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Contributors
Ken
Masugi- Columnist
 Ken Masugi is the Director of the Claremont Institute's Center
for Local Government.
Its purpose is to apply the principles of the American Founding
to the theory and practice of local government, the cradle
of American self-government. Dr. Masugi has extensive experience
in government and academia. Following his initial appointment
at the Claremont Institute (1982-86), he was a special assistant
to then-Chairman Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. After his years in Washington, he
held visiting university appointments including Olin Distinguished
Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Dr. Masugi
is co-author with Brian Janiskee of both The
California Republic: Institutions, Statesmanship, and Policies (Rowman & Littlefield,
2004) and Democracy
in California: Politics and Government in the Golden State (Rowman & Littlefield,
2002). He is co-editor of six books on political thought,
including The
Supreme Court and American Constitutionalism with
Branford P. Wilson, (Ashbrook Series, 1997); The
Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment with William Rusher,
(University Press, 1995); The
American Founding with J. Jackson Barlow
and Leonard W. Levy, (Greenwood Press, 1988). He is the editor
of Interpreting
Tocqueville's Democracy in America, (Rowman & Littlefield,
1991). [go
to Masugi index]
 Tom
Wolfe's Struggle With God and the Greeks
A review of I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe...
[Ken Masugi] 12/31/04
This
is an ugly book, but it could have been even uglier, being as it
is a book about the life of the mind. And protagonist Charlotte
Simmons of Sparta,
North Carolina is scarcely an heroic figure. Prized by her protective family
and a determined teacher, Charlotte becomes an outstanding student—admitted
with full scholarship to Dupont University (a fictitious Ivy League school
with a Georgetown or Duke-level basketball team). She is a freshman version
of Sherman McCoy of Bonfire of the Vanities, the would-be Master
of the Universe. That she winds up being a victim is the key to understanding
what Wolfe is up to: The clash of Greek morality (Sparta) and Greek philosophy
(Dupont)—each represented weakly, I emphasize—is the theme
of the novel. The life of the mind requires a new type of politics to defend
it, which is terribly missing but nonetheless hinted at.
With her
heavy accent and Southern, rural upbringing Charlotte might
be thought an evangelical Christian. What is striking is that
we fail to see Charlotte attending chapel, discussing religion,
or praying—except late in the book when at home for Christmas
break, she prays for her death. In fact, she was always ashamed
of her family and her origins. Her glitzy (and trashy roommate)
merely clarifies what she had felt before setting foot on Dupont's
vaunted grounds. She even grows to disdain the spinster high
school teacher who poured her being into Charlotte's thirsty
intellect. What primarily explains Charlotte is her concern
for her persona. Do they think her a snob, as she delivers
her high school commencement address? Will they mock my accent,
as she anxiously contemplates contributing a point to class
discussion? Will he think me a hillbilly unworthy of the "coolest
guy in the coolest fraternity," as she is being ravished?
Charlotte is far more in love with her reputation than with
what is truly good for her soul. To a great extent that concern
is for a good reputation, but her vanity is sufficient for
her to cast over all self-respect. She is a much better person
when she is blunt. To the extent that her conduct might be
described as virtuous, it is compromised, because she takes
no pleasure in it; "virtue" as she knows it makes
her miserable. She craves acceptance and looks for any rationalization
to get it. Though apparently untouched by feminism, she is
open to the idea (that of a former high school classmate, one
who has actually "gone all the way") of making college
an experiment without risks. Thus, her literally idiotic mantra,
when faced with the perplexity of college life, is "I
am Charlotte Simmons." (She omits her plainspoken mother's
addition: "and I don't hold with thangs like 'at.")
But separated from Sparta and her mother her soul is rather
an open city.
In the polis
of Dupont Charlotte's soul is confronted for good and ill by
three students—Adam, an academically ambitious nerd and
school newspaper reporter; Jo-Jo, the sole white star of the
basketball team; and Hoyt, the seducing senior Big Man on Campus.
From Adam, she gains a feeling of academic exhilaration she
had been seeking. He introduces her to his discussion group,
the Mutants, in fact a bunch of losers who make Sinclair Lewis's
Thanatopsis Society of Gopher Prairie sound like a Straussian
seminar. Adam wants the academic prestige his newspaper reporting,
work in Africa, and class performance will yield him. And he
wants to use his intellectual musings—to seduce Charlotte.
