“I’m pretty sure,” I said.
“I could swear I’ve read that fable a hundred times and there’s no cat in it.”
“You’re like the person whose mom takes Old Yeller out of the VCR before the dog gets shot,” I said, to raucous laughter, either because the audience appreciated that I’d stolen a joke from Friends, or because—in a triumph of assimilation—the audience thought it was a legitimately good bit of Austrian humor, what the Viennese call Schmäh. I’ll never know.
I do, however, know exactly why Herr Boltzmann wanted the “Little Fable” to end before the cat appeared, because then the story would have had a discernible moral. But doesn’t that kind of miss the entire point of Kafka? Kafka is parables without a lesson. “A Little Fable” is kind of the granddaddy of his oeuvre, given that it’s not a parable without a moral so much as a parable whose moral is that there are no real morals to be had in parables.
I cared a lot about all this in 2009, because this sort of the-answers-are-nonanswers stuff was what linked Kafka together with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein liked to demonstrate that instead of answering a so-called question of philosophy, it was more important to prove how wrong that question was in the first place. He didn’t solve problems so much as dissolve them. As far as I was concerned, I’m not going to answer because your question can’t be asked summed up Kafka quite nicely—that, and the use of stunning German prose to insist that language couldn’t express anything important. To me, the connection between the two nominal Austrians who never met each other was the stuff of true scholarly epiphany. And yet, as I rounded the final year of grad school—on another paid fellowship, one that allowed me to live in St. Louis full-time—I was starting to feel like my own journey to the Ph.D. was itself a parable with no answer or moral.
This made me a real hit at Witold’s department parties, where the philosophers treated literary studies as at best an amusing trifle and more often than not a jargon-riddled, pseudointellectual farce. (Philosophy, of course, is nothing like this.) Witold’s colleague Viktoria, for example, was a very enthusiastic and inquisitive Russian who for some reason enjoyed inviting us to dinner.
“Tell me,” she said one glum autumn evening, as St. Louis’s scraggly vegetation began its annual metamorphosis into angry-looking twigs, “what is it you love about Kafka?”
“Give me a second,” I said, and excused myself to the bathroom.
I locked the door behind me and took a breath. This wasn’t a fucking book club. I wasn’t doing this dissertation to talk about what I loved, to feed into that pernicious rhetoric of intellectual vocation—the “calling”—that enables hundreds of thousands of part-time professors in the United States to qualify for fucking food stamps because at most of our universities, the inner rewards of soaring exegesis are now expected to count as pay. My research wasn’t about love. It was about—
—and therein lay the rub. What was it about? There was no question that I had loved Kafka once. I had loved him a lot. I had loved him in place of a living person who broke my heart; I had loved him through college and young adulthood. But now, after half a decade of graduate school, at the age of thirty-three, 250 pages deep in a dissertation (times six drafts), I could think of no reason for what I was doing, other than that in 2005, a German department had offered me $100,000 to be a full-time student.
Back in Oregon for a Christmas visit to my family, I was at the health-food store with my mother and ran into Victor, a family friend I’d known since I was five.
“I heard you’re finishing your dissertation!” he said.
“Yep.” I developed a sudden interest in reverse-osmosis kale water.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s boring. You don’t want to hear about it.”
Victor shrugged and went back to his perusal of sprouted wheat berries.
As I loaded our groceries into the car, my mother said: “I think you hurt Victor’s feelings. Why do you do that?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I have no fucking idea.”
“Do you really think your own dissertation is boring?”
“That’s a ridiculous question, because dissertations are inherently boring, as you well know.”
“That’s different. Mine really was boring.”
“See?”
“But I didn’t tell everyone it was boring at the time.”
“Well, maybe you were deluded and I’m not.”
Her eyes were in the rearview as she spoke, but I could see her looking thoughtful.
“Do you even want to be an academic?” she said.
“Sure I do,” I said. “I’m good at it. Or, you know, better at it than I was at anything else I tried before.”
“I’m not asking if you’re good at it.”
“All right, how about this? I’m well into my thirties, and have spent the better part of the last decade working harder than I ever have, in training for one specific career at the expense of all others, and I don’t think anyone is going to want to hire a thirty-four-year-old German Ph.D. to be an editorial assistant, and at least I’ve had dental insurance this whole time.”
My mother pulled into our carport and sighed. “You’ll figure it out, Bekibek,” she said. “You always do.”
