In the end, I said: “I’m sorry. It’s personal.”
Anja shrugged, said, “Interesting. Fair enough.” My classmates stared at me uneasily. I’d made two grave grad-school faux pas by showing any sort of unexpected emotional vulnerability and by defying authority. The move to the OC had been one form of culture shock, but it was inconsequential compared to induction into the doctoral-study milieu.
There were so many new behavioral conventions I wasn’t sure I could adopt them all fast enough. For starters, I had to start dressing differently. Worse. Much, much worse. On my wooing visit to Irvine, I’d spent three hours sitting in on a seminar called “Poetics of Punishment,” whose intellectual rigor made my M.A. courses seem like the fourth grade, but whose sartorial rigor was somewhere on the continuum between halfway house and unintentional self-parody. Students in my M.A. program had the same priorities as Maya Rudolph’s old Donatella Versace character on SNL: to smoke and look cool. Do you know what the Irvine crowd thought was cool? A special weight you drape across a book to hold its pages open.
Franz Kafka was always telling people that he had made an “unshakable” judgment about Felice Bauer within thirty seconds of meeting her. Within two minutes of this seminar starting, I had come to the unshakable realization that real graduate students had reached new levels of not-giving-a-fuckness about their outward appearances. Of course, my future cohort had also made an unshakable judgment about me: I was a snobby, image-obsessed flake who maligned Los Angeles having never lived there, and my research interests in philosophical approaches to Kafka were somehow both “trendy” and “tired.” When we became friends, I assured them that my snooty facial expression was actually displaying crippling intellectual inadequacy, and they explained to me that in graduate school, dressing like a middle-school guidance counselor in 1993 was a mark of intellectual commitment.
Granted, the irony of my vanity during my campus visit was not lost on me, promising literary scholar that I was. For I had, during the second half of my twenties, aggressively cultivated a look that was supposed to show that I didn’t give a fuck what I looked like. This is because if the fashion world had a Geneva Convention, the early aughts in New York would have violated it, so I chose conscientious objection. Every subway ride displayed a nauseating mélange of three-hundred-dollar whisker-faded jeans that exposed butt cleavage, elbow-length hair blown out ruler-straight, and stilettos whose toes were so pointy, they made the wearer look like the Wicked Witch of the East after the house gets dropped on her. So I invented my own aesthetic based on the last time I was cool, and adopted a late-nineties Berlin fashion ethos of Look Like You Slept in Makeup and Sword-Fought with Your Clothes. I honestly believed that there was nobody on earth who gave less of a fuck about looking attractive than I. But that was before I set foot in a real graduate seminar in German, when I would soon realize that I “didn’t care” about my looks in the same way Gustav von Aschenbach “doesn’t care” about his looks in Death in Venice.
The other crucial cultural truth I learned about grad seminar was that the more confident a student sounded, the fuller of shit he probably was. Shortly thereafter I also learned that the professor, brilliant as she may be, is but a human being who has either written, or is in the process of writing, an article or book on the text you’re discussing, and is testing out her thesis on you. But nobody tells you this when you’re just starting out, so the first day of seminar leaves even the brightest young intellectuals feeling like impostors—or at any rate, that’s how I felt.
I’m not supposed to be here, I thought.
All these people know what they’re talking about, and I most certainly do not.
How can anyone have thought I was smart enough to be here?
What the fuck is a subaltern?
I would kill for a decent bagel.
Oh, God, pay attention! Did someone just say “subaltern” again? Gah.
Impostor Syndrome is like one of those antibiotic-resistant superbugs, in that no matter what remedies you try, it mutates and flares up anew—that is, the second I figured out one difficult thing (thanks to untold hours of reading and intermittent weeping), I immediately decided that that thing must thus be something kindergartners could parse. This went for the entire graduate-school cycle: seminar papers, comprehensive exams, even the dissertation. Soon, it all just seemed like a soup of easy stuff any idiot could do. And I was no outlier—I learned that behavior from what I saw around me. And this, friends, is why so many academics are pompous dickheads, because they are all scared out of their damn minds that someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will come along and recognize that the impostors have been in charge the whole time.
