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Professor Ponce Reflects on Spring Break, Good Books, and Teaching
Posted on: 03/14/2006
Too Close for Comfort
I have a new favorite book: Alexander Chee’s novel Edinburgh (2001). I won’t tell you why it’s my new favorite book, and I certainly won’t recommend it to you as spring break reading. The reasons why I won’t—or can’t—do either of these things are the subject of what follows.
The permissible ways of talking about books within academic contexts are, of course, highly constrained. Just how constrained was brought home to me when I taught Edinburgh in a course this past quarter on gay and lesbian literature, where we read stories, novels, poems, and essays by Asian American and African American writers from the 1920s to the present (Chee, like the protagonist Fee, is half-Korean and half-Scottish). I knew when I was choosing texts for this course that I would be taking a certain risk by including Edinburgh on the syllabus. When it came time to teach the novel, I prepared myself to broach themes of child molestation, adolescent gay sexuality, interracial desire, intergenerational sex, self-reproach, suicidal guilt, and AIDS. Of course, I could not have predicted back in October what effects these issues might have on my students. (As it turned out, there were no meltdowns in my class.) What I didn’t anticipate, however, was how the novel would affect me.
Why I found myself completely immersed in Chee’s fictional world, nearly to the point of obsession, is hardly something I would divulge in this forum, even if I had the words (the languages of praise and emotion are, it seems to me, surprisingly impoverished). Nor would it be something which you’d likely have the forbearance to read about. My point, rather, has to do with the question of critical distance and the nature of academic discussion. How does one talk about, much less teach, a novel to which one is so enthralled? Does analysis, the merciless dissection of a text, “kill” the work of art, or neutralize its power to overwhelm? What discourses does one turn to in hopes of conveying a novel’s affective impact? To be sure, we as a class discussed Chee’s wide range of cultural, historical, mythical, musical, artistic, and philosophical references; his use of shifting narrative points of view; his improvisations on the metaphors of fire and burning; and his opera-inspired use of melodramatic plot lines. But these literary elements, coupled with the dominant themes referred to above, could scarcely add up to something akin to aesthetic rapture.
To admit that the study of literature in higher education has nearly nothing to do with feeling the intensity of literary effect is to recognize that our academic discourses are rendered at the level of the intellect. We talk about issues, themes, narrative strategies, and cultural politics. We aim for conceptual understanding. Perhaps if we do not equate feeling with sentimentality and cynicism with sophistication, we hope that we and other “critical” readers will experience an emotional response, even if we simultaneously hope that those who do do not speak too ardently about it. What we do not talk about is the silent stream of tears at four o’clock in the morning, the impulse to dry-heave into a toilet, the desire to rip out a page of the book and eat it, or the fantasy of holding a candle-light vigil that culminates with the torching of the novel on a stone altar.
Since I can’t explain to you, in any of the acceptable ways I can think of that count as explanation, why it’s my new favorite book, I will close by quoting from the novel itself. Thirteen-year-old Fee and his tow-headed, best friend Peter have just finished performing in a boys’ choir concert at a cathedral in Maine. Both were selected by the choir director to sing solos—Peter a descant, Fee the acapella introduction to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s setting of Ariel’s song from The Tempest. After the description of their respective solos, there is an extra space on the page and then the next paragraphs go like this:
Afterward, as we stand around, receiving our parents and friends, I want to walk away from here with Peter. I want the doors to St. Andrew’s to fly open at heaven’s bidding and on a plank of sunshine to walk right up to heaven with Peter, where, looking at God’s face, we explode into flame, as all mortals do, looking on His countenance.
Instead, we return to the dressing room where we change in the smell of sweat socks and old dust, hang our robes, coil the ropes around the neck of the hanger. We climb into our clothes. We look at each other.
He knows.
Why is this my new favorite book? Because of the word “Instead.”
Professor Joe (aka Martin) Ponce is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State University.
