The Origin of Species (12 page)

History is not a text, but is only accessible to us in textual form
. After a moment of utter blankness, the fog began to lift and he started to write. There was a question on Benjamin he managed to fake his way through, then some fairly basic boilerplate stuff on Derrida and Bloom and Paul de Man. Alex filled page after page, trying to cram in every possible catchword and bit of jargon to show he knew the stuff, and then subjecting it all, and this was crucial with Professor Novak, to vicious critique. There were quite a number of questions on the feminists, which threw Alex off, given that Novak, all the while professing enthusiasm, had accorded them fairly short shrift during class.

It was important that Alex do well: the year before, Novak had actually failed him on the theory part of his comprehensives. Alex had made the mistake of leaving all his theory to the end of his prep time, figuring he already had a smattering of the stuff secondhand from his Master’s, but then when he’d sat down with the texts he hadn’t been able to get through more than a few pages of any of them without falling asleep. He had somehow managed to fudge his way through the written exam, but at the oral Novak had been merciless.

“I’m afraid I can’t pass you on this,” he’d said finally. “If you want you can take my course next term and I’ll put in an incomplete until then.”

Alex had been livid. The incomplete was a courtesy to save risking the little scholarship the university had given him, but still Alex was tempted, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, just to take the fail and come back at the thing on his own. Except that he would still have been up against Novak, who would probably have found a way to break his balls again. Novak had it in for him, he figured, on account of that accursed article of his in
Canadian Studies
, which was a send-up of probably everything Novak held dear. In the end, Alex swallowed his pride and signed up for Novak’s course. Bit by bit, he actually started to like the man—he turned out not to be the stickler Alex had taken him for but a fox, leading them into the thickets and then running circles around all their false assumptions. Then at some point he learned Novak had done work on the Victorians, and went in to speak to him about his thesis.

“Well, well. Let’s take a look at what you’ve got.”

So it had come about that a weird symbiosis had developed
between the two of them. Alex signed Novak on as his advisor, relieved to get free of the dinosaur he’d started out with, who’d had him reading Pater and Wilkie Collins for cultural context, and convinced at some level that anyone as hard on him as Novak had to be in the right. Then there was the air of political romance that surrounded Novak: he was a ’68er, having left Czechoslovakia just after the ill-fated Prague Spring. In class the Prague Spring served as a metaphor for one of the central tenets of Novakian thought, the impossibility of knowing a thing when you were in the middle of it.

“The amazing thing was that people in the West probably knew more than we did—they had television, newspapers, when we were just on some street corner and didn’t even know what was going on around the block.”

Alex had never had the courage to put a direct question to Novak about his life then but imagined it in suitably Cold War terms, the
samizdat
presses, the petitions, the secret meetings in the dead of night. He was willing to forgive Novak quite a bit on that account—his obvious unease with young men of a certain intelligence, for instance, which he covered with banter and biting sarcasm. With intelligent young women he was worse, something that had become increasingly apparent since Alex had moved to Mackay and the weekly après-class gathering had been shifted from the Café Prag on Bishop to Alex’s apartment. Novak was fond of his whiskey, which he didn’t mind asking Alex to keep in supply. Not, however, that it turned him into some sort of common lout; rather, it seemed to have the effect of sharpening him like a knife. He would be off in a corner in some tête-à-tête and there would be a flash, a little gesture, a quiet word, and suddenly the ground would be covered in blood.

Alex’s hand was getting sore. Novak wasn’t even pretending to keep watch while they wrote, sitting up at the teacher’s table peering narrow-eyed through his aviators into a text that had the fresh, unthumbed look of something hot off the academic press. He was a funny-looking man, really, spindly and slight but with a big, balding pate that gave him the appearance of a perfect egghead. And yet there was something magnetic about him, even attractive. It was the attraction of intellect, Alex figured, of seeming to see down into every sloppy syllogism or specious thought you’d ever let yourself get away with.

Novak did not look up from his book until Stephen, the first to finish, inevitably, got up, in his measured way, to hand in his paper.

