A Philosopher Is Bitten by the Imp of the Perverse

by Elizabeth Gauffreau

Tyler shifted in his seat and watched as Dr. Mowell’s eyes, and occasionally his lips, worked over random sentences of Tyler’s dissertation. The chrome and leather chair in which Tyler sat was singularly uncomfortable, a triumph of form over function, and he wished Dr. Mowell would just get on with it.

Tyler had typed the dissertation on foolscap--both for economy’s sake and to give Dr. Mowell the impression that this was a working draft, which, after leaving Dr. Mowell’s office with the dissertation in one hand and Dr. Mowell’s erudite, albeit polite, criticism in the other,  he would dash across campus to his apartment, snatch up a pencil, and set to work on the revisions in a frenzy of inspiration and gratitude.

In point of fact, Tyler had no intention of even rereading the dissertation. After two years of research on Hegelian dialectics, he had spent the last four weeks writing twelve hours a day, and as far as he was concerned, it was finished. He would take it from Dr. Mowell’s office to a typist, have it typed on bond paper, bound in a folder, and turned in to the Philosophy Department for approval before another week had passed. Then, with his doctorate in hand, he could pack up his books and what few clothes had survived the past four years of graduate school, and go home.

He had not yet told his parents he was coming. The cost of the trip back East would deplete his savings, and he would have to move in with them until he found a job. And what would he do with a doctorate in philosophy in Smithfield, Virginia? he asked the fashionably threadbare Oriental rug on the floor of Dr. Mowell’s office. Why, he would apply to teach at the colleges in the area, and maybe he would get an adjunct position. Or maybe he wouldn’t, and then he would ask his father to get him a job at the meat-packing plant. And that would be all right. He would get his own place, an apartment with big sunny rooms in an old house, where he could read his philosophy books and maybe write a journal article or two. He would not have to attend meetings or receptions, and no one would disagree with him because they would not know what he was talking about. I could be happy that way, he thought, as Dr. Mowell continued to flip through the dissertation. I would be free--free of the sycophantic toadies who surround me. The phrase had a nice ring to it, and Tyler repeated it to himself until Dr. Mowell began to speak.

“This won’t do,” Dr. Mowell said. “It’s poorly written, poorly supported, and”—here Dr. Mowell paused to remove his glasses—“derivative.” He put his glasses back on. “I also think it would behoove you in the future not to present work so poorly typed.” For a moment Tyler lingered on the word “behoove” and regretted taking a seminar in etymology. How much more concrete it would be to think of “behoove” as “behead.” He could rally the men at the meat-packing plant with cries of “Off with their heads!” and “Off with their hooves!”

Dr. Mowell opened his middle desk drawer and fished out a bull clip. He pinched its jaws open and clamped them on the stack of foolscap. “Let me see a new thesis and outline on Monday,” he said, extending the dissertation at shoulder level, so that Tyler had to rise from his chair to take it from him. The conference was over.

Tyler ran down the stairs of the Arts and Letters Building with his head tucked down and the dissertation pressed tight against his side. A few people he passed reached out their hands, as if to slow him down, but he kept running until his hot gasps choked him. In front of the library, he dropped to his knees and pounded the dissertation with his fists until the tears stopped and he could breathe again.

He slowly got to his feet, leaving the dissertation on the ground where he had thrown it, ignoring the stares of passersby. He brushed the dirt from his knees and contemplated a revision. Dr. Mowell had been wrong about his ideas being derivative. He had been right about their being poorly expressed, the awkwardness of the writing making the dissertation read like a Frankenstein’s monster of putrefying citations stitched clumsily together. He could revise it. He could smooth it and polish it into a Galatea of profundity. And then he would turn it over to the Dr. Mowells of the department to violate and desecrate, and after they had their way with it, they would disapprove anyway.

He bent down and picked up the dissertation, holding it loosely in both hands. The process of creation and destruction could go on ad infinitum! He would be seventy years old and still working on his dissertation, still being judged unworthy, no longer callow but senile. And even if they did approve it, would that make him any closer to being a true philosopher than he was right now? No, it would not. It would merely qualify him to take his place in the cabal of poseurs that was destroying him. He looked around for a trash can. Finding one, he held the dissertation over it, squeezed the clip, and watched the pages flutter to the bottom.

On his way home, he stopped at a convenience store and bought four burritos and two six-packs of beer. The burritos made him sick, and afterward he got good and drunk, sitting on the couch watching television. He found a channel showing syndicated reruns--My Favorite Martian, Green Acres, The Brady Bunch--and reveled in the destruction of his mind. After about three or four hours, a movie came on. As he watched the opening credits, he was jerked upright by the sudden realization that he had thrown his dissertation in the trash. He had thrown the only copy of his doctoral dissertation into the trash! What could he have been thinking! He was a fool! He had thrown four years of his life and thousands of dollars of student loans--which he would have to start paying back tomorrow--into a trash can outside the library, with sticky soda cans, old newspapers, and a half-eaten submarine sandwich.

