The Corrections: A Novel (6 page)

Possibly he said other things before he realized that his stoop was strewn with torn-up tulips and ivy, a vandalism still in progress, and that he was not alone. The holly bush by his door had produced two giggling young people. “Sorry, sorry!” Melissa said. “You were talking to yourself!”

Chip wanted to believe she hadn’t heard what he said, but the holly wasn’t three feet away. He set the groceries inside his house and turned a light on. Standing beside Melissa was the dreadlocked Chad.

“Professor Lambert, hello,” Chad said earnestly. He was wearing Melissa’s Mr. Goodwrench coveralls, and Melissa was wearing a
Free Mumia
T-shirt that might have belonged to Chad. She’d slung an arm around Chad’s neck and fitted a hip over his. She was flushed and sweaty and lit up on something.

“We were decorating your door,” she said.

“Actually, Melissa, it looks pretty horrible,” Chad said as he examined it in the light. Beat-up tulips were hanging down at every angle. The ivy runners had clods of dirt in their hairy feet. “Kind of a stretch to say ‘decorating.’”

“Well, you can’t
see
down here,” she said. “Where’s the
light
?”

“There is no light,” Chip said. “This is the Ghetto in the Woods. This is where your teachers live.”

“Dude, that ivy is pathetic.”

“Whose tulips are these?” Chip asked.

“College tulips,” Melissa said.

“Dude, I’m not even sure why we were doing this.” Chad turned to allow Melissa to put her mouth on his nose and suck it, which didn’t seem to bother him, although he drew his head back. “Wouldn’t you say this was sort of more your idea than mine?”

“Our tuition pays for these tulips,” Melissa said, pivoting to press her body more frontally into Chad. She hadn’t looked at Chip since he turned the outdoor light on.

“So then Hansel and Gretel came and found my screen door.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Chad said.

“Leave it,” Chip said. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.” And he went inside and shut the door and played some angry music from his college years.

For the last meeting of Consuming Narratives the weather turned hot. The sun was blazing in a pollen-filled sky, all the angiosperms in the newly rechristened Viacom Arboretum blooming hard. To Chip the air felt disagreeably intimate, like a warm spot in a swimming pool. He’d already cued up the video player and lowered the classroom shades when Melissa and Chad strolled in and took seats in a rear corner. Chip reminded the class to sit up straight like active critics rather than be passive consumers, and the students sat up enough to acknowledge his request without actually complying with it. Melissa, usually the one fully upright critic, today slumped especially low and draped an arm across Chad’s legs.

To test his students’ mastery of the critical perspectives to which he’d introduced them, Chip was showing a video of a six-part ad campaign called “You Go, Girl.” The campaign was the work of an agency, Beat Psychology, that had
also created “Howl with Rage” for G——Electric, “Do Me Dirty” for C——Jeans, “Total F***ing Anarchy!” for the W——Network, “Radical Psychedelic Underground” for Ε——com, and “Love & Work” for Μ—— Pharmaceuticals. “You Go, Girl” had had its first airing the previous fall, one episode per week, on a prime-time hospital drama. The style was black-and-white cinema verité; the content, according to analyses in the
Times
and the
Wall Street
Journal
, was “revolutionary.”

The plot was this: Four women in a small office—one sweet young African American, one middle-aged technophobic blonde, one tough and savvy beauty named Chelsea, and one radiantly benignant gray-haired Boss—dish together and banter together and, by and by, struggle together with Chelsea’s stunning announcement, at the end of Episode 2, that for nearly a year she’s had a lump in her breast that she’s too scared to see a doctor about. In Episode 3 the Boss and the sweet young African American dazzle the technophobic blonde by using the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0 to get up-to-the-minute cancer information and to hook Chelsea into support networks and the very best local health care providers. The blonde, who is fast learning to love technology, marvels but objects: “There’s no way Chelsea can afford all this.” To which the angelic Boss replies: “I’m paying every cent of it.” By the middle of Episode 5, however—and this was the campaign’s revolutionary inspiration—it’s clear that Chelsea will not survive her breast cancer. Tear-jerking scenes of brave jokes and tight hugs follow. In the final episode the action returns to the office, where the Boss is scanning a snapshot of the departed Chelsea, and the now rabidly technophiliac blonde is expertly utilizing the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0, and around the world, in rapid montage, women of all ages and races are smiling and dabbing away tears at the image of Chelsea on their own Global
Desktops. Spectral Chelsea in a digital video clip pleads: “Help us Fight for the Cure.” The episode ends with the information, offered in a sober typeface, that the W——Corporation has given more than $10,000,000.00 to the American Cancer Society to help it Fight for the Cure …

