And now, class, will you please hand in your papers, and before turning to Dr. Spielvogel’s useful fiction, let us see what you have made of the legends here contrived:
English 312
M &F 1:00-2:30
(assignations by appointment)
Professor Tarnopol
THE USES OF THE USEFUL FICTIONS:
Or, Professor Tarnopol Withdraws
Somewhat from His Feelings
by Karen Oakes
Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings…
– Sartre, What Is Literature?
On ne feut jamais se connaitre, mais settlement se raconter.
– Simone de Beauvoir
“Salad Days,” the shorter of the two Zuckerman stories assigned for today, attempts by means of comic irony to contrast the glories and triumphs of Nathan Zuckerman’s golden youth with the “misfortune” of his twenties, to which the author suddenly alludes in the closing lines. The author (Professor Tarnopol) does not elucidate in the story the details of that misfortune; indeed, the point he makes is that, by him at least, it cannot be done. “Unfortunately, the author of this story, having himself experienced a similar misfortune at about the same age, does not have it in him, even yet, midway through his thirties, to tell it briefly or to find it funny. ‘Unfortunate,’” concludes the fabricated Zuckerman, speaking in behalf of the dissembling Tarnopol, “because he wonders if that isn’t more the measure of the man than of the misfortune.”
In order to dilute the self-pity that (as I understand it) had poisoned his imagination in numerous previous attempts to fictionalize his unhappy marriage, Professor Tarnopol establishes at the outset here a tone of covert (and, to some small degree, self-congratulatory) self-mockery; this calculated attitude of comic detachment he maintains right on down to the last paragraph, where abruptly the shield of lightheartedness is all at once pierced by the author’s pronouncement that in his estimation the true story really isn’t funny at all. All of which would appear to suggest that if Professor Tarnopol has managed in “Salad Days” to make an artful narrative of his misery, he has done so largely by refusing directly to confront it.
In contrast to “Salad Days,” “Courting Disaster” is marked throughout by a tone of sobriety and an air of deep concern; here is all the heartfeltness that has been suppressed in “Salad Days.” A heroic quality adheres to the suffering of the major characters, and their lives are depicted as far too grave for comedy or satire. The author reports that he began this story intending that his hero should be tricked into marrying exactly as he himself had been. Why that bedeviling incident from Professor Tarnopol’s personal history could not be absorbed into this fictional artifice is not difficult to understand: the Nathan Zuckerman imagined in “Courting Disaster” requires no shotgun held to his head for him to find in the needs and sorrows of Lydia Ketterer the altar upon which to offer up the sacrifice of his manhood. It is not compromising circumstances, but (in both senses) the gravity of his character, that determines his moral career; all the culpability is his.
In “Courting Disaster,” then, Professor Tarnopol conceives of himself and Mrs. Tarnopol as characters in a struggle that, in its moral pathos, veers toward tragedy, rather than Gothic melodrama, or soap opera, or farce, which are the modes that generally obtain when Professor Tarnopol narrates the story of his marriage to me in bed. Likewise, Professor Tarnopol invents cruel misfortunes (i.e., Lydia’s incestuous father, her sadistic husband, her mean little aunts, the illiterate Moonie) to validate and deepen Lydia’s despair and to exacerbate Nathan’s morbid sense of responsibility-this plenitude of heartache, supplying, as it were, “the objective correlative” for the emotions of shame, grief, and guilt that inform the narration.
And that informed Professor Tarnopol’s marriage.
To put the matter altogether directly: if Mrs. Tarnopol had been such a Lydia, if Professor Tarnopol had been such a Nathan, and if I, Karen Oakes, had been a Moonie of a stepdaughter instead of just the star pupil of my sex in English 312 that semester, then, then his subsequent undoing would have made a certain poetic sense.
But as it is, he is who he is, she is who she is, and I am simply myself, the girl who would not go with him to Italy. And there is no more poetry, or tragedy, or for that matter, comedy to it than that.
