All in a Don's Day (9 page)

It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. So I replied in these terms:

‘I have looked at the Kealey piece … and thought it wicked satire, but certainly satire, which is of course always meant to be offensive, thought-provoking, and often intended to rebound on the very views it satirises … that's the point … try Juvenal, if you want an ancient precedent.'

I then looked round the web to find all kinds of huffing and puffing about Kealey, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, who regards sex with students as a ‘perk' of the academic profession. The
Mail
even managed to drag in an old article of mine which referred to ‘the erotics of pedagogy'.

Taking several more careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satirically mimicking the locker-room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a ‘perk' unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

It was however a dreadful experience looking not only at the press reports of all this but also the comments of the
THE
website (some of which were presumably written by academics, who showed no ability to read or understand satire
at all
… maybe they were all computer scientists, but I rather doubt it). To be fair, a few did make the plea for humour and satire. But not many.

‘It is appalling that
THE
permitted the deeply offensive comments about female undergraduates … to appear in its pages', said ‘gobsmacked'.

‘Anyone who thinks that thinks that female students are there in the classroom expressly as objects of the instructors' viewing pleasure needs to retire (please)', opined ‘sg'.

‘What is most shocking is the disrespect to his wife', added ‘Colemar'.

‘Smelling of old person like a pee-soaked slipper', quipped (?) ‘Dave'.

God help the students these people (and the all the others like them) teach. I would much rather have instruction from Kealey myself.

The issue here is, of course (though hardly anyone observed this), the perennial problem of fixing the ‘ideology' of satire. When Roman Juvenal huffs and puffs about the immorality of his own late first-/early second-century Rome, is he the conservative misogynist that he superficially seems to be, or is he holding up those views for ridicule? In Juvenal's case almost certainly the latter.

Likewise with the 1960s' comic anti-hero Alf Garnett. Was he pillorying racism, or making it easier to condone?

The trouble with satire, as poor Kealey has found, is that the literal-minded are always liable not to get it. And the
satirist is inadvertently taken to support the very views s/he is attacking.

(The very cynical therefore may always suspect double bluff – but I don't, here.)

The reference to Alf Garnett is well made. I was horrified a couple of years ago to hear a group of people involved in TV light entertainment, in a TV discussion, agreeing emphatically that it would be unthinkable nowadays to have a comedy programme with a character expressing views like Alf Garnett′s. Maybe they were afraid modern audiences wouldn′t grasp it was satire. If so, that′s a sad thought about modern sensibilities. But, in fact, I got the impression they themselves hadn′t grasped it was satire. You need iron in your body, but you also need irony.

MICHAEL BULLEY

So as a computer scientist who is interested in history and the Classics, and reads and writes Latin, and even has read some of your books, can I ask why the gratuitous swipe at computer scientists?

In my experience, the popular image of geeky computer scientist and well-rounded Classicist is a myth. Most computer scientists are avid fans of history and the humanities, which they pursue as a side interest while working with IT in their jobs. Most Classicists OTOH know their field and little else, and their IT expertise goes as far as buying books at Amazon and writing papers in Word.

TAYLOR

One of the downsides, surely, of being a university vice-chancellor is that you don′t get to make satirical comments about issues like your lecturers perving on your students. Who cares if it′s satire?

LUCY

Rule Number One in Public Rhetoric: NO IRONY!!!

Tom Lehrer was right, as always: ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize.′

XJY

Satire is never devoid of ethical undercurrents and often has an instructive purpose. An analogous case: Matthew Parris writes in the
Times
about 18 months back: ′Let′s decapitate cyclists, they are so naff in their lycra ha ha ha.′ Cyclists who complained were sneered at that they lacked a sense of humour etc. But in a world where real people string wire across cycle paths and think this funny, Parris′s article seemed to me to be as authentic a case of incitement to violence as an author of a legal textbook could wish for. Its satirical intent is no alibi for its consequences. Is not the same logic at work here?

SW FOSKA

It certainly is difficult to ′fix the ideology′ of satire and of ironic expression: that′s one of the reasons why people like the VC of the University of Bucks adopt ′defensive irony′ as a way of trying to have their cake and eat it: they hope to find a way to enjoy their ′transgressive′ expressions while disowning responsibility for them. If it′s done well, people tend to find it amusing and witty. But, as Dave already observed, if it′s done badly, as in this case it was, it makes the writer (or speaker) look like a dickhead.

I mean the last word ironically, of course …

RICHARD

Hmmm, nothing on male students and female academics, or indeed on same-sex relationships. There is a PhD in this for someone. But perhaps the best practical solution is for the QAA and their ilk to devise a proper protocol for lecturer–student relationships, with a formal plan for starting and managing each one, clear objectives and external monitoring to ensure consistency in the relationships within and across institutions. (If it happens, you read it here first.)

RICHARD BARON

18 October 2009

When I was a teenager, I took Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint
to school in my satchel, in the hope – I think – of having it discovered by some prudish teacher and provoking an argument about freedom of speech and sexual expression (and also to show how hip I was). My mother, I remember, requested it from the local library, for similar – if slightly more grown-up – reasons.

Until a few weeks ago I couldn't remember much about it, apart from the description of masturbation with the piece of liver. Presumably that's what everyone remembers.

I have, however, recently re-read it. It wasn't a happy experience. What was the virtue or merit of a 200-and-something page monologue of repetitive, blokeish sexual fantasy, preoccupied with the pleasures and guilt of masturbation (or alternatively with exploitative sex with exploited women … or if not sex, then constipation and other aspects of the ‘lower bodily stratum', as Bakhtin would have put it)? I wasn't shocked. In fact, the liver bit was quite coyly done, and the use of a cored apple for the same purpose was a rather underwhelming image. It was the sheer self-indulgence of the book that was so irritating.

