Rameau's Pastiche

Two years ago, Andy Grundberg wrote in The New York Times an elegant, perfectly plausible but ultimately premature obituary about the death of post-modernism. It continues to flourish, commanding the attention of academics in spite of near-fatal attacks. Not only is it no longer laying siege to the establishment, it has become a part of it.

Parody is a sure sign of continued relevance of postmodernism. Cathleen Schine's Rameau's Niece is a thinly-veiled attack on the currently fashionable lit-crit deconstructionist crowd. (The novel shockingly does not address the hottest topic in literary studies today, transvestitism. There is only one brief reference to "The Importance of Cross-Dressing in the Symbolism of the Eleventh Century Promissory Note" and nary a fetish in sight).

The novel's title is a clever allusion to Diderot's Rameau's Nephew. Its structure, while not entirely original, is ambitious. Reminiscent of Antonia Byatt's Possession, it uses the same conceit of imposing a fictional historical text upon the lives of contemporary characters and concocting a story to fill in the interstices.

Our heroine, Margaret Nathan, is perhaps the most unsympathetic heroine in recent fiction. A recent graduate student whose dissertation is published and becomes a best seller, she is catapulted into the limelight. One tends to make the inevitable comparisons between Naomi Wolf and the commercial success of The Beauty Myth, or Camille Paglia and Sexual Personae or Susan Faludi and Backlash, all currently fashionable authors who are trotted out to discuss their tomes on talk shows.

Margaret is married to the 40-year old Edward, who reads like a single neurotic New Yorker's idea of the perfect man. Not only is he English, but he is handsome, forbearing, and a Columbia professor, possessed of the ultimate academic credential...an Oxford degree. (Had Schine made him a few years older, he might have known Bill Clinton at Oxford and been able to take advantage of his status as an FOB, instead of languishing in a faculty office at Columbia.)

Edward comes off as an annoying troubadour with a penchant for spouting verse and a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge about the origins of everyday things. One keeps hoping in vain for the famed English reserve to come into play.

Edward and the monstrously self-absorbed Margaret deserve each other. She is perilously forgetful, almost amnesiac, it's difficult to see her successfully completing an undergraduate thesis, far less a dissertation and a subsequent book. The book which has brought her such acclaim, "The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny," has been embraced by the lit-crit crowd as a "a precursor of post-modern bricolage" which establishes her on the literary circuit.

Schine has an ear for authentic dialogue, especially the argot of the intelligentsia. The Washington-New York-Cambridge axis constitutes an arena for combatants to engage in calculated sparring. Schine proves to be a deft chronicler of the idiosyncracies of the tenured classes.

The conversational snippets alone make the book endurable, although they might be unintelligible to those unversed in the esoterica of post-modernism or unappealing to those weary of deconstructionist cant.

One almost expects the David Kennedy/Marjorie Garber/ Barbara Johnson crowd to make cameo appearances at the various social gatherings around which much of the narrative is centered, responding authoritatively to questions such as whether "the dissemination of revolutionary ideas through popular underground art such as pornography is an interesting antecedent to the samizdat publications of (Czechoslovakia)" or engaging in discussions of the validity of meta-Heideggerian semaphorism.

Margaret is currently working on another book, which shares the title of Schine's text, Rameau's Niece. This is the ultimate post-modern text, since it is lifted almost entirely from works of prominent philosophers of the time, such as Helvetius, Kant and naturally, Diderot. The text (within the text) is filled with double entendre about a young woman's sexual coming of age and search for enlightenment.

Working on the book triggers in Margaret profound discontent with the state of her life. Dissatisfied with domesticity, no longer content to be utterly reliant upon her husband, she begins challenging previously assumed verities. Convinced that her husband is having an affair with one or more of his undergraduates, she leaves him and seeks solace in the arms of various potential lovers. These include Lily, a chic bisexual who is exploring the butch-femme aesthetic, Martin, a Belgian electronics dealer and her dentist, Dr. Lipi.

Unsurprisingly, she is an incompetent adulteress. Her advances are rebuffed, except by the dentist, with whom she has an unsatisfying (and unprotected) sexual encounter. Suitably chastened, she seeks in an orgy of expiation to redeem herself by returning to the long-suffering Edward, who as further evidence of his perfection, takes her back. A rapturous reconciliation on his desk proves that faculty offices do have some charm.

Schine continues in a tradition exemplified by Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water and Auberon Waugh's waspish commentary for the Spectator. All attribute numerous undesirable traits to the young people who populate their work. These unfortunates are uniformly slothful, vain, banal, (place your vice here) revealing that while these authors may have read about and taught young people, they may not actually know any young people.

The undergraduates who populate Schine's novel (while admittedly peripheral characters) are stereotypes and crudely drawn, veritable tabulae rasae, empty vessels, waiting to receive wisdom. In this artificial undergraduate universe, all the women have flawless skin, long shiny hair and are transparently in love with their instructors.

The men have sparse facial hair, in a pathetic attempt to emulate the Beat Poets, and want to take a year off to ride a motorcycle cross-country. In 1993? Get real; thirteeners would never do a thing like that. Not eco-friendly enough, and in this economic climate with the intense competition for jobs, a year off has to be strategically planned for maximum resume-enhancing value.

There is a rich vein of misogyny, or at the very least, a virulent strain of anti-feminism running through this novel. Margaret, at age 28, agonizes about her husband's purported infidelity moaning that "he has forsaken my aging flesh for-for what? To lose him to some exquisite little girl with long hair flicking like a horse's mane, a student drawn to him and he to her, intoxicated with the wine dark words of Walt Whitman, yes, okay, that's as it should be." Since when does turning 30 signal the onset of senescence? Admittedly, there is a certain fragility to women's social status as they age, but this tends to be counteracted by the rewards of a rich and fulfilling professional life.

Rameau's Niece has some redeeming moments, Schine has a good eye for detail and for capturing the essence of a scene, it is becoming her own aesthetic signature. Ultimately, the work crumbles under the weight of its unwieldy structure and its astonishing social anachronisms.

So, if you genuflect before the gods of post modernism--Bakhtin, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan--or if you've been accompanying Umberto Eco during his walks in the fictional woods, you may want to take a look at this novel for its oppositional stance. Otherwise, you would be well advised to stay clear.