Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel After the 1980s [1 ed.] 1498562159, 9781498562157

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Pedagogic Encounters

Politics, Literature, and Film Series Editor: Lee Trepanier, Samford University Advisory Board Richard Avaramenko, University of Wisconsin-Madison Linda Beail, Point Loma Nazarene University Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, University of St. Gallen Timothy Burns, Baylor University Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California at Los Angeles Lilly Goren, Carroll University Natalie Taylor, Skidmore College Ann Ward, University of Regina Catherine Heldt Zuckert, University of Notre Dame Recent Titles Defenses Against the Dark Arts: The Political Education of Harry Potter and His Friends by John S. Nelson Between Science and Society: Charting the Space of Science Fiction by Douglas A. Van Belle Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel After the 1980s by Aristi Trendel The Politics of Twin Peaks edited by Amanda DiPaolo and James Clark Gillies AIDS-Trauma and Politics: American Literature and the Search for a Witness by Aimee Pozorski The American Road Trip and Political Thought by Susan McWilliams Barndt Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism by Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo Updike and Politics: New Considerations by edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill Lights, Camera, Execution!: Cinematic Portrayals of Capital Punishment by Helen J. Knowles, Bruce E. Altschuler, and Jaclyn Schildkraut Possibility’s Parents: Stories at the End of Liberalism by Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicolas Pappas Game of Thrones and the Theories of International Relations by Ñusta Carranza Ko and Laura D. Young Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics, in 21st Century Film and Literature by Anthony M. Wachs and Jon D. Schaff Science Fiction and Political Philosophy: From Bacon to Black Mirror edited by Steven Michels and Timothy McCranor Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces edited by Leslie Marsh The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion by Üner Daglier Why Moralize upon It?: Democratic Education through American Literature and Film by Brian Danoff

Pedagogic Encounters Master and Disciple in the American Novel After the 1980s Aristi Trendel

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Names: Trendel, Aristi, 1958- author. Title: Pedagogic encounters : master and disciple in the American novel after the 1980s / Aristi Trendel. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Series: Politics, literature, & film | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The book is about the pedagogic rapport in the post-1980s U.S. when the professor-student relationship gained unprecedented attention. Using eleven American novels, Aristi Trendel examines the complexity, richness, and exceptional nature of the pedagogic encounter and calls for a new genre, the Master-Disciple novel”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051669 (print) | LCCN 2020051670 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498562157 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498562164 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction--History and criticism. | Universities and colleges in literature. | Teacher-student relationships in literature. | Power (Social sciences) in literature. | College stories, American--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS374.U52 T74 2021 (print) | LCC PS374.U52 (ebook) | DDC 813.009/3557--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051669 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051670 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

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1 Lying in the Pedgagogical Encounter: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History 2 Mentorship and Gratitude in Lan Samantha Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost 3 The Power Differential Between Professor and Student in Francine Prose’s Blue Angel 4 The Myth of the Wounded Healer in Pedagogy: Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys 5 The Poet and His Translator in John Crowley’s The Translator 6 Queering Master and Disciple in Susan Choi’s My Education 7 Pedagogical Encounters in John Updike’s Roger’s Version and Terrorist 8 Master and Disciple in Cities of Light: Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein 9 Embodied Interaffectivity in Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin 10 The Pedagogic Encounter in the Time of the Posthuman: John DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

1 19 31 41 53 65 77 95 109 121

Conclusion: Toward the Master-Disciple Novel as an Established Genre

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Introduction

The politicization of the professor-student or master-disciple relation, which goes back to Socrates, has forcefully brought the concept of pedagogical rapport into the realm of American public debate since the 1980s. Thus, the exercise of pedagogic power, delicately wielded by the ancient Greek philosopher, whose enlightened teaching cost him his life, has become a source of inspiration for American writers. Indeed, in their turn, the latter have become highly involved in this debate through their fiction, shored up by essays or interviews. In fact, in the last few decades, several of them have pored over the complexities and far-reaching implications of pedagogic encounters. The phenomenology of master-disciple as a specific human rapport and charged personal encounter was revisited by George Steiner in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures 2001–2002, published in Lessons of the Master (2003). Steiner reminds us of the centrality of this interaction in human relations and tackles it as a class of its own. Though the acquisition of knowledge is, and will be, increasingly relying on other means, machines cannot dispense with the magister, for the concept of transmission, central in the pedagogical relation, far exceeds mere knowledge. Steiner, who through his title pays tribute to Henry James’s famous 1888 novella, “The Lesson of the Master,” also pores over twentieth-century works of fiction which testify to a rekindled interest in the issue after the 1980s when the pedagogical rapport underwent thorough examination on American campuses and in American society. In fact, the politicization of the pedagogical relationship in this period, which seems to have given an imaginative impetus to American literature, deserves a critical focus. The professor-student relationship in fiction could be studied under the category of the campus novel, though the campus is not the only setting that can frame this rapport. There have been quite a few studies on this type of vii

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novel such as John O. Lyons’s The College Novel in America (1962); Janice Rossen’s The University in Modern Fiction: When Power is Academic (1993); Kenneth Womack’s Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (2002); Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005); Merritt Moseley’s edited volume, The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays (2007); and Mark Bosco and Kimberly Rae Connor’s Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre (2007); or more recently, The Campus Novel: Regional or Global? (2009), edited by Dieter Fuchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski. However, none of these studies or PhD dissertations 1 specifically focused on the phenomenology of the professor-student bond. It is no wonder, then, that John E. Kramer’s bibliography, The American College Novel, an Annotated Bibliography (2003), is divided only into two parts that leave out the interaction between professor and student—the first is about novels that focus on students’ lives and the second part concentrates on administrative staff. Likewise, Merritt Moseley, in his article, “Types of Academic Fiction,” presents a typology based on student life, administration, and faculty, thus forgetting the fundamental bond between professor and student that creates a type of its own. In fact, while American fiction writers have eagerly taken up the topic, American critical studies have not done so. This book aims at filling this critical void and at paving the way for specific studies of what could be called the master-disciple novel—where the setting can be the campus with a professor and a student as characters, or an entirely different setting with characters who find themselves in such roles and thus develop a mentor-mentee relationship and all that entails. The master-disciple novel could complement existing variants of the “campus” or “academic novel,” such as the “varsity novel” (with a focus on students) or “The Professor’s Roman” (focusing on the figure of the professor). Moreover, it could arguably become an independent category as it overreaches the campus novel—mentoring relationships are to be found outside the academic environment. In addition, it might be far larger in scope since it goes beyond satire, central in the campus novel. This study mainly investigates the pedagogical encounter in the academic setting, which has clearly drawn the public’s attention since the 1980s, but it also acknowledges other settings. Though it is not a systematic investigation of the genre, it provides a collection of articles that, based on a thorough analysis of individual novels, examines the pedagogic encounter in its involvement with major issues whether artistic, ethical, social, or political. The master-disciple novel focuses on a dynamic, stimulating relationship that has frequently been approached in terms of sheer power in the public arena. Indeed, this rapport started to become codified in the 1980s when the notion of “political correctness,” specific to the United States, 2 turned out to be a tangled, controversial issue on American campuses and in American

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society. From its mention in a comic strip created by a leftist university student in a mood of self-irony and derision, 3 “political correctness” has come to be at the epicenter of an ongoing debate in American education, society, and politics and has been intensified with the election of Donald Trump. 4 The left wing’s conviction that Western culture and American society have been unjust, racist, sexist, and oppressive, and its subsequent endeavors to restore the imbalance of power between the dominant group, namely heterosexual white males, and those victimized by its domination, have been fought hard by the Right. A host of books from Left, Right, and “center” perspectives testify to the intensity of the issue. 5 Likewise, numerous press articles point to its virulence, such as the “Most Politically Correct Moments on College Campuses” yearly series, written by Katherine Timpf and published since 2014 in the conservative magazine, the National Review; they aim to show how ridiculous and inane “political correctness” is. Conversely, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aaron R. Hanlon’s moderate attack on the Right, centered on the issue of free speech, claims the pervasiveness of “PC.” As Hanlon puts it, “If we want to have a more accurate picture of the influence of political correctness on campus and in our wider culture, we need to stop framing it as a left-wing phenomenon” (Hanlon 2018). There is no indication yet that such polemics are soon to abate. Whether Western civilization is the culprit or not has become endlessly debatable and each side keeps bringing its arguments to the debate. Amy Chua’s book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018), attempts to present both sides of the story—America’s ignorance of the dynamics of political tribalism blew up in its face but efforts at restoration provoked a backlash. Precisely, Edward Allen’s 1992 novel, Mustang Sally, features what staunch defenders of “political correctness” could call the retaliation of “the white male,” or what more neutral observers of the American campus may call a reaction against the excesses of PC and the marginalization of the white male in academia. Allen’s novel could be read as a ferocious satire of American intellectual life in the 1990s—critiquing a deleterious academic and, by extension, political environment. However, what seems less debatable than the issue of responsibility for the abuse of power is the negative impact of this continuous strife on American intellectual life, education, and politics, all of which have become polarized. If Daniel Bell’s view of American intellectual life, in his article, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965–1992”—as a decaying intellectual environment, characterized by an “attention inward,” cultural wars, and the splintering of cultures—is valid, the good news could be that this environment appears to be flourishing in terms of literary production. Indeed, literary consciousness has been on the alert and fiction seems to be more independent than what Bell calls the institutionalization of intellectual

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life. As he puts it, “We do not have intellectual inquiry or discussion but ‘research’ ‘policy analysis,’ and in literature, ‘theory.’ Increasingly, intellectual life is specialized, professionalized, jargonized, and often hermetic in its focus and language” (Bell 1992, 74). It is clear that Bell saw all these developments on the American intellectual scene in an extremely negative light; and inevitably, so did several American fiction writers who capitalized on campus polemics. Nevertheless, before we take a closer look at the literary production of this period, it is worth noting that the independence of literature must be somewhat qualified as it has not fully escaped institutionalization; the university has become the patron of artistic life with the rise in and widespread use of creative writing programs which, on the one hand, offer employment to established writers and, on the other hand, encourage, frame, train, and promote writers-in-the-making. The expansion of such programs since World War II and their exponential multiplication since the mid-1960s—which is the focus of Mark McGurl’s acclaimed historical and literary study, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009)— appear to be a historical novelty with great implications for literature. Contrary to Bell who considered the institutionalization of intellectual life as a highly negative development, McGurl’s assessment of the university’s overall contribution to literature, though his perspective is more narrow than Bell’s, appears positive as his rhetorical question indicates, “moving our minds from the Pound Era into the Program Era, do we not bear daily witness to the surfeit of literary excellence?” (McGurl 2005, 129). Such excellence is disputed by Eric Bennett who, in his article, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” throws the shadow of ideology over the creation of these programs by pointing out that they were funded by the CIA; further he points to their limits in nurturing great writers. As he states, “Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off” (Bennett 2014). Nevertheless, though the creative writing programs have been increasingly questioned and criticized, 6 it would be hard to ignore the fact that they have aroused the literary imagination and have democratized the access to a vocal subjectivity despite the big business aspect that is attached to them, and the fact that only “Only 7 percent of MFA graduates are fully funded” (So and Piper 2016). Indeed, four out of the eight campus novels in this study involve creative writing workshops. It must be pointed out that the figure of the professor gains particular prominence in the creative writing workshop, as it is surrounded by the aura of creator. The creative writing professor acts as a mystagogue who leads the students through the mysteries of creation while at the same time acting as manager of emotions as they are transformed into art. Interestingly, McGurl remarks that “the very genre that would seem to bind the arts and sciences at the level of theme, science fiction, is only minimally represented in the

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creative writing program establishment” (McGurl 2005, 125), though this genre does not necessarily exclude the expression of subjectivity and interiority. It should be added that the professor’s numinous centrality in the creative writing workshop may also increase their vulnerability—professors become the object of transference much more easily and it could be assumed that they hold more power over the students than in other programs. However, whether in a MFA (master of fine arts) or another degree track, the figure of the male professor has undergone close examination, with the issue of the power differential between professor and student receiving particular attention. 7 Books such as The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner (1984), which denounced academic institutions for failing to address the issue of sexual harassment of female students and discipline guilty male faculty members, though criticized, set the tone. In the 1990s, the US Supreme Court issued three decisions interpreting Title IX, the federal civil rights law concerning equality in education, to require schools to respond appropriately to reports of sexual harassment and sexual violence against students. Conversely, books such as Laura Kipni’s highly polemical Unwanted Advances : Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017), which denounces feminist paternalism, and the Trump administration’s disputed attempts to revise sexual assault policy 8 keep the controversy going. Naturally, this fraught political environment could only further impact the different modes of professor-student interaction which Steiner, in his Lessons of the Masters, delineated. Steiner, poring over exemplary historical figures of masters as well as fictional ones, approached the master-disciple relationship through three underlying modes: subversion, destruction, and creative exchange. Although a great contribution to the study of the “master-disciple novel,” Steiner’s typology of the relationship provides categories that are certainly not in “silos” but can overlap. In all their complexity and instability, they are identified in the novels studied in this book. Furthermore, whether these developments on the US scene are self-consciously inscribed in these narratives or not, the latter cannot be read without these controversies in mind, as they have influenced the professor-student rapport. This relation involves a constellation of issues that crowd the public agenda in the United States—the syllabus, the university as a safe space, microaggressions, free speech, race, gender, and, of course, the nature of intimacy between the two parties, which is precisely the crux of the political matter. For what these novels have in common is the depiction of an uncommon encounter that yields a memorable, life-altering bond put in various perspectives. The centrality of affect in pedagogical encounters is underlined by Sharon Todd. In her introduction to Learning Desire: Perspectives on Pedagogy, Culture, and the Unsaid (1997), Todd states that “a growing emphasis has

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been placed on eros, sexuality, and emotion in teaching and learning encounters. (. . .) Expressing issues ranging from transference to identification, from sexual harassment to vulnerability (. . .) educators attempt to demonstrate that affect is not simply an individual or idiosyncratic feature of pedagogical life but is structurally operational in what gets learned, by whom, and how” (Todd 1997, 5, emphasis added). Though the author does not express a new idea, this reminder is important in a period of high controversy around the pedagogical relationship. Interestingly, the term pedagogical Eros, first appearing in Plato’s Symposium and eagerly taken up by diverse educators, finds a great currency in contemporary scholars’ work, such as that of Karsten Kenklies. Kenklies’s article, “The Struggle to Love: Pedagogical Eros and the Gift of Transformation,” notes “the deeply un-erotic nature of contemporary education” (Kenklies 2019, 549). The total prohibition of consensual sexual relations between professors and students at US universities seems to have created a great tension on campus and has had a great impact on the pedagogical situation. Moreover, it could be at odds with the current model that defines the relationship between universities and their students. The “facilitator model” (Lee 2011, 80) tries to find a balance between the students’ responsibilities over their actions and the universities’ involvement in them, contrary to the in loco parentis doctrine in force until the 1960s; until that period, universities had regulated all aspects of their students’ lives without considering their constitutional rights. 9 In fiction, a vehement revolt against the sexual prohibition on campus occurs in Philip Roth’s novels, in which his male characters are far too complex to fit into the model of “the lecherous professor.” Precisely, in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), Mickey Sabbath, a compelling character, becomes enraged against the feminists who trap him and destroy his teaching opportunities. The same pattern is to be found in The Human Stain (2000)—it is a female feminist professor who anonymously slanders her former colleague, the classics professor, Coleman Silk, presenting his illiterate girlfriend, Faunia, as his victim. Though Faunia is not Coleman’s student, there is a mentorship relation between the two characters. In these much-discussed novels, Roth builds two central characters whose downfall seems to be engineered by those who embraced “political correctness.” Both characters—the extravagant, transgressive, artist Sabbath and the sober, dutiful dean of Athena College—find themselves entangled in the cultural wars which are waged in the name of justice and equality. If they both seem to be more or less innocent victims of twisted or usurped values, the supreme victim, according to Roth, is finally the country which lost its way in its reckless celebration of diversity and human rights. Though Roth’s main contribution to the master-disciple phenomenology is The Dying Animal (2001), which deals with Eros and Thanatos in a pas-

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sionate pedagogical relation, 10 it is the The Human Stain that illustrates, in an extraordinary tour de force, the perils of such a relation in the era of “political correctness.” If, in Sabbath’s Theater, the pedagogical rapport is saturated with eroticism, it is totally voided of its substance in The Human Stain—the two African American students sue their professor, who has never seen them and whom they have never met, on the grounds of the misinterpreted term “spook.” It seems that only the offensive slang meaning of the polysemous term makes sense in an illiterate, paranoid America, according to Roth. The author presses on the irony of the situation (and his criticism of the United States) even harder as the professor also turns out to be an African American. In The Human Stain, the encounter between the professor and his students does not take place, which makes the students’ act all the more absurd. The mutuality and partnership, which are the core of education according to Martin Buber, are missing and replaced by prejudice, susceptibleness, and ideology. Buber, the philosopher of the dialogic intersubjectivity, viewed education as a shared enterprise. As he put it in Between Man and Man, “There are two forms, indispensable for the building of true human life, to which the originative instinct, left to itself, does not lead and cannot lead: to sharing in an undertaking and to entering in a mutuality” (Buber 2002, 103). Though Buber’s vision is ultimately religious, he puts human life under the sign of the encounter. In his major work, I and Thou, he clearly states that “All real living is meeting” (Buber 1937, 11) making the pedagogical encounter part and parcel of “the streaming mutual life of the universe” (Buber 1937, 16). The novels studied in this collection have been selected on the basis of their capacity to show the exceptional nature of the pedagogic encounter unfolding in a prominent social and political environment. For this reason, the chapter arrangement does not generally follow a specific order, though it ensures a smooth transition between them that highlights the diversity of the authors’ perspective. The two chapters on Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis are placed after the others, as these two works are not strictly campus novels but they exemplify the development of the pedagogic bond outside the campus. Furthermore, the thematic variation specific to each novel commands the theoretical framework necessary to elucidate the narrative, whether the former derives from philosophy, psychology, social science, anthropology, translation, feminist, or queer theories. Thus, a diversity of theoretical tools highlights the variety of the authors’ perspectives. It is a moral inquiry that Donna Tartt—in her campus crime novel, The Secret History (1992)—opens up as she structures her narrative around the notions of truth and lying. Lying shatters the pedagogical encounter between an elitist professor of exception and his six admiring, devoted students who live in close communion with him, evocative of bygone masters and their apprentices.

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On the one hand, by virtue of the professor’s high competence and intellectual superiority, breadth of knowledge, immersion in an aesthetic universe, and lofty pursuits—as well as his imperial conviction of the efficiency and rightness of his pedagogic method—the narrative establishes the authority of the master, known in Roman antiquity as auctoritas. However, the narrative also destabilizes his pedagogical work as both insular and falling short of its overall responsibilities—though he excels in the intellectual and aesthetic instruction, the professor finally does not live up to the moral one. In his ivory tower of high culture, knowledge, and beauty, the breach of moral law has devastating effects on both parties. Interestingly, despite some witty winks at issues such as cultural relativism, Tartt does not ostentatiously engage with the concerns of her decade, as the most obvious genre of this complex novel is the campus crime—one which directs the reader’s attention to the murder itself and its motives rather than to more controversial issues that the narrative also tackles. Furthermore, Tartt brings up the neglected issue of class in the pedagogical rapport by juxtaposing a professor with aristocratic values with the democratic imperatives of the United States. However, the most compelling aspect in the narrative is its exploration and assertion of the specificity of pedagogical Eros, based on intimations of philosophy, knowledge, beauty, wisdom, and immortality, which remains a sure value amid distress and waste. Equally valuable in the narrative is liberal education which offers Tartt’s narrator, successfully trained by his professor who transmitted his love of knowledge, culture, and “joyful wisdom” to him, the means to deal with his life-long guilt. It is also from a moral perspective that Lan Samantha Chang’s novel, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010), examines the pedagogical bond enlarging the picture of moral emotions. If the main moral emotion and motor of Tartt’s narrative in The Secret History is adaptive guilt that revolves around lying, gratitude is the centerpiece of Chang’s novel, which pores over the pedagogical rapport within the specific environment of creative writing programs. For Chang, the bond seems to generate gratitude, an index of moral maturity as, for the author, poetic education is closely linked with moral education. In addition, the narrative engages with sexual politics and puts up a challenging idea for consideration—no limits should be put to the pedagogical rapport since Eros is a force that contributes to artistic and moral growth. It is worth noting that this conclusive vision is not entangled with gender considerations, though Chang’s memorable professor is female, a breakthrough in the pantheon of characters dominated by male educators. Both novels, The Secret History and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, are reminders of the centrality of a moral education, of the importance of transmission, and of educators invested with a mission, whether they keep a distance from their students or they allow friendship and sexuality to abolish

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this distance. Chang’s endorsement not only of friendship but also of sexuality in the student-teacher rapport, in a narrative not unconscious of the sexual interdict that weighs over the professor, benefits from the hindsight of the preceding polemical decades that may have codified this rapport excessively. Thus, it chooses to shift the moral balance to the issue of gratitude and to the duties of the student rather than to those of the professor. Chang does not focus on the codification of the rapport; she brushes it aside for the benefit of the moral emotions that emerge in a pedagogical encounter, namely gratitude and love. They are asserted at the end of the narrative, which depicts a most powerful bond that can make room for both friendship and love, according to the author. Contrary to Chang, Francine Prose addresses the issue of professor-student sexual rapport frontally and centrally. Blue Angel (2000) seems to be wary of sexuality in the pedagogical relation as it is ultimately a destructive bond that the narrative tackles when the near-gratification of sexuality enters the picture. The bond that initially thrives on literary affinities is ultimately understood in terms of power and, in particular, the power differential in the pedagogical couple. Both parties are morally accountable for Prose, since her narrative reverses the power differential and clearly gives the student the upper hand. Thus, the novel suggests that the professor’s power over the student can be overestimated and capitalizes on his vulnerability in the highly tense academic environment of the 1990s marked by culture and gender wars. Eloquently, it is only in this environment that the developments in the narrative make sense. However, the novel’s satiric elements do not undermine the deep faith in the power of literature that brought the two main characters together—its healing capabilities seal the narrative. The creative writing workshop does not seem to fare very well in Blue Angel, though new talent is recognized and consecrated by publication in Prose’s novel. A more favorable view is offered by Michael Chabon in Wonder Boys (1995) which, just like Blue Angel, also features a sort of “blocked writer.” Chabon broadens the notion of pedagogical responsibility to include the corporate one. His contribution to the master-disciple novel is quite original as he associates diverse perspectives such as mythological, scientific, economic, and political. Master and disciple are aggrandized by a mythological figure that permeates the narrative—namely, the wounded healer—the archetype of the artist that goes back to Greek mythology and shamanistic traditions. In addition, the narrative points to scientific research on literary creativity by terming literary creation as the “midnight disease.” Moreover, the creative writing workshop appears as the right frame for those sufferers and healers who are thus integrated into society, with the creative writing program as part and parcel of the market economy. Last, but not least, it seems that these programs have democratized access to literary expression and provided a means to declaim the wound.

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Just like these three novels—All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost; Blue Angel; and Wonder Boys, all of which set the scene of the pedagogical encounter in a creative writing program—John Crowley’s 2002 novel, The Translator, examines the making of the artist in a creative writing workshop under the tutelage of a caring professor. Crowley heavily politicizes and subtly mystifies the bond which resists religious and political interdicts and manipulation. Furthermore, he uses history and mythology to indicate its might and intensity and, finally, he contributes to translation studies by involving his professor and student in a translating endeavor that artistically unites the two parties. It is also the making of the artist that Susan Choi’s My Education (2013) features, though not in a creative writing workshop. Just like Chang, Choi creates a female professor but introduces a complex triangulation and queers the pedagogical couple. In fact, the sapphic passion is in the center of the narrative, although both the female and the male professor contribute to the student’s maturation. If The Translator mystifies professor-student sexuality, My Education celebrates it. While Prose politicizes the pedagogical couple through feminist politics, Choi does so through sexual identity politics. The narrative examines “lesbian existence” and its rights, yet bisexuality is made all the more prominent by its political invisibility in the narrative. Religious faith and national identity in John Updike’s Roger’s Version (1986) and Terrorist (2006) broaden the range of issues that the masterdisciple rapport involves. These two novels clearly illustrate the great appeal of the pedagogical phenomenon on the American imagination for it is the adulterous rather than the pedagogical couple which constitutes the main focus in Updike’s great body of work. Interestingly, the former is displaced in favor of the latter in these two novels. While theology and science frame and shape the rapport in Roger’s Version, terrorism surrounds it in Terrorist. Through a complex interaction of professor-pupil, the novels seem keen on stimulating religious and national consciousness in a highly divided America—the deprived classes loom large in these two narratives. Updike’s representation of the underprivileged in the United States is equally exceptional in chronicling the middle-class. If a WASP writer pores over the phenomenon of master-disciple, it is all the more predictable that a writer, sensitive to the Jewish tradition with its millennia-long attachment to pedagogy, does so. Indeed, not only Philip Roth but also Saul Bellow eagerly took it up. Eloquently, Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein (2000), a fictional memoir inspired by Allan Bloom, depicts three pairs of master-disciple rapport that operate in the constructive mode. The central one is examined against three “cities of light,” namely Paris, Athens, and Jerusalem, that complete each other and give some insight into the relationship between Ravelstein, a famous academic, and Chick, a famous writer. Their complex relationship also involves a highly politicized disease, AIDS,

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and is crowned by a creative enterprise, notably the disciple’s biography of the master that aims at perpetuating the Jewish heritage. Though not a campus novel, Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin (2011), a socially committed narrative, depicts another self-altering encounter and mutually constructive bond between an academic and a young sexual offender that is created outside the university, though the pedagogue is a university professor. The narrative brings their bodies into focus and thus calls for an inquiry into the representation of embodied experience and emotion which challenges the pervasiveness of digitalization and exposes its dangers. With Lost Memories of Skin, the pedagogic couple moves away from academia and the formality of education and emphasizes the necessity of embodied instruction. Thus, Banks’s novel is most salient for two reasons: it demonstrates that the master-disciple novel can subsume the campus novel and it puts the body in the center of the narrative, making it indispensable in the interaction. Finally, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) is analyzed in the last chapter, as it seems to herald a new era—the posthuman—opening into an uncharted territory which accommodates the pedagogic encounter. DeLillo’s choice to voice twenty-first-century concerns with the posthuman condition through a pedagogic bond evokes the significance of this rapport in the human experience. NOTES 1. See Petr Antene, “Campus Novel Variations: A Comparative Study of an AngloAmerican Genre” (PhD diss., Palacký University Olomouc, 2015); and Patricia Barber Verrone, “The Image of the Professor in American Academic Fiction 1980–1997” (PhD diss., Setton Hall University, 1999). 2. See Annette Gomis van Heteren’s book, Political Correctness in Context: The PC Controversy in America. The author considers political correctness in North America as “yet another moralizing phenomenon in a tradition which is fundamentally different from its European counterpart” (Gomis van Heteren 1997, 81). Likewise, Bojana Klepač Pogrmilović views political correctness in Europe as “a contemporary phenomenon imported from the United States” (Pogrmilović 2019, 106). 3. “‘Politically correct’ was invented by people in social-justice movements to make fun of ourselves. In the ’80s, the Brown University student Jeff Shesol’s ‘Doonesbury’-esque campus comic strip, ‘Thatch,’ introduced a cape-wearing vigilante called Politically Correct Person, who faced off against his archenemy, Insensitive Man. Shesol went on to serve as a speechwriter for Bill Clinton” (Hess 2016). 4. The plethora of articles on this issue in the media and the publication of an edited volume of essays edited by Luigi Esposito and Laura Finley, Political Correctness in the Era of Trump: Threat to Freedom or Ideological Scapegoat? (2019), testify to the extent of the public debate. 5. Moira Weigel’s 2016 article, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a Phantom Enemy,” offers an overview of the most well-known studies on the issue. 6. See Charlie Tyson, “Art-School Confidential: The Expensive Superficiality of M.F.A. Programs,” Chronicle of Higher Education (December 09, 2018), accessed at https://www. chronicle.com/article/the-expensive-superficiality/245260 .

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7. In spite of Jane Gallop’s book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, which appeared in 1997, female professors accused of sexual misconduct is a more recent phenomenon. As Jonathan Galinsky notes, “Instances of female teachers sexually abusing male students are rare” (Galinsky 2018). Also see Anna North’s article, “When the Accused is a Woman: A #MeToo Story’s Lessons on Gender and Power.” 8. See Janet Napolitano’s article, “Don’t Let the Trump Administration Undermine Title IX” (Napolitano 2018). 9. See Philip Lee’s article, “The Curious Life of In Loco Parentis at American Universities.” Lee offers an overview of the relationship of universities with their students by tracing the legal history of in loco parentis. 10. For an analysis of this issue in The Dying Animal, see Aristi Trendel, “Master and Pupil in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal,” Philip Roth Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 56–65.

Chapter One

Lying in the Pedgagogical Encounter Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

Donna Tartt’s hyped novel, The Secret History, which took its author eight years of composition, was both a commercial and critical success. Academic criticism focused on various aspects of the narrative highlighting mostly the classical intertext (Arkins 1995; Pauw 1994). Tracy Hargreaves elaborated a reader’s guide (2001) offering a general analysis of the novel. If the book’s commercial success can be accounted for by both its well-poised suspense and Tartt’s publishing connections, and its critical acclaim by its learned references skillfully interwoven into the narrative, the most striking feature of the novel is the pedagogical relation that constitutes the cornerstone of The Secret History. Tartt creates a memorable bond widely opening a moral perspective to the master-disciple phenomenon and to the world. The Secret History is a confessional narrative that associates elements of different genres such as detective fiction, and more particularly the whydunit sort, the campus novel, and Greek tragedy. This first-person narrative of adaptive guilt mostly reveals the high cost of lying, initially underestimated by the characters. Indeed, lying, which is the engine of the plot, spoils or annihilates the six characters’ lives, meant to be built on beauty and learning, and alienates their beloved professor, Julian Morrow, a scholar of exception. One of Morrow’s former students, Richard Papen, the narrator of the story, in an attempt to save himself from a life-long duplicity, looks back in guilt and, heavy with his ten-year-old secret, recounts the story of a life that turned into a lie. The pathos of the quest for truth permeates Richard’s narrative, which reveals the premeditated murder of Bunny Corcoran, one of the members of a small group of classics students in Hampden, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Bunny blackmailed the initial four members of his group of class1

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mates when he discovered that they had accidentally dismembered a Vermont farmer during a bacchanal. Though Bunny’s murder is planned and carried out by Henry Winter, the others are made accomplices under his amoral leadership. The issue of truth is endemic in both genres, the academic novel and detective fiction, and it is its enemy, lying, in its various forms, that the narrative seems to explore and, more specifically, its deleterious impact upon the professor-student relation. On the one hand, The Secret History underlines the need for ethics in liberal education. On the other hand, it clearly suggests that veracity and trust are the foundations of the pedagogical bond and must not be shaken. In the narrative, wrong moral choices on both sides of the pedagogical relation break the bond with disastrous results, as the structure of the novel, by following the patterns of Greek tragedy and Dostoyevskian crime and punishment, also shows. Though the students break the legislated law, they are only punished by the moral one. The narrative could point to a Kantian advocacy of the duty of truth and reverence for the moral law that the students disobeyed under various pressures and ultimately under Henry’s amoral influence. Likewise, as a consequence of their actions, their professor was also tainted by his disregard for this law, which is finally the one mostly at stake in the narrative. As whydunit detective fiction places the intrigue onto the motivations of the characters—the six students and their professor—the reader’s attention is drawn more easily to their moral shortcomings. The narrative shows the pedagogical relation in its political, moral, and metaphysical dimension. Indeed, political, ethical, and philosophical questions impinge on the issue. They are explored within the dialectics of secrecy and revelation as the title, which evokes Procopius’s Secret History, seems to suggest. This historical allusion in Tartt’s title connotes a lack of transparency and promises its restoration. In his famous book, the Byzantine historian, claiming to expose the secret motivations of the rulers’ public actions, set up highly unflattering portraits of the sixth century CE emperor Justinian and empress Theodora. Likewise, the narrator’s probing behind the public facade opens up a Pandora’s box since his revelations display the questionable traits and acts of the characters. Richard’s secret not only involves a single individual but also exposes a larger picture of his social environment. In fact, the ethics of secrecy and the ethics of lying are closely linked in the narrative. In spite of their difference, these ethics can overlap as Sissela Bok demonstrates in her study, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. Though secrecy is not necessarily negative, it can accompany the most lethal acts, which is the very case in the novel. Concealment is the defining trait of secrecy that sets its practitioner apart from the rest of humanity, as the Latin origin of the term indicates—secretus, “set apart.” Richard’s confession, prompted by that “near-universal urge among human beings to

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bare personal secrets” (Bok 1984, 79), reinstates him within the human community that seems to be no less faulty and deficient than the main characters in the narrative. Moreover, it assesses and restores the pedagogical bond that bloomed and faded in the course of the narrative, the murder acting as a catalyst for the disintegration of the group. In her analysis of the campus crime novel, Margot McGovern notes that “it is often underpinned by a strong political agenda, typically using the instance of a crime as a platform for discussing the marginalization of minority groups within the academy” (McGovern 2013, 22). Contrary to other female authors, such as Carolyn Heilbrun, who clearly have a feminist political agenda, this is not Tartt’s case. The main female character in the novel, Camilla Macaulay, is a flat one and surprisingly passive and powerless, which makes the novel morally unsound for feminist critics, eager to find in texts advocates for the feminist cause. 1 We may wonder, then, what Tartt’s political agenda is, since The Secret History is not informed by feminist concerns. Though it does not explicitly come up in Tartt’s interviews, the issue of class is prominent in the novel. While the narrative is not concerned by gender politics, it seems to be conscious of class politics. In fact, a female narrator would not as easily have highlighted the class issue and the balance might have tipped towards feminist politics usually dissociated from class politics. In fact, in the United States, the ideology of the individual and the experience of diversity seem to conceal the realities of class. Precisely, E. Paul Durrenberger states that “As anthropologists return to the challenge of understanding class in the United States, one of our continuing problems is to be able to see the phenomenon in a land where the notion, much less the discussion, of class and class privilege is anathema because of incessant proclamations of the equality of opportunity, if not achievement. Race, ethnicity, personal initiative, or failure but not class explain privilege, power, poverty, and impotence” (Durrenberger 2001, 44). The Secret History could advance the debate on this issue—the novel draws the reader’s attention to the realities of class in the United States. The professor’s criticism of the issue of class is quite illuminating, as he severely denounces America’s hypocrisy, “‘I think we’re much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages. (. . .) In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true’” (Tartt 1992, 198). The statement not only points to the unbridgeable gap between the moneyed class and the rest in American society but also to what the power of money entails. However, Tartt’s professor criticizes the US system for its hypocrisy but does not advocate change. His implicit recognition of class as one of the reasons of inequality in the country does not necessarily imply a progressive view of it, as he also expresses a very conservative outlook on class. His

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quote of Plato’s definition of justice in the Republic, which advocates contentment with and acceptance of one’s place in society, precisely endorses an unjust view of it and dismisses those who aspire to change. Richard’s endeavor toward social mobility is a case in point—his working-class background is clearly an impediment to progress and a fulfilled, happier life. The narrator, a working-class boy, brings into his story both an acute consciousness and a deep hate and shame of his class that govern his relation to the others. This character defies the folk model of equality which, according to Durrenberger, is “so powerful and pervasive that it disguises the realities of class, daily practice, and practices of inequality” (Durrenberger 2001, 55). In spite of his ability to blend himself into any type of environment, Richard remains alarmingly self-conscious of all those telling differences of dress, manner, and bearing between himself and his classmates who come from upper-middle-class backgrounds. It is precisely the rejection of his class and of the social and intellectual environment it involves as well as his will to fight against its deadening effect on his mind that take him to Hampden College, an elitist, private institution. Though the system provides an escape route in the form of a scholarship, both his parents and the new restricted milieu he aspires to belong to, namely the small group of classics students and their professor, are, to a greater or lesser degree, immune to social change. His father, a small gas station owner, refuses to sign the necessary documents for the scholarship on the assumption that going to this college is useless, while the professor initially turns him down. Richard’s escape from the humdrum Californian town, Plano, which he finds stifling, is achieved through a lie and through lies he makes his way into the group. The door of Julian’s “Lyceum,” his own private space within the college, miraculously opens for him only when he invents for the class-sensitive professor a rich upper-middle-class family. Richard’s class-afflicted eye penetrates a divided America, a country in silos with huge differences, not only in financial resources but also in culture, which makes equality and equality of opportunity a meaningless term. In fact, Hampden College is just an isolated island of means in a deprived region. Far out in the country, at the inn where he and his friends stop by, their small group of well-dressed students arouses curiosity. Richard is aware of the local people’s perception of the students as rich, spoiled kids with little concern for those without any privileges. The student’s initial enchantment with the beauty of his new environment in Vermont can only clash with his discovery of the poverty, abandonment, inhumanity, and potentiality of crime that he experiences when he takes lodging in the hippie’s place during the holidays. Interestingly, he almost dies on the other side of paradise and is saved by Henry. The old hippie’s indifference, apathy, and near-cruelty to Richard, along with the insignificance of the hippies who live in the margin of the college and the college students’ total indifference to the leftist off-

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campus group, are indicative of the absence of any political protest with regard to the status quo. It must be noted that Henry’s approach to class is quite complex. Though he does look down on the poverty-level Vermonters and the uneducated popular jury who, according to him, would never give a fair trial to the students, the Greek notion of hoi polloi, the masses, is a more telling notion than class for him. As Henry interacts with characters from all classes, such as the well-off, well-educated dean, the reader may surmise that Henry’s criteria go beyond class; he tries to see who the other is and how authentic they are. Although Henry, just like Julian, embraces an inegalitarian view of society, his genuine interest in the common people and his capacity to communicate with them corroborates his search for authenticity in his relations to the others. Thus, contrary to Bunny who torments Richard when he senses his humble background and consequently gives the latter a reason to become an accomplice to his murder, Henry defends his friend. His secret affinities with Richard are based on existential ill-being and restlessness. It is worth noting that Richard’s resistance to Henry’s suggestion of murdering Bunny breaks when the class issue is exacerbated between him and Bunny, and the latter comes close to revealing Richard’s working-class origins. Moreover, Richard discovers how Bunny’s family strives to maintain an upper-middle-class appearance without the money necessary to live up to it and witnesses not only Julian’s fascination with the glamour of his invented Californian family but also his callous exasperation with the ill-mannered local children, the sound and sight of whom offend his aristocratic sensibilities. Though the gulf of class between student and professor seems to close somewhat when Richard, a conscientious student, successfully integrates himself with the classics group, his class-related lie and Julian’s awe of the upper classes remain in the background of the pedagogical encounter. Thus, they can only blemish the bond created by learning and high culture. Julian’s academy of ancient Greek—as Richard initially views it before making his final decision to take all his classes but French with the same professor, according to Julian’s questionable requirements—seems to be comprised of both an intellectual and, though only on the surface, moneyed elite within the exclusive Hampden College. On the whole, the college has the appearance of a progressive institution, apparently committed to some diversity which Julian ostensibly refutes. Tartt builds up a politically incorrect character, both awe-inspiring and questionable. He seems to be central in the plot, yet his narrative presence is limited. Indeed, in an interview, the author explains this perplexing absence. As she puts it, “He really should have been there more than he was. That’s a real weakness in the book. But the scenes with him were just excruciating to write. His scenes took me a month, even tiny scenes that were half a page.

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The other characters—I would just wind them up and let them go—he was much harder. The whole book would fall on its face if he wasn’t credible—he was the whole reason for everything happening” (Tartt 1992, 59). Nevertheless, Julian’s conspicuous absence from the thick of the narrative seems to add to the aura of mystery around the character. Naturally, this mystery does not make his views any less provocative or debatable. It is Julian’s elitist values that, first and foremost his colleague, French professor Georges Laforgue, rightly denounces. According to Julian, classical education is the only worthwhile form of instruction and, even more objectionably, he believes it should be reserved for the moneyed elite; he would not accept a student on financial aid. Ironically, it is only Richard who makes good use of his education and becomes a scholar of Jacobean drama, thus defying Julian’s model of the elite. Obviously, Julian rejects cultural relativism and fully embraces cultural elitism as Tartt’s witty intertextual wink at Philip Roth’s collection of fiction makes clear. “‘I wouldn’t advise you to go out and buy a copy of Goodbye, Columbus’ (required, notoriously, in one of the freshmen English classes) ‘if you forgive me for being vulgar’”(Tartt 1992, 30). The professor clearly considers that only the study of the classics is beneficial to the students. It is not surprising, then, that Julian is a friend of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and he is criticized by George Orwell—Eliot and Pound were known for their conservative views (let alone the second’s dubious political affinities that made his work highly controversial) while Orwell was noted for his socialist ones. It seems that in her attempt to flesh out Julian, Tartt introduced peripheral historical characters to give more credibility and prominence to one of her main characters. Moreover, not only the syllabus but also the professor’s authoritarian teaching methods appear undemocratic and are criticized as such by Richard who finally, and with good reasons, questions the professor’s expectations from his students to share his views. As James Cresswell notes, “The collision of social practices and different subjectivities in education means that it is a place of contested meanings” (Cresswell 2016, 33). In fact, Julian does not leave any room for real debate in his seminars. From his student’s critical point of view, his classes “ran more along the lines of benevolent dictatorship than democracy” (Tartt 1992, 305). In addition, the professor refuses any contact with his colleagues and claims a space of his own within the college, symbolically far from the other lecture halls. Therefore, his assumptions and requirements, his selective practices based on personal rather than academic criteria, his syllabus and aristocratic isolation from the rest of the college, can account for the insularity of his group. Psychologists do underline that “with wealth and privilege comes this island of sorts, this increased insularity from others” (DeAngelis 2015, 62); Julian cultivates it to the extreme.

