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Tina Srebotnjak: I think all know in this room is simply a spectacular writer. His first
novel "*** Suicides" was published to much acclaim in 1993, and it continues to captivate
new readers. And it was also made into a terrific film by Sofia Coppola. He followed that book
in 2002 with "Middlesex", a lyrical romp of a book about a hermaphrodite, and the book
landed him the Pulitzer Prize as well as, I guess, a place on Oprah's couch and her
reading club, not to be sneezed at, and now, finally comes his much awaited new novel "The
Marriage Plot," which is of course, fabulous as you might expect. "The Marriage Plot" opens
on graduation day at Brown University in 1982, and it follows three students, Madeleine,
lover of Victorian novels and the two men who love her. And so, to give us a taste of
the book, please welcome Jeffrey Eugenides.
[applause]
Jeffrey Eugenides: Thank you, thanks, thank you, it's great to be in Toronto again. Toronto
occupies a kind of mythic place in my family history because my father had a boat built
here when I was about nine or 10 years old and the whole family travelled to pick up
the boat and sail it. That was the idea that we were going to sail it back to Detroit and
we... My father had been in the navy, he knew something about boats but the rest of us did
not, and we went out into the lake and a huge squall appeared and finally, we were lost
in the lake overnight, and all retching over the sides of the... And we got so worried
that we actually tried to find out, we started reading what is a distress signal and we have
to call distress and we read in the book that you're supposed to put your flag upside down,
hang it upside down, and we didn't have a flag so we searched around. We finally found
this tiny little flag, we put it upside down, it's like a postage stamp size, people on
the shore started to see us and my mother did these...
[laughter]
JE: That's distress as well, and they just... People just looked at us oddly, but we survived.
But I always remember Toronto in that way so I'm glad that I'm back here under more
fortunate circumstances today. I wanted to dedicate this reading to my publicist today,
Dan Sharp, who's getting married in 11 days. Dan, it wasn't a plot in your case but I wish
you the best. I'm just going to read a little bit about Madeleine and Leonard. Madeleine
is the heroine of the book and she's falling in love with Leonard Bankhead and she's also
reading "A Lover's Discourse" by Roland Barthes, and Roland... She's hoping to emancipate herself
from her romantic illusions but at the same time she's falling in love with Leonard, so
it's not really working out terribly well. And I have a few quotes from Roland Barthes
in here. I hope you can tell when it's Roland Barthes and not me.
JE: They're italicized, it's hard to speak in italics [laughter], but I will try. And
if you think it's me and it's Roland Barthes, that's fine by me actually, 'cause I like
Roland Barthes. The first quote though, is from him and it is, "The necessity for this
book is to be found in the following consideration, that the lover's discourse is today of an
extreme solitude."
JE: It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first
moment she'd seen him. She hadn't even known him then, and so what she'd felt was only
*** attraction, not love. Even after they'd gone out for coffee, she couldn't say that
what she was feeling was anything more than infatuation. But ever since the night when
they went back to Leonard's place, after watching Amarcord and started fooling around, when
Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, the way she often was
with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she'd spent the
entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off.
JE: Worrying that her body wasn't good enough or that her breath was bad from the Caesar
Salad she'd unwisely ordered at dinner. Worrying too, about having suggested they order Martinis
because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, "Sure, Martinis. We can pretend we're
Salinger characters." After having had as a consequence of all this anxiety pretty much
no *** pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they'd put together. And
after Leonard, like every guy, had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lay awake stroking
his head and vaguely hoping she didn't get a urinary tract infection.
[laughter]
JE: Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she'd just spent the whole night worrying
wasn't in fact a sure-fire sign that she was falling in love. And certainly after they'd
spent the next three days at Leonard's place, having sex and eating pizza, after she'd relaxed
enough to be able to come at least once in a while and finally to stop worrying so much
about having an *** because her hunger for Leonard was in some way, satisfied by
his satisfaction. After she'd allowed herself to sit naked on his gross couch and to walk
to the bathroom knowing he was staring at her imperfect ***, to root for food in his
disgusting refrigerator, to read the brilliant half-page of philosophy paper sticking up
out of the typewriter, and to hear him pee with Taurine force into the toilet bowl. Certainly,
by the end of those three days, Madeleine knew she was in love. [laughter] But that
didn't mean she had to tell anyone, especially Leonard.
JE: Leonard Bankhead had a studio apartment on the third floor of a low-rent student building.
