And mine, to carve out a career in academia, one of the most competitive and cut-throat industries in the world – and to do it by studying the books that had been my escape, even though a huge percentage of the scholars in my field had no respect for them at all.
It was a battle that, in recent times, I’d started to accept I was going to lose.
It had been years since I’d graduated, and yet I felt like I’d made no progress. I’d published a monograph and a lot of articles and book chapters, and for now, I was managing to find enough teaching work to survive semester to semester, but I was still stuck, stagnating, in the precariat. I was making no progress at all towards anything real, anything solid, anything that wouldlast.
There were hardly any permanent academic jobs advertised in Literary Studies, but every time one came up, I applied. I’d only made it to one interview. I thought it had gone well, but then, when they emailed me my rejection, one line jumped out immediately:your research into popular fiction, while strong, does not fit within ourcurrent programme.I might be a good scholar – a brilliant one, even – but it didn’t matter at all if no one respected my object of study.
I kept marching forward. One thing I had never managed to learn was how to surrender.
But no matter how hard I worked – no matter how hard I fought – no matter how many union campaigns I was a part of – it was becoming clearer and clearer that this march I was on was Sisyphean. No universities were hiring. They were all firing – and casual academics like me were always the first to be sacrificed. I could fling myself into the boulder as hard as I liked, but there was no way to stop it from crashing back down on me.
I had just about admitted to myself that it was over, that despite all the years and years I’d sunk into becoming a scholar I was going to have to find another career path for myself—
And then the job was listed.
My heart only leapt a little when I saw the ad in the university jobs email digest:Lyons University, Lecturer in Literary Studies, Level B, permanent, full-time.I was too wise and too weary to hope too hard.
But then, when I saw the desired research specialisations, a blinding wave of joy hit me.The successful candidate will have expertise in one or more of the following areas: modernist literature, early modern drama, popular fiction.
The tears welled up in my eyes. I blinked them away so I could check I hadn’t read it wrong, that this wasn’t a hallucination caused by wishful thinking.
Popular fiction.
The sob escaped me before I could cover my mouth, a loud, choked sound, embarrassingly high-pitched. I grabbed a pillow off my bed and bit down on it, so none of my housemates would hear me low-key having a breakdown.
There’s a line in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ that I love so much I got it tattooed on my foot. Eucatastrophe, Tolkien writes, gives us a glimpse of a joy so powerful it’s mythic:‘Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.’
Sometimes, even though it seems all but certain, Gilbert Blythedoesn’tdie.
Sometimes, the ad for your dream job wants someone with your ironically unpopular specialisation.
Sometimes, despite all the odds,something good happens.
It took me a while to compose myself after that first ecstatic white-hot moment of hope, but eventually, I took some deep breaths and sat back down in front of my laptop, telling myself to be sensible. The job ad might be asking for a popular fiction specialist, but I was far from the only one of those in the world. Some other Sadie was probably sitting in some other bedroom in some other share house, screaming intotheirpillow at the thought that their dream might not be dead.
There’s another word that Tolkien coins in ‘On Fairy-Stories’: dyscatastrophe. That one actually does mean what it sounds like. If eucatastrophe is the good catastrophe, dyscatastrophe is the bad one.
The first hint of dyscatastrophe came when I clocked where Lyons University actually was: Hobart. If I got this job, I’d have to leave Sydney.
That was all right, though. I’d always known that if I was going to get a permanent academic job, I’d probably have to move. And it wasn’t like I had much keeping me here. I had friends, sure, but I worked so much that those bonds were tied pretty loosely, even though I lived in the same house as most of them. Really, the onlyperson in my life I absolutely couldn’t live without was Chess, and she had money now. She could visit whenever she wanted.
Still. The thought of moving hurt more than I thought it would. I rubbed my chest absently.
I read through the selection criteria again. PhD in a relevant discipline: yes. Excellent teaching record, including curriculum design: yes. Strong publication record: yes (I’d tried to combat the bias against popular fiction studies by taking the academic maxim ‘publish or perish’ very,veryseriously).
Expertise in one or more of the following areas: modernist literature, early modern drama, popular fiction.
It was still there. It still saidpopular fiction.
But I’d been so excited by that – so automatically drawn to those words – that I’d hadn’t processed the other desired specialisations.
Early modern drama.The exact research specialisation of my nemesis. The man I had only last night agreed to stop fighting with.
I owed more to Dr Jonah Fisher than I would ever,everadmit. There were a few reasons for this – pride, for one – but primarily, it was because my debt to him wasn’t rooted in anything he’d done for me, exactly. It was what he meant. What ‘Fisher’ stood for, in the grand narrative of the universe of Sadie Shaw.
It’s hard to fight a battle when your enemy is amorphous, nameless, faceless. You can’t defeat something you can’t see.
And when, in a first-year poetry seminar, a boy with scruffy dark hair and thick-framed glasses and the beginnings of a beard had disagreed with my reading of Wordsworth’s ‘To Joanna’, not backing down even a little when I fought back, he became the face of my enemy.
