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Sex in the Society:
Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons as a Window into Who We Are and How We Live
By Steve Garber
All sad and weary and shallow… for, as Socrates himself put it, ‘If a man debauches himself, believing this will bring him happiness, then he errs from ignorance, not knowing what true happiness is.’
“Moral” was the unwelcome word that crashed the party in his central nervous system.
In the morning—she was gone. Jojo loathed himself.
-- I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
Not a week goes by when I am not drawn into commenting on the sexualizing of American culture. Sometimes this happens in a very tender conversation over a cup of tea, listening to the tears of someone’s heart as they tell a tale of hope and sorrow, of yearning and grief. Sometimes it is in a much more public place like a classroom where the intimacy is gone, but the issues are just as live and have far-reaching consequence.
If there is any one story that comes up again and again it is Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, his novel about a young woman who leaves the mountains of North Carolina for the fictional yet very prestigious Dupont University, an amalgam of Duke/Stanford/Harvard.
Who is Tom Wolfe, anyway? And what is it that has made his in-your-face account of the college experience worth the time of those who wade through its 600+ pages?
For more than a generation, Wolfe has been feeling the world around him, putting into words his impressions of what it means to be human as the 20 th becomes the 21 st century. His essays and novels have chronicled the American experience, perhaps better than anyone else, from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to From Bauhaus to Our House to Hooking Up, from The Right Stuff to Bonfire of the Vanities to A Man in Full. He is a wonderfully gifted reporter; whether he is a great novelist, time will tell.
If we take his decade-by-decade analysis as that of an unusually gifted listener-- wondering about what he has seen and heard in light of our own convictions about the way the world is and isn’t --these questions stare us in the face: why I Am Charlotte Simmons, now? in what way is it a window into who we are, what we love and how we live, in the first years of the 21 st-century? There are three sentences in one chapter that give us help in framing an answer.
All sad and weary and shallow… for, as Socrates himself put it, ‘If a man debauches himself, believing this will bring him happiness, then he errs from ignorance, not knowing what true happiness is.’
Wolfe could have chosen any place, any person. It is telling that it is a tale set in the university. In the information age we are more sure than ever that acquiring knowledge is the stepping-stone to success, to mastery of this moment when the whole world seems at our finger-tips. Wasn’t Bacon’s promise that “Knowledge is power”? Profoundly and perversely we have bought into that false hope, and Wolfe, with an ear for the “story,” hears what is going on, and reports. The more perceptive call our moment “info-glut.” And most of the time, when we stop to think about it at all, we feel that way, viz. glutted.
The internet gives us access to everything, all the time. Google this, google that. (I recently “googled” the words, “December” and “despair” and found that 4,700,000 entries came up. One could spend a life on just those two words.) We can click our way into vast libraries without entering the ivy halls; in fact without ever leaving our homes. And yet, with all that is technologically possible, there has never been more competition for getting into “just the right school,” from kindergartens to colleges. People embarrass themselves, stumbling over each other, pushing-and-shoving to get more and more education—with little regard for the warning from one of our wisest novelists, Walker Percy, that “one can get all A’s and still flunk life.”
Charlotte takes her place at this table as a first-generation college student, very bright and very innocent. But she is sure that she knows who she is… I am Charlotte Simmons! Against all comers, people and ideas, she is sure that she will remember to remember what matters most, viz. the true happiness which Socrates points to.
It is that dynamic in the movement from adolescence to adulthood that Wolfe explores in his account of her freshman year. From the moment she steps out of the family pickup truck in Dupont’s parking lot and sees the BMWs and Escalades opening their doors to her fellow first-years, she knows that the university is a very different place than she has ever known. That moment becomes metaphor for her experience throughout the year, viz. the world she has known, the person she has known herself to be, will be pushed to the nth degree before she finishes in May. Or to put it harshly: before she is done with being a freshman, being a freshman will be done with her.
“Moral” was the unwelcome word that crashed the party in his central nervous system.
Nowhere is this more painfully seen than in the sexualizing of her experience as a student, which is the second reason for this particular story. Wolfe unashamedly peers into the sex-saddened society which meets each one of us as we walk through the grocery line week after week. Five Secrets for !!!! You Won’t Be Happy Unless You Try!!!! In the early years of this new millennia, sex sells everything. From cars to clothes, from toothpaste to travel, if it’s not sexy, it’s not!
The book is not for the faint-of-heart. There is a level of explicit sexual crudeness which is painful to a spiritually sensitive person. But there are many who have read it; after all, it is Tom Wolfe’s latest! And there are many who do need to know something of what really goes on in the modern university, as burdensome as that knowledge might be. How hard it is for any of us to be reallyreallyreally in the world— and yet not of it! How to be holy as the Lord our God is holy, and yet wholly engaged in our time with our neighbors? Opening the ears and eyes of our hearts to the world can wound us, especially if we know that there is a responsibility for knowledge.
