So many interesting & informed people feel called to defend theory, of all things, against its inexact representation in this New Yorker article. I read this mainstream magazine piece less as calling on bits & slivers of undergraduate theory education for part of its framing and more as a story of youthful exposure to the intoxicants of power, the ensuing discovery of intimate adult and institutional forces and boundaries, the phases of realization and the growing sense of horror and deflation as one realizes that love is not the center of this amazing attention one has received and that that whirlwind of obsession, desire, and pain, decades later, finds one still attempting to make sense of it all.
From the present-day perspective of the writer, what comes next is to see with one’s knowing, middle-aged eyes what one’s 20-year-old, vulnerable self barely or dimly grasped in the early 90s. What was it that a powerful male academic, at the height of his powers and fame, needed so much that he would prey on you? A you that was not fit for such a contest? That society allowed this relationship even while here and there it knew the relationship was never appropriate was evident in his evasions in social spaces; it was apparent too in your friend’s questioning—and in the surely exposing lunch with your sister—but the affair happened, and its costs and effects need to be reckoned, one’s self demands it. If here and there, some academic theory is sloshed to one side or the other of its putatively pristine academic journal integrity, I can forgive that.
I can’t stop thinking about an event in one’s youth where the mystery, questions, and mistreatment won’t let the victim go even after she has triumphantly moved on. This is the heart of trauma and healing, if ever there can be. That’s the human interest, not the fate of a theory.
Van Piercy 