The halls were full of bikes and junk mail. Stickers decorated the other tenants' doors:
A fluorescent marijuana leaf, a silkscreen Blondie. Leonard's door however, was as blank
as the apartment inside. In the middle of the room, a twin mattress lay beside a plastic
milk crate, supporting a reading lamp. There was no desk, no bookcase, not even a table,
only the nasty couch with the typewriter on another milk crate in front of it. There was
nothing on the walls but bits of masking tape, and in one corner, a small portrait of Leonard
done in pencil. The drawing showed Leonard as George Washington, wearing a tricorn hat
and sheltering under a blanket at Valley Forge. The caption read, "You go. I like it here."
Madeleine thought the handwriting looked feminine.
JE: A ficus tree endured in one corner. Leonard moved it into the sun whenever he remember
to. Madeleine, taking pity on the tree, began to water it until she caught Leonard looking
at her one day, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. "What?" she said. "Nothing." "Come on, what?"
"You're watering my tree." "The soil's dry." "You're taking care of my tree?" She stopped
doing it after that.
JE: There was a tiny kitchen where Leonard brewed and reheated the gallon of coffee he
drank every day. A big, greasy wok sat on the stove. The most Leonard did in the way
of preparing a meal, however, was to pour Grape-Nuts into the wok, with raisins. [chuckle]
Raisins satisfy his fruit requirement. The apartment had a message. The message said,
"I am an orphan." Madeleine's roommates, Abby and Olivia, asked her what she and Leonard
did together and she never had an answer. They didn't do anything. She came to his apartment,
and they lay down on the mattress, and Leonard asked her how she was doing, really wanting
to know. What did they do? She talked, he listened then he talked, and she listened.
She'd never met anyone, and certainly not a guy, who was so receptive, who took everything
in. She guessed that Leonard's shrink-like manner came from years of seeing shrinks himself.
JE: And though, another of her rules was to never date guys who went to shrinks, Madeleine
began to reconsider this prohibition. Back home, she and her sister had a phrase for
serious, emotional talks. They called it "having a heavy." If a boy approached during one,
the girls would look up and give warning, "We're having a heavy." And the boy would
retreat until it was over, until the heavy had passed. Going out with Leonard was like
having a heavy all the time. Whenever she was with him, Leonard gave her his full attention.
He didn't stare into her eyes or smother her the way Billy had, but he made it clear he
was available. He offered little advice, only listened and murmured reassuringly.
JE: People often fell in love with their shrinks, didn't they? That was called transference
and was to be avoided. But what if you were already sleeping with your shrink? What if
your shrink's couch was already a bed? And plus, it wasn't all heavy, the heavies. Leonard
was funny, he told hilarious stories in a deadpan voice. His head sank into his shoulders,
his eyes filled with rue as his sentences drawled on. Listening to Leonard, Madeleine
felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She'd never wondered why she acted the way
she did or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled
her powers of observation, whereas Leonard noticed every little thing. For instance,
they spent a weekend on Cape Cod and as they were driving back, Leonard said, "What do
you do? Just hold it?" "What?" "You just hold it for two days, until you get back home?"
JE: As this meaning seeped in, she said, "I can't believe you." "You have never ever taken
a dump in my presence, Madeleine." "In your presence?" "When I am present, or nearby."
"What's wrong with that?" "What's wrong with it? Nothing. If you're talking about I sleep
over and go off to class the next morning and then you go and take a dump, that's understandable.
But when we spend two, almost three days together, eating surf and turf, and you do not take
a dump the entire time, I can only conclude that you are more than a little ***."
[laughter]
JE: "So what? It's embarrassing", Madeleine said, "Okay, I find it embarrassing." Leonard
stared to her without expression and said, "Do you mind when I take a dump?" "Do we have
to talk about this? It's sort of gross." "I think we do need to talk about it", Leonard
said, "Because you're obviously not very relaxed around me. And I am, or thought I was, your
boyfriend, and that means or should mean that I'm the person you're most relaxed around.
Leonard equals maximum relaxation."
[laughter]
JE: Guys weren't supposed to be the talkers. Guys weren't supposed to get you to open up,
but this guy was. This guy did. He said he was her boyfriend too. He'd made it official.
"I'll try to be more relaxed," Madeleine said, "if it'll make you happy. But in terms of
excretion, don't get your hopes up."
[laughter]
JE: "This isn't for me," Leonard said, "This is for Mr. Lower Intestine. This is for Mr.