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Precisely, this insularity, both social and intellectual, disconnects the students from the rest of the world. The most salient example is Henry who, deep in the ancient Greek culture, fails to keep up with major developments such as the moon landing. In addition, it fosters intellectual arrogance and a confusion of values, which makes Francis say the man they killed was not Voltaire, thus implying that an anonymous farmer’s life is less valuable than a philosopher’s. Besides, the group’s isolation from the rest of the college may not be irrelevant to the incestuous relation between the twins, Charles and Camilla, as it keeps their social exchanges to a minimum. Finally, a connection between the moral deficiency of the group, and ultimately of their professor too, and their exclusive immersion in beauty and learning, the two pillars of Julian’s pedagogy, is established; insularity underpins wrong moral choices and facilitates secrecy and lying that engineer the group’s moral doom. Thus the narrative examines a case of guilty conscience—a term “employed to refer to a person’s inner mental awareness” (Cottingham 2013, 728)—in search of the light of revelation, and moral emotions, namely guilt and shame, that create dramatic tension in the pedagogical bond. As a New York Times reviewer wittily puts it, “what followed [Bunny’s murder] was a terrifying exercise in existential forensics, a kind of ‘C.S.I.’ of the soul in which the detective went sleuthing after the sources of his own guilt” (Scott 2002). The narrative points to lying as the original spring of this guilt and features a whole gamut of lies from the little white to the most serious or injurious. To start with, lying is announced and made salient in the prologue of the novel in a sinister way that makes Henry appear to be a cold-blooded murderer. His response to Bunny’s question, wondering what his friends were doing in the countryside, just a few seconds before murdering him—“why, we’re looking for new ferns” (Tartt 1992, 4)—sets up a kaleidoscope of lies worth being looked into, namely officious lies, lies to oneself, and malicious lies. In the chronology of the narrative, Richard’s initial lies to his parents and then to his professor, in order to obtain first a place in the Hampden College and then one within the classics group, seem to be what Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica calls officious lies—those that are meant to avoid harm or produce benefit. Besides, from a utilitarian point of view, they seem justified as they help Richard attain his goal of a quality education. However, even these white, officious lies become disputable in the light of the ensuing developments. Gradually, they become entangled with more serious falsehoods that lead up to murder. Besides, they turn Richard into an impostor whenever he has to maintain the invented identity of an oil tycoon’s son and thus evoke the Kantian view of a liar as one who is doing harm to oneself. Moreover, they conjure up the larger category of deception that subsumes

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lying. As Bok underlines “lying forms part of it” (Bok 1978, 13). In addition, Richard’s lying somewhat perverts Bunny, making him a torturer when the latter surmises his classmate’s imposture and takes pleasure in trying to bring into the open Richard’s secret about his background. Richard’s case exemplifies how secrecy both inhibits and supports moral choice. Being drawn into the secrets of the four students, Richard becomes part and parcel of them, sinking deeper into lying which is necessary to keep these secrets. Indeed, “studies indicate that members of groups are at times willing to take larger risks than each member would have taken individually” (Bok 1984, 109). At the same time, the pressure of truth drives Richard to confession. Ironically, it was the secrecy surrounding the five students and their professor that intrigued and attracted Richard to them in the first place. In fact, lack of communication between the classics group and the other students in the college fostered gossip about the former. As Bok observes, “Secrecy is one of the factors that make gossip take the place of more formal communication about persons. Gossip increases whenever information is more scarce and desirable” (Bok 1984, 91). If secrecy drew Richard to the group, it alienated Bunny from it and brought out the erratic, unbalanced part of his personality. The four students’ officious lie to Bunny, a fringe member of the group, aimed at excluding him from their bacchanal to ensure its success, not only turns him into a jealous blackmailer but also triggers a proliferation of lies that bring about the final disaster. Therefore, even officious lies that clearly intend no harm turn out to be detrimental. And so is another category of lying, self-deception or lying to oneself, best exemplified by Bunny and Julian in the narrative. The paradoxical nature of self-deception was pointed out by Kant in The Metaphysics of Morals (1996), while Nietzsche in Antichrist, as Walter Kauffman reminds the reader, considered lying to oneself to be “the most common lie” (Kaufmann 2013, 354). Likewise, Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1956) distinguished an intentional lie from a sort of lie he called bad faith that amounts to persuading oneself that one cannot act differently, thereby escaping one’s responsibilities. The narrative never explicitly names this type of lying but shows it. Bunny consistently denies being drunk and finds excuses for his poor physical state induced by heavy drinking. Moreover, his self-deception precipitates his murder, for he imposes his travels on Henry, refusing to acknowledge to himself how financially and psychologically disastrous this is for his friend. Likewise, Julian, sheltered by his great principles, chooses to remain at the smooth surface of reality and to ignore the drama that is taking place in his students’ lives. Precisely, Richard traces his professor’s moral shortcoming to this “odd blindness,” aggravated in Bunny’s case, as Julian refuses to see who they really are behind the comforting appearance of well-behaved, well-educated, wealthy students (Tartt 1992, 305). Moreover, the professor’s

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moral blindness may have encouraged, to a certain extent, Henry’s amoral attitude. Henry’s case in respect to self-deception is much more ambiguous, as the young scholar seems to have blocked out any moral obligations from consciousness. Indeed, Maxime Decout makes clear that “bad faith defies binary logic. For it involves a certain consciousness, even partial, of what is meant to be hidden” (Decout 2015, 13, my translation). Henry’s smearing his white shirt with dirt deliberately over Bunny’s grave is surely a form of parapraxis, as witnessed by his friends. Richard’s observation that Henry was not conscious of his act draws the reader’s attention to the nature of such an occurrence. It appears certain that Bunny’s classmate is acting out his guilt. Therefore, his amoral posture is unconsciously shaken. It is worth noting that Henry is “the adventurer” of lying in the narrative. François Noudelmann identifies this category in this way, “While the straight path of truth offers comfort and security, that of lying is steep and only hosts adventurers” (Noudelmann 2015, 48, my translation). Henry is the one who can live up to the demands of lying until he is caught by his unconscious. While Richard expresses the disgust of lying, Henry exemplifies “the pleasure,” “the casuistry” of it. Eloquently, Noudelmann, in his discussion of Rousseau and Nietzsche who clarified this phenomenon, refers to it as “the activity,” “the leisure” of lying (Noudelmann 2012, 50). It should be noted that Richard is alienated by Henry’s high performance of lying after Bunny’s murder. He praises his friend’s capacity to handle the situation but is shaken by the pleasure Henry takes in it as a marvelous performer. Aesthetics over ethics seems to be Henry’s mode of being. And so is Julian’s. Richard notes his professor’s aesthetic pleasure at the spectacle of the search for Bunny’s body. Though distressed by the events, Julian remains attentive to the “aesthetics of the thing” (Tartt 1992, 319). Likewise, Richard finds this pleasure improper, morally offensive for the situation. His reaction illustrates the limits of aesthetics and the superiority of ethics. However, the elective affinities between Henry and Julian cannot survive lying and Henry is the one most severely punished by his disregard of the moral law. In fact, the most malicious lie in the narrative seems to be the one told to the professor, which entails Julian’s exposure of self-deception and a reciprocal disenchantment. The first lie to Julian told by the participants in the bacchanal—Henry, Francis Abernathy, and the twins—is one of omission. The professor is kept informed of his students’ attempt to revive the ancient ritual but not of its consequences that is, the savage, accidental killing of a farmer. It may be argued that this lie, made inevitable by the decision of the students not to turn themselves in, could be justified from a utilitarian point of view by a series of arguments, namely the accidental nature of the murder, the unfair trial the students might have, and their eagerness not to involve

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their professor unnecessarily. However, it leads to Bunny’s murder, which makes it indissociable from the host of lies clustered around it—disentangling this lie from others that are more injurious appears problematic. Although the narrative chronologically seems to move from officious lies to the most serious ones, it also seems to point to a sort of agglutination of lies and hence to deontological ethics in general and, in particular, to the great concern for truth requisite in liberal education. As a matter of fact, teaching is mediated through language, the gateway to the sublime to boot in Julian’s seminar, and truth is inscribed in language. Jacques Derrida discussing Kant in his book, Histoire du mensonge (The History of Lying) underlines that “‘all language is structured by this promise of veracity”‘ (Derrida 2005, 50, my translation), obviously broken by the lethal lie the students tell their professor and the lie Julian tells himself. Right after Bunny’s murder, lies beget lies at an astonishing pace because the students have to cover up their act in their daily exchange with Julian. Interestingly, they culminate in a sort of performance of lying which takes place around the letter sent by Bunny to his professor before his assassination. In this letter, Bunny, in fear of his life, asks his professor for help and reveals some of the students’ secrets, namely the twins’ incestuous relation. In an attempt to prevent Julian from discovering through its letterhead that the letter is not fake and to eliminate this piece of evidence, Richard, in Julian’s presence, tries to communicate to Henry what is at stake so that his friend can find a pretext to remove the letter from their professor’s sight. The play of gestures, glances, and stares—performed around this almost-purloined letter which ends in Julian’s discovery of their act—is the most dramatic moment in the narrative. The reader’s attention is thus drawn to the perspective of the deceived, Julian. It is precisely this perspective that “leads us to be wary of all deception,” as Bok states (Bok 1978, 21). Consequently, the professor, forced to face his students’ perfidy, withdraws all support, which is particularly devastating for the two students who experience the excruciating moment of discovery. It is noteworthy that in the inept, long excuse Henry utters, the act of lying appears to be the most malicious act. It seems clear that the five students did not lie to Julian for altruistic reasons and that the crux of the moral matter, as in Henry’s understatement, is sheer lying to the professor. In the landscape of moral emotions, shame looms large, particularly for Henry who is the most humiliated. In fact, Julian cuts short his excuses, all the more weakened before the enormity of the murder, while Richard notes that the professor shuns his favorite student’s presence in spite of the numerous moments of intimacy they have shared. It seems that Henry’s guilt never reaches the level of consciousness. For this reason, he is trapped in guilt’s neighboring emotion, shame, which, according to psychologists, is a self-punishing emotion related to a negative

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self-evaluation of the whole person. In addition, Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek contend that “shame is considered the more painful emotion because one’s core self—not simply one’s behavior—is at stake. Feelings of shame are typically accompanied by a sense of shrinking or of ‘being small’ and by a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness. Shamed people also feel exposed” (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek 2007, 349). Richard witnesses Henry’s total disarray when he is caught in the act of lying. In point of fact, contrary to Richard, who becomes a scholar of the Jacobean drama that inquires into the nature of evil and thus he works through his guilt, Henry cannot survive Julian’s shamed dismissal and his own disillusionment with his professor and consequently takes his own life. Indeed, Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek highlight that “guilt appears to be the more adaptive emotion,” whereas “shame is a moral emotion that can easily go awry” as it “corresponds with attempts to deny, hide, or escape the shameinducing situation” (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek 2007, 350). Even Camilla’s love cannot save Henry for whom the only escape turns out to be suicide. Likewise, Francis, suffering from anxiety, also attempts suicide and Charles, sinking deeper into alcoholism, loses all self-control. Though Henry keeps his self-composure until the end, the others show visible signs of moral and physical collapse. Therefore, the narrative illustrates Noudelmann’s description of the body’s reaction to lying. As he states, “the body exposes the conflict between truth and lying, reveals the harm done to truth. And the physical discomfort, discreet and intense, greatly reveals that lying does not remain hidden in an unscrupulous mind but provokes an external disorder” (Noudelmann 2015, 13, my translation). Crazed by regret and remorse and blinded by jealousy, Charles, who along with Camilla had raised moral objections to Bunny’s murder, attempts to kill Henry. As the students go through the long agony of the inquiry into Bunny’s death, they enter the stage of punishment for their crime experiencing a whole gamut of terrifying emotions and sensations—horror, angst, worry, guilt, and shame or, as in a Greek tragedy, they are haunted by the Furies. In fact, Julian’s seminar on telestic madness, that is, the loss of self through the Dionysian ritual, one of Plato’s four divine forms of madness, constitutes a prolepsis for his students’ experience of the maddening pangs of conscience. During this seminar, the professor explains to his students the haunting role of the Furies. When it becomes clear that they can get away with their crime, their sense of safety is an illusion, for they had not reckoned on the moral law. Once again, such a miscalculation points to the Kantian duty to truth. It appears that only Julian could have saved his students, had he not withdrawn from their lives. If Bunny’s letter arrives too late for Julian to intervene, his discovery of his students’ act is timely enough to live up to the great values he had taught them to live by, “Duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice”

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(Tartt 1992, 509). Thus, while his students fail him through lying, he fails them by lying to himself, and a discrepancy is revealed between what he teaches and what he practices. In a “Pontius Pilate” gesture, he gives the incriminating piece of evidence, Bunny’s letter, to Henry and leaves the college overnight. Significantly, Julian’s act is viewed as abandonment by the dean who does not soften the announcement of the news to them, “‘He has left you. And somewhat in the lurch’” (Tartt 1992, 484). More severely, it is perceived as cowardice and shallowness by Henry, whose love for Julian thus bears a lethal blow, when the student realizes that his professor’s main concern was to stay away from his students’ problems in order to keep his reputation intact. This view is reinforced by Richard who gains an insight into his professor’s personality, The student’s initial vision of his professor as a sage, a parent, and a guardian undergoes a radical change. Julian now appears to him as “a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless” (477). The verdict involving two perspectives, the students’ and an outsider’s to the group, seems to be unanimous. Moreover, Richard’s watchful, moral eye embraces the human environment around their small group penetrating the general hypocrisy. The notion of self-deception could be extended to Bunny’s family as well as to the various groups that collectively respond to Bunny’s death. The former, “a bunch of greedy, shallow people,” “all surface” (Tartt 1992, 327), as Charles observes, do not face their grief but entertain a social image though they halfknow it is fake; their son’s death becomes an opportunity to polish this image. Likewise, Hampden College turns into “a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion” (355) as people pounce on Bunny’s death to manifest a grief that they do not truly experience. In a similar way, it seems that the hippies, who had a conflictual relation with Bunny, appropriate his death to exorcise their own demons—“Now that he was dead, they marked his passage to another plane in impersonal and almost tribal fashion” (356)— thus attributing a meaning to him that had never been there. Therefore, against this morally unsound background, Julian is seen as an academic who betrays his high principles and his students and thus fails his pedagogical mission. However, Richard’s vision shows the complexity of the pedagogical rapport. On the one hand, the narrative encourages the reader to consider the long-range and the long-term effects of lying imposed upon it while, on the other hand, it reconstructs the bond following the dialectics of deconstruction-reconstruction. Richard’s demystifying view of Julian does not exclude a re-mystifying one, all the more clear at the epilogue that restores the empathy and fascination Richard had experienced for the group, in particular for Julian and his intellectual double, Henry.

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It seems clear that the depiction of the bond throughout the narrative paves the way for this ending. Precisely, it is the exceptional nature of this rapport in the narrative that leads up to the final assessment. Therefore, François Pauw’s conclusion on the novel—“The ambiguously empty ending (. . .) confirms that Tartt offers no easy solution not even a desperate sleight of hand like Camus, who manages to imagine the eternally toiling Sisyphus as happy” (Pauw 1994, 109)—seems to ignore this fundamental aspect in the narrative. There is neither much ambiguity nor “emptiness” in the ending which can determine the reader’s understanding of the novel. Contrary to Pauw, Hargreaves rightly refers to the epilogue as “mystifying” (Hargreaves 2001, 23) but does not elaborate on her intuition. There is no doubt that the pedagogical bond is alive and throbbing in Richard’s memory; his search for truth and atonement also establishes the history and truth of the bond, the core of which remains love. Richard’s conclusive thoughts, “he wasn’t perfect (. . .) and still we loved him” (Tartt 1992, 480), encourages the reader to look closely at this rapport of love whose springs are beauty, learning, and pedagogy. If the professor’s fatal flaw is his exclusive concentration on beauty and learning, which makes him morally blind to anything else, then beauty, learning, and pedagogy, interrelated and intertwined, still remain the source of his students’ love. Julian remains a pedagogue of exception. First, he refuses to be paid for his work, which highlights teaching as a vocation and not a profession. Precisely, Steiner in Lessons of the Masters (2003) advocates this view of teaching which ideally should be beyond monetary reward. Next, Julian’s ivory tower of learning, the Lyceum, is a space characterized by beauty. The professor’s attention and sensibility to beauty is also manifested in his classroom where select objects and furniture create a splendid environment meant to motivate his students and facilitate learning. Then, not only does Julian offer this unique universe to his students but also “the most glorious kind of play” (Tartt 1992, 31). That is how the professor views his teaching, thus positing himself as a powerful stage director, a Homo Ludens, and a prestigious performer. Moreover, he resurrects the past in his seminars; ancient culture comes alive and becomes part and parcel of his students’ lives. Their discourse and activities testify to their full immersion in it. Thus, Richard compares Julian’s profile to “an Etruscan in a bas-relief” (Tartt 1992, 39), while the hole in the roof of Richard’s attic room reminds Henry of the Pantheon. Likewise, in this light, Henry’s translating Paradise Lost into Latin makes greater sense—he is a native speaker of a dead language. The group seems to be transcending spatiotemporal boundaries in their attempt to understand this past, which conjures up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept in Mille plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) of nomadic thinking—a free, open space of thinking widely traveled in full immobility. The professor and his students,

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as true explorers of the ancient world, may have “gone native,” which is really the case with Henry and Julian. In addition, their love of the ancient world brings them together and strengthens their friendship. Richard’s articulate remark about his ties to the group is very eloquent, “In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular” (Tartt 1992, 189). Indeed, Henry’s erudition and originality also command his classmates’ respect and admiration, even Bunny’s. The latter, though not very gifted for studies, is initially dazzled by Henry’s personality and love of learning and looks up to him. On the whole, Julian and his students appear as the only true academic group, the only genuine learners in the college in which the professors seem to be bores and hacks and the students mindless revelers. The students’ representative (and also a representative of the moneyed elite), described by Richard as “dumb dumb dumb” (139), is a case in point—he is a constant organizer of beer blasts and drinking competitions. Indeed, Julian’s pedagogy creates a heterotopic space as the professor is the only one capable of opening for his students the doors of the sublime. Twice in the narrative, his introductory phrase to his class (with a very slight variation)—“‘I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?’” (Tartt 1992, 34 and 404)—shows Julian’s pedagogical ambition and aim. The professor aspires to transmit not only knowledge, to teach not only values, but also to offer his students the experience of elevation, “hypsos” in Greek, the sublime which is “at the limit or outside any system of values” (Porter 2012, 53). This experience can be achieved through his classroom discourse. In fact, in Longinus’s definition of the sublime as James I. Porter reminds us, “‘Sublimity is a kind of preeminence of discourse. The greatest poets and prose writers excelled thanks to no other source than this, and it was from this they endowed their reputations with eternal life. Sublimity induces in hearers not persuasion, but ecstasy. Wonder together with amazement is always superior to what is persuasive and pleasing’” (Porter 2012, 53). The students’ response to Julian’s seminars seems to point to an experience beyond an enthusiastic interest in a class. The narrative depicts them as mesmerized and breathless. As Richard observes, “We were all leaning forward, motionless. My mouth had fallen open” (Tartt 1992, 40). Richard’s assertion that Julian is “a marvelous talker, a magical talker” (34) can be taken literally—the professor is able to transport his students beyond the ordinary life to the realm of beauty through the magic of discourse.

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It is no wonder, then, that Julian’s class inspires the desire to revive a bacchanal. Henry, in particular, dried up by scholarship, is eager to experience a noncognitive mode of existence. Julian’s discourse emphasizing the potentially liberating aspect of maenadism—“To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!” (Tartt 1992, 40)—finds a fertile ground in Henry’s mind. If the Hampden College students are beer blasters, Julian’s students are bacchanals in the original sense of the term. It should be added that though Richard does not participate in the experiment, he is also fascinated by Julian’s seminar on the Dionysian mysteries. Henry’s description of the group’s preparations for purification and of the night of the bacchanal to Richard, along with his affirmation that it changed his life, point to an experience that has nothing to do with drunken celebrations and evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept in Mille plateaux of devenir animal (becoming animal) which refers to an experience beyond subjectivity that requires ascetic practices. It was because Bunny lacked the ethos of such practices that he was excluded from the group. It is worth noting that it is after this ritual that liberated “the primitive, emotive, appetitive self” (Tartt 1992, 39), as Julian, who credits the ancient Greeks for their ability to understand it, puts it, that Henry is able to become Camilla’s boyfriend. However, it is not this type of love that interests Donna Tartt in this novel but another category, namely pedagogical Eros. In the Platonic sense of Eros, desire is not only connected to sexuality but also to philosophy, knowledge, beauty, wisdom and immortality. The author may have studied the phenomenon in her small group of Claude Fredericks’s select students in Bennington College. Likewise, Julian’s character bearing resemblances to Fredericks may have been inspired by Tartt’s professor. Julian’s small educational community, a tiny island within the college, evokes Gustav Wyneken’s educational community in the German village of Wickersdorf in the early twentieth century. For this educator, theorist, and reformer, who professed an international outlook, teacher and pupil served to institutionalize the pedagogical Eros that entailed fidelity, veneration, and love but excluded sensual elements. In spite of the scandals that surrounded Wyneken’s name, his experiment was noted by other champions of free schools and seems to inform Julian’s educational practices that encourage intimacy and love. There is no doubt that in the narrative, the educational bond generates friendship and love that stop short of sexuality. The bond, initially built on the professor’s high competence, inspires love for the object of their study to his students which then is transferred onto him. Julian’s professional acumen is highlighted by the blatant incompetence of the new teacher hired to replace him. The latter could not possibly inspire their love, for he does not master the object of his study and thus he elicits

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only indifference and contempt. Moreover, the transference of love from the object of study onto the professor himself is facilitated by the fact that all of the students are either real orphans (the twins) or symbolic ones (Richard, Francis). Richard’s declaration of love is unequivocal, “Regardless of what Julian felt for me, there was no denying that what I felt for him was love and trust of a very genuine sort (. . .) it was Julian who had grown to be the sole figure of paternal benevolence (. . .) my only protector in the world” (Tartt 1992, 475). It is precisely thanks to this genuine love that circulates between Julian and his students that Richard is able to rehabilitate the broken bond at the end of the narrative. Until the end, he puzzles over “the fundamental magic of his [Julian’s] personality” (Tartt 1992, 479) and in spite of his lucidity in acknowledging his “own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good” (480), he still aspires to an unblemished image of his professor; “I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true” (479). Richard’s encounter with Julian is the major event in his life but also in the lives of the other students. Charles’s initial vision of a future with the group living in Francis’s country house—bought from his aunt for a small price or with Henry’s money, in Julian’s proximity, and with Bunny included as he would be visiting them on weekends without his future family—is quite telling. It must be noted that Charles’s vision of their future, which delights the rest of the group, also makes Richard immensely happy. Richard’s other moments of happiness derive from his witnessing Henry or Julian communicating genuinely with the underprivileged people in Vermont, which evokes for Richard a possibility of bridging the gulf of class. Equally telling, not only of the intensity but also of the reciprocity of the pedagogical bond, are the students’ formal dinners in the country house when the guest of honor is Julian. They all share the happiness mingled with awe which Julian’s presence among them creates outside the Lyceum. The professor’s invariable toast to immortality, a wink at their discussion in his class, confirms his own wish to preserve these moments of harmony with his students. They were given a glimpse of immortality in his seminars through the sublimity of his discourse. Besides, the professor’s admonition to the twins—“in troubled times (. . .) best to go to one’s own people for help” (Tartt 1992, 147), when they claimed they were stranded after their secret abortive attempt to flee the United States in order to escape Bunny’s blackmail—reveals his solicitude for them. Moreover, he does not hesitate to adopt the term love, which he also experiences for his students. In the letter he sends to Richard in the sorrowful period that follows Bunny’s murder, he declares, “‘It brings love’” (361). Therefore, Francis’s intuition, “He loves us” (475), is not wrong.

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However, the most compelling declaration of love in the narrative is certainly Henry’s, “I loved him more than my own father. (. . .) I loved him more than anyone in the world” (Tartt 1992, 487). The bond between Henry and Julian is underpinned by the most elective affinities as it is the encounter of two minds dazzled by the classics, which leads to a mutual understanding and communion. It appears that Julian seems to know everything about Henry. Though Richard witnesses an intriguing moment of intimacy between professor and student, it is clear in the narrative that this intimacy never transgresses physical boundaries, as Richard’s simile indicates, “Julian and he were talking—in jocular, mocking pedantic Latin—like a couple of priests tidying the vestry before a mass” (404). In point of fact, Henry’s suicide following his disenchanting assessment of Julian’s flight is a measure of this love. It is no wonder then that Richard’s admonition to Henry, “we have to transcend our teachers” (Tartt 1992, 487), cannot possibly be heard because the professor represented for his student “a divinity on earth” (298), which explains why Henry does not put Julian though the academic evaluation required by the college. Nevertheless, he puts him through a moral evaluation that subsumes the academic when his professor flees in an undignified way. On the one hand, Henry’s apprehension of Julian as divine still points to the specific nature of pedagogical Eros that involves veneration and is connected to beauty and immortality. On the other hand, it evokes a fundamental philosophical concept, that of “the other,” and in particular, Emmanuel Levinas’s contention that the encounter with the other gives access to the absolute (Levinas 2002, 198). The pedagogical bond can demonstrate the metaphysical nature of the encounter with the other, defined by Levinas in Dieu, la mort et le temps (God, Death and Time) as “the invisible (. . .) the uncontainable (. . .) an infinite transcendence” (Levinas 2002, 157, my translation), because it is a fertile ground for the pupil’s apprehension of the master as divine. Equally worth noting is Levinas’s distinction between the sacred and holiness. 2 In the narrative, the ecstatic transgression of the limits of experience, which the four students had through their bacchanal, appears to have given them access to the sacred. The disastrous consequences of their experience illustrate the ethical evasiveness that the sacred encourages, according to Levinas. On the contrary, the concept of holiness involves the vigilance of moral individuation taught by the Jewish scriptures. The dean’s reference to Julian’s Lyceum as “the Holy of Holies” (Tartt 1992, 483)—alluding to the innermost and most sacred area of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, accessible only to the Israelite high priest—though ironical, evokes the metaphysical aspect that the pedagogical bond seems to involve. Julian, though unreligious, is depicted as a religious leader revealing the divine will.

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At the same time, just like a Greek god, he turns out to be human, all too human, but he is rehabilitated at the end in Richard’s discourse. Richard’s story of adaptive guilt that aims at atonement brings Julian and Henry back, the former as the enlightened master who can transform his pupil into a “philosopher-king” (Tartt 1992, 522), the latter as a troubled spirit seeking remembrance, just like the dead discussed in Julian’s class. Charles, Francis, and Camille lead unhappy, wasted lives but the period they spend as Julian’s students seems to represent the happiest they ever were. Therefore, although Tartt’s professor appears to be politically incorrect by the standards of his contemporaries and ethically problematic, his pedagogic qualities and the unique rapport he creates with his students cannot be erased. Moreover, what creates dramatic tension is not sexuality, fully under control in the give-and-take between professor and students in this narrative and thus respectful of academic and societal standards, but lying; its irreducibly ethical dimension deepens the scope of the pedagogical relation. The Secret History illustrates the creative potential of the pedagogical bond whose core is love, but it also exposes the destructive potential of that bond when the moral law which underpins the rapport is disregarded. One-and-a half-decades later, the moral law appears to be central in Lou Samantha Chang’s novel (2010), All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, which expatiates on the moral growth that the pedagogical bond can make possible. NOTES 1. See Mikaella Clements’s statement, “The scarcity and restraint of female characters in Tartt’s novels is frustrating, even to super-fans like myself” (Clements 2019). 2. For a discussion of this distinction in Levinas’s work, see John Caruana’s article, “‘Not Ethics, Not Ethics Alone, but the Holy’: Levinas on Ethics and Holiness.”

Chapter Two

Mentorship and Gratitude in Lan Samantha Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

Lan Samantha Chang’s short but poignant novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (2010), depicts a forceful, life-long bond deeply embedded in moral life. The power dynamics of the pedagogical relation, which in this narrative unfolds in a creative writing program, is seen in a challenging light. The narrow world of a poetry writing seminar, which brings together a group of budding poets and their famous teacher, yields a large picture of moral emotions. Chang not only rehabilitates Eros between master and disciple but presents it as a force that contributes to artistic and moral growth. Though Chang’s first two books, Hunger: A Novella and Stories (1998) and Inheritance: A Novel (2004), dealt with Chinese immigrant experience, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost changes focus as the Chinese American author capitalizes on her experience as a professor of English at the University of Iowa and director of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This insider’s knowledge seems to be used creatively in a novel about the value of mentorship. Sheng Wang, David Greenberger, Raymond Noe, and Jinyan Fan, who examine mentoring through attachment theory in “Development of Mentoring Relationships: An Attachment Theory Perspective,” provide a conceptual model which investigates the interpersonal dynamics of the mentor-protégé relationship. Their insights, which are valid not only in the corporate world but also in other environments, will be useful in understanding the relations developed in the novel. The narrative is built in three parts that follow the life of the four main characters over two-and-a-half decades. Initially brought together by the seminar in their renowned writing “School” (unnamed and capitalized in the 19

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narrative) in Bonneville, Miranda Sturgis, Roman Morris, Bernard Sauvet, and Lucy Parry remain connected for the rest of their lives through ties of love and betrayal, friendship and alienation, and naturally creative endeavor. The narrative’s centerpiece is the character of the professor, Miranda, whose mysterious aura is sustained intact until the end of the narrative and envelops her former students. Though the “focalizer” is Roman, the professor’s beloved student, it is Miranda’s discourse and magnetic appeal that command developments in this third-person narrative. The most notable themes are Roman’s career as a poet and professor as well as his marriage to and divorce from Lucy, Bernard’s felicitous completion of his long poem that significantly gives the title to the novel, and Lucy’s later artistic activity. However, the most remarkable changes take place in the inner lives of the characters, particularly Roman’s; as the most complex character in the novel, it is his story that advances the main themes in the narrative, namely love and mentorship, self-doubt and gratitude. Chang seems to place a high value in the act of mentorship which is explored through the moral emotions of love and gratitude. The negative print of gratitude, ingratitude, and the negative state of self-doubt, explored by personality and social psychology, complexify the bond between master and disciple in this narrative which suggests that pedagogical Eros generates gratitude that contributes to moral maturity. Thus, poetic education is closely linked with moral education. Chang’s use of chronotope enhances the significance of mentorship since the events take place in a distended temporality, from 1986 to the first decade of the twenty-first century, that mostly highlights “only a few key moments (. . .) relevant to the story,” as the author puts it (Chang 2016). Thus, the reader concentrates on what was most essential in the characters’ lives, namely the pedagogical encounter. Likewise, the diverse geography that frames these lives does not undermine their relation—on the contrary, it underlines the persistence of the bond which remains strong in spite of the separation imposed by space. Though gender does not seem to be a concern in the narrative, Chang’s choice of a female master could create a new tradition of female-centered mentorship as female professors who enact strong pedagogic bonds are almost inexistent in the American novel—memorable professorial characters are male. Moreover, Chang’s politics of mentorship seems to challenge the view that power dynamics can victimize students. The narrative capitalizes on such dynamics to tip the balance of power in favor of the student while simultaneously highlighting the moral responsibility of both student and professor; the latter is a role-model. Contrary to Blue Angel and The Secret History which deal with a breakdown in the moral responsibility of professors, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost presents a successful transmission of duty facilitated by love.

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The narrative sets up a picture of a small group of students clustered around their professor, an exceptional poet and the greatest institutional asset, but focuses on the two male students, Roman and Bernard. Indeed, they get closer to their professor, earn her blessing, and cultivate what Wang et al. call “a special kind of relationship (. . .) far more instrumental to both parties” (Wang et al. 2017, 54). Their respective interactions with their professor are better understood from the perspective of their personality differences, which also brings into focus the function of creative writing programs that capitalize on the charismatic personality of the mentor—both students are fascinated and awed by her, yet their rapport is shaped by their personalities and expectations. Right from the start, Chang draws contrasted portraits of the two characters—Bernard is depicted as a sort of saint whose devotion to poetry is religious while Roman, who gives up a banking career to become a poet, also nurtures worldly ambitions, such as academic employment and fame. However, their common dedication to poetry leads them to the School which seems to provide what they are after. Their search, which also reveals their different personalities, is expressed in terms that evoke mentorship—while Bernard enrolls in the program looking for a great reader, Roman is looking for a great judge who will validate his work. Thus, mentorship seems to be the primary attraction of the writing program and both students, who relate to their professor through love, make the most of it. The narrative illustrates Wang et al.’s contention that “Successful mentoring relationships are those in which the mentors not only provide the necessary minimum functions to fulfill the title of ‘mentor,’ but also connect psychologically and emotionally with their protégés” (Wang et al. 2017, 56). Though Roman’s moral trajectory is the most salient one and his love affair with Miranda involves the sexual politics of university life, Bernard’s relation to his professor is no less complex, as it is neither teaching nor publishing that he is after. His main pursuit is the unique bond that mentorship can create; for him, it appears endowed with a spiritual aura. As intimated to his friend, Roman, Bernard refers to his mentor as his “One Great Reader” and surprises Roman with the fervent explanation, “I mean the one person to whom I write, whom I will imagine as the ideal witness of my artistic life and work” (Chang 2010, 17). Although he refrains from revealing who the person of his fruitful search is, it becomes clear at the end of the narrative that it is his professor, Miranda. It is worth noting that literary theory abounds in types of readers—“Informed Reader,” “Ideal Reader,” or “Model Reader”—that are, naturally, all theoretical constructs. 1 Each construct emphasizes the part the reader has to play as an active agent in interpreting a text. Chang ironically enriches this typology with her “Great Reader” who, in a creative writing program, has the advantage of being both ideal and real. Her reminder of the mentor’s central-

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ity in a workshop seems to be less ironic. The workshop rests on this mesmerizing figure that leads the student or “acolyte” (Chang 2010, 13) through the maze of creation. Though acolyte is a strong term, it is devoid of irony in the narrative. Students strive to enter Miranda’s seminar “to sit for two years in the circle of her radiance” (11). Indeed, Bernard’s relation to Miranda and his progress in the creative undertaking is the perfect illustration of the mentor’s impact on the protégé. Under Miranda’s compelling, life-long mentorship, Bernard completes his long epic poem, which is the great work of his life, and finds a prestigious publisher, albeit posthumously. His letter to Roman after a post-School meeting with Miranda reveals the moral and artistic significance the teacher has for him. Her enduring interest in his project energizes his work. The value of Bernard’s work is corroborated by Roman’s reading experience when he comes across the completed manuscript. The narrative voice highlights the mounting emotion in the reader and describes its physical manifestations, “his breath growing shallower, his mind ringing with wonder” (Chang 2010, 154). Roman’s sense of wonder confirms the spirituality evoked in the poem’s title, “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost,” which seems to juxtapose the limitations of memory with the vision of infinitude that can inform human life and be captured in the experience of transcendence. This spiritual dimension in art, which emerges from Bernard’s poem, is enhanced by the spirituality that envelops Bernard’s personality. As a matter of fact, Bernard, who totally disregards material possessions and comfort, and who lives for poetry only and with the community of poets he corresponds with—what he calls his “correspondence with the writers of our time” (Chang 2010, 31)—seems to be modeled after the archetype of the sage. As described by Immanuel Kant, “The sage is happy in himself (. . .) he has within himself the source of cheerfulness and righteousness” (Kant 1963, 9). Therefore, according to Wang et al.’s model built on attachment theory in adulthood, Bernard’s attachment style to his mentor seems to be the “secure” type, which is characterized “by positive working models of self and others, expectations of the attachment figure’s availability and support, comfort with dependence on others” (Wang et al. 2017, 59). Significantly, Bernard’s poetic progress is also a progress towards selfrenunciation. His decades-long work on his historical poem about two seventeenth-century explorers, missionary Jacques Marquette and hunter-trapper Louis Jolliet, opens up a vista of holiness at the mouth of Mississippi as the narrative voice intimates to the reader: “For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness—and poetry—find entrance to the human soul” (Chang 2010, 180). Though the reference to poetry is parenthetical, the use of em dashes draws the reader’s attention to the prerequisite of humility for poetic achievement. Precisely, Bernard’s imaginary trip to the explorers’ river bank under Miranda’s guidance is a lesson in humility. Only after working for decades

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on his poem does he become fully aware of the vanity, envy, and desire he harbored in him and begins to see the way to purification, “On the riverbank, he knew he would never be worthy” (180). It seems that the price of being a creator is hubris and only humility could attenuate it. Thus, the perpetual endeavor towards artistic development is accompanied by a struggle for moral growth. Therefore, artistic development and moral growth do seem inseparable and it takes Bernard a lifetime to achieve them. It is thanks to the latter that the poet overcomes the jealousy he experienced for Roman when he discovered that he was Miranda’s lover. The love he belatedly declares to Miranda is not reciprocated with love, only friendship, expressed in strong terms, which indicate the mentor’s reward. “‘Bernard, your friendship, more than any other in my life, has been a great source of support and a great solace” (Chang 2010, 202). The former student’s appreciation of his mentor’s relation to him brings the mentorship process to a successful conclusion, as Bernard’s final assessment on his deathbed reveals—“Unrequited love is love. I was lucky” (202). It seems clear that the student’s sense of purpose, his artistic and moral perseverance, had been supported by his encounter with his great reader, great love, mentor, and friend. It also seems clear that this pilgrim’s progress had been accompanied by a sense of gratitude not only for Miranda who honored him with her life-long attention, expertise, and friendship but also by the sort of gratitude that involves no agency. If the former can be defined as “a response to benevolence” that “does not consist in the requital of benefits,” as Fred Berger rightly puts it (Berger 1975, 229), the latter, termed as “propositional” by Sean McAleer, “may be appropriate even when there is no benefactor intentionally bestowing a benefit” (McAleer 2012, 56). Bernard feels grateful that he has encountered the Great Reader. It is equally worth mentioning Randy and Lori Sansone’s practical, clinical definition of gratitude as “the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself (. . .) a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation” (Sansone and Sansone 2010, 19) for it combines gratitude that involves agency with gratitude that involves no agency. Moreover, McAleer rightly argues that “propositional gratitude and targeted gratitude to nonagents are appropriate and important when they express humility, an important virtue” (McAleer 2012, 58). Bernard’s character not only illustrates the general state of thankfulness which the Sansones, based on empirical studies, associate with “a sense of overall well being,” but it is precisely built on humility; as such it is a foil to Roman’s character which initially illustrates ingratitude. Chang gives gratitude a centrality in her narrative; it is intertwined in the moral relations between her characters and becomes an index of moral growth. Although Roman’s relation to his mentor does not always achieve the high-quality state that is permanently displayed in Bernard and Miranda’s

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interaction and is far more troubled and impaired by a conflict, it finally appears equally poignant and rewarding. Moreover, it involves not only the creative enterprise but also teaching and the moral responsibility it entails. In addition, the narrative investigates but does not dismiss the transgression brought forth by the six-month love affair between professor and student. Therefore, this mentorship involves artistic, moral, and political issues that are overlapping. Clearly, in Roman and Miranda’s interaction, the mentor appears as a parental figure, which can be reinforced by the fact that Roman is in search of his mother who abandoned him when he was a child and never reappeared. In point of fact, the mother figures as an unresolved problem. Precisely, his mentor advises him to do something about it. As a student, Roman’s attachment style to his professor seems to be the “insecure” type, which involves two variants, “anxious” and “avoidant.” While the former is “characterized by a negative working model of self, a strong desire for closeness (. . .) a deep worry about the acceptance (. . .) by others, and a tendency to use hyper-activating strategies to deal with insecurity,” the latter is “characterized by a negative working model of others, discomfort with closeness, a compulsive preference for self-reliance, and a tendency to use deactivating strategies to deal with insecurity” (Wang et al. 2017, 59). It seems that Roman navigates between these two attachment styles, the anxious one with his mentor while at School and the avoidant one when he graduates. It is the latter that he displays with Bernard, adopting a great caution in his friendship with his fellow student. However, at the end of the narrative, Roman’s moral development outgrows this fundamental insecurity which shaped his personality and his relation to others and can be correlated with his feelings of self-doubt and the consequent display of ingratitude. Though the first part of the narrative bears the title, “A Poetic Education,” which Miranda explicitly undertakes with the utmost care providing constructive criticism and advice, Roman is also pictured as a child clinging to his mother. At the same time, pragmatically, he never loses sight of the deadline of their love affair. In the course of this affair that thrives in secrecy, the professor both mothers and instructs him. He is the elected student who benefits from her partiality. Thanks to her, he gains his first fellowship and a prestigious prize followed by academic employment and a brilliant career. Thus, he becomes the exemplary winner of the system established by creative writing programs that provide rewards to encourage the desire to write and make writing materially possible. Indeed, Roman builds his life according to the necessity to write which he discovers in himself. As Stacey d’Erasmo puts it, “The perceived winners in this system are those writers who are empowered to build their lives according to this necessity the longest—the ones for whom the program leads to the fellowship, which leads to the big book contract, which leads to the teaching job with the lightest teach-

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ing load” (D’ Erasmo 2002/2003, 25). Precisely, Roman having access to this sort of empowerment appears as the “poster student” for creative writing programs. However, he also seems to be the winner who does not take all. In spite of the recognition he achieves as a poet, it appears that there is something missing in his work, which his mentor initially points out although she acknowledges the power of his writings. As his professo put it, “‘They draw attention and give nothing back’” (Chang 2010, 45). The narrative voice identifies this problem as an incapacity to love which entails moral and, to Roman’s despair, artistic deficiency. Miranda’s comments, which praise the aesthetic qualities of Roman’s poems but do not evade their moral shortcomings, intensify his doubts about his work. Self-doubt, a major component in this character, appears to be of the type described by Matthew Braslow et al., “beyond a specific sense of performance efficacy, reflecting an individual’s investment—even rumination— over how to view themselves” (Braslow et al. 2012, 472). Thus, it creates dramatic tension and explains Roman’s search of “that One Great Judge” (Chang 2010, 199) capable of eliminating that “warning fissure in the foundation of self-confidence upon which he depended so much” (35). Contrary to his monk-like friend, Bernard, who searches for a Great Reader and finds her, Roman keeps searching for “the great index finger from above” (36) and only at the end of the narrative does he stop believing in its existence. It should be noted that Roman’s fruitless search implicitly questions the formalist theories of the New Critics, influential from the 1930s to 1950s, who maintained that meaning—and by extension value—could be objectively assessed according to certain criteria formulated by experts. It is to such an expert that Roman turns as he asks for Miranda’s confirmation on the value of his poetry even years later when he finds out that she used her influence in the committee to give him the Detweiler Prize that launched his career. As the narrative voice states, “He understood that her greatest appeal to him was the faith he put into her opinion of what was good and what was not. Yet he had felt, also, a tearing need to know that she had missed him” (Chang 2010, 131). Naturally, Miranda’s double role as a mentor and a lover does not appear unproblematic in the course of the narrative, albeit complementary at the end. In fact, as a mentor, Miranda had tried to warn her student of the risks their affair involved. If she risked her job, her reputation, and her marriage, Roman’s risks “as a person, and, as a poet” (Chang 2010, 76) were no less considerable. However, the student chose to ignore these risks, as his reaction to his classmate, Phoebe, who pointed out to him that professors were intimate with students all the time arguing that it was “not illegal” (49) indicates—“Roman wanted to cover his ears” (49). Likewise, he panics when his professor mentions the dangers, “Don’t tell me (. . .) I don’t want to

