And you thought Harold Bloom was quirky!

To the kind of man who doesn't have the time or inclination to read past the cover, Marjorie Garber, GRD '69, is pure sensationalism. This man would dismiss her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety as "that hippie bullshit." The title of Sex and Real Estate might remind him of the clichéd posters saying "SEX...Now that I have your attention...". But Garber is certainly no academic lightweight. A former Yale junior professor and the first woman ever to receive tenure in the English department at Harvard, Garber writes what she wants.

LAURIE RANDALL/YH

Now that I've got tenure...

This is not a conservative woman that the Herald interviewed, though in her most recent book, Academic Instincts, she calls all scholars "conservative creatures" at heart. But Garber is not your typical academic. Her work, she says, is all about "unsettling boundaries." Her writing is "not about approval or disapproval," but about "understanding." There is indeed a keen contrast between her cool, analytical writing style and the sensationalism of which she is accused.

Her fascination with the subjects of bisexuality and cross-dressing can be easily written off as headline-grabbing. So how does she justify her appearance on a 1992 episode of Geraldo dealing with transvestitism, following the publication of Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety? "It seemed like a way to find a wider audience for what I thought was a thoughtful analysis of a subject that has been sensationalized," Garber said.

She feels that gender confusion is a natural product of culture—not just our own—and places the topic within an academic context. She turns to her own expertise in all things Shakespearean, citing the troupes of male actors who played female characters in Elizabethan England. Even Queen Elizabeth I referred to herself as a prince or king. Garber's writing is not meant as a judgement of some widespread bisexual syndrome, but rather as a careful analysis of a cultural symptom that has patterned itself across cultural and temporal boundaries.

Pulling anachronisms like a sort of taffy, Garber draws from a classic scene in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. The farmer Mr. Zuckerman shows his wife the miraculous happening above the pigpen, where the words of a spider web pontificate (as only as a spider can), "Some pig." To his wife's remark that the spider is out of the ordinary, Mr. Zuckerman replies with certainty, "Oh, no, it's the pig that's unusual, it says so, right here in the middle of the web." In our information age, this old story is imbued with new meaning. "It says so on the web." This becomes our locus of authority in the Information Age, says Garber, anachronizing two concepts so as to effectively illustrate—cross-dressing Shakespeare across time, if you will.

Temptations of the mainstream

As a self-styled cultural critic, little escapes Garber's notice. Her relationship with culture is not limited to the academic/intellectual periphery, but extends into the mainstream. Garber admits, hiding her regret, that she missed Temptation Island last Wednesday, and indeed, the entire Survivor series. "I like a show with plot." Harsh words from the professor of culture! She does enjoy and admire television shows such as The West Wing, Law and Order, ER, and The Practice, though to the last she expressed nostalgia for earlier episodes. She is also a self-professed "News Junkie," disdaining a reference to "media," preferring instead to call television news "information." Her musical tastes seem to lie more towards a flavor than a dish, nominating the Beatles and those in their as wake her favorites. Of the "bands developed for television," she said, "Can I tell you what *NSYNC sounds like? No, I can't." She fancifully spoke of the "golden oldies," citing the folk sounds of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Having concluded her catalogue of beloved musical "artifacts of the second half of this century," she quoted Renaissance and Baroque classics to her liking.

When asked how she parties, she said that hers was a company of academics, and "when scholars get together, they talk about ideas," mostly over dinner parties. On clothes? To her, "fashion is a language." Indeed, Garber looks with an academic eye upon even the most trivial of cultural objects. Though perhaps it might be difficult for some to see the relationship of ice cream to academia, Garber has no such trouble, saying, "Chocolate chocolate chip. Did you see how quickly I said that?"

`Fuck me?! Fuck you!'

Garber garners critics, as anyone would, for making real estate as frivolous as sex. Or sex as frivolous as real estate. New Republic columnist Zoë Heller attacked Sex and Real Estate for being "so serenely silly, so untroubled by any whiff of a serious idea as to invite a kind of awe. In making one's way though this bad, sad book, one's mind eventually turns to the innocents who pay cash money to have their precious offspring attend Harvard University and receive instruction from Professor Garber."

Perennial critic Camille Paglia, GRD '74, happens to be Garber's former student and lover. A graduate student at Yale when Garber was a junior professor, Paglia had a brief, "unsuccessful," relationship with Garber. Paglia takes odds with Garber's cultural vocabulary. Referring to Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Paglia criticizes Garber's jargon as "the numbing buzzwords of conference cant: transgressive, hegemonic, taconomes, problematize." To Paglia's credit (or Microsoft's dismay), only one of those four words is recognized by the Microsoft Word spell-check. Garber has historical precedents, citing the newly introduced words "brunch" from the 1890s, "motel" from the 1920s, and "meritocracy" from the late '50s. "Jargon is language in action," Garber writes. "The history of jargon is the history of ideas in the making, the history of how the infelicitous becomes felicitous, and vice versa." If this be madness, then there be method in it.

Interdiscipline or none at all

The predominant theme of her writing is her deep concern for classical literature as it relates to what is seen as modern day phenomena such as bisexuality. Garber sees, in the upcoming years, "a return to literature, a return to aesthetics, a return to poetry. There will be new interest in live drama." This, to her, will be about "more than nostalgia, but pleasure." Optimistically, she foresees a superior "importance of the humanities in public life." Students, to her, should realize that after their graduation the learning and the literature do not—and should not—stop. She brings what she knows about classics to culture, thinking neither should be seen as anachronistic to the other. In fact, she wonders where they ever diverged. In the past, Garber argues, a man of culture was also a man of science, and in the future she hopes to see the qualities merge once again.

Garber writes in a way that gives readers a playful perception of our own cultural experiences and prods the supposed timelessness of the humanities with important questions. Why is it, she asks in Symptoms of Culture, that "parents who would be appalled to find their college-age children studying the same chemistry textbooks or economic theorems that they themselves were taught 20 years ago, fully expect that those children will learn the same things about Shakespeare that they themselves were [taught] in college?" She contends, "What is it about the humanities in general, and Shakespeare in particular, that calls up this nostalgia for the certainties of truth and beauty—a nostalgia which never was?" She points to a strange paradox, wherein simple science is something to which we assign our cognitive faiths, and yet is allowed to change with the culture's new scientific understanding, while the impenetrably complex humanities are hardened into the rock of our past ages. We can further unravel the mysteries of the universe in light of new ideas, but Shakespeare becomes dogma. Garber argues that we wish "to believe in something, in someone, all-knowing and immutable. If not God, then Shakespeare, who amounts to a version of the same thing."

Graphic by Laurie Randell.

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