French Lessons: A Memoir - Softcover

Kaplan, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022656455X ISBN 13: 9780226564555

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alice Kaplan is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. She is coauthor of States of Plague, with Laura Marris, and author of French Lessons, The Collaborator, Looking for "The Stranger," and Dreaming in French, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. She has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

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French Lessons

A Memoir

By Alice Kaplan

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1993 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-56455-5

Contents

Part One: Before I Knew French, 
First Words, 
The Last Summer at Wildhurst Road, 
Loss, 
Leaving, 
Part Two: Getting It, 
Boarding School in Switzerland, 
Spring Break, 
Coming Home, 
Part Three: Getting It Right, 
André, 
Micheline, 
Céline, 
Part Four: Revisions, 
In Search of the French "R", 
Tenses, 
Guy, de Man, and Me, 
The Trouble with Edna, 
The Interview, 
Returning Home, 
Afterwards, 
Afterword, 
Note on the Text, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

First Words

"Let's get her to say it." My sister was ambitious for me.

"She's only three." My brother was the skeptic.

"Come on, I think she can do it. Come on!"

"All right, all right, let's see if she can do it."

"OK, repeat after us: 'Everything I like is.'"

"Everything I like is."

And on it went, ending with the three big words: "illegal," "immoral," and "fattening."

Getting my sister and brother's attention, winning a place in their games, was the biggest challenge. In an ideal world, my sister would let me sit on her bed when her friend Jane came over. My brother would let me watch Perry Mason with him; together we would guess who did it. I couldn't believe my luck when they decided to teach me a saying. The two of them together! The saying was immortalized on a piece of knotty pine one of them had brought back from camp: "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening." The words were burned on the wood with a special tool you got to use in crafts class. The words were written, not just printed, with curlicues on the ends of letters, and a flourish underneath.

I didn't know what "illegal" meant. I didn't know what "immoral" meant. I had a clue about "fattening," but I didn't know what it had to do with "illegal" and "immoral." I figured if I could learn to say it, my brother and sister would let me in on other games. "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Everything I like is either illegal immoral or fattening." I said it again and again until I was dizzy and all the words dissolved into one word, "everythingilikeiseitherillegalimmoralorfattening."

"Not bad." They had a glint in their eye.

My parents gathered around. I performed the sentence for them, with my brother and sister standing proudly by. My father laughed loudest.

It was the biggest language thrill produced in the house since my brother had learned the Tom Lehrer song "Fight Fiercely Harvard" and explained to his elementary school teacher that a football was a spheroid. ("Throw that spheroid down the field and fight! fight! fight!") The teacher had called home to report my brother's astonishing vocabulary.

"Well kids, let's hope it doesn't turn out to be true." My mother made the exit line so she could get started on dinner. The rest of them scattered.

I was left standing in the living room, contemplating my success. Daddy laughed. He understood. What a miracle. I didn't even understand the sentence and it still worked! My father looked just the way he looked when other adults came over for dinner and they talked in the living room after dinner, and he would lean back in his wing chair with his legs crossed, and guffaw. I amused him, as if I were a grownup. All it took was saying grownup words.

When I started to talk on my own, I couldn't be stopped. When I was in first grade, my sister's friends could hardly stand to ride to school with me in the car. I was loud and unrelenting. I liked to run my own bath water while I sang the song of the rest of my life, endless verses with my own lyrics: I would rule the world, I would sing on a stage, I would travel the seas. My father liked to listen to me sing.

Listening now to my childhood as the French professor I've become, what I hear first are scenes of language. Two Yiddish words came down to me from hearing my mother talk on the phone with her Jewish friends. She used a word for incompetency, "shlemiel," and a word for wild nonsensical ideas, "mishegossen." I heard just enough Yiddish in childhood to imagine a world of awkward, foolish people with wild plans that turned to buffoonery. Yiddish sounds, in and of themselves, were tempting, full of vulgar but thrilling possibilities, like "oy" with its diphthong you could stretch in your mouth for as long or short as you wanted. My grandmother, Ethel Yaeger, had a longer version of "oy": "oy vey ist mir." She mumbled it under her breath. There was also "Gesundheit — ist besser wie krankeit," a ritual sentence she used if one of us sneezed ("it's better than sickness"). There was "Gut in himmel," part acknowledgment of the power of God, part anger at whatever inconvenience He had caused.

The words stuck out too much for me to use at Northrop Collegiate, the private girls' school I had gone to since kindergarten. They made me feel funny, "oy" especially. "Oy" was in the same category as swear words, satisfying and ugly. I liked to say it to myself. "Wherever did you learn to say that," my mother asked, in mock shock, when I punctuated a sentence with "oy." When I got to college I heard people "oying" and "oy veying" with great ease, loud and clear. They sounded brazen to me.

I grew up half a block from a city lake in an old Minneapolis neighborhood populated by prosperous Republicans with names like "Colby" and "Dorsey" and "White." My parents hadn't migrated with others of their generation to the middle-class Jewish suburb, St. Louis Park, because my father wanted to be near a lake. Our house had been built in 1914 for people with servants. There were front stairs and back stairs, a bell button buried in the dining room floor, and on the wall of the dining room, an English hunting scene. There was an eight-burner restaurant stove with a griddle for pancakes, and a butler's pantry with the cupboards painted cream outside and mandarin red inside. There were five bedrooms and a library for my father, and a clothes chute, and a separate garage with a big lilac tree, and a rock garden for my mother. She had a garden smock and gloves and would climb around out there while my father was at work. In the spring the lilac bloomed and the smell came into our house, the smell of our prosperity.

The previous owners had left a set of papers on the radiator in the dining room, which my parents found the day they moved in. It was a detective's report assuring the old owners that although we were Jews, our general comportment was in line with the gentility of the neighborhood. Was the seller stupid enough to leave the report by mistake, or did he want us to see it and to understand our social responsibilities? Did it prove that we belonged there, that we were the "exception"? This episode sat in the back of my mind as I grew up. I watched us. We were on trial, being upright for the neighborhood.

We were so American. It seems now that no one will ever again have that sense of being American that we had then, in the time between the Second World War and Vietnam. It was the time of our father's success and our growing up.

We spoke American in that house: I can't reproduce this language, but I know exactly what I mean by it. It was American more for what we talked about than how it sounded, although it is amazing to think that in one generation, a language could become so native, so comfortable,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022656455X
• ISBN 13: 9780226564555
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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