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know” (Chang 2010, 77), again choosing flight over fight. Both reactions reveal the lack of self-confidence in his work. However, the student cannot flee from facing the truth. Miranda’s sibylline statement as a way out of Roman’s refusal to understand, “Let’s say that this is part of your poetic education” (Chang 2010, 77), does seem to subsume moral education under poetic education, as her student is required to assess and assume responsibility for his actions. As David Velleman states, “Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality. The question, then, is not whether two divergent perspectives can be accommodated but rather how these two perspectives converge” (Velleman 1999, 341). The mentor’s poetic education seems to aim at the convergence of these two perspectives. The risks take a toll on both professor and student. If giving her student the prize costs Miranda her reputation, it entails a severe crisis of self-doubt in Roman, which spoils his relation to his mentor. Belle Rose Ragins and Kathy Kram identify phases that make up mentoring relationships namely, “initiation, cultivation, separation, redefinition” (Ragins and Kram 2007). The separation phase in Miranda and Roman’s relationship is characterized by dramatic developments. To start with, the unemotional goodbye to his mentor on graduation day, marked by Roman’s switching to the avoidant style, was sealed by a problematic statement, “I’m indebted to you” (Chang 2010, 85). The protégé’s recognition of his mentor’s contribution to the launching of his career seems to represent for him the incurrence of a debt that can only be distasteful to him for, as Kant says, he is “placed under an obligation to the giver” (Kant 1996, 218). Kant specifies that if the person who receives a favor is proud and selfish, “the feeling that he is beholden to his benefactor hurts his pride. (. . .) He becomes defiant and ungrateful” (219). In fact, Miranda’s attribution of the Detweiler to Roman intensifies his sense of indebtedness and, as it simultaneously reactivates his doubts about the value of his poems, triggers a show of ingratitude which Kant considers as a vice and “devilish” (Kant 1996, 219). In his post-Detweiler meeting with his mentor, the former protégé questions her benevolence. When his feelings of self-doubt are not fully assuaged by Miranda, he attributes ulterior, selfserving motives to it, namely her desire to see him, using the prize to engineer their meeting. The mentor’s astonishment, disappointment, and distress revealed in her brief response, “You meant the world to me” (Chang 2010, 134), highlight the protégé’s ingratitude and the extent of his self-doubt. In fact, research has shown that “individuals troubled by self-doubt underestimated the strength of their partners’ love” (Murray et al. 2001, 423). As a matter of fact, Roman seems to be suffering from chronic self-doubt, defined as “the experience of general uncertainty about one’s competence coupled with an intense preoccupation over prospective failure and negative

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evaluation” (Carroll, Arkin, and Shade 2011, 190). Research has also shown that one coping strategy is overachievement and Roman’s career can be seen in this light. In addition, self-doubt about his artistic competence triggers not only the self-defeating behavior towards his former professor but also the rupture of his friendship with Bernard when the latter appears reluctant to give him his opinion about his new work, An Imagined Life. Roman’s hospitality towards Bernard, who at a certain point of his life finds himself homeless, stops appearing as an act of benevolence, as the former exacts a return for the benefit he offers, that is, Bernard’s judgment, which Roman highly values, on his manuscript. Consequently, Bernard recognizes this debt, “I do owe you” (Chang 2010, 164). As Berger points out, “To show that we feel we are obligated demonstrates that the gift misfired to a certain extent or, at worst, gives reason to think the donee misread the intentions of the grantor” (Berger 1975, 302). Bernard had erroneously believed in Roman’s friendship. Though laudatory, his comments on Roman’s poetry echoing Miranda’s past reservations indicate Roman’s persisting moral deficiency, “‘your self is never present in the poems. You seem to risk nothing’” (Chang 2010, 165). In addition, the break in this friendship also alienates Lucy as she becomes aware of this deficiency and thus becomes one of the reasons that provokes the couple’s divorce. However, Chang’s character is endowed with the capacity to change. The narrative subtly points to Roman’s slow progress towards moral maturity. In the middle of the narrative, Roman’s display of ingratitude is toned down by his consideration of love, which anticipates Ragins and Kram’s redefinition stage of the mentor-protégé relation. Right after his conflictual meeting with Miranda, the former student, whose offensive attitude dishonored his professor, reassesses his bond to her. As the narrative voice makes clear, “Roman felt on some level that nothing had changed. Deep down, nothing that had been said would change it—the puzzling and undefinable thing—the essential attachment between them so incomprehensible and so unspoken that he rarely cared to think of it. Had it not been the crux of their attachment that he was the pupil and she the instructor? She had been meant to introduce him to the world and to his future” (Chang 2010, 135). Thus, Roman appears not as a vile or “devilish” character but just as a careless arrogant boy tormented by self-doubt. Amid complex emotions, the narrative tries to grasp the essence of pedagogical Eros. Its elusiveness and resistance to definition confers upon it a mysterious aura and its endowment with a mission makes it a special category of love. Roman’s assertion of this love that can survive conflict points to the power of the bond which paradoxically persists in oblivion—it is forgotten but not lost. Likewise, Miranda’s reference to “the relationships that cannot be easily categorized by any official record” (Chang 2010, 104), such

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as Marquette and Jolliet’s, central in Bernard’s poem, can be transferred to mentor and protégé’s encounter since no official record can preserve the emotional give-and-take between the pedagogical couple. As such, her remark is complementary to the definition of pedagogical Eros given by the narrative voice. In spite of the conflict that marks the separation phase in Miranda and Roman’s relation, the bond stays intact in Roman’s mind, as the narrative voice indicated, and his professor remains his role model in the pedagogical undertaking. Roman’s relation to his student, Veronica, is certainly a mise en abyme that helps the reader understand Roman’s moral development—Veronica displays the same ingratitude towards her professor who advised and helped her organize, complete, and make her novel publishable. Moreover, in what we could call the moral plot in the narrative, the student’s attitude encourages the professor, who sees the student as “a monster of self-absorption” (Chang 2010, 151), to reconsider his own behavior toward his mentor but also to become aware of his responsibility toward his student. Veronica is Roman’s mirror image and as such it can make the latter aware of his own attitude toward his professor. Chang’s narrative economy eliminates the pitfalls of didacticism—no explicit connections are established among these developments. Moreover, Roman’s stance concerning student-professor relations also indicates that he highly values his encounter with Miranda. The narrative voice records the evolution of the professorial figure in almost three decades, “Bernard had no idea of how times had changed. He had seen their teachers as monolithic mysterious forces of nature rather than people. To such a force of nature, one made sacrifices; one prayed; (. . .) no one expected to be taken by the hand and mentored” (Chang 2010, 145). The regretful tone in this passage that can conjure up current student incivility, intimidation, and entitlement in academia 2—as well as the allusion to a loss of students’ autonomy that may remind the reader of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s ideas in their book (2018), The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure—is an implicit tribute to Miranda. Furthermore, the narrative turns the tables and encourages the reader to consider the benefits of love in the pedagogical relationship. Roman’s view could certainly appear provocative to those who hold the view that a sexual relationship or a romance between a teacher and student is an abuse of power and are in favor of the current rules and regulations. His reluctance to endorse his peers’ vision of the educational rapport is certainly based on the personal experience he had with his own teacher. “He did not know if the rules were most helpful in preventing a student from suffering abuse or in avoiding a situation where the other students watched jealously from the outside, knowing they were learning relatively little, while one of them had

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access to so much” (Chang 2010, 148). The narrative illustrates Roman’s tentative articulation of his convictions—Roman had been the object of Bernard’s jealousy and the former’s case exemplifies these benefits which are both material and moral. Precisely, the third part, redundantly titled, “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost,” provides a sort of moral denouement, since the long-due gratitude Roman withheld from his mentor, as both Lucy and Bernard had pointed out to him, is liberated. McCullough et al., who analyze gratitude as a moral affect, contend that “benevolence from social superiors (e.g., teachers or professors) might be perceived as more deliberate, and thus more moral, than benevolence rendered by a person of similar social status” (McCullough et al. 2001, 255). If Bernard’s perception of Miranda’s benevolence was clear and untroubled, Roman kept fighting against it for a long while. However, when such a perception is no longer obscured by his troubled personality, not only are his emotions overflowing but also his commitment as a teacher acquires a grave finality, related to his former mentor. Roman acknowledges the happiness he experienced next to Miranda as well as his own duties. As the narrative voice states, “He had known (. . .) that he was required to take his place among the generation of elders. Now, with the death of his teacher, this was irrefutable” (Chang 2010, 188). Indeed, McCullough et al. also consider gratitude as a “moral motive”—grateful emotions can motivate people to reciprocate prosocial behavior” (McCullough et al. 2001, 257). Thus, the narrative illustrates the Platonic idea that the ultimate goal of education is the apprehension of the idea of the good. In the invisible chain of events, Roman finally mends his broken friendship with Bernard when the latter writes to him from his deathbed and recovers in him his attachment to Miranda, thus restoring moral order. If the transcending experience he had been waiting for would not take place, what does take place is the loving return of his teacher in involuntary memory. Thus, on his way to meet Phoebe, his former classmate and currently a professor, he is “suddenly filled with a yearning for winter (. . .) Miranda’s laughter” (Chang 2010, 188). The recovery of Miranda’s graduation gift to him, a signed copy of her poetry collection, Flight, which he had lent to Bernard, further triggers a flurry of memories and their moment of grace— “He understood now that she had given him the Detweiler out of love” (204)—and mortification, “He wished to beseech her forgiveness” (205). This belated recognition and wish for reparation amount to gratitude. As Berger puts it, “being grateful to someone involves having a set of beliefs, feelings, and attitudes which are manifested when we show gratitude (. . .) but showing gratitude involves a demonstration of those beliefs and attitudes” (Berger 1975, 305). Thus, filling the pedagogical void which Miranda left behind is a demonstration of Roman’s determination to honor her. Miranda’s irrevocable ab-

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sence bestows pathos to Roman’s state and can modify the reader’s perception of the character which now appears more likeable in his distress and reflective attitude. In fact, according to McCullough et al., “gratitude is related to personality variables”—while “agreeableness is positively associated with gratitude,” narcissism is associated with ingratitude (McCullough et al. 2001, 260). Outgrowing one’s narcissism, which appears to be the case with this character, is a sign of moral maturity. Therefore, the passage of time in the narrative is clearly marked by a long moral journey for Miranda’s students. This journey took Bernard from a state of humility and aspiring creation to one of deeper humility and artistic perfection, while it took Roman from a state of ungratefulness and narcissistic confinement to one of gratitude and accomplishment as a pedagogue, which indicates social commitment. In both cases, the guide was the moral affect of love and in particular the pedagogical bond, a special category of love. Moreover, the narrative seems to redeem much-criticized creative writing programs which here appear as crucibles not only for the making of the artist but also of the moral person. Contrary to Susan Choi who, in an interview, questions MFA culture and considers that a “lot of it is (. . .) an economy to keep writers (. . .) afloat” (Choi 2014), Chang clearly favors a different perspective, namely an artistic and moral one. Though Francine Prose in Blue Angel (2000) seems to raise some questions about these programs, her main focus is the power differential between student and professor. NOTES 1. For a typology of readers, see Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction. 2. See June Williams’s article, “When Students Become Class Bullies, Professors Are Among the Victims.”

Chapter Three

The Power Differential Between Professor and Student in Francine Prose’s Blue Angel

Just like Lan Samantha Chang, Francine Prose places the pedagogical encounter in a creative writing program but gives a much greater prominence to the academic and political environment that frames it. Though published in 2000, Blue Angel became of even greater interest in the years that followed its publication. The intense revival of the PC and sexual harassment debates with Donald Trump’s political incorrectness and Harvey Weinstein’s scandals imparted an uncanny relevance to the issues that Prose’s novel brings up. Circumscribing the academic microcosm, Prose pores over a relationship caught in the maelstrom of the 1990s academic and social developments that Blue Angel chronicles. The novel could be read as a study of power that those developments foregrounded, namely the deep rooting of “political correctness” and the legal and academic devices that enforced it in American universities, the alarming rise of the so-called moral culture, and the intensification of the gender war. Prose, an eclectic writer and a feminist, takes a critical stance on these developments, encouraging the reader to think beyond ideological constraints. Precisely, it is literature that can help one to rise above them. Steiner’s typology of exploitation, subversion, and exchange that underpin the master-disciple phenomenology clearly coexist and overlap in Blue Angel—the novel blurs the frontiers among these categories. In fact, what starts as a constructive exchange and interaction between a professor and a student in the narrative turns into a sexual harassment case, and finally morphs into a sort of creative destruction, as the narrative illustrates the 31

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ancient Indian idea reformulated by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in economy, “from destruction a new spirit of creation arises.” 1 As the plot goes, Ted Swenson, a middle-aged professor of creative writing at Euston College, a liberal arts college in northern Vermont, falls in love with his talented student, Angela Argo who, after inviting him to her bed, charges Swenson with sexual harassment. Nonplussed and unwilling to resign, the professor refuses to express remorse or seek repentance. Consequently, he is fired and loses his family but falls back on the moral superiority of literature which offers understanding rather than judgment. Through its focus on the power differential between professor and student, the narrative examines academic politics, feminist politics, and what could be called literary politics. Power appears in Blue Angel as a manifold structure that underpins and fashions all exchanges. A simple definition of power is provided by Amy Allen who broadly defines the concept “as the ability or capacity of an actor or set of actors to act” (Allen 1998, 36) and puts forward three forms of power, power-over, power-to, and power-with not as “distinct types (. . .) of power” but as “distinguishable features of a situation” (37). The narrative creates situations that illustrate these features. First of all, it seems to depict an academic environment in which the balance of power has been tipped in favor of the students. Fear and mistrust seem to reign in the classroom, between administration and professors and among professors themselves. Political correctness—a term originally coined by progressives in a jocular mood, the notion of which their opponents at the other end of the political spectrum have severely criticized and ridiculed— seems to be responsible for this injurious atmosphere. Prose’s narrative may make the reader wonder whether the progressive resolve for social justice and protection of weaker groups is getting out of hand as PC becomes the butt of jokes not just for conservatives but also for novelists whose primary concern is truth. In this third-person narrative, the main character and focalizer, Ted Swenson, is hardly an unreliable one. His experience of the classroom is recounted in witty terms, rich in tropes, “Every classroom is a lion’s den, every teacher a Daniel” (Prose 2000, 23). The job of a creative writing professor is even tougher as it deals with the students’ sensibilities and need for expression; Swenson perceives the hearts and minds of his students as “minefields” “to pick his way through” (4). Proleptically, the student who is going to ruin his life is described as “a lit fire-cracker in their midst” (9). Swenson’s main preoccupation is how to make the classroom a so-called safe space so as not to risk his job. If social psychologist Jonathan Haidt—a sharp critic of what he calls “the new moral culture,” arguing that colleges are nurturing a hypersensitive mindset among students, ultimately damaging to them—can be

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criticized as “a closet conservative or a useful idiot for the right” (Goldstein 2017), Prose could hardly be seen as such. While the first chapter of the novel depicts the classroom as a slippery, even dangerous space for a professor, the second chapter sets the stage for the gender war raging in the course of the narrative. As the narrative voice puts it, “Any spark can set off the tinderbox of the gender war” (Prose 2000, 23). Swenson’s “chilly collegiality” with his colleague Lauren Healy, acting head of the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance, who “wants him dead” (21), sounds ominous. Swenson, “stranded (. . .) in the heart of the stony heart of Puritan New England” (25), pictures Dean Bentham, who updates the Euston College policy on sexual harassment, as “a punitive pediatrician,” “a slightly perverted headmaster” (21). During dinner at the dean’s place, Swenson’s defense of Philip Larkin, who is considered by some critics (Terry Eagleton, Stan Smith, Tom Paulin, Lisa Jardine, among others) as nostalgic of colonialism, a misogynist, and a racist 2, misfires and his outburst against repression is quelled by the general horror or embarrassment. 3 Therefore, the academic relational background to the psychodrama that is going to be acted between Swenson and Argo is delineated early in the narrative and appears more prominent as the interaction between the professor and the student becomes more intimate. The crux of the matter in the narrative appears to be “the power gap between teacher and student” whose “moral implications” (Prose 2000, 23) Swenson recognizes. It should be mentioned that to remedy this gap, the employment-based law on sexual harassment has been extended to the university since 1980. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Professional Ethics warns professors against exploitation of students for private advantage. This statement was, actually, the basis for a court decision, namely Korf v. Ball State University (1984), allowing a university to dismiss a faculty member who had engaged in a consensual relationship with a student. The legal background that underpins the update of the Euston College policy on sexual harassment is highlighted in the narrative by a court case that involved a professor at a state university accused of leering. The current policy clearly marks a break with past practices as the narrative voice ironically states, “All right. They can agree to that so long as it’s not retroactive. In the old days, undergraduate paramours were a perk that went with the job” (Prose 2000, 22). However, this reminder of the professorial abuse of power is followed upon another reminder, “the erotics of teaching.” As the focalizer, Swenson reflects, “there is something erotic about the act of teaching, all that information streaming back and forth like some (. . .) bodily fluid” (22). Nevertheless, the view of students as perks “that went with the job” implies a situation of domination, a subfield of the concept of power-over, according to Thomas Wartenberg who defines this concept as follows, “an agent A exercises power over an agent B if A uses his control on B’s action-

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environment to change it in some fundamental way” (Wartenberg 1988, 11). Differentiating exercise from use, Wartenberg points to uses of power that could be either beneficial or detrimental to subjects. In the “erotics of teaching,” the exercise of power can be positive—in Swenson’s long experience, special affinities with his students made them work harder and learn more. Prose’s professor is certainly not a stereotype of “the lecherous professor,” though he regrets missed opportunities since he also seems to perceive himself as “the only sucker at Euston who never slept with his students” (Prose 2000, 77), as the narrative voice indicates. However, he finds himself entangled in a consensual relationship, which the narrative questions since it dramatically reverses the power differential between professor and student. Initially, the encounter between a single-minded student with a passion for literature and a blocked writer, mired in midlife crisis, is a constructive one. Swenson, thrilled to discover talent, exercises his power over his student in a positive way. At this stage, Angela Argo, an avid reader and a dedicated writer, is an awkward, worshipping student, a disciple—she confides to her professor that his book saved her life. When her talent is recognized by Swenson, who becomes her reader and the editor of her novel-in-progress, she is transformed into a self-confident writer with declared ambitions for publication. However, the erotics of teaching turn into a destructive force for the vulnerable professor who, falling in love with his student, becomes a victim of her transformation. It is worth noting that both Daphne Patai, in Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, and Chloë Taylor, in “Disciplinary Relations/Sexual Relations: Feminist and Foucauldian Reflections on Professor–Student Sex,” point to professors’ “sexual vulnerability” (Patai 2000, 113) and to the agency such vulnerability confers to students. Moreover, the professor’s admiration for his student’s novel, which draws his attention to her in the first place, makes him a “groupie” (Prose 2000, 254), in his wife’s perception of Swenson’s interaction with Argo. It turns out that Swenson’s student negatively wields power over the professor, namely influence and its subcategory, manipulation. According to Wartenberg, influence is one of the three main forms of power, along with force and coercion, which “secures its ends in a more subtle manner, less likely to engender resistance” (Wartenberg 1988, 25). In the course of the narrative, the student enters the game of seduction, aiming at convincing the professor, who is unaware of her motives, to show her novel to his New York editor, Len Currie. Thus, Argo conceals the grounds for her seductive action. For Wartenberg, “it is this cognitive component that characterizes manipulation as a particular form of influence in which power is always at stake” (Wartenberg 1988, 24). Contrary to other writers such as Suzan Choi (My Education) and Jessica Lott (The Rest of Us) who, in 2013 and 2019, rehabilitate Eros between

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professors and students, Prose sets out to illustrate her belief, stated in her interview, “A Conversation with Francine Prose,” published along with the novel, that “sex between teachers and students is a bad idea” (6). 4 At the same time, unlike Billie Wright Dziech, who also advocates “the absurdity of faculty-student romance” (Dziech 2003, 156), Prose seems to question academic policies that forbid consensual relationships. Apparently, as D. G. Myers reports, the author was “provoked by the case of her friend Stephen Dobyns, a poet and a novelist who was suspended from his job at Syracuse University after making remarks about a graduate student’s breasts” (Myers 2010). Thus Prose creates a professor who, victimized by his student, is humiliated and loses his job unfairly. Indeed, Argo lures Swenson to her flat and then to her bed. His mental response to her question at the critical moment, whether he was “sure to do this” (Prose 2000, 169), points to the reversal of roles and evokes William Gass’s professor in The Tunnel who, also subjugated by love, remarks, “it was I who was supposed to be having an adventure, but it was she who had it” (Gass 1995, 557). The stakes for Argo are more than an adventure; mainstream publication is her goal. At the same time, the joke is on the professor—at the crucial moment, Swenson breaks his ailing molar and is given no second chance as the disruptive event, heavy with Freudian allusions to castration, brings his sexual intercourse with Argo to a full stop. Thus the broken tooth turns into what Eric Leuschner calls “the trope of the damaged professor” which “plays into a deeper characterization of the professoriate as a palpable symptom of the institutional and social critique explored by the academic novel” (Leuschner 2006, 340–341). Prose contributes to this critique with some recourse to satire. The broken molar scene clearly has a satiric intent. If the scene initially underlines the shift in the psychological power between professor and student, whose reversal Michele Paludi would find implausible, 5 what follows, that is, a sexual harassment case, also reverses the moral power between professor and student—the predator seems to be the student. When Argo finds out that there is no hope for publishing her book, she secretly records her conversation with her professor, edits it, accuses him of sexual harassment, and threatens to sue the college. While, on the one hand, Prose seems to satirize the professor, on the other hand, she also seems to make the student morally accountable for her act. Precisely, reviewers of the novel, such as Lucinda Rosenfeld, dismissed the female character as a “bitch” and a manipulator. Argo is far from being a victim; she is the victor who capitalizes on the so called “victimhood culture.” Swenson’s genuine bewilderment, expressed in his last question to his student, “What the fuck were you doing?” (Prose 2000, 312), could be shared by some readers. The professor’s dismissal by his college could seem unfair since it involves another reversal—the legal power meant to protect a victim

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is wielded by the victor. The reader may wonder whether Prose rejects her female character too easily, betraying her feminist commitments. An inquiry into the feminist politics of the novel could provide an answer. There is certainly an imbalance of focalizing power between the two main characters in the narrative—the focalizer is Swenson while access to Argo is only given through her acts and direct discourse. Thus, the reader is more likely to sympathize with the professor whose emotions abound in the narrative. However, the novel goes far beyond showing the tribulations of the straight, white male in a toxic environment in the last decade of the twentieth century, as is the case with Edward Allen’s Mustang Sally: A Novel. It also shows the tribulations of a young feminist. Though pathos surrounds the male character’s plight, the female character is more complex and mysterious, notably a two-faced young woman, a sort of fragile fighter who is struggling for her life. In fact, all the metal armor in Argo’s appearance seems to be a defense against a shaky psychological make-up. While her confidence in her writing, thanks to her professor’s praise and encouragement, empowers her, Angela is also “suicidal,” “the weakest, most vulnerable, most unstable girl on campus,” according to the campus nurse, Sherrie Swenson, the professor’s wife (Prose 2000, 255). In this morality tale, if Swenson is finally “crucified,” as his wife hoped he would be (255), this sort of semi-mock martyrdom does not fully overshadow the student’s story. His perplexity over her points to his lack of insight into his student. Billie Wright Dziech rightly states that professors “lose sight of the identities of the people they teach” (Dziech 2003, 157). Swenson seems to underestimate the fact that to become a writer is a matter of life and death for Argo, who is nurtured by literature. The psychological dynamics of the relationship is crucial to the plot. In fact, the destructive phase is put into motion when Argo thinks that she is let down by her professor and, consequently, her dream of publication is shattered. She pictures herself as a graduate with a professionally useless degree destined to become a drugstore employee, which also puts into question the creative writing programs. Before it takes an official form, her angry complaint is initially to him. As she tells her professor, “‘I can’t believe you didn’t fight harder for me’” (Prose 2000, 236). Thus, from an admiring student and a seductress, she is transformed into an avenger and a torturer. Interestingly, Swenson pinpoints “that tiny power reversal, that tiny tweak of S&M” (265) that occurs in Josef von Sternberg’s classic film, The Blue Angel, which reflects his own condition. Precisely, in her article, “Sexual Harassment and Sadomasochism,” Christine Williams observes that “When interpersonal relationships between faculty and students take on a specifically sexual or erotic character, they often develop sadomasochistic aspects” (Williams 2002, 106).

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Thus Argo’s punitive action appears as a vindictive response to what she perceives as her professor’s abandonment of her but also a male betrayal. Precisely, Roseanne Lucia Quinn in an autobiographical article wishes she had denounced the professor who seduced her. As she puts it, “if I had taken public action (. . .) I would have made of myself an indelible mark instead of a water-based impression” (Quinn 1993, 22). It may be this “indelible mark” that Argo is making although she initiated the seduction. Her accusation of sexual harassment politicizes her experience. If for Swenson this encounter is “personal” (Prose 2000, 309), for Argo, it becomes political. Through the latter, Prose delineates a third-wave feminism that leaves behind the socalled victim feminism of Catharine MacKinnon 6 but also its opponent, “the pleasure feminism” of Katie Roiphe. 7 The term, “third-wave feminism,” “a common reference on college campuses and among feminists” (Baumgardner and Richards 2010, xi) and in opposition to a depoliticizing postfeminism, refers to a nonjudgmental, pluralistic movement that stresses choice and individuality. The movement is a response to Naomi Wolf’s call for a new power feminism or Rebecca Walker’s call for a necessity to embrace contradictions. 8 It is this brand of feminism, defined as something individual to each woman, this new individuality firing on all cylinders, that Prose’s character represents. In fact, Punk-looking Argo is not affiliated with any group but claims her right to self-determination, knows what she wants, and strives to get it no matter how. It can be noted that Elizabeth Wurtzel in Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women celebrates the ascendancy of women who act improperly and can be exploitive or violent. Argo is the intrepid, tough fighter that reemerges when Swenson’s trial draws to a close and he discovers that his editor did finally read his student’s novel and gave her a contract, “there’s the Angela Argo she knows” (304), that is, the one who stops playing the victim’s role she had faked before the academic committee. Indeed, Argo is also the woman who gave her pornographic poems, most likely based on her personal experience as a phone sex worker, to the college library. Moreover, contrary to the female characters in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, who denounced their professors only because they were under pressure, Argo does so deliberately, producing an edited recording in which she offers a business transaction version of her relationship to Swenson—in her own discourse, “‘The only reason I let you fuck me was so you would help me get this novel to someone who could do something’” (Prose 2000, 243). This nonnormative sexuality and amorality are accommodated by third-wave feminism which, according to Amber Kinser, “speaks to a ‘media-savvy, culture-driven’ generation of young women” (Kinser 2004, 136), “devoted to reducing the stigma surrounding sexual pleasure in feminism and U.S. culture” (Snyder 2008, 188). Prose’s character seems to be such a woman.

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Ironically, this sexuality is not on trial in the Puritan Cabot Hall, for the case provides a powerful weapon to the previous generation of feminists in the gender war that is inflamed at the end of the narrative. Lauren Healy transforms from being a simple misreader of literature, in Swenson’s perception of her, to becoming his chief prosecutor. Likewise, “the generous, Mother-Hubbard librarian” turns into a “retentive librarian” (Prose 2000, 281). The same transformation occurs to Swenson’s nearest and dearest. First, Argo, from cherished student and a sustaining paramour, turns into “a shark” (263), “a bloodthirsty killer” (299). Next, Sherrie Swenson initially dismisses her husband with a generalization, “Guys turn out to be guys” (278). Then, she enlists their daughter, already engaged in the feminist cause, against her father as well as her friend and colleague, Arlene Shurley, who testifies against him and offers shelter to his wife. Finally, she abandons him. Thus Swenson’s initial apprehension of women as “another species” (Prose 2000, 80) narrows to a perception of them as “a coven of vengeful harpies” (198) which ties in with his editor’s warning, “hang onto your balls” (220). The latter is one of these men who resist the protective academic policies. As the narrative voice puts it, “in face [he] doesn’t want to hear that Swenson is toeing the politically correct line of sexual harassment. He would have respected Swenson more if he were screwing the entire female student population” (220). In spite of the warnings and all his efforts, the amorous professor, unlike Philip Roth’s character in The Dying Animal who cleverly bypasses the danger of being caught as a harasser, remains on the front line. Therefore, it may not be productive to ask whose side Francine Prose is on, for she is on the side of literature. It becomes clear that the author loves her characters, which takes her away from writing mere satire. When it comes to who is right or wrong, Prose cultivates the art of ambiguity, keeping the reader suspended as confinement on either side would only result in ignorance. Ultimately, in this power struggle that has several setbacks for both parties, it is the moral power of literature that may be lasting. The narrative, both a tribute to and a defense of literature, capitalizes on intertexuality which enhances the understanding of the two sides—both fictional and historical, the intertextual network actually provides a reading guide into the narrative. Moreover, Blue Angel demonstrates Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life that literature exercises our moral imagination, and her belief that it is necessary for institutions to be informed by “the insights of compassionate imagination” (Nussbaum 1995, xviii). Furthermore, the novel points to two more aspects of power, power-to and power-with, defined by Allen. As she puts it, “power-to is the individual ability or capacity to act so as to attain some end; and power-with is the collective ability or the capacity to act together so as to attain some common or shared end” (Allen 1998, 36).

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Indeed, the elective affinities initially manifested between the aspiring student and the jaded professor are based on the centrality of literature in their lives and, more particularly, the genuine admiration for each other’s novels. Their novels announce the narrative developments—Argo’s novel, Eggs, offers a prolepsis to the reversal of the power differential between student and teacher and Swenson’s Phoenix Time, mainly through its title, points to his moral recovery thanks to Anton Chekhov. Precisely, for Allen the concept of power-to amounts to resistance and empowerment. Swenson emerges from his drunken stupor, confronts the committee with his own convictions, and can face the uncertainties of the future “light-hearted” (Prose 2000, 314) thanks to epiphanies he gained while watching The Blue Angel and reading Chekhov, the patron saint of the narrative right from the beginning to the end. As the narrative voice makes clear, “No one forgives the liars, the cheaters. Except for Chekhov, of course. That’s what Swenson wants: the end of ‘The Lady with the Pet Dog,’ Gurov and Anna (. . .) they’re not just small and ridiculous (. . .) but humans, acting out of their mortal desires and dreams and fears, and therefore lovable and forgivable” (260). Likewise, Swenson is neither “a slob” nor “a predator” but just a vulnerable professor who aspires to transcend mundane existence, and Argo is neither “a little slut” nor a guileless girl but just a striver seeking to fulfill her calling. Such a recognition, achieved through the exercise of moral imagination, could prevent downright dismissal of one or the other, along with the gender groups they belong to, and confer the sort of collective ability to act together. Prose would certainly agree with Nussbaum’s controversial belief that “Narrative literature does have the potential to make a contribution to the law in particular, to public reasoning generally” (Nussbaum 1995, xv). The academic “court” that puts Swenson on trial in the narrative is heavily flawed for it lacks sensitive, empathetic, humanistic, multivalued concerns honed on literature. It is no wonder, then, that the author is keen on exposing the declining standards of readers and the uncertain future of mid-list writers who are talented and may still try to maintain high literary standards. Swenson’s editor comes up with an alarming picture of the book industry and of readers’ replacement of novels by “cheesy memoir[s]” (Prose 2000, 222). If Swenson could afford to decline Currie’s lucrative offer to write such a fabricated, sensational memoir that would pander to voyeuristic taste, eloquently described by the latter, “Novels just don’t give the reader the same kind of hard-on” (222), it would certainly be much more difficult for a struggling young writer such as Argo to do so. As she loudly admits, “I would have written the memoir (. . .) if someone said they’d pay for it. It’s easy for you to have standards, you and your nice fat teaching job” (236). Prose simply depicts the desperation of talented new writers in a book industry whose single concern is profit.

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Through this confrontation between an emerging young writer and an established one, Prose broadens the perspective of the professor-student encounter. In spite of the uncertain future of literary fiction, the author subtly manages to accommodate her faith in the power of literature pragmatically and in a balanced narrative giving each issue its due. The same faith in this power emerges in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, which examines its healing properties. NOTES 1. Erik S. Reinert, who cites Sombart’s famous phrase, also states that though “‘creative destruction’ has almost become the trademark of Joseph Schumpeter (. . .) the first use of the term (. . .) must be attributed to Werner Sombart” (Reinert 2019, 403). 2. John Osborne in his study, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction, gives a long list of the poet’s critics (Osborne 2008, 187). 3. While David Bromwich in his article, “The New Campus Censors,” denounces the students’ power over free speech on American campuses, it seems that the freedom of speech is jeopardized at every level—it is Swenson’s colleagues who silence him. 4. That also seems to be the drift in Robert Stone’s 2013 novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl. 5. See, “They [harassers] deny the inherent power difference between themselves and their students as well as the psychological power conferred by this difference” (Paludi 1990, 75). 6. Stuart Jeffries says about Catherine MacKinnon, “Naomi Wolf branded her a ‘victim feminist.’ ‘Victim feminism,’ claims Wolf, ‘urges women to identify with powerlessness, even at the expense of taking responsibility for the power they do possess’” (MacKinnon 2006). Indeed, in the 1990s, among other feminists, Wolf, in her book, Fire with Fire (1993), made the argument that the women’s movement was dominated by the view of women as victims. However, Elisabeth M. Schneider’s article, “Feminism and the False Dichotomy of Victimization and Agency” (1995) is an attempt to appease the tensions that conflicting views generated. 7. See Katie Roiphe’s controversial 1993 book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, in which she criticizes women for crying “date rape.” 8. See Claire Snyder’s article, “What Is Third - Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.”

Chapter Four

The Myth of the Wounded Healer in Pedagogy Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys

Michael Chabon, the wonder boy of creative writing programs in the United States—awarded with a MFA from the University of California in Irvine, after his highly successful first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, came up with an equally successful second narrative, his witty Wonder Boys, published in 1995 and made into a film in 2000. In this novel, Chabon capitalizes on the mythical figure of wounded healer, a cultural archetype revisited by Carl Jung who used this topos to describe the phenomenon that may take place between a patient and a therapist. Chabon’s narrative sets up a pantheon of wounded healers devoted to literature and bound together by a complex network of mentorships. This universal figure that emerges in myths and rituals involves the paradoxical situation of an incurable disease whose recognition as a calling has healing properties. In their historical overview of this figure, Noga Zerubavel and Margaret O ’Dougherty Wright comprehensively state that “The construct of the wounded healer has existed for over 2,500 years and has its origins in Greek mythology and shamanistic traditions (Groesbeck 1975; Kirmayer 2003). Images of the wounded healer permeate religion, philosophy, and art, but also have a place in psychotherapy, counseling, and medicine, denoting a powerful duality of woundedness and healing within the therapeutic relationship” (Zerubavel and Wright 2012, 483). Notably in Greek mythology, Apollo, Asclepius, and Chiron are figured as wounded healers. 1

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However, while the wounded healer has been investigated in the clinical encounter, it has hardly been examined in the pedagogical and, more particularly, within creative writing programs which allow participants to share an existential vulnerability and teach them how to channel it into craft. 2 Moreover, since “it is critical to have an environment that is not experienced as shaming or stigmatizing,” as Zerubavel and Wright state, the creative writing workshop provides such safety through the aestheticization of experience (Zerubavel and Wright 2012, 489). Creative writing workshops could carry echoes from the myth of Asclepius, the Greco-Roman god of medicine, who in recognition of his own wounds established a sanctuary at Epidaurus where others could be healed of their wounds. The novel points to a keen interest in this figure that clearly emerges in the pedagogical environment of the narrative and can be examined not only from a pedagogic perspective but in combination with a scientific and an economic one. Chabon’s approach to this special category of sufferer is quite original and deep in reflexive modernity. In Wonder Boys, the myth is put into full perspective in the context of historical developments in American education, mainly the rise of Mark McGurl’s “Program Era,” the period marked by the postwar establishment of creative writing programs in American universities that have somewhat democratized the access to the craft of fiction. The American writer undertakes the portrait of the artist as a wounded healer in this first-person narrative which mostly takes place over a busy weekend. The main character, creative writing professor Grady Tripp, in the midst of WordFest, the annual literary festival at his university, is watching his fragile life smashing into smithereens as he finally loses his huge, inprogress, never-ending novel, his job, his wife, and, very nearly, his pregnant-by-him lover. However, the gains should not be overlooked as he finally takes up his role as a teacher and a father completely, which involves a more active involvement in society. In fact, his commitment to teaching paves the way for his commitment to fatherhood, which calls for the reader’s attention to the phenomenology of the student-professor relationship. Chabon clearly tackles this special interaction through the wounded healer construct. Wonder Boys associates elements of the Künstlerroman and the campus novel, “signature genres” of “the Program Era” (McGurl 2005, 49), and focuses on the dislocation, disorientation, and self-destructiveness that characterize the modern wounded healer in search of perpetual recovery and wholeness. Chabon’s wounded hero, in endless trouble of his own making, is put into perspective through a mirror of wounded artists and teachers, all afflicted with what the narrator calls “the midnight disease,” the insomniac artist’s compulsive confrontation with the mystery of existence and incapacity to be happy, which eat his life away. We may wonder whether the institutionalization of the creative writer in the Program Era is a blight or a blessing for the artist, the archetypal figure of

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the wounded healer in the narrative. Chabon vividly depicts the duality of the wounded healer—he presents his character at the mercy of the incurable midnight disease, while he puts up for consideration an additional role a creative writer can take on, that of the institutionalized teacher committed to his students. The latter could balance the woes and setbacks of the writer on the one hand and, on the other, it could enhance the artist’s social function as a guide offering healing inspiration to aspiring writers. This sort of duality, embraced by the narrative, associates two conflicting elements in its representation—namely, the artist’s total freedom and granted right to be in the margin of society along with their enlarged commitment to the community through university patronage. The narrative is set against a major development for American education, literature, and business, that is, creative writing instruction in postwar American universities. Starting with the pioneering Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1936 and workshops at Stanford University, this new academic discipline has extended to some 350 institutions and continues to grow. University employment for writers naturally has its proponents and opponents. 3 In this debate, Chabon, who could be an interesting case study in the literary history of writing programs, has clearly aligned with the former 4—he has been the poster child of this academic discipline which highlights the function of literature as an institutional value. In fact, as an insider to creative writing instruction, both as a student and a teacher, Chabon knows what he is writing about. His narrative agenda in Wonder Boys involves the display of the hero’s wounds and woes within a constellation of obsessive leitmotifs, namely creativity and disease, family and commitment. The dual nature of the artist and wounded healer crowns the narrative that pores over the wound and its integration in American society, education, culture, and economy. Such an integration highlights the joint processes of recovery and healing. A proliferation of wounded healers marks the narrative. In a peculiar architecture of mirrored images that evokes the ties between the archetypal wounded healers, Apollo, Asclepius, and Chiron, Chabon’s quintessential healer emerges as an orphaned, alienated yet disciplined, even successful, gifted artist who nevertheless has broken down or is on the verge of breaking down. In this mirrored universe, what is valid for one wounded healer seems to be valid for the other. They have all sunk or are likely to sink “into the fastness of an impregnable failure” (Chabon 1995, 13). Therefore, Bob Batchelor—who studies together Joel and Ethan Coen’s character Lebowski, Bill Clinton, and Chabon’s character Grady Tripp— underestimates the extent of failure in Chabon’s narrative when he states, “each wears both his heart and foibles on his sleeve, equally, for the world to see. The openness is admirable and falls in line with the traditional heroic narrative that demands a bit of failure among the hero’s triumphs” (Batchelor

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2014, 20, emphasis added). In fact, the theme of the wounded artist who has succumbed or is just about to succumb to his injuries is overdetermined and reinforced by the long series of Hollywood’s suicides whose worshipping aficionado is James Leer, Grady Tripp’s talented, suicidal student. Leer has done his homework thoroughly, storing in his memory a complete, chronological account of these suicides which fascinate him and seem to point to his wound. The constant eyewitness of this pervasive near-collapse is Tripp who selfconsciously testifies to the persistence of the wound, “I lost my mother in infancy and my father to suicide, and everything was about to change once more, with unforeseeable result” (Chabon 1995, 45). He holds up the recurrent self-image of “a wounded minotaur” (107) while he spends a long weekend of self-assessment, symptomatically bearing an outstanding double wound, the festering bite of his lover’s dog and the moral one. The latter seems to go far back into his past when it materialized in the form of “the tiny black-rimmed hole” (4) he witnessed as a fourteen-year-old adolescent on the body of cult horror-story writer, August Van Zorn, who took his own life. In addition, this recollection is a screen for the hole on his father’s selfwounded body. However, this ur-wound remains a mystery and is confounded with “the black hole” of existence which writers are compelled to confront. It is this showdown that generates fiction and is referred to as the midnight disease throughout the narrative. It seems to account for the falling apart of the narrator’s life. Precisely, Tripp attempts to explain why he drove his wife away, bringing the wound into the picture, “Without reference to doppelgängers and the symptoms of the midnight disease it’s hard to say why, exactly” (Chabon 1995, 128). He imagines himself as one of Van Zorn’s heroes whose merit is to stare at “the enormous slumbering Thing with one yellow eye already half open and peering right at us” underneath “the very thin membrane of reality” (5). He repeatedly declares that he feels as “one of August Van Zorn’s heroes, in the instant before his hapless narrative broke off with a final terrible dash” (254). Nevertheless, the narrative highlights Tripp’s woundedness to better reenact the process of recovery, which involves the awareness of the disease and a sense of a shared destiny. As both a sufferer and an observer, Tripp easily recognizes the disease in his fellow writers, thus limiting the feeling of loneliness and isolation. As he says, “It seemed to me that O. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to ‘fit in’ by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers” (Chabon 1995, 76). The experience and recognition of the disease creates a community of fellow sufferers headed by professor and student, Tripp and Leer, and puts in motion the process of recovery.