Charlotte enters into three communities at Dupont, and Wolfe severely limits her experience to just those three. Through her eyes we learn the ways and means of the jock culture, the fraternity/sorority houses, and the “militant mutants,” i.e. the newspaper staff. That is a weakness in his imagination, and in the story. They are representative, but I found myself longing for her to meet someone of true and honest faith, to be invited into a real conversation about the meaning of life and love by a friend from IVCF, the Coalition for Christian Outreach, or Reformed University Fellowship-- someone somewhere who would love her for the sake of Jesus and the kingdom.
But she meets no one like that, ever.
She does meet Jojo, a basketball player who in his senior year has never been asked to be serious about anything other than hoops. His courses are ones designed for jocks, his apartment is outfitted for its most important business, viz. video games, and his study habits are nil. Why study, after all? If the university provides a nerd to make sure that papers are in and on time, why would you ever need to study? Jojo knows he is a stud. Everyone knows Jojo is a stud.
Charlotte complicates his life, because he has never met anyone who honestly pays attention in class. And the only reason he meets her is that he mistakenly signs up for a class that actually invites him to think, one that is outside of the regular “course of studies” for athletes.
And he has never met a girl who wasn’t smitten by his aura, the fame of being Jojo, basketball star at Dupont. Charlotte seems from another planet. In a culture of whatever, she knows who she is and why she is there… after all, I am Charlotte Simmons.
There is more to the story, of course. But let’s return to the beginning, “the three sentences, one chapter—and one sad conclusion.” Jojo is with the team on a road-trip. His teammates have gone out on the town, but he decides to discipline himself and work on a paper. Everyone is surprised, even he is surprised. But he stays put, and reads Socrates, “If a man debauches himself….”
Knock, knock, knock. Before the night is completely gone, a beautiful babe shows up at his door, and with a certain perverse innocence, says to Jojo, “Can I come in?” he wants to know how she knew he was there. “Your teammates told me…. They said you’ve been studying very hard and feeling lonesome, and you needed a break… and here I am.”
Yes, there she was. She came in, and came onto Jojo in a way that was very hard to refuse… and crashed the party in his central nervous system.
And Jojo? Jojo loathed himself.
That right in the middle of Wolfe’s difficult-to-read account of life in the university, coarse and crude as it is, he situates his story in a moral universe, is amazing. For it is not only Jojo who loathes himself, but sorrowfully, Charlotte does too—for choices she makes during the year. That thread of reflection and remorse—I will not call it repentance –is strong enough that the reviews in prominent national papers like the NY Times and the Washington Post were dismissive. While on the one hand they could not ignore a new Wolfe novel, they wondered—the disdain dripping from their proverbial pens –which cabbage leaf he crawled out from under. Sooo out-of-date! What is the problem, Tom Wolfe, with an 18-year old girl being a good person, a good student, and good in bed? What world do you live in, anyway, Tom Wolfe?
To some extent, with common grace insights, he lives in the world that is really there, the one in which we live and move have our being. It is the one that Romans 1 affirms, the one whose contours are so plainly revealed that sons of Adam and daughters of Eve are without excuse when they deny its reality and truth. But people do repress and suppress what they know in the deepest places of their hearts, and choose to worship what has been created rather than the Creator himself. In every century and in every culture human beings and human history suffer when that choice is made. We live a little lower than the angels, even lower than the way humans are to live. And the consequences ripple across time, affecting persons and polities.
Wolfe sees something of this, even through a glass darkly. He is an intellectually serious person who has something to say in his stories. Walker Percy described his own writing as a diagnostician, the novelist as physician. With self-consciousness, Wolfe takes up that calling too. I read I Am Charlotte Simmons as a narrative exposition of his two essays, “Hooking Up” and “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” both now available in the collection, Hooking Up. For several years I have assigned them in courses I have taught, as I think that they are about as close as we get to a finger-on-the-pulse of contemporary culture, viz. where we are right now.
The first is a look at the “hooking up” phenomenon, the term-of-choice to describe varieties of sexual intimacy: from the fellatio in the hallways and stairwells of wealthy suburban junior high schools all the way through to serial, almost anonymous “sex in the city” for adults of all sizes and shapes. As he puts it at one point: “in the era of hooking up, ‘first base’ meant deep kissing, groping, and fondling; ‘second base’ meant oral sex, ‘third base’ meant going all the way; and ‘home plate’ meant learning each other’s names.”
Assigning this in many different venues has persuaded me that twenty-somethings see Wolfe as describing their experience—whether they are in the most closeted of Christian ghettos or in the most out-of-the-closet secular settings. As one thoughtful young student at a Christian college put it to me, comparing Cornelius Plantinga’s wonderfully insightful Engaging God’s World with Wolfe’s Hooking Up, “Plantinga tells the story of the world of the classroom; Wolfe tells the story of the world we live in when we leave class.” I thought that was unfair to Plantinga, as his book is a richer, truer account of life under the sun than most I know, but the comment was honestly offered.
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