Tyler heaved himself to his feet and lurched out the door, sprawling on his face on the front walk. He heard a voice call out to him, but he ignored it--his neighbors thought he was a lunatic anyway--and chanted a mantra for luck as he marched down the street: gotta get it back, gotta get it back, gotta get it back. When he arrived at the library and located the right can, it was empty. Some maintenance lackey had swept through and emptied it. He reached both hands into the can, hoping to find one page, even one page, stuck to the side, but he found only a burger wrapper, which he clutched in his hand as he stumbled home.

Reluctantly coming into consciousness the next morning, Tyler opened his eyes and discovered that he was lying on the floor. He reached a hand to his face and touched dirt and dried blood. The front of his shirt was crusted with blood and vomit. He turned his head. All the lights were on, the television was on, and the front door was open. The room looked as though someone had run away from home, without a second thought or backward glance.

Tyler got up on one elbow, crawled to the television, and turned it off. The telephone rang. He picked it up and moaned, “Stop it, please,” into the receiver.

“Watson, is that you?” The voice was familiar and loud. “Are you coming in or not? It’s almost eight-thirty.”

“Sorry, Phil, I can’t today. I’ve got the flu really bad. I think I’m gonna die.”

“Fine, you go ahead and die, but we got a big shipment coming in tomorrow, and I expect to see you.”

“I’ll be there.” Tyler dropped the receiver back into its cradle and closed his eyes.

The next morning, as he walked to the warehouse, he felt a little better. After the call from Phil, he had taken some Alka Seltzer and slept until the early afternoon. When he had felt able to get up, he had gone into the bathroom and attended to his face, swabbing the dirt and blood with hydrogen peroxide, like his mother would have done, then gingerly shaving around the scraped parts. He had shampooed his hair, showered, and put on a clean set of clothes, realizing for the first time that he did not own an iron. After he had cleaned his apartment--mopping, vacuuming, scrubbing, and polishing--he had gathered up the sources for his dissertation and carried them back to the library.

As he walked to work, he kicked a pebble, its trajectory remaining straight and true so that he was able to kick it for blocks. The air felt warm. He unbuttoned his jacket and shrugged his shoulders against the cloth. This was how he could be happy. He would no longer try to think, or to reason, thereby deconstructing himself into nothingness. He would watch the trees bud and kick pebbles and live by the honest labor of his hands and his back.

When he reached the warehouse, he looked up and saw holes in the glass that gave the workers inside more light to maneuver the forklifts and hand trucks and read the smudged print on the invoices. The bums had been throwing apples at the windows again.

The apples came from a crumbling mission next door to the warehouse. It was run by some church he’d never heard of, and on Wednesday nights the priests, or brothers, or whatever they were, passed out food--produce donated by local supermarkets, mostly, sometimes day-old bread--to the neighborhood derelicts. Whenever a bum would bite into a rotten apple, he would heave it at the warehouse and smash out a window.

Tyler entered the building slowly, allowing his eyes time to adjust to the dim light before he punched in. He glanced at his watch and saw to his surprise that he was on time. He even had time for a cup of coffee.

Phil was standing at the coffee pot, his cup in his hand and curses on his lips. “Them bums,” he said, “them frigging bums. Coming over here with their free handouts and destroying private property.” He splashed more coffee into his cup. “What a life. What a life!” He kicked a nearby pallet with the toe of his boot for emphasis. “Never work a day in your goddamn life, and expect me, the taxpayer, to give you free handouts, and then expect me to clean up the mess when it ain’t good enough for you!” His voice echoed through the warehouse, pieces of it escaping through the jagged holes in the grimy glass.

Tyler had seen the bums lurking outside the mission, filthy, stinking of Thunderbird and urine, living symbols of the failure of the capitalist system. He poured himself some coffee and wondered just how pissed off Phil would get if he were to give a “Compassion for These Our Misfortunate Brethren” speech. He assumed an earnest expression and peered into Phil’s face. “Oh, but Phil, these men are victims. No one is born a bum, Phil. Bums are created by our society, Phil. They are victims: of broken homes and substance abuse and poor education--”

Phil interrupted him, scowling. “I hope you don’t feel sorry for them people.”

“Sorry?” Tyler said. “Sorry? Sorrow does not begin to express my feeling for these innocent victims of an oppressive capitalist system--”

“Them lazy bastards is takin’ food out of my kids’ mouths!”