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Indeed, Tripp expresses this sense of shared isolation in his observation of his student. “I don’t know why, but I was sorry to see him go. I felt as though he were the only person whose company I could possibly have enjoyed at that moment, awkward and isolate and hopeless as he was, disquieted and bewildered by the proliferating symptoms of the midnight disease” (Chabon 1995, 52). It seems that what differentiates writers from the rest of people is precisely the production of creative work which amounts to a self-healing act that could be extended to the like-minded reader. The meandering path which the creative act can take is prominent in the narrative and involves the process of healing. If Plato termed creativity as divine madness, and Edgar Allan Poe first and Chabon later adopted the literary phrase of midnight disease for the driving force behind creativity, scientists came up with the medicalized term of hypergraphia. The term refers to an overpowering desire to write and is somewhat distinct from graphomania, if we agree with Milan Kundera who, in his 1999 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, defined it as the desire to be published, to have a public of unknown readers. Chabon seems highly intrigued and fascinated by the close relation between the midnight disease and creativity. Neuroscientists, such as Alice Weaver Flaherty, who studied the brain and specifically the temporal lobe to understand this phenomenon, found that disorders such as epilepsy or manic depression can cause hypergraphia, which is also triggered by suffering. Though deflated by slapstick and comic elements, suffering pervades the narrative and is heightened by the main character’s inability to complete his 2,600-page novel, significantly entitled Wonder Boys. This inability amounts to an uncontrollable hypergraphia which paradoxically is akin to a writer’s block. Interestingly, while the narrator refutes a writer’s block, hypergraphia’s tormenting opposite, his condition appears as such. In point of fact, Flaherty in her study of literary creativity, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, mentions a “high-output block,” “a variant of writer’s block in which the blocked writer actually writes more, even if badly” (Flaherty 2004, 83), and adds that “hypergraphia when uncontrolled can lead to very bad prose” (Flaherty 2004, 49). Moreover, “Drug-induced hypergraphia is not rare” (Flaherty 2004, 44), and indeed, this is the character’s case—Tripp is constantly under the effect of marijuana. After reading her teacher’s novel, Tripp’s student, Hannah Green, identifies this problem which has been preventing her professor from shaping the colossus of his novel into an intelligible work of art. It seems that Tripp’s hypergraphia has run amok. In fact, according to the Freudian model of development, he appears stuck in the primary process, unable to make it to the secondary. Likewise, cognitively, he also appears stranded in divergent thinking, never developing the convergent thought necessary not only to express himself but also to communicate. Tripp’s hyper-

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graphia being beyond control, it is no wonder that his editor, Terry Crabtree, himself on the brink of professional failure and incapable of doing anything about his friend’s unarticulated novel, gives it up. Ironically, one of the structuring elements in the narrative is precisely the narrator’s incapacity to give a coherent form to his own novel, Wonder Boys. Significantly, Chabon’s novel is “rumored to be modeled upon Chuck Kinder, who struggled with the manuscript of Honeymooners for two decades as it ballooned to nearly 3,000 pages” (Myers 2008, 575). Whether Chabon’s model is just a conjecture, as D. G. Myers contends, or a certainty according to Eoin Koepfinger who states that Chabon “immortalized Kinder as a character in Wonder Boys” (Koepfinger 2012), Kinder’s role as a mentor for Chabon at the University of Pittsburgh cannot easily be dismissed. This extratextual link could corroborate the mentorship network within the narrative which is headed by the relation between Tripp and his two students, Hannah Green and James Leer. Tripp and Leer’s interaction exemplifies the healing process for both teacher and student. It is not very surprising that the relationship between Tripp and Leer has been critically assessed by William G. Tierney who considers this professorstudent rapport as an “an exception to the norm” “for students and teaching are seen as an obstacle to tenure and career” (Tierney 2004, 172). Though research seems to be much more important for an academic career than teaching and this fact has often been satirized in fiction, student-professor relationships appear to be a much more inspiring topic for American writers who are moving beyond satire. It is certain that the highly constructive nature of the relationship between Tripp and his students appears exceptional as Tripp turns out to be a model teacher. In Steiner’s typology of the bond between master and pupil, which involves three categories—namely, the master’s exploitation of the student’s dependence, the student’s threat of subversion and betrayal, and the reciprocal exchange of love and trust—Tripp and Leer clearly belong to the third, demonstrating mutual inspiration and creative exchange. This last category falls into line with the wounded healer construct. If Tripp’s bond to the first writer who marked his life, Van Zorn, is rather one-sided in that only the latter had an impact on the former, the bond that ties Tripp and James together is reciprocal. Tripp’s perception of his young student is insightful and points to an elective affinity, “He was a furtive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn’t belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged” (Chabon 1995, 48). Likewise, Leer’s perception of Tripp is equally sharp as he becomes aware of his teacher’s need for family. He observes that he and his professor are “orphans” (204). Together they escape the festival and drive to Tripp’s familyin-law to spend Seder with them.

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It appears that Tripp, in the midst of a life, self-described as a “praxis of alcoholism and reckless living” (Chabon 1995, 130), takes his special student under his questionable wing and acts as a substitute father for the lost boy. While troubled by his moral and physical wounds, he is constantly plagued by the question of whether he is fit to be a teacher. He finds himself irresponsible when he gives Leer a codeine pill and is ready to give him a condom when he realizes that his student is going to sleep with his editor, Crabtree. However, essentially, the main deviation from the figure of a “politically correct” professor seems to be his failure to protect his student from “committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place” (Chabon 1995, 160) as he wittily puts it in a fit of self-irony. It is certainly an unorthodox tutelage but as Rick Moody comments in his discussion of his experience in Angela Carter’s workshop, “All these things were inadvisable, but what was not was the idea of emotional commitment to the process, a strong relationship between student and professor.” (Moody 2005). There is little doubt, then, that this strong relationship has healing properties for both wounded parties. In point of fact, Tripp’s salvatory paternal commitment to James Leer never fails him, even when he finds himself jealous of his student for having completed his novel successfully, thus triumphing over his own out-of-control hypergraphia. It intersects with and is enhanced by another development, namely, his belated commitment to fatherhood, initially refuted as he had advised his lover, Sara to get an abortion. It is worth noting that the process of commitment as a teacher precedes that as a father, and confirms William Deresiewicz’s view of teachers acting in loco parentis. “Professors are the surrogate parents that parents hand their children over to, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction evokes” (Deresiewicz 2007). Precisely, the narrative does raise and casts out the stereotype of the lecherous professor that studies such as The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, consolidated. Unlike other narratives which capitalize on the dramatic potential of a sexual relationship between student and professor (Blue Angel, The Translator) and as in Denis Johnson’s novel, The Name of the World, the professor firmly resists his student, Hannah who has “a crush” on him (Chabon 1995, 66). Chabon’s narrative capitalizes on the salutary responsibility the teacher bears toward his students. Like Socrates, professor Tripp resists his pretty student’s seductive offer and sticks to “all the good reasons [he] (. . .) had for leaving poor Hannah Green alone” (111). In fact, Batchelor rightly remarks that “Grady is (. . .) a throwback to the 1960s, but he does not resort to the era’s predatory habits committed by some white male faculty members against female undergraduates. Instead, in the late 1990s, political correctness—personified on the American college campus—has enervated patriarchal figures like Grady, who replace 1980s ag-

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gressiveness with 1990s emotion” (Batchelor 2014, 25). It is precisely this emotional engagement that accounts for the richness of the exchange between Tripp and his students. Hannah, for instance, who greatly admires her professor’s literary talent, does not hesitate to point out to her master the weaknesses of his novel to which Tripp has blinded himself. Therefore, Chabon’s “marvelous boy” lives up to the myth of the wounded healer. The title of the novel seems to wink at Wordsworth’s verses in “Resolution and Independence,” “I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” (Wordsworth 1802). But unlike Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century poet who put an end to his promising beginnings by committing suicide to escape the indignities of poverty, and the other talented writers in the narrative who end their hollow lives either with a bang or a whimper, Tripp becomes a survivor of his wounds, an achiever and a savior. Indeed, the professor holds onto his dead poets’ society, the coterie of his talented and less-talented students who flock to his workshop, and is fully apt to heal the wounds of his wonder boys and make them operational. As Hobbs rightly remarks, “Grady’s character is transformed from pot-smoking, irresponsible man-child into a family man who acts as mentor for young writers” (Hobbs 2014, 173). Nevertheless, the critic does not point out that it is precisely this precious mentorship that makes it possible for Grady Tripp to see the extent of his social commitment to others and to see literature clearly. The healing potential, inherent in the mythical figure, is thus fulfilled. The ending justifies Powell’s reading of the novel as “the story of a foundering writer passing the torch to the next generation” (Powell 2014, 202). Significantly at this final point, Tripp pictures himself only “as a half-blinded minotaur” (Chabon 1995, 367). “Half-blinded,” as opposed to “blindly” previously associated with the same image (107), indicates the process of recovery. Therefore, Tripp’s role as a creative writer and teacher involves a tremendous commitment to the aspiring writers who want to be taught literature from the inside. Such commitment turns out to be equally salutary for him. He appears to have an enlarged family that includes his students. As the intrusive narrative voice puts it, “Usually he sits with one or two much younger men, students of his, wonder boys whose hearts are filled with the dread and the mystery of the books they believe themselves destined to write (. . .) he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters” (Chabon 1995, 367). In the professor’s vigilant discourse, the wound, never out of sight, needs to remain under control. Thus, Chabon seems to reconcile the view of artists as “egocentric, temperamental, neurotic, rebellious, unreliable, licentious, extravagant, obsessed

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by their work, and altogether difficult to live with” (Wittkower and Wittkower 1963, xix) with their social commitment. His narrative makes clear that the operative mode of a writer and a creative writing teacher is, “I am wounded, therefore I perform and heal.” This seems to be the motto or the shibboleth of creative writing students who are thus encouraged to expose their wounds within the heterotopic space of this formal discipline. Moreover, the narrative highlights the economic aspects of such performance whose far-reaching implications McGurl points out. As he puts it, “reflexive modernity [is] (. . .) a hall of mirrors in which the subject engages in an endlessly entertaining but, on another level, frighteningly compulsory performance of self. ‘Perform or Else’ is Jon McKenzie’s shorthand for the new dispensation in which, as he and Paolo Virno and others have described, the theatrical, technological, and management senses of performance have become all but indistinguishable” (McGurl 2009, 366). McGurl touches upon the overlapping area of art and business and thus opens another perspective that the novel offers to the reader. Thus, creative writing instruction appears as a part and parcel of the experience economy. The exposure of the students’ wounds is monitored by the professor whose luminous presence incites the aspiring writers to aestheticize their personal experience. McGurl rightly states that the author-professor provides “a more immediate identification with the charisma of authorship” (McGurl 2009, 17). This is the reason why Tripp is accused by a frustrated, angry student of being a fraud. This flat character who appears twice, though he is just an extra in the narrative, voices the expectations of the students/clients who are promised an unforgettable experience though the guidance of a mystified master with healing abilities. Tripp’s comments on the student’s discourse bring into view the specificities of, and the expectations from, the “product.” He comments on the protesting student’s remarks in this manner, “he felt that the college was cheating him by taking his money to put him through writing classes with a pseudo-Faulknerian nobody like me” (Chabon 1995, 80). Tripp is compared to a giant of American literature, Faulkner, to demonstrate the smallness of his own stature. The clients have to be satisfied. Likewise, the department director also calls Tripp a fraud for his failure to deliver a new novel in seven years and thus for failing his corporate responsibility. However, Chabon does not mean his character to be a fraud—the literary value of his in-progress novel, on which the professor works every night, is certified by his talented student, Hannah; temporarily blocked by his wound, his recovery follows a tormented path. As a matter of fact, Chabon is not only interested in the phenomenon of creativity and the affects and effects of mentorship, whose combination point to the myth of the wounded healer, but also in the economic aspect of the creative experience, in other words, in the economy of the wound

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and its integration in the market economy. Though the latter enables the wounded healer to carry out his mission fully, it does raise questions about the view of master-disciple as product and client within this economic environment. In point of fact, the narrative is framed by a major event, the WordFest, which exemplifies the university politics of literary labor. Through its annual conference, the university promotes itself and sells its authors. Among others, James Leer is emerging as a new talent and finds a publisher. Chabon’s satire of this event is rather mild though Tripp’s fleeing from it is symptomatic of his malaise within the economic politics of the institution. In addition, his long drive in his old Galaxie, which makes both his name and the brand of his car take on new meanings, places the narrative within the long tradition of vehicle symbolism running through American culture and establishes ambivalent relations with the culture industry and the market culture. Chabon can certainly be credited for a fair amount of pragmatism and the happy ending for both Tripp and his student is the sign of such pragmatism. The narrative seems to illustrate McGurl’s view that “the university stepped forward in the postwar period both to facilitate and to buffer the writer’s relation to the culture industry and the market culture” (McGurl 2009, 15). We could add that it also facilitates the role of the wounded healer. Finally, the only escape from the system for a writer might be silence—and the most famous case of silence in literature is Arthur Rimbaud’s—but this option, if it truly is one, leaves unresolved the issue of proclaiming the wound, its exposition and its healing properties. These properties can engineer the process of recovery in a creative writing program. In any case, it is quite extraordinary that the market through creative writing instruction found a way to capitalize on the labor and abilities of the wounded healers. Whether it is a win-win situation will certainly remain debatable as long as creative writing education is flourishing. Overall, in creative writing programs, the master-disciple rapport finds a new frame but also a new challenge, which John Crowley in The Translator renews, though he sets his pedagogical encounter in the 1960s, a period rather unconcerned with his contemporaries’ debates. NOTES 1. For a study of the wounded healer figure in Greek mythology, see Christine Downing’s article, “Only the Wounded Healer Heals: The Testimony of the Greek Mythology.” 2. It should be noted that Galia Benziman, Ruth Kannai, and Ayesha Ahmad, in “The Wounded Healer as Cultural Archetype,” detected this myth in the figure of Pollyanna, the eleven-year-old orphan character in Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 eponymous novel and thus offered an exploration of this figure in fiction.

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3. In his essay, “Campus Writers,” J. A. Sutherland cites both Pamela Hanford Johnson who considers that “America has been awfully lucky to have patronage through the academies, awfully lucky” (Sutherland 2007, 76) and V. S. Pritchett who states that “Artificial worlds have a sterilising effect on writers” (77). 4. As the author stated in his interview to Scott Tobias, “I think writing programs can be very good for people. It always seemed strange to me that this question gets raised only in the context of the teaching of writing, as though writing were different from the other arts, which have routinely been taught for a long time, like music and painting and drama and sculpting” (Chabon 2000).

Chapter Five

The Poet and His Translator in John Crowley’s The Translator

John Crowley’s novel, The Translator (2002) marks the author’s entry into “literary fiction” with a master-disciple narrative that focuses on an intense bond between a creative writing Russian professor and poet and his young American student against the background of the raging Cold War that heavily impacts their lives. Crowley, “a master of fantastika” (Crowley 2017), praised by Harold Bloom for his novel Little, Big (Bloom 2003), lets his much-lauded imagination thrive on a pedagogical encounter of the benevolent kind. The narrative features two kindred spirits that finally transcend rather than transgress a malevolent environment through the act of creation. Crowley avoids the pitfalls of a professor-student love affair by setting this encounter before the age of the erotic prohibition at the university and by mystifying the bond. Clearly, the narrative seems to be vouching for “a pedagogy of desire” (Zembylas 2007) and could be notable for a double contribution—to the phenomenology of master-disciple and to translation studies. 1 In fact, the pedagogical encounter is enhanced by the act of translation which becomes a medium of fusion between professor and student. I will investigate the nature of pedagogical Eros in this narrative along with the ethics of translation through the figure of the translator, the process of translation, and the final orientation of the narrative’s philosophy of language. History is prominent in the narrative—major historical developments, such as the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis—shape the characters’ lives and historical dates guide the reader through the maze of a nonlinear chronology. Indeed, the opening chapter is set in 1961 and features a historical character, John F. Kennedy, as he awards a poetry prize to Christa Malone, a high school student, who thus encounters her future lover in absentia—Innokenti Isayevich Falin’s name comes up as Kennedy informs the 53

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student of the presence of the exiled Russian poet in the same midwestern state as she. Falin is obviously a trophy poet for the United States, deep in the Cold War, though in the course of the narrative he will also appear as a double agent whose mystery persists until the end. The two characters seem to be caught in the web of history. It comes as no surprise, then, that Falin’s poetry is eminently political. His prophetic poem, titled “1961,” which is one of the poems saved by translation and equally conspicuous in the first chapter, announces the collapse of the Soviet Union. Likewise, the last chapter, set in 1993, features Kennedy’s assassination, as it is interpreted by the characters, primarily Christa and her father who works for the Department of Defense on unspecified, seemingly secret cybernetic missions. In the same manner, Christa’s beloved brother, Ben, chooses to enlist in the army and is officially killed in an accident in the Philippines, which is questioned by Christa’s radical friends—they contend that he was a victim of the US secret interventions in Vietnam. Thus, framed by a major figure in American history, the narrative pores over two poets and apprentice translators who attempt to change the course of history. This idea is announced by the novel’s epigraph which is taken from Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s biography of the persecuted poet, Osip Mandelstam, “Poetry is power, M[andelstam] once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck.” Moreover, the epigraph prefigures the master-disciple’s loving interaction enhanced by creation which takes two forms, producing poetry and translating poetry. Both operations are mediated by pedagogical Eros, a category of its own, as the narrative voice makes clear, “A crush, an obsession with a magnetic teacher: she couldn’t believe that it was actually a category of feeling” (Crowley 2002, 79, emphasis added). Initially, the professor’s method of memorizing poems to understand them and his compelling performance in reciting poetry in class captivate the student and render her highly responsive to him. As a matter of fact, the pedagogical encounter between these two characters, which occurs in Falin’s creative writing workshop on the reading and writing of poetry, is treated as a major event fraught with meaning and purpose. The narrative deals with a theme typical in the campus novel that features the pedagogical couple in a creative writing program—the making of the artist in the creative writing workshop. Creative writing workshops foster a greater proximity between professor and student as they deal with personal expression and the creative management of emotions and imagination. Indeed, in the course of the narrative, professor and student exchange their stories as they grapple with their transformation into poetry. Though everything seems to separate them, namely age, status, politics, language, and culture, the experience of imprisonment and loss draws them together.

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Christa lost her baby at birth while she was confined in a convent during her pregnancy, and then her beloved brother also died. Falin lost everything, including his poems. His childhood story as a state child, one of those “orphaned and abandoned youths (known as besprizornye) fed by the period’s war-fare, epidemics and starvation” (Ball 1993, 229) is related to Christa in a Dickens-like vein. This narrative is offered to her in exchange for her remaining in his course, which the student wants to abandon as writing loses all of its meaning for her after her brother’s death. Falin’s will to keep her there, on the track of creation, and his encouragement to express the experience of her loss in poetry renew her sense of artistic purpose and help her regain her faith in art. Thus her relation to him progresses along with her creative endeavors. In this development, some events appear to be milestones that subtly draw the reader’s attention. For instance, through a folktale which Christa finds in a library book, Folk-Tales and Fables of Old Russia, marked by one of Falin’s cards, she apprehends Falin’s experience of losing his poems, taken away from him in his own country. Just like Christa’s first encounter with the poet in absentia in the first chapter, this serendipitous meeting by proxy, Falin’s card in the book, intimates to the reader a sense of destiny which mystifies the professor-student interaction. What is initially termed as an infatuation and an obsession turns out to be love in troubled times, deep in secrecy. The narrative seems to illustrate the ontology but also the politicization of desire, analyzed by Michalinos Zembylas in his 2007 article, “Risks and Pleasures: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Pedagogy of Desire in Education,” thus defying current views, rules, regulations, and laws that ostracize desire and punish such intimacy between professor and student. It is worth noting that setting the major part of his narrative in the 1960s, Crowley only indirectly contributes to the ongoing debate about the relations between professors and students that has prominently been on the public agenda since the late 1980s. Interestingly, it is a priest, to whom Christa confesses that she has a sexual relationship with her professor, the one who, in the name of power imbalance, utters the blame and the verdict. The narrative voice gives access to the priest’s direct discourse which stresses the power differential between professor and student, “‘He was placed in a position of authority over you and has abused you. He should have nurtured and not done you harm’” (Crowley 2002, 216). His discourse has a late-twentieth-century ring. In addition, more than sexual misconduct, the affair is branded as a sin for which Christa does not repent, thus defying religious scriptures and asserting the right of desire. However, the sexual gratification of desire is highly ambiguous in the narrative—Falin seems to reject Christa’s sexual advances while three decades later, Christa admits to the Russian scholar, who asks her about the exact nature of her relationship to the poet, that she does not remember

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whether the affair was sexual or not. This secondary position of sexuality in the narrative calls for comparisons with other American writers who grant a controversial primacy to sexuality, as a reviewer’s remark indicates, “There could be something unsavory about a romance between a middle-aged professor and his admiring student, but Crowley is not Philip Roth or John Updike” (Dalgleish 2002). In fact, Updike’s and Roth’s profuse, clinical description of sexual acts appears even more objectionable to those readers offended by the two authors’ vision of sexuality when it narrows down to professor-student love affairs. Moreover, the narrative points to a distinction between sexuality and eroticism—whereas the former seems to be ambiguous and secondary, the latter is strong, assertive, and mystified. Scenes of intimacy abound in the narrative and while the professor and the student may not technically be lovers, they do behave as such as the narrative voice suggests, “he only asked because lovers do, just to hear her speak” (Crowley 2002, 254, emphasis added). In addition, while Falin seems to refuse Christa’s sexual offer, he simultaneously affirms that not only are they lovers but they “will be now always” (198). Precisely, Erica McWilliam, who in her article, “Touchy Subjects: A Risky Inquiry into Pedagogical Pleasure,” explores pedagogy as an erotic field, defines “‘erotic’ in ways that acknowledge its corporeal dimension but not a sexually explicit dimension” (McWilliam 1996, 306). It is to this erotic dimension, salient in the professor-student’s relationship, that the narrative voice alludes when it states that the student was protecting them from something “they weren’t doing, the protecting being all there was to catch” (Crowley 2002, 184). In this passage, the narrative implies a reversal of roles as the student appears to be the protector and the professor the protégé. Thus the author highlights the professor’s vulnerability inherent in his position of authority which novels such as Blue Angel specifically explore. Furthermore, the narrative mystifies the erotic bond in several ways such as the personality of the professor as perceived by the student who finds herself unable to penetrate her mentor’s mystery. “It was as though he himself existed here in this town in translation. (. . .) Within him was the original, which no one could read” (Crowley 2002, 59). Interestingly, the metaphor involving translation points to their undertaking of translation that creatively marks their encounter and seals their love. In addition, it anticipates the difficulty of the task that will bind their poetry together. It is worth noting that their union is finally intimated through the Greek myth of the other half, recounted by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. The narrative voice subtly evokes the ancient myth as it describes their ardent, long embrace and student experiences, “She knew—she knew by now— that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing that once upon

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a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together” (Crowley 2002, 209). The use of the conjunction, as though, which introduces the myth, does not undermine the force of the image that revokes human fragmentariness, restores primeval harmony, and marks the end of the quest. It seems that student and professor were bound to each other and thus fulfilled their exceptional destiny. Therefore, the pedagogical couple is caught in a desiring ontology that in the narrative seems to reclaim the notion of desire from a purely negative, repressive, or libidinal framework. Precisely, building upon Deleuze and Guattari’s sociopolitical notion of desire as being an immanent force that produces creativity, novelty, and change, contrary to the Lacanian model that views desire as a fixed structure of lack, Zembylas theorizes it as a productive force in pedagogy. As he puts it, “Through reclaiming desire as a legitimate affective and relational practice in the classroom it may become possible to affirm the duplicity of pedagogical desire—in other words, while desire puts the teacher and student into risk (e.g., through experiencing uncertainties and anxieties), it also brings important pleasures (e.g., through assuming subversive positions of knowing)” (Zembylas 2007, 334). The scholar, without excluding the possibility of malevolent pedagogic encounters, contends that the task of education consists in nurturing the productive desire for “it is this productive force of desire that possesses transformative power” (Zembylas 2007, 338). In fact, the pedagogy of desire provides different strategies for working through power relations, raising subjects capable of rejecting normalized representations and radicalizing themselves. The narrative features these strategies, such as the communion between master and student or the mystification of the bond, and illustrates the politicization of desire as the two characters stand up against the repressive forces of religion and ideology. When her confessor demands that Christa break off her relationship with Falin, she simply refuses. Likewise, when the federal agent attempts to recruit her to spy and report on Falin, the student warns her professor who then, in 1962, tries to protect her by mysteriously disappearing during the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The poet cryptically alludes to the intrusion of history in their lives and particularly to this development which, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear war, separates them. As Falin alarmingly tells Christa, “‘I know that something has happened. While we wrote poems and tomatoes grew’” (Crowley 2002, 227). The narrative suggests that his unresolved disappearance that follows this historical development and the intensification of the crisis is linked to the confrontation between the two superpowers. As a matter of fact, Falin’s action is even more radical and is intimated through the Christian symbolism of sacrifice and salvation. Thus, Bill Sheehan intuitively remarks that the novel is a “Richly imagined metaphysical

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drama involving the existence—and possible intervention—of angels” (Sheehan 2003, 370). Indeed, Falin’s visionary poem titled, “1961,” and mailed to Christa right after his disappearance in 1962, is about the intercession of the nations’ angels, presumably those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Besides, a poet seems to be the ideal figure for such a sacrifice. Falin ambiguously answers Christa’s question as to whether he was not “some kind of agent,” adding Pasternak’s verse, which he had recited in class, that pictures the poet as “Eternity’s hostage kept captive by time” (Crowley 2002, 228). It seems that Falin could be this angel/poet/agent whose sacrificial action saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe. Significantly, the professor seems to be encouraged by his student to this sacrifice—in their conversation in front of the television transmitting aggravating news from the crisis, Falin asks Christa whether the unrecognized sacrifice of someone who could stop the end of the world would be justified and she deems it necessary. Therefore, professor and student are together in this act of abnegation as the former disappears without any traces, which points to his death, and the latter loses the man she loves. Thus, the narrative, by entertaining the ambiguity, combines elements of the fantastic and the conventions of a spy novel—Falin could be a double agent that the Soviet Union had to sacrifice to end the crisis. Falin’s status as an agent, and double to boot, is never confirmed in the narrative. The Russian scholar, Gavriil Viktorovich, informs Christa that no traces of him had been found so far in the KGB files which were in the process of being examined. In addition, not only Christian symbolism but Greek mythology reinforce the idea of sacrifice. The main character, Christa implies that the United States also needed a sacrificial victim to end the crisis. Her focalization suggests that Kennedy was this victim and such an awareness is experienced as a shock accompanied by guilt, “She felt stabbed, as though the story or the myth she had articulated had caused it to happen, had right now got him shot through the head in Dallas: (. . .) the tragos of our tragedy” (Crowley 2002, 288). Christa’s mythic interpretation of Kennedy’s assassination evoking Falin’s long poem, The Gray Gods, which speaks of parallel worlds, deepens the aura of mystery that surrounds the events. Crowley avoids the pitfalls of an all-American point of view on the Cold War, pointing to the flaws and contradictions on both sides. The narrative eloquently figures Falin’s experience in a totalitarian state, subtly expressed in his poem “Bez,” while at the same time, as an outsider to the United States, he can best point out America’s “heedlessness.” As he puts it, “‘You people, with daring to conceive that bomb, and knowledge to build it. Then most awful of all the courage (. . .) to use it. And then to lie awake in fear” (Crowley 2002, 169). Not only Falin’s but also Christa’s focalization and acts reveal that she dismisses a Manichean vision of the two superpowers.

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However, the nightmarish world of history and politics which involves madness, destruction, and betrayal is juxtaposed with the world of artistic creation that transmutes the lead of human experience into gold, whether in an original work or in its translation. The narrative seems to treasure the practice of translation, thus reflecting the growing international interest in translation in the twenty-first century, which Susan Bassnett underlines. “Within academia, interest in translation has been growing apace, with a proliferation of journals, books, conferences, doctoral dissertations and courses” (Bassnett 2016, 300). Thus, Crowley who teaches creative writing at Yale, fictionally expresses this interest since his narrative raises fundamental issues related to translation. To start with, the title of the novel highlights the figure of the translator. In the course of the narrative, the reader discovers that there are in fact two unskilled translators—in this joint venture, Falin does not master the target language and Christa has only a very elementary knowledge of the source language, thanks to the intensive Russian course she undertakes in summer, lying to the organizers about her intentions. Ironically, she states that she is interested in working for the CIA to obtain the necessary funds for her linguistic training, whereas she only wants to learn her mentor’s language to be closer to him and to translate his poems as he asked her to do. Nevertheless, in this delicate undertaking, these two translators, who may appear to be like the blind leading the blind, are guided by their poetic skills. Then, the narrative responds positively to Walter Benjamin’s rhetorical question, “But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information. (. . .) the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic,’ something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?” (Benjamin 1996, 253). Therefore, the poetic sensibility, vision, and status of the translators provide a sort of guarantee for the outcome of their translating endeavor. Moreover, the act of translation appears as a matter of life and death and the translator as an invaluable partner, even a savior. When Christa accepts Falin’s proposal of translating his poems, he responds in solemn, strong terms and is eager to celebrate what he calls their “partnership” (Crowley 2002, 174). Such partnership between professor and student enhances their trustful relation. As Steiner philosophically states, “All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust. (. . .) It is an operative convention which derives from a sequence of phenomenological assumptions about the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps formally antithetical semantic systems” (Steiner 1998, 312). Thus the issue of trust is originally highlighted in the narrative. The student and professor’s undertaking, sealed by trust and joy, takes on graver overtones when the professor appeals to his translator again, “‘I need you,

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Kit. . . . to save my soul. . . Or perhaps only my life” (Crowley 2002, 191). Interestingly, this sibylline statement is understood by Christa in the light of her translating enterprise—she reminds her teacher of all the efforts she makes to learn a particularly “hard language” (191). Her response suggests an underlying belief in the capacity of a translator to preserve the original work in another language. Furthermore, the narrative uses other strategies to enhance the visibility of the translator whose invisibility was objected to by Lawrence Venuti on political grounds. According to Venuti, “Insofar as the effect of transparency effaces the work of translation, it contributes to the cultural marginality and economic exploitation that English-language translators have long suffered (. . .) whose work nonetheless remains indispensable because of the global domination of Anglo-American culture, of English amenable to fluent translating” (Venuti 2008, 17). Actually, the narrative achieves an extreme visibility of the translator through a daring act—Christa publishes a joint translation of Falin’s poems and her own under the title, Translations Without the Originals. Christa’s indisputable visibility fictionally confirms Bassnett’s observation that “translators are (. . .) starting to become visible (. . .) we do seem to be heading in that direction” (Bassnett 2016, 303). In addition, the student’s radical act could actually update a former view of translation of which Octavio Paz reminds us, “translation was not only a confirmation but also a guarantee of the existence of spiritual bonds but modern age destroyed this assurance” (Paz 1992, 152). The narrative retrieves this spirituality. Christa’s first poetry collection, a combination of Falin’s fifteen poems in translation and hers, represents a symbolic union between mentor-student and the preposition “without” in the title, chosen by her, evokes Falin’s long poem, “Bez,” “which meant ‘without’” (Crowley 2002, 54). What’s more, her act of appropriation, though problematic, as the guilt-ridden focalization shows—“she had let their poet die, and then taken his poems for her own” (8)—creates pathos by pointing to loss and emphasizes the salvatory act of translation. Furthermore, the translating process informs the narrative and evokes translation history and theory. The novel featuring the problems of translating poetry raises the most important issue of translation which goes beyond the skills of a translator, namely translatability, refuted by Otavio Paz for he considers that poetry is universal. Falin’s discourse on translation challenges this view. The character contends that a language represents a world and since his poems were written for a world he had lost, the reader should have lived in this world and this language “since childhood, and grown up in it” (Crowley 2002, 163). His reading to Christa of his translated poem, titled “1937,” is a demonstration of what can only remain untranslatable. Likewise, their joint effort to translate one of his untranslated poems seems to justify

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his conclusion: “‘You cannot translate. You can only make other poems’” (181). Thus, the poet’s approach to translation, as he struggles with his student to translate his poems, seems to be much closer to Walter Benjamin’s and Maurice Blanchot’s. According to these two thinkers, as Vivian Liska and Naomi Conen demonstrate, “it is not the communicability of languages but the tensions of inter- and intralinguistic difference that constitute the essence (. . .) of translation. Thus, one can speak of (. . .) a common attraction to all that escapes homogenization and the erasure of difference (. . .) and of a shared resistance to the idea that information should be transferred as accurately as possible, so as to ensure the communication of a unique and contained meaning” (Liska and Conen 2014, 231). Precisely, Venuti’s “symptomatic reading,” which adopts Friedrich Schleiermacher’s foreignizing method and denounces the domestication of texts, exposes the illusion of transparency in English translations. Indeed, to avoid writing “other poems” in translation, as Crowley’s character had bluntly put it, Venuti suggests that it can occur “only when the domestic remainder released by the translation includes an inscription of the foreign context in which the text first emerged” (Venuti 2000, 473). Whether Christa’s translations exactly adopt Venuti’s symptomatic reading or not is not totally clear, however they remain, more or less, a “rough translation” (Crowley 2002, 5) and therefore, dismiss a misleading fluency and a problematic transparency. Moreover, their ambiguity renders a single interpretation impossible and, consequently, they cannot serve a political and ideological agenda fully as was the case with the translation of one of Falin’s poems, namely a passage in his long poem, “Bez.” The passage relates the poetic persona’s response to the sight of his neighbor in tears, an occurrence deemed worth writing about. Indeed, Falin’s analysis of the unnamed translator’s work indicates that his translator domesticated, politicized, and instrumentalized its meaning in the context of the Cold War. Falin’s example of a single verb in that poem is quite eloquent, “‘Where the translation said I will denounce my neighbor my poem said only I will write about my neighbor . . . the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say someone has written about someone else, we mean that the person has supplied the authorities information or just speculation. (. . .) But to write, in Russian, is still also to—just write (. . .) letters, poetry” (Crowley 2002, 57). The translator’s elimination of polysemy must have resulted from an ideological choice which impoverished the text. Therefore, both the issue of translatability and an agenda other than the literary one could account for Falin’s wariness about the outcome of translation. Such caution, confirmed by Christa’s remark that Falin “didn’t believe in translation” (Crowley 2002, 278), is also indicative of a certain orientation

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of the character’s philosophy of language. His search for harmony between the two languages, suggested by his image of “the shell and the chick” as being one (178) to refer to the original and its translation, reveals a certain nostalgia we find in Maurice Blanchot when he talks about “the most intimate relation between two languages” (Liska and Conen 2014, 239). In their translating sessions, Falin and Christa are striving to achieve this intimacy. Interestingly, Liska and Conen compare “Blanchot’s articulation of nostalgia with what they call “Benjamin’s messianic hope for the unification of incomplete languages through the medium of translation (. . .) from which Blanchot keeps his distance” (Liska and Conen 2014, 238). The only messianic hope in the narrative is that of saving the text through the act of transmission and by preserving it, thanks to their search for linguistic intimacy between the two languages. For Christa, this intimacy takes on erotic overtones, as her reflections on her translating endeavors during the period when her mind was totally occupied by Falin’s poems reveal, “She thought, long after, that she had not then ever explored a lover’s body, learned its folds and articulations, muscle under skin, bone under muscle, but this was really most like that: this slow probing and working in his language, taking it in or taking hold of it; his words, his life, in her heart, in her mouth too” (Crowley 2002, 183). The loving exploration and possession of her professor’s body vicariously occurs on linguistic ground. What is more, the whole translating undertaking appears as an act of love. In Christa’s conversation with Gavriil Viktorovich, this idea is fleshed out. The established poet attempts to assess her professor’s act of entrusting the translation of his poems with her in this manner—“‘he hoped he would pass on to me something he couldn’t keep any longer. He wanted it for me’” (Crowley 2002, 278). The former student highlights the act of transmission in the pedagogical couple which seems to be associated with love. Further, the Russian scholar not only confirms her intuition but also establishes a connection between her translation and her return to writing original work. Together they seem to embrace an epiphany—what the poet ultimately wanted was not just his poems “into other poems” but “Himself into . . . another poet” (Crowley 2002, 279), which echoes the Greek myth again. While the Platonic myth suggested the union of the lovers’ bodies, it is the union of their minds that is now evoked thanks to the medium of translation. Thus, translation appears as a metaphor for love and conversely love is a metaphor for translation. Therefore, the narrative eloquently intimates the transmission of the creative will from the master to the disciple. Crowley’s complex, original novel validates the significance of the pedagogical bond by embracing a pedagogy of desire and by enhancing its creative give-and-take through a thoughtful foray into the intricacies of translation.

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If Cold War politics informs The Translator, sexual identity politics is prominent in Susan Choi’s novel, My Education. NOTE 1. The novel’s concern with translation has drawn some critical attention to this particular topic in The Translator. See Daniel Simeoni’s article, “Le traducteur, personnage de fiction” (“The Translator as a Fictional Character”), and Iulia Mihalache’s, “Le jeu de scène: traductions et traducteurs à travers les cultures et les genres littéraires” (“Performance Game: Translations and Translators through Cultures and Literary Genres”).

