Academic Truth Is All Relative

There's a wonderful scene in "Annie Hall" when Woody Allen's character, Alvy, is standing in line with Annie (played by Diane Keaton) to see a film. Behind the couple is an obnoxious pseudo-intellectual (who we later find out is a professor at Columbia) mindlessly nattering on and on about every topic imaginable. The professor's knowledge knows no bounds: we are subjected first to criticism of Federico Fellini's oeuvre, then to a savage diatribe against Samuel Beckett. Names are dropped with impunity, including that of media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Alvy soon has enough of the professor's pretentious cant and triumphantly produces the real-life McLuhan, who conveniently was waiting behind a nearby signboard. The lines McLuhan delivers to the academic are priceless:

"I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work...How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

The professor, for once, has nothing to say. His arguments are proven meritless, rejected by the very authority whose theories they are based upon. Thanks to McLuhan, the professor is discredited, embarrassed--and unequivocally wrong.

My movie buff friends tell me that the above scene is the first instance in which Woody Allen presents Annie Hall's main theme: the idea that only in art can one reshape reality and have complete control over one's life. As Alvy says into the camera after the scene, "Boy, if life were only like this."

Real life is much more complicated. After all, how many of us, while debating the meaning of an author's work, actually can summon the author at the snap of our fingertips to resolve the dispute? Alternatively, how many of us have ever had an author explicitly reject our interpretation of his or her ideas?

I raise the question rhetorically, but unfortunately for me, I actually can relate to the pompous professor. My senior year in high school, I wrote an essay on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which I boldly asserted that one of the novel's characters, Ras the Exhorter, was based on the real-life black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. I remember feeling the smug self-satisfaction that comes with crafting (what I thought was) an original academic argument. I excerpted the essay on my Harvard application. I wondered--only half in jest--whether it was publishable.

I was in for a rude awakening. Indeed, the next fall, I came across an interview of Ellison conducted in 1955, which focused mostly on Invisible Man. The interviewers did not beat around the bush.

"Isn't Ras based on Marcus Garvey?" they asked. So much for my original thesis.

Ellison responded directly. "No...No conscious reference to Garvey is intended."

In reading those words, I felt as though Ellison had emerged from the grave and shot me with a semiautomatic.

What bothered me more than my destroyed thesis, however, was a larger question: What was my scholarship worth? Sure, I had amply demonstrated that similarities exist between Ras and Garvey, but the causal link had been shattered by the only guy who had a right to do so--the author himself. I was wrong, and my paper was worthless.

Or was it? I wrote my high school English teacher about the situation, and he responded that my words were significant, regardless of Ellison's original intentions. Once an author releases his book to the public, he said, the public is free to make any use of it. Somewhat mollified, I approached one of my Harvard professors, and she agreed. "It doesn't matter what Ellison may or may not have intended," she said. "It's what you think that counts."

I was glad to hear those words, but I didn't actually believe them. They smacked to me of academic relativism, the sort of thing where any interpretation is valid, where the notion of "truth" is scoffed at, where a skillful (or lazy) reader can manipulate (or misinterpret) an argument, turn it on its head and still be celebrated as a conquering hero.

I'm not standing here on my bully pulpit railing against "lax academic standards"--not I, one of the beneficiaries of grade inflation! I suppose I'm struggling more with the idea of Truth, at least in the context of academic writing--the sort of writing that occupies each of us at least for the years we are here.

I don't find the "any interpretation is valid" argument convincing. There are instances when, as Woody Allen memorably shows us, we simply are wrong. I recognize, of course, that Ellison didn't reject my argument in the way McLuhan rejected the professor's; while "no conscious reference to Garvey" may have been intended, Ellison did considerately leave the realm of his unconscious wide open to academic scrutiny. Unfortunately, I'm no psychoanalyst.

In this specific instance, I truly believe I was wrong. The argument may have been well-supported, but its fundamental premise was misguided. True, if Ellison hadn't opened his big mouth, my illusions of self-confidence probably would have lasted a little longer. But academic argument is not about self-confidence; it's about unearthing that thing we call Truth--that which is.

It is for this reason that, in the end, I side more with the academic relativists. It's not that I believe there is no Truth, or for that matter, that there are innumerable Truths. Rather, I feel that as we struggle towards that which we seek but do not know, it is only natural that we err along the way. As members of an academic community, we should feel free to innovate, and risk erring. Only then can we advance. But errors and flaws should be recognized as such--not celebrated mindlessly for simply existing as viable arguments.

Sujit Raman '99-00 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesday.