Delillo and education

The first aspect of Delillo's novel that caught my attention was the representations of education and higher learning that seemed to fall on the wayside as the novel progressed. Though attention to J.A.K. as a professor of Hitler was largely emphasized and made prominent as the novel's themes unraveled, his role as an educator became less important, as interactions with his students, minimal from the start, were completely ignored. It seemed like the author held Jack's career as of lesser import than his professionalism in Hitler, which purposefully trivialized higher education as represented in the novel.

Jack's first impressions made for the reader on The College-On-The-Hill are completely visual, as Jack's infatuations with appearances serves as a lens in which readers can see the problematic discourse made in describing school itself.  With students greeting each other, puzzling attention to detail and objects students bring with them, and a remark made about "spectacle," visual "brilliance," and "well-made faces," brings the appearances to our attention. Instead of focusing on collegiate or scholarly imagery, this mass of college students being dropped off is "a collection of the like-minded," which ties the idea of higher learning merely a victim of the crown and an appearance-driven establishment. As a mass, they all move in a similar many, with a rare detail or individualization of a single student. When all these students seem to blend together, the nature of this specific crowd evokes an irony within the setting they're traditionally supposed to be independent, defined in their studies, and individualized when they graduate. The criticism is subtle, but consistently reinforced, using Jack as a contributor to collegiate ignorance. His inability to speak German along with his obsession with how his robe looks are factors which play into the whole of the student body, as his position places him as a leader and influencer to those within the program.

Within a scene describing one of J.A.K.'s lectures, the manner which he describes his subject, addresses the class, and composes himself is completely self-involved, walking the reader through tedious detail of his own mannerisms and tangential meanderings are aimed less as a means of education and more of a lecture for personal advice to be given, and for his opinions to be thrown into a group for absorbing. Jack himself isn't even sure of what he is saying regarding the nature of "plots"--an ambiguity to begin with. It brings to like the triviality of studying Hitler as a subject in general --a man of such colossal power, unfathomable cruelty, and incomprehensible destruction that to try and understand it within a classroom setting miniaturizes it in an alarming way. It dwarfs those studying Hitler, and more so, makes them ignorant, as trying to encompass the nature of Hitlers' cataclysmic genius becomes something of an immediate impossibility when the phrase "Hitler Studies" is even mentioned to the reader.

Francisco Tirado