Exit Interview

The syllabus for the Short Story is infinitely flexible--I like to use collections of stories, and I aim for a diversity of styles and voices, but the mix could take a vast range of different forms. Ben Marcus compares the compiling of an anthology to a mix-tape, and as your DJ for the semester, I'm curious which of these tracks have been most compelling to you, have stuck with you the most, and which are most forgettable.

Please take a few minutes, in this final class before graduation(!!), to answer a brief survey. And once again, thank you for all of your efforts this semester--I've really enjoyed the ride.

“Interpretation and Jhumpa Lahiri”

The New Yorker magazine has an uncanny record of publishing new work by authors I’m currently teaching in my classes, or articles relevant to subjects I’m teaching. A new short story by Jonathan Lethem will appear while I am halfway through his novel Girl in Landscape for my Coming-of-Age Novel course. A story based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis—by my favorite contemporary Kafkaesque writer, Haruki Murakami—will appear just as I’m wrapping up my unit on Kafka in the Twentieth-Century Novel. A review of the first Amazon Kindle, written by the novelist Nicholson Baker, will appear just after we finish discussing the summer reading for Twentieth-Century Novel, Baker’s 1988 book The Mezzanine. And there are further examples I could cite. The coincidence is nice, and it gives me an opportunity to mention some recent work by these living authors in class, but it’s also a little eerie, as if the New Yorker were keeping tabs on me, observing my syllabus from afar and orchestrating these convergences.

So I wasn’t too surprised when the December 7, 2015, issue arrived, featuring a “Personal History” story by Jhumpa Lahiri, just as the first iteration of this Short Story class was winding down last semester—and we were right in the middle of Interpreter of Maladies. The personal essay is titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” with the subheading, “For a writer, a foreign language is a new kind of adventure.” There’s a nice black-and-white photo of Lahiri, gazing with intense eyes at the camera. The first section is headed “Exile.” The essay begins:

                       My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

                        Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. 
                        But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs 
                        mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not 
                        readily encounter it.

                        I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic 
                        outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.

            I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost
fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her 
language. (30)

Right away, we recognize some familiar themes from Lahiri’s fiction—cultural exile, language and culture migrating (or failing to migrate) to a new geographical territory, movement between continents. But something seemed off. This doesn’t sound like Lahiri’s prose, the graceful, carefully crafted, detail-oriented sentences that shape her short fiction. There’s a choppiness, a slight stiffness; the sentences are short, with fragments and comma splices. And the paragraphs are short. There’s the stiff use of “one” as a personal pronoun. There’s a kind of tentativeness to the sentences, like feeling around in the dark rather than confidently asserting a state of affairs.

The essay goes on to describe Lahiri’s own efforts to teach herself Italian, using a book called, conveniently enough, Teach Yourself Italian. She becomes obsessed with the Italian language, and with it, Italian history and culture. She writes her doctoral thesis on Italian architecture and its influence on seventeenth-century English playwrights. She travels to Italy, where, despite feeling confident that she “knows” the language, she is “barely able to ask for directions on the street.” Eventually, she moves with her family from the United States to Rome, where she begins to write in Italian rather than English. The essay details her “linguistic metamorphosis” as she explores the “very different literary path” that another language offers her: “I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself.”

The prose manages communicate its ideas clearly, and the short, choppy sentences often have a poetic directness to them. But they remain short, for the most part, with simple grammatical constructions. At the very end of the essay, there’s a clear explanation for this shift in narrative voice: Translated, from the Italian, by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri, of course, composed the essay in Italian—writing about her struggles to grasp the language and its nuances, to think in the language, and to express her ideas in this foreign form in the unfamiliar language itself.

It turns out that this essay is an excerpt from Lahiri’s newest book, In Other Words, which was composed in Italian and translated into English, which builds on the themes in the essay to explore her “love affair” with the Italian language, and her struggle to find a new voice with which to express herself after growing dissatisfied with English.

A nonfiction book about an Indian American writer’s fascination with Italian language and culture might seem like an abrupt transition, for a Pulitzer Prize winner in short fiction in English. But I was struck, as I read again through the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, how constant this theme of interpretation is throughout Lahiri’s work, how fascinated she is with people’s efforts to communicate across cultures, their failures and successes in doing so.

