asked.
"They're all up on pedi, one of the hearts went bad on them. We're next on the list."
I looked around, back along the corridor. There were windows far away, at its end. Lots of windows. Rain washed down them
all.
2
THAT WAS TUESDAY. The day before, our tenth straight day of rain, I made it to Modern European Novel almost on time and, standing
in the doorway soaked and adrip, was surprised to find the room filled with students.
Water boiled up everywhere out of the canals and drainage system, streetcars and buses ran irregularly if at all past businesses
closed down from flooding, large animals, small cars and children were being swept away, and still these kids showed up to
talk about literature.
My childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly: Stephen Daedalus at his teaching. But these
(as I kept reminding myself) weren't kids, and comparing our childhoods didn't even make it to apples and oranges.
I remember a musician friend, a guitarist, telling me he got gigs mostly just because he made them, because he always showed
up. That was pretty much how I'd wound up teaching English Lit Who's taking Modern European Novel this semester, with Adams
off in Berlin? the chair asks at a department curriculum meeting. And someone says how about Griffin over in Romance Languages,
fee'sa novelist Does a great job with Modern French Novel. Next thing I know, I find myself on temporary trade, like a ballplayer.
How much of our life occurs simply because we don't step backwards fast enough?
So I find myself quoting, instead of Queneau or Cendrars or Gide, feeling an impostor the whole time, Conrad, Beckett or Joyce.
Surely they'll find me out.
I added my own to the line of half-furled umbrellas aslant against the back wall. Likefirearmson a stockade wall, strange
trees growing upside down out of pools of water.
"Last class, we were talking about Ellman's biography of Joyce." I pulled out my folder of notes. Water dripped along my sleeve
into the satchel's interior. Three spots fell onto the folder itself, raising small blisters.
"In another context, and of another writer, Ellman remarks: 'If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which
we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.'
"Never has there been, I think, a more determined world-creator than Joyce."
Today we were discussing the Nighttown sequence from Ulysses. In past weeks I had sketched out for them the basic structure of the novel and stood by (I hoped) as they discovered that
not only was the book fun to read, it was actually funny: No one ever told us that before, Mr. Griffin. Probably not. Ulysses was offered up to them, to us all, as some kind of intimidating monolith, like those giant gates in King Kong. You had to beat on the drums and chant the right formulas before you'd dare let the beast of Literature loose.
Hosie Straughter had told me about the book years ago. When Hosie died of cancer in '89, body withering down in a matter of
months to a dry brown twig, I couldn't think of a more appropriate tribute than to sit that whole weekend rereading Ulysses. Literature was only one of the things Hosie had given me. 1 had my own beasts. Hosie showed me how to contain them.
"The sequence is phantasmagoric, equal parts dream or nightmare and drunken carousing, Freud, E. T. A. Hoffman and vaudeville
all whipped up together in the blender. Here, more than anything else, it resembles Beckett's work. Like Beckett's, it's about
nothing—and at the same time about everything.
"All the novel's characters and relationships, all the novel's figures, one might even say the whole of civilization—"
"Prefiguring Finnegans Wake." Mrs. Mara. In the front row and a denim miniskirt today.
"Exactly. In the Nighttown sequence all these characters and relationships—real, mythic, imaginary—reappear, maybe
"They're all up on pedi, one of the hearts went bad on them. We're next on the list."
I looked around, back along the corridor. There were windows far away, at its end. Lots of windows. Rain washed down them
all.
2
THAT WAS TUESDAY. The day before, our tenth straight day of rain, I made it to Modern European Novel almost on time and, standing
in the doorway soaked and adrip, was surprised to find the room filled with students.
Water boiled up everywhere out of the canals and drainage system, streetcars and buses ran irregularly if at all past businesses
closed down from flooding, large animals, small cars and children were being swept away, and still these kids showed up to
talk about literature.
My childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly: Stephen Daedalus at his teaching. But these
(as I kept reminding myself) weren't kids, and comparing our childhoods didn't even make it to apples and oranges.
I remember a musician friend, a guitarist, telling me he got gigs mostly just because he made them, because he always showed
up. That was pretty much how I'd wound up teaching English Lit Who's taking Modern European Novel this semester, with Adams
off in Berlin? the chair asks at a department curriculum meeting. And someone says how about Griffin over in Romance Languages,
fee'sa novelist Does a great job with Modern French Novel. Next thing I know, I find myself on temporary trade, like a ballplayer.
How much of our life occurs simply because we don't step backwards fast enough?
So I find myself quoting, instead of Queneau or Cendrars or Gide, feeling an impostor the whole time, Conrad, Beckett or Joyce.
Surely they'll find me out.
I added my own to the line of half-furled umbrellas aslant against the back wall. Likefirearmson a stockade wall, strange
trees growing upside down out of pools of water.
"Last class, we were talking about Ellman's biography of Joyce." I pulled out my folder of notes. Water dripped along my sleeve
into the satchel's interior. Three spots fell onto the folder itself, raising small blisters.
"In another context, and of another writer, Ellman remarks: 'If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which
we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.'
"Never has there been, I think, a more determined world-creator than Joyce."
Today we were discussing the Nighttown sequence from Ulysses. In past weeks I had sketched out for them the basic structure of the novel and stood by (I hoped) as they discovered that
not only was the book fun to read, it was actually funny: No one ever told us that before, Mr. Griffin. Probably not. Ulysses was offered up to them, to us all, as some kind of intimidating monolith, like those giant gates in King Kong. You had to beat on the drums and chant the right formulas before you'd dare let the beast of Literature loose.
Hosie Straughter had told me about the book years ago. When Hosie died of cancer in '89, body withering down in a matter of
months to a dry brown twig, I couldn't think of a more appropriate tribute than to sit that whole weekend rereading Ulysses. Literature was only one of the things Hosie had given me. 1 had my own beasts. Hosie showed me how to contain them.
"The sequence is phantasmagoric, equal parts dream or nightmare and drunken carousing, Freud, E. T. A. Hoffman and vaudeville
all whipped up together in the blender. Here, more than anything else, it resembles Beckett's work. Like Beckett's, it's about
nothing—and at the same time about everything.
"All the novel's characters and relationships, all the novel's figures, one might even say the whole of civilization—"
"Prefiguring Finnegans Wake." Mrs. Mara. In the front row and a denim miniskirt today.
"Exactly. In the Nighttown sequence all these characters and relationships—real, mythic, imaginary—reappear, maybe
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