Thoughts on Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean
I have so much to say about this book. It remains one of the few books I have read for pleasure that I’ve taken notes for. I went into Tam Lin knowing that it was polarising, hearing some people who hated it and others who loved it passionately. I can see both sides evenly, but after some mulling, I must place myself in the latter camp. I’ve heard some people bring up that the dialogue is too erudite, too unbelievable to be realistic for college students-and to this, I disagree-I’ve met peers who quote Shakespeare ruthlessly and namedrop philosophers and scholars and speak in verse as part of their every day vocabulary. (Though, I did think Robin and Nick were a bit too outlandish to be true, but there did turn out to be a good reason for that!) I’ve also heard that some people find the countless references to a) a liberal arts education and b) a number of classical and classic texts are both unnecessary, condescending, frustrating and infuriating.
I have a theory about this, which also remains my single big gripe about Tam Lin: it’s not a traditional, or carefully plotted narrative. Pamela Dean mentions this on the back flap of the Firebird edition I’m reading: “Tam Lin was a rusher-off.” Written technically in tight-third, the first half of the book seems more like a diary-the excruciating details of college life, down to every class, literary work, assignment, play, conversation, and walk in the woods. I don’t exaggerate. If you are bored by reading someone’s diary of daily life, then yes, you will find the book laborious and plodding. Janet mentions everything from the housing lottery to the spoiled squirrels on campus, the geography of the buildings and dining hall food. Her thoughts about the syllabi. The draft you catch passing a certain building. They’re Janet’s thoughts, Janet’s questions, and Janet’s opinions, Janet’s musings on life and love-and if you don’t like Janet, well, then… you get the idea.
(Part of me stamped my foot and wished Pamela Dean had attended college ten years later than she did, after Clifford Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures, in 1973. The book marked the beginning of a literary era in anthropology. Every time Janet said anthropologists couldn’t write, I twitched-because in my opinion, some of the best writing is done by ethnographers today. I do concede to the fact that some of those old monographs are super dull. But João Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, for instance, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. And oddly enough, to the same readers who find the first bits of Tam Lin too detailed: it will provide a great source to the anthropologists of the future, if they ever want to read about someone’s experience at a liberal arts college!)
Most novels are one-sided conversations. And most novels should be-we read them for the experience the author creates for us. However, it made much more sense for me to ENGAGE with Tam Lin, and join Janet in conversation, as if she were an actual person. Question her and chase after her ideas, even the ones that the she dismisses. That being said, you do need a fair amount of pre-existing knowledge in order to keep up on a first read. I’ve read a good chunk of the texts Dean makes references to, but certainly not all of them-thanks largely to Columbia’s core. I laughed at “What do you want to take Euripedes for? Isn’t he the fellow who invented the deus ex machina?” and “She had a way of looking at you as if you’d just sold Athens out to the Persians,” because I’ve read Medea and the Histories. I’ve struggled with Aeschuylus’s vague and incomprehensible verses. I know that Lysistrata is full of filthy, filthy jokes. I wasn’t particularly a huge fan of how these texts were imparted in the form of the book, but I appreciated it as one appreciates a well-read friend: a) it gave me suggestions of what to read-I really want to try The Lady’s Not For Burning now-and b) it shows what effect books and literature can have on our lives. But I agree, not everyone will like layering of texts, and people who have not read them may as well be as frustrated as Christina.
I didn’t really get into the story until about half-way, at around page 270, which is around the time the diarist structure breaks down. Semesters were covered in a chapter. Seasons went by with a page. The unevenness of the pacing really bothered me, because this is where everything began to move, and it had the potential to be so BRILLIANT. In fact, I would even make a case to say that the second half was not long enough. I would have loved to read about Nick and Robin’s reactions to Janet’s father’s (who is a professor) class on the Romantics. I wished the revelation was a slow, entrancing read, not crammed into the last fifty pages-including a good chunk of the ballad-which was when nearly every plot point was quickly resolving itself. I found myself slowing my reading, not wanting it to be over too soon. I can appreciate on a holistic level that Blackstock College became, both physically and metaphorically, a fantastic new world, but with such a densely packed last half, I simply cannot justify the monograph-like first half. Even if it drops hints early on (I had guessed Medeous was the faerie queen at the first hint of her longevity).