The slick production values of a campaign like “You Go, Girl” could seduce first-year students before they’d acquired the critical tools of resistance and analysis. Chip was curious, and somewhat afraid, to see how far his students had progressed. With the exception of Melissa, whose papers were written with force and clarity, none of them had persuaded him that they were doing more than parroting the weekly jargon. Each year, it seemed, the incoming freshmen were a little more resistant to hardcore theory than they’d been the year before. Each year the moment of enlightenment, of critical mass, came a little later. Now the end of a semester was at hand, and Chip still wasn’t sure that anyone besides Melissa really
got
how to criticize mass culture.

The weather wasn’t doing him any favors. He raised the shades and beach light poured into the classroom. Summer-lust came wafting off the bared arms and legs of boys and girls alike.

A petite young woman named Hilton, a chihuahua-like person, offered that it was “brave” and “really interesting” that Chelsea had died of cancer instead of surviving like you might have expected in a commercial.

Chip waited for someone to observe that it was precisely this self-consciously “revolutionary” plot twist that had generated publicity for the ad. Normally Melissa, from her seat in the front row, could be counted on to make a point like this. But today she was sitting by Chad with her cheek on her desk. Normally, when students napped in class, Chip called on them immediately. But today he was reluctant to say Melissa’s name. He was afraid that his voice might shake.

Finally, with a tight smile, he said, “In case any of you
were visiting a different planet last fall, let’s review what happened with these ads. Remember that Nielsen Media Research took the ‘revolutionary’ step of giving Episode Six its own weekly rating. The first rating ever given to an ad. And once Nielsen rated it, the campaign was all but guaranteed an enormous audience for its rebroadcast during the November sweeps. Also remember that the Nielsen rating followed a week of print and broadcast news coverage of the ‘revolutionary’ plot twist of Chelsea’s death, plus the Internet rumor about Chelsea’s being a real person who’d really died. Which, incredibly, several hundred thousand people actually believed. Beat Psychology, remember, having fabricated her medical records and her personal history and posted them on the Web. So my question for Hilton would be, how ‘brave’ is it to engineer a surefire publicity coup for your ad campaign?”

“It was still a risk,” Hilton said. “I mean, death is a downer. It could have backfired.”

Again Chip waited for someone, anyone, to take his side of the argument. No one did. “So a wholly cynical strategy,” he said, “if there’s a financial risk attached, becomes an act of artistic bravery?”

A brigade of college lawn mowers descended on the lawn outside the classroom, smothering discussion in a blanket of noise. The sunshine was bright.

Chip soldiered on. Did it seem realistic that a small-business owner would spend her own money on special health care options for an employee?

One student averred that the boss she’d had at her last summer job had been generous and totally great.

Chad was silently fighting off the tickling hand of Melissa while, with his free hand, he counterattacked the naked skin of her midriff.

“Chad?” Chip said.

Chad, impressively, was able to answer the question
without having it repeated. “Like, that was just one office,” he said. “Maybe another boss wouldn’t have been so great. But that boss
was
great. I mean, nobody’s pretending that’s an average office, right?”

Here Chip tried to raise the question of art’s responsibilities vis-à-vis the Typical; but this discussion, too, was DOA.

“So, bottom line,” he said, “we like this campaign. We think these ads are good for the culture and good for the country. Yes?”