Chapter Six

Queering Master and Disciple in Susan Choi’s My Education

Susan Choi’s fourth novel, My Education (2013), mainly depicts a sapphic passion, set in the early 1990s on an American small-town campus, between a student and a professor who is the wife of the student’s star professor. The adult narrator, Regina Gottlieb, mother of a child and happily settled in a heterosexual marriage, assesses the formative value in her life of her two professors and former lovers, Martha Hallet and Nicholas Brodeur. This couple, whose marriage falls apart in the course of the narrative, though not because of Regina, is greatly endowed with beauty, culture, intelligence, and charisma, but it is Martha that takes the lion’s share in Regina’s heart and has the privilege of breaking it. This inequality in narrative prominence brings the female professor to the fore of the novel, thus breaking the tradition of male professors who hold center stage in erotic relationships between students and professors. Although Regina’s great love of her youth seems to stimulate the former student and current writer’s memory fourteen years later, the sociopolitical context shapes the significance of the events in the narrative. Indeed, the text intertwines academic and identity politics in the 1990s, the decade of stillactive lesbian separatism and emergent bisexuality. While both the narrative and the author in her interviews seem to reject ostentatious academic and identity politics, they also seem ineluctable in the text. The narrative advances sexuality as a major theme, rehabilitating pedagogical Eros, asserting “lesbian existence” (Rich 2007), and delineating an overall picture of politically silent bisexuality. I will investigate the subtle politicization of lesbian existence contrasted with the almost-invisible bisexuality as an identity in the narrative, which makes it all the more salient for the reader. 65

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The narrative highlights the erotic dimension of mentorship, fully acknowledging the erotic force of the pedagogical situation. The beginning of the novel announces a stock romance between a glamorous male professor with a reputation of seducing his students and a graduate student who becomes his TA (teaching assistant) on a 1990s campus agitated by protests against racism, sexism, colonialism, and under the spell of high theory and cultural studies. Nicholas Brodeur’s reputation as a predator and his “villainous status” (Choi 2013, 11) not only fail to scare his students away but rather add to his appeal. The French consonance of Nicholas’s surname, Brodeur, matches his “damned poet” image, which fascinates impressionable Regina who sees in him not only a superior type but as the “paragon” of her “type” (21). However, the irony that surrounds the professor’s “wicked” (Choi 2013, 44) personality destabilizes this image, his supposed predatory acts are dismissed as “gossip” (11), and Nicholas turns out to be a family man and a caring father. As for his affairs with his students, they are consensual and only with graduates, according to his wife who sounds categorical about it. This is where Choi seems to draw the line concerning the highly controversial sexual relationships between students and professors. By making her narrator a graduate student, the debate on pedagogical Eros and its hazards may be less inflammatory. Thus Regina enters a maturation process through a love that has its own specificity; as it involves social, intellectual, and generational differences, it could entail a controversial power relation. Choi pores over this persisting imbalance without rejecting pedagogical Eros and its ensuing sexual relationship; on the contrary, she seems keen on pointing out its constructive side amid grief and disarray. Furthermore, she brings a fresh approach to this old topic, introducing a complex triangulation and sexual identity considerations—Regina, who is on the verge of falling in love with her professor, turns instead to his wife, falls passionately in love with her, and seduces her. Though Nicholas is very present in this affair, he becomes Regina’s lover only when the lesbian affair is over. While the narrative displays no frontal engagement in academic and sexual identity politics, it is informed by both of them. The affair between Regina and Martha is permeated by their respective statuses as student and professor, which appears as an obstacle at the beginning since Martha, in the process of recommitting herself to her husband, resists Regina’s wooing on two grounds—not only is Regina a student but she is her husband’s student to boot. Likewise, Regina’s declaration of love for her sweeps away the idea that her interest in Martha is just a student’s mere infatuation—the former makes a distinction between a “crush” (Choi 2013, 92) and love. Moreover, it is Regina who takes the erotic initiative and

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chases Martha, thus making any speculation on the student’s victimization rather difficult for the reader. Therefore, what appears at this point as transgressive is the eroticism between student and professor and adultery. Nevertheless, lesbian love is the central focus in the narrative—Choi brings the lesbian body into prominence through a minute description of sexuality and examines the construction of lesbian identity. Regina, from a heterosexual with “an idolatrous attraction to beautiful women” (Choi 2013, 80) decides to become a lesbian when she meets Martha and “idolize[s]” the professor’s “independence and unfettered intelligence” (180). Same-sex desire is fully assumed and though the student, contrary to the professor, has no experience in lesbian relationships, she can articulate this desire in crystal clear terms as she recognizes and acknowledges the irresistible attraction the professor exerts on her. “Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. (. . .) And (. . .) Martha’s face told me” (80). Consequently, the recognition and reciprocity that take place in the first tête-à-tête between the student and the professor who is on parental leave, right after their formal introduction in the couple’s house, are acted out in near-lovemaking. It is through the language of the body that the two women initially communicate their true emotions to each other. When Martha attempts to nip the emerging affair in the bud, Regina, observing the hardening of the professor’s nipples, immediately knows that the latter will not be successful. “You see, the glance said, my body tells the truth. (. . .) But I already knew that” (Choi 2013, 93). Therefore, she persists and reaches her goal—Martha becomes her torrid lover. In fact, Choi puts the lesbian desiring body in the center of her narrative through the elation of the senses. The sexual act echoes the Platonic myth of the union with the other half with a variation—the two halves are female. The student envisions her fusion with her lover as the only possible mode of existence, “No conceit requiring my separate existence was tenable now. I yearningly bid it goodbye (. . .) I couldn’t start to imagine just what we would do (. . .) but I somehow felt (. . .) the final result” (Choi 2013, 106). Likewise, sexual intercourse is informed by pedagogic imagery that points to the constructive exchange between master-disciple, “Love is tutelage, after all; and ardour, such as we had laid hold of, that same tutelage greatly compressed—so that, knowing nothing but what she had just taught me, I was somehow no longer afraid” (108). The syntactic convolution of the long sentence conveys the post-orgasmic shock of Regina’s epiphany which involves a reciprocal guardianship through love. This exaltation of lesbian love is attached to two characters who are young, beautiful, and smart. It is worth noting that the attractive image of the two women conjured up in the narrative could superficially match the cultural images of lesbians in the 1990s mainstream media, such as TIME, News-

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week, or Vogue, which gave a positive visibility to the lesbian body in a decade “in love with lesbianism” (Ciasullo 2001, 605). Ann Ciasullo, who analyzes the so called “lesbian chic” (578), contends that these representations of lesbianism are normalized-heterosexualized or ‘straightened out,’” thus made “palatable for mainstream consumers to consume” (579). Conversely, Ciasullo underlines the absence of the “butch,” “a figure (. . .) better able than the ‘femme’ body to challenge mainstream cultural fantasies about lesbianism” (578). Thus, we can better understand how Choi’s novel breaks away from these inauthentic images celebrating lesbian sexuality. 1 The narrator, through her comments, guides the reader into understanding the nature of this love. In addition, the butch makes a brief appearance in the narrative, as if to remind the reader of the lesbian spectrum, through Alicia, a very minor character who turns out to be a lesbian. Regina’s description of Alicia’s companion, Nelly, corresponds to a masculine working-class butch. “She had short, coarse brown hair and wore a pencil stub behind one ear (. . .) and Levi’s held up by suspenders. Something in her bearing (. . .) suggested to me that she might be a butcher (. . .) as well as a lesbian” (Choi 2013, 358). Though such a stereotypical image is very limited, it introduces another lesbian couple in the narrative who does not hide their affair—contrary to Martha and Regina, the former make their love visible in public. Moreover, the narrative not only exalts in lesbian sexuality but also examines identity politics bringing forth the issue of lesbian struggle in a homophobic environment, though not collectively but at the level of the struggling individual. Regina, in her mid-thirties, looks back, retrieves her lesbian love, and revises it in hindsight, highlighting the nature of same-sex love and its social hazards. The narrative is structured into two unequal parts whose titles are dates, 1992 and 2007. The intervening years seem to be the time span necessary for the narrator to assess this period of her past. Thus the first part, which is considerably longer than the second and could be read as a coda to the first, is also more gripping in terms of narrative force. In this section of the book, Regina resurrects the passion she experienced for the professor, who was older than she, in her graduate year. Lesbian love, a revelation in Regina’s youth, is not simply a behavior but entails the claim of a lesbian identity. This character clearly illustrates this identity as a sought-for position. Only in retrospect does Regina fully identify the specificity of her same-sex affair and firmly places a love that was initially mythologized in its historical context. As she says, “At the time, I believed the least relevant factor of all was that we were both women. (. . .) My adoration of her was so unto itself it could not refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings. (. . .) And yet, irrelevant as I thought gender was to our sex, and to all the disasters it wrought, I now see that the form our love took was fundamentally girlish (. . .) we might as well

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have been sylphs capering through the glade” (Choi 2013, 87, emphasis added). The sylph metaphor that likens the two lovers to the mythological air spirits points to an ahistorical natural world secured by the innocence of love and the exhilaration of pleasure; the latter evokes Colette’s observation on same-sex sexuality. “The girlfriend is delighted in the certitude of caressing a body whose secrets are familiar to her and whose own body guides her” (Colette 1971, 121, my translation). 2 Sexual kinship and affinity seem to be a given in same-sex desire and can account for the resulting harmony. However, gender is back with a vengeance in Regina’s assessment of her broken affair—her “gender-blindness” (Choi 2013, 87) is finally questioned. At the very outset, her primeval paradise is threatened by the sense of shame. Interestingly, Regina’s very first erotic encounter with Martha is tainted by the shame imparted to her by her colleague’s negative reaction; Lawrence’s horrified expression when he witnesses the two women’s necking, highly confounds the student. Her emotional response is followed up by a defensive statement to him—Regina finds herself saying to Lawrence that she had never kissed a woman before. As Michael Warner states in “Fear of a Queer Planet,” “Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is intricated with gender” (Warner 1991, 6). Regina seems to be discovering it albeit in a vague way. Her first real lesbian experience entails a primal encounter with shame but also resistance to it. In her conflicting emotions, the shame and the sense of “glory,” the experience of self-horror and the sense of “triumph,” all go together (Choi 2013, 84). Therefore, shame appears as a political emotion that initiates the construction of lesbian identity which, stigmatized, can be experienced as a “deviant” one. Indeed, Warner who, in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, investigates the politics of shame rightly states that “Individuals do not go shopping for sexual identity, but they do have a stake in a culture that enables sexual variance and circulates knowledge about it because they have no other way of knowing what they might or might not want or what they might become” (Warner 2000, 7). A hostile environment to same-sex love compels Regina to adopt a lesbian identity because making it public and gaining legitimacy is the only way to fight against the shame attached to it. Thus, the dialectics of shame/pride, hiding/ transparency, secrecy/disclosure, and domination/liberation enter the narrative. It is because of the two characters’ different approaches to these notions and the reality they shape that the affair breaks. Initially, their love is kept secret, for Martha is a married professor and the wife of Regina’s professor to boot. The surrounding culture is already an issue for them, and Regina finds it difficult to abide by the rules of secrecy imposed by Martha. The babysitter’s suspicion at the married couple’s home

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and her subsequent declared homophobia, as well as the male mockery in the far-out, demimonde working class bars the two women frequent, for they are the only places in which they can meet safely, give an indication of social intolerance and disgust that surround nonheterosexuality. “Dyke,” as an offensive term, is frequent in the text though it is not a slur when Dutra, Regina’s friend, uses it. Regina’s initial compromise factors in the emerging social problems and grants Martha the necessity to keep their affair secret and confined to the bars. The insults in this realm of alcoholics and, generally, from people who do not socially matter can be easily challenged by Martha, who also challenges her lover when she asks Regina to fearlessly follow her to these bars and to be indifferent to the people’s response. Martha’s Pyrrhic victory over the homophobic marginals is mildly celebrated by Regina who does not fail to notice how limited this public confrontation is. Though she follows her lover’s example, she also notes that the public Martha challenges cannot matter to the latter. The professor’s daring behavior only reveals Martha’s disappointing limits. However, what mainly empowers Regina, what helps her fight her own fear of the homophobic social environment and bestows on her an inner freedom, making her apt to challenge the whole society, is not Martha’s attitude in the bars but her own pride in love, an antidote to shame. As she eloquently expresses it, “I wanted acknowledgment. I was so proud that she loved me—did nobody know?” (Choi 2013, 217, emphasis added). Significantly, Regina’s sense of pride partly stems from Martha’s teacherly status, which is precisely what deters Martha from making the love affair public. Thus, when Regina’s concern becomes disclosure—once the married couple is separated officially and Regina drops out of the university—Martha’s remains secrecy. The latter’s boldness is confined to the local ill-reputed bars or trendy restaurants in New York but stops short of risking her professional life. Her rhetorical question to Regina whether secret love, with all the risks that it entails, cannot be enough is answered negatively by her lover. It could never be enough for, as long as they hide, Regina and Martha appear as a “water-bound fish” and a “versatile frog,” in Regina’s imaginative leap (Choi 2013, 211), and therefore, their love is impossible. In hiding, lesbian identity for Regina can only remain “a spoiled identity” (Warner 2000, 28), for shame is a moral emotion that questions not just behavior but the whole being. It is significant that when Martha, moved by her lover’s intensity, seems on the verge of making the affair public and introducing Regina as her girlfriend in her social environment, reparation, purification, transparency, serenity, and peace all seem attainable. They are all clearly apparent in the narrator’s flash of memory, “I did not say, with a satisfied pounce, ‘So you were hiding me.’ Some moments are free of all taint. I kissed her and she

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drew me against her, though first we removed the scotch bottle and TV remote from the bed—to give love a clear field, or a clean slate” (Choi 2013, 242). The italics in the text, the reference to the secrecy of their affair, the redundancy of the image in the phrases “clear field” and “clean slate,” the opposition of “taint” and “clean”—all suggest the deleterious effect of the closet and the necessity to walk out of it, which would entail a form of liberation. Eve Sedgwick, though lesbians are not prominent in her study, Epistemology of the Closet, identifies knowledge, secrecy, the unsayable as means of domination, not reducible to other forms of domination. As she puts it, “The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century” (Sedgwick 1990, 71). If Regina’s position is clear concerning the closet, Martha’s is ambiguous. It should be noted that her final decision not to make her affair public, which amounts to spoiling it for Regina, seems to be based not only on the consequences her same-sex love could have on her career but also on her reluctance to commit. As she confesses to Regina, “Whatever I feel, I don’t feel it the way that you do” (Choi 2013, 266). Family commitments seem to stifle her as her outburst indicates, “Come on, Regina. You ‘love me’ (. . .) you want to be Joachim’s other mommy? (. . .) pay half of my mortgage? (. . .) bake little pies every day?” (130). However, this unflattering picture of a would-be lesbian family derives from its similarity to a heterosexual family, for which Martha is not very gifted. Nevertheless, her willingness to accommodate the necessities of the closet—thanks to her independence of mind, immunity to homophobic slurs, abhorrence of marital commitment, and need to reduce the risks entailed by disclosure—paradoxically perpetuates it. Indeed, it is only Regina’s attitude that illustrates an activist’s position though it is not articulated as such. Interestingly, it is the notion of friendship, put forward as an alternative to a fully committed, public relationship, that comes up in Martha’s discourse. Since the professor fights, albeit unsuccessfully, to keep her lover in her life with all the intensity the affair involves, this notion of friendship requires some elaboration. Janice Raymond’s vision of female friendship in her study, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, is quite enlightening in this respect. Raymond who investigates women’s innate capacity for intense same-sex friendships, with or without homoerotic components, defines female friendship as “the arousal of the original, or the wild, Self in each woman.” According to her, “Friendship for women is basically ‘the call of the wild.’ It is a contagious cry from another like the Self to arise from a tamed and domesticated existence. It inspires a woman, again and again, to return to an original state of female existence not tamed by man” (Raymond 1986, 59). Raymond’s concept of “gyn/affection” precisely expresses such “a continuum of female friendship” (Raymond 1986, 15). Therefore, the professor’s plea for a type of friendship

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that dates back to antiquity, as Raymond’s study demonstrates, could be easily understood in this light. However, Regina’s search for liberation and transparency is entangled with her search for independence and emancipation. The narrative deftly weaves identity politics, namely “the spoiled identity” (Warner 2000, 28) of same-sex sexuality, with academic politics, notably the secondary position of the student in the pedagogic relation. The student’s rebellion against the professor who is ready to compromise and live in hiding is mingled with her rejection of her seemingly weaker status as a student. Therefore, her decision to abandon her graduate studies and find a job, approved by Martha, is motivated precisely by her desire to fight against the inequality that the status of student confers upon her in order to become her lover’s equal. As she resolutely puts it, “No longer would I be the student, to Martha’s professor” (Choi 2013, 187). The narrative illustrates bell hooks’s balanced view on erotic relationships between professors and students, which recognizes the contribution of the erotic to the maturation process. In her article, “Passionate Pedagogy: Erotic Student/Faculty Relationships,” the feminist author and social activist underlines the positive use of desire, the negotiation of power, and the confrontation with conflict as part of the learning process. Although Dutra warns Regina that Martha seems to be inconstant, ironically, it is the student who abandons the professor because Martha’s vision of their relationship is not satisfactory to the former. Regina’s breakdown, grief, and mourning follow her decision to detach herself from Martha appear as a rite of passage to adulthood. It is made clear that leaving Martha does not entail the end of Regina’s attraction to women; she ironically refers to it as her “presumably erstwhile, presumably cured lesbianism” (Choi 2013, 261), which is the alcoholic oldtimers’ perception of her when they see her drinking alone in the seedy Red Rooster bar. The sardonic phrase “cured lesbianism” that clearly reflects the male customers’ updated view of her conjures up Adrienne Rich’s remark about the term—“the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring” (Rich 2007, 221), and points to the early view of same-sex love as a pathology. As if to wipe out such a perception, the narrative depicts Regina’s love for Martha as life-long, since it resurges fourteen years later. Indeed, in the narrative’s present, the former student, overjoyed mother, happy wife, and published writer, visits her old lover and their one-off reunion is also sexual. Her reflections, while she is undertaking the long trip to meet the former professor and wondering what the fourteen intervening years have taken away, announce the persistence of desire, “Rancour. Some urgency, not all” (Choi 2013, 378). Though it is no longer an affair, this simultaneity of male and female sexual partners and Regina’s realization that she had never stopped loving Martha make bisexuality all the more salient.

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As a matter of fact, the overall picture of bisexuality should not be overlooked, in spite of the narrative’s main concern with lesbian passion; not only Regina’s current marriage and Martha’s former one but also the pedagogical triangulation brings it into sharp focus. If Regina’s husband, Matthew, is only a flat character, Nicholas is much less so. Both professors, Nicholas and Martha, are significant in Regina’s maturation—the former student recognizes her indebtedness to him in this manner: “After I’d travelled the distance, I saw what he’d done” (Choi 2013, 285). The temporary shelter he offered to Regina when she was broken and his discreet withdrawal when she was ready to fight for her life again are being assessed at the very end of the first part, thus highlighting his significance in her life. Clearly, triangulation does not only make bisexuality an ineluctable issue in the narrative but also enriches the student-professor phenomenology in an original way. The male professor is always present in Regina’s story, though relegated to the backseat until the lesbian affair is over. The student lucidly analyzes her feelings for her “abruptly imploded polestar” (Choi 2013, 106), which involve great admiration and respect, but can only link them to Martha. As she declares, “My esteem for him was hopelessly mixed with my ardor for her. (. . .) The two seemed so confoundingly separate” (128). Nicholas and Martha complete each other for Regina; though “separate” they seem inseparable. It appears that Nicholas advances and solidifies the affair with Martha when the latter makes Regina her confidante. It seems that the professor’s constant mental presence in the two women’s lives is a positive force in their affair, since it is experienced as “not an intrusion but the basis of a bond” (Choi 2013, 163). It is no wonder, then, that at the end of the affair, Regina’s former professor is again under the narrative spotlight for, as Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran put it in “The Erotics of Mentorship,” “electric teaching, the kind that leaves an indelible mark, happens in the flesh, in the moment, in the live performance of bodies sharing the energy of a time and place” (Figlerowicz and Ramachandran 2018). Nicholas’s pedagogic legacy and his involuntary role in the triangle become instrumental in Regina’s healing process and artistic development. Though it is Nicholas that plays the nurturer’s role, student and mentor, both sexual partners and companions, support each other in their common grief and discover what Regina articulates as a “profound kinship” (Choi 2013, 279). The professor’s final assessment, “‘I think we fell a little in love” (285), is not refuted by the student whose relation to him goes through the throes of self-avowed betrayal. Swaying between demythologization and sacralization of the master, her “remote, golden god” (280), the disciple preserves her awe of him, as her emotion indicates when she bumps into Nicholas years later. Though devoid of the intensity of the same-sex sexual passion, the student’s relationship to the male professor is no less complex.

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It is worth noting that if bisexuality is oblivious and unnamed in the text, it is manifested through its characteristics. Regina’s self-avowed genderblindness of her youth, though somewhat revised in her adulthood, points to a certain definition of bisexuality. Paula Rust notes that to “facilitate the decline of the significance of gender, some bisexuals define bisexuality as a form of sexuality independent of gender, or assert that they fall in love with the ‘person,’ not the ‘gender’” (Rust 1995, 241). In addition, when Nicholas barges into his colleague’s house and drags Regina to his place, the gossip that follow runs thus, “‘Do you think it’s a work-study job?’ (. . .) ‘That’s a job I would pay for. For fifty percent more tuition, you can sleep with both of them’” (Choi 2013, 272, emphasis added). This trivial or jealous comment does encode the definition of bisexuality as a “both/and” sexuality, which involves fluidity in the narrative. Steven Angelides in his A History of Bisexuality underlines that “being either/or implies both” (Angelides 2001, 15). Indeed, bisexuality appears in the narrative as an optical illusion that reveals two facets to view, if one adopts the right focus. Moreover, Maria Pramaggiore highlights the fluidity of bisexuality that characterizes the sexuality of the two main characters. As Pramaggiore puts it, “Bisexual epistemologies (. . .) acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring object” (Pramaggiore 1996, 3). The pedagogic triangulation in the narrative illustrates that bisexuality is not a fixed identity but characterized by mutability and mobility. The retrospective perspective corroborates such fluidity. The novel that can be read as a fictional autobiography evokes a narrative conception of the self, a notion put forward by Jerome J. Bruner who states that “there is no such thing as an intuitively obvious and essential self. (. . .) Rather we constantly construct and reconstruct ourselves to meet the needs of situations we encounter, and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future” (Bruner 2002, 64). Thus, Regina’s heterosexuality in the present of the narrative, disrupted by her meeting with Martha, reestablishes the bisexuality of both women. Before leaving Martha, Regina tellingly arranges a promising meeting between her former lover and Dutra, Martha’s former pool companion and fling. Moreover, Regina’s discussion of her life with Dutra, which calls into question her conventional happiness, as well as the narrative’s open-endedness settle nothing for the future. It should be noted that Choi was rightly annoyed by a journalistic comment about her lack of engagement in bisexual politics. 3 Authorial freedom precedes any kind of political agenda. But since lesbian politics inform the narrative, such obliviousness when it comes to bisexuality cannot go unnoticed by the reader, all the more so since bisexual theories

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were maturing in the 1980s and 1990s in the environment of queer movements. Interestingly, Robyn Ochs notes, “few authors actually use the “bword” (Ochs 2009, 257). Moreover, according to the findings of Ault’s study of lesbian women, “Many women (. . .) define a dyke as ‘anyone who is not heterosexual,’ and lesbian-aligned bisexual women often use the term to describe themselves (. . .) ‘dykes’ includes bisexuals, or the burden of the bisexual stigma” (Ault 1999, 176). It is no wonder, then, that bisexuality appears subsumed in Regina’s definition of herself as a lesbian, which naturally entails the invisibility of bisexuality. Indeed, “bisexuality has been acknowledged to be a silenced sexuality within several domains including mainstream media,” as Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge who undertook a “Queer(y)ing Psychology” project, contend (Barker and Langdridge 2008, 389). Therefore, it is worth underlining the emergence of bisexual politics and theory outside the narrative, which could account for the journalist’s expectation of seeing more of it in Choi’s novel. Activists, such as Mariam Frazer, fight against the invisibility of bisexuality on the grounds that its erasure would amount to oppression as well as to the pathologizing of the bisexual body in medical and popular discourse on AIDS. Nevertheless, whether the invisibility of bisexuality in the narrative was intentional on behalf of the author, who declared that she hated identity politics, or not, Choi has queered her educational couple. Just like bisexuality, the term queer does not appear in the text but it embraces, as Ault states, “not only those who mark themselves as gay or lesbian but, indeed, anyone whose proclivities, practices, or sympathies defy the strictures of the dominant sex/gender/sexual identity system” (Ault 1999, 177). Although “queer theorists have been curiously silent on the subject of bisexual identity” according to April Callis (Callis 2009, 217), bisexual activists, theorists, and scholars advocate “an identity-in coalition” (Du Plessis 1996, 43) claiming this umbrella term—queer. As Du Plessis notes, “another adjacent term by which bisexuality renames itself in Bi Any Name is ‘queer’” (Du Plessis 1996, 40). Naturally, novelists may have no use for these terms or labels, necessary for theorists or legislators, but the novel illustrates the difficulty of eluding either academic or sexual identity politics. Their felicitous association in the narrative destabilizes both fixed boundaries in relations between students and professors and heteronormativity. If sexual identity politics is ineluctable in Choi’s novel, so are religious and national politics in John Updike’s Roger’s Version and Terrorist.

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NOTES 1. It is worth noting that the frankness and explicitness of sexual scenes in the text nearly earned Choi the highly dubious prize of Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. 2. “L’amie se complaît dans la certitude de caresser un corps dont elle connaît les secrets, et dont son propre corps lui indique les préférences” (Colette 1971, 121). 3. See, “I actually think there’s more political stuff in my work than in a lot of other novels” (Choi 2014).

Chapter Seven

Pedagogical Encounters in John Updike’s Roger’s Version and Terrorist

John Updike’s two main characters in Roger’s Version (1986) and Terrorist (2006) are untypically cast into the archetypal figures of master-pupil against the background of a divided America. In these two novels that reflect on public issues which have shaken American society, namely creationism/intelligent design, “political correctness,” and terrorism and national identity, the author pores over the phenomenology of master-pupil, steeped in theology and science in Roger’s Version and in politics in Terrorist. Through the complex interaction of these two figures, the narratives assert Christian values in the former and national ideals in the latter. In a country that has clearly moved away from John Winthrop’s vision of New England as “a city upon a hill,” these two narratives are set to stimulate religious and national American consciousness. Contrary to Terrorist, which was quite controversial, Roger’s Version won wide critical acclaim. At the author’s death in January 2009, the novel was among the ten most memorable works chosen by TIME magazine (TIME Staff 2009). Roger’s Version, a character-driven novel of ideas, 1 relates the encounter between Roger Lambert, a fifty-two-year-old divinity school professor and a specialist in church heresy, and Dale Kohler, a twenty-eightyear-old computer science graduate. The latter applies to the divinity school and through Lambert’s roundabout support gets funds for his project to provide electronic evidence for the existence of God. Their intense engagement with each other is accompanied by developments in the lives of those close to them. They are triggered by Dale’s ambiguous affair with Roger’s wife, Esther, and Roger’s eroticized relation with his young niece and Dale’s friend, Verna Ekelhof. If Updike’s classic triangle is turned into a rectangle, 77

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it is mainly through the establishment of a network of tutoring that runs along with the main pedagogical couple, Roger-Dale. Several critics, such as James Schiff (1992), Donald Greiner (2002), and Michial Farmer (2017), understandably focused on Updike’ s deliberate rewriting or transformation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter. However, a reading of the novel based on the charged personal encounter between the classic figures of master and disciple could be equally productive, all the more so since Updike, unlike other American authors such as Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth, has rarely focused on the relations of mentorship. René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire will help elucidate the uniting and disuniting forces that underpin the interplay between these two characters whose bond goes through several phases. Indeed, Steiner’s categories of subversion, destruction, and exchange clearly overlap in the novel. The narrative involves all three of these modes of rapport and thus deals with a highly complex bond. Moreover, as is often the case in the American campus novel after the 1980s, the narrative takes on board the issue of “political correctness” and without naming it, as Francine Prose ostensibly does fourteen years later in Blue Angel, defies it. Roger, who appears to be a politically incorrect character, given his views on women and race, ostensibly fraught with sexism and racism, initially decides to support Dale’s preposterous project as a counterweight to what he sees as a proliferation of gender and Black studies. Notably, his scorn for feminist politics is underlined by his negative stance on his female student’s doctoral dissertation which he eloquently dismisses as “butchifying the saints” (Updike 1986, 174). Roger’s student must be tackling her topic through gender theory. Likewise, Roger’s objectionable diction, such as “tar baby” (Updike 1986, 178), and remarks about race that could certainly be perceived as racist, stud the text. Adam Begley’s comment on one of these remarks as simply “mischievous” (Begley 2014, 420) is rather an understatement. Updike delights in provocation, in transgressing limits no matter what the cause for such limits is. It is clear that the author means to preserve his narrative freedom against any political agenda and will not dismiss his objectionable character, whose concern is religion. Precisely, the novel’s former title was Majesty, which referred to the “majesty of God” as Begley reports (Begley 2014, 418). Roger’s Version confirms Steiner’s view that Updike’s “sense of American experience is religious (. . .) in a vein related particularly to the history of New England Calvinism on the one hand and to the thought of Barth and Tillich on the other” (Steiner 1979, 94). Both theologians are prominent in the text. The narrative, by juxtaposing two Protestants with a different brand of faith and religious views, forges the representation of Christian identity while it also pioneers the upcoming debate on intelligent

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design, 2 showing how absurd it is through the encounter of the two main characters. As a matter of fact, the bond between Roger and Dale seems to be created instantaneously during their very first meeting. Indeed, the first-person narrator, Roger, whose narrative position confirms his masterly power, refers to their “stilted intimacy” (Updike 1986, 8) with a mixture of attraction and repulsion which amounts to fascination. What accounts for this instantaneity is the common geographical origin of the two characters—Rust Belt Cleveland, which marked them strongly though differently, and the character they are both related to and thanks to whom they get acquainted, Verna; but, above all, it is their interaction as professor and student. It seems that the narrative initially dispenses with the pedagogical process that unites master and pupil to put forward a sort of pedagogical Eros at first sight. Roger is taken by surprise when he finds out the reason for Dale’s appointment which, as the student terms it, is “God” (Updike 1986, 10), “god as a fact” (19); Roger is subsequently given a lecture on the universe’s “purposeful intelligence” (15) or what, in other words, appears to be intelligent design; the latter is the descendant of creationism. 3 However, in spite of his keen interest in and immediate fascination with him, Roger also feels during this lecture that he is treated and “instructed” (14) as “a sluggish student” (11) by the lecturer and this reversal of roles, which is redolent of subversion, makes Roger want to “teach” Dale “a lesson,” which points to the professor’s aggressive attitude towards the student and his inclination to harm him. Undoubtedly, their first debate sets the tone and the nature of their exchange which is constantly marked by conflict and collusion. In the course of the narrative, all their religious debates—highly demanding for the reader due to their theological and scientific erudition—as well as their social exchanges put forward a strong ambivalence that is only resolved at the end. Thus, a constructive and destructive mode of interaction seems to unfold simultaneously while, at the ending, it is rather the constructive mode that appears to be prevailing. Dale evolves from “a troublesome student” (Updike 1986, 28) for Roger and becomes a most special and exceptional one, for he penetrates the latter’s inner self. The professor progressively—“I grew fonder of him” (72)—experiences for the student a higher form of love expressed by the Christian concept of “αγάπη” (168) which transcends any other form. 4 Nevertheless, at the same time, this superior form is fought against and accompanied by hate. As Roger confesses, “Our exchange of αγάπη notwithstanding, I did intend to crush him” (172). Likewise, Dale’s feelings seem to be equally ambivalent. On the one hand, he eagerly “confides” to Roger (Updike 1986, 18). On the other hand, his wish to have the professor’s full approval in his desperate attempt to make God discoverable may be complicated and thwarted by his sense of

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guilt, for it seems that he becomes Esther’s lover. While some critics such as Begley have understandably been noncommittal concerning Dale’s affair with Roger’s wife, since the whole narrative, apart from the characters’ direct discourse, is Roger’s version of the events, certain narrative elements point to the confirmation of such a development. For instance, Dale confides to Verna that he has had an affair with a woman who lives in Roger’s neighborhood and is much older than he. Likewise, Esther’s probable pregnancy can only be the fruit of this illicit affair and Roger is convinced that this is the case. Nevertheless, Updike seems keen on surrounding these developments with some ambiguity that persists until the end. However, what seems to be certain is Dale’s and Roger’s conflictual closeness. Although Dale does not really deny evolution, his self-appointed mission to make those “telltale signs” in the universe scientifically visible (Updike 1986, 200) as a prop to “the moral impulse and our will to believe” (200) makes him appear to the academic committee as a near-creationist. It is not the moral applications of his project, however, that convince the committee to accept it but Roger’s calculated intervention. His strategic “Judas kiss” (211), that is, his repudiation of Dale’s project in the name of his own Barthian faith before the committee, with no sensibility towards the neoconservative theologian, renders its members attentive to Dale’s project and earns him the grant. Naturally, the reader may wonder why the professor supports a project he finds untenable or whether he means to give Dale the chance to get rid of his obsession, which would confer on his act a pedagogic purpose. Given the ambivalence of emotions that govern their bond, namely love and hate, Roger’s support could have such a moral motivation. Likewise, Dale’s introduction to professor Myron Kriegman by Roger could also carry an ambivalent intent. Kriegman enlightens the student on the scientific unsoundness of his project in a most professorial manner that sounds patronizing and humiliating outside a classroom and in a social gathering. As a result, Dale does not ask for a renewal of his contract. Though, according to Verna’s and Esther’s testimony, he seems to be shaken in his religious faith, he climbs down from his “Babel Tower” (Updike 1986, 168), as Roger dismissingly terms Dale’s project, and is cured of his illusion. Indeed, whether Barthian or not, according to the narrative, Christian faith must not be tainted by any intelligent design temptation. On the other hand, an even more positive development occurs in Roger. The professor’s empathy and compassion for Dale (and his fellow beings), as his imagining of the student’s fruitless, agonizing wrestle with the computer illustrates, is liberated from hate and appears stripped of some of the disturbing aspects of his personality, namely cynicism and callousness. Andrew Tate rightly observes that “a radical instability” characterizes “the cultural binary of student and

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professor” (Tate 2008, 48) in Roger’s Version, though he does not elaborate on this intuition. The same restoration of order appears in the other couples related by pedagogy, which underpins and facilitates the circulation of desire. In fact, the master-pupil bond is overdetermined in the narrative as it is also propped by Esther-Dale’s relation. In their case, tutorship is displaced onto Esther and Roger’s son, Richie, tutored in math by Dale. Esther’s compliment to Dale, “you’d make a wonderful teacher” (Updike 1986, 118), is accompanied by a possessive assertion as she vehemently rejects the idea of Dale tutoring Verna; the latter is strongly encouraged by Dale and Roger to sit for the General Educational Development (GED) test. Esther’s protest leaves no room for doubt about her possessive attitude towards Dale, “‘Oh no, you’ve been signed up to tutor Richie’” (122). It is worth noting that another sort of displacement occurs in the RogerDale couple. The latent eroticism between the two men, observed by some critics such as John Duvall, who in his article, “The Pleasure of Textual/ Sexual Wrestling: Pornography and Heresy in Roger’s Version,” explored the homoerotic subtext (1991), has been displaced onto the affair between Esther and Dale, even if the latter cannot be totally confirmed by the narrative. Dale’s way out of it seems to be his plan to go back to Cleveland and thus be out of the way. Furthermore, in the distribution of tutors, Roger is coupled with Verna, whose sexual appeal is enhanced by the old appeal Verna’s mother exerted upon the professor. However, in the erotics of instruction, Verna, who “revives” “the old counselor” (Updike 1986, 121) in Roger, has her own merit as a student. During “a tutorial session” (137) in Verna’s flat that tellingly reminds Roger of “a student’s flat” (176), the divinity professor is sensitive to his niece’s individuality. As he observes, “My quickened sense of Verna’s intelligence affected my skin; sexiness is a nervous condition, like hives, to which the intelligent are most susceptible” (131). Though he acts out his desire in a one-off sexual meeting, highly encouraged by Verna, he clarifies his situation with her and helps her take control of her life at the end. If Steiner’s model of master-disciple interaction can enlighten the reader on the nature of the emotions that this encounter generates, their complexity, intensity, and, last but not least, immersion in religion could also be understood in the light of René Girard’s broader concept of mimetic desire. Though this concept is not specific to the master-disciple phenomenon, it may elucidate the antagonistic mode of the relation and its resolution in this narrative. Girard, poring over the mystery of human interaction, contends that human desire is not autonomous but mediated. The French philosopher reveals a triangular structure of desire which involves the subject, the mediator or model, and the object desired by the subject; the subject feels strongly about the object because the model desires it. It must be noted that Girard’s

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theory was shaped by his study of literature and has been naturally quite controversial 5 for it sounds too ambitious, but it does give us an insight into the nature of human desire. Roger’s Version is about human desire and the mystery of human relations. Precisely, the male bond in Roger’s Version, rather untypical in Updike’s work, is quite intriguing since it is also characterized (as we shall see) by what Girard calls possession brought forth by rivalry, equally central in the philosopher’s analysis. As he states, “Rivalry (. . .) only aggravates mediation; it increases the mediator’s prestige and strengthens the bond which links the object to this mediator by forcing him to affirm openly his right or desire of possession” (Girard 2000, 41). As a matter of fact, in the case of what Girard calls internal mediation, that is, the proximity between the subject and the model, mimetic appropriation is inevitably divisive and the only way out of the violence it breeds is ultimately the imitation of Christ. The implicit affirmation and triumph of Christian values at the ending of the narrative provides the resolution to the conflicting emotions that shake the two rivals, Roger and Dale, making Girard’s concept quite relevant in this novel. It is noteworthy that conflict and collusion, rivalry and companionship are overdetermined in the novel as religion, class, and sexuality are involved in master-pupil’s interaction. Dale and Roger, the former animated by his belief in a god discoverable by human means, the latter by one reached by faith alone, are both marginal in a divinity school dominated by lapsed Unitarians and Quakers, which could also account for Roger’s support of Dale for the grant. Their religious differences are aggravated by the involvement of the female characters in their exchange, which makes sexuality equally prominent in the narrative. Roger’s encounter with young, impetuous Dale amounts to no less than a miraculous awakening of desire, as Roger’s biblical image of “Lazarus awakening” (Updike 1986, 10) announces. The professor, existentially, spiritually, and vocationally jaded, is jostled out of his middle-class lethargy and is offered a new lease on life and a moral one to boot. It is Dale’s desire, both real and imagined, that shakes Roger out of the staleness and boredom of a settled, orderly life. The student’s faith generates the religious debates that stimulate Roger’s intellectual and spiritual life; they involve science and constitute a considerable part in the narrative. Likewise, Dale’s sexuality stimulates Roger’s imagination, which abounds in graphic fantasies that also occupy an important part in the text. Interestingly, religion and sexuality are inextricable in the narrative. The reader may naturally wonder what Dale, in many respects “inferior” to Roger, may have that is enviable to the latter. It seems that it is Dale’s burning faith and moral consideration for others, as well as his relative youth and sexual energy, that appeal to the professor who no longer finds satisfac-

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tion in his calling, his profession, or his marriage, and is thus sexually blasé and in the midst of an existential crisis. Right from the start, Dale appears as a fellow Protestant but also as a potential sexual rival, since Roger immediately suspects that he is Verna’s lover. Significantly, the suspicion, which brings Dale’s sexuality to the fore, unreasonably persists. Likewise, Roger imagines Esther as “another man’s precious wife to defile” (Updike 1986, 33) right after his first meeting with Dale, persistently seeing his wife through another man’s eyes, namely Dale’s. James Schiff’s insightful observation that “Roger Lambert becomes obsessed with Dale Kohler, attempting to utilize him as an instrument for revitalizing and rediscovering his marriage” (Schiff 1992, 66) underlines both Roger’s possession by Dale and the mimetic force that the student exercises on the professor. As Girard makes clear, “The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model—the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred” (Girard 2000, 39). In fact, the phenomenon of possession that involves Roger’s feelings of rivalry toward Dale is particularly striking in the narrative. The professor, following Dale’s tracks, revisits and sees the unnamed city of Boston through the student’s “still-religious eyes” (Updike 1986, 53). As he clearly states, “I was taking this walk in the steps of another and I felt his spirit invading mine” (52). This invasion entails identification, “I had the sensation of being Dale Kohler” (64). Thus, it is obviously possession that paves the way for Roger’s spiritual regeneration. He describes the change in his frame of mind in this self-conscious manner, “His religious reaction passed into me. Peace descended, that wordless gratification that seems to partake of the fundamental cosmic condition” (71). The professor’s transformation stems from his encounter with the student. Likewise, Dale is instrumental in the return of Roger’s sense of desire, as Dale’s imagined desire for Esther is being transmitted to Roger. The professor’s description of this recovery is graphic, “I saw her close up, through Dale’s eyes, the smeared edge of lipstick (. . .) and I felt a sexual stir in my lap, a blip of stiffening there, with his instinctive recognition, religious and information-saturated as he was, that this woman in bed (. . .) would do anything” (Updike 1986, 121). As in Girard’s example from Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband, the husband’s desire for his future wife is mediated through her would-be lover. Therefore, Dale becomes a sexual rival and the intensity of this rivalry is expressed in the professor’s wish to “have him destroyed” (Updike 1986, 93). Dale’s moral being is eagerly put into question, “I wonder what moral sensations he felt, fucking my little Esther” (159) and the student’s sexuality is belittled, “his waxy face, breaking out in a masturbator’s pimples” (55). Their class difference is also used to devalue the model. Dale, in spite of his university degree, seems to belong to the other America represented by Ver-

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na’s neighborhood and lodgings. The professor, whose material possessions indicate his middle-class status and comfort, becomes a keen and at times apprehensive observer of that America under Reagan whose administrations exacerbated social differences. Indeed, Roger’s depiction of the underprivileged brings forth a disunited country whose social gaps cannot be bridged as the professor’s sharp eye reveals. “They had the almost-poor’s prim contempt for the truly poor, for the indigent and useless. Early though the night was, the underclass had already dispatched some delegates to the hospital; the young derelict with his missing teeth and winter tan, the muttering bag lady with her bleeding forehead, the family of Haitians protectively bunched around some nocturnal wound” (Updike 1986, 255). The suffering “underclass,” in all its telling misery, offers its spectacle to the attentive professor who has no reformer’s eyes. As a matter of fact, Roger admires the American president, Ronald Reagan, and his often fearful forays into the indigent part of the city elicit no more than a mere, though purple, description without any intent of a social critique of the American system. Updike had to do some sociological research for this novel. Begley reports his visits to “unsavory Cambridge neighborhoods, notepads in hand” (Begley 2014, 419). It seems that authorial consciousness of deprived America stops short of any suggestion of social reform in spite of the prominence of the class divide in the narrative. Though the title highlights Roger’s version of the events, Dale’s visibility through the character’s direct discourse is equally significant. The student’s desire seems to be no less decisive in the developments that occur in the chronotope of the narrative. Indeed, Girard contends that the model has no passive role in the triangle. “The model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. (. . .) Beyond a certain level of intensity they are totally absorbed and the disputed object becomes secondary, even irrelevant. Judging from many rituals, their mutual fascination can reach the level of a hypnotic trance. That particular condition becomes the principal goal of certain religious practices under the name of possession” (Girard 2000, 12). Indeed, Dale also seems to be possessed by Roger. As he tells the professor, “But at night I sometimes want to talk to you. I think of arguments” (Updike 1986, 170). The student’s confession heightens the pathos that surrounds the encounter and points to reciprocal emotions. Precisely, it is the student’s obsessive desire to persuade the professor of the rightness of his convictions and his eagerness to be around him and enlighten Roger’s mind that win the professor over as he regretfully discovers. “I felt lightly covered in slime after our spiritual grapple, our ‘reaching out.’ I hated to have my most intimate views, my hot Barthian nugget insulated within layers of worldly cynicism and situation ethics, dragged toward the light by this boy’s earnest agony, his obstinate refusal to let me go until I

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blessed him. I kept my distance from my students and resented this interloper from another department, from another side of the university altogether, tracking his big hush-puppy footprints where so many others had never trod” (Updike 1986, 174). It seems clear that the student penetrated the professor’s inaccessible inner life since he moved the latter deeply. At the end, Dale, with his illusions discarded and shaken by doubt, comes to resemble Roger before the encounter. Nevertheless, he takes the decisions that seem to be beneficial for him and Verna, whom he has taken under his wing. If Dale’s resolve to return to his home, Cleveland, is his way out of the infernal circularity of desire, Roger’s way out is Christian practice. Contrary to other critics such as Frank Novak, whose eloquently titled 2005 article, “The Satanic Personality in Updike’s Roger’s Version,” offers a very partial, monolithic view of the character, John Neary notes that Roger finds “God in the return of the ordinary” (Neary 1992, 208). This balanced view may point to the professor’s recovery of Christian values, such as forgiveness, generosity, agape, and sacrifice. After Roger’s imaginative foray into Dale’s failed attempt at computerized evidence of the existence of God, the professor seems to review his faith in Barth’s inaccessible, absent God and to allow for a more present one as his reference to Paul Tillich’s social engagement indicates, “Tillich was right: as creatures we are not only incorrigibly religious but incorrigibly social” (Updike 1986, 246). This recognition of social responsibilities and eagerness to take them up occur with a simultaneous revival of his desire for his wife and acceptance of her affair with Dale, “As I left to rescue another woman, I felt lust for my wife, steeped though she was in another man’s brine” (Updike 1986, 246). Therefore, Andrew Tate’s view of Roger as someone who “uses the theology as an excuse to evade commitment and engagement with the world” (Tate 2008, 60) does not take into account the professor’s development and his final commitment as well as the contribution of Christian religion to this change. Though Roger recognizes the human limitations to live up to the ideal conception of Christian love, the old “ghost of Christianity” (Updike 1984, 76) is given flesh and blood in the narrative and is thus put forward as part and parcel of the American experience. After American faith, two decades later in Terrorist, Updike revisits American national identity through the same configuration. The encounter of master-pupil is central in the narrative, all the more so in that two masters vie for the pupil’s malleable mind. Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an Arab American high school student abandoned by his Egyptian father who failed to become an American and left the country, is raised in a depressed New Jersey city by his Irish mother, an aspiring painter and nurse’s aide. A gifted but socially alienated pupil, Ahmad is repulsed by American materialism, consumerism, “trashiness,” and “immorality,” and finds shelter in “his Islamic identity” (Updike 2006, 99). Indoctrinated by his imam, Shaikh Rashid, a religious

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member of a terrorist group that is infiltrated by the CIA, the student is chosen to carry out the terror attack against the Lincoln Tunnel and does so efficiently but is stopped in extremis by his Central High School counselor, Jack Levy, an agnostic Jew. Levy is eager to sacrifice his own life to stop the attack. Both the weary counselor, who, suffering from Weltschmerz temporarily fails his pedagogical and civic duties, and the fanatical imam, who momentarily wins the battles but loses the war, claim the heart and mind of the young Arab-American student. Ahmad, won over by the former, finally discards terrorism and seems to return to the cradle of the American Creed. For John Updike’s faithful readers, Terrorist can be a disappointing experience, as it is artistically a flawed novel, yet rewarding for one who wants to look at Updike as an American writer after 9/11 inquiring into the nation’s identity. Naturally, the author’s immense literary talent and great achievement in American letters amply justify international scholars’ interest in even a mediocre novel, as shown by Sylvie Mathé’s and Theodora Tsimpouki’s articles which point out the novel’s shortcomings, namely the central character’s flimsiness and unconvincing diction as well as its ideological bias. It is no surprise that Updike, whose fiction reflects all the major developments in the United States, pores over terrorism in this novel. Generally, with the rise of terrorism in the West and in the Middle East, anglophone novels dealing with terrorism have multiplied since the 1970s. Thus, their authors contribute to a certain “mythography” of terrorism that started in the media. Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel, who take up a typology of novels from 1970–2001, note that the difference between terrorism before 1970 and after lies in the capacity of the latter for damage (Appelbaum and Paknadel 2008, 403). To be sure, with the major attack on 9/11, the United States was not spared such damage. This traumatic experience of a terrorism “extremely loud and incredibly close” 6 (Foer 2006) jostled American literary imagination. In fact, the post–Twin Towers novel revisits American identity in an effort to overcome the identity crisis, which Updike’s Terrorist is attempting to do with questionable results. The author has been consistently concerned with the evolving configuration of national identity, but this concern appears more pressing after 9/11. Four decades after Couples (1968), Updike, the moralist, gets out his pen again to sketch a graver and much more confused image of America in search of a renewed and restored awareness of its identity. In this fable of a novel, the author reveals some of the underlying myths and historical, cultural, and ideological impulses which drive thinking in the United States. I will examine Updike’s brand of nationalism, and look into its drawbacks. I will also argue that Updike’s nationalism is based on the American Creed as the author attempts to embrace a sort of cosmopolitan liberalism, while he harbors a strong identification with the country. Updike seems to be a loyal supporter of his nation and as such, his critical apprehension of America,

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notably its education system, may be constructive but remains very limited. This sort of loyalty can become a double-edged sword that may alienate America from the rest of the world. American national identity becomes a major theme in the novel. Terrorist, Updike’s “most political” work, according to the political correspondent for the New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg (Updike 2006 interview), displays the author’s eagerness to participate in the nation’s effort of recovery from the 9/ 11 shock. Terrorist is distinguished both by its theme, setting, and heavy, Updike-unlike plot, as the elegiac bard of suburban adultery ventures into a new territory; illicit love in a middle-class, neat, comfortable environment no longer occupies center stage. The setting is the ironically named city of New Prospect, New Jersey, a declining city built upon a hill, which marks both its continuity and rupture with the country’s past. This “Third World jungle” (Updike 2006, 33), as the narrative voice calls it, offers no prospects for the Central High students, Ahmad’s schoolmates, who will become drug addicts and dealers or pimps, like Tylenol, or prostitutes, like African American Joryleen. Indeed, Updike’s characters, instead of the usual successful WASPs, are now a multicultural crew in an impoverished environment. This change from the representation of a WASP society to the representation of a diverse one is certainly indispensable for his exploration of the national identity. Updike wrote from the 1950s, “the perceived zenith of American national integration (Citrin, Haas, Muste, and Reingold 1994, 3) to the first decade of the twenty-first century when, after all the trials and tribulations American society went through, this integration seemed shaken by the 9/11 attack. It is from the platform of a diverse, under-terrorist-threat society that Updike looks into the issue of national identity and through the emblematic encounter of masterpupil. The events of 9/11 have brought to the fore the question of the implications of rapid ethnic change for a unified sense of nationhood and instilled fear of multiple sorts in American society, namely fear of terrorism but also fear of the political manipulation of fears about terrorism. It is the first form of fear that Updike is drawn to and explores along with diversity in a patriotic vein. The narrative features a society mobilized by a terrorist threat which demands a heightened watch, dutifully provided by the Secretary of Homeland Security. His vigilance prompts an upgrade of the terror-threat level on a Sunday morning when, contrary to anybody else, he works, as the narrative voice highlights meaningfully. The country appears in a state of emergency, caught in “a perpetual war for the perpetual peace,” 7 fighting on the domestic front after having fought a liberating, civilizing war abroad, according to the main character. As Levy points out to Ahmad, when the latter objects to joining the army because then he would be sent to “fight his brothers,” “fight for your brothers, it could be.

