The Human Stain

polyphonic.” Amused by the undergraduates. Where's their intellectual side? Completely shocked by their having fun. Their chaotic, nonideological way of thinking — of living! They've never even seen a Kurosawa film — they don't know that much. By the time she was their age, she'd seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the Rene Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars. In earnest at Yale she resumes her intellectual mission, taking classes with the most hip professors. A bit lost, however. Confused. Especially by the other graduate students. She is used to being with people who speak the same intellectual language, and these Americans ... And not everybody finds her that interesting. Expected to come to America and have everyone say, “Oh, my God, she's a normalienne.” But in America no one appreciates the very special path she was on in France and its enormous prestige. She's not getting the type of recognition she was trained to get as a budding member of the French intellectual elite. She's not even getting the kind of resentment she was trained to get. Finds an adviser and writes her dissertation. Defends it. Is awarded the degree. Gets it extraordinarily rapidly because she had already worked so hard in France. So much schooling and hard work, ready now for the big job at the big school — Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago — and when she gets nothing, she is crushed. A visiting position at Athena College? Where and what is Athena College? She turns up her nose. Until her adviser says, “Delphine, in this market, you get your big job from another job. Visiting assistant professor at Athena College? You may not have heard of it, but we have. Perfectly decent institution. Perfectly decent job for a first job.” Her fellow foreign graduate students tell her that she's too good for Athena College, it would be too declasse, but her fellow American graduate students, who would kill for a job teaching in the Stop & Shop boiler room, think that her uppityness is characteristically Delphine. Begrudgingly, she applies — and winds up in her minikilt and boots across the desk from Dean Silk. To get the second job, the fancy job, she first needs this Athena job, but for nearly an hour Dean Silk listens to her all but talk her way out of the Athena job. Narrative structure and temporality. The internal contradictions of the work of art. Rousseau hides himself and then his rhetoric gives him away. (A little like her, thinks the dean, in that autobiographical essay.) The critic's voice is as legitimate as the voice of Herodotus. Narratology. The diegetic. The difference between diegesis and mimesis. The bracketed experience. The proleptic quality of the text. Coleman doesn't have to ask what all this means. He knows, in the original Greek meaning, what all the Yale words mean and what all the Ecole Normale Superieure words mean. Does she? As he's been at it for over three decades, he hasn't time for any of this stuff. He thinks: Why does someone so beautiful want to hide from the human dimension of her experience behind these words? Perhaps just because she is so beautiful. He thinks: So carefully self-appraising and so utterly deluded.

Of course she had the credentials. But to Coleman she embodied the sort of prestigious academic crap that the Athena students needed like a hole in the head but whose appeal to the faculty second-raters would prove irresistible.

At the time he thought that he was being open-minded by hiring her. But more likely it was because she was so goddamn enticing. So lovely. So alluring. And all the more so for looking so daughterly.

Delphine Roux had misread his gaze by thinking, a bit melodramatically — one of the impediments to her adroitness, this impulse not merely to leap to the melodramatic conclusion but to succumb erotically to the melodramatic spell — that what he wanted was to tie her hands behind her back: what he wanted, for every possible reason, was not to have her around. And so he'd hired her. And thus they seriously began not to get on.

And now it was she calling him to her office to be the interviewee. By 1995, the year that Coleman had stepped down from the deanship to return to teaching, the lure of petitely pretty Delphine's all-encompassing chic, with its gaminish intimations of a subterranean sensuality, along with the blandishments of her Ecole Normale sophistication (what Coleman described as “her permanent act of self-inflation”), had appeared to him to have won over just about every wooable fool professor and, not yet out of her twenties — but with an eye perhaps on the deanship that had once been Coleman's — she succeeded to the chair of the smallish department that some dozen years earlier had absorbed, along with the other language departments, the old Classics Department in which Coleman had begun as an instructor. In the new Department of Languages and Literature there was a staff of eleven, one professor in Russian, one in Italian, one in Spanish, one in German, there was Delphine in French and Coleman Silk in classics, and there were five overworked adjuncts, fledgling instructors as well as a few local foreigners, teaching the elementary courses.

“Miss Mitnick's misreading of those two plays,” he was telling her, “is so grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns that it does not lend itself to correction.”

“Then you don't deny what she says — that you didn't try to help her.”

“A student who tells me that I speak to her in ‘engendered language’ is beyond being assisted by me.”

“Then,” Delphine said lightly, “there's the problem, isn't it?”

He laughed — both spontaneously and for a purpose. “Yes? The English I speak is insufficiently nuanced for a mind as refined as Miss Mitnick's?”

“Coleman, you've been out of the classroom for a very long time.”

“And you haven't been out of it ever. My dear,” he said, deliberately, and with a deliberately irritating smile, “I've been reading and thinking about these plays all my life.”

“But never from Elena's feminist perspective.”

“Never even from Moses's Jewish perspective. Never even from the fashionable Nietzschean perspective about perspective.”

“Coleman Silk, alone on the planet, has no perspective other than the purely disinterested literary perspective.”

“Almost without exception, my dear”—again? why not?—“our students are abysmally ignorant. They've been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of dealing with such students — and Miss Mitnick is merely typical — I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naive of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it's even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless ‘likes.’ I have trouble believing that an educated woman coming from a French academic background like your own believes there is a feminist perspective on Euripides that isn't simply foolishness. Have you really been edified in so short a time, or is this just old-fashioned careerism grounded right now in the fear of one's feminist colleagues? Because if it is just careerism, it's fine with me. It's human and I understand. But if it's an intellectual commitment to this idiocy, then I am mystified, because you are not an idiot. Because you know better. Because in France surely nobody from the Ecole Normale would dream of taking this stuff seriously. Or would they? To read two plays like Hippolytus and Alcestis, then to listen to a week of classroom discussion on each, then to have nothing to say about either of them other than that they are ‘degrading to women,’ isn't a ‘perspective,’ for Christ's sake — it's mouthwash. It's just the latest mouthwash.”

“Elena's a student. She's twenty years old. She's learning.”

“Sentimentalizing one's students ill becomes you, my dear. Take them seriously. Elena's not learning. She's parroting. Why she ran directly to you is because it's more than likely you she's parroting.”

“That is not true, though if it pleases you to culturally frame me like that, that is okay too, and entirely predictable. If you feel safely superior putting me in that silly frame, so be it, my dear,” she delighted now in saying with a smile of her own. “Your treatment of Elena was offensive to her. That was why she ran to me. You frightened her. She was upset.”

“Well, I develop irritating personal mannerisms when I am confronting the consequences of my ever having hired someone like you.”

“And,” she replied, “some of our students develop irritating personal mannerisms when they are confronting fossilized pedagogy. If you persist in teaching literature in the tedious way you are used to, if you insist on the so- called humanist approach to Greek tragedy you've been taking since the 1950s, conflicts like this are going to arise