Duodenum."
JE: Even though this kind of amateur therapy didn't exactly work, after that last conversation
for instance, Madeleine had more, not less, trouble going "number two" if Leonard was
within a mile. It affected Madeleine deeply. Leonard was examining her closely. She felt
handled in the right way like something precious or immensely fascinating. It made her happy
to think about how much he thought about her.
JE: By the end of April, Madeleine and Leonard had gotten into a routine of spending every
single night together. On weeknights after Madeleine finished studying, she headed over
to the Biology lab where she'd find Leonard staring at slides with two grad students.
After she finally got Leonard to leave the lab, Madeleine didn't have to cajole him into
sleeping at her place. At first, Leonard had liked staying at the Narragansett. He liked
the ornate moldings and the view from her bedroom. He charmed Olivia and Abby by making
pancakes on Sunday mornings. But soon, Leonard began to complain that they always stayed
at Madeleine's place and that he never got to wake up in his own bed.
JE: Staying at Leonard's place however, required Madeleine to bring a fresh set of clothes
each night and since he didn't like her to leave clothes at his place, and to be honest,
she didn't like too, either, because whatever she left picked up a fusty smell. Madeleine
had to carry her dirty clothes around the classes all day. She preferred sleeping at
her own apartment where she could use her own shampoo, conditioner and loofah, and where
it was clean sheet day every Wednesday. Leonard never changed his sheets. They were a disturbing
gray color. Dust ball clung to the edges of the mattress. One morning, Madeleine was horrified
to see a calligraphic smear of blood that had leaked from her three weeks earlier, a
stain sheet attack with a kitchen sponge while Leonard was sleeping.
JE: "You never wash your sheets," she complained. "I wash them," Leonard said evenly. "How often?"
"When they get dirty." "They're always dirty." [laughter] "Not every one can drop off their
laundry at the cleaners every week, Madeleine. Not everybody grew up with Clean Sheet Day."
"You don't have to drop them off," Madeleine said, undeterred. "You got a washer in the
basement."
JE: "I use the washer," Leonard said, "Just not every Wednesday. I don't equate dirt with
death and decay." "Oh and I do? I'm obsessed with death because I wash my sheets? People's
attitudes to cleanliness have a lot to do with their fear of death. This isn't about
death, Leonard. This is about crumbs in the bed. This is about the fact that your pillows
smells like a liverwurst sandwich." "Wrong." "It does." "Wrong." "Smell it, Leonard." "It's
salami. I don't like liverwurst."
[laughter]
JE: To a certain extent this kind of arguing was fun, but then came nights when Madeleine
forgot to pack a change of clothes, and Leonard accused her of doing this on purpose in order
to force him to sleep at her place. Next, more worryingly, came nights when Leonard
said he was going home to study and would see her tomorrow. He began pulling all-nighters.
One of his philosophy professors offered Leonard the use of his cabin in the Berkshires and
for an entire rainy weekend, Leonard went there alone to write a paper on Fichte, returning
with a typescript 123 pages long and wearing a bright orange hunter's vest. The vest became
his favourite item of clothing. He wore it all the time.
JE: He started finishing Madeleine sentences, as if her mind was too slow, as if he couldn't
wait for her to gather her thoughts. He riffed on the things she said, going off on strange
tangents, making puns. Whenever she told him he needed to get some sleep, he got angry
and didn't call her for days. And it was during this period, that Madeleine fully understood
how the lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because
it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person
you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.
JE: The more Leonard pulled away, the more anxious Madeleine became. The more desperate
she became, the more Leonard pulled away. She told herself to act cool. She went to
the library to work on her marriage plot thesis, but the sex fantasy atmosphere, the reading
room eye contact, the beckoning stacks made her desperate to see Leonard. And so, against
her will, her feet began leading her back across campus through the darkness to the
Biology department. Up to the last moment, Madeleine had the crazy hope that this expression
of weakness might in fact be strength. It was a brilliant strategy because it lacked
all strategy. It involved no games, only sincerity. Seeing such sincerity, how could Leonard fail
to respond? She was almost happy as she came up behind the lab table and tapped Leonard
on the shoulder, and her happiness lasted until he turned around with a look not of
love, but of annoyance.
JE: It didn't help that it was spring. Everyday people seemed more and more unclothed. The
magnolia trees budding on the green looked positively inflamed. They sent out a perfume
that drifted through the windows of Semiotics to 11. The magnolia trees hadn't read Roland
Barthes. They didn't think love was a mental state. The magnolias insisted it was natural,
perennial.
