But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t so much as run a comb through my hair without sinking into terror and self-doubt, so frayed were my nerves for the entire year. This was due to the extended nature of the academic hiring cycle, where listings appeared in early fall and weren’t filled until April or May. This meant nine months of prostration, waiting, rejection, and, worst of all, hope both legitimate and false (but mostly false). Plenty of hope, as Kafka allegedly once said. “An infinite amount of hope. Just not for us.” Or, at any rate, not for me. So, what could it harm, indeed.
As I probably should have expected, my first try on the market yielded exactly bupkes. It was as if I’d screamed those eighty-page dossiers into a yawning chasm, a void that wasn’t even kind enough to be the Nietzschean abyss and actively glare back at me. Ludwig Wittgenstein told everyone that the most important part of the Tractatus was the part he didn’t write. Was the most important part of the job market the things the search committees didn’t say? I pondered this as I spat bile onto Facebook and refused to leave (or clean) our grimy one-bedroom in St. Louis, rising from bed only to make chocolate-chip pancakes that began to favor the chocolate chips over the pancake batter so aggressively that in the end I was just drowning molten goo in syrup. I pondered it as, after several months of this excellent use of my time, I pulled what had once been a roomy pair of Katharine Hepburn–style wide trousers over my behind, only to clasp them with protracted effort and create what I believed the youngsters called a “muffin top.”
“I think,” I said to Witold on a soaking-wet February morning, another set of form rejections from Southeastern Evangelical College and Semi-Pro Football Team et al. piled up in the mailbox as I waddled into the living room, “that I might have been eating my feelings a little bit.”
He looked up from grading his two hundredth logic assignment of the weekend and smiled a sly Witold smile, this thing he does when he really wants to say something smart-ass but isn’t sure he should.
“Go on,” I said, lower lip quivering. “Just say it.”
“You know what’s really good exercise?” he said.
“CrossFit?” I sniffled.
“Cleaning the bathroom.”
“Why don’t you clean the bathroom, then?”
“I do clean the bathroom—but I also work forty hours a week, and pay eighty percent of the rent, and I thought that perhaps, with you on fellowship and home all day, you might, you know, notice your surroundings a little bit.”
“I’ll have you know,” I said, “that the job market is a full-time job.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but the pay is fucking terrible. And the benefits seem chiefly to be a bottomless vortex of misery.”
I scowled at him and made a big show of throwing all the half-empty shampoo bottles across the bedroom while I limply smeared some Simple Green around the bathtub.
When I read “Before the Law,” all I wanted to do was jump into the page and tell the man from the country to just go back home. What do you need the Law for, really? I would say. The Doorkeeper is an asshole, and he’s just the most minor of the assholes—he said so himself—so what do you think is going to happen to you, even if you get in there? You won’t have won anything. You’ll just be surrounded by assholes, just like in Spaceballs. Don’t listen to him with his “maybe later” and “try again.” He was created to tell you “maybe later” disingenuously! Go home!
A reasonable person would, in a similar vein, have spent that one year on the job market, taken one look around, gone Jesus H. Christ, this is ridiculous, and beaten feet out of there. But I had other plans. Other excellent, fun plans. You would think, at the very least, if I hadn’t gleaned the appropriate lessons from “Before the Law,” I’d at least have paid attention to an even more important part at the end of The Trial, when the Priest explains to Josef K. the real moral of that very parable: that the Court’s case against K. isn’t actually personal. “The Court wants nothing from you,” the Priest says—doors created for the sole purposes of slamming in faces notwithstanding. “It takes you when you come and lets you out when you leave.” And that’s all. Of all his unknown crimes, K.’s worst was the egocentricity of assuming he was being persecuted.
I knew this intimately from my work, and I of all people should have let art bleed into life. And yet, I couldn’t help but assume that an academic search committee happening to choose another applicant, for reasons that ultimately had nothing to do with me (or my 198 best friends), was a swift personal judgment upon my inherent unworthiness as a scholar. Or, worse, somehow these search committees knew I’d been a nineteen-year-old lazy-ass, and no amount of sincere intellectual labor in my thirties could compensate. Making the job market personal in this way wasn’t just egocentric, though—it was also easier than the reality, which was that being selected for a particular academic position required an alchemic combination of “correct” qualities that was largely out of my control: a perfectly in-need specialization (one that stepped on no toes, but was familiar enough to everyone not to be dismissed as vogueish gibberish); a CV that struck the exact correct balance between teaching and research (different, of course, for every institution); and, most importantly, some sort of transcendental intangible that made one person the right “fit” and another the wrong one.
The reality was that my CV was probably near-identical to everyone else’s: a handful of publications in the “right journals”; a dissertation under contract to become a book; an impressive-sounding list of conference presentations in far-flung locations; a stack of glowing teaching reviews and another stack of glowing letters of reference. What made me “not good enough” (and someone else good enough) largely came down to factors I’d never be able to identify, much less control. Academia wasn’t weeding me out personally for my past or current sins, real or imagined. The job market wasn’t out to get me. It wanted nothing from me. It took me when I arrived—and it would let me leave when I left.
Except I wouldn’t leave. Sometimes, after all, you want the impossible precisely because it’s impossible. Also it was just so much less terrifying to decide that it was all my fault for being lazy fifteen years ago—or any number of other character shortcomings, academic and otherwise. All I had to do, I decided, was be better. Publish more. Work harder. Be even more willing to move anywhere, and do anything. I decided to attempt the job market for three more years. Every single person I knew in academia who held a position I respected told me in no uncertain terms that this was exactly the right thing to do—if not, perhaps, too few years. (Many suggested five. Some suggested ten. A few suggested “as long as it takes.”)