The title story, of course, concerns a literal “interpreter of maladies.” Mr. Kapasi had always imagined himself doing “real” and consequential work with his linguistic aptitude: “He had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” (52). But instead, in addition to part-time work as a tour guide, where he “interprets” India for visitors, he works in a doctor’s office, finding clever ways to convey the metaphorical descriptions of symptoms that patients bring to the doctor: “He complained that he felt as if there were long pieces of straw stuck in his throat. When I told the doctor he was able to prescribe the proper medication” (51). The Indian American wife in the backseat of his cab is suddenly interested in him, finding his work “romantic,” and thus begins a short-lived but intense period where Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi engage in what he describes as “like a private conversation” between them (54).

It soon becomes clear, as they are alone in the car and she moves to the front seat, treating him as a kind of confessor, that she has her own “malady” she wants him to interpret. After her sudden, shocking confession that Bobby is not Mr. Das’s son, and Mr. Das and Bobby (and the father) have no idea, it’s not clear what she’s hoping to hear him say, as we discussed in class: his summation, that it sounds like “guilt,” is about as good as I’d be able to do. But we get the impression that Mrs. Das wanted something more—she doesn’t ask what she should “do,” but demands that he have “something to say” (65). She wants a “remedy,” but it sounds more like she just wants to be understood, or sympathized with. To be interpreted to herself. Her secret makes her profoundly lonely, and we observe her disconnection from her husband and children from the first paragraph. She has this almost mystical faith in the ideal of “interpretation,” only there’s no “doctor” in the equation. It’s like she wants to be understood by Kapasi, or for him to “say something” that makes her understood to herself.

There’s one moment in “Interpreter of Maladies” that seems to anticipate Lahiri’s recent adventures in Italian, where the narrator describes, through Mr. Kapasi’s perspective, the excitement he feels at the prospect of this projected cross-continental friendship with Mrs. Das: “It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right in the world, that all struggles were rewarded” (55-56). “Interpretation” here is not simply the substitution of one code for another, but a sudden dawning of understanding, an ability to see another picture of the world, “unencumbered” by “effort.”

This idea of “interpretation” as something more than simple “translation” recurs throughout the collection, in many of the cross-cultural encounters Lahiri narrates. In “Sexy,” we see Miranda develop a sudden interest in Indian culture and language because of her exciting affair with Dev. She goes to an Indian restaurant and tried to “memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu,” but “the phrases didn’t stick in her mind” (96). So she starts to frequent the foreign-language section of a local bookstore, where she “studied the Bengali alphabet” using what appears to be the same series of books Lahiri herself used, “the Teach Yourself series.” She even tries to “transcribe the Indian part of her own name, ‘Mira’” (97), but it doesn’t turn out so good. “It was scribble to her, but somewhere in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something” (97).

This ambiguity of “interpretation” persists throughout the story, as Miranda is never sure she “understands” Dev, and the reader can’t tell for sure whether this is a bona fide love affair, or is she is being played by a more experienced seducer. The story’s title refers to what she views as a key early moment in their affair, when they stand on opposite ends of the bridge, alone together in the Mapporium at the Christian Science center. Dev insists that they will be able to hear each other whisper across the span of the bridge, and he urges Miranda to say something. All she can think of is “hi,” after she hears his whispered words “so clearly that she felt them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot” (91). Ever the smooth-guy, he whispers back, “You’re sexy.” She experiences this moment as a kind of pure communication, across a symbolic cultural bridge (he’s just shown her the map of India), where “interpretation” takes the form of a physical sensation on her skin.

If this is the moment that makes Miranda believe that she’s in love, the story’s account of her falling out of love with Dev hinges on a reinterpretation of the titular phrase. When she encounters the preternaturally incisive, hyper-mature eight-year-old Rohin—a symbol of her own guilt, as he’s the one who must witness his mother crying herself to sleep every night as her husband has an affair halfway around the world—he suddenly calls her “sexy” (after she puts on the dress she bought for a date with Dev, significantly). She is, understandably, shocked (not a comfortable thing to hear from an eight-year-old!), so she asks him what the word means. He won’t reply at first (“It’s a secret,” implying that he knows some aspect of the word that she will be unfamiliar with), but she persists and, “gripp[ing] his ankles, holding his feet still,” she gets him to “interpret” Dev’s earlier line: “It means loving someone you don’t know” (107).