“Piece of cake,” Stephen said dryly, the sort of joke, for some reason, maybe because he knew everything, had read everything, he could get away with.

“Don’t forget a bottle tonight,” Novak said. “The good stuff, not the rotgut Alex usually has.”

Alex wrote until the full three hours of the exam had elapsed. That was a mistake, he knew, it would seem amateurish to Novak, but he wasn’t taking any chances. There were big patches of sweat under his arms, the vinegary tang of which wafted up to him as he rose to hand in his paper.

“Are we still on for our meeting today?”

Novak squinted at him through his glasses as if he’d never set eyes on him before.

“Sorry?”

“About my dissertation.”

“Sure. Sure. I’d forgotten all about it.”

He was grateful when Novak’s attention shifted at once to Amanda behind him and he was able to slip away before she’d had a chance to accost him.

The budding sense of purpose and hope Alex had had when he’d gone to bed the night before was more or less withered. He hadn’t called Ingrid, of course, and wasn’t about to call her now, when he felt like he’d just emptied out his insides. Instead he went down to the liquor store on St. Catherine, still fuming over Novak’s crack about his whiskey, and picked out a forty-dollar Scotch, with the thought of throwing it in Novak’s face. Then, realizing that whatever he did would somehow end up turning against him, he walked out of the store without buying anything.

For lunch he dug some three-day-old shawarma out of the back of his fridge, eating it cold while he thumbed through his thesis proposal in preparation for his meeting. All crap, he thought, just a hopeless rehash of the half-baked notions he had strung together more than two years earlier for his admissions application. He’d be lucky if Novak didn’t just drop him. He’d be precisely nowhere then.

It’s curious, isn’t it? You go along all your life, expecting some plan’ll show itself, then you find out there isn’t one. That it’s just one damn thing after another
.

I suppose it’s a little like evolution, when you think of it, Peter. Some things work, some don’t. Natural selection
.

I guess that would make you a sort of genetic dead end
.

Novak’s office was just up the street in the Liberal Arts Building, a Second Empire graystone where the university’s Great Books program was housed. Most of the building’s nineteenth-century charm had been gutted out of it, replaced by padded divider walls and acoustic ceiling tiles, but there was still a collegial air of unhurried scholarship to the place, a rarity in these days of Gradgrindian utilitarianism. Novak was at the end of the main floor, in a cubbyhole of an office that overlooked the fire exit and back alley. Despite the impression he gave of sinecured permanence Novak was actually a sessional, and so had ended up banished here to his little closet in Liberal Arts rather than over in English among the tenured. Alex was always surprised by how tidy and spruce Novak’s office was, his books neatly shelved, his desk clear, the tiny couch beneath his window available for sitting. Alex supposed that all this mirrored the tidiness of Novak’s mind, though it did not seem to mirror his life. Rumors about him swirled constantly through the department—the wife who had recently decamped to Toronto, ostensibly to follow a job, though the grapevine said otherwise; the son who was apparently a skinhead. Novak, however, never gave any outward sign of these disturbances, or even that he had descended long enough from the usual parapets of his thought to notice them.

The morning’s exam papers were sitting on the corner of Novak’s desk. Alex shot a glance at them and saw that his own was right on the top, already riddled with red but not graded yet. This was exactly the kind of childish ploy that Novak would pull, and that made Alex loathe and admire him.

“So.” He sat tenting his fingers at his desk, pointedly ignoring the exams. “You have something for me?”

Alex was caught off guard.

“Well, no. Not exactly. I mean, I gave you a copy of my proposal last month.”

“Ah,” Novak said, though Alex couldn’t tell whether he was actually acknowledging possession of the thing.

There was a silence. Novak had always asked his grad students to address him by his first name, Jiri, a privilege he didn’t extend to his undergrads, though for Alex this had the effect of making him feel he couldn’t address him at all.

“Why don’t you just tell me what it is you really want to do,” Novak said finally. “Plain and simple. In your own words.”

A little spasm of terror went through Alex. This wasn’t what academia was about, putting things in your own words. In any event he could hardly tell Novak that what he really wanted to do was redeem his own life.

