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Saturday, October 29, 2005
The Crackup “Like Heidi, the feminist art historian, Laurie [an English professor] has a revealing crackup while presenting a lecture,” a reviewer writes about Wendy Wasserstein‘s Third, a play UD’s already posted about quite a bit, though she’s neither seen it nor read its script. The-professor-who-has-a-revealing-crackup-while-presenting-a-lecture is a tried and true motif of fiction, drama, and film. Popular culture, of course, already considers professors nutty. Writers, however, seem intrigued by the painful irony of the culture’s custodians of wisdom going mad… as if to say the world’s so insane that even the most reasoned among us must go round the bend. Here’s UD’s favorite example of this motif, from the opening pages of Saul Bellow’s Herzog: He was clear enough in April, but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering “Excuse me,” reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed; his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything - everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative; he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear - longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent. |