The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  After having exhausted himself all his life in an activity that was intensely absorbing but not really creative, it seems that Dana, in his final years, eventually found a certain form of inner peace: he abandoned his law office to his son and together with his wife went into self-imposed exile from the United States. The old couple first spent two years in Paris, then moved to Rome. Paradoxically, it was in Rome, the Latin and papist Babylon, that our New England Puritan finally felt as if he had reached port. He confessed, “At last I found my life’s dream.” Yet he was not able to enjoy it long: three years later, in 1882, he died of pneumonia. As one of his biographers recalls, “The ghost of his former strength took hold of him at the very end, and during his last days he suffered from hallucinations, struggling to leave his bed as if he wished, once again, to launch himself into some long and hazardous journey.” He was buried in that same Protestant cemetery that had contained the graves of Keats and Shelley.

  The personality of Dana was deeply divided. First among all his critics, D.H. Lawrence perceived this inner conflict. This insight was all the more remarkable in that Lawrence had virtually no biographical information on Dana: his brilliant 1924 essay, published in Studies in Classic American Literature, was simply based on a reading of Two Years Before the Mast.

  In a way, Dana’s decision to go to sea had been a challenge thrown at his conventional society, at the establishment that had produced and nourished him. Then, on his return, the writing of his book was a continuation and a memorial of this youthful rebellion. Dana’s return to Boston was like the return of the prodigal son and for this reason his literary achievement could have no further development. The transparent simplicity of Two Years Before the Mast is misleading: the power and inner tension of his narrative are largely the products of all that Dana chose to hide. One single incident can provide a good example of this.

  In the middle of his journey, Dana went through a crisis of which he gives us only a truncated picture. In California, just before starting the return journey, the captain ordered Dana to move to another ship, one that would remain there for another two years. This instruction plunged Dana into panic and in his desperation he went to extraordinary lengths to secure his early return home. The methods he adopted then did, in fact, alienate him from the other sailors. They were suddenly reminded of what Dana had tried so hard to make them forget: he was not one of them, he belonged to the privileged class.

  But why did the prospect of another two years in California provoke such terror in Dana’s mind? The explanations he provided are not very convincing. Such a delay, he said, would virtually have prevented him from resuming his studies at Harvard and therefore would have condemned him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life. This argument does not hold water.

  From the testimony of one of his seafaring companions, another young bourgeois from Boston who had enrolled on the same ship, we learn something of Dana’s life ashore. He was sharing a hut with a friendly young Indian woman. It seems our Puritan did enjoy for quite a while the brutish bliss of being simply young, carefree and healthy on a sunny Californian beach: he had discovered the animal innocence of life before the Fall.

  However, as soon as the captain’s new instructions managed to turn this happy interlude into a more permanent way of life, Dana became terrified. As in R.L. Stevenson’s disturbing tale, where past a certain point Mr. Hyde can no longer revert to his Dr. Jekyll identity—since the chemistry of his organism had been irretrievably altered—Dana realised that should he pursue his Californian life any longer, he would reach a point of no return. This would indeed condemn him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life; there would be no more possibility to reintegrate his original self.

  In a short and illuminating autobiographical sketch he wrote for himself in 1842 (this remarkable page was discovered and published more than a century later), Dana described how, after his return to Boston, he went through a dramatic mystical crisis, at the end of which he received confirmation within the Episcopalian Church. Regarding his Californian experience, he summed it up in only one phrase: “Not a man in my ship was more guilty in God’s sight than myself.”

  During the remaining years of his life he numbed himself with a constant overload of work, plunging himself into frenzied activity close to neurosis and repeatedly provoking severe depression, which in turn required prolonged rest. At times, also, he suffered bouts of his old illness: migraines, failing eyesight, fainting fits.

  At other times he retained a furious lust for adventure and physical effort in open air; he would go hunting and camping with trappers, whose simple and primitive way of life delighted him, and he amazed them with his exceptional physical resilience.

  His need for escape sometimes took other forms: far from Boston, he would take advantage of his travels to explore the lower depths of big cities such as New York and London. In a way somehow similar to George Orwell’s exploration in the next century of the marginal worlds of tramps and hoboes, he would disguise himself in sailor’s clothing and descend into “dark, filthy, violent and degrading regions of saloons and brothels in the harbour districts” or he would spend an evening there chatting with prostitutes.

  We know of these episodes only because he wrote them down in private diaries not meant for publication. He was never discovered or identified during these dangerous dives—imagine the scandal that would have resulted—but one wonders to what extent he was not unconsciously looking for such a liberating accident.

  Meanwhile, he applied all his energy to discharge with stoic nobility the obligations of a model husband, model father, model parishioner and model citizen. It seems as if the institutions of marriage, family, church and law, as well as his dedication to serving the common good, were so many defences against the “madness of art” that was so obviously his original calling. As for literature, he never wrote anything again.