“I suppose it’s like Derrida,” he started. “This idea that there’s a whole structure in our minds that controls how we think. Except instead of language or binary opposites or something like that, it’s genetic.”

“But you’re talking about biochemistry, not literature. What are you actually going to write about, what are you going to analyze? Are you going to find the genetic code in
Anna Karenina
?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“But that’s just boring. You’re just stuck saying that people are ruled by self-interest or they aren’t. It’s too simple a mechanism, don’t you see? It’s fine for protozoa, but it doesn’t explain much when you get to humans.”

Alex was losing heart. He was ashamed at how unformed his ideas still were. Every once in a while some insight would come to him and he’d think he’d cracked the back of the thing, little aphorisms that he’d write down in a notebook he kept for the purpose, but then he’d go back and every entry would seem hopelessly banal.

And yet he remained convinced he was on to something.

“What’s really behind all this?” Novak said. “I mean, it seems such a tangent. It’s not like you’ve got a background in this.”

“I did do my Master’s in Victorian Studies,” Alex said peevishly.

“And you probably read Dickens and Ruskin and Oscar Wilde just like I did. I doubt you were reading
The Origin of Species
.”

He
had
in fact read
The Origin
at the time, but wasn’t about to try to score points by mentioning that.

“So?” Novak said. “What is it?”

Alex felt cornered.

“It’s nothing. I guess it was a trip I took when I was younger. To the Galápagos.”

He regretted the admission at once.

“Aha. World’s End.” Novak had latched onto the thing like a springing cat. “Now things are beginning to make a bit of sense. Tell me about it.”

Novak often made a show of inviting confidences, as if he were some benevolent
patronus
, but he was probably the last person Alex would have wanted to pour his heart out to.

“It was just a trip. An accident, really. But it got me interested in all this stuff.”

Novak was losing patience.

“Look, Alex, that’s great. It’s good to work with something that’s relevant to you. But no one’s going to give you a doctorate just because you’re interested in something. You have to know it like the back of your hand.”

Alex could feel his blood pressure rising.

“Did you even read my proposal, at least?”

Novak gave him a look.

“Alex, all that was just the standard kind of bullshit people put in their proposals. You know that as well as I do. It was impressive bullshit but it was still bullshit. You’ll have to do better than that with me.”

Alex reddened. His anger crested, then spent itself on the shores of shame.

“So you’re saying I should just find something else.”

But Novak actually seemed taken aback.

“That’s not what I meant at all. Don’t misunderstand me—it’s intriguing, I’ll give you that. It’s original. I just need you to spell it out.”

It looked like he’d have to be happy with just this crumb. It was almost worse than nothing: he couldn’t quit the thing now, yet wasn’t sure he had the will to go on.

Novak had stood to indicate the interview was over.

“Look, Alex,” he said, “you’re an intelligent young man, anyone can see that. I read that paper of yours in
Canadian Studies
—I thought it was brilliant. You just need to focus a bit, that’s all. Maybe scale back a bit on what you’re trying to do.”

For all his iconoclasm, Novak was bowing like the rest of them before that gold star of academia, publication.

“Try starting fresh. Take the summer to write something out, then bring it by.”

Novak had come around his desk. He extended a hand and Alex started to raise his own, then checked himself when he saw Novak had only meant to open the door.

“Good exam, by the way. A little weak on Benjamin, maybe.” Alex couldn’t shake his sense of humiliation as he left Novak’s office. Somehow that felt like the point of all this, of the whole academic shuffle, not some search for the truth but just this endless jockeying for position. But then he was the one who had consecrated himself to this undertaking as if it could matter, as if some sort of expiation could come out of it.

That was his mistake in this as in everything, that he didn’t simply shed his skin and move on. You got no points for wallowing. He should forget his dissertation, forget the Galápagos, should go out this minute and buy his ticket. This was the chance he’d been waiting for, a new beginning. He felt it kindle again, fickle flickering hope, then quickly snuffed it for fear it would spread.