Introduction to literature and Jhumpa Lahiri

Although my PhD. is in American literature before 1900 and I should, therefore, really love teaching courses in that area more than anything else (especially to English majors), I’ve got to say that there’s a certain joy in teaching an introduction to literature class to non-majors. When I teach these kinds of classes, my main goals are simply to get the students to realize that studying literature can be fun, that it does have some connection to their everyday lives, and that they can say smart things about it. Those aren’t particularly lofty goals, but they are awfully fun to guide students towards. To help along the way, I pick texts that are fun—surefire crowd pleasers.

This semester at Shepherd, I am teaching English 102, Writing for the Humanities, for the first time, a course that asks instructors to do a lot—it serves as the second half the of the freshman composition sequence and thus stresses research-based writing. Right now the department has it structured as an introduction to literary analysis, too, and the textbook we use is Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, one of these mammoth hard-cover books that contains a lot of the “greatest hits” of literature. You can take a look at my syllabus here. Most of the works I’ve chosen are works I’ve taught before or that I simply love.

And here’s why a course like this is such a blast for me to teach: as a nineteenth-century Americanist, how else am I going to have the opportunity to teach John Donne or Shakespeare or Robert Browning?

Now, though, I am also wondering if I shouldn’t have pushed myself towards teaching a few more works that I haven’t taught before, mostly because of the lovely hour or so I spent with a brand new story (brand new to me) yesterday afternoon. One of the few works I put on the syllabus without reading it beforehand is Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies.” I haven’t read all that much by Lahiri, but everything I read just knocks my socks off. This story was no exception. For those who don’t know much about her, you can read more here and here.

My first encounter with a work by Lahiri was several years ago, when I read a short story called “This Blessed House,” which was included in Convergences, a reader I was using in an English 101 class at UNCG. (The story was originally in Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri's 1999 short story collection.) “This Blessed House” is a great little story about an Indian-American couple who keep finding Christian-themed kitsch all over the house they just bought. The wife is delighted by the finds, the husband is annoyed—and the whole thing is just a great read. I remember being particularly struck by this passage:

“Though she did not say it herself, he assumed then that she loved him, too, but now he was no longer sure. In truth, Sanjeev did not know what love was, only what he thought it was not. It was not, he had decided, returning to an empty carpeted condominium each night, and using only the top fork in his cutlery drawer, and turning politely away at those weekend dinner parties when the other men eventually put their arms around the waists of their wives and girlfriends, leaning over every now and again to kiss their shoulders or necks. It was not sending away for classical music CDs by mail, working his way methodically through the major composers that the catalogue recommended, and always sending his payments on time. In the months before meeting Twinkle, Sanjeev had begun to realize this.”

This passage sums up what I think Lahiri does so well—captures the image, the gesture, the simple thoughts that make us human--and that in some way translate across lines of race and class.

My next encounter with Lahiri came through The Namesake, her first novel, published in 2003 and made into a pretty great movie in 2007. I won’t say too much about it, other than that you should read it (or at least see the film).

Anyway, as I mentioned, for my class on Wednesday, we are reading “Interpreter of Maladies,” the title story from Lahiri’s 1999 Pulitzer-prize-winning collection. This story, about an Indian tour guide who takes a young Indian-American family to the Sun Temple at Konorak, once again shows us everyday people who seem to be living happily enough on the surface, but dream of better things and harbor secrets and regrets. And that’s a clichéd and oversimplified way to talk about the story, I know.

Particularly moving are the passages where the tour guide, Mr. Kapasi, imagines that he and the young wife, Mrs. Das, will begin an important correspondence with each other and that he has found someone who will appreciate and value him:

“The paper curled as Mr. Kapasi wrote his address in clear, careful letters. She would write to him, asking about his days interpreting at the doctor’s office, and he would respond eloquently, choosing only the most entertaining anecdotes, ones that would make her laugh out loud as she read them in her house in New Jersey. In time she would reveal the disappointment of her marriage, and he his. In this way their friendship would grow and flourish….As his mind raced, Mr. Kapasi experienced a mild and pleasant shock. It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.”

Of course, the story doesn’t end in this happy fantasy—not by any means, but that’s part of what makes it worth reading. The state of mind this put me in—that wonderful time after you’ve read a great story for the first time and you are still running through it in your head—left me in a great mood for the rest of the day. I only hope I can get my students to hold onto a fraction of that feeling when they read it.

The point of all this? Well, I guess there are three: 1) I am happy to be teaching introduction to literature, 2) it is great to know that I can still get that excited over a new story and 3) I wish I had time to read more Lahiri.