In Which Narration Is Such A Crime At Times

photo by Molly Dektar

False Positives

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

Seeing the men in their dirty little tractors spray-paint the lawn green is how you know the tourists are coming. In college, we called any non-student with a camera a “tourist” though I know, in a vague statistical sense, that there must have been a lot of false-positives. I was born near the Galapagos Islands and went to high school in Times Square; I grew up knowing what it feels like to have to dust off the glitter in order to come to terms with a place. Harvard felt like a perfectly organic extension of Times Square, so it took some effort to not resent people who didn’t know the pristine grasses were painted-on. I sometimes played this game where I would spot them by the lanyards around their necks. (I wasn’t very good at this game.)

There’s a biblical sensibility to this resentment, a rallying against the golden calf. It made me uncomfortable to see buses of Japanese schoolchildren swarm around the John Harvard statue in their starched white shirts and navy blazers, rubbing the bronzed booted foot that my douchier friends drunkenly peed on some nights. They loved Harvard because they did not know it, but they could not love it until they did. Luckily, there’s no shortage of people who want to show them around.

The campus novel has been around since the 1950s and has, since its conception, introduced gentiles to the rituals and totems of the ivory tower. There is a lot of tenure-track malaise in these books, but that’s a niche concern. The genre’s real major draw is the sex — and there’s a lot of it. It makes sense. If you want to get to know place vicariously, what’s more fun than entering it through the bedroom door? Illicit sex is a respite from any monotony that the lifestyle might entail; in Willa Cather’s The Professor, the protagonist has a brush with death after a gas stove leaks in his study. I cannot think of a lonelier way to die.

photo by Molly Dektar

But the genre does more than bring outsiders behind the scenes. It allows insiders to engage in self-fictionalizing. Read solipsistically, “ethical” and “unethical” become null categories replaced by amoral aesthetic designations of beautiful and not-beautiful. If we are all characters in the campus novel, then anything we do can be contextualized, excused, forgiven. Bad behavior, so long as it is written well, is romantically metabolized into a tragic flaw.

Once, in college, a former professor unsuccessfully tried to hit on me by referencing an excerpt from a novel in which the protagonist, a humanities professor (and it is always, or almost always, humanities professors: the genre’s authors rarely place their men in the cold-shower carnal biome of hard science) close-reads what he calls “the podium effect,” a phenomenon whereby the “ugliest and most squalid, horrible, tyrannical, and despicable among [professors] arouse spurious and delusional passions… I’ve seen dazzling women barely out of their teens swooning and melting over some foul-smelling homunculus with a piece of chalk in his hand, and innocent boys degrading themselves (circumstantially) for a scrawny, furrowed bosom stooped over a desk.” 

The writer — Javier Marías — is being satirical here, but that’s the thing about satire, isn’t it? Some people don’t get the joke. Still, there is some nuance to Marías. (And an attempt to pretend there are loads of classic academic novels about boys “degrading themselves” for older women in power. There aren’t.) Other novels don’t even invite misinterpretation. Here are titles of the books in Philip Roth’s David Kepesh trilogy: The Professor of Desire, The Breast. You needn’t have read these books to guess what they’re about.

The third book, The Dying Animal, is my favorite. The novel’s protagonist, a literature professor, patronizingly describes a young Cuban-American student’s thinking (he’s already described her “gorgeous breasts”) in this way: “She thinks, I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours?”

Consuela has no interiority. Kepesh fetishizes her because he infantilizes her, and we spend the next couple hundred pages learning to find redemption in his character, because he has found her beautiful, the ultimate pronouncement. He is a professional aesthete and he's chosen her. She, and I, and you, should feel anointed. 

In n+1’s review of Elegy, the movie adaptation of The Dying Animal, Molly Young writes, “I do not speak for all women when I say this, but in reading the book it is possible to feel vicariously worshipped for nothing more than sheer femaleness." This is true. Roth’s descriptions of Consuela’s long, black hair made me feel an almost erotic appreciation of my own. This is the power of Roth’s writing (and maybe my vanity, a little bit). But in reading the book — in reading most of these books, The Dying Animal and Herzog and Disgrace and The Gold Bug Variations, it is impossible to not feel infantilized and essentialized and caricatured. It is impossible, in some way, to not feel completely devastated.

photo by Molly Dektar

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described falling in love as the dipping of all things into an obscuring dye. It consumes. His words have always seemed to me a more accurate description of depression, and I thought about those words often in the days after Javier Marías was used against me. That's how I remember the episode. The devil had cited Scripture for his purpose, and I was sad as hell.

It was made un-sad by one of my mentors at Harvard, a female professor who's read her share of academic novels and doesn't hide behind language to skew reality. She told me about a lot of hard things in the days following Marías' betrayal, about gender and power and bureaucracy and ethics and responsibility and foolishness and sexism and ego. She also told me some things about narration. She told me this: do not let men in power narrate you to you.