Now that he had Phil going, Tyler didn’t want to stop. He had taken the smug social worker persona about as far as he could, and he quickly searched his mind for another one. He could affect a holy roller, complete with wild gesticulations and wild misquotations of Biblical platitudes. He opened his mouth and shouted, “FOR SUCH AS THESE!  FOR SUCH AS THESE, THE THUNDERBIRD-BESOTTED WITH STRONG THROWING ARMS, SUCH SHALL ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN!” The cords in his neck bulged, his eyes popped, and spittle sprayed from his mouth. Random parts of Phil’s face began to twitch. Tyler threw both arms heavenward. “THE WEAK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH!  THE POOR MAN CAN PASS THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, BUT THE RICH MAN IS TOO EFFETE!”                

Phil’s face coalesced into fury. “You are a lunatic, Watson, do you hear me, a lunatic!  You’re fired!”

Tyler walked back outside into the early spring sunshine without much thought as to what he was going to do next: leaving the job was as ill-considered as taking it. He had originally taken the job his first semester into the coursework for his doctorate, the afternoon that Dr. Mowell had remarked that Heraclitus’s On Nature was a bit dense, as if it were an untidy hedge that only needed a little well-directed trimming to resume its true and perfect form. With his eyes burning and his stomach jumping from yet another late night of reading and rereading and writing notes and outlines and exegeses to be prepared for class the next day, Tyler leapt from his seat and shouted that On Nature was not a hedge but a thicket which would not only resist, but dull, any blade of reason that attempted to penetrate it! The writing did not make sense, and no amount of time spent studying it would make it any less senseless! He might as well get himself a part-time job so that he could, number one, move out of the graduate student dorm and, number two, buy himself some food!

When he arrived at his apartment after leaving the warehouse, the door was unlocked, and when he hesitantly pushed it open, he found Michael Spiering sitting on his couch eating Doritos. Michael’s dissertation, on precursors of Trillich and German idealism, had been approved the month before, and everyone knew he was assured of an instructorship until one of the old war horses dropped dead or had a catastrophic mid-life crisis, and freed up a tenure-track position.

Tyler stood just inside the front door with his hand on the knob. Michael had led the class’s laughter the first time Tyler presented a paper in seminar, even commenting on the typing, announcing that a sentence snaked across the paper just as a train of cars rose up and down along a roller coaster track. “What do you want, Spiering? You’re getting crumbs on my couch.” Michael continued to crunch Doritos, his demeanor as relaxed as it was smug. “What happened to your face? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

“I don’t fight with people,” Tyler said. “I have no reason to.”

Michael dipped his hand into the Dorito bag. “The whole department’s talking about you.”

Tyler took a step into the room and closed the front door behind him, not removing his hand from the knob until he heard the latch click. “So?”

Michael wiped the Dorito dust from his face with two fingers. “I had no idea you were so thin-skinned. No one’s dissertation is approved the first time. It was just a draft, for God’s sake. What did you expect?”

“I expect you to keep your little brown nose out of my business!” Tyler snapped. He advanced to the couch and snatched the Dorito bag out of Michael’s hand, stuffing it into the wastebasket under the kitchen sink before once again advancing on the couch. “What gives that prick the right to tell a little toad like you what goes on in another student’s conference! Who the hell do you people think you are? You are a disgrace--you and Mowell and the whole lot of you--you are a disgrace to the title of Doctor of Philosophy! You make me want to vomit!” Tyler turned his back on Michael and began to retch.

Michael jumped to his feet, reaching out his hand to touch the back of Tyler’s neck. “Calm down, Tyler--you’re making yourself sick.” He eased Tyler onto the couch and sat next to him. “Let me tell you what happened before you get hysterical.” He tapped Tyler’s knee. “You might even find it amusing. Nobody would have known a thing about your conference with Mowell--as I told you, we’ve all been through it--nobody would have known a thing about it, except that when you decided to make your statement, you made it in a trash can on campus. The maintenance people found your dissertation and turned it in to Security because they thought it looked like something important.” Here Michael chuckled, but immediately stopped when he saw Tyler’s face. “Security took the paper to the Registrar’s Office; they found the last two classes you were registered for and turned the dissertation in to the department.”

There was more to the story--by now a droll anecdote to Michael--but Tyler had stopped listening. A hot flame of hope surged through his chest. He could save his dissertation and salvage his degree after all. His crisis had not been a crisis at all but a momentary lapse into eccentricity for which anyone could be forgiven. He could probably even get Phil to give him his job back. He stopped Michael’s narrative by touching his arm. “Where is it? Did you bring it to me?”

Michael stopped talking and looked puzzled. “No, Dr. Mowell has it.”

Tyler let his hand fall from Michael’s arm and stood up. He walked outside, leaving the front door open. One of his neighbors was sweeping her front walk, cleaning away sand and bits of debris that no one else could see. Tyler’s dissertation was now locked in the bottom drawer of Dr. Mowell’s file cabinet, and it would remain there forever, sealed inside a plastic bag, its pages wrinkled and stained, forensic evidence of his failure.