French Lessons: A Memoir (17 page)

When I think back on Capretz's method, in this light, I remember some of the cartoons he would show for comic relief Bodies coming apart. Patients on the operating table.
Black humor. Humor teaches better than sincerity-violent
humor. It's violent being thrown into a new language and
having to make your way. Violent and vulnerable: in a new
language, you are unbuttoned, opened up.

In 1 99o a group of Yale undergraduates filed a complaint
with a sexual harassment grievance board against "French in
Action"-the Capretz video method-claiming its sexism
was preventing them from learning the language. They
pointed out that the camera focused far too often on
women in skimpy T-shirts; that men were the action figures
in the stories, while women were either sexy objects of contemplation or fat and frumpy objects of ridicule. In the most
contested episode of the video series, the female character Mireille is sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens reading a
book when the pick-up artist Jean-Pierre comes along and
tries to get her to talk by making comments about her skirt.
She resists by refusing to say a word. A language course
teaching women's silence?

Yale student Jacqueline Shafer, in her reaction to this and
other scenes, wrote: "At times I felt I was enrolled in a class
aimed at titillating and encouraging male students who
might otherwise not be interested in learning French, while
the women were expected to ignore and/or overcome their
own discomfort with the images before them-women, in
other words, were supposed to take care of themselves.
Like the women Jean-Pierre harasses, I was expected to step
aside."

I taught those scenes from 1978 to 198 1. I joked, with the
other French instructors trained in the Capretz method,
that we were perpetuating a sexist bourgeois world viewbut I was only joking. When the Yale students filed their
complaint in i99i, I admired their action-but I couldn't
join them wholeheartedly. I analyzed the debate, I recognized the flaws, but I didn't condemn "French in Action." I
had gotten too much from it.

"It was not what France gave you but what it did not take
away from you that was important": Gertrude Stein published that line in Paris France in i 94o, the year her adopted
country caved in to the Nazis.

I've been willing to overlook in French culture what I
wouldn't accept in my own, for the privilege of living in
translation.

Learning French and learning to think, learning to desire,
is all mixed up in my head, until I can't tell the difference.
French is what released me from the cool complacency of the R Resisters, made me want, and like wanting, unbuttoned me and sent me packing. French demands my obedience, gives me permission to try too hard, to squinch up
my face to make the words sound right. French houses
words like "existentialism" that connote abstract thinking,
difficulties to which I can get the key. And body parts which
I can claim. French got me away from my family and taught
me how to talk. Made me an adult. And the whole drama of
it is in that "r," how deep in my throat, how different it feels.

Tenses

The difference between the passe compose and the imparfait
is something every French teacher learns to teach, one of
the standard rites of the pedagogy. You learn to draw a time
line. You go up to the blackboard, and it's dramatic, and you
say, "this is the imperfect: the imperfect is for description;
it's for events that haven't finished." The time it takes to say
this is just about the time it takes to drag your chalk line,
slowly, all the way across the board. You pick up your chalk
and you explain, chalk in hand, that the imperfect is used to
describe feelings, states of being; it's used to describe background, landscape, and ongoing thoughts. All sorts of
things with no definite beginning and end. Then you pause,
take hold of your chalk piece like a weapon, and you stab
that blackboard line at one point, then at another. This is the
passe compose, this staccato: a point on the imperfect line of
experience, a discrete action in the past with a beginning
and an end that you can name.

I was walking to the parking lot [unfinished action] when
I tripped [sudden discrete action].

It was nice out that day ]description: it faisait beau], so we
went ]narrative event] to the park.

Even Grevisse's venerable Bon Usage (Good Usage-the
standard French grammar manual) refers to the imperfect as
a "process line." Life has description and life has plot. The
French divide it up in such a way that you always know what
tense to use. The air was still as glass when the tornado
touched down. Was-imparfait; touched-passe compose.

For a French professor there is no way to talk about tenses
without remembering Camus's The Stranger. It's the linchpin
in courses, joining grammar and literature, the first novel in
French that American students read. The Stranger is supposed to favor the passe compose over the imparfait: critics argue about this. The story is supposed to be, in some
philosophical sense, about the difference between the two.

