The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Week Eight: Man Threatens to Cleave Bear’s Skull with Penis

  The theory of V. Hornblower concerning the nature of entertainment is: all things entertaining derive amusement from proximity to the penis. You will find a variety of writings by Hornblower on reserve. The reserve room is next to the room displaying a treasury of decorative daggers.

  Week Ten: Repartee Between Shoemaker and Ruling Lord

  The heroes are twins,12 as in all the best hero narratives, twin wolves suckling at their mother, separated after a dark prophecy about their potential to rule. This is all written down in a heroic narrative transmitted to a benevolent priest in the seventeenth century. This priest is lucky enough to have a few words in the native dialect, noteworthy for the abundant use of the letter X. The priest inscribes a manuscript in this dialect, dictating, translating, expending his poor eyesight and many thousands of candles in the process. The manuscript is in Spanish, it is in English, and it is in the local dialect with the Xs. Just like the Rosetta stone. He puts the manuscript in a neglected cave near his priestly dwelling, just before he is set upon by bandits. His head is mounted on a pike. Let this be a lesson to you, etc. After the priest is murdered, the rain forest falls into the hands of indigenous tribes, and those panning for gold give the rain forest a wide berth. And yet, in the nineteenth century, a pair of British adventurers of the intrepid sort, armed with machetes and a battalion of yage-chewing mercenaries,13 venture in. Many die of Chagas’ disease, leprosy, malaria, and dengue fever. And yet the British explorers will not give up, ever pressing on, if only for the crown, until at last they find themselves in the deepest part of the forest, with only the one last canteen. Alone.

  These explorers are then surrounded by a crew of highly decorated cannibals, many wearing those little earlobe-stretching decorations that would make them unsuitable for any public relations position. A long and unsettling dialogue takes place between the cannibals and the explorers. Gesturing is the common vocabulary. The explorers realize the terrifying bargain that is now theirs to contemplate. Either they can join the cannibals, who that very night intend to ambush a nearby tribe, from whom they will select and eat a few enemies. Or the explorers can themselves be served as the meal. The outcome is this: one of the explorers stays, joins the band of indigenous brigands, and is never again heard from. The other escapes. And in the midst of his escape, the second adventurer stumbles into a certain cave, and in this cave is: a manuscript.

  Week Twelve: Love Cured by Bath in Beloved’s Blood

  Compile a list of rules of contemporary romance14 using primeval source material, e.g., 1) if a lover is not to be wooed, call in favors from elves; 2) do not love a giant, there will never be compatibility; 3) if your lover dies and you are unfaithful to her memory, she will come back from the grave; 4) it is fine to ask if you can kill your lover’s parents; 5) before marrying a woman first see if you are able to lift her; 6) it is only prudent to trick a poet into writing your love letters; 7) elopements should always involve a forest and military engagement; 8) if you have seven lovers, see one each day of the week; 9) if your lover has no sense of touch, conduct assignations symbolically; 10) heroes often win the most attractive lovers but also perish first; 11) a fine aphrodisiac can be made from what is found in a lover’s ear; 12) love is best explained by parable.

  Week Fourteen: Priest’s Concubine Cannot Rest in Grave

  My hours are few, my time is nigh, my body has been much extended beyond its natural span. Now that my fingers are no longer able to use a quill, I have purchased a digital software program which allows me to pronounce magic spells in a voice-to-text interface. Among my spells is this one: I have turned you all into proper scholars. A scholar is a necromancer. The life of scholarship is exceedingly lonely. What matters are things that have lasted for a thousand years. Or more. The language can only be preserved in your mouths,15 pronounce the language, use divinations with the language, trample the language, call the language by name, deform the language, make sacrifices on behalf of the language, fashion an altar to the language, make the language profane, make the language sublime, make the language laughable, make the language deadly serious, hand the language out at a party, tear the undergarments off the language, where the language is concerned, employ frottage, cause the language to take to its bed, refuse to pity the language or pander to it, force the language outside and smack it around, give the language multiple orgasms, spirit the language away to an undisclosed location, go joyriding with the language, buy sled dogs with the language, get an artificial tan with the language, visit the language in prison, have a language uprising, depose a dictator with the language, write a prayer in the language, curse enthusiastically with the language, teach the language to a child.16

  * * *

  1. Adapted from an encomium I wrote on the occasion of Robert Coover’s retirement from Brown University, this piece is probably more precisely a recollection of all my classes in the creative writing program there, between 1979 and 1983.

  2. With mummery, I allude to Coover’s great novel Gerald’s Party, among my very favorite works by him. Gerald’s Party has lots to say about the relationship between theater and literature.

  3. When I took Coover’s class “Exemplary Ancient Fictions,” in 1982, we read from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, and all the titles of the various weeks in this piece are appropriated from Thompson.

  4. The undergraduate creative writers were somewhat competitive. It made the classes go. One of my classes with John Hawkes, who had a very significant impact on me, also contained Jeffrey Eugenides, Cary Twichell, and Melora Wolff, all of whom were working at a very high level. The competition to produce more original writing, better work, was probably good for all of us. But it made the classes very demanding.

