A Review of the Blue Angel
by Janice Albert
IN HER LATEST novel, Blue Angel, Francine Prose updates a 1905 story by Heinrich Mann in which an entertainer, Lola Lola, fascinates and then ruins Professor Rath, who gives in to his obsession for her. Francine Prose moves the story to a small, expensive college in Vermont. Her professor is Ted Swenson, the sole tenured member of the college creative writing department. Her female antagonist, Angela Argo, pierced, dyed, dressed in sadomasochistic gloom, and propelled by some atavistic urge to destroy the thing she feeds on, intuits his every weakness, betrays him in whatever way she can, and finally hangs him out to dry. Did I mention it’s a comedy?
Francine Prose is the author of ten novels and her interest in academic life runs deep. Her article, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” critiquing multicultural literature, was the hit of Harper’s September, 1999, issue. There are some good moments in Blue Angel, chiefly in Prose’s descriptions of campus life. She writes of driving over college roads “crippled with speed bumps.” There’s a set piece in which faculty guests at the Dean’s dinner get on each other’s nerves, playing roles they established with each other years before. Even the food plays a comic role — crackers with Marmite, burned sausage, and a dessert of jam trifle, “a giant freestanding pudding, its outer layer … trembling under the load of tiny silver candy ball bearings and multicolored sprinkles. A blazing toxic rainbow.”
Swenson meets Angela in his one and only class, in creative writing. (This class, nine students, appears to be his entire teaching load. He is famous for never keeping office hours.) Swenson runs the class as a workshop. That is, each week the students discuss one of their stories. During that time, the student author is not permitted to speak. Although Swenson has a role (he tries to maintain a civil tone), the truth is that he is so bored that he spaces out for moments at a time. His students try to wake him up by writing stories in homage to Philip Roth, whose character Portnoy becomes overly intimate with the meat for the family dinner.
The topic of the novel is sex, whether it arises in dinner-table conversation about Edgar Allan Poe, in student stories about young men and uncooked chicken, or in lectures on the campus policy on sexual harassment.
Francine Prose raises the topic and then seduces the reader twice with scenes of professor/student congress. In the one case, the scene is complicated by the equipment and mechanics of unplanned sex in a dorm room. But the second scene, again between a teacher and student, is far more original and climactic, having been prepared for by a series of poems on the subject of phone sex.
These scenes do for the novel what Marlene Dietrich does for the film Der Blaue Engel by constantly taking off her clothes. Recognizing our pleasure in the sight of Dietrich, we become confederates with Professor Rath, even while we recognize his mistaken judgment. By making us into voyeurs in scenes of student-teacher sex, Prose lets us participate in the thrill of dominance (Angela’s cold-blooded management of Swenson) and the chill of being dominated (a high school student submitting to her band director).
It goes without saying that the novel does not waste a tear on those who claim to be victims of sexual intimidation. All the feminists in this work are hard boiled, doctrinaire characters. Those who claim to have been victims of abuse are described as “weepy.” What is it about the topic of sexual harassment that brings out the beast in some of our best writers? David Mamet’s Oleanna conjures an atmosphere of intimidation on both sides, but his female student Carol, with her shadowy, menacing “group,” is truly scary. And what about the coinage “Feminazis”? Has everybody been reading too much Hemingway?
But yet, to return to Blue Angel, Angela hasn’t really suffered sexual harassment; she clearly had the upper hand all along. If anything, her taping and then reporting Swenson to the “committee” is an unmotivated act of hostility. It’s a dangerous act when a writer takes on the subject of the criticism of writing. In her creation of Angela as a modern Lola Lola, Francine Prose has failed to notice how very stiffly posed and unmotivated Marlene Dietrich is in that very role. Dietrich laughs long and hard when Rath proposes, then marries him any way. Can we really bear to imagine the wedding night? After five years, he is destroyed, while she looks better than ever.
But Francine Prose is not working with a divine, blond beauty here, and so our attention wanders to the machinery of the plot. The behind-the-scene pulleys and winches fail to persuade us that this college exists or that the events could take place as they are depicted. Especially unmotivated, next to Angela’s taping and editing Swenson’s comments, is his total lack of interest in defending himself. The author may take some pleasure in having him sit through his own trial like one of his workshop students, unable to speak, but the joke is a very weak one. And the ambiguity of the narrative comment during the committee hearing makes us always unsure whether we are overhearing Swenson’s interior monologue or the voice of Prose sitting, like the Wizard of Oz with a microphone, behind the curtain.
Swenson should be fired-there’s no doubt about it-but not for tumbling his student. He deserves to be let go for having no curriculum, for having nothing to teach, for freeloading on the college dime year after year, and for his thoroughly jaded and demeaning attitude toward his students. Perhaps Swenson threw his head back and laughed when the college proposed tenure to him. In the film, Lola Lola’s callousness destroys Professor Rath; she derides his love and mocks his devotion.
Swenson’s callousness betrays the principles of higher education. Through indifference, he derides and mocks the sanctity of tenure and the trust his college has placed in him. The destruction of Professor Rath, filmed in 1930 Germany, can be easily interpreted as an historical allegory. Is Francine Prose’s Blue Angel also an allegory, this time about the destruction of straitlaced higher education by self-satisfied striptease dancers like Swenson?
Perhaps. One thing is certain, in Mann’s story and in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film, Professor Rath is portrayed as a sympathetic character, the lamb being lead to the slaughter. In Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, it’s not at all clear who is holding the axe over whom. Professor over student? Student over professor? Professor over college? College over professor? In the film, Dietrich sings the classic “Falling in Love.” In Francine Prose’s imaginary little Vermont college, we realize society’s love affair with higher education has ended; in this way, her book is a fitting commentary on 21st century higher education.
