The English Major’s Guide to Eating a Hot Fudge Sundae

Way back when I was applying to graduate school, I had to take the Very Nasty Graduate Record Exam (VNGRE) and also the Supremely Nasty Graduate Record Exam Subject Test (SNGREST) in order to Get Into a School.  The plain old VNGRE was Nasty in that it had a math section.  Since I was applying to English Departments I did what I always do on math sections.  Because it is multiple choice and your options are A, B, C or D, I just filled in the little bubble for "A" on all the answers and figured that I would get at least 25% of the answers right.  As it turned out, I didn't, because they take off a quarter point for every wrong answer, which of course I hadn't factored in, being math-challenged, and so I got the lowest possible score, 200.  I don't know why I got 200 points instead of 0 points - as I say, math is a mystery to me.

It didn't matter, because I did extremely well on the English section, which left only the SNGREST to conquer.  I would have been fairly confident on that one, too, but there was an Issue.  The Issue was Critical Theory.  I had been an undergrad back in the halcyon days before Critical Theory came along to torment everybody who had the childish notion that the way to be a critical thinker was to read the book and then think about the book and then write about the book, and in my secret, subversive mind I still wanted to do just that.  So I knew I was going to sail through the parts of the exam that wanted to know which of the following was not one of the Pre-Raphaelites: Dante Gabriel Rossetti; William Morris; William Wordsworth; Edward Burne-Jones (it's Wordsworth, but I'm sure you knew that.)  But I knew I was never going to wrap my head around the difference between De Saussure and De Man, because, frankly, I didn't care.  And only last weekend I was viciously pleased to see that somebody - an Upper West Sider, in fact; go, us! - just wrote a book about Paul De Man, one of the Head Gremlins who started this whole Critical Theory mishegas, in which it is shown that De Man was a "(Nazi)  collaborator, a scheming careerist, an embezzler and forger who fled Belgium in order to avoid prison, a bigamist who abandoned his first three children, a deadbeat who left many rents and hotel bills unpaid, a liar who wormed his way into Harvard by falsifying records, a cynic who used people shamelessly" - and, for all I know, a secret nose-picker as well. It would have been just like him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/books/review/the-double-life-of-paul-de-man-by-evelyn-barish.html?rref=books/review&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Sunday%20Book%20Review&pgtype=article

So I had an awful lot of trouble with Critical Theory, and, in order to try to memorize it for the exam, I wrote a Prose Poem incorporating salient points from the Kaplan Study Guide. It must have worked, because I scored in the 98th percentile and got into the school of my choice (it happened to by CUNY/CCNY, and I can tell you that their English department rocks. Even I managed to fit in. ) 

And so, in honor of Wicked Wednesday, I present:

The English Major’s Guide to Eating a Hot Fudge Sundae

Materials:

1. Parfait glass
2. Vanilla ice cream
3. Generous quantity of hot fudge
4. Aerosol spray can of whipped cream
5. Maraschino cherry (optional)
6. Spoon (long-handed iced tea variety, if available)

Fill Item 1 with Items 2-5, in listed order.  Insert 6.  

Next:

Choose a method of critical approach to the resultant confectionery.  Possibilities include:

The Marxist approach: Consider the hot fudge sundae not as a timeless, fixed creation, subject to universal standard of evaluation, but rather as a product of a specific cultural and historical context.  Bear in mind that, this being the case, the sundae is not a timeless, fixed creation, and it will melt if you think about it too long.

The Feminist/Black/Post-Colonial approach:  Discuss the marginalization of Other postprandial sweets (such as bananas akara, cassava cake, and black sticky-rice cake in coconut juice) by the hot fudge sundae, a typical product of Euro-American patriarchy.  You may wish to consider the phallocratic hegemony implicit in the upgrading of hot fudge sundae to banana split.  How does the encoded ideology of the vanilla ice cream support the dominant class?  You may make an argument for the fudge as an encrypted form of the struggling voice of the oppressed ideological subject.

The Freudian approach:  Juxtapose the conflicting impulses to fill one’s mouth with sweets (the oral stage) against the indubitable resemblance melting ice cream mingled with swiftly cooling fudge bears to fecal smears (the toileting or anal stage = rage against the Mother.)  Please give archetypal examples, perhaps making specific reference to The Golden Bough.

The New Historicist approach: Analyze the cultural-ideological layers of the sundae (3-4 parts, depending on whether or not you opted for the cherry.)

The New Critical approach: Avoid falling into unsustainable speculations as to whether the creator of the sundae actually intended to create a sundae, rather than, say, a crème brulee (the “intentional fallacy”) and subjective effusions about the sundae’s beauty and toothsomeness (the “affective fallacy”.)  Beware of “the heresy of paraphrase” when contemplating the calorie content of the sundae; instead, do a “close reading” of the state-mandated “Nutrition Information Chart.”   Avoid such ambiguous (and ultimately meaningless) phrases as “energy-boosting” and substitute robust Anglo-Saxon words, such as “fattening.” 

The Structuralist/Semiotic approach: Discourse on the meaning of the sundae as produced by its structure.  What, for example, might it signify if the cherry were at the bottom of the glass?  You may wish to consider the ice cream as the center and the hot fudge and whipped cream circumscribing it as periphery.  Or not.

The Deconstructionist approach:  Take everything out of the parfait glass and stuff it back in its original container (no whining about how hard it is to get the whipped cream back into the can, please.)  Avoid slippage, taking care to achieve full erasure and leave no trace (not to be confused with the environmentalist approach.)

The Reader-Response approach:  Refrain from eating the hot fudge sundae.  The experience of the sundae is the event; the sundae is what occurs in the diner’s head, not in the interaction between mouth and spoon.

Finally, there is this Obsolete (yet oddly satisfying) method of approach:  Linger happily over the sundae, savoring its many delights; turn every morsel many times upon the tongue.  Digest it well. Meditate upon it.  Produce a pithy and carefully formulated opinion as to its successes, its failures, and its overall structure.   When you are done - go have another one.