Excerpt
From Reading Room/6:
From Bellow’s Chicago to Kafka’s Prague
Daniel Magliocco .
In 1935 Saul Bellow made a curious decision. Before the
start of his junior year at college he decided to relocate some twenty miles
north from the unabashedly serious University of Chicago to Northwestern University.
Spread out on acres of tax-free property on Chicago’s North Shore, Northwestern offered a
sweetly suburban campus complete with a thriving Greek scene, two beaches,
and a variety of Big Ten sports teams swathed in the slightly-emasculating
color purple. The student body, while obviously intelligent, lacked the heady
intellectualism of the U. of Chicago. The rationale Bellow would later give
for his move is significant: “Northwestern had less prestige, but my
teachers there appreciated me more. And of course I wanted to be appreciated.”
“Appreciated” was a peculiar term for a college student to use.
Students worry about a variety of things, from coursework to girlfriends to
whether it’s safe to eat unrefrigerated pizza two or three days after
the fact, but appreciation rarely makes the list. More likely, I imagine, his
decision to transfer had more to do with his search for an identity unambiguously
his own than it did appreciation.
University of Chicago, with its high-minded intellectualism
and heady legions of sleep-deprived classicists, smothered the young Bellow,
effectively dictating who he was to become before he was ready to commit.
Certainly his intellectual prowess was never the problem. But youthful rebellion
and dissonance between yourself and your environment spark self-awareness
and a keen sense of self. U. of Chicago was for Bellow just then starting
out much like a glove, taut and suffocating.
The majority of my college generation, including me
(at this writing I am a senior at Northwestern), have downplayed the emphasis
Bellow put on self-discovery. Regarding U. of Chicago’s intellectualism, Bellow would later say that
it “stifled” him and “made him feel small.” The institution
left no room for the individual. While Bellow sought a university that gave
him room to breath, present-day students often seek out the suppressing conformity
that Bellow rejected.
In the antithesis of Bellow’s decision, I almost left Northwestern after
an up-and-down first couple of years. With an eye towards the future and a
precarious conception of who I was or where was going, I sought a university
that would spare me the who am I? angst of a slightly, but not abnormally,
introspective twenty-year-old. Paradoxically, the rationale Bellow gave for
leaving U. of Chicago was exactly what I was searching for, and possibly, had
I been in his shoes, would have waited passively while the oppressive weight
that Bellow rallied against crushed me completely.
In many ways Northwestern has not changed much since
Bellow’s day. While
excellent in its own way academically, is not a particularly intellectual place,
both in the type of education and, more obviously, in the general feel of the
place. Take the library, for instance. A victim of early 1970s architecture,
when poured concrete was all the rage and windows were out of fashion, the
Northwestern library looks like a post-Cold War relic —a bomb shelter,
or maybe an abandoned missile silo. It’s a far cry from, say, the library
at Columbia University with its classical architecture and lofty inscriptions
carved elegantly into its stone face.
Making matters worse, somebody had the less-than-brilliant
idea to organize the library stacks in circles, rather than conventional
rectangles. It’s
may be the only library in the country where vertigo becomes a more-than-viable
possibility. Its aesthetic mistakes compounded, the library simply lacks the
gravitas that one expects of a major university.
The general Northwestern education works similarly.
The five very specific undergraduate programs, from theater to engineering,
have a decidedly pre-professional focus. Economics majors, hoping to be Wall
Street’s Next Big Thing, abound;
journalism majors from the ever-prestigious Medill School of Journalism have
clearly determined the course of their lives well before they mailed their
applications. Even the study of philosophy, a traditional cornerstone of a
classic liberal-arts education, has been co-opted as a suddenly hot major by
those law-school bound. The “appreciation” and casual freedom to
wander that Bellow sought has been replaced not by the stiff intellectualism
of the University of Chicago, but by excessive preprofessionalism.
At the beginning of my sophomore year I started to
think that I should leave the place. Whatever it was, it just wasn’t me: My courses weren’t
engaging, the education too pre-professional – the list went on and on.