“Actually, I never do, but somehow I still manage.” This despite having a mother who calls me Bekibek and has done so since 1990.
She was right, though. I had to quit telling everyone my research was boring and terrible, even if doing so was for purely altruistic purposes, to spare them a quarter-hour of bloviation about the rule-following paradox and whether controversial Wittgenstein scholar Saul Kripke ruined it or blew it right open. (If you want to know the answer to that, then I hate to tell you this, but that’s the wrong question.) If I wanted to succeed on the job market, I’d have to start assuming everyone else should find my dissertation as interesting as I did back when I started it.
The academic job market is not the kind of thing you enter for fun, thinking maybe you’ll apply for a job as a professor, because what could it harm? Because it does—and in my case did—a tremendous amount of harm. How? Let me count the ways. First, the job market destroyed my time, time that would have been better spent on my dissertation, or making out with Witold, or submitting my résumé at the Gap. (Not really. I’d never be hired at the Gap, because I was too old.) Applying for a single academic job—and mine was but one application out of two hundred for each position—requires about thirty hours of work up front to compile an eighty-page dossier, customized for each institution, with a meticulous cover letter and an extensive portfolio of teaching and research materials. This was bad enough, but then every place I applied also required I use a specific online portal that demanded, from all two hundred of its applicants, two more hours of irrelevant HR paperwork aimed at people with regular jobs. (“Phone number of current supervisor”? “Years spent in current position”? “Reason for leaving this position”? How about: TA positions and dissertation fellowships are all for a single year each, as per industry standard, you fucking dicks?)
Back when I reluctantly took the GRE, and despite barricading myself in the NYU library for three days with nothing but black coffee and quadratic equations, I scored a 710 on the math portion. This sounds like it was good but was actually very bad. Engineers and physicists take the GRE, too, and so I scored in the thirty-third percentile. (I guess I am bad at math after all. At least for an engineer.) But even my feeble thirty-third-percentile brain knew that a one-out-of-two-hundred shot at the two dozen open tenure-track German positions in the country was what professional statisticians call extremely fucking shitty odds.
And yet, when the rejections came, I could barely see through the hurt of it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t get a job. Sometime during the past five years, my academic self had snuck up on my personal self and eaten her whole. (I suppose it might have had something to do with spending most of my waking hours being an academic, even if I didn’t “love” it or entirely know why.) Being passed over for a professorship was Dylan Gellner my high-school boyfriend dumping me all over again—I’d bared the fruits of the hardest intellectual work I’d ever done before these search committees, essentially shown them my soul, and they’d been unmoved. I’m sure, like Dylan Gellner, they liked me fine—but once again, the whole of my thinking, feeling self had fallen short. Actually it was even worse than getting dumped by Dylan Gellner, because going out with Dylan Gellner didn’t pay for my rent, food, and utilities.
The totalizing sense of existential failure that emanated from the rejections then infected my household, and a pall of uncertainty took root about every aspect of my future. It wasn’t just Where would I be working? (Or, for that matter, Would I be working?) It was: Where would I be living in the next year—or, foreseeably, for the rest of my life? Would it be somewhere Witold could get a job and move? Would he want to? It was simply expected that if I was a serious enough scholar, I would happily sacrifice my relationship. Who needs a love life when you’ve got the Life of the Mind? Academic job applicants are cautioned on a regular basis to remove wedding rings at interviews, not to speak of a spouse (or, if female, children), and to appear married only to the Profession (and yes, they call it “the Profession,” capitalized, in utter seriousness).
People with no experience in academia wonder why their cousins or friends with Ph.D.s are on the brink of nervous collapse, when nowadays it’s hard for everyone to find a job, thank you very much. What they don’t realize—and they have no reason to know this, of course—is that academia expects its aspirants to sacrifice everything for even the slightest, smallest chance at full membership in the club. The rhetoric is painted cheerily—Be flexible and willing to move!—but the reality is pernicious: Give up everything, expect nothing—and you just might get something. Discovering all of this for the first time, while sequestered in a strange town with no day job, made me a truly delightful partner. So much so, in fact, that one day, Witold did what he does best, which is use math to express difficult concepts.
“Your job market woes,” he said, “have sucked ninety-five percent of the fun out of this relationship.”
“I’m surprised you’re leaving the five,” I said. “That’s pretty generous.”
“I know it is.”