  5. This version of “Syllabus” is heavily redacted (see below) in order to justify the liberal inclusion of footnotes in the text. There are entire weeks from the semester missing.

  6. Can’t remember the name of that indie bookstore on the East Side that people used for the arty courses—instead of the Brown Bookstore. But I sure loved it in there. Some bookstores smell like books, and that is a powerful and evocative smell. E-books do not have the same quality.

  7. Robert Coover once threw a dinner for hundreds at a restaurant in Fox Point that specialized in fado. The food was really slow, but the music was fabulous.

  8. By which I mean: how do we interpret Ovid? A question we asked in Bob Coover’s “Exemplary Ancient Fictions.”

  9. I was always sort of terrified of office hours. But Angela Carter insisted that all students come to her office once or twice a semester. She would then suggest reading, among other things. Once I happened by Bob Coover’s office while he was there, even though it wasn’t a day for office hours, and I remember overhearing him say, firmly, into a phone: “No more magazine articles!” I think of this moment a lot these days.

  10. In “Exemplary Ancient Fictions,” our assignment, one week, was to take the aforementioned Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index, find a few beguiling entries, and then make stories out of them. This one is incredibly tempting, because of its reverse-alchemical shape. Often the rules of a form get their value from those who fail to respect them.

  11. Obviously, there are a lot of dwarves in folk literature, but the question would be: why was a writing program self-evidently indebted to what was most modern at the time, or even most “postmodern,” so interested in old forms? Hawkes was known to say in class that “what was most old was most new,” and this is exactly the kind of utterance he favored: the paradoxical utterance, at least in my understanding of him. So dwarves, because they were important in fairy tales, to describe that time, that instant of the “modern” and “postmodern.”

  12. See, e.g., the Popol Vuh, which I read first in Coover’s class.

  13. Angela Carter, during her time at Brown, gave me a list of things to read (scrawled in her beautifully orna
te hand, on a scrap of notebook paper) and it said: “Our Lady of Flowers, The Wild Boys, Naked Lunch.” I knew nothing of William S. Burroughs, author of the latter two, and I was astounded by his work. WSB, of course, was afflicted with the legend of yage.

  14. This list is a parody of a list of requirements for courtly love by Andreas Capellanus, author of De amore. The list, from the Coover syllabus, had such an impact on me (I thought it was so funny) that I wrote a song for the band I had at Brown in those days, “The Thirty-Nine Rules of Courtly Love.” The song contained no suggestions about love at all.

  15. In the end, the legacy of American experimental writing, which was what I believe I learned at Brown, is more about the language than it is about anything else. Or this was John Hawkes’s position. I remember, in my last semester there, having a discussion with him about computers. A vanguard of students in those days were writing their papers at the computer lab, alleging that this made composition easier or more convenient somehow. Hawkes wanted to know, however, what the effect of this would be on language. He would have been shocked to see the results, to see the language crammed into the 140 characters of a Twitter post or into the status updates of Facebook. Robert Coover, on the other hand, has restlessly looked for the new in technological interfaces, and with a zeal that I find charming and persuasive. But in each case these writers were mainly interested in the words on the page. I understand my own job as a reflection of their tutelage. It’s not about the theme of the work—all of the themes have been dealt with—it’s not so much about the story, it’s about the language deployed to do the job. I hope one day I can live up to this lesson, the lesson that I was lucky enough to get at Brown.

  16. And this is the last line, of course, because I had a two-year-old at home at the time I wrote the first draft. Who was just getting a grip on the language happening around her. And now she’s four and every day asking me, again, to read to her about . . . Medusa.

  My Own Core Curriculum

  MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE

  My parents warned me this would happen. I arrived at Brown in medias res, after spending two years at a college they had picked for me, and here I was, on an unfamiliar campus, friendless, clueless, confused, and filled with a shifting ratio of hope and terror. I was not supposed to be here.

  A dutiful, tiger-parented child of Korean immigrants, I had never openly gone against their wishes and advice before. Despite my itchy unhappiness, my parents had advised me to stay at my current college and merely study harder. Rupturing a college experience, much less a transcript, is never a good idea. Also, why leave a perfectly good (i.e., prestigious) college? Some backstory: In order to give their children a better life, my parents immigrated to the US from Korea as war refugees, leaving behind family, and for my mother, her own college education that had been interrupted by the war. In return, my parents—reasonably, they thought—expected their American-born children, with much easier lives, to strive for conventional, secure careers. I was supposed to follow my father’s footsteps into medicine.

  Instead, I’d begun to realize medicine wasn’t the right field for me. I actually already knew what I wanted to be: a writer. I’d written my first “novel” when I was nine and had an essay titled “Volunteer Work Does Pay Off!” published in Seventeen when I was sixteen. My parents, however, forbade writing as a career (“Too unstable!”). It became such a point of tension that the only solution in our confrontation-avoidant household was to ignore it.