Now, lexicographers would dispute Rohin’s translation, but it hits home for Miranda. What she had experienced as a thrilling sensation of being “known” by Dev is now revealed to be a moment of failed communication, of not being known but only being seen, or wanted. “Miranda felt Rohin’s words under her skin, the same way she’d felt Dev’s. But instead of going hot she felt numb” (107-8).

It’s a revealing moment when she asks Dev later if he remembers what he whispered that day on the bridge, as if trying to confirm Rohin’s suggestion of a failed communication. Dev responds “playfully,” flirtatiously, and claims that he remembers: “Let’s go back to your place” (109). Well, no, Dev, those weren’t your actual words—but clearly this is what he meant by “You’re sexy.” He wasn’t seeing or knowing her in some profound way, expressing his love and their spiritual connection spanning continents; he simply wanted to go back to her place, which sums up his experience of their affair quite succinctly. Rohin’s interpretation turns out to be spot-on.

“Masculinity in the Stories of Junot Diaz”

One of the common threads in Díaz’s first story collection, Drown, is the recurring character and frequent narrator Yunior. In these stories, we see him as a young boy, aged nine and younger, in the Dominican Republic, and as an adolescent in urban New Jersey. Díaz has gone on to employ Yunior as the (partial) narrator of his 2007 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which follows him into his college years at Rutgers, and he reappears as an adult (still going by the juvenile name Yunior) in the 2012 story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Díaz has described his larger writing project as a kind of cumulative biographical novel of Yunior’s life. Yunior’s circumstances closely echo Díaz’s own, yet he insists that his character is not a transparent representation of himself—Yunior is a fictionalized rendition of the author, as Rafa is a “satanic extremity of [Díaz’s] brother.” In the same interview with Richard Wolinsky where he memorably describes Rafa as “satanic,” Díaz says of Yunior, “I had an idea for Yunior at the beginning. My entire project had certain preoccupations. I kept looking for a protagonist that would allow me to address some of these preoccupations. I wanted to talk about gender. I wanted to talk about masculinity. I wanted to talk about race. I needed a character who was fantastically honest, fantastically observant.”

The stories throughout Drown reflect these preoccupations with gender, masculinity, and race, and these preoccupations are focused in this collection on young men in the process of forming their identities. Even the stories that don’t feature Yunior center on young men—pre-teens or early teenagers, sometimes young adults—who occupy Yunior’s north Jersey urban immigrant milieu. We imagine the narrators of “Drown” or “Aurora” or “Edison, New Jersey” as guys Yunior might know, or go to school with, or live down the block from. The collection could be read as a study of coming-of-age as experienced by young Dominican immigrant men to Northamerica, and of course, sexuality and gender identity are a big part of any coming-of-age story. We encounter these characters at a formative stage in their lives, and we see them trying out their nascent masculine identities, figuring out where they fit into the culture. A recurring theme throughout concerns the pressure to be, to act like, a particular type of man: dominant, assertively heterosexual, emotionally detached, sexually virile and promiscuous, and independent of women’s influences. Yunior navigates his coming-of-age with his older brother Rafa and his often absent father as his male role models, and we see him both wanting to be a man and grappling with some serious ambivalence about what it means to be a man in his community. Even in his absence, his father serves an ambivalent role-model function, communicating a picture of “manhood” as independent and not firmly tied to family. It seems that Yunior isn’t sure he wants to be like his father, even as he understands that in many ways his father is typical and representative of what masculinity entails in his world.

We see a similar dynamic between male friends and co-workers throughout these stories, with the narrator/protagonist often as a younger, less experienced male who is “apprenticed” to an older or more experienced man (Lucero and Cut in “Aurora,” the narrator and Beto in “Drown,” the narrator and Wayne in “Edison, New Jersey”). Our protagonists are given subtle and not-so-subtle life lessons in what it means to be a man in this Dominican American community. Another common thread is the relationships between these young men and their mothers. It would sound disparaging to call them “mama’s boys,” but their mothers loom large in their consciousness, and these sometimes emotionally callous young men are remarkably sensitive and empathetic toward their mothers. We see how their views of masculine sexuality are strongly shaped by their lonely, abused, and steadfast mothers—Yunior’s view of his father is largely shaped by his bitterness about his Mami’s suffering and struggle to raise the family in his absence (reflected in “Aguantando”). Yunior’s love and admiration for Mami is unambiguous and evident throughout the book—he portrays her as strong and committed, where his father is shady and unreliable. Did you notice that Díaz dedicates the book to his mother?