Jo-Jo came to Dupont only to play basketball, but upbraided
by Charlotte he begins to question his life purposes. His classes
are rocks for jocks, and tutors write his papers anyway. It
turns out he needs Charlotte to save himself from expulsion.
Despite their shortcomings, let alone hers, Charlotte improves
the character of Adam and Jo-Jo. The scenes involving Hoyt
and his fraternity, with obscenities and vulgarities streaming,
are as painful as hitting your head repeatedly with a ball-peen
hammer. They are the farthest thing from the Christian martyr
who fought Islam, St. Raymond Nonnatus, whom their fraternity
honors in name. Hoyt, like many others at Dupont, know their
admission into the school means they have already attained
a level only others could dream of. (These graduates will be
the foul-mouthed Wall Street traders at the beginning of Bonfire.)
The three men of mind, spirit, and desire comprise a kind of
caricature of Socrates' tripartite soul, in the Republic. They
in turn reflect a greater whole, also noted by Wolfe--the stupidity,
cowardice, and moral corruption of the modern university.
The faculty
are wizened versions of the students. If they do the right
thing, it is for the wrong reason (as is true of many of so
many of Wolfe's characters). Even freshman Charlotte catches
on to the superficiality of her teachers. In a neurophysiology
course she boldly offers a critique of Darwin, which wins praise
from her Pulitzer Prize-winning professor. She is elated. But
the point of the course she is so caught up in is that all
intellectual achievement and indeed all life is a neurophysiological
illusion. In such a cynical atmosphere, where students think
they have it made and spend their time drinking, partying,
masturbating, and fornicating; athletes pretend to be students;
and professors teach nihilism, reality is indeed uprooted.
No wonder Charlotte lost her bearings: Both campus experience
and the classroom subvert what moral and intellectual foundations
she had.
If I am a
tough on Charlotte, it is because I expected greater things
of her. But Wolfe has his own intentions with her, and he fulfills
them magnificently. Everyone associated with a university or
seeking to be associated should read this novel, as should
everyone considering a donation to a university. I initially
thought Charlotte would be a student version of Charlie Croker,
the manly hero of A Man in Full, and in a way she is. As valiant
a high school teacher she had, when she poured her being into
Charlotte her virtue was insufficient. Without a grounding
more solid than Charlotte possessed, what virtue she had was
readily destroyed. (I take this to be Wolfe's response to Allan
Bloom's still immensely useful critique of the university,
The Closing of the American Mind, which praised the '50s elite
university too highly.) As Aristotle notes at the end of the
Ethics, even the best family needs politics to protect its
virtue. And politics is not a topic of discussion, let alone
serious discussion, at Dupont. The dregs of the '60s and the
sexualized politics of the '0s are what we see. Post-modernism
(with its levels of sarcasm) is as it were a natural development
in student souls. Hoyt's St. Ray fraternity's break-up of a
gay rights demonstration epitomizes the lack of political seriousness.
There are significant parallels that explain more about Wolfe's
purposes. Charlotte is as conventional as the 1950s she appears
to reflect, in mores and even clothing. When the '50s confront
the '0s, the '50s lose, much as the Just Logos is defeated
by the slick-talking Unjust Logos in Aristophanes' Clouds.
Charlotte wants a man, but she is fickle and uncertain. She
will get the right man when she discards pretense and discusses
Socrates. Charlie has his women, but he will become a "man
in full" only through his conversion to Greek philosophy
of a particular kind. Charlie becomes an evangelist for Stoicism.
Charlotte's life, by comparison, is transformed by Socrates
or at any rate by her use of Socrates. Her urging Jo-Jo to
take a course on Plato seemed initially to be a disaster but
proves to be transformative for both of them.
For all his
brilliance at portraying contemporary life, Wolfe approaches
and then veers away from confronting the most important human
questions, explored most profoundly by the Bible and Greek
philosophy. May his next novel take the mean between Socrates
and Stoicism and discover Aristotle. And may that be his opening
to the Bible and an even greater flourishing of his mind. tOR
copyright
2004 Claremont
Institute.
tOR
copyright 2004 Claremont
Institute.
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