Miss Oakes: As usual, A+. Prose overly magisterial in spots, but you understand the stories (and the author) remarkably well for one of your age and background. It is always something to come upon a beautiful young girl from a nice family with a theoretical turn of mind and a weakness for the grand style and the weighty epigraph. I remember you as an entirely beguiling person. On my deathbed I shall hear you calling from your room, “Will you hang up the downstairs phone, please, Mom?” That plain-spoken line spoke volumes to me too. Ka-reen, you were right not to run off to Italy with me. It wouldn’t have been Moonie and Zuckerman, but it probably wouldn’t have been any good. Still, you should know that whatever the “neurotic” reason, I was gone on you- let no man, lay or professional, say I wasn’t, or ascribe my “hangup” over you simply to my having transgressed the unwritten law against copulating with those sort-of forbidden daughters known as one’s students (though I admit: asking Miss Oakes, from behind my desk, to clarify further for the other students some clever answer she’d just given in class, only twenty minutes after having fallen to my knees in your room to play the supplicant beneath your belly, was a delicious sensation; cunnilingus aside, I don’t think teaching has ever been so exciting, before or since, or that I’ve ever felt so tender or devoted to any class as I did to our English 312. Perhaps the authorities should reconsider, from a strictly pedagogical point of view, the existing taboo, being mindful of the benefits that may accrue to the class whose teacher has taken one of its members as his secret love; I’ll write the AAUP about this, in good scholarly fashion of course outlining for them the tradition, from Socrates to Abelard to me-nor will I fail to mention the thanks we three received from the authorities for having thrown ourselves so conscientiously into our work. To think, I recounted to you on our very first “date” what they did to Abelard-yet, here I am still stunned at how I got mutilated by the state of New York). Ah, Miss Oakes, if only I hadn’t been so overbearing! Memories of my behavior make me cringe. I told you about Isaac Babel and about my wife with the same veins popping. My insistence, my doggedness, and my tears. How it must have alarmed you to hear me sobbing over the phone-your esteemed professor! If only I had taken it a little easier and suggested a couple of weeks together in northern Wisconsin, some lake somewhere, rather than forever in tragic Europe, who knows, you might have been willing to start off that way. You were brave enough-it’s just that I didn’t have the wherewithal for a little at a time. At any rate, I have had enough Vivid Experience to last awhile, and am off in the bucolic woods writing my memoirs. Whether this will put the Vivid Experience to rest I don’t know. Perhaps what I’ll think when I’m done is that these pages add up to Maureen’s final victory over Tarnopol the novelist, the culmination of my life as her man and no more. To be writing “in all candor” doesn’t suggest that I’ve withdrawn that much from my feelings. But then why the hell should I? So maybe my animus is not wholly transformed-so maybe I am turning art into a chamberpot for hatred, as Flaubert says I shouldn’t, into so much camouflage for self-vindication-so, if the other thing is what literature is, then this ain’t. Ka-reen, I know I taught the class otherwise, but so what? I’ll try a character like Henry Miller, or someone out-and-out bilious like Celine for my hero instead of Gustave Flaubert- and won’t be such an Olympian writer as it was my ambition to be back in the days when nothing called personal experience stood between me and aesthetic detachment. Maybe it’s time to revise my ideas about being an “artist,” or “artiste” as my adversary’s lawyer preferred to pronounce it. Maybe it was always time. Only one drawback: in that I am not a renegade bohemian or cutup of any kind (only a municipal judge could have taken me for that), I may not be well suited for the notoriety that attends the publication of an unabashed and unexpurgated history of one’s erotic endeavors. As the history itself will testify, I happen to be no more immune to shame or built for public exposure than the next burgher with shades on his bedroom windows and a latch on the bathroom door-indeed, maybe what the whole history signifies is that I am sensitive to nothing in all the world as I am to my moral reputation. Not that I like being fleeced of my hard-earned dough either. Maybe I ought just to call this confession “The Case Against Leeches, by One Who Was Bled,” and publish it as a political tract-go on Johnny Carson and angrily shake an empty billfold at America, the least I can do for all those husbands who’ve been robbed deaf, dumb, and blind by chorines and maureens in the courts of law. Inveigh with an upraised fist against “the system,” instead of against my own stupidity for falling into the first (the first!) trap life laid for me. Or ought I to deposit these pages too into my abounding liquor carton, and if I must embroil myself in the battle yet again, go at it like an artist worthy of the name, without myself as the “I,” without the bawling and the spleen, and whatever else unattractive that shows? What do you think, shall I give this up and go back to Zuckermanizing myself and Lydiafying Maureen and Moonieing over you? If I do take the low road of candor (and anger and so forth) and publish what I’ve got, will you (or your family) sue for invasion of privacy and defamation of character? And if not you, won’t Susan or her family? Or will she go one better and, thoroughly humiliated, do herself in? And how will I take it when my photograph appears on the Time magazine book page, captioned “Tarnopoclass="underline" stripped to his panties and bra.” I can hear myself screaming already. And what about the letter in the Sunday Times book review section, signed by members of Maureen’s Group, challenging my malicious characterization of Maureen as a pathological liar, calling me the liar and my hook, the fraud. How will I like it when the counterattack is launched by the opposition-will it strike me then that I have exorcised the past, or rather that now I have wed myself to it as irrevocably as ever I was wed to Maureen? How will I like reading reviews of my private life in the Toledo Blade and the Sacramento Bee? And what will Commentary make of this confession? I can’t imagine it’s good for the Jews. What about when the professional marital experts and authorities on love settle in for a marathon discussion of my personality problems on the “David Susskind Show”? Or is that just what I need to straighten me out? Maybe the best treatment possible for my excessive vulnerability and preoccupation generally with My Good Name (which is largely how I got myself into this fix to begin with) is to go forth brazenly crying, “Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.” Sure, quote Iago to them-tell them, “Oh, find me self-addicted and self-deluded, find me self and nothing more!