Short Story: Sargeson Prize Runner-Up

ReadingRoom

Wellington author Jake Arthur has been judged runner-up on the 2023 Sargeson Prize for his brief story “On Magnificence”, described by choose Vincent O’Sullivan as a narrative about “how and why a principled feminine professor tells a male pupil he’s lovely, and known as earlier than an Ethics Committee” 

My pal, the professor, advised a pupil he was lovely – you’re actually very lovely had been the phrases – and two weeks later was summoned to the Joint Disciplinary Conduct Committee.

At first she noticed neither correlation nor causation. She’d forgotten her remark to the scholar and assumed she was being introduced in, as teachers generally had been, to behave as an adjudicator or witness in a course of convened to handle another person’s behaviour, normally a person’s. The method didn’t curiosity her for causes of jurisdiction. As a result of it was a college matter and never a police matter, it will be a transgression, not a criminal offense. The probabilities had been due to this fact predictable, the implications banal.

It was not clear why the Disciplinary Conduct Committee was Joint. It was this she mirrored on when she obtained her summons. The implication was that components had been being introduced collectively that had been normally separate. Furthermore, it appeared to her that the formulation, Disciplinary Conduct, prompt not that the Committee doled out self-discipline, however that it enquired into the behaviour of self-discipline itself. She thought that the way in which one behaved may very well be disciplinary, whether or not of others (a narrowing of eyes, a sharpening of tone, a stiffness of method) or of oneself (sit up, don’t purchase the chocolate bar, keep eye contact). That it was Joint may counsel the way in which disciplinary behaviours tended to be meted out by teams, moderately than people. In truth, she puzzled, was it ever doable to self-discipline somebody as a person – self-discipline implying an understood algorithm or norms that, even when enforced by a lone actor, all the time retained the drive of consensus?

She advised me later that she was glad she didn’t instantly realise the Committee was convened in her honour (or, she corrected, her dishonour) as a result of it gave her a couple of additional days of serenity – of normality – which she’d by no means since been capable of get better. She confided she couldn’t sleep. She’d by no means realised, earlier than, how clearly she may hear road noise from her home. Her dwelling was an outdated villa from the 1910s that was set again into the Kelburn hill. Being recessed on this manner gave the property an excessive amount of privateness, however she now realised that it additionally created a form of cave impact whereby any noise from the street beneath would amplify and echo, in order that generally it appeared {that a} man laughing on the road was truly standing at her bed room window and laughing at her.

Privateness, she mentioned, was one thing that she was now considering rather a lot about, as a result of she’d assumed her communication to the scholar was non-public, that it was undertaken in a non-public capability, however it had nonetheless taken on this public and due to this fact disciplinary life. Conversely, within the case of her villa, her personal privateness remained intact in a single sense (being larger up, she was not actually uncovered), however admitted intrusions from the general public, like a bubble blown inside a bubble by a road magician.

In reply I discussed Habermas and noticed that his thought of the general public sphere had so permeated our collective imaginary that maybe we noticed all collectives as in some way round, curiously probably the most condensed form, which could clarify the way in which that, in teams, individuals tended to desert impartial or ambiguous convictions for his or her most inflexible formulations. She replied that within the German, Habermas’s phrase was Öffentlichkeit, which had nothing in any respect to do with geometry, the sphere being an invention of the English translator – suggesting that the analogy should have already got been embedded within the English imaginary, as in social and political circles, itself a translation of the French coterie, initially referring to the way in which peasants grouped collectively to lease land, and maybe additionally associated to côte, or coast, and the sweeping circle made by a bay.

The purpose is, she mentioned, I can’t sleep. I hear voices from the road. Despite the fact that I can stroll about bare I don’t as a result of the voices make it really feel like a foul dream, one through which I’m ridiculed and uncovered. And the worst factor is these goals that I’m not having as a result of I’m not sleeping are really easy to interpret, so predictable. It feels probably, she mentioned, that my thought of myself is barely a pretence that conceals probably the most simple of natures.

*

I met the professor whereas I used to be her pupil at Victoria College within the late 90s and 00s. She was my first expertise of charisma. Individuals took her programs as a result of she was operating them, no matter their content material. Even her gruelling paper on Thomas Aquinas was oversubscribed.

I learn the entire of his Summa Theologica in an act of devotion. Its twisting questions and solutions, its gnomic objections and {qualifications}, all I imagined in her voice, evoking the way in which she spoke at cross-purposes with herself, elevating factors solely to refute and reformulate them. I completed its almost two million phrases with the conviction that Aquinas had written it in a state of affection, in love with God, with the thoughts of God, with what he thought was his entry to it, and in love with the proof of that entry within the ever-growing pile of manuscript pages in his cloistered, tower examine.