I would have liked some more exploration into Janet and Thomas’s relationship, which seemed rushed compared to the two-thirds of the book Janet and Nick were ‘together’. With some more development, it could have been a really poignant romance. I especially loved this line: “Thomas was the only person she could think of who would really understand the small shiftings of unspoken thought and feeling, minor tremors that might suddenly expand into an earthquake,” which is ironically what I wanted from their interaction (394).
Tam Lin is ultimately about womanhood. I thought Dean was so clever to use pregnancy and the setting of second-wave feminism at a liberal arts college to bring the ballad to life. This is a time when you really see the ‘female’ binary breaking down. I saw it in Crime and Punishment, in Rigoletto, in practically every book I’ve read for school, that the prominent female characters are either virgins or whores. This is one of the reasons why I love strong female characters, and why I love the ballad of Tam Lin, because it subverts this notion and then some. I mused for an extra moment when Janet asked herself why the women in comedies always seemed more real than the women in tragedies. I will never forget juxtaposing Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro against David McVicar’s production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore-and perhaps this is why I will always appreciate opera buffa over opera seria.
I will also never forget the passage where Janet muses against the roles women are forced to play in history-their child out of wedlock will be a bastard, and they will, of course, commit suicide in shame-compared to the options she has today. She’s lucky to have contraceptives, alternatives, and parents who support her her decision. Thomas, too. And Christina and Molly (but I will get to them later). Her pregnancy becomes a crucial plot point-a feature of salvation, not death. It allows her to discern the truth, looking up Robin, Rob’s and Nick’s names in old books and finally beginning to realise what they are. It marks the beginning of the puzzle’s solution. It ultimately is a result of agency. Janet chooses to have sex with Thomas, she chooses to save him, she chooses to keep the baby. She plans her own future, peripherially aware that she has ‘ruined’ herself, to finish her degree, and to wait to get married.
I also loved all the other female characters-there was such a variety-from Peg (one plot point that didn’t get resolved) to Nora, from Christina to Melinda Wolfe (whom I’m still intrigued by!), I love Christina and Molly actually. These are all shades of woman, ones that want to be doctors and marine biologists and English graduate students. Ones who will stay true to a broken man in efforts to help heal him (Molly) and ones who will walk away, knowing that it will hurt, but they’ve had enough (Janet). This lovely spectrum of female characters might have come at the cost of the male ones, but whatever, we have had enough of the male-spectrum books in Western canon.
On a more self-centered note, Janet reminds me a lot of myself. I’m certainly not as well-read in the classics as she is, but she’s confident, introspective and insightful. She deals with people the way I do, quiet but with resolve, firm, sometimes impatient, sometimes unfair. I liked her conversation with Thomas about Nick. I also like how Dean wrote in what a snob she could be to Christina, because sometimes I catch myself doing that. But Janet is always thinking, reading, self-assessing. She’s also funny: “I’d hate bad prose whether I was mad at Nick or about to marry him…All right, All right, I might hate it but I wouldn’t yell at you about it” (381).
I like the book because it both describes and nearly provides a simulation of what college would be like-it brings forth lots of interesting ideas in literature and philosophy to muse upon. The same problem is that Janet, like Pamela Dean, is just one person’s perspective, which will never perfectly capture the multitude of opinions and experiences that one becomes exposed to at a liberal arts college. Still, I think it does an admirable job, and while some characters may be exaggerated, their spirit is true. College-hat time between adolescence and adulthood, at least in the US-is a fun and exciting time in life, where we get a sort of pseudo-independence that leads to all sorts of possibilities. The story, despite some major structuring issues, was amazing. I almost wish more authors wrote fantasy fiction set in colleges, but Tam Lin, at the very least, is begging for a re-read.
Now that I've written this all out, part of me is wondering if I should revise some of it and submit it as a proposal to Sirens next year. Hum.