JE: On a beautiful, warm May day, Madeleine showered, shaved her legs with extra care
and put on her first spring dress; an apple green baby doll dress with a bib collar and
a high hem. Her bare legs toned from a winter of squash playing were pale but smooth. She
kept her glasses on, left her hair loose and walked over to Leonard's apartment on Planet
Street. On the way, she stopped at a market to buy a hunk of cheese, some *** Wheat
Thins and a bottle of Valpolicella. Coming down the hill from Benefit, toward South Main,
she felt the warm breeze between her thighs. The front door of Leonard's building was propped
open with a brick so she went up to his apartment and knocked. Leonard opened the door. He looked
like he'd been napping. "Nice dress," he said.
JE: They never made it to the park. They picnicked on each other. As Leonard pulled her toward
the mattress, Madeleine dropped her package, hoping the wine bottle didn't break. She slipped
her dress over her head. Soon, they were naked, raiding, it felt like, a huge basket of goodies.
Madeleine lay on her stomach, her side, her back, nibbling all the treats. The nice-smelling
fruit candies, the meaty drumsticks, as well as more sophisticated offerings. The biscotti
flavoured with anise, the wrinkly truffles, the salty spoonfuls of olive tapenade. She'd
never been so busy in her life. At the same time, she felt strangely displaced, not quite
her usual tidy ego but merged with Leonard into a great big protoplasmic, ecstatic thing.
JE: She thought she'd been in love before. She knew she'd had sex before, but all those
torrid adolescent gropings, all those awkward backseat romps, the meaningful performative
summer nights with her high school boyfriend, Jim McManus, even the tender sessions with
Billy, where he insisted they look into each other's eyes as they came. None of that prepared
her for the wallop, the all-consuming pleasure of this. Leonard was kissing her. When she
could bear no more, Madeleine grabbed him savagely by his ears. She'd pulled Leonard's
head away and held it still to show him the evidence of how she felt. She was crying now.
In a hoarse voice edged with something else, a sense of peril, Madeleine said,"I love you."
JE: Leonard stared back at her. His eyebrows twitched. Suddenly, he rolled sideways off
the mattress. He stood up and walked naked across the room. Crouching, he reached into
her bag and pulled out "A Lover's Discourse", from the pocket where she always kept it.
He flipped the pages until he found the one he wanted then he returned to the bed and
handed the book to her. "I love you. Je t'aime. I love you." As she read these words, Madeleine
was flooded with happiness. She glanced up at Leonard smiling. With his finger, he motioned
for her to keep going. The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal,
but to the repeated utterance of the love cry. Suddenly, Madeleine's happiness diminished,
usurped by the feeling of peril. She wished she weren't naked. She narrowed her shoulders
and covered herself with the bed sheet as she obediently read on. Once the first avowal
has been made, "I love you" has no meaning whatever. Leonard, squatting, had a smirk
on his face. It was then that Madeleine threw the book at his head. Thank you.
[laughter]
[applause]
TS: And don't we all say, "Well done, Madeleine!" Wouldn't we all have done the same thing?
I'd like to start, I mentioned in the introduction that the book opens on graduation day, 1982
at Brown University or Brown College, that's where you went, and I wonder if you can give
us a sense of what was going on campus, especially in the literature department where Madeleine
is studying in a very old-fashioned kind of way, I guess, Victorian literature.
JE: Well, when I got to Brown, 1978, French theory, structuralism, de-construction-ism
was coming to America in a big way and it caused a kind of rift in the English department.
I was an English major and you had certain professors who were continuing to teach the
way they taught for 30 years, kind of ageing, new critics, old, new critics, and then you
had people who were becoming semioticians, and they wanted to use an entirely different
methodology. So the one faction distrusted... They both distrusted each other and finally,
the semioticians decamped from the English department and created the program in semiotic
studies. So, if you were at Brown when I was there, it was like being the child of divorcing
parents. You didn't know which one you should have allegiance to, and so you had kind of
allegiance to both of them. But that was what was going on intellectually in the world that
I orbited in.
TS: Now, can you give us a dummy's guide to semiotics? For those of us who just are maybe
not as conversant as we could be.