The story: a white guy, a petty bureaucrat in a French company in Algiers, kills an Arab on the beach. He is tried for
murder. Testimony reveals that he went to a Fernandel
movie the day after his mother's funeral (Fernandel was a famous comic actor), and to the beach. About the murder he
claims, when pressed, that the heat of the sun made him do
it. He is the Stranger. He is condemned, his head to be cut
off in a public square in the name of the French people.

The man's life begins as he realizes he's about to die. Happiness as he watches the sun rise and fall in the slit in his cell.
He can just see the water, just see the beach. In his cell, about
to be guillotined for the murder of an Arab on a sunny day,
the Stranger writes: "I think that I slept because I woke with
stars on my face. I felt ready to relive everything." I felt: "je
me suis senti" (passe compose) and not the expected, "je me sentais" (imparfait). Feelings are usually supposed to be in the
imperfect. The whole point of the book, the point that this
nuance of tense expresses all by itself, is that nothing in the
Stranger's life lasts long enough to be written in the imperfect. He is in prison, and he is going to die. Life for the
Stranger is existentialist: here we learn the big word, even
though it's not a word that Camus himself would have used
in 1942 when he wrote The Stranger. We also learn that
"Stranger" can mean foreigner-like us, learning Frenchor it can mean, in a purely psychological sense, an alien or
outsider. In the novel the narrator is both: he is a foreigner in
Algeria, a colonial bureaucrat, and he is estranged from ordinary language. He can't muster up the conventionality to
tell his girlfriend that he loves her, or cry at his mother's
funeral.

The tools I had for understanding the story weren't sociological ones, they were the tenses and the conditionals. I
didn't know that Algeria was a colony. That the Stranger
wasn't a foreigner but a colonizer, a petit colonisateur working
in an office. I didn't understand how shocking it was that
when the Stranger's boss asked him if he wanted to go work
in the Paris office, the Stranger didn't jump for joy. This was,
for the French reader, the ultimate sign of a man lacking all
normal ambition. No ongoing desires. It is macabre that
most American students learn French from this story of
freedom achieved through the murder of an Arab. The Arab
himself is usually considered incidental. We, the readers, are
the strangers to French. The Stranger outdoes us, he is a
stranger to our conventional lives, with his desires that
come and go in a minute, his indifference to planning, to
eating, to marriage. Desire, for him, is no more than a stimulus response:

J'ai senti ses jambes autour des miennes et le l'ai desiree.

I felt her legs around mine and I desired her.

and, in prison, talking to himself in the passe compose, the
Stranger claims:

Je n'ai jamais eu de veritable imagination.

I never had any real imagination.

This we were taught to admire. That denial of imagination
was part of the aura that existential literature gave out. It was
marked by the constant awareness of death and indifference to context-beach or cell. We cut our teeth on it,
then we learned to teach the murder of an Arab. Discuss
whether the sun made him do it, or what it means that he
says so. Philosophical claims: there may be no tomorrow,
experience is fleeting, feelings are strangers to one's self.
And literary claims: sentences come and go, too, with no
connections between them. The Stranger was our inauguration to the world of description and truth, an inauguration
in which history-the history of the Meursaults of Algeria,
the history of the nameless dead Arab, the history of the author Camus, a poor boy who made it from Algiers to Paris by
virtue of his seamless sentences-was never mentioned.

In our advanced courses, much later, comes the possibility for a total shift in tone, a past for events that are so long
gone they are wrapped in the shrouds of time: "il fut un
temps" ]there was a time] is the French equivalent of "once
upon a time." This distant tense, called the passe simple or
passe historique signals a past that is beyond our reach, the past
of legend:

Louis XVI fut execute le 21 janvier 1793, place de la Revolution,
aujourd'hui place de la Concorde.

Louis XVI was executed the 21st of January, 1793, on
what was then the Place de la Revolution, today Place de
la Concorde.

TV announcers use the passe simple. Professors use it. Students use it as a joke when they want to sound pretentious.

