By Robert Glick
Smart, acerbic, funny, bitchy, and witchy, Ray Levy’s novel School commingles jouissance with shame, wants you uncomfortable. Its semi-autobiographical trans narrator rejects graduate school in the humanities, the identity-numbing brass ring of a tenure track job, and the fascism he sees encoded into poststructuralism. (The narrator transitions to identifying as a man in the middle of the novel; I use the pronoun “he” throughout this review.) Through a series of scenes, interviews, and dialogues, the book proceeds to destroy deconstruction by lampooning the pillars of poststructuralist thought and humiliating iconic male poststructuralists (Derrida, Lacan, de Man). Foucault, female French psychoanalytic theorists (Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, etc.), and deconstructors of gender and sex (e.g., Butler) are conspicuously not subject to this narrative domination.
By the end, the novel surgeons a parodic brutality on the belief systems us left-leaning academic types have so deeply invested in, while still displaying an intense, intimate longing to belong, albeit differently, within and around these systems. The book makes you uncomfortable because you are so deeply implicated (in my case, as a straight, white, cis, able-bodied academic). You went to that same graduate school, studied with those same professors, had some of those same conversations (which you still feel are important). And because the author Ray Levy so completely masters the act of writing, you can’t possibly understand all the subtle bodies of meaning, nor can you discern the rich patterning, the myriad elbow-in-the-ribs references. You’re utterly dominated by the text. You’re made to feel complicit and stupid. Which is not the worst thing, but does make everything you write timidly provisional.
The novel is broken into four sections, with the largest, “A Sentimental Education,” further subdivided. Many sections, such as this one, as well as the first and third chapters, both entitled “Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man,” are lifted from other titles (in Flaubert and de Sade, respectively). Indeed, much of Levy’s writing is paraphrased and rewritten from seminal philosophical, critical, or literary works. Many sections also contain collages: photographs or video stills juxtaposed with text from Derrida, or The Bride of Frankenstein.
Dissociatively, the narrator, who has had the hegemony of poststructuralism and theories of play forcibly smeared upon them as a graduate student, stumbles through the novel, inserting their person into various absurd intertextual scenarios. The ghost, here and often, is Kathy Acker. The genre is, here and often, horror. Reading School is like riding a roller coaster again and again in order to get sick on it again and again. There’s the narrator in dialogue with a priest (whose utterances we never hear), who is perhaps the “voice” of queer theory, about placing the terms “woman and lesbian” in scare quotes. Now the narrator’s fleeing into the woods, from a dinner hosted by potential colleagues, abhorrent baby carrots stuffed into his pockets. Now he is Derrida’s teaching assistant, present in a story Derrida told in 1997, telling us how “Jacques saw the cat see his nakedness, and Jacques felt shame.” Hilariously, this representation of shame is directly followed by a conversation about whether Derrida should purchase a pair of joggers.
Later, the narrator has an encounter with Severin, protagonist of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs. Severin takes the narrator back to his place, where “we’d both take off our clothes. Next, I’d drape myself in furs and Severin would wrap himself in toilet paper.” However, in this scene, which climaxes with the narrator’s curiosity to “I don’t know, see what happened,” we can see how the narrator’s scathing critique and persistent disappointment in “being schooled” belies a desire for something less distant and alienated, something not de(con)structive. Call it fascination, or a belief in futurity. An interest in what is happening to his own body as he grows hair on his thighs; a search for non-normative belonging within normative spaces. The narrator’s consideration of his transition, and of gender and sex writ large, are, I think, central to the novel; yet the critical readings, humor, and satire work hard to inoculate against more personal readings of the text.
What if we don’t want to play by the neoliberal academy’s rules? What would reading a text look like if it was based not on play but rather on relations of domination and submission? And how might the narrator’s trans identity and materiality constitute itself in a world not subject to the hegemonic fluidity of poststructuralism and, more specifically, queer theory? (Jessica Alexander expertly articulates and unpacks the friction between queer theory and transgender theory that permeates School.)
The book, predictably, doesn’t answer these questions. Embedded in the abject shriek of the novel, however, is a hope for collaboration and transgression. In the last chapter, the narrator, noted as Ray, performs a dialogue with Rachilde, a fictional experimental film-maker, who—and I’m simplifying here—has in turn internalized the decadent writer Rachilde. Together, they express an affirmational YES at the end: “I fucking knew it,” writes Levy. “I knew there was more. Another step or stage, a greater form of enormity. I’ve been waiting for it.” Ultimately, this desire to step into a speculative future lends a more personal, embodied feel to the book’s scathing critiques. At the same time, it amply rewards and relieves the reader, who has themselves experienced the sadistic pleasure/pain relation written into such a brilliant, fun, and difficult novel.
