I climb one of the secluded stairwells in the Arts Building and follow the dizzying signs to a narrow, carpeted corridor. I find my destination at the end and excuse myself into a bright, modern research “space” (“classroom” seems defunct). I squeeze in at the middle of an arrogantly long table next to a fellow course-mate. What I take to be the course’s teaching staff is sitting in a sort of guard-of-honour arrangement opposite us, at once hostile and encouraging; I’m unsure if they will start interrogating us on the use of semi-colons in Tristram Shandy or invite us all round to their houses for hot chocolate and a chat.
I thought I’d be first to arrive, but not so; there are already a handful of others, all evenly-sparsed round the boardroom table, and I soon discern a difference with these my fellow course-mates; I notice their open macs, fresh notepads, eager pens. A few minutes pass and the pens appear to loiter about the mouth or twiddle between finger and thumb before hovering, invariably, back to the page. Fingers too dance above keyboards in nervy, expectant agitation: they are excited.
It is a strange feeling to me. After years of head-lolling in doldrum tutorials to the oft-unwilfully regurgitated observations that Wordsworth “was a fan of nature”, or of the mesmerizingly astute character analyses of Mr. Darcy, and how he “started off pretty bad but then became good”, this new throbbing eagerness was motivating. Then the “induction” began and, discovering they weren’t going to cross-examine our undergrad capstones which they’d somehow smuggled into the meeting, we introduced ourselves and I was eager to know more about these dangerous people who were also mad and bad enough to do a master’s on this thing called “literature”. A boring “terms and conditions” talk followed which was interlarded with several unabashedly honest interjections from the chair’s colleagues on the state of affairs of some of the Institution’s ways of doing things. And it was precisely this sort of casual candidness which made me realise, though not “friends”, we master’s students were sort of in on something, as those philistine freshers were not (I was even shocked at my own arrogance when, after having participated in a library tour only the previous week, I was wielding my first borrowed book and scoffing at the hordes of fresher-mania that had the indecency of clogging the exit. Ignoramuses).
Skip a few days and I’m in my first lecture, a seminar on Ulysses. We sit round in a fittingly U shape, in symbolic worship of Dr Ulysses as he intones – preparatory to anything else – his disillusionment with the technological prowess of the University of Dublin. By the middle of the lecture we have already grinned and guffawed and now an eager minority are putting nervy, farraginous questions to the Oracle – drunk on its knowledge – which vary from fin-de-siècle protestant-ascendancy Sandymount to 20th-century German editorial experiments with the Dublin book. I’m impressed with a fellow student’s intimacy with its author’s biography, with another’s knowledge of its cultural context, and suddenly I realise, in appropriate epiphanic fashion that there are others like me who are actually into this sort of thing…and who get my interruptive esoteric quips. I quickly dispel all the traumatic undergrad tutorials from my mind (such as one wherein I commented on a particularly Fitzgeraldian turn of – “I’m sorry? Oh, you mean the writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby? I thought I’d clarify for the others, please continue!”) and sit in awe of our shared passion.
The session concludes with a tea downstairs where a gregarious bunch of us sit round a table and laud each other’s undergraduate dissertations. I discovered the editor of a literary magazine, a fellow writer and a Nabokovian stylistician among others. I am now exhilarated, riding on some literary high as at a book club on coke, with these my newfound pedantic peers who are budding and blossoming before me like Proust’s aubépines and I wonder if I won’t start seeing madeleines spinning madly round the Perch in a moment. Eventually people drop off like dominoes, and the remaining few part ways, but we have forged something, if not an uncreated conscience, at least some smithy where we will attack Ulysses hammer and tongs until we or the anvil gives out.
And, after boasting this way of our arrogance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. We may no longer be cool enough to fit in with the flitting and frenetic freshers, or drink our pockets dry on a Wednesday afternoon in some dingy Dublin den in a vague attempt at “cultural research”, nor do we have the relieving thought of four long years (with the length of four long winters) lying ahead of us. But what we do have, we master’s students, is a freshly squeezed bank account and a piece of parchment with some Latin on it. And our age. Oh and that something I spoke of earlier – the one we’re in on and the freshers aren’t. Yeah, take that freshers! …I confess my arrogance has no limit.