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Not all Iraqis are insurgents, you know. Most aren’t. They just want to get on with business. Civilization started there. They had an up-and-coming little country, until Saddam” (Updike 2006, 41). Levy’s discourse gives the government credit for taking up a noble mission abroad to restore civilization in a country whose growth had been stunted by the dictator. The end of the Cold War was not the end of America’s struggle to propagate its values. In the background of the narrative, America’s exceptionalism persists and frames the events that develop on the domestic front. Furthermore, Updike, in his interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg and Lila Azam Zanganeh, expressed his view on the Iraq war without fear and trembling: “Also, Iraq. I don’t know. It would be nice if it weren’t happening. A lot of things would be nice. I can certainly see how it was to get to the invasion, the second—his invasion instead of his father’s invasion—was a potentially brilliant idea. But it hasn’t worked out to be brilliant” (Updike 2006 interview; 2010). After his support for the Vietnam War, which made him a pariah among American intellectuals and cost him his job at The New Yorker, he expresses qualified support for the Iraq War and his sympathy for the Bush administration, although he declared himself a Democrat in his autobiographical text, “On Not Being a Dove” (Updike 1989). Updike’s hawkish attitude and support of America’s foreign policy reveals an unconditional love and loyalty for his country, which is also expressed in his fiction. Moreover, Terrorist, due to the exceptional circumstances, is clearly robed in nationalist ideology. “By nationalist ideology, we mean a particular body of arguments and ideas about what defines the nation—its members, its core values and goals, [. . .] and its relations to other nations. A nationalist ideology is an effort to give specific content and political direction to a group’s consciousness of difference from other nations and their beliefs” (Citrin, Haas, Muste, and Reingold 1994, 2). Nationalism, this feature of American political culture, appears in the novel in a quite subtle way, as Updike, in a myth-renewing attempt, dusts off American national identity and shapes a picture of the United States above political parties, religions, races, overcoming the clash of civilizations and united by the same civic creed in liberty, the law, democracy, individualism, and egalitarianism. The narrative is built as in a Hollywood almost-disaster film. Behind a semblance of ordinariness, a terrorist attack is being engineered methodically and patiently by the enemies of the United States. At the beginning of the narrative, the government is on the alert, ensuring the citizens’ security. At the end of the narrative, it is revealed that the CIA, with its Arab American agents, was also very active and waiting in the wings but, above all, the attack is finally thwarted by the action of a single man, an ordinary citizen, the counselor who, after having been alerted by another dutiful citizen, his sister-in-law, stops Ahmad from committing the terrorist act in the nick of time of time.

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Interestingly, Updike declared that he wanted to see through the eyes of a “devout, young, somewhat naive Muslim (. . .) to see through his eyes, America, as it must look as an impure, not to say obscene and disgusting morass of overeating and oversexness.” He also underlined that he is “not writing about an evil terrorist, or really writing against terrorism” (Updike 2010). However, given the circumstances, and the time of the publication of the novel (in 2006 a good number of Americans were worried about terrorist attacks), Terrorist can be read as a political statement about the efficient mobilization of multiethnic America to foil such attempts. In the narrative, America’s sustained efforts to make Iraq a safe democratic country go hand in hand with constant efforts to make a diverse society viable and to exterminate terrorism at home. Updike’s faith in good government along with America’s ordained destiny inform the author’s fiction. Shifting focalization in the novel allows for the representation of a large range of views, yet there is also a very flattering portrait of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Although he is referred to as “a born-again, right-wing stooge (Updike 2006, 32) by the narrative voice, when the focalization is on Levy, the former also appears as a constructive patriot who carries a clear-crystal vision of America and its mission. Temporarily tempted by “Mammon”—“If this thing in New Jersey blows up, there’ll be no sitting on fat-cat boards for me. No speaker’s fees. No milliondollar advance on my memoir” (261)—he is instantly led back to the altruistic path by his devout assistant, his “undersecretary,” as he calls her, who watches over him and his mission as dutifully as she watches over the country’s diversity program. Thus, their discourses echo and complement each other’s. The secretary is quite straightforward when he expresses his belief in American superiority. “My trouble is (. . .) I love this damn country so much I can’t imagine why anybody would want to bring it down. What do these people have to offer instead? More Taliban—more oppression of women, more blowing up statues of Buddha” (Updike 2006, 258). Likewise, to his perplexity over why America is hated, his “undersecretary” responds with the biblical citation of light and darkness which reiterates President Eisenhower’s Inaugural Address of 1953, “lightness [is pitted] against the dark.” Such an affirmation of America’s innocence, one of the myths that underpin the American Creed and endow it with emotional force while strengthening American nationalism, is problematic. It involves America’s complacency and self-confidence in its own success, benevolence, and sense of national mission. The ancient Greeks called the combination of these features hubris, and the Catholic church calls it pride; as for other nations, in a more secular vein, they refer to it as American hegemony. This affirmation of innocence is at the base of Updike’s mythopoeic activity. If Don DeLillo, in his 2001 “In the Ruins of the Future,” touches

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upon the reasons that may have paved the way to terrorism, 8 Updike seems to take American innocence for granted. The sense of national mission is pervasive in the narrative as his main character, counselor Jack Levy, carries the burden of America’s exceptional destiny and responds to the ideological challenge of terrorism showing how the enemy within can be neutralized and won over. Thus Levy, an ordinary man, becomes a hero. However, while Updike almost unquestionably embraces his country’s foreign policy, he seems more reflective and critical regarding American society’s shortcomings—namely, education and, behind it, family. Levy is the guidance counselor at Central High, a decrepit school in a derelict city. Defeated by the system, he is failing as a counselor. The narrative voice exposes the character’s professional tribulations, “Then Jack comes home depressed because the problems beyond solving are getting to be boring, and his gestures at solving them a mere routine (. . .) a con job” (Updike 2006, 136). In a debased society of shaky values, the key character, morally drained, finds no good reason to live, “As Jack Levy sees it, America is paved solid with fat and tar, a coast-to-coast tarbaby where we’re all stuck. Even our vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about. [. . .] Religious fanatics and computer geeks” (27). Cold War vocabulary reinforces the idea of the Cold War as an ideal-giver. 9 In this technological world of fanatics and terrorists running amok, in this America oblivious of its ideals, life appears useless and aimless. It is the encounter with the disoriented student that changes Levy’s life. The author uses the phenomenology of master-pupil to advance his views on the necessity to be very attentive to the state of education in the country. Thus, he brings together, in a doubly-emblematic relation, a Jewish counselor and an Arab student who is under the influence of a destructive master. Shaikh Rashid is piously instructing the boy how to carry out his exterminating mission in the name of religion and promises him eternal bliss. As for the counselor, rendered impotent by an educational system in tatters, he is lost in his own profane, melancholic musings, but belatedly revives to a sense of duty. Having missed Ahmad’s initial orientation toward college education, he first tries to make up for this failure by a visit to Ahmad’s mother. He promotes the opportunities of the country’s diversity program in this manner, “‘Any college these days, the way the politics of it are, wants diversity, and your boy, what with his selected religious affiliation, and his ethnic mix, is a kind of minority’s minority—they will snap him up’” (Updike 2006, 83). Therefore, affirmative action appears very promising in the narrative. Moreover, another element in the narrative reinforces Levy’s role as an educator. As the plot unfolds, the counselor becomes the lover of Ahmad’s mother, but she later abandons him. Unable to influence Ahmad’s decision to take up college education or his mother to continue their affair, he volunteers

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to teach a course in civics. This superficially minor detail becomes very significant in the light of the counselor’s response at the end of the narrative—he turns out to be the only man able to avert the murderous attack on the G-day, tellingly compared to “the day of Nine-Eleven” (Updike 2006, 265). In addition, he saves Ahmad’s life and directs him to the rule of law. The reference to 9/11 makes clear that the catastrophe that was not averted then can be averted now. Indeed, the counselor manages to enter Ahmad’s fated truck when he is on his way to accomplish his evil mission and, as they drive through the tunnel, he gives his student a lesson in American civics and identity, making clear that they are together in this undertaking. He thus replaces Shaikh Rashid as a father figure and turns out to be Ahmad’s mother’s only lover willing to play a father’s role helping his son-pupil to choose his future profession, suitable for him and useful for his ethnic group and the whole society. As he assures the boy, “I wasn’t kidding you about you making a good lawyer. You’re cool under pressure. You talk well. In the years to come, Arab-Americans are going to need good lawyers” (Updike 2006, 309). This possibility of return to law and order highlighted by the return to the fine light of day after the darkness of the tunnel once again evokes Eisenhower’s Inaugural Address mentioned above, “lightness [is pitted] against the dark.” The symbolism of the events points to Ahmad’s transformation from a terrorist to a fledgling American. Clearly, Levy, shaken out of his apathy, dolorism, and immersion in defeatism, finds a new ideal in “achieving America,” to use Richard Rorty’s phrase. Levy’s act restores old American values, especially family values, thus expressing a will to change the country’s perilous direction. As the narrative voice states, “The lack of fathers, the failure of paternity to keep men loyal to their homes, is one of the marks of this decadent and rootless society” (Updike 2006, 145). Though the focalizer of this state of things is the imam, it is the counselor’s act that fulfills this need. Moreover, Levy’s sense of self seems to have shifted from the personal to the collective. According to the social theory of national identity, two aspects are of primary importance: “the level of commitment people feel toward the national group and the boundaries they set to determine who is fully in the group and who is not” (Theiss-Morse 2009, 4). Updike smoothly arranges the transition from the personal to the public sphere. Levy finds himself under a double obligation, that of a teacher and that of a citizen, and bows to the ethical imperative of the country. Moreover, he brandishes the ideal of a multiethnic America. To Ahmad’s statement that he “is not thrilled to think of his mother fornicating with a Jew,” he playfully says, “Hey, come on, we’re all Americans here. That’s the idea, didn’t they tell you at Central High? Irish-Americans, AfricanAmericans, Jewish-Americans, there are even Arab-Americans” (Updike

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2006, 301). It is clear that the counselor’s social identity has developed gradually in the course of the narrative. An evolution in “the three components of social identity” (Theiss-Morse 2009, 8) seems to have taken place: from the cognitive aspect, there is a renewed awareness of group membership and self-categorization; from the emotional aspect, the level of attachment has gone up; and from the evaluative aspect, the group is now considered good enough to die for. Indeed, David Miller, in his 1995 study On Nationality, points out that unlike other identities, national identity is one for which people are willing to die. The climax of the novel is to be found in the counselor’s willingness to sacrifice his life on the altar of his Americanness. It would be interesting to compare Updike’s response to 9/11 with DeLillo’s apprehension of the event in his much quoted article, “In the Ruins of the Future.” As DeLillo states, “We are rich, privileged and strong, but they are willing to die. This is the edge they have, the fire of aggrieved belief” (DeLillo 2001). Albeit fictional, Updike’s response refutes this difference. Americans could also be willing to die for their creed. Master and pupil in Terrorist do not save only each other but a whole country. In fact, what is worth sacrificing one’s life for in Terrorist is not only the lives of people in the Lincoln Tunnel but something more abstract and long-lasting—belief in the country’s rule of law and individual freedom. Finally, both Levy and Ahmad appear apt to “achieve” America. The latter seems to possess all the necessary qualities to become an exemplary citizen, namely self-reliance, honesty and purity, high ability for individual achievement, and devotion to an ideal. He appears as a future representative of law and order and a defender of his ethnic group’s rights. Maintaining one’s ethnic heritage and blending into the larger society are not mutually exclusive, according to Updike. American identity is conceived in this narrative as embracing both assimilation and cultural pluralism. It is worth noting that the other pure American and exemplary citizen whose integration is complete is Charlie, initially thought to be part of the terrorist conspiracy but later discovered to be a CIA undercover agent, whose life is sacrificed in the exposure of the attack—he is caught and tortured by the terrorist group. Thus, Ahmad’s intuition that Charlie is a “pure American” is finally confirmed (Updike 2006, 218). Charlie is also the character who, in a long passionate speech, reminds the reader of America’s revolutionary past and in particular New Jersey’s role in the ultimate victory of the American colonists. Updike’s choice of the “Military capital of the American revolution,” as New Jersey was called, can no longer appear random but is rather overdetermined, as it can serve the author’s triple narrative design. Indeed, New Jersey is an ideal setting to bring America’s diversity, glorious past, and poor, unequal education into focus. Nevertheless, it also makes

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Updike’s representation of Arab-Americans appear all the more wanting and polarized. They are either enemies, un-Americans who try to undermine America, such as the imam, or “pure” Americans engaged in the fight against the enemy, such as Charlie. As for Ahmad, caught in the middle of this war and won over to the American side, he will put all his American virtues along with his purity at the service of the rule of law. The novel’s ending pointing at America’s future harbors America’s ingrained faith in the country’s creed. From the post-9/11 “dread of the future,” which DeLillo predicted (DeLillo 2001), with Updike we move to hopeful trust and belief in the country’s capacity to continue to shape its own future successfully. This happy ending, so unlike Updike who normally “refuses to offer solutions to the cultural problems he depicts, refuses, in short, to preach,” as Donald J. Greiner rightly puts it (Greiner 2002, 157), contributes to a reading of Terrorist as a nationalist fable shaped by the encounter of master-pupil. The novel’s aesthetic shortcomings may be symptomatic of a major shortcoming to be found in this unquestioned support. It would be relevant to refer to Edward Said’s essay, “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation,” which argues for “a renewed sense of intellectual morality” that “can no longer reside comfortably and exclusively in the condemnation of approved enemies” notably “terrorism” (Said 2001, 429). In his “most political novel,” Updike may have failed to recognize this necessity. The author’s narrative not only condemns terrorism but capitalizes on it to celebrate the moral victory of the righteous. In addition, Updike highlights the importance of civic education, and education in general, for the fight against terrorism but leaves the reader wondering about the tenor of such education. Could it be an education based “not on critical appraisal but on venerating the authority of a national culture and a national state,” as Said says (Said 2001, 423), and divorced from history and social sciences as Anatol Lieven points out in his 2004 study, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism? Moreover, American education seems to be limited only to the gifted like Ahmad, but unavailable to the underprivileged, “the already dead” (Updike 2006, 272) like Joryleen and Tylenol, who are left to enrich the criminal statistics. In his introduction to the Rabbit Angstrom novels, the author humbly admits, that “unlike such estimable elders as Vonnegut, Vidal, and Mailer,” he has “little reformist tendency and instinct for social criticism” (Updike 1995, xi). In “a political novel,” such an absence becomes problematic, as the idealization of America may not be very beneficial for literature and the country. Updike’s novel is an unqualified statement of creedal civic nationalism and belief in the value of the American thesis for America and humanity. Both Roger’s Version and Terrorist capitalize on the master-pupil bond to explore the needs of a country in search of the preservation of its core values. Just like in these two novels, the pedagogical encounter appears equally vital

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and crucial in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which suggests that the transmission of cultural and religious heritage is a matter of survival. NOTES 1. Hence its stage adaptation by Blackbird Theater director Wes Driver in 2014. 2. The first publication of the term appeared in Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon’s creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People, in 1989. 3. Intelligent design is the descendant of creationism, as Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross showed in their 2004 book, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. 4. For an analysis of this concept, see Denis de Rougemont’s famous study, Love in the Western World (1956) It should be mentioned that Rougemont’s book was reviewed by Updike in The New Yorker. 5. Joshua Landy’s article, “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist,” is a strong attack on Girard’s theory. 6. See the eponymous novel by Jonathan Safran Foer on the 9/11 attack published in 2005. 7. Charles A. Beard’s phrase, used critically by Gore Vidal in his eponymous book. 8. See, “If others in less scientifically advanced cultures were able to share, wanted to share, some of the blessings of our technology, without a threat to their faith or traditions, would they need to rely on a God in whose name they kill the innocent?” (DeLillo 2001). 9. See, “Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?” (Updike 1990, 442).

Chapter Eight

Master and Disciple in Cities of Light Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein

Saul Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein (2000), is a fictional memoir inspired by Allan Bloom, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of a blockbuster, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which provided plenty of ammunition for the right in the American culture wars. In this sort of roman à clef, Bellow builds up a colossus of a character steeped in the pathos of a politicized disease, AIDS. The memoirist, Chick, a renowned writer, is appointed by his close friend and mentor, Abe Ravelstein, a professor of political philosophy and author of a best-selling book critical of US higher education, to write his biography. After a long period of procrastination and self-doubt, Chick comes up with a colorful, compelling portraiture of his dead friend, in spite of some gray areas. Some generic considerations seem to be necessary. Ravelstein is technically a novel, yet—contrary to the opinion of some reviewers, notably Cynthia Ozick who justifiably considers Ravelstein’s real-life model irrelevant to fiction—its organic link to reality can be brought into the picture; it is highlighted by Bellow himself. As the author’s biographer, James Atlas, reports, Bellow “reversing his life-long habit of denying his characters’ real-life sources,” “acknowledged freely to reporters” that Ravelstein was based on Allan Bloom (Atlas 2000, 593). In addition, the novel seems to be an expansion of Bellow’s obituary on Bloom, a text published in his collection of nonfiction pieces, It All Adds Up. Thus, fiction rarefies and aggrandizes life, but the opposite may be true. Although the novel was mostly met with enthusiastic reviews, it is not vintage Bellow due to several aesthetically unjustified repetitions and the flatness of some of its characters; yet it remains of great interest. Ravelstein 95

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is an academic novel that strongly capitalizes on the master-disciple bond and, in particular, the pedagogical couple’s link with Jewish tradition. In fact, there are several sets of master-disciple interactions in the narrative, all based on love and trust—Ravelstein and his university students; Chick and his student/wife, Rosamund; and Ravelstein and Chick, the most prominent one. Though Chick considers himself too old to be Ravelstein’s disciple, in the course of the narrative, he clearly appears as one. It is worth noting that the narrative’s topography, varied and salient, plays a major role in the memoir. More than mere settings, cities in Ravelstein contribute to the understanding of this untypical American don, whose life takes on an accrued significance when it is connected with Paris, Athens, and Jerusalem. They are all cities of light, albeit of different intensity and meaning in the narrative. Contrary to Paris, which is the hub of a bustling worldly life, the paradise of socialites but also of cultural activity, Athens and Jerusalem are depicted as cities of the mind and are the throbbing centers not only of intellectual but also of spiritual existence. The master-disciple interaction develops in different manners within these cities. The narrative opens in Paris in the luxurious, historical Grillon hotel in which insouciant Ravelstein and his honored guests, Chick and Rosamund, spend a holiday. It is Ravelstein’s thank-you trip to Chick for having encouraged and supported him in the writing of the book that made him rich and famous. The stay is described in great detail, as Chick is an eyewitness of Ravelstein’s whereabouts. The professor enjoys the fruit of the commercial success of his book, staying in the penthouse of the best hotel in the city, eating in the most refined restaurants, and buying top-brand clothes. Chick notes the look of “wild happiness” (Bellow 2000, 18) on Ravelstein’s face over their Lucullan meal at the high-class Parisian restaurant and confirms that Paris was “one of his great pleasures” (170), while highlighting the uniqueness and singularity of the city, “there was no background, no atmosphere like the Parisian” (45). Indeed, no other city could satisfy Ravelstein’s taste for luxury, refinement, and sophistication so fully. Patrice Higonnet, in his history of the city, Paris: Capital of the World, devotes a chapter to Paris which he presents as a capital of pleasure, “the capital of bourgeois pleasure” to boot, even “‘the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes’” (Higonnet 2002, 289). The French historian traces the evolution of “the mythical capital of the Republic of Letters since 1750 and later of Haussmannian modernity” toward the phantasmagoria of the Belle Époque (288). However, he also demythologizes the city in his presentation of it as a “machine for manufacturing luxury and entertainment for the privileged” (289). In the narrative, Paris lives up to this reputation that, from the last decades of the nineteenth century, has persisted into the final decades of the twentieth century. It is the prestigious part of the city that figures in the novel, with

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spendthrift Ravelstein as “a grandee in the new order of things” (Bellow 2000, 29). The new order of things, heavily underlined by the memoirist, refers to the incongruity of a professor among the typical clientèle of the sumptuous hotel. However, for Ravelstein this “theological mad dance of commodities” in Slavoj Žižek eloquent phrase (Žižek 2000, 11) is clearly mock-theological. He can both afford this form of extravagant pleasure that the city offers but can also deconstruct it without really denouncing it as Žižek does in his Marxist analysis of society. The professor appreciates celebrity and enjoys the proximity of Michael Jackson in his hotel, yet this showbiz Paris with the crowds waiting for the star in front of their hotel is nothing but “pop circus” (Bellow 2000, 2). Likewise, he disregards material possessions—contrary to Chick who seems to be more attentive to the material value of objects, he does not care about the damage of the ridiculously expensive brand-new Lanvin jacket. In the same way, he repeatedly challenges table manners, interestingly codified in nineteenth-century Paris and according to Higonnet “a mechanism of exclusion” (Higonnet 2002, 309), by eating in a careless, even shocking way. It is not surprising that he appreciates those who, like Rosamund, transgress such conventions too, in one way or another. Besides, Chick is not shocked at all by such deviation, eagerly accepting his friend’s provocative table manners since any objection to them would be “a confession of pettiness” (Bellow 2000, 38). In fact, Ravelstein laughs at these “fabulously expensive forms of pleasure,” such as gastronomy, high fashion, and comfort, which were turned into “minor art forms” and “legitimated” in fin-de-siècle Paris (Higonnet 2002, 309), while letting them enhance his life. His sharp mind pierces their flimsiness and ephemerality, but the glaring social inequality they highlight seems to be, for him, beside the point. Though the narrator underlines that he is not qualified to present Ravelstein’s ideas, they do break through. Ravelstein, in the front line of the intellectual revolution of the Reagan era, an honored guest of Reagan and Thatcher, is celebrated by members of the Reagan and Bush administrations for his ideas. He rates Hayek—whose political and economic philosophy was used by Thatcher and Reagan to legitimate the neoliberal attack on “big government” and the bureaucratic welfare state— higher than Keynes (Bellow 2000, 8); to mass democracy he opposes a brazen, offensive elitism that could only aggravate its discontents. If Paris highlights Ravelstein’s bon vivant, dandy side, the city with its offer of an additional type of pleasure, namely sex, illuminates another aspect of his personality which becomes controversial when his memoirist comments on it. Against a Parisian background, Chick portrays an indulgent Ravelstein in matters of sex, to say the least. The narrative depicts the portrait of a city that evokes Paris in the 1920s, according to Brooke Blower,

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“Americans have commonly portrayed the capital as a vast reserve of leisure and indulgence” (Blower 2011, 7). In fact, Chick’s memoir focuses on a dying professor, terminally “polluted” (Bellow 2000, 138) by a lethal—at least in the 1980s and 1990s—disease, AIDS, who aspires to be sexually active in the last days of his life and chooses Paris as a farewell trip for it. In the novel, Paris lives up to its image as both “capital of sex” (Higonnet 2002, 300) and “capital of homosexuality” (314). Ravelstein is delighted by the beauty of the young men in Paris and Chick alludes to Ravelstein’s commodification of sex. In addition, the memoirist explicitly relates the city to what he terms as his friend’s sexual misconduct. He highlights Ravelstein’s strong taste for chancy, risky sexual encounters that could only take place in this city, “For certain kinds of (. . .) misconduct, Paris was still the best place” (Bellow 2000, 31). Precisely, Higonnet specifies that historically the city “was also a destination for American sexual tourism” (Higonnet 2002, 320). Naturally, Ravelstein is no mere tourist or sexual tourist to boot as he has another life in Paris too, a “supplementary” one (Bellow 2000, 171), and thus a complex double life in the city. It is worth noting that the only divergence between master and disciple is their view of the city that indirectly involves the larger issue of sexuality, inseparable from AIDS, in the narrative. Chick confesses his contempt for the city, but more importantly he seems to dismiss Ravelstein’s “irregular” sexual life (Bellow 2000, 160). Thus Miriam Jaffe-Foger’s view that “Chick did not weigh Ravelstein’s actions as sin in this narrative” (Jaffe-Foger 2015, 13) and that “Bellow brings readers in close to destigmatize the suffering, dying body” (Jaffe-Foger 2015, 20) may be debatable. The biographer shapes, to a certain extent, the image of his subject and the memoirist’s view would certainly be less controversial if Ravelstein’s disease were a less sensitive topic. Contrary to the current celebratory assertion of sexual orientation built upon the idea of the social construction of gender, for the professor both his sexuality and disease are private matters, as his anger against the maid, who in front of his friends wants to administer “his AZT,” clearly indicates (Bellow 2000, 142). Only very intimate friends know about the professor’s sexual orientation and the decline of his health related to his sexuality. Ravelstein radically dissociates himself from the gay community. His disapproval of “queer antics” and of what he calls “faggot behavior” (8), expressed in an offensive vocabulary, would certainly appear shocking to his peers. Nevertheless, it seems that he implicitly encourages his appointed biographer to write about his sexual life, telling him about his overflowing libido in the last weeks of his life, “‘this is information you should have’” (Bellow 2000, 143). Therefore, Ravelstein appears as a seeker of truth and wants his biographer to be the same and omit nothing, including the most private aspects of his life. Precisely, he criticizes Chick’s sketch of Rakhmiel Kogon

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for the lack of comments on Kogon’s sexual life and thus he implicitly reminds his biographer of a topic that should be addressed in his own biography. As a result, Chick fulfills Ravelstein’s wish. It could then be surmised that, through fiction, Bellow attempts to launder his name from the accusations of outing Allan Bloom, since the novel actually revealed Bloom’s sexual orientation and subsequent death from AIDS. In this light, one may argue that there can be no friend/disciple’s betrayal of the master, within or outside the narrative, and that the relation remains one of mutual love and trust. However, Chick’s views of homosexuality and AIDS remain problematic. Ironically, it is his stance on them that politicizes AIDS. He presents them as an outsider whose concern is moral order. First, he asserts his own sexual orientation—when his wife, Vela, hints that his relation to Ravelstein could be sexual, he claims ignorance that might even be read as innocence as he tells her that he does not even know “how the act is done” (Bellow 2000, 113). He repeatedly refers to Ravelstein’s promiscuous, rampant sexuality that is not abated by the disease without mincing his words. In his view, Ravelstein’s dangerous, irregular sexual life and “reckless sex habits” “destroyed” him (189). His judgmental statements suggest his friend’s breakdown of self-management and self-discipline, which can be interpreted all the more didactically when they involve a sexually transmitted disease. Moreover, Ravelstein is also described in the narrative as an inveterate smoker—he even smokes in his hospital bed as soon as he can use his hands. This general lack of control raises the issue of the moral responsibility, which acquires an increased sharpness when it is associated with AIDS. Precisely, Susan Sontag in her essay, “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” puts AIDS in the perspective of catastrophic epidemics that are interpreted as signs of moral laxity and political decline. As she says, “In the twentieth century it has become almost impossible to moralize about epidemics— except those transmitted sexually” (Sontag 1988, 144). The terms that Chick regularly employs to refer to Ravelstein’s sexuality, such as irregular and reckless, sound like euphemisms for guilty and bring up a view of the disease as something that was criminally or immorally allowed to happen, all the more so as a dissociation between love and pleasure is the operating principle throughout the narrative. According to Sontag, AIDS patients were categorized into two groups, the guilty (homosexuals and drug addicts) and the innocent (hemophiliacs). Chick’s moralizing terms that dismiss Ravelstein as incapable of being prudent and exerting proper self-control remind the reader of how AIDS had come to symbolize the perils of living outside the norm. Consequently, it is no wonder that the professor enjoys Paris more for its “wickedness,” which mainly involves sexual permissiveness, rather than its “civility” (Bellow 2000, 103), and foregrounds this facet of the city rather than the intellectual one. Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that Ravelstein’s relation to the city is also intellectual, since he is a regular, honored

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lecturer and his stature as a man of letters is more recognized in France than in the United States. In fact, his complaint that, in spite of his rank and his hard work, he is not given a chair becomes all the more meaningful with his witty remark that the only chair the administration seems willing to offer him is “the electric chair” (36). The touch of bitterness in his wit deepens his criticism of his country. Not that Ravelstein is indifferent to Paris as a city of letters. On the contrary, he is a keen observer of the historical developments that have marked the image of the city and takes note of its decline. As Chick observes, “very few French intellectuals got high marks from Abe Ravelstein” (Bellow 2000, 103). Though Ravelstein studied in Paris under Alexander Kojève, he does not mince his words about its impoverishment in terms of prominent figures and the loss of the city’s former attractiveness and glory. This evolution in the image and reputation of Paris, recorded and illustrated in the narrative, is confirmed, to a greater or lesser extent, by cultural observers of the city’s intellectual radiance. Daniel Bell, in his scholarly article, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965–1992,” weighs the intellectual importance of Paris in the last decades of the twentieth century in this manner, “Still, one thinks of Paris as an intellectual center, with its concentration of universities, publishing, broadcasting, and government (. . .) and the tradition of the important public thinkers, though no one today matches the stature of a Raymond Aron or a Jean-Paul Sartre” (Bell 1992, 76). Bell’s view is quite similar to the one expressed in the narrative. Though France, still identified with its capital, exported some French intellectuals, such as Jacques Derrida or Julia Kristeva, they remained within academic circles. There are also more extreme views of the city’s decline, such as Sudhir Hazareesingh’s in his eloquently entitled article “From Left Bank to Left Behind: Where Have the Great French Thinkers Gone?” published in a wide circulation newspaper, the Guardian. As Hazareesingh puts it, “This ideal of a global French rayonnement (a combination of expansive impact and benevolent radiance) is now a distant and nostalgic memory. French thought is in the doldrums. French philosophy, which taught the world to reason with sweeping and bold systems such as rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism, has had conspicuously little to offer in recent decades” (Hazareesingh 2015). Though somewhat exaggerated, Hazareesingh’s description brings home a change in the perception of Paris clearly echoed in the novel. We may wonder what accounts for this difference in degree between the two views, apart from chronology. One reason could be the comparative yardstick of their authors—while Bell compares Paris with the United States, Hazareesingh focuses mainly on France, though the title of his article sends the reader back to interwar Paris, capital of the arts and major attraction for

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expatriate American writers. Ravelstein’s statement that Paris is certainly a better place than some American cities would certainly be poor consolation to the French whose self-image, “existentially bound up with its sense of cultural excellence” (Hazareesingh 2015), would only suffer greatly, according Hazareesingh’s well-informed analysis. Naturally, the French are not unaware of this change of fortune explored in Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Map and the Territory (2010). The reader could, then, wonder whether Jean Méral’s view in his book, Paris in American Literature—a systematic study of the city from the midnineteenth century to the early 1980s, first published in French in 1983—that Paris has lost its distinctiveness as an inspiration for American writers is relevant to this narrative. The novel would have certainly been included in Méral’s book, had it been published earlier. In Ravelstein, Paris has rather lost its distinctiveness as a capital of letters and is no longer an inspiration as a city of the mind. Thus, contrary to the writers of the lost generation who, according to Higonnet, “were out of touch with what was happening in the city” as they were living in a restricted community (Higonnet 2002, 338), Bellow, several decades later, seems to record the historical reality of the city quite accurately. In this respect, Méral’s observation that, over a centuryand-a-half, American perception has evolved from one based on myth and imagination to a more realistic view is illustrated in the novel. Ravelstein’s enthusiastic relation to the city that offers “goodies” reserved for the happy few seems to be an expression of his love for a comfortable life and of a seize-the-day philosophy. Nevertheless, the professor’s Weltanschauung is inspired by other cities, namely Athens and Jerusalem, that guard the treasures of the mind and visions of eternity well. Certainly Paris has lost some of its former literary and cultural glamour and appeal, but there is another reason why the professor is less interested in this facet of the city—thanks to his own master, Felix Davarr, he gained access to “the twin sources of civilization” (Bellow 2000, 15), Athens and Jerusalem, the former initially rated by him higher than the latter. Ravelstein’s intellectual and spiritual growth occurred in these two cities of the mind. Therefore, though a regular visitor to Paris with an insider’s knowledge of the city, the professor is a permanent resident of Athens and Jerusalem which provided the “foundations of his teacher’s vocation” (Bellow 2000, 53) according to his memoirist. Not that he dislikes the United States, but in terms of culture, he is clearly a European as his witty remark about saving Finnegans Wake for the nursing home, because it is better to “enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than the Simpsons” (46), implies. As for teaching, just like Donna Tartt’s professor in The Secret History, the classics provide the core of his program.

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Consequently, Ravelstein appears as the enlightened professor who, having mastered the classics, transmits the invaluable knowledge he has received from them to a carefully selected group of gifted students, a “band of brothers” and “initiates” (Bellow 2000, 103), who live in close community and communion with him, developing family-like, life-long ties. It should be noted that after their schooling in the great masters of humanity under his guidance, based on Socratic pedagogy, some of them occupy high places in Washington. Thus, Ravelstein also appears as the educator of the neoliberal and neoconservative aristocracy, providing the group with cultural legitimacy and thus the means for cultural hegemony that reinforces class dominance. Public readers of the novel, such as Francis A. Boyle, who strongly rejected Ravelstein/Bloom’s conservative views, decoded the real-life personalities behind the characters, namely homosexuality-despiser, political philosopher, and classicist Leo Strauss behind Felix Davarr and Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leaders of the neocons, behind Ravelstein’s cherished, life-long student, Philip Gorman. However, in spite of its controversial politics, the narrative is mainly animated by the lineage of discipleship and the forceful pedagogical bonds that brings into focus. They seem to hark back to Athens which becomes the site of pedagogical Eros and longing par excellence. Eros is the guiding philosophical principle in the narrative. It is worth noting that in his text, “Allan Bloom,” Bellow commenting on Bloom’s sequel to The Closing of the American Mind, underlines his friend’s sensibility to “Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias forced upon us by managers and manipulators” (Bellow 1994, 279). In this age of managers, longing, in the narrative, is a way to keep your soul alive and love is a blessing for mankind. In addition, Athens is particularly valued, as it provides the most powerful myth of love, the Aristophanic sempiternal search for the other half. It is worth noting that though Ravelstein loves to teach this Platonic myth, love appears disembodied and longing remains an abstract idea. Ravelstein’s lover, Nikki, referred to as “family” (Bellow 2000, 69), does not seem to be a sexual partner and is certainly a flat character. Likewise, though Chick’s wife, Rosamund, another flat character, saves her husband’s life when he is infected by the consumption of poisonous fish in the West Indies, their love story is not shown in the narrative. In spite of some analepses into their encounter before their presumed love affair, they only figure as an insipid married couple. Bellow finds a way out of what is controversial, but would be politically incorrect to omit, by rendering it acceptable through marriage—a student-professor affair. The only form of Eros that comes alive in Ravelstein is the pedagogical one that does not involve sex.

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Indeed, when respectable professors of political theory tell the father of one of Ravelstein’s students that the professor seduced and “corrupted” his students,” Ravelstein wittily dismisses the accusations: “The paterfamilias was warned against the bugger-familias” (Bellow 2000, 58). In his word play, patriarchy fares no better than homosexuality. Interestingly, while the pejorative slang vocabulary for homosexuality dismissively figures in Ravelstein’s discourse, Chick informs the reader that his friend probably “considered himself a Uranian—a British euphemism for homosexual” (8). The memoirist reminds the reader of the nineteenth-century term for homosexuality (adopted by Oscar Wilde), very eloquent for its reference to Greek antiquity. Precisely, in Plato’s The Banquet, Aphrodite Urania, due to her birth solely from Uranus, is associated with noble love for male youths. Thus, homosexuality is put in the ancient Greek perspective and could be viewed against a different set of values from the current ones. It appears that Ravelstein is keen on replacing his students’ families and acting as their guardian because he is capable of emancipating them through a superior form of life that would transform the ordinary one, as his conviction of his students’ greater familiarity with “Nicias and Alcibiades than with the milk train or the ten-cent store” (Bellow 2000, 25) indicates. In addition, though “a man’s examined life can make him wish he was dead” (34), Ravelstein’s aim seems to be the Socratic self-knowledge and independence of thought in his cultivation of his students’ singularity. The professor clearly takes up the risk that self-examination involves both for himself and his students. With his untypical academic program and manners rooted in his firm belief that it is “irresponsible to pretend that teaching could be separated from the binding of souls” (Bellow 2000, 82), he leads his students from Antiquity and Enlightenment to the present corporate America, giving them “a picture of this mass democracy and its characteristic-woeful- human product” (19). The devotion to his teaching that involves an elitist view of society and an endless, exhausting debate with his students turns them into life-long disciples flocking around his deathbed. Athens provides not only for what and how to teach and live but also how to die. Contrary to the narrator, who admits to be prone to depression, there is no trace of spleen, melancholia, or bipolarity in the master who, in Apollonian grace and in spite of his “buffoon” (Bellow 2000, 45) side, retains his exuberance and Socratic equanimity before death. He has “powerful wings hidden under his coat” (171) to take him to Paris and appears as a high-flying flâneur of the mind, while he is dying. Thus Ravelstein, “a Lazarus case” (169), detached, energetic, stoical, challenges disease and death. While his specific disease is irrelevant to him, death is a passionate, ongoing philosophical discussion in the narrative. Therefore, it would be rather restrictive to classify the novel under the category of what Judith Laurence Pastore and

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other critics term, “AIDS literature” (starting to grow along with the awareness and spread of the disease in the 1980s) that attributes a special significance to death caused by this disease. However, a metaphorical network associated with the disease informs the narrative. Precisely, Sontag analyzes two main metaphors concerning AIDS, a military one built around the semantic field of war—battleground, invasion, and surrender—and one built around the notion of pollution and, tellingly, “reminiscent of syphilis” (Sontag 1988, 105). Both metaphors, used by Chick and Ravelstein alike, are prominent in the text. The former comes up in Chick’s discourse when the memoirist pictures Ravelstein as a soldier doomed to die: “In combat you were covered by special allowances made for soldier,” and notes his friend’s readiness “to surrender” (169). Moreover, the image of pollution is recurrent in the characters’ discourses. Looking at his friend’s limbs, Chick cannot help thinking of the “contaminated blood in them” (Bellow 2000, 91). Likewise, Ravelstein thinks of himself as “fatally polluted” (138). It should be noted that through the metaphor of pollution, the “public health discourse” comes up in which “the body is regarded as dangerous, problematic, ever threatening to run out of control, to attract disease, to pose imminent danger to the rest of society,” as Deborah Lupton observes, echoing Sontag’s views (Lupton 2003, 33). Since Ravelstein features a man dying of AIDS, it could have made some connection with literature asserting gay rights. Nevertheless, there is not such an assertion in the narrative as there is no construction of a gay identity. However, there is a construction and declaration of a strong Jewish identity in the novel that cements the master-disciple bond. It is worth noting that if no intentional politicization of the disease informs the narrative, an intense politicization of Jewish identity is hammered home to the reader. Chick’s memoir appears to serve the Jewish cause, that is, to keep memory alive, and to remind the world of what has happened to the Jewish people by asserting the Jewish identity and establishing collective guilt. As the narrator avows, for “the chosen” there can be no choice because “Such a volume of hatred (. . .) has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was (. . .) justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by (. . .) their extinction” (Bellow 2000, 179). Therefore, it is this duty, perceived as ineluctable, that transforms Ravelstein from an atheist to a transmitter of the Jewish religious legacy to his disciple. Thus Chick changes from someone whose identity as a writer was above his Jewish identity to someone who has finally forged “in the smithy of his soul (. . .) the conscience of his race,” to use James Joyce’s final image in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce 1992, 196). While there is no celebration of gay identity in the narrative, there is certainly a celebration of Jewish identity, which could confer an “activist” dimension on the novel.