  * See above, p. 141.

  Part V

  UNIVERSITY

  THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY*

  THE TITLE of my little talk is An Idea of the University. This is, of course, a humble homage to Cardinal Newman’s great book The Idea of a University—a classic work published a little more than 150 years ago, which has lost nothing of its relevance for us today and should remain the basic reference for any reflection on the problems of the university.

  This topic is huge—but I shall not be long, for I shall approach it only from the very limited perspective of my own modest personal experience. In doing this, I may repeat things which I have already said or published before. I apologise for this repetitiveness—it cannot be helped, I am afraid: a simple desire to remain truthful to one’s experiences and beliefs is often the enemy of eloquence and novelty.

  I have spent all my active life in universities: first, as a student, of course (but, in a sense, every academic always remains a student till his death). For nearly forty years, I have pursued research and carried on teaching in various universities, first in the Far East, then mostly in Australia, with some periods in Europe and in the United States. My career was happy; I have been lucky: all my life, I had the rare opportunity to do work which I loved in congenial and stimulating environments. Only, near the end, deep modifications began to affect the university—I am not talking here of any specifically Australian problems, but of a much more broad and universal malaise. As these transformations were progressively taking the university further away from the model to which I had originally devoted my life, I finally decided to quit—six years before reaching retirement age. Considering the way things have evolved since then, it is a decision that I have never regretted. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I was a deserter. I am not proud of that. Yet today my heart is with the brave people who are starting Campion College and will continue to fight the good fight—and it is to show them my support that I have come here tonight.

  Near the end of his life, Gustave Flaubert wrote in one of his remarkable letters to his dear friend Ivan Turgenev a little phrase
that could beautifully summarise my topic: “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower; but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.” These are indeed the two poles of our predicament: on one side, the need for an “ivory tower,” and on the other side, the threat of the “tide of shit.”

  Let us consider first the ivory tower. C.S. Lewis observed that, to assess the value of anything—be it a cathedral or a corkscrew—one should first know its purpose. Intellectual impostures always require convoluted jargon, whereas fundamental values can normally be defined in clear and simple language. Thus, the commonly accepted definition of the university is fairly straightforward: a university is a place where scholars seek truth, pursue and transmit knowledge for knowledge’s sake—irrespective of the consequences, implications and utility of the endeavour.

  In order to function, a university requires basically four things—two of these are absolutely essential and necessary; the other two are important, but not always indispensable.

  First, a community of scholars. Sir Zelman Cowen told this anecdote: some years ago in England, a bright and smart politician gave a speech to the dons at Oxford. He addressed them as “employees of the university.” One don immediately stood up and corrected him: “We are not employees of the university, we are the university.” And one could not have put it better: the only employees of the university are the professional managers and administrators—and they do not direct or control the scholars, they are at the service of the scholars.

  The second essential thing, a good library for the humanities and well-equipped laboratories for the scientists. This is self-evident and requires no further comment.

  Third, the students. The students constitute, of course, an important part of the university. It is good and fruitful to educate students; but students should not be recruited at any cost, by all means, or without discrimination. (Note: in this country, foreign students who pay fees bring every year nearly $2 billion to our universities. In the university where I last taught, in a written communication addressed to all staff, the vice-chancellor once instructed us to consider our students not as students but as customers. On that day, I knew that it was time for me to go.)

  I dream of an ideal university that would deliver no degrees, nor give access to any specific occupation, nor award any professional qualifications. The students would be motivated by one thing only: a strong personal desire for knowledge—the acquisition of knowledge would be their only reward. In fact, this is no mere utopian dream of mine. Examples of this model actually operate; the most illustrious one was established in the sixteenth century and is still the highest seat of learning in Paris: the Collège de France.

  The fourth requirement for operating a university: money. It would be foolish to deny the importance of money, and yet remember that one has seen great universities performing their task in conditions of extreme deprivation. But this is certainly not the time or place to pursue this particular line of thought.

  Having thus sketched out the “ivory tower,” let us examine now the “tide of shit” that is beating at its walls.

  Two points are particularly under attack. First, the elitist character of the ivory tower (which results from its very nature) is denounced in the name of equality and democracy. The demand for equality is noble and must be fully supported, but only within its own sphere, which is that of social justice. It has no place anywhere else. Democracy is the only acceptable political system; yet it pertains to politics exclusively, and has no application in any other domain. When applied anywhere else, it is death—for truth is not democratic, intelligence and talent are not democratic, nor is beauty, nor love—nor God’s grace. A truly democratic education is an education that equips people intellectually to defend and promote democracy within the political world; but in its own field, education must be ruthlessly aristocratic and high-brow, shamelessly geared towards excellence.