I used to get emotional about tenses when I taught grammar. I'd invent personalities for each tense. The passe compose
was easy-that was Meursault's tense, one time only in the
past, easy come easy go. The imparfait was just thatimperfect-it captured those indefinite, unsatisfied human
conditions. The subjunctive: most of life takes place in the
subjunctive, not the indicative-one action subjecting, subjugating itself in the subordinate clause to a realm of feeling
or doubt. "I am afraid [feeling] that you don't understand
[subjunctive]" versus "I know [certainty] that you understand
[indicative]."

The subjunctive has a schoolyard reputation for extreme
formality since it's the last verb form people learn in the
grammar sequence-second year. I remember my feelings
of expertise when I could rattle off my tongue, "I1 va falloir
que je m'en aille" (I'm going to have to go now), and glide
out of a room. The subjunctive is really something else;
realm of doubt, desire, fear and trembling before language.

I think about the tenses all the time, especially that slash
in the imperfect time line, proving that a sudden event can
come and disturb the smooth thoughtlessness of everyday
living. The time line is my theory of history; my own history
fits it to a tee.

Guy, de Man, and Me

I

William Golden's father was an American businessman in
the garment district, Seventh Avenue; his fortunes rose and
fell with hemlines. Periodically he would show up in New
Haven and stay in his son's apartment for weeks at a time,
doing the dishes and hanging out at Naples Pizza. William's
mother was an ex-mannequin from Paris, rich now and living in Neuilly with a second husband and French preppie
children; she was indifferent to the son who reminded her
of a tacky first marriage. She had fled New York when William was five, leaving him with his father. The father sent
William to the Lycee Francais de New York, partly out of
nostalgia for the mother, partly for the tuition break. The
lycee, heavily subsidized by the French government, costs
much less than the average New York private school.

The split between his school language and his home language did its work on William from an early age. French
came to represent the absent mother-aesthetically imperious, demanding, rejecting; after-school English the unsupervised, blase, frequently unemployed New York Dad.

William had two distinct personae. A French moi, exceedingly fastidious, clean of diction, light of step. We used to call him, in translation, Guillaume Dore. Guy for short. Guy
was thin, exceedingly so, and his French self was neat to a
fault. "Tip top" [pronounced "teep tup"] is the English
phrase that the French use to describe such impeccable selfpresentation. Cardigans, flannel pants, the left hand posed
in the air to mark a particular stage in Cartesian dialectic.
William's other was American me, "Bill," who slouched,
knew baseball statistics from the sixties, listened to reggae,
drank from cans at the graduate student bar, ate beer nuts,
and played poker.

These personae were in limited contact with one another.
I would have been better off having the relationship with
Bill. I met Bill at the Gypsy Bar; Guillaume on the first day of
Peter Brooks's Balzac class. Bill liked me. But it was
Guillaume Dore I wanted and Guillaume Dore I got.

He had come to Yale graduate school fresh from his college thesis on existentialism. He was obsessed with Sartre
and with bad faith and-of all things for someone totally
out of contact with his other half-with authenticity. Paul
de Man's course in theory drove the existentialism out of
him pretty fast, but substituted deconstruction, which was
even less forgiving. Because there wasn't even a person
there to be inauthentic-deconstruction was about keeping person-ness away. Later I decided that Guillaume chose
de Man as his mentor because de Man, like Guillaume's absent mother, was impossible to please. De Man didn't even
believe in pedagogy! So how could Guillaume learn his
lessons?

At the literature lectures everyone on the faculty watched
de Man's face, to gauge his reaction. The question asked by
de Man was the center of gravity of any intellectual event.
During my first year in graduate school, a young don came from Oxbridge to lecture on Mallarme. De Man sat in his
usual third row seat, his head sunk into his tweed jacket like
a turtle's. After the talk, at the precise moment when de
Man's head emerged from his collar and he lifted his hand
and twinkled his eye, the don went ramrod stiff, whipped
out his pencil and held it to his paper in nervous alert. All
before de Man had uttered the first word of his question. At
the time it seemed to me the reversal of what should go on
at a lecture-shouldn't the lecturer be telling de Man something and not the other way around? It was embarrassing.