The only antidote to Impostor Syndrome (which is actually not an antidote, but rather, in Kafkan fashion, exacerbates it), is posturing—well, that and eyeball-peeling amounts of work. But I was already doing that, and I still felt like a fake. So all that left was faking it better. Do not ever let anyone know anything is difficult for you, Schuman. I could not betray weakness to anyone, even if that person was allegedly my friend. I could not let on for a second that I felt like a water-treading fraud who was ten seconds from drowning at all times. If someone referenced a book I hadn’t read, I learned to say, “I should really read that again.” (Then I checked that book out and read its introduction, index, and two most relevant chapters for future name-dropping.) If someone asked if I was familiar with a theorist whose name might as well be in Kyrgyz, I just said what everyone else said, which was: “Oh, I haven’t read him since undergrad.” If the person responded, “Actually, Xyvltz Yqctullzxll is a woman,” I dialed it all the way up: “Obviously, but I genderqueer names at random as a performative act. You mean to tell me you don’t?” (I looked the theorist up on the Stanford Encyclopedia later in the privacy of my room, with Law & Order on in the background.) If I had to write a lengthy essay on a subject that perplexed me beyond all reasonable measure, I just gave it a proper academic title so nobody would be the wiser: MILDLY CLEVER THING: Three-Part List, “Incomprehensible Scare Quotes,” and an Extremely Convoluted Explanation with at Least One Made-Up Word. (Then I employed my all-consuming and overly complex essay-writing system, which involved color-coded index cards.) And, when in doubt, I made a reference to Martin Heidegger. Because what better way to counter a bunch of my own gibberish than a bunch of someone else’s gibberish?
I was in an especially good position to become the greatest of grad students, because I took two Heidegger seminars in a row as soon as I arrived in Irvine. Dear old Martin is primarily famous for being an active Nazi, but he is somehow also the unabashed go-to favorite thinker of every progressive literary theorist on earth. He is secondarily famous for schtupping Hannah Arendt. He is tertiarily famous for finding human earth language—even German, with its infinite repository of untranslatable compound words—incapable of expressing the most important ideas of his wide-ranging and prolific philosophical career. As a result, he made up a bunch of his own, such as Dasein (“being-there”), Sein-Zum-Tode (“being-toward-death”) or Zeit-Spiel-Raum (“time-play-space”); Gelassenheit (“released-ness”), Geworfenheit (“thrown-ness”), vorhanden (“present-at-hand”)—and my department chair’s personal favorite, Ereignis, which literally means “event,” but in Heideggerese means something more akin to “a coming-into-view” (i.e., something coming into view—you know, a noun). (Heidegger is 100 percent the German language’s fault.)
The word Ereignis was also, I learned in seminar, pretty much directly relevant to Goethe, who pretty much (almost) used it to describe the German Novelle, or novella. English speakers will call something a “novella” if it’s too long to be a short story but too short to be published on its own, but for Goethe the sole criterion was that it describe one “single unheard-of event,” or sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit. Crash course in what passes for fun in a Ph.D. seminar: the compound adjective Goethe uses here contains the adjectival version of the verb sich ereignen (“to occur”), which is the root of the word Ereignis, and so he and Heidegger were pretty much best friends, even though one of them was born fifty years after the other one died. At any rate, thanks to my department chair’s enthusiasm for orthography (and, I suppose, ontology), I cut my Ph.D. teeth on a seminar about Heidegger and the Novelle, a seminar I took in the winter quarter of my first year that turned my feeble Dasein into what Heidegger might term putty-silliness.
It wouldn’t have been so bad had I not decided to double down on impossible-to-read German philosophers that quarter—but I did, with the only German philosopher who is even more difficult to read than Heidegger: Immanuel Kant, the man whose four-page-long sentences made me yearn for something as simple as a Heideggerian made-up hyphenate. Specifically, I bookended the Heidegger seminar with a course offered by the philosophy department, whose only text was the interminable Critique of Pure Reason. Since the material terrified me and the class was full of people I didn’t know, on the first day, I did what three months of grad-school inculcation had taught me to do: I distinguished myself as a complete pompous posturing twit.
“Do you have a preferred translation we should read?” one of the philosophy students had asked, a guy whom everyone called Jack Osbourne because he looked just like Jack Osbourne.
“That’s a good question,” answered Will, our professor, an awkward and exceedingly kind guy who couldn’t have been more than two years older than me. I didn’t pay attention to the answer he gave, because I was too busy screwing up my courage to ask my own question.
“Yes?” he said.
“Uh,” I said, “do we have to read it in translation?” I tapped nervously on my own ancient used copy of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which I’d snagged for $7.50 at a used bookstore in Oregon over Christmas break.
“Of course not! If you can read it in German, do.”
What I didn’t say was that since reading the Critique of Pure Reason was, to me, like performing a Jazzercise routine in hardening cement, I might as well not-understand it in its original glory. What the rest of the seminar heard was me upping the ante on their sad little monolingual philosopher asses, and for years after that people in the philosophy department would refer to me as the Girl Who Reads Kant in German, protagonist of the world’s most stultifying Stieg Larsson novel.