What God was to Aquinas, the professor was to me: towering, too, unreachable, too. In her programs, I felt myself being authored, what little was written in my character revised in new instructions. I felt I used to be turning into extra fascinating, however much less agential. I skilled the powerlessness of affection and have become as limp as a doll.

On the time she was a latest rent, and coup, for the literature division, although her precise subject was mental historical past. She’d come immediately from a fellowship at All Souls School, Oxford, a place few ladies obtained and one fewer ladies nonetheless held for the complete seven-year time period. She moved to Wellington to ‘retire’, although nonetheless in her thirties. She didn’t need to delude herself along with her personal significance, an phantasm which Oxford nearly required. She mentioned she needed to embrace obscurity. It was a difficulty of existential honesty. When she first advised individuals the place she was going, they requested if she had an incurable sickness.

Different fellows at All Souls had been of their twenties, recent from the doctoral programmes they’d began instantly following their levels, these levels the inevitable finish-line of an unique boarding-school schooling. Like tropical fish, these had been people accustomed to very particular situations; their well being deteriorated as quickly as they had been uncovered to something exterior of that slim vary. Worse, these lovely, delicate fish had come to consider they had been apex predators. In the meantime, the professor was already a mom, and he or she discovered this granted her two particular benefits. First, she had no urge to publish early, her teenage being pregnant having worn away the enchantment of precocity; and second, she intimidated homosexual males. Her life chastened them. She had made their important preoccupation, their intercourse lives, really feel unproductive: a substitute, onanistic. Or so she mentioned.

She mentioned: You can not transfer for homosexual males; with out them, Oxford would crumble. The Anglican Church would crumble after which Oxford would crumble, after which Rome.

She mentioned: As a lady amongst homosexual males, you might be both ignored or you might be made right into a form of icon. It’s important to select the latter. 

The important thing was to say your self as a mom and as a lady whereas by no means exhibiting them the fact of what that entailed. You needed to assert the feminine data that they coveted however may by no means grasp, however in any other case act like a person. It was solely too apparent that this was regressive. It was a parody of womanhood: celebrated within the summary and erased, in observe, from the true lives of those males obsessive about different males.

I grew a penis, she as soon as advised me, after which I needed to fuck different males with it.

For all this, she liked Oxford, mentioned that it was presumably the most effective place on the earth. Homosexual males, she contended, had been the one true buddies ladies may have as a result of they emancipated ladies from rape. They had been eunuchs: lovely arrases you might step behind and be hid by. The very best orgasm she’d ever had was from a homosexual man in his sixties who’d gone down on her within the Senior Widespread Room out of mental curiosity and port. It was completely platonic. He did precisely what she needed, as if programmed, however even then it was not mechanical, as a result of it was layered in taboo: the illicit location, the age distinction, the tearing down of the partitions of sexuality, their mutual admiration for one another’s scholarship.

For all that she confided in me, I feel I believed intercourse was one thing she had overcome, had sublimated in some remaining coup de grâce of the mind. That it had been such a big a part of her previous solely confirmed the dimensions of her victory. It was crucial for me to consider this to maintain the perfect I had cultivated for our friendship. It felt like a betrayal to acknowledge, even to myself, that my love for her was additionally erotic. I had goals the place we might bathe collectively and I’d face the wall, concealing an erection. In others, she would critique my work, staring solely at my crotch.

My thesis, on Aquinas, was beneath her supervision. We went for peripatetic lectures on the Wellington hills, or we sat in her workplace late into the night, consuming port. She invited me to her dwelling for lengthy, intense dinners, the place music was by no means performed. Her home was piled with books and adorned in a sort of vacationer chintz: recreations of Egyptian hieroglyphs, fake African statuettes, even a couple of Good day Kittys waving on stacks of grammars and esoteric poetry. About these she mentioned nothing. If requested about any of them, she would flick her hand: Oh, they’ve all the time been there.

The identical gesture accompanied any point out of her daughter. She was an easy lady, and so most likely very completely happy. She was learning one thing scientific, a type of newer -ologies, in Sydney. In her absence, the professor had adopted a tabby referred to as Whiskers, who was hit by a automobile, after which a alternative referred to as Synecdoche.

*

The paedagogical eros, she advised me, could be very highly effective. What these directors don’t perceive – what the West doesn’t perceive – is the idea of taboo. She prompt that the Anglosphere may higher perceive itself not as iconoclastic however as Puritan, for it was attempting to expel disgrace by expelling the erotic – and in the long run was solely reconfiguring them each. The reality was, she noticed, that now we have by no means in historical past hidden our disgrace extra totally from ourselves. The secular piety was that it was doable to dwell with out sin, that people had been perfectible. This was what liberalism was, at its core: a utopian venture of the human soul. And utopias had been essentially naïve.