There were shrugs and nods in the sun-heated room.

“Melissa,” Chip said. “We haven’t heard from you.”

Melissa raised her head from her desk, shifted her attention from Chad, and looked at Chip with narrowed eyes. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, these ads are good for the culture and good for the country.”

Chip took a deep breath, because this hurt. “Great, OK,” he said. “Thank you for your opinion.”

“As if you care about my opinion,” Melissa said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“As if you care about any of our opinions unless they’re the same as yours.”

“This is not about opinions,” Chip said. “This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artifacts. Which is what I’m here to teach you.”

“I don’t think it is, though,” Melissa said. “I think you’re here to teach us to hate the same things you hate. I mean, you hate these ads, right? I can hear it in every word you say. You totally hate them.”

The other students were listening raptly now. Melissa’s connection with Chad might have depressed Chad’s stock more than it had raised her own, but she was attacking Chip like an angry equal, not a student, and the class ate it up.

“I do hate these ads,” Chip admitted. “But that’s not—”

“Yes it is,” Melissa said.

“Why do you hate them?” Chad called out.

“Tell us why you hate them,” the little Hilton yipped.

Chip looked at the wall clock. There were six minutes left of the semester. He pushed a hand through his hair and cast his eyes around the room as if he might find an ally somewhere, but the students had him on the run now, and they knew it.

“The W——Corporation,” he said, “is currently defending three separate lawsuits for antitrust violations. Its revenues last year exceeded the gross domestic product of Italy. And now, to wring dollars out of the one demographic that it doesn’t yet dominate, it’s running a campaign that exploits a woman’s fear of breast cancer and her sympathy with its victims. Yes, Melissa?”

“It’s not cynical.”

“What is it, if not cynical?”

“It’s celebrating women in the workplace,” Melissa said. “It’s raising money for cancer research. It’s encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It’s helping women feel like we own this technology, like it’s not just a guy thing.”

“OK, good,” Chip said. “But the question is not whether we care about breast cancer, it’s what breast cancer has to do with selling office equipment.”

Chad took up the cudgels for Melissa. “That’s the whole point of the ad, though. That if you have access to information, it can save your life.”

“So if Pizza Hut puts a little sign about testicular self-exams by the hot-pepper flakes, it can advertise itself as part of the glorious and courageous fight against cancer?”

“Why not?” Chad said.

“Does
anybody
see anything wrong with that?”

Not one student did. Melissa was slouching with her arms
crossed and unhappy amusement on her face. Unfairly or not, Chip felt as if she’d destroyed in five minutes a semester’s worth of careful teaching.

“Well, consider,” he said, “that ‘You Go, Girl’ would not have been produced if W——had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W——is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty-two, and that the goal of the people who own W——stock” (Chip’s brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W——stock) “is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world’s finite resources.”

“What’s wrong with making a living?” Melissa said. “Why is it
inherently
evil to make money?”

“Baudrillard might argue,” Chip said, “that the evil of a campaign like ‘You Go, Girl’ consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies: ‘Desire office equipment.’ It signifies: ‘Our bosses care about us deeply.’”

The wall clock showed two-thirty. Chip paused and waited for the bell to ring and the semester to end.

“Excuse me,” Melissa said, “but that is just such bullshit.”

“What is bullshit?” Chip said.

“This whole class,” she said. “It’s just bullshit every week. It’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil. They all know ‘corporate’ is a dirty word. And if somebody’s having fun or getting rich—disgusting! Evil! And it’s always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t ‘really’ happy. And it’s impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what’s so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say
exactly.
It is so typical and perfect that you hate
those ads!
” she said to Chip as, throughout Wroth Hall, bells finally rang. “Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. Like, the only way you can make something bad out of an ad that’s great for women—which you have to do, because there has to be something wrong with everything—is to say it’s evil to be rich and evil to work for a corporation, and yes, I know the bell rang.” She closed her notebook.