The Sizzle & The Steak: Teaching at The Sorbonne

On reality, cliché & a revelation at the techno parade

Paris, March, 2020 (photo by a fellow writer in Paris)

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Back to School

I am sitting in the shadow of a shiny metallic building at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle: Paris III. There’s a buzz saw screaming outside and construction workers yelling at each other as they clang their metallic hammers on stubborn sheets of metal.

I’ve come here to resume my autumnal teaching gig at the Sorbonne. As my forty-five students filter into a crowded room that wasn’t built to hold this many people, I’m reminded of that liminal space that exists between reality and cliché, and of the age-old dictum: sell the sizzle, not the steak.

The Sizzling Simulacrum

a culinary sketch

In many ways, teaching at the Sorbonne for the past four years has been a dream. I’ve rediscovered old classics by introducing students to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s psychological-horror classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory,” a contemporary story about the USA that’s all-the-more impressive when you realize it was written five years ago.¹ I also once taught a Cinema and Literature course, in which I used Karl Marx’s theory of alienation to study characterization in Fight Club with a group of thirty-five millennials who’d never heard of Tyler Durden. That was fun.

One of my favorite creative writing lectures is the one I give on Day 1: why are so many stories in western literature based on a central climax? The author Jane Alison’s magisterial craft book changed my writing life, debunking the tired idea that good stories, like good sex, must be about the climax:

“There’s power in a wave, its sense of beginning, midpoint, and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories. But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?”

Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode

On Day 1, we also talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s theory on the “shape of story” to better understand why we write characters in certain ways.² And because I like rules of three, I round out the lecture discussing Rick and Morty with my students, and why it’s so popular, and how Dan Harmon adapted the “hero journey” structure explored in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of One Thousand Faces to inform his own groundbreaking “story circle” theory.³  

Ah yes, we’ve been through it all, me and my creative writing students, braving the drafty co-ed corridors and seasonal colds and student strikes (+ faculty strikes, too) to study the wisdom of Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood and dozens more, Steering the Craft with Ursula K. Le Guin through stormy administrative waters, inventing new worlds beneath the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs of white-walled rooms.

But alas, these words are becoming hyperbole, and like I tell my students, we must avoid tumbling towards cliché. I’m becoming unreliable and, with terms like intradiegetic narrator, obtuse. I’ve concerned myself with the Show of teaching at the Sorbonne, not the Tell, in hopes that I can prove to you that I’m worthy of this conversation. I’ve only been interested in the ideal, not the reality, and while the sizzle sounds nice, the sizzle has no calories. So what about the steak?  

The Raw Reality

The French philosopher Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) was a major influence of the May ‘68 Student Revolution

And now, a shameful admission: I’ve been selling you a sizzle that has no steak. I don’t teach at the Sorbonne—not technically, at least, not if you’re thinking of the hallowed University of Paris that was founded in the 12th century. Go ahead. Call me a fraud. Just know that that Sorbonne no longer exists.