Yunior and Rafa share the secret knowledge of their father’s ongoing affair with “the Puerto Rican woman,” and they both decide not to say anything to their mother, in “Fiesta, 1980.” Yunior’s resentment of his father for riding him so relentlessly about his motion sickness is compounded by his resentment of his brazen infidelity and disrespect of his wife. While Rafa seems to be modeling himself as a young Papi-in-training, going off with the girls at the fiesta, Yunior—as the object of his father’s critical scrutiny and negative attention—feels more of an allegiance toward his mother, sitting in the hall and watching her whisper back and forth with her sister. He wants his father to be publicly “exposed” as a cheater, and he even looks forward to it as a justified comeuppance (40), but he hesitates to be the one to do it (in large part because he doesn’t want to hurt his mother, but also because he’s not certain it would improve the situation to tell her). What he’s really learning in this story is that his mother likely knows something about the affair, and that she resents it but is powerless to do anything about it. When his father unabashedly takes him to the other woman’s apartment, Yunior glimpses how unremarkable and commonplace such infidelity is in this community—a “boys will be boys” approach that sends him and Rafa mixed signals. On the one hand, he’s upset at the way it hurts and upsets his mother; on the other hand, he realizes on some level that the sexual double standard will apply to him, too, and that he might even be expected to be a habitual cheater.

There are interesting examples of young men learning these implicit lessons about gender and masculinity throughout these stories, but I’ll just cite one other. The narrator in “Edison, New Jersey” has recently broken up with his girlfriend, and he laments that his mother misses her as much as he does. He has his own ethical limitations—he openly boasts about “stealing” from his boss—but his moral sense is strong when reacting to Wayne’s open boasting about his own marital infidelity. “Twice this year Wayne’s cheated on his wife and I’ve heard it all, the before and after,” he complains. The narrator communicates his disapproval, but that makes Wayne drive all crazy, so he “[tries] to forget that I think his wife is good people and ask[s] him if Charlene’s given him any signals” (124). He’s bothered by Wayne’s reports of pursuing Charlene throughout the story, no doubt chafing after his own recent breakup with “the girlfriend.” When he makes his romantic effort to “save” the Dominican maid by helping her escape from Pruitt, Wayne warns him not to. The only way the narrator can save face is to imply that he is just trying to score with the maid. Wayne asks, “Was it worth it?” and the narrator admits “it wasn’t.” “Did you at least get some?” Wayne asks. “Hell yeah,” the narrator replies. When pressed, he says, “Why would I lie about something like that?” (138). Well, why would he lie? The reader knows that whatever romantic interactions went on in the van on the way to Washington Heights were awkward and halting, endearingly innocent, in contrast to Wayne’s relentless pursuit of women. The narrator does seem to have some vague romantic intentions: he puts his hand in her lap and leaves it there as he drives, hoping she’ll grasp his hand. She doesn’t. “Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work” (137). The narrator is not a predatory alpha-male but a sweet, romantic dude who is quite passive and even childlike in his efforts to seduce the maid. His bid to “save” her is deemed foolish by Wayne, his mentor figure, and the only way he can reclaim his pride is to insist that he “scored” with her. He turns himself into a Wayne—there’s less shame in predatory pursuit of women for sex than this quasi-heroic, even chivalrous attempt to rescue her from a sketchy situation.

We see these young men at decisive stages in their lives, in terms of gender and identity. It makes sense why this macho ideal of masculinity would take hold in a marginalized and exploited immigrant community like this (with roots, of course, in the Dominican culture they’ve moved from—Papi is already cheating before he comes to the US). These men feel marginal, neglected, criminalized, and ostracized from the American Dream and mainstream white American culture. They live among poverty, vice, and often squalor, and the projection of physical strength and independence has a lot to do with pride and a strong assertion of self. Their masculinity is implictly under attack in America, and they have something to prove. Yunior, in Oscar Wao, has gotten deep into weightlifting, and Díaz has described his character’s bodybuilding as a way to give himself a kind of protective layer against his vulnerabilities and insecurities. We can see the men in all these stories as playing out some version of this same dynamic, asserting their dominance over the women in their lives when they are unable to assert it elsewhere.