For a moment the horrible thought came to me that this really was what men thought about all the time – that this was
a true exposé of ‘what men were like'. If so, I thought it was probably better not to know.

The reason for putting myself through this literary torture was that I had agreed to be a panellist/judge on the Cheltenham Literary Festival's Booker event – going back to the novels published in 1969, to give a retrospective Booker prize. In reality, the novels published in 1969 were up for the (second) Booker in 1970. The winner was Bernice Rubens's
The Elected Member
. But we were choosing between
Portnoy
(supported by John Walsh), Graham Greene's
Travels with my Aunt
(supported by Kate Adie), Margaret Atwood's
The Edible Woman
(supported by Erica Wagner) and John Fowles's
French Lieutenant's Woman
(mine). None of these had been in the running for the original prize. Portnoy was ineligible as Roth is American. Greene had refused to be considered. The Atwood had in 1969 only been published in Canada, so hadn't really made it on to the radar here. And the Fowles didn't get anywhere. (The word on the street is that it was totally scuppered by Rebecca West, who was one of the judges.)

So who won our 40 years on prize?

First to be eliminated was
The Edible Woman
. Erica basically pushed her out of the balloon herself, by saying in her opening remarks that she thought it was a good book but not as good as
Portnoy
. It was Atwood's very first novel and pretty ragged at the edges. (There is, for example, an extraordinary silly episode where the heroine gets stuck under a bed … this is before she goes off food, in response to the sense that she is being consumed by her fiancé.)

This left two votes for Roth and one each for Fowles and Greene. Kate put up a good fight for
Travels with my Aunt
as life-affirming – though on reading this one again, I found Greene's Catholicism seeping into bits I didn't want, the racism
uncomfortable and the knowing references to (and parodies of) his other novels a bit too self-consciously artful.

I had decided that
French Lieutenant's Woman
was brilliant. I had been assigned it by the management rather than chosen it – and had feared that it wouldn't be half as good as I remembered from first reading it as a moody adolescent (the other side of the coin from the one who tried to annoy with
Portnoy's Complaint
… no problem packing this in the satchel). In fact, it was better. Fowles seemed to me to have pulled off the nearly impossible feat of reflecting radically on the nature of our engagement with the Victorian past, and the nature of the novelist's task, while still telling a wonderful story.

However, as neither Kate nor I would give way,
Portnoy
limped home to victory.

It wasn't a popular choice with the audience, who I think ranked it (on a show of hands) on a par with the Atwood. In audience terms, the triumph was probably Kate's who had taken a good few votes from
The French Lieutenant's Woman
by the time of the final ranking. (Damn … how did I manage to lose votes … ? Too bloody academic, I guess.)

I′m with Somerset Maugham on this, who said that the way to treat the ′Book of the Moment′ of his day was not to read the thing for at least three or four years … It was amazing, he said, how many ′must-reads′ turned out to be ′don′t-bothers′ after a lapse of time.

ANNA

Being all about sex doesn′t necessarily sink a work –
Y Tu Mamá También
pulls it off. (But it′s hard.) A maniacal monologue can
be a masterpiece – Hamsun′s
Hunger
. And misogyny can be fascinating:
The Kreutzer Sonata
. But Roth isn′t in that league. (To give him his due: I didn′t have any trouble turning the pages.
Portnoy′s Complaint
is an easy read.)

GABRIELLA GRUDER-PONI

Prof. Beard, You have entirely missed the point of
Portnoy′s Complaint
.

It is not about masturbation. It is, instead, a searing look into the Jewish-ethnic-male identity circa 1960s. Any man who′s grown up in an ethnic-immigrant household in America has his entire life story etched out in the pages of that book: the perpetual feelings of inferiority; the smothering embrace of insecure parents; the being torn between Old World morality and New World sexual pleasures; the daily humiliations of not understanding the dominant culture.

ORS

Is the title of the book ambiguous? Portnoy complains/Portnoy has a complaint = illness?

ANTHONY ALCOCK

I cannot resist praising
Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
(ZONE BOOKS, 2003) by my colleague Thomas Laqueur, which rightly links concern about masturbation with the development of ideas of credit in the eighteenth century. And DH Lawrence (not a figure I enjoy quoting, though he did pen a splendid poem against the University of Nottingham and its benefactor Mr Boot) argued that masturbation was what defined the middle classes.

QH FLACK

25 November 2009

Lucky Catullus. He has had more publicity in the last 24 hours than in the last 24 years. Whole cohorts of journalists who have never read a word of this first-century
BC
poet have been puzzling (with the help of Wiki usually) about what the words ‘pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo' really mean.

Because these were the words written by city bigwig Mark Lowe in an email to a young woman who had asked him the meaning of ‘diligite inimicos vestros'.

What it means is quite simple (though a number of family newspapers have refrained from printing a translation without a good few dashes and asterisks): ‘I will ram my cock up your ass and down your throat.'

Mark Lowe's defence is that Catullus was being witty. A few journalists have half-sided with him – suggesting that this was meant as a lusty retort to the Latin she wanted him to translate. The passage, which is from St Matthew, says ‘love your enemies'. No, says Catullus, bugger them.

If anyone had actually read (and thought about) the complete poem – for the offending phrase is the first and last line of Catullus Poem 16 – they would have seen a better joke and a better defence.

For it's a poem about an old conundrum: can you deduce a person's character or behaviour from what they write? Catullus addresses Furius and Aurelius (the ‘queer' and the ‘faggot'),
who have suggested, that because he writes poems about kisses, he might be a little on the effeminate side.