Excerpt From The Lecturer's Tale

In The Lecturer's Tale, "mild-mannered liberal pluralist" Nelson Humboldt appears to be a sheep among wolves in the factional English Department at Midwest University. Having grown up on a steady diet of canonical authors, Nelson is working on becoming a literary scholar but finds himself more than a little confused by his colleagues, "the New Order of semioticians, postmodernists, and feminists" who aren't nearly as eager as he is to study Shakespeare and assign Keats. Then one day Nelson's right index finger is accidentally removed by the whirring spokes of a student's bicycle. When the finger is reattached, Nelson gets something unexpected in the bargain -- the power, held within his right index finger, to bend others to his will without their knowledge. During a meeting of the department's hiring committee at a coffeehouse called Pandemonium, Nelson is asked to pick up three well-known academics applying for a job at Midwest. In this passage, Nelson meets the first candidate, postcolonialist Lester Antilles, whom Nelson would benefit from derailing.

A few days after the meeting at Pandemonium, Nelson drove to the airport to pick up Lester Antilles, the first of the job candidates to visit. Nelson roared down the freeway in a nearly new Crown Victoria from the university's motor pool, through Minnesota dairy land sleeping under a heavy quilt of snow. His own little Toyota couldn't even go this fast; over fifty miles per hour, it shook and rattled and pierced him with drafts of freezing air through the loose seals around the windows. Its windshield wipers whined, its heater stank of exhaust. But the Crown Vic sailed over the wet pavement, throwing up twin fantails of water that corkscrewed together in the rearview mirror. When Nelson came up behind a convoy of trailer trucks, lumbering nose-to-tail like a line of elephants, a mere tap on the accelerator sent the sedan surging past them. Even at full throttle the Crown Vic was quieter than his living room, the wipers silent, the heater purring, the air smelling of Windex and air freshener.

Nelson's new suit of clothes was comfortable, but coming up the airport concourse he tugged at the collar and pulled at his cuffs. He felt like some scrubbed, fidgety teenager dressed by his mom, sent to fetch an imperious uncle and told to behave himself. Waiting at the gate, he forced himself to concentrate on what he had to do.

In the dead of a Minnesota winter, Lester Antilles came off the plane in a white linen suit, an open-necked shirt, and canvas shoes. He was broad-chested and bullet headed, with a flat, impassive face and heavy-lidded eyes. His hair was cropped to within a quarter inch of his blunt skull. He wore thick-lensed glasses with clear plastic rims, a St. Christopher's medal around his thick neck, and a big gold ring. He looked every inch the globe-trotting, guerilla intellectual -- either that, or a Colombian drug lord. Nelson couldn't make up his mind.

In a discipline where scholarly heft was defined by being more postcolonial than thou, Lester Antilles was the heftiest of the lot. As a graduate student at an Ivy League school he had announced to his dissertation committee that doctoral theses at major Western universities were a primary locus of the objectifying colonialist gaze on native subjects, and he refused on principle to participate in the marginalization of indigenous voices or to become complicit with the hegemonic discourse of Western postcolonial cultural imperialism. In practice, this meant that for six years he refused to take classes, attend seminars, or write a dissertation. As a result of this ideologically engaged nonparticipation, he was offered tenured positions even before he had his Ph.D., but by refusing to write a book or any articles on his topic -- publishing with major university presses being even more complicit with imperialism than writing dissertations -- he provoked a fierce bidding war. Columbia won by offering him an endowed chair and a full professorship, and on Morningside Heights he courageously continued his principled refusal to teach any classes, hold any office hours, publish any books, serve on any committees, or supervise any dissertations. For this demanding and theoretically sophisticated subaltern intervention in the dominant discourse, Antilles made well into the six figures, more money than the president of the United States.

His finger twitching, Nelson stepped in front of Antilles and spoke his name. Antilles stepped back, and his heavy eyelids raised a fraction. For a moment Nelson wondered if the man were deaf as well as professionally mute. But then the candidate lifted his hands to his ears and plucked out two tiny earphones, which were connected by a thin wire that plunged into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he surprised Nelson by speaking in a whispery voice.

"You are from Midwest?" he said without emotion.

Down the concourse and through baggage claim, Antilles made bored monosyllabic replies to Nelson's queries about the flight. For the first time Nelson felt uncomfortable in his new clothes; he might was well have been wearing a pair of farmer's overalls for all the impression his clothes made on the candidate. In the car Antilles gingerly replaced the earphones and pulled a small cassette player out of his breast pocket. He flipped the tape, turned up the volume, and put the player back in his shirt pocket. He closed his eyes, and Nelson drove back to Hamilton Groves in the humming silence of the Crown Victoria, listening only to the thin, unidentifiable whine of Antilles's music. His finger burned uncomfortably on the steering wheel.

What to do? wondered Nelson. How to sabotage a man who left you no openings? For the rest of the day, Nelson missed all of the events at which Antilles did not speak. Nelson missed the meeting with the graduate student leaders of every ethnicity and sexual preference on campus, where Antilles did not answer their questions and the students went away in awe at Antilles's stunning critique of their own complicity with the dominant culture of the university. Nelson missed the lunch with the hiring committee at Peregrine, where Antilles actually spoke twice, once to order the mesquite grilled chicken and again to ask for the Grey Poupon. Nelson missed the private meeting with the faculty of the English Department, where Kraljevic, Lorraine Alsace, and Penelope O hung on every word Antilles didn't say, and Morton Weissmann -- unable to get a word in where no words were spoken -- seethed in frustration.

Nelson did not catch up with Antilles, in fact, until the end of the day, when Nelson waited, finger smoldering, in the lobby of Antilles's hotel. The candidate came in near midnight after a presumably uneventful dinner at Pescecane's house, his earphones in place, his eyes dulled by the drone of the music. Nelson leaped up and met him in the middle of the lobby. Antilles's eyelids lifted in mild alarm, and he took a step back. Nelson took him by the wrist.

"I have a suggestion for your job talk tomorrow," Nelson said. Antilles blinked rapidly, and Nelson plucked the cassette player out of Antilles's pocket, took out the tape -- Kenny G, of all things -- and replaced it with a tape Nelson had made that afternoon. Rooting around in a box of old LPs in his basement, he'd found -- stuck in between his Badfinger records -- an old comedy album he'd loved when he was a kid, a record by a Vegas insult comic called Hello Stupid: Frankie Carson LIVE! at the Sands. Gripping Antilles's wrist with his right hand, Nelson used his left to press the play button on the cassette player.

"Knock 'em dead tomorrow morning, slugger." Nelson's finger turned to ice as he squeezed Antilles's wrist. "Break a leg."