There were moving trucks outside the window when I started writing this essay. Student-led tour groups walk across campus, pausing before important-looking buildings so people can take pictures. My ID swipes me into majestic buildings that tourists cannot access, but on sunny days like this, I like to do my work outside, on the wide, grassy lawn. It is open to the public. It is almost winter now, and the green has faded. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

photo by Molly Dektar

In Which Magical Realism Fails Us

Gabo

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on the day he died. It hovered around 50 degrees in New York, but I don’t know if it was sunny and the Internet has moved on. The red moon came and went. I prayed for rain but instead we got hail, some days before or after his passing, I don’t remember. I resented the sunshine when it came. It seemed disrespectful. Gabriel Garcia Marquez had just died, but the sun had come out anyway and somewhere everywhere young co-eds unpacked their shorts and headed to campus lawns carrying Frisbees. Life went on.

Some Christians believe that, for three hours after Christ died, the Earth was cloaked in an inky darkness. From Matthew: “From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.” Theologians disagree on the specifics of the event and we can only fact-check against the Bible (a precarity that should be avoided), but there’s something immeasurably reassuring in believing the heavens will turn black for you, even if that specific move is reserved for the Messiah. The sky didn’t darken when Garcia Marquez passed away and as much as I searched for some kind of local sign, there was nothing. Green chrysanthemums did not start sprouting out of bathroom faucets, eggs did not lose their yolks, white doves followed no one, and midnight fireworks over Sarasota did not warn the poets on the boardwalk about how it all might end. Magical realism had failed us.

There is a Jonathan Larson song from Rent that I’ve always liked. The singer, who is dying — remember, this is Rent, everybody is dying — goes through a list: rain falls, grass grows, flowers bloom, children play, eagles fly, the earth turns, the breeze warms, the tides change, the oceans crash, the crowds roar, the babies cry. What follows the list: “But I die.” The singer has HIV and is literally dying but she also misses her ex-boyfriend and is amazed that life was going on despite her pain. It’s not a wholly solipsistic expectation but it is naïve to carry around that sense of spiritual entitlement. It is also immeasurably comforting.

with his family

Growing up on a steady diet of Garcia Marquez’ works, from the journalistic accounts of his early career to that last book he wrote that nobody liked, groomed me to be the kind of adult for whom magical realism was not merely a literary device, but a belief system that provided a language for the way grief was metabolized. For Joan Didion, a dignified adulthood meant losing “the conviction that lights would always turn green for me.”

Garcia Marquez coddled us, promising that not only would traffic lights turn green for us, but swallowtails would swarm the house if someone in it had their heart broken. He didn’t offer a solution for sorrow, but he promised cosmic sympathy. Believing him might be foolish, but it is a legitimate way to grieve.

In Bluets, a little book about heartbreak, Maggie Nelson quotes a friend who said that “we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Magical realism meant never having to experience sadness alone because the earth was looking at us suffer and would respond in time. Maybe a tree would grow outside the house and its fruit would taste salty, like tears, or maybe honeybees would leave their empty hives as an offering outside the kitchen door. Crying was not a private act and mourning was communal.

This was true of Garcia Marquez’s funerary procession. Thousands of people pilgrimaged to the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City to say goodbye to Gabo, as he is affectionately called in Latin America.  A storm hit as the public waited for the presidents of Mexico and Colombia to take the stage. The public released yellow butterflies — a mechanic in One Hundred Years of Solitude was always followed by yellow butterflies — into the wind. His ashes might be shared by Mexico and Colombia. It seemed like a very important diplomatic consideration. Thousands of pilgrims with yellow flowers waited their turn to see his urn. Gabo had died, leaving behind him a trail of tears and yellow butterflies.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Haven. She last wrote in these pages about false positives. She tumbls here and twitters here. 

"I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" - The Hold Steady (mp3)

"On With The Business" - The Hold Steady (mp3)

In Which There Are Moving Trucks Outside Her Window

photo by Molly Dektar

False Positives

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

Seeing the men in their dirty little tractors spray-paint the lawn green is how you know the tourists are coming. In college, we called any non-student with a camera a “tourist” though I know, in a vague statistical sense, that there must have been a lot of false-positives. I was born near the Galapagos Islands and went to high school in Times Square; I grew up knowing what it feels like to have to dust off the glitter in order to come to terms with a place. Harvard felt like a perfectly organic extension of Times Square, so it took some effort to not resent people who didn’t know the pristine grasses were painted-on. I sometimes played this game where I would spot them by the lanyards around their necks. (I wasn’t very good at this game.)