Luckily for me, the seminar was what the philosophy department called a “piggyback,” a graduate reading group that met as part of an advanced undergraduate course, so I had the good fortune of attending a twice-weekly lecture for younger people that went slowly and used middle-sized words. By the time graduate section each Friday rolled around, I had amassed a passable (if temporary) grasp on “synthetic a priori judgments,” the “transcendental dialectic,” and the “pure concepts of the understanding.” I was thus left free to sit in the seminar circle and space out, as the philosophy graduate students did their goddamnedest to word-salad away whatever tenuous understanding Will’s undergrad lecture might have imparted.
I liked to stare around the room at the faces of my classmates and wonder what these philosophy types were like. By six weeks into the quarter, I’d already made a Kafka-style unshakeable judgment about most of them—Maya the gorgeous Iranian probably belonged in Comp Lit; the guy with the Indiana Jones hat and the old-timey book-strap was a jackass; the Jack Osbourne–looking motherfucker wasn’t a dick, he was just really insecure. (I knew nothing about that.) That didn’t stop me, however, from making my lone contribution to discussion, which was to interrupt him as he pontificated on a passage in which Kant discussed “two modes of understanding” and say: “Well, Brad, in the German, it says zweierlei Erkenntnissart, which literally means ‘twofold mode of understanding,’ and I’m not exactly sure that’s the same thing.” Recommence silent staring. All of this silence and staring, combined with the fact that none of those philosophy people ever talked to me—indeed, some days nobody talked to me at all, and I didn’t talk to anyone else, and I briefly feared that it might be because I was a ghost, and it made me long for some kid who sees dead people to come hang out with me—gave me the decided impression that nobody in philosophy would ever want to hang out with me.
This, it turns out, was not a correct impression—someone in that class did want to hang out with me, but I almost didn’t realize it because of my terrible habit of skipping breakfast. One Friday, about seven weeks into the ten-week winter quarter of my first year—so, mid-February, and thus a perfect and sparkly day of about seventy degrees—the clock somehow managed to strike the 1:00 P.M. start of Kant seminar and I still hadn’t eaten anything. I’d bought a bran muffin, and I was desperate to chomp it down, but nobody else was eating, so I chickened out. Real intellectuals didn’t need any further sustenance than the theory of Apperception, goddammit. By the time the clock inched its way to three, I was what Heidegger might term the Ready-to-eat-my-own-hand.
As I rushed to the door, I noticed that one of my classmates—a strong-jawed silent type who always sat in the back and had recently started showing up with his arm in a sling—had stopped dead in my path. With the muffin halfway to my gaping maw, I damn near ran into him, which would have pushed his slung arm directly into the doorway. Instead I stopped short, said: “Gah! Sorry!” and prepared to maneuver around him, with my food, at long last now, six or seven inches from my quivering yap. He, however, turned to face me and addressed me directly, almost like he knew I existed. “So,” he said, “you’re in the German department?”
“Yes?” I said.
Did he want to have, like, a conversation or something? With me? Why? My mind suddenly entering what Heidegger might call a Disappearing-of-all-smart-talkiness, all I could come up with was the same damn question as everyone else.
“I realize this is probably the last thing you want to talk about,” I said, which is of course an excellent way to begin a conversation, “but what happened?”
“Oh,” he said. “I dislocated my shoulder.” He pointed to the wrist braces I wore for my carpal tunnel syndrome. “What’s with you?”
“This? It’s from too much typing and writing. How did you dislocate your shoulder?”
“I was bodysurfing,” he explained.
“Like, in the ocean?”
“Yep. Big wave caught me and slammed me into the sand.”
I was terrified of the ocean and all the things that could go awry in its merciless salty grasp (most of them shark-related), so I winced and gasped. I also noticed that, arm sling and head grease aside, he looked like a goddamned matinee idol, all broad shoulders and dramatic brow and sensitivity-inflected eye crinkles. Green eyes. Bright ones. How did I not notice this from six weeks of staring? Jack Osbourne’s big fat head must have been in the way. “I’m just impressed that you have time to go to the beach with all the Kant we have to read,” I said.
“Oh, I’m just auditing this course for fun.”
“Excuse me?” Reading the Critique of Pure Reason was like knocking down a brick wall with only my own skull and a ten-gallon bucket full of my tears.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m almost done with my dissertation, which has some chapters on the first Critique. So, you know.”
“Oh, yeah. I know.” I barely knew anyone who had passed their comprehensives, much less almost finished a dissertation, so I did not know.