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Right from the outset, Ravelstein posits himself as Chick’s educator. “Though I was his senior for some years he saw himself as my teacher” (Bellow 2000, 173). Chick glorifies the superior role of Ravelstein as a teacher, an educator, a master and acknowledges his educational debt to him, “l learned quite a lot from Ravelstein” (42). While it is “too late” for him to “Platonize” (180), that is, to become immersed in the ancient Greek world, it is not too late for him to join his master in Jerusalem. This operation involves a long process and the special interaction between a master and a disciple apprehended by Chick, who is unable to find the exact term for this rapport in the modern vocabulary, as “higher forms of interdependence” (94, emphasis added). The phrase could be used as a definition of pedagogical Eros that challenges the oblivion of death in the narrative. Indeed, late Ravelstein’s persistence in Chick’s daily life takes “the form of a discussion of life-afterdeath” (188). Although the disciple declares his independence in matters of love, keeping his affair with his student, Rosamund, secret from Ravelstein who, anyway, was directing post-divorce Chick towards this pretty, intelligent young student of his, in any other matter, he seems dependent on his master’s “power of ordering experience” (Bellow 2000, 187) and Ravelstein’s capacity to structure his life. Powerful images intimate further Chick’s awe of the master, “As birds went he was an eagle, while I was something like a flycatcher” (101). Such an admiration, which makes the disciple rate his master greater than Diderot and question his own self-confidence as the pun, eloquently borrowed by Ravelstein and picturing Chick with the “sword of Dimwitoclese” (13) over his head, indicates. Therefore, he lets himself be directed to the composition of Life of Ravelstein, the biography he is “ordered” (Bellow 2000, 231) to write. Such an undertaking seems to involve a rite a passage that marks the disciple’s progress from the status of pupil to that of master. Due to his infection, which evokes the master’s own and thus a similar destiny, Chick almost dies and under the effects of healing drugs, temporarily loses his memory. This voyage to the dead gives birth to a new man. Bellow is quite lavish with this symbolic process—Chick perceives himself as a man risen from the dead, a newborn endowed with a true vision. As he says, “I had already died and risen again, and there was a curious distance in my mind between the old way of seeing (false) and the new way (strange but liberating)” (216). It seems that “the doors of perception were cleansed” and the world is now infinite for the disciple. If it was urgent for dying Ravelstein to instruct his pupil on the writing of his biography, it seems now urgent for Chick to get down to it in full appreciation of the great subject, “the subject of subjects” (Bellow 2000, 164), he was given. For what finally makes Ravelstein such a notable subject is his capacity to direct his pupil away from an inwardness the master considers morbid and toward something larger than they are,

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that is, their Jewish heritage which involves their adherence to the Jewish tradition. Therefore, Ravelstein and Chick are placed within a long pedagogic tradition “inherent in Judaic monotheism,” as George Steiner states (Steiner 2003, 150). Interestingly, the famous scholar cites a passage from the novel to demonstrate this view. “We are a people of teachers. For millennia, Jews have taught and been taught. Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility” (146). Steiner could certainly find no better evidence than a millennium novel to illustrate and emphasize this idea. Ravelstein seems to point to the narrative traditions of Rabbinic Judaism. As Birger Gerhardsson notes, those who formed these traditions “did so with the basic intention of preserving and spreading, in one way or another, the many-faceted wisdom of the Torah in face of all the situations of life” (Gerhardsson 1961, 182). In fact, the best instance of such a situation in the narrative is suicide. When Ravelstein’s friends, the Battles, come to him for counseling, the dying man strongly advises them against it on religious grounds. Further, he chides Chick for saying that Ravelstein has given them a “Jewish” response (Bellow 2000, 159). It seems clear that the master attempts to live up to a role prescribed by the Scriptures and thus adhere to the tradition. Gerhardsson underlines that “The teachers, conscious that their lives provided a form of visual teaching, were (. . .) the prime movers of all narrative tradition” (Gerhardsson 1961, 188). Therefore, it is in Jerusalem that Ravelstein and Chick review their teacher-pupil duties. While the teacher completes his career within the Jewish heritage, the pupil follows suit for he “says what he has seen and heard” (Gerhardsson 1961, 183). Thus, he first notes Ravelstein’s great shift of devotion, “in his last days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about not the Greeks” (Bellow 2000, 173), and then becomes his ideal interlocutor. He is not shocked when Ravelstein, in his anger, makes racist statements against African Americans. Together they repeatedly denounce anti-Semites. If they cannot “afford to set up a Jewish Index” (174), they can expose Kipling’s negative attitude towards Jews, discuss Voltaire’s hatred of them, cite Céline’s infamous writings, wonder whether BMW used slave labor during the war. Likewise, ordinary people such as Chick’s mother-in-law or Ravelstein’s Parisian landlord are not spared either. The disciple depicts the master “full of Scripture,” “following a trail of Jewish essences” (Bellow 2000, 178) and, under his guidance, revises his view of Grielescu, the famous scholar, who rallied with the fascist government and finally takes up the “Jewish life” he has to “live in the American language” (167). Their Jerusalem is the city of the psalm, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy” (137 5–7). The memoirist’s conclusion that one cannot deny

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one’s own origins, that “it is impossible not to remain a Jew” (179), leaves no ambiguity as to his new commitment. The reader may wonder, then, whether Jerusalem could also be, to some extent, the historical city of contentious politics, though there is no stance taken on such politics in the narrative. Likewise, Bellow in his travelogue, To Jerusalem and Back, seldom gives his view directly, though he does refer to what he calls his responsibility to the Jewish people (Bellow 1976, 211). Nevertheless, his character’s proximity to death, which seems to account for his return to his origins and adoption of Jewish religious legacy, appears to be a springboard for political commitment. Therefore, religion and politics appear indissociable in the narrative and Bellow turns out to be a Jewish writer, in any case much more so than in other works. Although AIDS as the cause of Ravelstein’s death was not intended to have religious and political significance in the narrative, the resemblance to a spiritual and political awakening, which is to be found among AIDS patients, cannot be totally ignored. Precisely, Toby Johnson in his article, “Facing the Edge: AIDS as a Source of Spiritual Wisdom,” contends that AIDS “can be understood not as a punishment from God” but “as a challenge and an instruction,” and that the biggest development concerning the disease “has been the interest in matters spiritual” (Johnson 1993, 127). Therefore, AIDS remains in the background of the cultural and religious politics of the narrative. In conclusion, Ravelstein seems to be immortalized against three welcoming cities that provided the means for a valuable life and a meaningful death. First, Paris, the city of pleasure, entertained the rich man; and Paris, the city of letters, honored the prized academic who transmitted his provocative, stimulating ideas to a captivated audience. Then, Athens received the illuminated master and independent thinker, the controversial fighter against ideologies, and the staunch defender of liberal education who opened the gates of the city to generations of devoted-unto-death disciples. As for Jerusalem, it finally claimed the Rabbinic teacher and activist who perpetuated the religious legacy and enlisted his devoted-beyond-death pupil to their cause. In no other American novel after the 1980s does the master-disciple bond appear so vital for a whole culture or is the phenomenology of teacherpupil so clearly set against an ancient tradition actualized at the turn of the millennium. If the body holds a prominent position in Ravelstein, it gains a definitely central one in Russell Banks’s novel, Lost Memory of Skin.

Chapter Nine

Embodied Interaffectivity in Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin

Russell Banks’s twelfth novel, Lost Memory of Skin, published in 2012, just like his previous novels, testifies to its author’s social commitment. In this narrative, which prominently features the body in distress, the author’s alienated, marginalized characters are not only the underprivileged but also come from the upper classes and seem to suffer the same exclusionary destiny. What brings them all together appears to be the US criminal regulatory framework concerning sexual offense. The uniformity of the law regarding sexual conduct and the actual living conditions of convicted sex offenders was Banks’s starting point in this novel, which pairs a professor of sociology and a young sexual offender cast into the roles of teacher and pupil. I will argue that Lost Memory of Skin could be considered as a significant contribution to the representation of embodied experience in the pedagogic encounter. In an interview given to the American news program, Democracy Now!, Banks denounces both American law, which creates undignified, dehumanized living conditions for sex offenders who have served their time, and the digitization of human life which has resulted in the loss of “skin connections with other human beings” (Banks 2011). Indeed, the law targeting sex offense has been deemed as “afflicted by deep pathology” by Allegra McLeod, who contends that the measures taken to protect society from sex offenders are ineffective as “sexual abuse remains pervasive and significantly underreported” (McLeod 2014, 1553). Likewise, Gillian Harkins, in her analysis of Banks’s novel in terms of security and protection from the possible danger of the pedophile, offers a critical overview of the legislation implemented in the two decades that preceded the publication of Lost Memory of Skin. Those series of laws re109

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sulted in “an elaborate system for sex offender management (. . .) including online preventative surveillance, psychological and actuarial risk assessment, lifetime registration and residency restrictions, GPS and electronic monitoring, and mandatory community notification” (Harkins 2016, 750). It is no wonder, then, that amid this security-focused, prophylactic preoccupation, American culture eagerly took up the figure of the pedophile 1 which “by 2011 (. . .) had become the figure for the registered sex offender tout court,” as Harkins points out (Harkins 2016, 747). Banks’s novel tries to give the reader an accurate picture of what it means for a sexual offender to live in this system. The narrative focuses on the predicament of a highly diverse group of sex offenders who struggle to survive in a society that no longer makes room for them and, in particular, on a twenty-two-year-old man evicted from the army and convicted for trying to have sex with a fourteen-year-old girl he met online while looking for a sexual mate for his iguana. Though a sex offender according to legislation, essentially, he is not one. His inexperience, candor, innocence, family background, and personal circumstances illustrate both the indiscriminate nature of sexual offense categorizations and the desperation of a sexual offender’s daily struggle, epitomizing the plight of a social victim. The narrative features the social alienation of the characters but also their attempts at socialization and reconnection through the development of a pedagogical bond between the Professor and the Kid. In a reciprocally constructive interaction, the Professor takes charge of the Kid and teaches him how to manage his vagrant life. Their encounter turns out to be a major affective event in their lives involving life-altering decisions. The body, in the center of the narrative, meets a specific interest in the representation of embodiment in literature. As David Hillman and Ulrika Maud point out in their edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, “Literary thinkers have always been particularly interested in concrete, nonconceptual aspects of knowing and feeling; often these emerge most potently through the sensuous immediacy of embodied cognition” (Hillman and Maud 2015, 4). In Gernot Hauke’s terms, embodiment “refers to both the embedding of cognitive processes in brain circuity and to the origin of these processes in an organism’s sensory-motor experience” (Hauke 2016/2017, 4). The skin, highlighted in the title of the novel, is a synecdoche for the body which appears as the medium of emotion. Banks picks up the gauntlet of the representation of embodied cognition in a most subtle, original way, depicting the body as “a sounding-board in which every emotion reverberates,” to use William James’s oft-cited phrase in the theories of emotion (James 1884). The narrative underlines the disastrous effects of digitalization upon the body and the importance of resocialization through due attention given to it. Research on embodied emotion

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could help the reader understand the depiction of the body in Bank’s narrative as a medium of communication in the pedagogical encounter. Indeed, emotion research has moved beyond the confines of the brain of an isolated individual, offering an alternative framework for cognitive science, namely theory, experiment, and phenomenology. According to empirical findings, “embodiment has a far-reaching influence on our emotional life” (Fuchs and Koch 2014, 2). Researchers, such as Thomas Fuchs, embrace a nonrepresentational, enactive, and embodied concept of intersubjectivity and contend that social cognition emerges from embodied social interaction or intercorporeality. Intercorporeality and interaffectivity are the very basis of social cognition. In particular, Fuchs’s concept of embodied affectivity refers to emotions not as inner mental states to be deciphered or inferred from external cues but as forces that impact individuals through bodily resonance and connect them in circular interactions. Embodied communication is the result of intercorporeality, “a pre-reflective intertwining of lived and living bodies” (Fuchs 2016, 200) which affect one another. In fact, Froese and Fuchs’s eloquent concept of “extended body” is of great relevance to the narrative. As they put it, “through our mutual interactions with others our living and lived bodies become inextricably intertwined in a dynamical whole, thus forming ‘an extended body’ by which we enact and encounter the world together” (Froese and Fuchs 2012, 211). Therefore, this view of embodied communication involves a higher risk when it comes to people who are considered dangerous, such as pedophiles. Even if they do not act out their desires, any contact with children could be deemed problematic. The law passed in Miami-Dade County in 2005 stating that registered sex offenders could not live within 2,500 feet of a school, bus stop, park, or any other place that children might gather seems to rest on this view of communication. As the law rendered sexual offenders homeless, a colony was formed under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a bridge that connects Miami Beach with mainland Florida (it should be added that it was dismantled in 2010). It was precisely the sight of these people from his window that pushed Banks to inquire into their lives and write about them. As he states, “I have always felt like an outsider. (. . .) As long as you can hold on to that feeling without it eating you alive, it can open the door to the world of misfits and rejects” (Banks 2009, 150). The author’s Causeway in fictional Calusa offers shelter to an assembly of isolated characters who have no other place to go and whose motto is everyone for himself. The only element in common is that they are all registered sex offenders whose unholy bodies society wishes out of sight; thus each represents what Helen Schulman, in her review of the novel, terms “a modern-day boogeyman” (Schulman 2011).

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As a matter of fact, the terror that such a figure induces is illustrated by the reaction of the Kid’s parole officer when she finds out that there are children in the proximity of the Kid’s new shelter in another shanty town after the police destroyed the one under the Causeway. In a state of panic, she thus explains to the Professor why the Kid has to leave the place, though she knows there is nowhere else to go, “‘It’s not about paying your debt to society. It’s not about punishment. These fuckin’ guys are incurable’” (Banks 2012, 156). The affective state of fear and panic is analyzed by Brian Massumi in his article, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.” According to Massumi, “Threat is once and for all, in the nonlinear time of its own causing. (. . .) The felt reality of fact legitimates preemptive action, once and for all. Any action taken to preempt a threat from emerging into a clear and present danger is legitimated by the affective fact of fear, actual facts aside” (Massumi 2010, 54). The character’s panicky, unreflective response represents the whole society’s stance towards sexual offenders, formalized by the law. Ostracized by the law, conjured away from any human interaction, this “leper colony” (Banks 2012, 41) in the narrative is composed of loners who shrink from each other in mistrust and often disgust. Consequently, they seem to be doomed not only because of brutal police raids or the violence of nature, both of which threaten to annihilate them and do—as Rabbit’s death, precipitated by police brutality, illustrates during the hurricane—but also from lack of human contact which desocializes them. Thus, the loss of memory in the title precisely refers to their alienation from the rest of society which seeks to push their sick, threatening bodies out of existence. In Fuchs’s framework model of embodied affectivity, “the notion of body memory may be used to denote all forms of implicit memory that are mediated by the body and actualized without explicit intention or recollection in our everyday conduct” (Fuchs 2016, 201). However, as Froese and Fuchs contend, based on agent-established model of embodied social interaction, “the persistence of acquired behavioral routines (. . .) continues to depend on the actualization of further appropriate interactions (. . .); otherwise the ‘implicit knowledge’ decays away” (Froese and Fuchs 2012, 223). Therefore, if the law eliminates the threat of the pedophile, it also eliminates the sexual offenders as social beings; their weakened and, in the long run, severely damaged intercorporeal memory renders them unable to experience empathy for “developmental research indicates that empathy is based on an intercorporeal memory or an implicit relational knowledge of how to interact with others that is acquired in early childhood and conveys a basic sense of social attunement” (Fuchs 2016, 206). It is this social sense that sexual offenders lose and hence any capacity for empathy is also lost when they are deprived of social interaction.

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Precisely, the narrative depicts a group of men with the Kid in the center, all afflicted by the loss of “skin memory” and forced together out of necessity in the same place. In this group portrait with the young man, they are all independent from and indifferent to each other until the Professor, who does research on how the underclasses and the underworld make use of new environments, enters the picture. The development of a singular bond, which could be qualified as pedagogic, between the Professor and the Kid and the former’s actions help them move from isolation to cooperation. Above all, the pedagogic bond transforms the Kid from a sort of sleepwalker to a self-conscious individual. Though the title highlights the loss of social cognition, the open-ended narrative finishes in reconnection and a promise of resocialization. I will focus on the pedagogic bond between the Professor and the Kid, which is all the more noteworthy for it develops outside a formal educational frame. The bodies of the Professor and the Kid are given particular salience through various narrative strategies of symmetry or asymmetry, resemblance or antithesis. Thus, the Kid, who does not look his age, is small and skinny while the professor is huge and obese. While the Kid’s thinness makes him inconspicuous, the Professor’s corpulence makes him highly noticeable. Though not for the same reasons, they both wished their bodies to disappear and become invisible. They are both bodies in distress, the Professor suffering from addiction to food and the Kid from addiction to internet pornography. Their disorders have an impact on their sexuality—the only form of sex for the Professor is masturbation while the Kid, still a virgin, gives up compulsive masturbation for he becomes impotent after he is arrested for attempting to have sex with a minor. Moreover, the reader’s attention is directed to their bodies as they both appear to have been marked wrongly as sexual offenders—the Kid because of his inexperience, the Professor because of his past as a double agent, though this identity remains ambiguous. According to the latter’s narrative, the secret agencies he worked for will eliminate him (and it finally appears that they have done so), engineering a sexual offense accusation to mask his murder as suicide. Finally, they both have the experience of depersonalization-derealization, the feeling of observing oneself from outside one’s body as if in a dream, which appears to stem from a troubled, lonely childhood. The Professor felt neglected by his parents’ complete absorption in each other’s concerns and their exclusionary marital love while the Kid was left to himself to watch pornographic movies on the internet by a careless mother, too busy with her own life of serial boyfriends. Furthermore, the narrative symbolically indicates their rebirth into reality—for the Professor, through his confrontation with the hurricane, and for the Kid, after his stay in the Panzacola Swamp, depicted as a fallen Paradise.

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Therefore, a correlation can be established between the body and emotions. The narrative highlighting the two characters’ bodies depicts the encounter between the Professor and the Kid as an emotion-fraught one resulting in self-awareness for the latter and an accomplished mission for the former. In his phenomenological study of emotions, Fuchs, who regards interaffectivity as the mutual empathic coupling of two embodied subjects, presents emotions as encompassing phenomena that connect body, self, and the world. The development of the bond between the Professor and the Kid will be better understood if we look first into what Fuchs, in his article, “The Phenomenology of Affectivity,” calls “the background feeling states (. . .) characterized by a tacit presence of the body in the experiential field” (Fuchs 2013, 614). They are, in fact, “existential feelings (. . .) clearly distinct from emotions since they are not directed at specific objects or situations” (Fuchs 2013, 615). In particular, Fuchs identifies the feeling of being alive, “a prereflective, undirected bodily self-awareness that constitutes the unnoticed background of all intentional feeling, perceiving, or acting” as “the most foundational layer of affective experience” (Fuchs 2013, 615) and “a primary manifestation of the embodiment of subjectivity” (Fuchs 2013, 615). It is this elementary existential feeling which commands our engagement with the world that appears disturbed in the Kid. At a decisive moment of self-awareness, the third-person narrator highlights this condition, which is described in the narrative as a ghostly state, the uncanny sense of being one’s own ghost, “not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person” (Banks 2012, 412, emphasis added). The compelling image of the dust bunny which suggests a flimsy, elusive materiality points to a sense of unreality and the state of derealization-depersonalization. The narrative makes clear that, for the Kid, this disturbance can be traced to the passage from materiality to digitization which distorts his apprehension of reality. In fact, the narrative voice stating the compulsive nature of the Kid’s sexual practices also explains why the Kid could not put an end to watching pornography and masturbating. For him these were “the only times he felt real” (Banks 2012, 412). Banks, the moralist, uses a strong biblical metaphor to denounce the turn to immateriality picturing the internet as the snake in the Garden of Eden and pornography as the forbidden fruit which leads the boy to lying, “the first thing the Kid remembers lying about” (411). Thus, the Kid’s loss of innocence and his entry into a world of good and evil, right and wrong originate in his inappropriate use of the internet. It is noteworthy that the return to embodied reality tellingly occurs on the night of the Kid’s arrest when he watches himself on the incriminating video secretly taped by Brandi’s father. “He does not know why but everything changed that night. Suddenly for the first time in his life he was visible to himself again. (. . .) It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual

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body and it was not just his body (. . .), it was him” (Banks 2012, 412–413). Interestingly, body consciousness is depicted as a miracle, the miracle of revival, resurrection. Thus, the narrative seems to make a strong case in favor of the embodied theory of emotions. The emotion the Kid experiences when he regains consciousness of his body in his interaction with the adolescent girl’s father and the police officer is, movingly, shame. As the narrative voice puts it, “And who was he? He was the digitalized body of an about-to-be convicted sexual offender (. . .) trying to hook up (. . .) with a fourteen-year-old Internet girl— and because now it was on a computer screen for everyone in the world to see, it was reality” (Banks 2012, 413). The Kid’s reengagement with the world is sealed by the return of a moral emotion. The emotion which assails the Kid when he feels “real” again, is considered by Tangney et al. as a most painful one “because one’s core self—not simply one’s behavior—is at stake” (Tangney et al. 2007, 349). Thus the Kid is about to find his way back to reality in guilt and shame, while at the same time he also finds himself belonging to the “American untouchables,” a category of men beyond hope, “redemption, care, or cure, both despicable and impossible to remove and thus by most people simply wished out of existence” (Banks 2012, 90). Therefore, he regains the threedimensional reality but not his humanity. His encounter with the Professor, which makes accessible a new gamut of emotions to the Kid, will restore this fundamental condition. The narrative depicts the relationship between a “feral child” (39) and a scholar, an authentic seeker of truth, as the most humane one in an inhuman world. If the Kid loses his innocence because of what Gail Dines calls a “pornified culture,” created by the “domestication of the Internet which began around the year 2000” and “made pornography affordable, accessible, and anonymous” (Dines 2017, 2), the world is far more evil as the Professor’s Hobbesian Weltanshauung indicates. As he tells the Kid when he reveals to him his former life as a secret agent, “No, I’m not ashamed. And I don’t feel guilty for all these years of deceit. (. . .) That was the nature of the world (. . .) those are the rules of the game (. . .) you either play the game or it plays you. I only regret that I stopped playing the game. Now it’s playing me. Except for this one last move” (Banks 2012, 391). The Professor’s last act of mastery and final control over his life is made possible by his encounter with the Kid and the emotional ties entailed by this fundamental event. The narrative underlines their pedagogic rapport through the absence of the two main characters’ proper names and the capitalization of their roles: the Professor, the Kid. From the first to the last meeting, it records a sinuous progress towards mutual trust, admiration, respect, and affection which characterize a mutually constructive pedagogic bond.

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Right from the start, these two characters are cast into the roles of teacher and pupil. The Professor answers rather positively the question of whether the Kid is one of his students when he introduces himself to the people who may know the young man’s whereabouts—“sort of” (Banks 2012, 95). In the third part of the narrative, the Kid reminds Cat Turnbull’s wife, who runs the store at the Panzacola Swamp where the Kid takes refuge after the hurricane, of a “little schoolboy” (326). This character also intuits the affective nature of their rapport which reminds her of filial interaction, “They were a mismatched couple. (. . .) The two seemed intimately connected but formal; attached to one another but determinedly independent” (326). Indeed, such a description could correspond to a pedagogical pair. Interestingly, the first meeting occurs at the end of the first part, late at night while the Kid is in the middle of a dream about creation and the nature of good and evil. The Professor appears at the tent sill in “floods” of “white light” (Banks 2012, 78), a supernatural sight that renders the Kid speechless, as the focalization indicates, “it probably is God” (78). Only when the Kid crosses out the two most threatening categories of existence for him, “God” and “cop”—the former inducing the sense of sin and guilt, the latter shame and restriction of freedom—does he speak to the Professor who paves the way for a different kind of rapport. The Kid also agrees to meet him for an interview to help this unfamiliar kind of man advance his research on the causes of homelessness. These interviews make long tête-à-tête between these two men possible and advance communication. Thus, the Professor’s interest in the Kid does not remain solely scientific or “strictly sociological,” as Janet Maslin contends in her review of the novel (Maslin 2011). In his search for truth and the Kid’s humanity, left out by the judicial register, the Professor turns out to be the only human being who takes a genuine interest in the Kid, discovers his uniqueness, and guides him into the recovery of his humanity and the elaboration of an action plan for his life. Conversely, the Kid turns out to be the only human being worthy of the Professor’s confidence by virtue of his capacity to carry out his mentor’s plan; the Professor’s aim is to rehabilitate his damaged reputation with the people he most cares about—and it is the Kid who is entrusted with the recorded, posthumous message to the Professor’s wife which reveals the truth about his life. The narrative thus features a most constructive type of rapport between teacher and pupil who reach an exceptional level of communication under extremely difficult conditions. In fact, Fuchs and De Jaegher make clear that the physical process of interacting between two embodied subjects also involves the coordination of meaning. As they put it, “coordination (. . .) is driven forward by the subjective experience of both partners who share their affective states, which will often be intense, whether positive. (. . .) Affect attunement and mutual incor-

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poration create dyadic states of awareness” (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, 471). Indeed, through their series of interviews which entail an intense exchange, both positive and negative, or “synchronised, desynchronised” in Fuchs and De Jaegher’s terms (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, 471), the Professor and the Kid, whose inner lives are hidden from everyone, reach a new state of awareness. The Professor’s life is built on a structure of compartments which maintains his various separate identities and keeps his emotions at bay and thus entails a sense of derealization-depersonization. The narrative voice highlights this sense and the Professor’s secretive nature as well as his isolation, “His inner body and his needs, however, are his secret life, which by and large he keeps locked away, even from himself. No one comments on his inner life” (Banks 2012, 120, emphasis added). It is worth noting the use of the term “body” to refer to the character’s thoughts and emotions, which clearly evokes the role of the body as a vehicle of emotion. However, when the Professor’s former life comes back threateningly, this structure breaks down, his emotions submerge him, and he enters a state of helplessness as the image of “a gigantic, bearded baby lost in tantrum” (Banks 2012, 269) suggests. After his abortive effort to see his parents again and his resistance to the temptation of suicide, this “eccentric and alienated son” (259) regains control of his fragmented self and the flood of emotion which parallels the onset of the hurricane. The Professor braves both the cyclone and the collapse of his identity. He thus faces himself and reality, which amounts to a symbolic rebirth after the deluge; he then acts as a father to the homeless Kid in distress, sheltering him in his own home while the hurricane is still raging. Right from the beginning, the Professor discovers the Kid’s qualities—he tells his wife that the young offender is courageous. The Professor’s observation seems to indicate some admiration for the lost boy, which is confirmed in his later assessment of the Kid’s capacities to face his life on the streets: “Recycling. You’re readier for the future” (Banks 2012, 310). Patiently and methodically he instructs the Kid and the erratic group of men around him in organizing their lives under the Causeway so that they might become accepted by society. The show of emotion to the Kid, his elected pupil, though controlled and understated, sounds genuine as his responses to the young man during their last meeting indicate, “it’s been . . . interesting knowing you” (317) and “I’m touched by your concern, Kid. Seriously” (319). Moreover, his unabashed declaration of trust leaves no doubt about the Professor’s feelings towards the Kid. “I trust you, kid. For decades I’ve trusted no one but myself. But I trust you” (Banks 2012, 295). His acts substantiate his declaration. As Jack Barbelet, who seems to consider that “the basis of trust is emotional” (Barbelet 2009, 374), puts it, “If it is to be meaningful, trust makes a difference to how a person acts. By giving trust to

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another an actor engages in an activity that would otherwise not be available, or may seek to achieve a goal or outcome that would otherwise not be attainable” (Barbelet 2009, 370). Indeed, the Kid is the first person ever entrusted with the revelation of the Professor’s life during their final interview, which not only helps the Professor assemble the loose fragments of his life and unify it but also seals a reciprocal bond. Moreover, the Kid, entrusted with the Professor’s posthumous message to his wife, delivers it successfully, thus honoring the Professor’s trust. Though the Kid is paid for this mission, this financial reward finally appears as a subtle way for the Professor to help the Kid. Besides, Barbelet states that “Calculation and the self-interest of the trusted do not facilitate or explain trust” (Barbelet 2009, 373). Precisely, calculation and self-interest neither cancel nor undermine the emotional and epistemic aspects of trust. In addition, Belli and Broncano contend that “trust is essential to becoming a socially situated self. Without trust, the subject feels negative emotions” (Belli and Broncano 2017, 444). This observation is best illustrated by the Kid’s life, which takes a positive turn after his encounter with the Professor—the Kid appears as a person determined to be integrated into a society which turns sexual offenders into “a thing,” “an object” (Banks 2012, 282). Indeed, the narrative voice had made explicit the Kid’s sense of objectification, “Because that’s what he feels like now” (282). The third-person narrator was also expansive on the Kid’s emotions during the hurricane that destroyed the organized community set up by the Professor and induced a sense of discouragement and renewed despair in the Kid. His emotions were conveyed in the form of a dialogue with himself, “Forget communal living, collaboration, cooperation. (. . .) Except for Annie and Einstein, you’re on your own now, Kid” (303). In this difficult passage, when the Kid lost everything, he still had his fragile animals, the parrot and the dog; he had been striving to look after them because the Professor made him believe he was capable of doing so. As a point of fact, the Professor bestowed on the Kid the sense of what Fuchs and Koch call “affective affordances,” that is, an affective sensitivity to the environment. As Fuchs defines the term referring to “Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances (that means offerings in the environment that are available to animals, such as tree being ‘climbable,’ water drinkable,’ etc.), (. . .) affective affordances: things appear to us as “important,” “worthwhile,” “attractive,” “repulsive,” “expressive,” and so on. Without emotions, the world would be without meaning or significance” (Fuchs and Koch 2014, 2). It is precisely this new significance, indispensable to organizing his life, that the Kid gains through the expansion of emotions in his rapport with the Professor.

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In fact, the Kid’s emotional attitude towards the Professor is more explicit in the narrative than the reverse. The Kid’s habit of calling the Professor, “Haystack,” a nickname of the Kid’s invention obviously referring to the Professor’s size, turns out to be a term of endearment. Significantly, studies on the use of pet names in relationships point to the positive aspect of such a practice. 2 Besides, because of his growing attachment to the Professor, his resistance to him breaks down and the Kid, in a state of extreme despair, decides to follow his mentor when the latter appears like a deus ex machina to save his stray pupil from the hurricane. Moreover, the Kid’s goodbye to him, after the Professor’s revelations of his secret life and his instructions on how the Kid should carry out his mission, is tinged with love freely expressed. “I’m gonna miss talking to you. I kind of wish what’s gonna happen wouldn’t” (Banks 2012, 320). The narrative voice confirms the Kid’s emotions, namely nostalgia for the Professor and sorrow at the idea of his imminent disappearance. “He can’t remember when he last felt both sorry and sad for someone” (318). In addition, the Professor remains a witness of the Kid’s life even after he is gone and the Kid starts assessing his life and taking control of it—“he wonders what the Professor would think of his theory. One good thing about being with the Professor is that the Kid was never bored” (347). Though only intellectually, the professorial presence in the Kid’s life continues to produce positive results. It seems clear that intellectual and emotional stimulation, the ability to understand his life, and confidence and faith in himself and in humanity are the final treasures that the Professor manages to give to the Kid, superseding Captain Kidd’s map to the hidden treasure that the boy was initially after. Banks elliptically refers to his intertextual use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island, “Then I realized this was part of a very classical pattern. (. . .) The younger person on a journey towards self-awareness, and the older figure perhaps not as pure as he first seems. I found myself thinking a lot about ‘Treasure Island’” (McGrath 2011). Just like Stevenson’s character, Jim Hawkins, the Kid begins to master his own life, which involves a series of ethical decisions, such as not feeling superior to Shyster, the exsenator and child molester, or visiting his mother. He also carefully plans his survival through cooperation with the other offenders in the post-hurricane life under the Causeway and accepts the management of his money offered by his tutor. Therefore, his season in the Professor’s tutorship ends in the full moral assessment of his life and the reshuffle of his emotions. As the narrative voice states, “And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography. (. . .) No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing” (Banks 2012, 413). The recovery of the Kid’s humanity clearly expressed in the

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narrative—“He had been made human” (413)—is accompanied by the affirmation of the interconnection of motion and emotion and depiction of the body as “the very medium of affective intentionality” (Fuchs 2016, 196). As the narrative voice redundantly puts it in the near-ending, “He needs to move fast if he wants to stay synchronized and ready because the pace of change is picking up. He can feel it spreading out from inside his body in the general direction of his skin.” (415, emphasis added). Precisely, Massumi’s rhetorical question expresses this very idea about the body: “It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? (Massumi 2002, 1). Thus the interconnection between movement and emotion seems to crown the ending of this open-ended narrative that humanizes a group of outcasts and asserts the moral valence of human interaction and, in particular, the pedagogical relation, thus politicizing it outside the academic frame. Last but not least, Banks’s representation of embodied experience highlights the importance of a teacher in flesh and blood in the age of digitization. This critical voice emerging from fiction joins many others 3 that have alerted us to the impact of digitization on cognition and emotion. A similar alert is given by Don DeLillo who, in Cosmopolis, immerses his pedagogic encounter in cyberfinance. NOTES 1. For examples, see (Harkins 2016, 749–750). 2. For a discussion of this issue, see Elisabeth Landau’s article, “Why Do We Use Pet Names in Relationships?” 3. See Otto Peters’s book, Against the Tide: Critics of Digitalization; Warners, Sceptics, Scaremongers, Apocalypticists. 20 Portraits, which examines the perilous effects of digitalization on individuals and society, though it does not specifically address distance education.

Chapter Ten

The Pedagogic Encounter in the Time of the Posthuman John DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

While Russell Banks’s novel, Lost Memory of Skin, featured the pedagogic encounter outside the formal academic background and placed it in the age of digitization, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis (2003), moves even further away from academia and embeds the genre in cyberfinance and the posthuman. The term refers to human beings’ symbiosis with technology, and since the 1990s it has established itself across a number of disciplines including literary criticism. It seems significant that the author, who appears in this narrative most concerned and perplexed by the transformations accelerated technoscientific advances bring about in the human, examines these developments and their lurking dangers through an atypical pedagogic encounter. Twenty-nine year old billionaire, Eric Packer, an assets manager, belatedly discovers that he has been the unwitting mentor of his hitherto unknown-by-him former employee, forty-one-year-old Richard Sheets alias Benno Levin. The encounter between the two men at the end of a single, eventful day appears as a fated one and acts as a catalyst upon Packer’s troubled inner life. While Banks’s narrative encounter was of the constructive type, DeLillo’s is destructive, yet enlightening. In this Joycean crosstown epic, Packer sets off from the wealthy eastern districts, traverses New York in his high-tech stretch-limo, amidst heavy traffic jams, with threats on his life and his fortune rapidly declining, to get a haircut in Hell’s Kitchen, the underprivileged neighborhood of his childhood. Over the course of the next several hours, he receives various visitors—his 121

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head-of-finance, Shiner, his currency analyst, Chin, his doctor, his chief-oftheory—and he interacts with his wife of three weeks, and lovers, as well as going through an anti-capitalist demonstration, a rapper’s funeral, a technorave, and a massive-scale film shooting; he kills his bodyguard and ruins himself financially. Thus, he provokes havoc in the market and then, in what could be interpreted as suicidal intent, he seems to encourage his own assassination by Levin. Their confrontation binds these two characters together and reveals a mentorship relation. This showdown between the white billionaire who aspires to a posthumanity and the racialized outcast who defends humanity seems to articulate the twenty-first-century’s concern with the posthuman condition. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner state that though “the period since 1945 can be considered as the beginning of a transition to a posthuman epoch,” the turn of the twenty-first century highlighted humanity’s “liminal zone where individuals are forced to confront the meaning and future of the human” (Best and Kellner 2001, 195). Cosmopolis is DeLillo’s contribution to this reflective confrontation. I will argue that DeLillo through a pedagogic encounter engages in a critical posthumanism, a phrase Stefan Herbrechter deemed necessary to articulate as “the task of analyzing the process of technologization, based on the idea of a radical interdependence or mutual interpenetration between the human, the posthuman and the inhuman. This interpenetration happens at a political, economic, philosophical, technoscientific as well as a cultural level” (Herbrechter 2013, 20). In Cosmopolis, DeLillo precisely aims at a comprehensive approach to the posthuman condition by setting up two contrasting portraits based on geography, race, culture, and socioeconomic status. Initially, Packer dominates the narrative. Though Levin becomes prominent only at the end, he is no less important in it. First of all, Packer best represents a turning point in human history, the shift from humanity to posthumanity. Packer is a hybrid, a human morphing into a posthuman. He is not exactly a biologically modified human, as in purely speculative fiction, but he has morphed, culturally and psychologically. Though not a literal cyborg, 1 he exemplifies a new model of subjectivity. Like posthuman subjects, he is technologically mediated to an unprecedented degree. He is a networked being, the Me++, 2 constantly interacting with sensate intelligent interconnected devices which create posthuman subjectivity. Information is his mindscape. With a cultural mindset that considers information as more essential than material forms, Eric Packer has entered “the condition of virtuality” (Hayles 1999, 19). Indeed, Packer’s osmosis with technology is even described in graphic terms as a sexual act. Watching the currency tickers as they are instantly readjusting to his leverage on the market, he experiences the effect on him as “cunnilingual in particular” (DeLillo 2003, 106). Fully immersed in the glo-

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bal infotainment of the multimedia environment and self-avowedly “ruthlessly efficient” (31), he seems to represent the neoliberal euphoria and the hyper-capitalist accumulation of wealth. His American Dream has taken a techno-turn. As he points out to his currency analyst, “‘there’s only one thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and intellectually. (. . .) The interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability’” (23). Thus, Jerry Varsava rightly sets up “a chilling portrait of a rogue capitalist running amok in the dying days of the stock-market bubble” (Varsava 2005, 80). Likewise, Ruzbeh Babaee and Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya argue that “Eric is void of any historical thinking and instead reloaded with new data and information” (Babaee and Wan Yahya 2014, 110). However, these views of DeLillo’s main character are only partial as Packer is also endowed with a humanist background—he studied ornithology, is fond of etymology, reads poetry, significantly the poem read by the anti-capitalist demonstrators in the narrative, and appreciates painting. Packer exists in collusion with technology but is also engaged in an ontological quest for self-definition. On the one hand, he lives in the future, as his wrist device endows him with a knowledge of the events to come, and is thus possessed by the sense of the obsolescence of the surrounding objects and the language that names them. On the other hand, at the end, and through his encounter with his former employee, he outgrows “his predatory impulse” (DeLillo 2003, 209) and rediscovers himself through mental and physical pain. It seems that the surest sign of the character’s humanist component is the blurred awakening of memory and his rush to the past evoked by his firm decision to have a haircut at the other end of the city, in the deprived area of his childhood, on a day when traffic jams and security warnings render the destination almost unreachable and highly dangerous. His surprising justification of this decision, which appears as a whim to his chief-of-security, indicates a sort of nostalgia for a distant, despised past. In the character’s unexpected discourse, “‘A haircut has what. Associations. (. . .) There’s no barber chair here. Nothing swivels but the spycam’” (DeLillo 2003, 15). This double pull towards the past and the future is a symptom of the confusion that seems to surround “the new culture” (104) in which Packer is immersed. As a matter of fact, the confident depiction of this brave posthuman world is accompanied by the evocation of a general malaise and disseminated disorientation which also permeate the narrative. The author captures both the elation and anxiety that stem from the posthuman shift as Shiner’s discourse indicates. “‘I love information. (. . .) It’s a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning in the world. (. . .) But at the same time what?’” (DeLillo 2003, 14, emphasis added). Likewise, Chin, eager to quit his profession, eloquently voices the pervasive sense of uprootedness and dislocation, “‘I feel located totally nowhere.’” (23).

