomination any time
soon. Recently, while browsing in the stacks, I overheard –
accidentally, of course – the following conversation:
| NEW
EMPLOYEE: "So who's this Carlisle anyway? And,
just out of curiosity, why was he chosen as the web
site's new columnist?"
TRAINER:
"Oh him. Everyone asks the same question. You've
seen him around. He's that weedy fellow who lopes awkwardly
about the store in outfits. Last month he sported a beret
and sailor suit (he'd just seen Querelle
for the first time). We were all glad when his obsession
with the French ended – he hadn't bathed for several
weeks – but his current look is even less successful.
The ascot and ill-fitting tweeds make him look less like
an English lord, as intended, than a bewildered giraffe
in a Sherlock Holmes costume. Frankly, he was "chosen"
for the column because he is good for little else. His skills
as a bookseller seem to be limited to glaring menacingly
at anyone browsing Anne
Rivers Siddons, refusing to shelve fitness books, and
quoting Derrida
to annoyed customers. The column was just the ticket. Carlisle's
writing is insufferably pompous, but it takes the
semiliterate little bugger the better part of a week to
write a paragraph, so – knock on wood – he's more
or less out of the way."
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Believe it or not, my first thought upon hearing this invidious
slander was not how best to parry my partner's thrust (though
I can't help adding that people who live in peasant-dress houses
shouldn't throw stones). No, my reaction was not anger, but pity.
As any third rate writer knows, the first rule of satirical characterization
is Get Your Facts Straight. If you'd actually seen Querelle
you'd know that Brad Davis never wears a beret. And, come on,
Holmes in an ascot? Sherlock and Watson weren't fancy boys.
So, dear colleague, instead of retaliating, I've opted to help
you out. You clearly need a few pointers in the demanding art
of character assassination. I've therefore gathered a few excellent
examples for you to print out and study on your lunch break. Try
not to drip wheat gluten on the paper.
Example one: My first example comes from the inimitable
Truman
Capote. Though Breakfast
at Tiffany's is one of the most flawless novellas ever written,
most people know the story of enigmatic Holly Golightly from the
popular, though mediocre, 1961 vehicle for Audrey Hepburn. Pity.
Where the film is cute and sentimental, the book is witty and
heartfelt, a showcase for Capote's considerable talents. Capote's
novella is also very, very funny, containing some of the most
deftly executed satirical passages I've read. One of my favorites
is this paragraph, a model of imagination and economy, which describes
one of Holly Golightly's suitors, millionaire Rusty Trawler:
| He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby
fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging
his plump and spankable bottom. There wasn't a suspicion of
bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature
features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if
he'd been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined
as a blownup balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls
and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering. |
So, my fellow bookseller, if your off-the-cuff attempts at satire
pale in comparison to Mr. Capote's, take heart: even Blake Edwards,
on occasion, made a mess of his material.
Example two: Moving back in time a few decades, my next
example comes from Brideshead
Revisited by Evelyn
Waugh, possibly the greatest of twentieth-century satirists.
Admittedly, though Brideshead is by most accounts Waugh's
greatest work, it is on the a whole not as consistently funny
as his earlier comic novels such as Vile Bodies and Decline
and Fall (you try maintaining 300 pages of witty banter
after entering your second world war.) But when Brideshead
is funny, it surpasses anything Waugh ever wrote.
The following paragraphs are taken from an extended monologue
by effete collegian Anthony Blanche, who's taken his classmate
Charles Rider (our hero) to dinner. Blanche, by this point more
or less in his cups, recounts a recent incident wherein a group
of college boys threw him into the local fountain, Mercury. And
though Blanche has clearly doctored the details in hindsight,
the reader hardly minds, for here Blanche provides a perfect example
of how to take a potentially humiliating situation and turn it
in your favor (perhaps, my fellow employee, you could turn the
same trick for those blemishes). The boys have just come up to
Blanche's room to seize him:
| Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him
in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by
Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them
to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear
sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology
you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure
than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy
of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be
my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand,
you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified
libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts,
to the fountain."
Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that?
I walked down with them and not one came within a yard of
me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really
most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck
some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily
home, and heard Boy Mulchaster saying, "Anyway, we
did put him in Mercury." You know, Charles,
that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time.
When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens
and have cretinous, porcine sons like themselves, getting
drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats,
they'll still say, when my name is mentioned, "We put
him in Mercury one night," and their barn-yard daughters
will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his
day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue
du Nord!
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Yes, what a pity to grow dull. And since there's nothing more
boring than a poorly conceived insult, I hope, my puca shell-wearing
coworker, you're taking notes.
Example three: For my final example I've chosen a less
prominent figure. But though James
Hynes may not be as well known as Capote or Waugh, give him
time.
The Lecturer's Tale is as sophisticated and witty a satire
as any of recent years. Like his previous collection of three
novellas, Publish
and Perish, The Lecturer's Tale is a take no prisoners
assault on the (allegedly) sorry state of contemporary literary
scholarship.
I know, I know. Not another academic satire? It's true. Recent
years have produced more parodies of gruesome academics than reality
based TV shows. Some might argue this signals a marked lack of
original inspiration in our fiction writers. But it's just as
plausible that for this particular generation of writers, the
environments richest in the satirist's raw materials – pomposity,
stupidity, pretension, vice, etc. – can be found within the
ivied edifices of our universities.
Anyone who reads The Lecturer's Tale will undoubtedly
conclude the latter, for the academics in Hynes's fictional university,
Midwestern, are as barbaric a lot as any that has been portrayed
in literature. Fortunately for readers, Hynes eviscerates his
despicable subjects in hilarious style. And though the excessive
climax stretched this readers tolerance uncomfortably, rarely,
if ever, have I read a more entertaining book. And I have never
read a book with more hilarious caricatures. Take for example
this description of literary theorist Lester Antilles, who has
just arrived at Midwestern to apply for a recently vacated chair
in the department.
| In a discipline where scholarly heft was defined by being
more postcolonial than thou, Lester Antilles was the heftiest
of the lot. As a graduate student at an Ivy League school
he had announced to his dissertation committee that doctoral
theses at major Western universities were a primary locus
of the objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects, and
he refused on principle to participate in the marginalization
of indigenous voices or to become complicit with the hegemonic
discourse of Western postcolonial cultural imperialism. In
practice, this meant that for six years he refused to take
classes, attend seminars, or write a dissertation. As a result
of this ideologically engaged nonparticipation, he was offered
tenured positions even before he had his Ph.D., but by refusing
to write a book or any articles on his topic – publishing
with major university presses being even more complicit with
imperialism than writing dissertations – he provoked
a fierce bidding war. Columbia won by offering him an endowed
chair and a full professorship, and on Morningside Heights
he courageously continued his principled refusal to teach
any classes, hold any office hours, publish any books, serve
on any committees, or supervise any dissertations. For this
demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention
in the dominant discourse, Antilles made well into the six
figures, more money than the President of the United States. |
So, dear colleague, now that I'm through presenting models for
your literary edification, I would respectfully suggest that this
third example demonstrates something even more important than
linguistic panache. Though Lester Antilles is no doubt intended
as an unsavory character, he clearly understands how to achieve
his goals efficiently. I might humbly submit myself as another
example of the wisdom of this philosophy. As you yourself pointed
out, I got what I wanted – this column – because of
all the things I did not do. Surely, even people who wear
Birkenstocks aspire to something; why not give it a try? You might
begin, like Mr. Antilles, by refusing to speak.
—Carlisle
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