39 pages • 1 hour read
Ben LernerThe Topeka School
Ben LernerFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Glossolalia
Glossolalia refers to the practice of speaking in a way that sounds like speech but is actually nonsensical. The practice is often associated with the religious practice of speaking in tongues. However, in The Topeka School, Lerner uses the concept of glossolalia to refer to any moment in which spoken language breaks down or becomes detached from meaning.
Glossolalia first appears in reference to Adam’s competitive debate. In tournaments, debaters employ the spread, a technique in which they rapidly read off more evidence than their opponents could plausibly “respond to within the given time” (22). To bolster spread, debaters speak so quickly they appear to be speaking nonsense to laypeople: “To an anthropologist or ghost […] interscholastic debate would appear less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual” (23).
Later, the results of Jonathan’s experiments on speech shadowing result in glossolalia. In the experiments, participants must repeat what they hear on a sped-up tape recording; because they are concentrating more on reproducing what they hear than its content, participants end up repeating the recording’s abstract nonsense without realizing it. Jonathan argues that the experiments reveal the inherent chaos underlying the human practice of language: “information overload [causes] the speech mechanisms to collapse” (44). Though language appears to be rational, Lerner uses the concept of glossolalia to suggest that its rules are merely a façade covering-up its true nature: Jonathan destroys “human language to reveal the river of nonsense coursing just beneath its ‘good, sound rules’” (46).
The most striking instance of glossolalia happens when Jane cannot verbalize the sexual abuse she endured as a child at her father’s hands. Her language completely breaks down until she is no longer producing words. While language might allow us to communicate and make sense of the world around us, the concept of glossolalia suggests some human experience is outside of language’s sense-making capabilities.
The Men
“The Men” is Jane’s term for the group of anonymous male callers who threaten her after the success of her book. These men are a stand-in for America’s growing group of predominantly White men who cling to misogynistic attitudes and resent feminists and successful women.
Jane first encounters the Men after earning national fame following the success of her psychological self-help book, which is geared towards women. These men make anonymous, threatening phone calls to Jane, threatening her with violence and misogyny. In other occasions, the Men approach Jane in public, insulting her as a “home-wrecker” (92). In spite of the Men’s threats, however, the calls don’t really frighten Jane, who instead sees them as symptomatic “of the ugly fragility of masculinity” (90). For Jane, the Men represent a larger cultural issue plaguing American society: A growing number of men resent that feminism has led to greater rights and independence for women. As such, the Men are a new form of traditional masculinity, the older version of which died at the end of the 20th century.
At Adam’s championship debate, Jane is both impressed by and terrified of Adam’s skills, anxious that Adam might become like one of the Men: “Maybe I’d offered my boy up to the wrong tutelage, the Brain had offered him to the Men, thinking he would somehow know better” (209). In this passage, the notion of “the Men” comes to refer to most men in American society—particularly those who adhere to outdated beliefs about masculinity and the proper roles for women. These ideas of masculinity are ultimately socially constructed and transmitted—Jane is concerned that Adam might become like the Men through the “tutelage” of his debate coach.
The People’s Mic
The “people’s mic” is a protest practice that appears in the very last passage of The Topeka School. Though its mention is brief, its placement as the novel’s closing image makes it into an important symbol of how Americans might be able to fight back against the breakdown of language described throughout the rest of the novel.
The adult Adam and his family attend a protest at ICE’s offices in New York City to protest ICE’s deportations of undocumented immigrants. While the protest initially takes place inside the building, it is ultimately forced to move outside, where the protestors use the “people’s mic” or “human microphone” (282): the crowd repeats and amplifies a speech delivered by a single protestor, allowing a larger group to hear the speech “without permit requiring equipment” (282).
Though Adam is embarrassed by this practice, he also perceives it as a necessary means for resisting the violence and abuses of the Trump administration: “I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread” (282). Invoking the debating practice of the “spread,” Adam places it in opposition to the human microphone. The spread uses the appearance of evidence to argue, with little regard for logic and relevance, and only to drown out counterargument. In The Topeka School, spread is a problem that has suffused American culture, where obfuscating lobbyists drown out dissent with jargon-heavy mountains of evidence that has little substance but provides an image of authority. Lerner counters the rapidity of the spread with the slow, deliberate, and communal nature of the human microphone, suggesting that Americans must learn to restore meaning to language if they hope to restore order to a fragmented and divisive American society.
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