As I was feeling that wherever it was that I wanted to go, Northwestern was
bringing me in the diametrically opposed direction, I decided to apply for
a transfer to Wesleyan University. Its reputation as a quirky liberal-arts
school appealed to me. I was accepted, with a little hand-written come to Wes!—scribbled
on the upper-right-hand corner of the otherwise unremarkable form letter.
Curiously, I was bothered most by the Northwestern
student body despite being happy with my social life—I liked the friends I made. In tangible, everyday
relationships I was fine; conceptually I was miserable. All the abstractions
previously mentioned, from pre-professionalism to an admittedly unfair disdain
towards the Midwest, had influenced my decision to apply to Wesleyan. Some
ideal of an East Coast liberal intellectual ideal milled around in my head
and the pretty campus on Chicago’s North Shore didn’t do the trick.
Wesleyan would have accomplished exactly what Bellow
fought against. It’s
one of the few universities in America to openly advocate political activism
in its mission statement, and on some semi-conscious level I believed that
Wesleyan’s uniqueness would rub off, helping me carve out my own little
niche.
The oh-so-apparent irony that while Wesleyan outwardly
oozes identity, definition, and “differentness,” I would internally be no closer to some acceptable
concept of myself was lost on me. At the time I believed that Wesleyan was
somehow “my people” while Northwestern was not, oblivious to the
real issue that I simply wanted a label, easily identifiable to anyone who
bothered to look: C’mon, you know me, I go to Wesleyan!
My impulse of wanting to throw myself into a preconceived
mold to alleviate an insecurity regarding who I was is nothing new, particularly
for my generation. It starts in high school – although my particular high school, I’m
convinced, is entirely unlike any other in America. It’s the only $24,000-a-year
private school that celebrates its beginnings as a progressive place “for
the working man.” Which is probably where all this self-doubt started—my
twelve years immersed in progressive education with all its huge, unanswered
contradictions.
I’ve seen my share of Saved By the Bell and been around pop culture long
enough to know that high-school students define themselves in groups. Chuck
Klostermen mentions this somewhere in his pop-philosophy collection of essays,
Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. In a typical American high school there seem to
be Jocks, Smart kids, Potheads, Goths, Bible Thumpers (I’ve actually
only heard of this last group from my freshman-year roommate from Georgia).
Adolescence, confusing as it is, becomes a little less so when roles are so
narrowly defined.
College is no different. Students frequently act or
dress in a way that they think they should act or dress – on a conscious level or otherwise. It’s
not quite as obvious or ridiculous as the Marilyn Manson-loving social misfit
in high school, but college students adopt certain prefabricated molds in their
entirety, often oblivious to the irony in claiming it’s all in the name
of individuality. When the future seems unsure, it’s a lot easier to
follow a generally accepted blueprint than draw one up yourself. The process
of identifying a stereotype and adopting it whole-hog is a common step in a
young person’s developing sense of self. Students will frequently vacillate
from one activity to another, pursuing each with passion and vigor despite
incongruities between the two. One semester a student is a budding politician,
the next an elementary, spoken-word poet. Bits and pieces of this and that
are collected along the way, to be hopefully used to create a self autonomous
and unique.
But I’ve jumped ahead a bit. Before one becomes a philosophy major and
dresses in nothing but black, or a hemp-wearing environmentalist, there’s
a moment when one decides that a particular stereotype happens to be the desirable
one. Often students do things just because, or engage in an activity not because
they love said activity, but because they love the idea of loving said activity.
This is all part of the process.
A lot of people, may disagree with what I’m writing and maybe I’m
just thinking too much. Or maybe all this identity stuff is just ridiculous.
Or maybe it’s simply outrageous to claim that people think only in preconceived
molds: People just are; forget about the clothes you wear and the college you
go to!
I wish I could believe that people simply lived in
the moment, subsisting on a choice-by-choice basis until enough of Freud’s iceberg pokes through
the surface and an acceptable sense of self emerges. I, however, don’t
believe this. You are who you talk to, what you read, or where you go. These
decisions, while made in the moment, reflect and influence who you will become
and are often more calculated and deliberate than people like to believe. You’re
not what you eat; you’re the decision to eat what you did.
