Spring Break
Flesch discusses fiction, teaching
by Steven Sparber
Arts | 11/25/08
Posted online at 2:30 AM EST on 11/25/08
The name William Flesch is synonymous with English at Brandeis University. As a first-year, I was lucky enough to have a class with Professor Flesch, and it was unlike any other English class I have since encountered. I was also fortunate enough to have the following interview with him.
JustArts: What pleasure do you get from teaching English in college?
William Flesch: I just wrote a book on "vicarious experience," and I think that the pleasure of teaching is a version of the pleasure of writing, the pleasure of performing or telling someone to see a great movie. Part of the pleasure of liking any kind of literature or aesthetic experience is feeling something fresh when you're with someone who is encountering it for the first time. Teaching is like telling someone, "You have to read this!" or "You have to go see this!" turned into a career. But everyone feels that way. There's nothing more worth doing with your life than thinking, reading and writing. What I like to think and read and write about is literature.
JA: What were your favorite authors, poets and works at different times in your life?
WF: Embarrassing question. I'm embarrassed by how much I loved e. e. cummings in high school. The first adult novel I ever read was Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morning Star. I read a lot of Herman Wouk at the time. In a novel of his, a character decides to read James Joyce's Ulysses, which this character knows is a "difficult" book. I thought, "Oh cool!" I was in eigth or seventh grade and my father had a copy of Ulysses, so I started reading it and couldn't make head or tail of it. Still, I worked on it for about a year and a half and got something out of it. But the first poetry I ever loved was Kipling, which my father used to read aloud. I should also say that the poet who in a way changed everything for me and was the first poet I read as an adult was Wallace Stevens. He totally overcame any infatuation I would have had with cummings.
JA: Ulysses is a notoriously difficult and enigmatic book. What did you like about it?
WF: What I liked about it when I first read it was that it was "notoriously difficult and enigmatic." What I got to like about it was the sense in which it took the human experience of an ordinary person with complete sympathy and seriousness. It is a book that is appealing to adolescents because of the character Stephen Dedalus, who is a very brilliant, full-of-himself adolescent. When you first read Ulysses you're kind of disappointed to find out that he turns out not to be the hero. But in fact the hero of Ulysses is a middle-aged, ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. The sympathy and commitment which Joyce, who is himself like Stephen Dedalus, gives to Leopold and his wife Molly Bloom is something really deep and moving and extraordinary. It's not why people read Ulysses the first time. They read it for Stephen, and they read it for Joyce. What you eventually come to see is what really matters. That's what makes it a great book and not just a brilliant book. But my favorite book of all time is Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
JA: What draws you to that book?
WF: The fantastically intense and fantastically subtle description of what it's like to be a human being and what human loneliness is like and how everyone experiences that loneliness. Loneliness isn't anyone else's fault. It's how things are. I wrote an essay on Proust a long time ago that has as an epigraph, a quotation from Franz Rosenzweig: "Only the man who suffers can praise God in all his works. But all men suffer." That's what Proust is about, the way the "only" and the "all" interact in that quotation.
JustArts: What pleasure do you get from teaching English in college?
William Flesch: I just wrote a book on "vicarious experience," and I think that the pleasure of teaching is a version of the pleasure of writing, the pleasure of performing or telling someone to see a great movie. Part of the pleasure of liking any kind of literature or aesthetic experience is feeling something fresh when you're with someone who is encountering it for the first time. Teaching is like telling someone, "You have to read this!" or "You have to go see this!" turned into a career. But everyone feels that way. There's nothing more worth doing with your life than thinking, reading and writing. What I like to think and read and write about is literature.
JA: What were your favorite authors, poets and works at different times in your life?
WF: Embarrassing question. I'm embarrassed by how much I loved e. e. cummings in high school. The first adult novel I ever read was Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morning Star. I read a lot of Herman Wouk at the time. In a novel of his, a character decides to read James Joyce's Ulysses, which this character knows is a "difficult" book. I thought, "Oh cool!" I was in eigth or seventh grade and my father had a copy of Ulysses, so I started reading it and couldn't make head or tail of it. Still, I worked on it for about a year and a half and got something out of it. But the first poetry I ever loved was Kipling, which my father used to read aloud. I should also say that the poet who in a way changed everything for me and was the first poet I read as an adult was Wallace Stevens. He totally overcame any infatuation I would have had with cummings.
JA: Ulysses is a notoriously difficult and enigmatic book. What did you like about it?
WF: What I liked about it when I first read it was that it was "notoriously difficult and enigmatic." What I got to like about it was the sense in which it took the human experience of an ordinary person with complete sympathy and seriousness. It is a book that is appealing to adolescents because of the character Stephen Dedalus, who is a very brilliant, full-of-himself adolescent. When you first read Ulysses you're kind of disappointed to find out that he turns out not to be the hero. But in fact the hero of Ulysses is a middle-aged, ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. The sympathy and commitment which Joyce, who is himself like Stephen Dedalus, gives to Leopold and his wife Molly Bloom is something really deep and moving and extraordinary. It's not why people read Ulysses the first time. They read it for Stephen, and they read it for Joyce. What you eventually come to see is what really matters. That's what makes it a great book and not just a brilliant book. But my favorite book of all time is Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
JA: What draws you to that book?
WF: The fantastically intense and fantastically subtle description of what it's like to be a human being and what human loneliness is like and how everyone experiences that loneliness. Loneliness isn't anyone else's fault. It's how things are. I wrote an essay on Proust a long time ago that has as an epigraph, a quotation from Franz Rosenzweig: "Only the man who suffers can praise God in all his works. But all men suffer." That's what Proust is about, the way the "only" and the "all" interact in that quotation.
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