NON-FICTION text, as this usually shuts down students with different responses, I approached our panel discussion with similar caution. Yet not every panelist taught literature and shared my pedagogical concerns. Should they, too, have been expected to approach our panel discussions pedagogically and not just as readers? In a broader sense, was there a distinct role for the literary scholar and critic in this kind of programming? The Function of the Literary Critic at the Present Time
This question remained unresolved for me through our third and last panel discussion. Even as the tensions became easier to navigate by that final community dialogue, as we offered one another frank feedback on what kind of academic language was difficult to access and what kinds of expectations we might share (or not) about how to convey our responses to the novel fruitfully to readers attending the panels. The composition of the panels also changed, with different colleagues serving on each one. Since I participated in all three, I was able to observe the dynamic change as different people brought fresh energy and insight to our conversation. I was asked to interview Lahiri herself at one of the public interviews, to be held at Seattle Central Community College, a great privilege
yet retained their complexity, whether I was fairly representing the concerns that had come up in so many of the conversations I’d had, and whether the questions were prefaced with enough (but not too much) context in terms of where they came from. Backstage, I clutched some notes and my well-worn copy of The Namesake, little yellow post-it notes fanning out crazily to mark significant passage that I might refer to as needed. Lahiri seemed nice, and there was something about her hip, knee-high leather boots and neatly done hair that seemed reassuring—like I wasn’t the only one who had dressed with carefulness for the occasion. We chatted a bit before being introduced and going onstage. It was not until we were seated on stage under the bright lights and I had asked my first few questions that I realized the disconnect between the Pulitzer prize-winning author I was interviewing and me, the literary critic. The gap can be conveyed best by Lahiri’s responses two particular questions I asked. One of the novel’s richest points of interest for many of the readers I’d talked to (and for my own group of fellow panelists) was the conflicted relationship that Nikhil has with his girlfriend Maxine’s parents, Gerald and Lydia. On the one hand, he prefers them in some ways to his own, yet their interest in him is fraught with a kind of exoticization of his Indianness. This is not to dismiss
“I was ashamed to even suggest that I identified with the Ganguli’s experience and appreciated Lahiri’s portrayal of it, given the dominant unsympathetic reaction to the Gangulis narrative in our group.” after having engaged so closely with colleagues and community members to analyze and appreciate Lahiri’s novel. The interview questions that I prepared grew out of those months of collaboration, conversation, argument, and analysis, the product of focused and sustained discussions of The Namesake. In short, I arrived at the interview after having participated in a rich, intellectually and emotionally rigorous dialogue with scholars, activists, and other members of my community. The questions I had prepared I regarded as no less than the fruits of an intense and collaborative labor of love, refined and revised through numerous interactions with fellow readers. I was nervous about meeting Lahiri, as I had been preparing for this very public conversation for some time. I worried about the wording of my questions—whether I had made them accessible
Gerald and Lydia altogether, but rather to point out the complexities of Nikhil’s interaction with them relative to his own parents and the cultural differences between the two families. In all of the conversations I had with readers about this tension, not once did anyone deny that it existed. Certainly, some readers were more ready to judge Maxine and her parents than others— sometimes for cultural insensitivity and ignorance, sometimes for racism—but no one denied that there was something of interest there. I was stunned by Lahiri’s response to a question I asked about how and why she chose to portray this very interesting conflict the way that she did. She replied that she does not judge her characters—that she gets to know them by walking with them, seeing life through their eyes, but she does not judge them. When I pressed her a bit on how she chose to portray the social issues that
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