Goodbye to All That

1

I've always loved Joan Didion's essay about leaving New York, where she lived during her twenties, at first entranced by the city, and then, suddenly, not. Didion tells the story of how finally in her late twenties she learned "the lesson … that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair." I borrowed the theme of "Goodbye to All That" a few years ago for my Paris memoir, where I transposed Didion's account of leaving New York with my returning to it from Paris, giving up on the city of my dreams, at about the same age. I'm leaning on it now for another story with the same lesson of timely farewell, with a different location.

Slow learner.

This story, which I've told before (you'll see why) is not about cities, though it is about location: Hanover, New Hampshire in the summer of 1988. The scene: The School for Criticism and Theory. Michael Riffaterre, then Director of the School, and my former dissertation advisor at Columbia, had invited me to teach in the summer session and "carry the flag" (the flag being feminist criticism). Naturally, I was flattered, even a little thrilled. I would be teaching in the same session as Mary Ann Caws, who was a friend, and Edward Said, whom I knew slightly and admired greatly. I felt promoted just by virtue of getting to hang out with the cool kids.

I'm a New Yorker, not really a fan of life in the country; after a while, all the green wears me down and trees fail to absorb my daily quotient of anxiety. But the teaching would be challenging, I reasoned, maybe even fun, as was the idea of sharing work in progress with a group of smart people. The drill involved the teaching faculty circulating a piece of new work to the entire school and then discussing it in public, after responses by the director and a faculty member from the host institution. At the same time, having just left Columbia for CUNY, did I really want to spend six weeks in striking distance of the man who had alternately praised and diminished me for almost two decades of emotional turmoil? Why return to that roller-coaster ride? Because I thought I'd be safe. We were no longer at Columbia, after all.

My turn to share my work came midway through the summer. I was nervous but also curious. The previous presentation sessions had been exciting. I believed in my project, a self-conscious experiment I called "Dreaming, Dancing, and the Changing Locations of Feminist Criticism, 1988." I was eager for feedback. Once we were all settled on stage, the Director took the floor, and in a cold, almost bitter tone, read out an attack on Feminist Criticism, notably what he called the "insularity of Feminist Criticism. You Feminist Critics," he objected, mansplaining avant la lettre, and addressing his complaint to me, "are not content to define your differences," but are "othering male critics … and excommunicating their interpretations." It's obvious, he concluded, "that the premises of today's Black Criticism imply the same kind of exclusion." The man went on, nursing his wound, building to his conclusion, a defense of Literature: "Even if we were to concede," he claimed, "that, the insularity of what I should call native criticism (rather than personal, or gender, or race criticism) would still ignore the very nature of the literary phenomenon, namely that it transcends time, place, and borders."

Native.

The audience sat in stunned silence. While the structure of the event included the requirement of a response from the faculty member whose work was being discussed, I found it impossible to speak. I refused, I finally said, because the critique was generic and had nothing to do with my paper, which was a particular instance of feminist literary criticism. My silence in the moment was not entirely voluntary. The attack had quite literally staggered me: taken my breath away, my head and heart were pounding as I sat there facing the audience, which included...