Some Thoughts about Jhumpa Lahiri and One Book, One Community

I was fortunate to attend the discussion and question/answer session with Jhumpa Lahiri this week. For those of you who may not be informed, Jhumpa Lahiri, the best-selling author of collections of short stories such as Unaccustomed Earth and The Interpreter of Maladies and the author of the acclaimed novel The Namesake, was invited to come to WestConn as part of the One Book/One Community Project. As I understand it, the Danbury Library and several other community organizations, including WestConn, created this project with the goal of producing a common reading for the Danbury community. The idea was that everyone in Danbury (or at least everyone interested in this project) would be able to access a copy of The Namesake and read it. As part of this project, WestConn made The Namesake a common read for our university and made efforts to require incoming first year students to read it.

I think these are all wonderful developments. The idea of a common read for an entire community is both ambitious and interesting.

Nevertheless, I have some reservations about how well this project was executed, particularly when it comes the Lahiri discussion, one of the purported high points of this project.

First, it seems that not many freshmen actually read the book, and that many of them only had a vague realization of this requirement. They received a letter or email about it, apparently, but very little follow-up. Of course, it may well be unfair to blame this on an administrative failure, since it may just be that our freshmen are not paying attention. But there is additional evidence of the failure of the university in this regard. For example, there appears to have been only small attempts to integrate this requirement into the curriculum. It does not appear to have been discussed in first-year seminars, for example, or in many relevant classes. This may be the reason why first year students appear not to have been the main audience at Lahiri's talk in Ives Concert Hall on Wednesday. Instead, the audience appears to have consisted of South Asian-American students, WestConn faculty, and members of the community--arguably, the people whom this project least needed to reach.

The other comment that I have concerns the talk itself, which seems to not have served the purpose for which it was designed. It appears, from the conclusory words of President Schmotter among others, that one of the purposes of choosing The Namesake as the common read was to highlight questions of immigration and cultural identity. The problem with that choice is that both The Namesake and Lahiri herself tend ultimately to eschew such questions. In The Namesake, Gogol ultimately realizes that both his search for "Indian" or "American" identity are futile; that searching for such identities by dating ideal-typical white girls to fit in as an American or an ideal-typical Bengali woman to fit in as an Indian are beside the point of a universal struggle for identity.

My point is that it seems like an interesting paradox that a book written in part to reject the blind celebration of otherness or of a universal "immigrant experience" was chosen as an archetype from which to celebrate such an experience.

That being said, I was disappointed in both Lahiri and the way that the discussion went. Lahiri, by her own admission, is not a distinguished orator, though she may make up for that with her apparent thoughtfulness. Still, the disconnect between the writer and the audience was sort of disconcerting and seemed to be underscored by Lahiri's disturbing elitism. The discussion between Lahiri and WestConn's own Professor John Briggs tended far too much toward the quoting of literary luminaries and discussions of "the craft." Lahiri and Briggs did more than simply push the audience into different directions--they brazenly ignored their concerns. Many audience members came up to the microphone during the question and answer session. They poured their hearts out about how The Namesake had helped them work through their own identity conflicts and asked for Ms. Lahiri's help in the questions that were pressing to them.

In response, Lahiri and Briggs made it clear that their purpose was not to provide "pop psychology" and made jokes about charging "hourly rates" (to uncomfortable laughter in the audience) and engaged in discussions about the preoccupations of writing, the drawing of compelling characters and the creation of riveting dialogue, questions that transcended identity politics. I suppose it is well and good to talk about universal themes (in Lahiri's words, how to narrate the repeating story of being born, loving, losing, and dying), but in this case the tack of Lahiri and Briggs seemed openly disrespectful to the passions and concerns of their own audience.

Lahiri can write about whatever she wants, and can interpret her work as she wishes. But as a person, rather than as a writer, it seems mean-spirited to dismiss out of hand the claims of people that you have inspired. And it does suggest to me that the One Book/One Community project, while certainly worthwhile, may not have lived up to all its aims.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Words?

