Hutton Honors College

In this, the third of my columns for our revised Honors College Web site, I shall offer some confessions which have never before been revealed in print.

Despite my many years in the classroom, I am always nervous in the days preceding any new semester's teaching. Such stage fright takes the form of many restless nights in the week or two before the start of classes, and is always accompanied by nightmares which typically place me in the position of teaching a text (a play, a poem, a novel) I have never read or which I do not understand in the least—for example Joyce's Ulysses. In such dreams, students usually are quite outspoken in their criticism of me ("hey, why are we paying for your course anyway"?), and they applaud heartily when one of my learned colleagues enters the class to save the day and presumably to redeem the course from fifteen weeks of bumbling ignorance and chaos. Indeed, these dreams about my own shortcomings have often inspired me to teach several demanding works over the past years, including Ulysses—although I have yet to tackle Finnegan's Wake in the classroom, despite anxious dreams in which that text is the centerpiece of my syllabus.

As I grow older and more experienced and perhaps jaded, I no longer, as I did years ago, look forward to grading my students' papers. Simply reading them for edification and class discussion is another matter, and I do learn a great deal from such an activity. But to have to assign a grade and to explain in written and oral detail just how a given essay could be improved has lost its charm. I often think enviously about the way in which Robert Frost, during his two-week visit to Amherst College and to my sophomore literature class, assigned and collected papers. On the day when the papers were due (I had written on Shelley, a poet Frost especially admired), Frost asked for the papers, but with one important caveat: only those students who were convinced that their papers were worth the poet's time in reading them should hand them in. As I recall, only one student out of a class of 25 was gutsy or foolish enough to submit his essay to Frost.

Years ago, having recently arrived at IU, I was teaching a course to freshmen in Morrison Hall 007, the worst lecture hall in Bloomington. I strode upon the stage (I was lecturing on Crime and Punishment) when I spied a student in the ninth or tenth row reading the IDS. Filled with frustration, and much like Raskolnikov, losing all control, I picked up a stick of chalk and winged it hard and accurately. The hall grew amazingly quiet, and I realized that I may have opened up a good deal more than a piece of skin on the forehead of one of my students. Whether I was clever or merely desperate and young, I ordered the bleeding student to see me immediately after class. As we met on stage, I told him in a bold, authoritative voice that I would not report him to the Dean of Students for his inexcusable behavior if he would not, in turn, report me. I was lucky. As it happened, the wounded student emerged as one of the top students in that class, and we became friends for many years to come, but I would not advise such a way of winning friends and influencing people.

Finally, let me confess to a major hoax. I was teaching Nabokov's dazzling Chinese puzzle of a novel, Pale Fire, and decided to enliven my L202 class by inviting an ersatz-Nabokov to visit (this event took place in the 70's, when Nabokov was very much alive). The book is filled with its own hoaxes, jocoserious twists and turns, in a universe where appearance and reality constantly interpenetrate and change places. My "Nabokov" was a seasoned IU philosophy professor whose penchant for tricks and whose eastern European accent fit the role perfectly. And so "Nabokov" visited my class, spoke at length in a language of vacuous profundity (e.g. "always the illusion is grounded in reality; always the truth is the handmaiden of fiction"), until as the plot of Pale Fire would have it, the author was shot by a mad assassin (I had borrowed a stage pistol from the Theatre Department and had convinced an English Department colleague to pull the trigger). The noise of the report was louder than I had hoped, but as "Nabokov" slumped to the desk, I snatched his briefcase and yelled on cue, "but his new manuscript is safe with me." I raced out of the classroom and headed for the ground floor of Ballantine worrying that the campus police would greet me on my return. Instead, there was "Nabokov" signing my students' books (and with his own name, George Nakhnikian). I have good reason to believe that there are students (some in Honors), now alums, who still do not realize that Nabokov was not Nabokov or that they were themselves active participants in fanning the pale fire that is the inextinguishable, incandescent domain of storytelling.