These kids, she mentioned, they uncover sin in themselves, they usually file a grievance to the college.

*

After nearly twenty years in Australia and a foul divorce, I returned to Wellington.

I received in contact with the professor after seeing her title within the paper. She was giving a chat, the house cease in a world tour accompanying her new e book, on a side of the Counter-Reformation.

I walked as much as her home in Kelburn, listening to the clicking of my smartest sneakers. She opened the door and pulled me inside like a fugitive.

She advised me I had gained weight, that I had aged. We drank and he or she touched the corners of my brow from which my hairline had receded. She advised me I had been probably the most lovely boy. She used the previous tense. I had been Reni’s Saint Sebastian. She advised me she had thrilled, bodily, to see me enter a room. She had devoted her fourth e book to me, didn’t I realise? She picked it off a shelf in her library and confirmed it to me. I remembered studying it, voraciously, at night time, whereas my fiancée was asleep. The dedication learn For Saint Sebastian, his magnificence.

She was more than happy to see me, nonetheless. The college was a corpse in superior decay. I used to be fortunate to have escaped the worst of its miasma. She felt like an embalmer, attempting to remain the contagion or, worse, that she was placing make-up on high of what was already too far gone. Different occasions she felt extra like a secondary parasite, not one which had killed its host, however that will die together with it, like a flea on a rabid canine.

She talked to me as if I used to be her equal. She requested my opinion on new arguments she was formulating, books she had learn, thinkers she was considering with. The spell fell over me once more. I liked to listen to her say phrases I didn’t recognise, like bolus, manumission, and kvetch. However I used to be now not a baby. I now not believed that there was a lifetime of the thoughts devoid of the physique. The professor had by no means pretended this was true; it was my invention. Like a baby, I had chosen straightforward mistruths. I had constructed a form of idol. For all his asceticism, I now imagined Thomas Aquinas wracked in his tower with holy touches.

*

The best privilege of being a scholar, the professor mentioned, was the time it afforded to understand magnificence. Widespread concepts of magnificence and understandings of aesthetics had develop into so impoverished that taking it severely was understood as vainness, at worst as capitalist seize. Nevertheless it was not consumeristic to be an acolyte of magnificence. The reverse: consumerism had debased magnificence by its love of operate and transaction. Magnificence was understood by way of design, ease of use and ‘enchantment’; it was understood as a method of differentiation for extracting a premium.

True magnificence, she maintained, was surplus to operate and unable for use. It couldn’t be deployed or grasped, nor even absolutely accounted for; it was a gestalt. It was magnificence’s nature to be underdetermined by its particular person sources, like a physique of water fuller than its topography may clarify. Thomas Aquinas’s work was one such physique, proof that magnificence discovered its corollary not within the erotic, however within the chic. For Aquinas approached the utmost horizon dialectically, by way of minute oppositions: his writing resembled a cupboard with a number of giant drawers, inside which had been a whole lot of smaller drawers, and so forth in a mise en abyme, besides that it operated in reverse. The smallest drawer opened to the bigger, and so forth. Furthermore, his dialectic was unfavorable: God was to not be discovered inside the drawers, however within the area the drawers left when pulled open, and even then, what was discovered was an overview, a shadow from which He was absent. This futile try to account for magnificence was, she defined, the first calling of the scholar and consequently the workplace of the college itself ­– whether or not the directors knew it or not.

And human magnificence was no exception. It was a drive on the earth which couldn’t be wholly defined by its obvious origins or causes. It was teleological, the hint on the earth of the unmoved mover, the primum movens; in different phrases, it was proof of God. To be lovely was to not obtain a present a lot as to be elected a gift-giver, with all its attendant gratitudes and resentments. Magnificence made others acquisitive, even because it resisted acquisition. Nor may the attractive particular person himself be mentioned to really possess magnificence a lot as wield it, like one may a sword or any object exterior to however augmenting the physique.

What the Joint Disciplinary Conduct Committee was actually accusing her of, she advised them, was acquisitiveness. The suggestion that she had been ‘inappropriate’ made sense provided that it was seen as symptom an acquisitive impulse – that’s, a need to bodily possess. The Committee didn’t appear to recognise (and nor did the scholar) that buying magnificence was futile a priori. She was an acolyte of magnificence, a scholar of it. She was not a collector.

She did concede that she had a selected weak spot for drawing consideration to magnificence. That, in a deep sense, was her job. It appeared to her a joke of a cosmic order for magnificence to not know itself, akin to a prophet unaware he’s talking prophecy. It was a severe case of mistaken id, finest rectified.

