Children of Academe

Tuna casserole makes excellent running food, and it's super easy (and super cheap - you can get all the ingredients for under $5).  Boil some egg noodles and preheat oven to 375.  Strain them.  Run cold water over them.  Mix the noodles with two cans of cream of mushroom soup, one soupcan of milk, two or three cans of tuna, a can of peas/carrots, and maybe some diced onions if you're inclined.  Spread the mixture into an 8"x11" pan, and bake for about 40 minutes.  Then, cover with slices of American cheese, and put back in the oven for about 10 minutes, til the cheese is melted.  You can't beat this dish.  It was my Lenten Friday pre-long run meal.  If you're worried about the high fat content of the cheese slices, try the fat free kind.  Personally, I go for the 2%.

I love tuna casserole for another reason though, one that has to as much to do with its connotations as with its hearty goodness.  There's refuge in a can of cream of mushroom soup.  The gelatinous unpronounceability of its ingredients in all their sublime chemistry reminds one, paradoxically, of the simplicity of eating.  It induces one into the comfort of again taking for granted--rather than being astonished by or critical of--the convenience of the grocery store and the scale and efficiency of the modern food economy, however excescent and diabolical.  We can leave the Michael Pollans of the world to their scolding and their kale.  The casserole is ready.

Casserole abides.  My attachment to casserole feels traditional, as if it were a regional dish passed through generations of grandmothers -- though I realize, of course, that tuna casserole, like my invented food tradition, is manufactured, the invention of 1950s recipe books that helped Americans adjust to the stunning abundance of postwar life, with its aisles and aisles of packaged convience foods to store in the pantry or the bomb shelter.  How much harder it is to cook from scratch.  How much harder it is, as well, to cook dishes other than what you were raised on.  The heavy casserole pulls with the gravity of the familiar past.  It pleads its rightness against ways of eating ungoverned by its gentle precepts of economy, convenience, taste, and the presumption of sharing.  A casserole is rarely eaten alone.

Another Europhilic humanities scholar with pretentious jet ski

Despite their radical politics and extravagant readings of lierature, despite their uncut hair, despite the clothes sometimes too fashion forward for their age, despite their choice to earn a small fraction of the money commanded by similarly educated members of their age cohort, despite their often very genuine indifference to money--humanities academics are extremely conservative in their habits and values, most especially their valuing of education and intelligence above all.  Academia, unlike everywhere else, has clearly defined steps for advancement and markers of merit, for achieving all of which the criteria are usually fairly clear.  And while luck plays no small role in who lands academic jobs, academia is as much a meritocracy as anywhere, at least as much as I imagine the military to be.  On a more psychic, less institutional level, academia replicates at every stage the child-parent, child-teacher relationship, such that every academic, this one included, strives in his heart of hearts to be a good schoolboy, the smartest in the gradeschool class, the precocious tot who makes the teacher beam.

Maybe at one time in my life I considered myself unconventional for ten days or so, but I've always known, and over the last few years been able to admit, how thoroughly conventional I am.  I have whiled away hours in a chair or on a couch reading Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Judith Butler, and a host of lesser psychoanalytic lights on the conditioned nature of our desires, on the supposed conflict between what society tells us we think we want and what we really want, on our epistemological alienation from the desires that drive us, while I know I have at the same time been striving for what everyone else wants, and what I see as my true desire: helping others, being respected and loved, having a fulfilling job, getting paid enough to stand tall in the world.  Perhaps I have no non-traditional desires.  So be it.  Perhaps this is because I lack imagination.  But there are worse qualities to lack.  Imagination only multiplies the complexity of what an honest look at the existing world presents on its face.  Do I have any deviant desires?  I lack the intellect to dream them up.  So be it.  Creativity isn't everything.  Imitatio.

The great theme of Philip Roth is the cost of having what we want when our desires break with tradition. Desire in Roth never solely liberates, following it out rarely leads to uncomplicated happiness, pursuing it is not uncomplicated and merely heroic.  Roth is famous for all the sex in his books, but the sex is a red herring.  His characters don't want liberation from stultifying sex mores but instead want liberation from stultifying tradition.  the problem, though, is that the traditions they consider narrow and ignorant have provided them with comfort and unstinting love. 

In the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth's alter-ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, has achieved literary fame and financial success with a novel that satirizes the narrowness of his own family and the mores of the neighborhood in Newark where he grew up.  His family and community feel betrayed, and prominent critics and intellectuals accuse him of ethnic self-hatred.  Zuckerman is baffled at first, wondering why people cannot see fiction as fiction.  His father calls him a bastard on his deathbed, and his brother, a dentist in Newark, accuses him of speeding their father's death with his scandalous novel.  In The Anatomy Lesson, the one I just finished, Zuckerman is forty and suffering from a mysterious pain in his upper back; he decides to quit writing and go to medical school.  There's more to say but I won't spoil it. 

What makes Roth so wonderful is he comes down squarely neither on the side of the autonomous liberated artist unfettered by family and tradition, nor on the side of family and tradition. Were the Zuckerman trilogy merely another bildungsroman of heroic artist, it wouldn't be half as compelling; it isn't about the trials of fashioning novels but about the trials of fashioning a self.  Autonomy trades flight for a loss of balast; the cost of stability is inertia and restlessness.  We're always simultaneously children and adults, we like childhood because it's easy and adulthood because we think we can have what we want.  The good parent provides comfort to the child by denying it its desires; the child rages against the "no" but craves it just the same for the feeling of protection it provides and for the boundaries it sets; Roth's adult goes to bed as late as he wants (and with whomever he wants) and ends up a little sadder inside but more completely human for having risked the satisfaction of pursuing his own ambitions past the bounds set by his past.  Having a self, Roth knows, will involve losses, entail risks, and bring inevitable pain.  It is a yoke, as Zuckerman's neck pain in The Anatomy Lesson suggests.