French Lessons: A Memoir (21 page)

"He didn't talk to one": Guy's memory of his attempts to
talk to de Man, his thesis adviser, include two third-person
and no first-person pronouns. Guy had the guts to walk out
of his own class, years after the student with the Cross penand-pencil set walked out of our "Introduction to Literary
Theory." My story isn't really that different from theirs, except that I waited longer to understand what the three of us
had in common. De Man had failed me, too, only it was a failure that I wasn't aware of. I didn't go to talk to him, because I had no idea that he had given a minute's thought
to the problem that interested me most-the problem of
the fascist intellectual. He seemed the least interested of
anyone on the faculty in that topic. Think of the questions
I could have asked him, had I known to ask: Why did he
think intellectuals had been attracted to fascism? Had he
been attracted, or had he been doing hack work? What was
it like to write for a newspaper controlled by the Nazis?
What did he know about the camps? What role did personality play in people's attitude toward fascism? How did listening to the radio and going to the movies alter their
perception of the world? What was it like living through the
purge of the fifties? How did his guilt affect him?

I didn't talk to de Man, because none of my questions
about fascism were on the horizon in New Haven in 1975none were considered fit for literary theory as de Man defined it. What a waste! Taking apart meaning, looking at
words, shunning the illusion of the fully present communicative voice-these aspects of deconstructionist theory as
we absorbed it may have been part of de Man's intellectual
struggle against the manipulative tendencies of fascist propaganda. May have: I'll never know, because de Man covered
his work with the clean veil of disinterestedness. Now I'm
helping my own Ph.D. students write their dissertations,
and I don't want to fail them the way that de Man failed me.
How do I tell them who I am, why I read the way I do?

What do students need to know about their teachers?

The Trouble with Edna

I have a student named Edna, who is doing an independent study with me on Jean-Marie Le Pen. She reminds me
of myself when I was studying French poetry with Ann
Smock, wanting her to see me as a serious person "working
on literature."

Edna is just back from a year of study abroad where she
took the majority of her classes at "Sciences Po"-the
French institute for the study of political science. She is imbued with the style and the tone of a French Sciences Po student. She went even farther than I did to make herself over;
her French is indistinguishable from that of a student at Sciences Po. She is every French professor's dream! She acquired all the micro-traits of intellectual francophilia: in her
notebook, she underlines her main points, marked with
Roman numerals "I.", "II.", "III.", in contrasting coloredpencil colors, and for every big point, she's got a little point
"a.", a little point "b.", sub-points "i.", "ii.", "iii." This, I imagine, she got from sitting in French university amphitheaters
where the professors actually say "aspect number three,
second part, small a" as they're talking, to assist the students
taking notes. Edna instructs me in our second work session that she wants to write her honors paper via the "Sciences
Po" method. She's very attached to her pencils and to her
pen, which she refers to as "mon bic."

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the object of her study, is a ruddy,
wisecracking French politico and assemblyman, the leader
and mastermind of an extreme right-wing party called the
National Front. He's recycled some old slogans of the racist
right, like "France for the French," and makes statements
about wanting to kick all the Arab immigrants out of France
and deport people with AIDS on trains. He provokes people
to compare him to Hitler: AIDS in French is SIDA and Le Pen
talks about AIDS patients as being "Sidaique," which rhymes
with "Judaique"-Jewish. So the left press calls him a Nazi,
and he tells them they're a bunch of over-interpreting intellectual losers with morbid one-track minds. The troubling
part is that Le Pen has had a lot of support, both from disillusioned working-class communists and from high bourgeois
types who are angry at the socialists, the immigrants, and the
Jews. They like to watch Le Pen make a fuss.

The Edna with whom I speak about Le Pen in my office, in
French, is entirely different from the whiny Edna who
called me at home in English to ask in English to do the independent study in the first place. Her French is heavily intonated, clear as a bell, full of subjunctives. She addresses
me as Madame. I suggest to her in our second meeting together that being an American may actually constitute an advantage for the study of Le Pen-that while she may prefer
to write her essay in Sciences Po style, she should take advantage of her cultural remove from the material at hand,
her American perspective. It was hard to even think of her
as an American, the way she talked, but I said it anyway, to
challenge her. She looked surprised, and I began to see, un derneath the severe haircut, the military posture, the poised
"bic," an eighteen-year-old kid grappling passionately with a
newly formed intellectual identity.

I'm growing very fond of Edna-I'm starting to be able to
tease her, she's starting to loosen up a bit, and we're starting
to get some work done. She's going to do a "lexical study" of
Le Pen, looking at the language in his speeches and how that
language is received by the press, studying how the communist daily, L'Humanite, and the right-wing bourgeois daily, Le
Figaro, and the socialist daily newspaper of record, Le Monde,
quote him. In the guise of methodological assistance, I've
had her reading Barthes' essays on cultural mythologies
along with a book about Philippe Petain's radio speeches
and an article about Joan of Arc as a symbol of the right. She
gobbles up this material and transposes her knowledge
onto French graph paper (lines vertical and horizontal),
main points double underlined, subordinate points single
underlined with "le bic."

Edna is helping me think about the estrangement of
working in French in American university French departments. What codes and tics and class prejudices we pass on
to our students when we encourage them to speak "perfect
French," whatever that is.