Jason, her pupil in RELI108 (lectures on Monday and Wednesday afternoons), effectively, would the Committee not acknowledge he was lovely? And but he was troubled by that frequent ailment in his era, that sickliness of spirit, that ever-crescent moon. He ought to have been having fun with giving the reward of his magnificence. For the factor about bodily magnificence was that it was finest loved with others; it was an auspice beneath which a lot may very well be catalysed between individuals, experiences heightened, spirits lifted. However Jason’s spirits had been low. He was glued to his telephone. He had ‘anxiousness’.

He had come, almost in tears, to her workplace hour, about his B+ task. The professor felt she had been beneficiant, unable to not summon his face when marking his decidedly unbeautiful phrases. Nonetheless he reported that the B+ was the worst grade he had ever obtained. And this, to her, was the final word signal of his magnificence, proof that it had been engaged on the world all this time with out his data. His work was middling; it was superficial; it was a tower constructed on sand, tilting.

He accused her grade of stopping him from reaching his potential. He had ambitions to attend a prestigious college overseas, maybe Oxford or Harvard.

She consoled him that these establishments had been on the identical path of decay that she mapped for all the modern West. They had been embalmed, it was true, in decidedly more cash, however that will solely keep the contagion for thus lengthy. The decline was terminal; certainly, it was already submit mortem. His ambitions had been, in different phrases, misdirected; they operated beneath two misapprehensions: first, that the college, as an thought, was nonetheless alive on the earth (which, she prompt, the very existence of this committee implied it was not), and second, that if it existed, he could be a probable candidate to profit from it. He was neither intelligent sufficient now, nor, she mentioned, alive sufficient in spirit to sufficiently enhance himself and profit from situations which in any case had been hypothetical, counterfactual.

She acknowledged earlier than the Committee that these had been heavy tidings for any younger particular person, however to those she had added the final word sweetener: the revelation to him of his magnificence.

However, Jason, she had mentioned to him in her workplace, that is all by-the-by as a result of, do you know, you’re actually very lovely? You aren’t a scholar however moderately the spur to scholarship, the work on which work is to be written. You might be already replete in what the college, had been it not useless, would dwell to hunt out. You see: you’ve bypassed the edifice, the entire sick system, and may stroll down the road along with your head held excessive. And even when outdated, even as soon as magnificence has left (as a result of this was one other thriller of magnificence, its transience, the indiscernible level at which it may very well be mentioned to depart) you should have the reminiscence of the rapture of it, the way in which it possessed you and the way in which others wished to own it in you; and that’s an strategy to one thing holy which few, vanishingly few, ever make. She had then concluded that their assembly was a turning level in his life. He may go away her workplace cured of his preoccupations, which had been banal, and with a brand new sense of wielding akin to being bearer of some ceremonial object he alone was tasked to make use of and defend.

She advised me later that she felt relieved, in recounting the incident, to have performed justice each to what was mentioned and to her intentions in saying it, and reported that after completed, she had turned to Jason, who was now seated reverse her and who was surrounded, on either side, by a mediator from the Committee (bureaucratic flunkies, she mentioned, fatty pouches of the palliative college).

Taking a look at him, she was reminded that she had been proper about his magnificence. To his pale lips, his inexperienced eyes, the thick crop of his eyebrows suggestive of the Levant, the prominence of his clavicle like a bow or the lip of a protect, and even the motion of his Adam’s apple like a pebble clothed in silk, to all these loca amoena his magnificence was a surplus.

She turned to him and mentioned:

I’m positive you see, now, Jason, what I meant. I used to be merely telling you a reality about your self. Or, maybe higher, a reality about creation that you’re automobile to. And if anybody ought to be complaining, it’s me, or it’s we others round this desk, as a result of your magnificence makes us grasping for the ineffable; it’s one drop of chilly water reminding us how parched we’re.

*

A second session of the Joint Disciplinary Conduct Committee was scheduled for Monday week and once more the professor’s presence was requested, although she confided in me, because the longer shadows fell over her Kelburn dwelling, that she thought the session superfluous, having mentioned already all that there was to say.

In his judging feedback, Vincent O’Sullivan went to city, saying the story “was by far probably the most surprising, one thing distinctive even amongst New Zealand tales that I’ve learn…It’s that uncommon factor, a narrative primarily about concepts, about mental definitions, about how philosophical convictions form behaviour and drive occasions…. You’d be onerous put to discover a story remotely like this.” Jake Arthur receives $1000 (plus the Newsroom price of $350) as second place within the 2023 Sargeson Prize, staged by the College of Waikato. First place in New Zealand’s richest brief story prize was gained by Anna Woods, awarded $10,000 for her story “Pig looking”, which appeared in ReadingRoom final Saturday. Subsequent week’s brief story, by Claire Grey, was judged third place.