Obviously, not all students go through this described
process of self-identification. There has to be, after all, an original on
which stereotypes are based. Easy Rider may seem like a parody of the free-wheelin’ Sixties, while it’s
actually the paradigm that has been ripped off so many times it hardly seems
like one. Although, from birth onward, most of us jump into or strive for an
ideal that’s been lived out by previous generations. I do wonder whether
this process of agreeing with known stereotype as a necessary step in self-identification
is something relatively new. Is it more prevalent among students these days?
I don’t think everyone used to think this way, at least as often. In
the last fifty years or so, as marketing and advertising has become increasingly
sophisticated, aware, and savvy; legitimate means of self-expression has become
co-opted. Thomas Frank argues in Commodify Your Dissent that dissent and rebellion,
cornerstones of youth self-expression and a predictable step in a young person’s
developing sense of self, have become stereotypes. How, exactly, does one aesthetically
express originality, which, in turn, is an expression of a strong sense of
self – or an original sense of self entirely your own? Buy a radically
cool new pair of Nikes? Or maybe you want to go the academic-looking vintage
T-shirt route. This has all been done; nothing seems original. No wonder young
people jump into a stereotype as a legitimate means of self-expression. They
have no other choice. Che Guevera’s face stares ubiquitously through
the window of Times Square tourist traps, the guerrilla rebel fighter, now
seems to represent nothing more than mass-produced individuality.
But this phenomenon is only aesthetic. More significant
reasons for this generational difference exist. Self-awareness and the development
of a strong sense of self require time. Idle time. It doesn’t seem, to me, that my generation spends
as much time doing nothing as did previous ones. Or, when they are doing nothing,
students still have one eye on solidifying an unsteady future.
This is the real reason I had wanted to leave Northwestern.
It seemed to me that everyone there was gearing up for the office world.
Or, gearing up for whatever next event someone in their position would be
gearing up for – a
fraternity kid for a fraternity party, a journalist focused solely on the newspaper,
everybody doing the next thing that their proscribed role dictated that they
should do.
So, does Bellow’s decision to leave U. of Chicago and come to the Northwestern
as he knew it exemplify a decision that most in my generation would hesitate
to make? Or, would most choose a university as if they were choosing their
future selves? Of course. But Bellow chose Northwestern, a university that
has the peculiar property of defining itself more by what it isn’t than
what it is. Northwestern inhabits a strange place: It’s in the Big Ten
but has few similarities with Michigan or Ohio State; it likes to compare itself
to the University of Pennsylvania, but the closest it can be is a copy, at
best. It is in flux, a Midwestern school that wants nothing more to be an East
Coast Ivy Leaguer. It feels uncomfortable in its own clothes.
Northwestern’s open-endedness is what attracted Bellow in the first place.
No one really experiences the weight of some oppressive institutional ideology
while studying at Northwestern – it simply doesn’t exist. There
may be typical sub-groups, but a unified conception of the “Northwestern
man” or woman doesn’t exist. For Bellow, this was ideal. But he
came of age in a different moment. Maybe identity was less of an issue and
stereotypes were shied away from, and true originality was still a possibility.
In time, however, I came to appreciate Northwestern for the variation among
students, the friends I’ve made, and most crucially, my inability to
define the place in twenty words or less. By necessity I reached the same conclusion
Bellow intuited, and realized the importance of developing a sense of self
independent of an institutional affiliation or preconceived model. In the end
I chose not to attend Wesleyan, realizing on some level that such a choice
would have been a cop-out, or a circumvention of a process that I needed to
engage in.
And occasionally, these questions have led to me strange
places, catalyzing interests I didn’t even know I had. As I’m writing this I’m
sitting in a Prague coffee shop, where I’ve been practically living for
the past four weeks, trying to conduct research in preparation for my senior
thesis. My topic? Perhaps not coincidentally, Kafka, whose work Edmund Wilson
once described as nothing more than “the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting
soul trampled under.”
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