JE: Semiotics... What? There's a strange noise coming from there. [chuckle] Is that a tape
recorder? No. Oh, so okay. It's a squeaky little thing. [laughter] Semiotics is the
study of underlying structures of any system, so it began as an anthropological term to
try to figure out commonalities between cultures, cross-culturally, and then it began... They
started applying it to different disciplines. In literature, the easiest way to understand
it, there's actually a funny joke. What do you get when you cross a semiotician and a
godfather and a Mafioso?
TS: What?
JE: An offer you can't understand. [laughter] Something like that. I'll give you an example
of how a semiotician would examine, let's say, Romeo and Juliet. Instead of looking
at Romeo and Juliet and discussing the language or maybe the historical context or any questions
about the feuding families, a semiotician would look at Romeo and Juliet and think of
all the other love stories that exist, all the way up to West Side Story, and find what
the commonalities are between all of these stories. So they all have at their hearts
some kind of problem like the parents forbid them to wed, and if you were a strict semiotician
you would actually see no difference between West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet, even
though one of them obviously has singing and dancing in it and one does not. [chuckle]
But that's how they would look at it. It's more that way.
JE: So, and if you take it further and you get to deconstruction, the idea is that every
text contains internal contradictions that render it meaningless or render it incapable
of transmitting meaning. So I could go out to Brown, I wanted to be a writer already
and they were telling me the author was dead, and I was not even alive hardly yet and I
didn't want the author to die, and they were telling me that you couldn't write books that
would have any meaning. So I was attracted to the thought, but I was also depressed by
the thought and I've continued to be of two minds on the subject, and a book like The
Marriage Plot comes out of that struggle intellectually, though it's not a book by any means about
literary theory, I can see some really troubled books, [laughter] but actually no, 'cause
you can see from what I wrote in the book.
TS: It's actually, it's not at all and the take on semiotics is very amusing, although
respectful in many other ways too. But it did strike me that semiotics might have ruined
Madeleine's love life then. Or at least because she falls in love with Leonard at the exact
time when all of this stuff is happening on campus, so her very old-fashioned view of
how one falls in love and that kind of narrative that she has for her life is challenged in
a way by these big ideas that are going around on campus.
JE: Well, this book began not on page one, but on page 19, the sentence, "Madeleine's
love troubles began at the time when the French theory she was reading de-constructed the
very notion of love." It was that predicament of someone trying to emancipate herself from
her romantic illusions, at the same time as she was falling in love that appealed to me,
because the struggle between her head and her heart was where the book began.
TS: Yeah, and she is, as I say, studying Victorian literature. She's so in love with the narrative
and it struck me, I luckily missed semiotics. I was before your time, so we just read literature
as if it was just literature. And it did strike me that don't people have a continual need
for narrative? I mean, really, semi... All that stuff aside, isn't that, doesn't that
continue to be what people long for when they're reading?
JE: Well, Madeleine sneaks off after the semiotics seminars into the B level of the basement
just to read some little narrative, as though it's a wicked kind of vice and that comes
from my own life, because I studied with Gilbert Sorrentino, who was a brilliant writer and
a very strong, strict postmodernist. He believed that there were no stories left to write,
that every narrative possibility had been exhausted, so hence, you shouldn't even try.
And he was a very captivating man and had read everything and so, when I was studying
under him, I tried to appease him or satisfy him with my stories which were postmodern
and experimental, but I also tried to sneak in narrative in ways I could because I always
have liked narrative. I started out writing poetry, but finally chose fiction because
of the hook of the narrative was too great for me to resist, so I've continued in that
way.
TS: "The Marriage Plot", which is the title of the book, also, Madeleine's doing her final
paper on the sort of the state of the marriage plot and one of the professors in the book
suggests that the marriage plot has destroyed the novel. How so?
JE: Well, the easiest way is to read that passage if you want me to, but...
TS: Sure. Do you know where it is?
JE: It's pretty close in. The idea is that, the marriage plot is the foundational plot
of the novel in a sense, from Jane Austen, and... I probably won't find it that easily.
Here it is.
JE: In Saunders's opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had
never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended
on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write
about. The great epic sang of war, the novel of marriage. *** equality, good for women,
had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter
whom Emma married if she could file for separation later?
[laughter]
JE: How would Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence
of a pre-nup? [laughter] As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn't mean much anymore
and neither did the novel."
JE: And it goes on like that so I put that... I've had thoughts like that, and I understand
that they are reactionary, so I put it into the mouth of her dear old professor who's
a little bit close-minded, but who has a point to make...
TS: Yeah, he does.
JE: And one that I felt myself.
TS: A good point.