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In the same vein, Packer’s quaint question, where the limos spend the night, furthers the befuddled sense of space that permeates the narrative. Right from the beginning, Packer feels “hesitant and depressed” (DeLillo 2003, 7) constantly looking for his spatiotemporal bearings. His pursuit of futurity is equally perplexing. The temporal disruption that the images of future events Packer sees on the screen of his wrist device, his posthuman crystal-ball, without being able to process them, causes further tension and disturbance. In fact, the only character who does not partake in the all-embracing tension but assumes the position of a sage is Packer’s chief-of-theory, Kinski, posthuman Sibylla and guru, who claims a new theory of time, justified by the postmodern space-time compression. Moreover, the narrative articulates the ambient pressure towards dematerialization and clearly denounces a cultural trend which Katherine Hayles identifies as the “systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment” (Hayles 1999, 48). It is no wonder, then, that hatred of materiality culminates in the fantasy of disembodiment. Randy Laist rightly views Packer as an illustration of the concept of disappearance, Paul Virilio’s “‘inexorable enactment of the stripping down of the world’” that informs the technoscientific imagination (Laist 2000, 54). It is Kinski who utters the most striking and objectionable trend of posthuman culture, the aspiration of total dematerialization. “‘People will not die. Isn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information’” (DeLillo 2003, 104). Therefore, “the new culture,” is marked by a new philosophy of space and time. However, DeLillo prominently puts back into the picture the body that had been spurned in the “flesh-eating 90s,” as Arthur and Marilouise Kroker refer to the decade in their eponymous book, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s. The author exposes the dream of the erasure of embodiment, at work in techno-utopian scenarios, as the ultimate commodification of immortality. Packer’s vision is informed by such an astounding development that would be a boon to capitalism. As the narrative voice puts it, “The technology (. . .) was the natural next step. (. . .) It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment” (DeLillo 2003, 206). Thus, DeLillo critiques posthumanism as part of an ideology of a technoscientific, capitalist society. Cultural confusion that surrounds the transition from the human to the posthuman in the narrative is intertwined with political irresponsibility. Totally unchecked, Packer turns into a gambler in the world of global finance when he starts manipulating the yen without the least concern for the consequences of his act on the global market.

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In Cosmopolis, economic neoliberalism, free market ideology, and late capitalist individualism are inseparable from technological posthumanization processes. DeLillo’s criticism of the latter stems from this conflation, salient in the narrative. Advanced capitalism engenders a perverted form of the posthuman, a posthuman that breeds its own forms of inhumanity. As Rosi Braidotti ambiguously puts it, “The perversity of advanced capitalism, and its undeniable success, consists in reattaching the potential for experimentation with new subject formations back to an overinflated notion of possessive individualism (. . .) tied to the profit principle” (Braidotti 2013, 61). Eric Packer exemplifies this type of individualism whose posthuman empowerment, combined with the hacker’s creed of freedom of information, shakes the market. The most political reading of the novel is given by Varsava who uses Cosmopolis as an opportunity to hammer home to the reader the underregulation of markets. There is little doubt that DeLillo exposes the unaccountability of technocapital advancement against a background of global capitalism. In spite of his fascination with technoscience, the author cannot help imagining its use and misuse in an autoregulated market and thus sounds the alarm. DeLillo’s ambivalence, which could be confusing to the reader, renders more complex his stance on the posthuman and makes clear that any downright rejection or unreserved endorsement of the posthuman condition would be reckless. Indeed, DeLillo politicizes the posthuman as his narrative aestheticizes global finance through Packer’s search of what Alison Shonkwiler calls “the financial sublime.” 3 Aestheticizing finance turns out to be disastrous since Packer becomes indifferent to the consequences of his acts upon the market. Despite his staunch faith in technology, 4 DeLillo does illustrate how the posthuman condition engenders its own inhuman dimension, namely financial instability as well as greater economic inequality, poverty, and homelessness, exemplified by Packer’s former employee, Benno Levin; Levin resists in a desperate way against the totalitarianism of the markets. Various groups and individuals in the narrative prepare the reader for Levin’s final act of resistance which seems to be murder. Cosmopolis pictures a world ruled by politics-transcending finance, unbound by material, national, or temporal constraints. Packer’s powerful corporation, ruined by a single act of its founder, illustrates how “the corporation has increasingly become a focal point or figure (. . .) for American financial anxieties in a global age” (Clare 2014, 3). Packer’s irresponsible, willful manipulation of the yen, facilitated by the experience of money as informational patterns, is an instance of managerial malfeasance. In an unregulated market governed by managers, there can be neither remedy nor punishment for Packer’s one-man show. Consequently, the reader may wonder whether the market is an invincible Lernaean Hydra whose autopoiesis can create the future and everything in it

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including its most radical opponents, as DeLillo’s character, Kinski, maintains, or if any opposition to market forces can stand a chance. The narrative indicates that there is still some hope, which could be comforting for the reader. The recognition of one form of resistance, namely self-immolation, by Packer, the paragon of cyber-capital, appears as DeLillo’s sign of engagement in critical posthumanism. As the narrative voice, which carries Packer’s focalization, puts it, “Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate its act” (DeLillo 2003, 99). However, the most radical form of resistance is represented by Levin, in the front line of the left-behind. His portrait is based on three basic elements—impoverishment due to technological advances, racialization due to white domination, and humanity as opposed to the posthuman. He belongs to those who according to Kinski “want to hold off the future,” those ruthlessly thrown “into the gutter to retch and die” (DeLillo 2003, 90). The violence of the image echoes Packer’s ruthless efficiency which resulted in Levin’s termination. Precisely, unable to follow the “microtimed,” “infinitesimal” system (91) in Packer’s corporation and consequently fired, Levin illustrates all the better the digital divide between the technology-flyers and the rest. In this light, Levin’s assassination of Packer, evoked in the narrative, seems to be an act of revolt against neoliberal practices and the vertiginous speed of technological advancement rather than an act of personal revenge against his termination. Moreover, it is highly significant that Levin with “his syndromes” from Malaysia (DeLillo 2003, 192) and Korea (202) is somewhat racialized. In addition, his self-chosen pseudonym, Benno Levin, corroborates his racialization. Thus, the issue of ethnocentrism regarding information technologies is brought into the picture. Indeed, ethnocentrism is highly encouraged by information technologies, according to both Katherine Hayles and Joel Dinerstein. In particular, the latter contends that technology is “an abstract concept functioning as a white mythology” (Dinerstein 2006, 570). It seems that Levin’s racialization widens the gap between the human and the posthuman by highlighting a white elite. Equally significant is Levin’s real name, Sheets, which points to the “old culture.” Indeed, the character living “offline” writes his “spiritual autobiography,” “longhand in pencil” (DeLillo 2003, 149), with the ambition of finding through this act “some honor, some worth at the bottom of things” (152). These telling details in the presentation of the character evoke the humanist tradition. As Herbrechter makes clear, “critical posthumanism opens up the possibility of a return to some fundamental aspects of humanism” (Herbrechter 2013, 106), which both Packer and Sheets illustrate. In fact, the two characters, Packer, initially a symbol of success but ultimately of failure too, and Levin, a symbol of failure, but ultimately of resistance to the problematic aspects of the posthuman, turn out to be bound to each other by the ties of

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“the double,” as Randy Laist, among other critics, has observed (Laist 2010, 176). Levin finally emerges as the unknown life-threat that has been weighing on Packer’s life throughout the narrative. Ignoring all warnings, Packer inexorably progresses toward his nemesis, Levin, lying in wait for him in his squalid lodgings in the western part of the city. Therefore, it is Packer who solves the problem of the latter as Levin’s decision to kill Packer involves a major practical question for the former teacher who left teaching to become rich: “And how will I find him to kill, much less actually aim and shoot? So it is largely academic this give-and-take” (DeLillo 2003, 154). The term academic, though ironic, fleshes out Levin’s academic background. On his way to his former employee, Packer is getting ready to meet him and the reader smoothly progresses toward their confrontation. This preparation involves Packer’s subtle evolution as a character. DeLillo sets up a picture of the posthuman while he asserts humanist values in a post-anthropocentric perspective. The author adopts a strategy of spacial and temporal juxtapositions and a narrative movement that attempts to recover these values. Packer’s trip takes him away from his futuristic dwelling in the residential complement of the Twin Towers in eastside Manhattan, out of his limo, and back to his former neighborhood in westside Manhattan, adjacent to the seedy, makeshift lodgings of his former employee, where the showdown between the two men takes place. This trip also entails a movement from the future, where Packer lives, to “century past” (DeLillo 2003, 148), from cyber reality to concrete reality or “the meat space” (64), from protective motorization to the exposure of walking alone. Above all, Packer’s trip involves a movement from lust to the acknowledgment of love (for his wife), from the fantasy of disembodiment to the vulnerable-to-pain, destined-for-death body, and last but not least from “the digital imperative” (64) to the categorical imperative. Such an itinerary from east to west evokes the frontier which represents the secularization of the Puritan ideal of a New Jerusalem and the restoration of Adamic perfection and return to Eden and immortality. Though “the concept of the Adamic (. . .) inform(s) the posthuman” (Dinerstein 2006, 575), according to Joel Dinerstein, Packer’s trip from the east to the west is essentially back to the past, to the body, to finitude and mortality and therefore it could appear as a parodic one. However, on his way, Packer seems to become aware of values such as human dignity, respect for the other’s suffering, acknowledgment of companionship—as his new relation to his driver, never looked at before, indicates; Packer embraces the man to bid him goodbye (DeLillo 2003, 180). At the same time, he assassinates his chief-of security, for he felt that Torval was “a threat to his self-regard” (147). Nevertheless, this act may be more complex than the narrative voice suggests, for his chief-of security appears as

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the most dehumanized character in the narrative, presented as a humanmachine interface. Just like the act of self-immolation that shook Packer and Packer’s murder by Levin at the end of the narrative, this form of violence might be understood as a revolt against a dehumanizing condition. Packer eliminates Torval on his way to his self-willed death, for they have both turned into dehumanized machines, as his showdown with Levin suggests. Thus Packer seems to be ready to face his opponent but also his fellow traveler, Levin. In a compelling tête-à-tête, both farcical (echoing the parodic aspect of Packer’s rush to the west) and grave, Levin posits himself as a thwarted, profoundly disappointed disciple after revealing his identity as the capitalist’s former Thai baht currency analyst. While Packer’s heart was “frozen” (DeLillo 2003, 198), Levin’s was seething with love and hate. Indeed, Levin’s autobiographical writing, which is highlighted by a shift from the thirdperson to the first-person narrative, reveals Packer’s significance in his life. For instance, in the part of chapter 3, titled “The Confessions of Benno Levin,” Levin confides to the reader, “It was important to know where he was, even for a moment. It put my world in order” (151). The master appears as the structuring factor in the disciple’s life. Likewise, his admiration for him is expressed in equally strong, though understated, terms. “He is always ahead, thinking past what is new. (. . .) He wants to be one civilization ahead of this one” (152). The master appears as a seer but also as a man of action. In their “philosophical pause” (DeLillo 2003, 187), as they agree to refer to their violent, armed meeting, Levin acknowledges his debt to his mentor in precise, poetic terms, worthy of an aesthete: “‘You tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature. (. . .) The mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals. I learnt this with the baht. I loved the baht. I loved the cross-harmonies between nature and data. You taught me this. The way signals from a pulsar in deepest space follow classical number sequences, which in turn can describe the fluctuations of a given stock or currency. You showed me this” (200, emphasis added). The pedagogic encounter which seems to involve two kindred spirits appears under the auspices of the quasi-mystical union between man and nature. Furthermore, in a highly emotional discourse, Levin declares the disciple’s love and awe of the master to Packer in unequivocal terms. “I feel I know you better than anyone knows you. I used to watch you meditate, online (. . .) I couldn’t stop watching. (. . .) When you shut down the site I was (. . .) dead, for a long time after” (DeLillo 2003,198). The statement of the other’s knowledge, which is recurrent in Levin’s discourse, seems to derive from love. The lover’s deprivation of the love object is voiced in a disconsolate manner while expectation and demand become more articulate, “‘I wanted you to heal me, to save me’” (204). Though the sense of letdown

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increases and renders highly ambivalent the intensity of affects that surround the master, the disciple’s capacity for analysis and his lucidity enlighten the former. As a matter of fact, Levin had been following Packer’s trajectory from afar, invisible and unknown by him, and then saw his admiration, devotion, and trust turning into disappointment, bitterness, a sense of betrayal, and horror. Levin’s guide to the digital world seems to have taken a wrong turn and his pupil can point out this failing in a final reversal of roles. Indeed, in their forceful exchange, Levin takes on the master’s role and adopting the maieutic method leads Packer into self-awareness. Levin turns out to be Packer’s final destination. Thus starting with the reasonable question, “‘why you’d willingly enter a house where there’s someone inside who’s prepared to kill you’” (DeLillo 2003, 190), the master probes into his disciple’s mind, which needs enlightenment as Packer’s imperative question indicates, “Tell me. Why am I here?” (190). Such a great expectation establishes Levin as an authority figure, the subject-supposed-to-know. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept, which refers to the analysand’s perception of the analyst as a subject who knows, can also be applied in a pedagogic context. 5 Levin guides his expectant pupil into self-knowledge by offering suggestions, such as the sense of failure that could have hit Packer hard when he least expected it and entailed a blow to his self-esteem. His “thoughtful and patient” (190) stance in full contradiction with his declared will to kill his former employer reveals the qualities of a good teacher who works on his student’s slowly emerging receptiveness. In fact, Packer’s newly developed “enormous remorseful awareness” (DeLillo 2003, 196) of the others is mediated through the recognition of Levin’s presence in the world, which the disciple acknowledges as he becomes attentive to the “terrible intimacy” of Levin’s voice, to the “nearness of feeling and experience” that he finds himself unable to “reciprocate.” He can only feel “sad for the man,” witness his “lonely devotedness and hatred and disappointment,” yet he admits that Levin “knew him in ways no one ever had” (204). This reciprocal ontological knowledge of each other and Packer’s compassion for Levin seal the master-disciple relation which leads the former to the recognition of his all-powerful fantasy of immortality and his fear of death, yet not to his salvation for he remains immersed in a manifold failure. It seems that Packer’s final confrontation with his double puts the mortal body in the center of the narrative and holds up Packer as an Icarian figure doomed to die. Levin makes a telling parallel for his eager pupil’s benefit between his own syndromes and what he calls Packer’s complex, “Icarus falling” (DeLillo 2003, 202). Packer committed hubris and therefore, as Levin’s image seems to suggest, he has to be punished. His ontological quest, blended with his financial operations, comes to an abrupt standstill. In his

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war with the yen, which he could not chart, the mighty cyber-capitalist was defeated. In his mystification of finance and technoscience, he failed to unlock the secrets of the universe by tracking the movements of the yen, invested with what Slavoj Žižek calls an “ultimate speculative identity” (Žižek 1997, 129), and thus to discover the order he was anticipating, the “pattern that wants to be seen” (DeLillo 2003, 86). Instead of the order and the purposeful design he expected in his currency speculations, he discovered disorder, unpredictability, randomness, and fear of death. In this light, Packer’s constant terror of his asymmetrical prostate, unappeased by his doctor’s daily checks and reassurances but finally soothed by Levin who has the same anatomical asymmetry, becomes clear. This lethal lack of symmetry, of which his own body kept reminding him, was ignored in Packer’s ontological search and currency calculations. In their pedagogic session, Levin points out the paramountcy of the “lopsided” (DeLillo 2003, 200) to him and thus Packer’s illusional quest. Precisely, R. L. Rutsky is quite enlightening on this relation between the human and randomness. As he puts it, a useful way to understand the distinction between the human and a nonanthropocentric posthuman is in terms of their differing relations to mutation and randomness. Indeed, the human subject can only conceive of itself in opposition to the random, for it is constituted on the basis of pattern, organization, and controlling the random, just as it seeks to control the body, dominate the world, and narrativize history [. . .] To become posthuman is to participate in the random processes of mutation, processes that can never be entirely reduced to patterns or standards, codes or information (Rutsky 2007, 111).

Thus, Packer’s flight from the human is arrested when the master of the digital universe stumbles upon randomness, but so is his new élan back to the human for he has to be punished for his arrogance and ruthlessness. In this post-Freudian era, his past is not recovered in the narrative as the incompleteness of his literal haircut suggests (though ironically his economic haircut is total). Moreover, Packer fails what, based on the model of the Turing test, Hayles calls “the Moravec test.” 6 Along with his belated recognition that “who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data” (DeLillo 2003, 207) is the witnessing of his own death, of a world that goes on without him, unthinkable at the beginning of the narrative, when he believed that “When he died he would not end. The world would end” (6). It is precisely at this point that the narrative remains suspended while the open-ended finale paves the way for posthuman ethics which would also assert humanist values. Not only financially but also morally ruined, Packer lets himself be killed by his executioner, thus seemingly endorsing Levin’s verdict. The posthuman delusion of unlimited mastery depicted in the narrative is destroyed. The novel not only makes an ethical point but

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also highlights the uncertainties that the future has in store for the posthuman condition. It is worth mentioning that Herbrechter, just like Hayles and Braidotti, makes clear that “the prefix ‘post’ does not signify a radical break with humanism” for “equating posthumanism with technoculture would be too narrow an understanding” (Herbrechter 2013, 48). However, Herbrechter seems to take smooth continuity for granted whereas DeLillo does not. The American author, focusing on the transition from the human to the posthuman subject, demonstrates the dangers of a radical break which the inseparability of technology and capital entails as well as the necessity to maintain the connection with humanism. Though equating posthumanism with technoculture could be too narrow an understanding, a critical understanding of this possible equation is necessary before or alongside a wider vision of the posthuman. Although the title of the novel is ambiguous, it also seems to imply the vital connection with humanism. Packer defines himself as “a world citizen” (DeLillo 2003, 26) and he is, indeed, a global and cyber citizen. Levin, by virtue of his attachment to humanist values, is as well, as he interestingly cites Saint Augustine to Packer. On the one hand, “cosmopolis” could refer to globalization with all the controversies that surround this central concept. On the other hand, as Russell Scott Valentino rightly remarks, the term carries humanist echoes. The critic underlines “the significance of the Greek coinage, which ultimately invokes the Stoic notion of the kosmou polites (. . .) and its long line of Utopian descendants in the Western tradition, from Augustine to Kant and Marx” (Valentino 2007, 152). Valentino’s reminder could lead us to Braidotti’s view of posthumanism as “the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and antihumanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives” (Braidotti 2013, 37). But such an end is, again, not taken for granted by DeLillo’s literary project which questions this new framework. If his character’s posthumanity is flawed, his death, whether an assassination or a suicide, is the sign that such posthumanity, exemplified by the moneyed technoelite, is highly problematic. DeLillo’s posthuman is anchored in the human and the transition from the human to the posthuman condition, which technoscientific advancement precipitates, must still be negotiated. Indeed, DeLillo’s reflection on how the effects of contemporary technoculture force through a rethinking of the integrity and identity of the human, which should ally “the digital imperative” with the ethical one, makes him both an insider and an outsider in turn-of-the-century America. His doubleedged position could make him a moderate reconstructive posthumanist. 7 This stance is suggested in Cosmopolis by the pedagogic encounter that features centrally in his narrative.

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NOTES 1. See “the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg” (Hayles 1999, 4). 2. To borrow William Mitchell’s famous pun from the computer language C++. 3. See, “[T]he financial sublime refers to the full range of mystifications of capital— technological, political and otherwise—that make it impossible to distinguish the actuality of money from the increasing unreality of global capitalism” (Shonkwiler 2010, 249). 4. DeLillo made his views clear in his oft-quoted article, “In the Ruins of the Future.” 5. See Laura Hetrick’s article, “The (Art) Teacher as Lacan’s Subject-Supposed-to-Know.” 6. See, “Whereas the Turing test was designed to show that machines can perform the thinking previously considered to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind, the Moravec test was designed to show that machines can become the repository of human consciousness” (Hayles 1999, xii). 7. Best and Kellner differentiate between “radical deconstructive posthumanists” who reject altogether the legacy of humanism and “moderate reconstructive posthumanists” who rethink mind, body, agency and do not sever themselves from the modern legacy (Best and Kellner 2001, 196).

Conclusion Toward the Master-Disciple Novel as an Established Genre

The master-disciple novel seems to be here to stay as it deals with a fundamental human rapport and has been following the evolution of society. Whether in the classroom or outside the formal academic environment, the enactment of pedagogic roles can be reversible and fluid but not always in a constructive give-and-take. Whether the narratives involve only a single pedagogic couple as in Blue Angel or more as in Ravelstein, they display distinctive features. The concept of existential educative encounter, which pertains to the existential philosophy of education, seems necessary to understand the master-disciple novel and preempts the other characteristics of it. The meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter is discussed by Jani Koskela and Pauli Siljander in their article, “What is Existential Educational Encounter?” Based on Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s existential philosophy of education and his theory of discontinuous education, Koskela and Siljander clearly contrast the concept, which is not synonymous with Bildung, with the mere transmittal of knowledge. They further emphasize the tension in the dualism of the educative process and highlight the fact that “an educative encounter involves one’s whole being” (Koskela and Siljander 2014, 73); it amounts to an awakening and is a collision. In fact, they consider encounter as “an intrinsic property of learning (. . .) the first phenomenal phase of a mental process leading to awakening of the tensions and discrepancies between one’s inner life-world and the outer lifeworld” (Koskela and Siljander 2014, 77). All the novels discussed in this study point to the encounter as an existential category, distinct from mere 133

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educational instruction. Furthermore, since an educational encounter points to a relation of a specific kind, causal theories of relation, which reconcile relational and substantive ontology, could contribute to the understanding of its specificity. 1 Though Koskela and Siljander do not discuss the relation between the concept of existential educative encounter and that of pedagogical Eros, there is little doubt that what characterizes the existential educative encounter is pedagogical Eros, which seems to ensue and to become the essence of such an encounter bringing into the picture “the puzzling strangeness of the other,” the Platonic idea of atopos (Kenklies 2019, 549). As Karsten Kenklies reminds us, “Not being identifiable and resistant to all known categories, the atopos rips the other person out of its usual state of being into what has always been described as ecstasis, as standing besides oneself” (Kenklies 2019, 554). The novels analyzed in this study indicate that Eros, with or without its sexual dimension, which is ultimately a distinction that may mostly concern legislators and administrators, commands and shapes the lives of the parties involved. As a rule, the intellect in general and aesthetics, the critical refection on art, culture, and nature, in particular, seem to mediate the erotic exchange. Not only creative writing programs and the humanities, which obviously favor intellectual exchange and aesthetic appreciation, but also other contexts seem to bring aesthetics into the picture. Banks’s and DeLillo’s novels are cases in point. Thanks to his encounter with the Professor, the Kid, in the former’s novel, becomes sensitive to the beauty of the fallen Paradise he discovers in the Swamp. The financial sublime, the conjunction of nature and finance, engulfs the two characters in Cosmopolis who share the same experience of it until one of them commits hubris. Thus theories of aesthetics and affect theories are necessary to analyze the powerful emotion that defines the concept of pedagogical Eros. Academic politics, in its effort to regulate it and protect those who are deemed powerless, seems to underestimate, misconceive, or completely ignore the power of this affect that can turn the tables. Legislators and administrators could only benefit from the novelists’ insights into this issue as the latter can afford a broader vision of education. Not only strictly fiction writers but also authors with a larger range of activities can enlarge this vision. All the more worth noting are bell hook’s views on Eros and pedagogy, as they are expressed by a feminist. Denouncing the mind/body split, hooks claims “a place for passion in the classroom,” and contends that Eros and the erotic do “not need to be denied for learning to take place” (hooks 1994, 193); she confidently concludes that “when eros is present in the classroom setting, then love is bound to flourish” (hooks 1994, 199), though hate should also be included in this vision. Last but not least, hooks considers that “commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expres-

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sion of political activism” (hooks 1994, 203). Therefore, her position combines political, emotional, and ethical commitment to pedagogy and reveals the underlying ethics of care. Though this feminist philosophical perspective to ethics is quite controversial, it could frame an analysis of a pedagogic encounter. 2 Precisely, the novels analyzed in this study raise the necessity of ethics in the understanding and governance of the pedagogic relation. Their authors underline the professors/mentors’ moral responsibility but tackle the complexity of the issue and exclude dismissive or punitive attitudes that could narrow readers’ capacity for an all-embracing vision. Robert Stone’s campus novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl (2013), subtly inquires into the issue of professorial responsibility. Just like Tartt’s The Secret History, Stone’s novel could be read as a detective story (of the whodunit type) that does not sidetrack the reader from the pedagogical encounter and, just like all the narratives in this study, subtly raises the question of the assessment of moral responsibility. Precisely, R. S. Downie proposes the combination of three models for such an evaluation, namely “the morality of the role, the role-enactment and the role-acceptance” (Downie 1964, 36). Contrary to Tartt’s professor, Stone’s character is endowed with a higher degree of ethical sensitivity when he deems himself morally responsible for the death of his student and tries to atone for it. Elina Kuusisto and Kirsi Tirri who inquire into teachers’ moral competence in pedagogical encounters clearly state that ethical sensitivity “has been found to be the most critical of the ethical abilities, as without it the ethical dimensions of a situation may not even be recognised” (Kuusisto and Tirri 2019, 82). It is this recognition that underpins Stone’s professor’s search for atonement. Another type of moral recognition is required from the introspective flâneur, Julius, in Teju Cole’s Open City, namely the acceptance of his former professor’s decline and mortality. Though the novel received a lot of critical attention, no critic pored over the mentorship relation in the novel. His mentor’s home is Julius’s main harboring stopover in his endless peregrinations in the cosmopolitan city of New York. The deprivation of this shelter, when Professor Saito dies, leaves Julius at a loss and in search of acknowledgment of their bond by an indifferent environment. The first-person narrator who is able to express love only for his mentor is led to assess alone the significance of their encounter. “I didn’t know whom to call. He had meant so much to me but, I realized, our relationship had been so private or, rather, outside a network of other connected relationships, that hardly anyone else knew about it, or about how important it had been to us” (Cole 2011, 184). It is this acknowledgment of the significance of the pedagogic bond that the master-disciple novel offers, especially on the American campus where intimacy in pedagogy is viewed with suspicion.

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Thus encounter, Eros, beauty and thought, responsibility, and moral competence seem to be major defining concepts and building blocks of the master-disciple novel. Academic politics and legislation, ethical issues, and social and technological developments seem to have given it an impetus after the 1980s in the United States. Though the physical campus is undergoing changes as technological advancements have put it into question, there is little that could put an end to the pedagogic encounter, which may mutate into other environments that will frame or favor the development of the pedagogic bond. NOTES 1. For a discussion of these theories, see Wesley J. Wildman’s article, “An Introduction to Relational Ontology.” 2. For this theory of care in education, see Nel Noddings’s 1984 book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, enriched by a new preface in 2003.

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Index

the academic novel, viii, 1, 35, 96 affirmative action, 90 AIDS, xvii, 95, 98, 99, 104, 107 Allen, Amy, 32, 38, 39 Allen, Edward, ix, 36 The American Association of University Professors, 33 American Creed, 86, 89; civic creed, 88; creed, 88, 92 American Dream, 123 Angelides, Steven, 74 Antene, Petr, xviin1 Apollo, 41, 43 Appelbaum, Robert, and Alexis Paknadel, 86 Aquinas, Thomas, 7 Aristophanes, 56 Arkins, Brian, 1 Aron, Raymond, 100 Asclepius, 41, 42, 43 Atlas, James, 95 atopos, 134 attachment theory, 19, 22 auctoritas, xiv Ault, Amber, 75 Babaee, Ruzbeh and Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya, 123 Ball, Alan, 55 Barbelet, Jack, 117, 118 Barker, Meg, and Darren Langdridge, 75

Barth, Karl, 78, 85 Bassnett, Susan, 59, 60 Batchelor, Bob, 43, 47 Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards, 37 Beard, A. Charles, 94n6 Begley, Adam, 78, 80, 84 Belli, Simone, and Fernando Broncano, 118 Bell, Daniel, ix, x, 100 Benjamin, Walter, 59, 61, 62 Bennett, Eric, x Benziman, Galia, Ruth Kannai, and Ayesha Ahmad, 50n2 Berger, Fred, 23, 27, 29 besprizornye, 55 Best, Steven and Douglas M. Kellner, 132n7 bisexuality, xvi, 65, 72, 73, 74, 75 Blanchot, Maurice, 61, 62 Bloom, Allan, xvi, 95, 99 Blower, Brooke, 97 Bloom, Harold, 53 Bok, Sissela, 2, 7, 10 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, 133 bond, viii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 30, 31, 46, 53, 56, 57, 62, 78, 80, 82, 93, 96, 107, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 135, 136; and mimetic desire, 82 Bosco, Mark, viii 149

150

Index

Boyle, A. Francis, 102 Braidotti, Rosi, 125, 131 Braslow, Matthew D., Jean Guerrettaz, Robert M. Arkin, and Kathryn C. Oleson, 25 Bromwich, David, 40n3 Bruner, J. Jerome, 74 Buber, Martin, xiii Callis, April, 75 campus novel, vii, viii, xvii, 1, 54, 78 campus crime novel, xiii, xiv, 3, 42. See also whydunit Carter, Angela, 47 Carroll, Arkin, and Shade, 27 Caruana, John, 18n2 categorical imperative, 127 causal theories of relation, 134 Céline, 106 Chatterton, Thomas, 48 Chekhov, Anton, 39 Chiron, 41, 43 Chua, Amy, ix Ciasullo, Ann, 68 Citrin, Jack, Ernst Haas, Christopher Muste, and Beth Reingold, 87, 88 Clare, Ralph, 125 class, xiv, 3, 3–5, 16, 70, 82, 83, 102; the deprived classes, xvi; the middle-class, xvi; underclass, 84; underclasses, 113; the upper classes, 109 Clements, Mikaella, 18n1 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 43 Cole, Teju, 135 Colette, 69, 76n2 Connor Rae, Kimberly, viii creative writing, x, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, 19, 21, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 59, 134 creationism/intelligent design, 77; creationism, 79, 94n3; intelligent design, 78, 79, 94n3 Cresswell, James, 6 cultural wars, ix, xii; culture wars, 95 cyberfinance, 120, 121 Dalgleish, David, 56 Davis, Percival and Dean H. Kenyon, 94n2 DeAngelis, Tom, 6

Decout, Maxime, 9 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 13, 15, 57 DeLillo, Don, 89, 92, 93, 94n7 depersonalization-derealization, 113, 114, 117 D’Erasmo, Stacey, 24 Deresiewicz, William, 47 De Rougemont, Denis, 94n4 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 100 Dines, Gail, 115 diversity, xii, 3, 5, 89, 90, 92 digitization, 109, 114, 120, 121 Dinerstein, Joel, 126, 127 Dionysian mysteries, 15 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 83 Downing, Christine, 50n1 Downie, R. S., 135 Driver, Wes, 94n1 Du Plessis, Michael, 75 Durrenberger, E. Paul, 3, 4 Duvall, John, 81 Dziech Wright, Billie, xi, 35, 36 Eagleton, Terry, 33 embodiment, 110, 111, 124; disembodiment, 124, 127; embodied affectivity, 111, 112; embodied experience, 109, 120; the embodied theory of emotions, 115 encounter, vii, viii, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 5, 16, 17, 20, 23, 28, 34, 37, 40, 42, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 69, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93, 102, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 131, 133, 134, 135; concept of, 133; existential educative encounter, 133, 134 Eros, xii, xiv, 15, 17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 34, 53, 54, 66, 79, 102, 105, 134 Esposito, Luigi, and Laura Finley, xviin4 ethics of care, 135 Farmer, Michial, 78 Faulkner, William, 49 feminism, 37, 40n8; third-wave, 37, 40n8; feminist political agenda, 3; feminist critics, 3; feminist politics, xvi, 3, 32, 36, 78

Index Figlerowicz, Marta, and Ayesha Ramachandran, 73 the financial sublime, 125, 132n3, 134 Flaherty Weaver, Alice, 45 Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross, 94n3 Franzen, Jonathan, 37 Frazer, Mariam, 75 Fredericks, Claude, 15 Froese, Tom, and Thomas Fuchs, 111, 112, 114 the frontier, 127 Fuchs, Dieter, viii Fuchs, Thomas, 111, 112, 114, 120 Fuchs, Thomas, and Hanne De Jaegher, 116 Fuchs, Thomas, and Sabine Koch, 111, 118 Galinsky, Jonathan, xviiin7 Gallop, Jane, xviiin7 Gass, William, 35 gender politics, 3 gender theory, 78 gender wars, xv, 31, 33, 38, 82 Gerhardsson, Birger, 106 Girard, René, 78, 81, 83, 84 Goldberg, Jeffrey, 87, 88 Gomis van Heteren, Annette, xviin2 gratitude, xiv, xv, 19, 20, 23, 29, 30. See also ingratitude Greiner, Donald, 78, 93 guilt, xiv, 1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 115 Haidt, Jonathan, 32 Hanlon, R. Aaron, ix Hargreaves, Tracy, 1, 13 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 100, 101 Harkins, Gillian, 109, 110, 120n1 Hauke, Gernot, 110 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 78 Hayek, Friedrich, 97 Hayles, Katherine, 122, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132n1, 132n6 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 3 Herbrechter, Stefan, 122, 126, 131 Hetrick, Laura, 132n5 Higonnet, Patrice, 96, 97, 98, 101 Hillman, David and Ulrika Maud, 110 Hobbs,, 48 Homo Ludens , 13

151

hooks, bell, 72, 134 Houellebecq, Michel, 101 hypergraphia, 45, 47 ingratitude, 24, 26, 27 the in loco parentis doctrine, xii the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 43; Iowa, x Jaffe-Foger, Miriam, 98 James, Henry, vii James, William, 110 Jardine, Lisa, 33 Jeffries, Stuart, 40n6 Jewish scriptures, 17; scriptures, 106 Jewish tradition, 96 Johnson, Denis, 47 Johnson Hanford, Pamela, 51n3 Johnson, Toby, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 10, 22, 26, 131 Kauffman, Walter, 8 Kenklies, Karsten, xii, 134 Keynes, John Maynard, 97 Kinder, Chuck, 46 Kinser, Amber, 37 Kipling, Rudyard, 106 Kipni, Laura, xi Klepuszewski, Wojciech, viii Koepfinger, Eoin, 46 Korf v.Ball State University , 33 Koskela, Jani, and Pauli Siljander, 133, 134 Kramer, E. John, viii Kristeva, Julia, 100 Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise, 124 Kundera, Milan, 45 Künstlerroman, 42 Kuusisto, Elina, and Kirsi Tirri, 135 Lacan, Jacques, 129, 132n5 Laist, Randy, 124, 127 Landau, Elisabeth, 120n2 Landy, Joshua, 94n5 Larkin, Philip, 33 Lee, Philip, xii, xviiin9 lesbian existence, 65 lesbian identity, 67, 68, 69, 70 lesbian separatism, 65 Leuschner, Eric, 35

152

Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, 17 Lies, 4; gamut of, 7–10; self-deception, 12. See also lying Lieven, Anatol, 93 Liska, Vivian, and Naomi Conen, 61, 62 Lott, Jessica, 34 Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt, 28 Lupton, Deborah, 104 lying, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Lyons, O. John, viii MacKinnon, Catharine, 37, 40n6 maenadism, 15 Mailer, Norman, 93 Malamud, Bernard, 78 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 54 Mandelstam, Osip, 54 Maslin, Janet, 116 Massumi, Brian, 112, 120 the master-disciple novel, viii, xi, xv, xvii, 133, 135, 136 Mathé, Sylvie, 86 McAleer, Sean, 23 McCullough, Michael E., Shelley D. Kilpatrick, Robert A. Emmons, Shelley D. Kilpatrick, and David B. Larson, 29, 30 McGovern, Margot, 3 McGrath, Charles, 119 McGurl, Mark, x, xi, 42, 49, 50 McLeod, Allegra, 109 McWilliam, Erica, 56 mentorship, xii, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 41, 48, 49, 66, 122, 135; politics of, 20 Méral, Jean, 101 mid-list, 39 microaggressions, xi the midnight disease, xv, 42, 43, 44, 45 Mihalache, Iulia, 63n1 Miller, David, 92 Mitchell, William, 132n2 mimetic desire, 78, 81 Moody, Rick, 47 moral competence, 135, 136 moral culture, 31, 32 moral growth, xiv, 19, 23; moral education, xiv, 20, 26 moral emotions, xiv, xv, 7, 10 moral law, xiv, 11; disregard of, 2, 9

the Moravec test, 130, 132n7 Moseley, Merritt, viii Myers, D. G., 35, 46 Napolitano, Janet, xviiin8 national identity, xvi, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92; American identity, 38, 86, 92; exceptionalism, 88 Neary, John, 85 the New Critics, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 9 Noddings, Nel, 136n2 North, Anna, xviiin7 Noudelmann, François, 9, 11 Novak, Frank, 85 Nussbaum, Martha, 38, 39 Ochs, Robyn, 75 Osborne, John, 40n2 Ozick, Cynthia, 95 Paludi, Michele, 35, 40n5 parapraxis, 9 Pasternak, Boris, 58 Pastore, Laurence Judith, 103 Patai, Daphne, 34 Paulin, Tom, 33 Pauw, François, 1, 13 Paz, Octavio, 60 Peters, Otto, 120n3 pedagogical rapport, vii, xiii, xiv, 12 Plato, xii, 4, 11, 56, 103 Poe, Allan Edgar, 45 Pogrmilović Klepač, Bojana, xviin2 political correctness, viii, ix, xii, xiii, xviin2, xviin5, 31, 32, 47, 77, 78; PC, ix, 32; politically correct, ix, xviin3, 18, 38; political incorrectness, 31; politically incorrect, 78 politics, ix, 77; academic politics, 32, 38, 72, 134, 136; academic and identity politics, 65, 66; bisexual politics, 74, 75; (see also bisexuality); Cold War politics, 63; cultural and religious politics, 107; identity politics, 68, 72, 75; lesbian politics, 74; religious and national politics, 75; sexual politics, xiv, 21; sexual identity politics, xvi, 38, 63, 75; of shame, 69; (see also shame);

Index university politics, 50 Porter, H. Eleanor, 50n2 Porter, I. James, 14 posthuman, xvii, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132n1; critical posthumanism, 122, 126; posthumanism, 131; posthumanity, 122; posthumanization, 125; posthuman ethics, 130 Powell, David McKay, 48 power, vii, viii, ix, xv, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 40n5, 55, 57, 66, 105; power differential, xi, xv, 30, 32, 34, 39, 55; power dynamics, 20; power gap, 33; abuse of, ix, 28, 33 Pramaggiore, Maria, 74 Pritchett, S. V., 51n3 Procopius, 2 The Professor’s Roman, viii queer, xiii, 75 Quinn, Lucia Roseanne, 37 Ragins, Belle Rose, and Kathy Kram, 26 Raymond, Janice, 71, 72 Reinert, S. Erik, 40n1 Rich, Adrienne, 65, 72 Rimbaud, Arthur, 50 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 30n1 Roiphe, Katie, 37, 40n7 roman à clef, 95 Rorty, Richard, 91 Rosenfeld, Lucinda, 35 Rossen, Janice, viii Roth, Philip, xii, xiii, xvi, 37, 38, 56, 78 Rust, Paula, 74 Rutsky, R. L., 130 safe space, 32 Said, Edward, 93 Saint Augustine, 131 Sansone Randy and Lori, 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 100 satire, ix, 35, 38, 46, 136n2 Schiff, James, 78, 83 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 61 Schneider, M. Elisabeth, 40n6 Schulman, Helen, 111 Schumpeter, Joseph, 40n1

153

shame, 4, 7, 10, 11, 69, 70, 115 Sheehan, Bill, 57 Showalter, Elaine, viii secrecy, 2, 7, 8, 24, 69, 70, 71 Sedgwick, Eve, 71 self-doubt, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 95 sexual harassment, xi, xii, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38 sexual identity, 66, 69 sexual offense, 109, 110, 113 Shonkwiler, Alison, 132n3 Simeoni, Daniel, 63n1 slapstick, 45 Smith, Stan, 33 Snyder, Claire, 37, 40n8 socialization, 110 Socrates, vii, 47; maieutic method, 129; Socratic pedagogy, 102 Sombart, Werner, 32 Sontag, Susan, 99, 104 spy novel, 58 Steiner, George, vii, xi, 13, 31, 46, 59, 78, 81, 106 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 119 Stone, Robert, 40n4, 135 Strauss, Leo, 102 the subject-supposed-to-know, 129, 132n5 the sublime, 10, 14 Sutherland, A. J., 51n3 Tangney, June Price, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra J. Mashek, 11, 115 Tate, Andrew, 80, 85 Taylor, Chloë, 34 telestic madness, 11 Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth, 91, 92 Tierney, G. William, 46 Tillich, Paul, 78, 85 Timpf, Katherine, ix Title IX, xi Tobias, Scott, 51n4 Todd, Sharon, xi, xii translatability, 60, 61 transmission, vii, 20, 62, 93 Trendel, Aristi, xviiin10 truth, xiii, 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 Tsimpouki, Theodora, 86 the Turing test, 130, 132n6 Tyson, Charlie, xviin6

154 Updike, John, 56, 85 Valentino, Russell Scott, 131 Varsava, Jerry, 123, 125 the varsity novel, viii Velleman, David, 26 Venuti, Lawrence, 60, 61 victimhood culture, 35 Vidal, Gore, 93, 94n6 Vonnegut, Kurt, 93 Von Sternberg, Josef, 36 Walker, Rebecca, 37 Wang Sheng, David Greenberger, Raymond Noe, and Jinyan Fan, 19, 21, 22, 24 Warner, Michael, 69, 70 Wartenberg, Thomas, 33, 34 WASP, xvi, 87 Weigel, Moira, xviin5 Weiner, Linda, xi whydunit, 1, 2, 135

Index Wilde, Oscar, 103 Wildman, Wesley J., 136n1 Williams, Christine, 36 Williams, June, 30n2 Winthrop, John, 77 Wittkower, Margot, and Rudolf Wittkower, 48 Wolf, Naomi, 37, 40n6 Wolfowitz, Paul, 102 Womack, Kenneth, viii Wordsworth, William, 48 the wounded healer, xv, 41, 41–42, 42, 43, 46, 48, 50, 50n1, 50n2 writer’s block, 45 Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 37 Wyneken, Gustav, 15 Zanganeh, Azam Lila, 88 Zembylas, Michalinos, 55, 57 Zerubavel, Noga, and Margaret O ’Dougherty Wright, 41, 42 Žižek, Slavoj, 97, 130

About the Author

Aristi Trendel is associate professor at Le Mans University, France, where she offers courses in American civilization and business. She has taught American literature and creative writing for several years at the School of Management of Strasbourg. She has published book chapters and articles on American writers in American and European journals, book reviews, and fiction in literary magazines. She is the author of four books of fiction.

155