In the past month, the Echo, WestConn's student newspaper, has run two very thorough and interesting pieces about WestConn's decision to terminate Rosalie Appel, a tenured professor of Art. (Jake Kara, "Professor Fired After Forty Years," The Echo (April 8, 2008))The Echo's article said that the termination, which was the culmination of a lengthy and failed process of remediation, might have been the result of two possible types of incidents. According to documents obtained by the Echo, the University claims that Professor Appel was fired because of her "verbal abuse" of employees on campus and her "unprofessional" lack of social skills which have led to "interpersonal conflicts." Professor Appel, according to the Echo, claims to have been fired for testifying against her department in a lawsuit filed by an applicant for a faculty position.

I do not know Professor Appel, nor do I know the circumstances around her termination, so it would be inappropriate for me to discuss them here. But this case does bring up an interesting hypothetical question: If tenure is supposed to protect the rights of faculty members to hold controversial opinions, should a faculty member be terminated for the manner in which those opinions are expressed, in the absence of any other dangerous or violent actions?

My answer is a qualified no.

The qualifications are hate speech and sexual harassment. No professor, or for that matter any student or administrator, should be afforded any protections to allow them to display nooses, burn crosses, or engage in any behavior that has the profound connotation of violence toward a minority group (whether based on race, gender, or sexual orientation), because this kind of speech, like Justice Holmes's famous "shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic," has such a narrowly tailored relationship to actual violence. A stand has to be made against this speech.

That being said, in other cases, the idea of "verbal abuse" strikes me as simply a way in the backdoor of censoring unpopular ideas. I think the argument that "it wasn't what you said, just the way you said it," is simply a way of distancing yourself from having to stand up and oppose an opinion. And I would think in this hypothetical case, universities trying to use "conduct" as a reason to fire someone are simply making an end run around the academic freedom of professors.

There is an easy litmus test to prove this point: if conduct (the manner in which words are said) is the issue, and not the content or argument behind those words, then it should follow that if the words were replaced with something that could would be agreeable or complementary to the person alleging "verbal abuse," that it would still be seen as verbal abuse. Hypothetically, then, imagine these two situations:

Situation One: A faculty member walks into the computing center, walks up very close to an employee, and screams belligerently at the top of her/his voice:

"You're a bunch of bums! My computer hasn't worked in years! You're so incompetent my three-month-old grandchild could do a better job than you! Go get a real job! $%##%@#%!"

Situation Two: A faculty member walks into the computing center, walks up very close to an employee, and screams belligerently at the top of her/his voice:

"You folks are wonderful!!! You are the gosh darn greatest group of computer geeks on the face of the earth! Bless you all!!"

As you can see, these two situations are not the same. I am willing to bet my bottom dollar that the second situation, while odd, would never get reported as a case of "verbal abuse," where the first one would. This means that such accusations of verbal abuse aren't really about conduct, but actually about the content and opinions of a statement--content that tenure is supposed to protect.

Some might argue here that I've missed the point--the problem is not the content but the way the content is phrased. They would argue that the thesis of situation one, put in a gentler way, would be acceptable.

But here this "gentleness" is just a smokescreen for the social control of ideas. This "gentleness," in the form of active listening, is taught by communications experts and psychologists as a constructive means of communication. We are all supposed to say "I acknowledge you when you say x", "I hear you when you say y," and "I feel this," "I feel that." But all this does is reward an evasive discussion style that will privilege and empower only those people who are expert in manipulating this form of communication. I think ultimately that this psychologically "right" form of communication is just a form of disingenuous dishonesty. In the case of Professor Appel, according to the Echo, the university recommended psychological counseling to have better verbal skills. But the purpose of such communications skills is the maintenance of a societal norm of communication behavior. Psychology privileges the idea that communication be rational and sensitive, but then defines for itself what constitutes that rationality, thus constructing itself as a system of power (see Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic (New York: Routledge, 2003) for a more articulate explanation of this).

Policing the way that people say things to others automatically polices the content of that speech. Thus, in the hypothetical example of a professor who is terminated because his or her manner is considered to be offensive, what is really at issue will always be the content of his or her ideas. That's my opinion, anyway, even though I might well be wrong.