Jason Fitger immediately calls to mind a Buzzfeed listicle that you might have seen. It features a dozen or so pictures of people reading texts on their phones or laptops. We cannot quite make out what they are texting, but we can see the form their texting takes: long, paragraph chunks of text. Built into the very form of this writing is a certain assumption not only about its content, but about the meaning of the activity itself. As the Buzzfeed title puts it succinctly: these people are definitely breaking up.
In his essay, I will argue that Jason Fitger is a both a parody of, and an elegy for, a certain kind of character: the self-important mid-century male intellectual whose boorish behavior primarily takes the form of an inability to shut off his analytical faculties. Like the people in the Buzzfeed article, his emotions do not silence him but make him unable to stop talking. Analysis and probing is, in its own way, a kind of harassment or intrusion. There is something traumatic not just about what people say when they say too much, but about the act of saying too much itself. The works of many male novelists and film makers from the 20th century--John Updike, Phillip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Woody Allen, to name a few--are populated with figures like Fitger who are just as often celebrated for their lovable eccentricities as parodied for their abusive tendencies. David Foster Wallace argued that these figures themselves--he called them the Great Male Narcissists--were just as often representative of these character types as their fictional creations. One of the most celebrated traits of these figures was their ability for incisive, probing rants and diatribes.
Of course, Dear Committee Members is something different altogether: in this book, Julie Schumacher also engages in a healthy dose of celebration of the Great Male Narcissist. She does so, though, in the same spirit that an anthropologist might celebrate the archetype of a long-lost culture. Already in her era, figures like Fitger are dinosaurs--fossils of a lost way of doing things. This is not to say that they do not leave a legacy, however. These figures live on in different ways: in the passive aggressive asides of colleagues and in the heartless bureaucracy of the modern university. Fitger seeks to kill off the GMN as a toxic legacy of the past, while at the same time resurrecting his best qualities for the sake of resistance in the present. She seeks to rebuild his incisive wit as a force for good.
Verbosity--the tendency to write much more than is appropriate to a given medium or venue--has a meaning that is itself distinct from the content of the writing itself. We can read not only Fitger's words but the way in which he forms them as well. He most resembles the misogynistic GMN when he is most verbose. However, while Fitger is a normally verbose, he is not always. Just as easy to read are his inabilities to generate large amounts of text. In one case, he concludes a letter for a student he is unenthusiastic about recommending--even though she is highly qualified--with a terse, backhanded compliment: "I recommend Ms. Zelles to you with all the unusual accolades these letters are expected to provide" (31). This relative restraint, I would argue, is a sign of an important agenda in its own right.
Fitger's attitude to Zelles is complicated. She is, on the one hand, a victim of the old-fashioned misogyny that motivates the Great Male Narcissist. One thing these men could not tolerate was a woman who equaled their abilities in the professional sphere. They either had to downgrade these women to junior colleagues, or if they could not do this, transform them into objects of sexual interest, thereby also diminishing them. Fitger is not an unreconstructed GMN in this regard--a true GMN would have begun to date Zelles, not include passive-aggressive asides in his letters. In this sense, Fitger is a more professional version of his previous counterparts, who had no ability to separate business and personal affairs. One of the traits of the narcissist is that business is always personal. If there is a true GMN in the book, it is H. Reginald Hampf, or HRH--not only his initials, but the initials for a monarch: His Royal Highness.
At the same time, Fitger's read on Zelles is also more sophisticated than it might seem: he sees in her the rise of a skilled social climber. It's easy to immediately see Fitger's advocacy of Darren Browles as a way of engaging with his younger self. However, if there is a character who resembles the young Fitger, it would be Zelles. The young Fitger was a skilled writer, but an even more skilled academic politician. When Fitger writes of Zelles, the comments are reminiscent of the way his own writing has been critiqued. He says of her, "She is obviously brilliant, but I find her off-putting and a bit of a cipher. She has a mind like a bric-a-brac storehouse of facts: a surplus of content put to questionable use" (32). His own writing, while in ways brilliant, also seems cluttered and uninspired, and more aimed at promotion than artistic insight. Like Zelles, Fitger's real triumph was to excel at the mind games that his academic advisor played, as he attempted to pit students against one another and manipulate their vulnerabilities. Fitger did not beat the system so much as master it's toxicity, and for all his flaws, he does show a genuine desire to protect the next generation from this similar abuse.
It's tempting to say that Zelles will represent a generation of Great Female Narcissists to rival Jay and his cohort, but this is not correct either. That figure, too, is a relic of the past. There were already a generation of GFNs, whose tactics rivaled and responded to the GMNs. They used mind games and played students off one another just as HRH did (Google Avital Ronell and "transference" if you don't believe me). They were the exception to the rule of a past replete with the GMNs. The rule of the future is not manipulation, but the cold and calculating logic in which academic success is just another way of climbing the corporate ladder. Fitger actually has one foot in both worlds--he played HRH's game, but he seems equally skilled at the new games as well. As he ages, he seems more inclined to beat the system than to master it.
Zelles is smart and talented, but her writing is ultimately no more original than Browles's, suggesting that all that separates them from one another is their skill at "playing the game." By attempting to throw a wrench into the gears of Zelles's climbing, Jay of course might be working through some misogynistic baggage. It is in his verbose missives, though, in his inability to limit the size of letters to his ex-lovers that he really confronts and works through this baggage. We all write long texts in the midst of a breakup--it takes a true GMN to be writing them still years later. It is at these moments that he most seems to be a classic GMN. However, unlike HRH, he seems to mostly protect his students from his narcissism. In his terse LORs for Zelles, by contrast, he is doing something else as well besides working through his past. Much as he needed someone to redirect his intense egoism into more productive channels, he attempts, in his own flawed way, to do this for her. His own penance for his history as a GMN is to advocate for a more humane institution that would allow those of equal ability--Zelles and Browles--an equal chance at success, even if they were not equally skilled at "the game."
I apologize for the length of this essay--I didn't have time to write a shorter one, as the wit famously said.
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