How great literature can change your life

Friday

In my weekly memoir installment last Friday, I mentioned that I received a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in 1987-88 to teach at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Yugoslavia. How this came about requires an elaborate explanation.

When I was in graduate school, Julia and I attended films on almost a weekly basis. I found films to be as moving and as powerful as literature and, because Atlanta was a good film city in those years, we were able to immerse ourselves in films from all over the world. I also took a film class from Emory’s David Cook, and the essay that I wrote—“The Ideological Foundations of the Czech New Wave”—would prove to be my first publication.

What fascinated me was the role that cinema played in the intoxicating but short-lived Prague Spring of 1968. Always looking for instances of art contributing to social justice, I found here a narrative art form influencing the course of history, with Czech directors tapping into socialist ideals to imagine an alternative to both Soviet communism and western capitalism. While their history then took a dark turn, I started paying attention to other Eastern European cinemas that seemed to have similar potential, focusing particularly on the fine films coming out of Hungary.

At St. Mary’s, meanwhile, I started teaching the college’s first film classes, as my father had at the University of the South, and I also attended a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar on “Phenomenological, Semiotic, and Post-Structuralist Approaches to Film.” My article “Holes in the Sausage of History: May ’68 as Absent Center in Three European Films,” which dealt with the impact of the student-worker uprising on directors Jean-Luc Godard, Bertrand Tavernier, and Alain Tanner, appeared in Cinema Journal.

Determined to see up close whether films could influence a country’s history, I applied for a Fulbright to Hungary, only to learn that there were no openings there. Instead, the Fulbright office offered me a choice between Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) and Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Since Yugoslavia was producing better films at the time, I took that option, not realizing that the good films were coming out of Serbia and Croatia, not Slovenia. (I didn’t even know about Slovenia.) My family packed up our bags in June to study Slovenian at UCLA before heading for Ljubljana.

I didn’t do much with Slovenian film—it’s since gotten better—but we fell in love with the country. The boys were 8, 5, and 3, and we took regular hikes, saw every film that was kid friendly (most were American), regularly attended the puppet theatre, traveled around the country, and made occasional excursions to Austria and Italy (including Mardi Gras in Venice). We also had with us an African American student who, in exchange for room and board, had helped with childcare for four years. William Boyd, who would follow his father as pastor of New Elizabeth Baptist Church in Baltimore, was a fabulous gospel baritone and he became a bit of a star, singing in the major concert halls in Zagreb and Sarajevo as well as appearing on Slovenian television.

Since I’m filtering my memoir through the books I’ve read and taught, I’ll turn my attention to those. What first struck me about the country was its reverence for poets, some of whom have prominent statues erected in their honor and streets bearing their names. One explanation is that, at a time when Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, authors like France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar demonstrated that Slovenian was not just a local dialect but a language capable of producing major works of literature—which in turn meant that Slovenia deserved to be its own nation. (The Ukrainians revere Taras Shevchenko for the same reason.)

At the University of Ljubljana I shared an office with an old Melville scholar, Janez Stanovnek; spent many wonderful hours with the department’s Australian literature expert Igor Maver, then a young professor like myself; and would regularly join the department for two-hour lunches at a local tavern. The pace of life was so relaxed that I had plenty of time to teach my courses, do my research, read books on my own, and spend time with my family. I taught Theory of the Novel, African American Literature (in Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia, the Slovenians were sensitive to what it meant to be a minority), and Introduction to Literature.

The theory course led to my most significant friendship, albeit in a roundabout way. The local cultural center was running a program of Warner Brother cartoons, for which we had purchased tickets. Toby, however, was sick so I went to the box office to return one. Mladen Dolar, a philosopher and one of the so-called Ljubljana Lacanians (along with the internationally famous Slavoj Žizek), was there with two-year-old Kaja, and having been alerted to my turning in one ticket, he approached me to ask if I had another one. I, who was more interested in preparing for my Theory of the Novel class than in seeing the show, offered him mine if he would accompany my kids.

He noticed that I was reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, which he knew well. (Later, when Mladen was invited to teach at Duke, he would become a good friend of Jameson.) After the showing, a friendship developed with Mladen and his then wife Eva Bahovec, also a philosopher. The four of us were all the same age, and every time we return to Slovenia we reconnect. I spend hours talking with Mladen about literature—he is one of the best-read and most thoughtful scholars I have ever known—and visit Eva’s classes. (In our last visit Eve invited me to participate in discussions about Foucault, A Streetcar Named Desire, Freud and Jung, and the film Lost in Translation.)

Perhaps the most important thing I carried away from this Fulbright, in addition to lifelong friendships, was a reassessment of America. Having grown up in the midst of segregation and then witnessed the Vietnam War, I felt sour about our country. It was one reason I had looked toward eastern Europe, wondering whether Yugoslavia’s “market socialism” offered a viable alternative. What I discovered was that no country is perfect and that every country has its strengths and weaknesses. I developed a more balanced view of the United States, renewing the love I had had for it as a child even as I acknowledged its blemishes. Sometimes one has to leave to appreciate what one has.

My interactions with my colleagues helped me in this endeavor. At one time my office mate, genuinely perplexed, said to me, “I just don’t understand how America works.” It was a good puzzle and I put a lot of thought into it. I told him I thought the American Dream is the unifying factor, even though often Americans dream different and sometimes conflicting dreams. (This is the main point of The Wished For Country, a historical novel about southern Maryland written by my former neighbor Wayne Karlin.) This dream, I noted, is bolstered by various foundational documents, including “The Declaration of Independence,” The Constitution, “The Gettysburg Address,” “The Pledge of Allegiance,” and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Whether we can still hold together is, I suppose, an open question at this point.

Faced with such questions, I became interested in American literature for the first time in my life. I was fascinated how the Slovenians focused on certain authors often overlooked by the American academy—most notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Jack London—and came to understand why a heavily forested and socialist country would take an interest in those two. 

Last week I noted that a major goal for my first sabbatical was finding new ways to make literature feel urgent to my students. I hadn’t yet had the epiphany I was to experience ten years later—more on that in a future post—but my vision of the different uses to which people put literature was expanding.