  There were no creative writing courses at my previous college, so I’d sought out the college literary journal, whose editor was excited and impressed that I’d already had something published. I agreed to submit, and departed from the perkiness of my Seventeen essay to write a much more emotionally risky piece describing my experience with racism growing up in a small, “Minnesota-nice” town. I never heard back from the editor, who did not return my calls and avoided me on campus. I can only presume the piece was met with quiet horror and quickly killed, in the way most things happened at my Seven Sisters school: with a clenched-teeth smile overlying an abject fear of things that were “not nice” or “vulgar”—and racism was both.

  I informed my parents of my plans after I’d been admitted to Brown as a junior transfer student. Normally, they did not miss any opportunity to visit the schools my siblings and I attended; for my Seven Sisters school drop-off, they had taken a hotel room and spent five whole days there. For my entry to Brown, they stayed home and I drove my tiny Dodge Colt north from New York City, where I had been doing an internship.

  Here I was, in nirvana, a university that had a creative writing department. Nevertheless, I was immediately, unceremoniously rejected by the competitive intermediate fiction writing workshop. At the very last minute, a professor, Meredith Steinbach (to whom I’ll always be grateful), somehow having seen my sample, admitted me.

  “Intermediate Fiction” was for serious writers; one classmate would later attend the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I, however, found myself strangely unenthusiastic to be living my dream; in my rush to write “big” and “universal” stories, I mostly aped my favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor, even though I wasn’t a Southern Catholic white lady. While praised for their technical proficiency, my stories were blaring mediocrities, boring to read, and—I didn’t want to admit to myself—boring to write, too.

  Having already shattered my self-image as a broody Creative Writing (now Literary Arts) concentrator, I turned to writing for the Brown Daily Herald. My first story was an interview with Sasha Frere-Jones, a first-year whose great-grandfather had written King Kong. The next, a piece about other published writers on campus. I didn’t show much talent for journalism, either; the editors complained that I wrote too slowly, turned in items that were much too long, and always, always buried the lede. At the end of the day, this wasn’t what I wanted to do, either.

  Around this time, I came up with a new concentration: economics. My parents were unhappy with my fleeing the premed program, but they felt economics was an acceptable substitute—all signs pointed to a lucrative career in finance, perhaps with Harvard Business School as a future stepping stone. I had developed an interest in developmental economics, but another facet of my decision was the relatively low number of classes the econ concentration required. Beyond that, I had no grand plan.

  All my life I’d reflexively excelled, or at least striven for extreme competence in anything I tried. Show me a structure and I’d work within it with utmost discipline and effort. I could easily have forced myself through premed or, say, an English major (professor being deemed another acceptable profession), but my odd, jerry-rigged academic experience, sorely lacking in specifics on how this was going to help me become a writer, was weirdly pleasing to me, perhaps because my life up until this point had been severely regimented. The range of available courses was intoxicating. Reading the course catalog was like opening a novel written in a strange new dialect: religious studies, Shakespeare, bio, Russian literature in translation, intellectual history, American civilization, economic history, semiotics. There was Engine 9, which wasn’t really an engineering course, and one, I remember, named “Rock and Roll Will Never Die.”

  My friend Phi, who was a history concentrator, alerted me that the US history survey, History 52, was going to be taught by the eminent scholar Bill McLoughlin, who rarely taught these large lecture classes. Even though I didn’t have any particular interest in history, I signed up. I was surprised and delighted to find that the class was taught using novels: The Jungle, Babbitt, The Damnation of Theron Ware, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Milagro Beanfield War. Professor McLoughlin’s lectures started at Reconstruction and went through the Gay Nineties, the Gilded Age, the Depression, World Wars I and II, and McCarthyism, and ended at the Nixon administration. I can’t say exactly what constituted the alchemy of combining novels and history, but some kind of nuclear fusion occurred in my brain. When we covered anti-immigration sentiment in the 1920s and arrive
d at the racial unrest of the sixties, I knew I wanted to write about the ethnic and racial aspects of those moments in history.

  The teaching assistant who taught my section noticed how hard I was working and correspondingly wrote me pages and pages of detailed critiques. I’d had no previous experience with historical analysis, but I was understanding that I could mine the vein of my personal experiences. Ideas from that essay about racism in my hometown that I’d written at my previous college could be thrown into a larger, historical context, and eventually achieve a lock-and-key melding of historical analysis with original writing. Similarly, reading these excellent novels helped me to understand how these writers had assimilated social issues into their work.

  My final paper, an exploration of the changing tides of anti-immigrant sentiment and racial unrest in the twentieth century, was easily one of my proudest collegiate achievements. For a moment, I considered switching my concentration to history. But I understood that I didn’t actually have the passion and aptitude that the concentration would require; instead, this class would somehow be important as a kind of undergirding, a bedrock of knowledge that I would work from in the future. Subsequent courses included a religious studies class that explored Christian themes in the work of authors such as my beloved Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Classes in economic history and developmental economics let me follow an offbeat interest in capitalism. Basically, I was creating my own core curriculum for becoming a writer.