“It’s hard out there, no doubt,” they said. “But there are always jobs for good people.” Yes, an infinite amount of jobs. (Well, twenty-four jobs.) But not for me.
Keep trying.
Come back.
Maybe later.
In the meantime, I was both lucky and unlucky to land some stopgap academic employment, a day job to pay the bills while I continued on the market. I was lucky, because the difference between unemployed and employed is of course vast. I was unlucky because the job was as an adjunct, the academic equivalent of the Land-Surveyor in Kafka’s Castle, a sort of shifty mercenary who’s summoned to the ivory tower but not really let inside, who effectively both belongs to the Castle and doesn’t.
Adjuncts are real professors in that they have teaching responsibilities that are, in most cases, more or less identical to those of their full-time, tenure-track or tenured counterparts. (To students, they’re exactly the same, save for the fact that they always show up in the course listing as “staff.”) But they’re also not real professors, in that they aren’t listed in a department roster, don’t have offices (or if they do, they share with multiple other adjuncts), often don’t have use of the copier or the library, don’t have building keys, aren’t invited to faculty meetings, and are generally regarded by their full-time colleagues somewhere between invisible and gonorrhea incarnate. Adjuncts teach on a course-by-course, semester-by-semester basis for as little as seventeen hundred dollars per class (per three-and-a-half-month semester), and can be fired at any time for any reason. They are academia’s dirtiest little secret—not because they keep quiet (they don’t; many form unions and agitate); it’s more that for some reason, students and their parents don’t seem to care that they’re paying $250,000 to be taught by someone who has to eat at the soup kitchen.
The adjunct job I was offered at the small honors college associated with Witold’s university was a few sections of the introductory freshman literature course, which contained no German texts, but for which I had trained as a TA back in Irvine, when I taught a section of the humanities core sequence. That had been a welcome diversion from my normal duties, of teaching German 101 to half-snoozing freshmen who used Google Translate for most of their assignments, which is not as intellectually fulfilling as you might think. But the literature courses I taught, both in Irvine and then as an adjunct in St. Louis, were different. Demystifying texts with students—difficult ones that they never would have chosen for themselves, that they approached with trepidation or sometimes hostility—was, it turned out, even more enjoyable than demystifying them alone in my room.
After every semester, I would rip into my student evaluations like they were a plate of the chocolate-chip pancakes I now rarely allowed myself.
It was a surprisingly enjoyable class to go to.
If I could take any class at college over again, I’d pick this one.
One of the most interesting classes I’ve taken, and one I will never forget.
Dr. Schuman is pretty much the smartest person I’ve ever met ever.
Dr. Schuman is the best teacher I have ever had, not just here, but in my life.
The good news was that I clearly and at long last had found the place I belonged. The bad news was: What if nobody would let me do this for a living wage, ever? If I stopped teaching college, I’d feel destroyed—but if I kept adjuncting, I’d be destroyed. So that is why I couldn’t just leave. That is why I couldn’t just tell the Doorkeeper to go fuck himself, and get Botox so I could be hired at the Gap. That is why, after another market cycle again yielded no tenure-track offers, I kept waiting outside that door for two more years—even though it damn near killed me.
I don’t mean this existentially. I almost died courtesy of an appropriately Kafkan disease. But let’s backtrack a second: What if the Doorkeeper allowed the man from the country in to the Law for exactly two years, with the promise that almost everyone who has been allowed to do this got full and permanent access afterward? That’s what happened to me. I applied for—and won—a postdoctoral fellowship from a high-profile granting institution, one that was for “promising scholars” who were in danger of Leaving the Field, a fate worse than death.
“Many of our fellows have had their positions converted into tenure-track jobs,” explained the program’s director during a terrifying orientation webinar (largely terrifying because of the word webinar). “Just work hard and make yourself indispensable.” Sounded feasible enough.
I was placed at a massive research university in Ohio, in a department whose chair sold me on four impending retirements (nudge nudge, wink wink), and “collegiality” (academic shorthand for “we actively pretend not to hate each other”). This is it, I thought. I was going to go to Ohio alone, take advantage of my solitude and turn that dissertation into a book, crank out articles, overprepare for class, and suck up to my collegial new colleagues with such believable sincerity (believable because they, being so collegial, would be nice people I’d enjoy pleasing) that they’d have no choice but to look at each other and go: Why even bother with a stupid national search to replace these retirements, when Rebecca is right here being indispensable?
When I arrived, the department manager pointed to the unopened box of books and teaching materials I’d had mailed to myself and told me I might as well take it home. “We thought about petitioning the Dean of Space for an office for you—but for such a short time, will it really be worth it?”
All I could think to say in answer was: “You have someone called a Dean of Space?”
After I held office hours with unimpressed students in the department storage room for several weeks, one of my new colleagues took pity upon me: since he had two offices, he’d allow me to use one of them—so long as I didn’t make him clean it out. That had been a true moment of collegiality, yes—one that almost made up for the start-of-semester party, when the department’s most eminent professor came up to me and said: “Amy! It’s nice to meet you. It must be so nice to be almost finished with your dissertation.”
“It’s nice to meet you too,” I said. “My name is, uh, actually Rebecca, and I am happy to report that I finished my dissertation two years ago.”
She looked at me like she wanted to spit poison. I was reminded of the scene in The Trial where Josef K. has his first interrogation, and the magistrate says, “So, you’re a house painter!” This isn’t true, and K. tries to set the record straight—but that actually just ends up making him look worse in the eyes of the ever-shifting Court.