I read an interview in a big French daily paper with an
American theater director working in Paris. This was a man
who had lived in France for years and had worked his way
through the system to the point of being made a director at
the national theater, the Comedie Francaise. He directed,
among other pieces of the patrimony, an ensemble of Moliere farces. He stated in his interview that there was a moment in his life in France where he would rather have died
than commit a grammar, a pronunciation, or an intonation mistake. During this period, he claimed, he had whipped
his language into shapes and sounds that made it completely indistinguishable from native French. Finally "one
day," as it were, he had some kind of cultural revelation and
reassumed his accented French-the happy sign of his difference, which had always been his pleasure and his right.

American professors fought for a couple of generations
to get out of the pigheadedness (pigheadedness picked up
from the British) and laziness inherent in the idea that you
could teach foreign literatures in English.

We would teach French language and French literature directly in French: everyone, from the first-semester student
to the lecturer on Racine and Moliere, was to function effortlessly in what language teaching specialists call, revealingly, the "target" language.

What is so bad about that? After all, isn't speaking French
in the halls of an American university the reward, part of the
aura and romance of going into French in the first place?

You can't work in a French department for long without
wondering whether our attachment to French isn't pathological. Both the native speakers and the Americans suffer
under a system where language skills are made a fetish. The
"natives," who often arrive in this country as exiles under
dramatic situations, have to come to terms with an isolation
from their own culture, and learn to make a place for themselves in the American university, and in American intellectual life. What if their most passionate intellectual interests
are untranslatable here? What if the debates in the English
department next door make no room for them? The temptation is to cling to Paris, to take a colonizing attitude toward
their role as purveyors of French culture. The system is
complicated by issues of gender and sex roles. When I was a college student, I used to look around in my classes and
wonder why the majority of the students in Frenchgraduate and undergraduate-were female, yet most of the
professors were male. Where were the missing bodies?
Twenty years ago, it was commonplace for American men to
marry French women they met on their year abroad. The
women became their husbands' best editors and picked
up extra money teaching language; the men became the
literature professors. French departments divided up into
"literature" sections-husbands-and less prestigious "language" sections-wives. While women now occupy more
literature positions, the split between language and literature teaching, the disdain of the literati for the language instructors who make their own teaching possible-is still
palpable in many French departments.

What about the ambiance of the French department?
There are jokes in our field about male French professors
who have worked in American French departments for ten
years-brought here because of their scholarly prestigeand who still can't order a hamburger in English. They flourish in their workplace, the French department, where
"French only" is a badge of honor. There is invariably trouble when a tyrannical or insensitive native speaker rules
over a department where all the assistant professors are
Americans, forever on guard against the telling mistake that
might cost them a promotion. S, an American in her first job
at an elite college, was asked by her native French chairman
to take the minutes for the department meeting, held in
French, and she worked on those minutes-which he
called a prods verbal (the expression used for the transcript of
a trial!)-for sixteen hours. One of the most important
critics of modem French literature in the world likes to tell how he was denied tenure at another elite college because
of his French "r," which smelled of New Jersey.

How can I explain to someone who doesn't function in
this world the terror of the gender mistake: how I learned at
the luncheon for my first campus visit job interview that
pizza (why didn't I notice that characteristically feminine
a-ending?) was feminine. Whether to call colleagues "vous"
or "tu"? If you call them "vous" you are stuffy and formal; call
them "tu" at the wrong moment you might be dressed
down like an undergraduate. To be in French, you fold your
stiff white shirt cuffs over your tight sweater cuffs; you cross
your 7's, you can even say "hamburger" and "hot dog" and
"Coca Cola" with a French accent.

French colleagues are invariably more generous in assessing the language skills of their American colleagues than we
Americans are when we talk about each other ("Really, you
know, her French isn't very good"). American French professors, they say, are much too self-conscious about petty
details of linguistic performance, which have nothing to do
with real intellectual life.

Easy for them to say: those details are our second identity.

When we started discussing the problem of what language to teach in at a French Civilization conference held in
England, everyone got on edge, the whole tenor of the discussion changed: people started shouting, you felt the urgency and the desperation of their positions. I talked about
Edna-my horror at feeling as though we American teachers of French only want to produce our own French fantasy,
a kind of Stepford Wife, dressed as a Polytechnicienne. Is
this horror just my stem Midwestern reaction? Do people
in other fields have a stereotype to which they need to con form? (Or as Laurence Wylie put it at the conference, "Do
you need an Oxford accent to study British history?") Is this a
problem about how people learn, or is it about the furtive
way that academics seek their social status? Other French
professors attending the conference responded to these
questions, sensibly, by invoking the "utility" argument: we
don't have to make a fetish of French but we do have to
teach people to function in the language; there is a basic
level of functionality or utility toward which we can work.
Adrian Rifkin, a British art historian and my kindred spirit in
the group, responded passionately that there is no neutral
"utility." Business French? The esthete's French, the kind
they teach at the Ecole Normale? Technocrat's French (Polytechnique and Sciences Po)? Street French, the abject argot
of a Celine? The zillions of ethnic Frenches-Canadian, Cajun ones, the French spoken in the northern suburbs of
Paris by the beur, the North African immigrants. When a class
of Duke students tells me that the Quebecois have "bad accents" I know we've gone wrong with our utility argument.
When they say that they want to speak "just like a real
French person," I ask them: "Which one?"

This is a subject that touches American nerves because it
touches our deep fear of not really speaking French that
well, no matter how well we speak. While I was writing a
book in French on Celine, the reference librarian in a major
research library patiently explained to me, "here in France,
our card catalogue lists books in alphabetical order." Do we
end up picking up their disdain for us and making it ours?

There is that fear and humiliation, but also the pride at
struggling against American ethnocentrism and enabling
our students to speak and write in a language that's not their
own.