French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan
A Long Affair with the Language of Love and Hate
Sep 4, 2008
It may not be surprising that Alice Kaplan, professor of French literature and history at Duke University and a founding director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies there, would write a book called French Lessons. What is refreshing, however, is the balance between the intimate, the analytical, and the historical in her book.
Introduction to French Studies
Kaplan’s relationship to the French language is romantic, transcendent, intellectual. French entered Kaplan’s life soon after the death of her father, a lawyer who prosecuted war criminals at the Nuremburg trials. She threw herself into her studies, and excelled at French in particular. She grew close to Mr. D, the father of a friend who in turn was a father figure to her during her adolescence. Wealthy and cultured, he collected modern art and was a Francophile.
Life in French
One of the key turning points in Kaplan’s life came when her mother offered to send her to boarding school in Switzerland. Kaplan was fifteen, and depressed. She left her middle-class, Midwestern life for a year in Geneva, where she began to live in French. She transformed herself into a sophisticated European who smoked cigarettes and skied in the Swiss Alps. She spent time with jet-setting, élite teens and became the rigorous master of her body and mind through strict diets and endless vocabulary lists.
De Retour
Back in the States, Kaplan left for university a year early. She ended up at Berkeley, where she discovered the world of contemporary French poetics studying with Ann Smock. Smock gave her Raymond Queneau’s Le Journal de Sally Mara as Kaplan left for her junior year in Bordeaux. Queneau was a key member in the experimental literary movement OULIPO, and Kaplan comments, “I was part Queneau, part Sally Mara; part precocious student spoofing my own lessons, part enthused adolescent wanting to please her teacher.”
André
The middle section of the book, titled “Getting It Right,” chronicles Kaplan’s year in Bordeaux. Three individuals play defining roles in her life in French here. André was her first French lover, a hard-drinking womanizer who gave her herpes of the ear during their brief interlude. Kaplan sums up her linguistic attraction thus: “It was the rhythm and the pulse of his French I wanted, the body of it, and he refused me, he told me I could never get that.”
Micheline
Enter Micheline, daughter of a pharmacist whom Kaplan befriended. Micheline is a phoniatre, a cross between a psychoanalyst and a physician who specializes in problems revealed in speech. At first hired by Kaplan to help her “work on her French,” Micheline explains that her accent is her “song” and will never leave. Disappointed, Kaplan nonetheless remains lifelong friends with Micheline and her family, and it is through them and her life in Bordeaux that she acquires what she calls her regular French.
Céline
Kaplan also discovers Céline while in Bordeaux. She grapples with her love for his raw, emotional writing and his strong anti-Semitic bent via his correspondence with Milton Hindus. Hindus, like Kaplan, was Jewish. As Kaplan tells the story of the bizarre, tenuous intellectual friendship between the two men, she deals with her own ambivalence. Fascism and intellectualism in twentieth-century France would become a recurring theme in her academic work.
Deconstructionist Theory and Fascist Intellectuals
In 1979 at Yale, Kaplan’s dissertation on fascist writers seemed an odd topic to her advisors. What no one yet knew was that de Man, the revered deconstructionist scholar there, had written scores of articles for a Nazi-run newspaper during World War II. Known as the de Man scandal, this posthumous revelation about the theorist made waves in the intellectual community.
Fascist Writer and Editor Brasillach
Kaplan continued to research fascist intellectuals. She went to France and spent days interviewing Maurice Bardèche, a close friend of fascist writer Robert Brasillach, who was put to death after the war. She struggles with what it means to spend time talking to a Negationist who played an active role persecuting Jews. Strong memories of Kaplan’s father and his work as a lawyer at the Nuremburg trials return to her.
Escapism and Distancing Mechanism
The French language originally served as a means of escape from a sad Midwestern adolescence. Kaplan recalls her father distancing himself from the family as he threw himself into his work, and sees parallels to her own life. She questions her attempts to hide herself in French, as well as those of her students. At the same time the French language has been a source of liberation for her, and she sees it create positive transformations in her students, too
French Lessons was published in 1993 by University of Chicago Press (ISBN: 0-226-42419-7). Anyone who studies language will enjoy reading it, as will Francophiles.