  The second aspect of the ivory tower that is constantly under attack is its non-utilitarian character. The heart of the problem is memorably expressed in the paradox of Zhuang Zi, a Daoist philosopher of the third century BC and one of the most profound minds of all time: “People all know the usefulness of what is useful, but they do not know the usefulness of the useless.” The superior utility of the university—what enables it to perform its function—rests entirely upon what the world deems to be its uselessness.

  Vocational schools and technical colleges are very useful—people all understand that. As they cannot see the usefulness of the useless universities, they have decided to turn the universities into bad imitations of technical colleges. Thus the fundamental distinction between liberal education and vocational training has become blurred, and the very survival of the university is put in question.

  The university is now under increasing pressure to justify its existence in utilitarian and quantitative terms. Such pressure is deeply corrupting. I have no time now to examine all aspects of this corruption; let me give you just one example—only one, but it has ominous significance. In Europe, not long ago, a respected university hit hard by funding cuts felt compelled to wind up some of its courses. An entire department had to be closed down—the most vulnerable, the least economically viable, a department which had more lecturers than students, which offered no future to its graduates, which performed no visible service to society and the state. The department that was abolished was the Department of Pure Philosophy—ivory tower within the ivory tower, historical heart and origin of the university itself.

  When a university yields to the utilitarian temptation, it betrays its vocation and sells its soul. Five centuries ago, the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus defined with one phrase the essence of the humanist endeavour: Homo fit, non nascitur—One is not born a man, one becomes it. A university is not a factory producing graduates, as a sausage factory produces sausages. It is a place where a chance is given to men to become what they truly are.

  *Address to the Campion Foundation Inaugural Dinner, Sydney, 23 March 2006.

  A FABLE FROM ACADEME

  This piece, written nearly half a century ago, was never published, but it circulated privately among friends, and friends of friends. Eventually, I received quite a few letters from academics in faraway places—complete strangers—assuring me that they had personally witnessed the very incident evoked in my little fable: they even recognised the protagonists! This confirmed for me what I had always suspected: reality imitates fiction.

  THERE was in Timbuctoo a great university that was the cultural pride of the entire country. A very old scholar called Hutudan was lecturing in the Department of Applied Pataphysics of that university. Pataphysics (as you surely know) is the science by which movements of the tails of cows are observed in the morning in order to forecast whether it will rain in the afternoon. It is a very subtle discipline that requires exceptionally sharp eyesight, as the slightest twitching of the tails must be individually recorded and interpreted. Hutudan was blessed with good eyes and even though he was quite a fool in many other respects, his unique pataphysical expertise had won him great international fame; he was professionally sought out and consulted from all over the world, and the post office had to use two camels to bring his incoming mail every day. Disciples flocked to him. His days were busy and happy.

  In the Department of Applied Pataphysics there was another scholar called Galosh. No one could remember exactly when, how or why Galosh had become a member of the department. The poor man was born blind, and his infirmity naturally prevented him from taking part in regular pataphysical work. However, it was eventually found that Galosh had a few talents de société—for instance, he could juggle three telephones while simultaneously typewriting with his toes. Hence, he was entrusted with some secretarial duties, which enabled him to feel useful in spite of his physical handicap. This greatly raised his morale. His three telephones were constantly ringing, his typewriter was rattling and clinking. His days were busy and happy.

  Unfortun
ately, after many years of this life, Galosh became bored with his telephones and began to nourish the dream of becoming a leading pataphysician. Since the various duties within the department had to be detailed in typewritten form, and since he was the only person who knew how to type, he hit upon a brilliant idea: he would invite other blind men to come and train Hutudan’s disciples; as for Hutudan himself and all the colleagues who could see, they would be exclusively employed in the cleaning and maintenance of the departmental toilets.

  As I have said, Hutudan was rather obtuse in all matters that did not pertain to pataphysics. This time, however, it did not take him too long to realise that something untoward was afoot. So, one day, he waxed his moustache, brushed his teeth, polished his shoes and went to knock at the door of the vice-chancellor, the wise and prudent Professor Krokodil. When I say that he knocked at the vice-chancellor’s door, this is merely a manner of speaking, for there was no door to knock at. Professor Krokodil had undertaken to break the world record of wise and prudent academic administration: he had already managed to run the university for thirty years without making a single decision or taking a single initiative. In order to preserve his record in its immaculate state, he stayed in permanent hiding and transformed the chancellery into a fortress surrounded by a moat; its only access was over a drawbridge manned by an army of drunken dwarfs. On that day, however, Professor Krokodil happened to be fishing in the moat, and thus Hutudan was able to shout his story from across the water, in spite of all the interference from the drunken dwarfs. Professor Krokodil listened to him attentively before shouting back to him: “Don’t you worry, sir! I shall look into this matter. I’ll be in touch with you very soon.”