There’s a biblical sensibility to this resentment, a rallying against the golden calf. It made me uncomfortable to see buses of Japanese schoolchildren swarm around the John Harvard statue in their starched white shirts and navy blazers, rubbing the bronzed booted foot that my douchier friends drunkenly peed on some nights. They loved Harvard because they did not know it, but they could not love it until they did. Luckily, there’s no shortage of people who want to show them around.

The campus novel has been around since the 1950s and has, since its conception, introduced gentiles to the rituals and totems of the ivory tower. There is a lot of tenure-track malaise in these books, but that’s a niche concern. The genre’s real major draw is the sex — and there’s a lot of it. It makes sense. If you want to get to know place vicariously, what’s more fun than entering it through the bedroom door? Illicit sex is a respite from any monotony that the lifestyle might entail; in Willa Cather’s The Professor, the protagonist has a brush with death after a gas stove leaks in his study. I cannot think of a lonelier way to die.

photo by Molly Dektar

But the genre does more than bring outsiders behind the scenes. It allows insiders to engage in self-fictionalizing. Read solipsistically, “ethical” and “unethical” become null categories replaced by amoral aesthetic designations of beautiful and not-beautiful. If we are all characters in the campus novel, then anything we do can be contextualized, excused, forgiven. Bad behavior, so long as it is written well, is romantically metabolized into a tragic flaw.

Once, in college, a former professor unsuccessfully tried to hit on me by referencing an excerpt from a novel in which the protagonist, a humanities professor (and it is always, or almost always, humanities professors: the genre’s authors rarely place their men in the cold-shower carnal biome of hard science) close-reads what he calls “the podium effect,” a phenomenon whereby the “ugliest and most squalid, horrible, tyrannical, and despicable among [professors] arouse spurious and delusional passions… I’ve seen dazzling women barely out of their teens swooning and melting over some foul-smelling homunculus with a piece of chalk in his hand, and innocent boys degrading themselves (circumstantially) for a scrawny, furrowed bosom stooped over a desk.” 

The writer — Javier Marías — is being satirical here, but that’s the thing about satire, isn’t it? Some people don’t get the joke. Still, there is some nuance to Marías. (And an attempt to pretend there are loads of classic academic novels about boys “degrading themselves” for older women in power. There aren’t.) Other novels don’t even invite misinterpretation. Here are titles of the books in Philip Roth’s David Kepesh trilogy: The Professor of Desire, The Breast. You needn’t have read these books to guess what they’re about.

The third book, The Dying Animal, is my favorite. The novel’s protagonist, a literature professor, patronizingly describes a young Cuban-American student’s thinking (he’s already described her “gorgeous breasts”) in this way: “She thinks, I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours?”

Consuela has no interiority. Kepesh fetishizes her because he infantilizes her, and we spend the next couple hundred pages learning to find redemption in his character, because he has found her beautiful, the ultimate pronouncement. He is a professional aesthete and he's chosen her. She, and I, and you, should feel anointed. 

In n+1’s review of Elegy, the movie adaptation of The Dying Animal, Molly Young writes, “I do not speak for all women when I say this, but in reading the book it is possible to feel vicariously worshipped for nothing more than sheer femaleness." This is true. Roth’s descriptions of Consuela’s long, black hair made me feel an almost erotic appreciation of my own. This is the power of Roth’s writing (and maybe my vanity, a little bit). But in reading the book — in reading most of these books, The Dying Animal and Herzog and Disgrace and The Gold Bug Variations, it is impossible to not feel infantilized and essentialized and caricatured. It is impossible, in some way, to not feel completely devastated.

photo by Molly Dektar

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described falling in love as the dipping of all things into an obscuring dye. It consumes. His words have always seemed to me a more accurate description of depression, and I thought about those words often in the days after Javier Marías was used against me. That's how I remember the episode. The devil had cited Scripture for his purpose, and I was sad as hell.

It was made un-sad by one of my mentors at Harvard, a female professor who's read her share of academic novels and doesn't hide behind language to skew reality. She told me about a lot of hard things in the days following Marías' betrayal, about gender and power and bureaucracy and ethics and responsibility and foolishness and sexism and ego. She also told me some things about narration. She told me this: do not let men in power narrate you to you.

There were moving trucks outside the window when I started writing this essay. I’m studying literature at Yale now, reading my way towards a PhD. Student-led tour groups walk across campus, pausing before important-looking buildings so people can take pictures. My ID swipes me into majestic buildings that tourists cannot access, but on sunny days like this, I like to do my work outside, on the wide, grassy lawn. It is open to the public. It is almost winter now, and the green has faded. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

photo by Molly Dektar

"Difficult Outburst and Breakthrough" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"A Bird With No Name" - Guided by Voices (mp3)