I have a theory about this, which also remains my single big gripe about Tam Lin: it’s not a traditional, or carefully plotted narrative. Pamela Dean mentions this on the back flap of the Firebird edition I’m reading: “Tam Lin was a rusher-off.” Written technically in tight-third, the first half of the book seems more like a diary-the excruciating details of college life, down to every class, literary work, assignment, play, conversation, and walk in the woods. I don’t exaggerate. If you are bored by reading someone’s diary of daily life, then yes, you will find the book laborious and plodding. Janet mentions everything from the housing lottery to the spoiled squirrels on campus, the geography of the buildings and dining hall food. Her thoughts about the syllabi. The draft you catch passing a certain building. They’re Janet’s thoughts, Janet’s questions, and Janet’s opinions, Janet’s musings on life and love-and if you don’t like Janet, well, then… you get the idea.
(Part of me stamped my foot and wished Pamela Dean had attended college ten years later than she did, after Clifford Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures, in 1973. The book marked the beginning of a literary era in anthropology. Every time Janet said anthropologists couldn’t write, I twitched-because in my opinion, some of the best writing is done by ethnographers today. I do concede to the fact that some of those old monographs are super dull. But João Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, for instance, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. And oddly enough, to the same readers who find the first bits of Tam Lin too detailed: it will provide a great source to the anthropologists of the future, if they ever want to read about someone’s experience at a liberal arts college!)
Most novels are one-sided conversations. And most novels should be-we read them for the experience the author creates for us. However, it made much more sense for me to ENGAGE with Tam Lin, and join Janet in conversation, as if she were an actual person. Question her and chase after her ideas, even the ones that the she dismisses. That being said, you do need a fair amount of pre-existing knowledge in order to keep up on a first read. I’ve read a good chunk of the texts Dean makes references to, but certainly not all of them-thanks largely to Columbia’s core. I laughed at “What do you want to take Euripedes for? Isn’t he the fellow who invented the deus ex machina?” and “She had a way of looking at you as if you’d just sold Athens out to the Persians,” because I’ve read Medea and the Histories. I’ve struggled with Aeschuylus’s vague and incomprehensible verses. I know that Lysistrata is full of filthy, filthy jokes. I wasn’t particularly a huge fan of how these texts were imparted in the form of the book, but I appreciated it as one appreciates a well-read friend: a) it gave me suggestions of what to read-I really want to try The Lady’s Not For Burning now-and b) it shows what effect books and literature can have on our lives. But I agree, not everyone will like layering of texts, and people who have not read them may as well be as frustrated as Christina.
I didn’t really get into the story until about half-way, at around page 270, which is around the time the diarist structure breaks down. Semesters were covered in a chapter. Seasons went by with a page. The unevenness of the pacing really bothered me, because this is where everything began to move, and it had the potential to be so BRILLIANT. In fact, I would even make a case to say that the second half was not long enough. I would have loved to read about Nick and Robin’s reactions to Janet’s father’s (who is a professor) class on the Romantics. I wished the revelation was a slow, entrancing read, not crammed into the last fifty pages-including a good chunk of the ballad-which was when nearly every plot point was quickly resolving itself. I found myself slowing my reading, not wanting it to be over too soon. I can appreciate on a holistic level that Blackstock College became, both physically and metaphorically, a fantastic new world, but with such a densely packed last half, I simply cannot justify the monograph-like first half. Even if it drops hints early on (I had guessed Medeous was the faerie queen at the first hint of her longevity).
I would have liked some more exploration into Janet and Thomas’s relationship, which seemed rushed compared to the two-thirds of the book Janet and Nick were ‘together’. With some more development, it could have been a really poignant romance. I especially loved this line: “Thomas was the only person she could think of who would really understand the small shiftings of unspoken thought and feeling, minor tremors that might suddenly expand into an earthquake,” which is ironically what I wanted from their interaction (394).
Tam Lin is ultimately about womanhood. I thought Dean was so clever to use pregnancy and the setting of second-wave feminism at a liberal arts college to bring the ballad to life. This is a time when you really see the ‘female’ binary breaking down. I saw it in Crime and Punishment, in Rigoletto, in practically every book I’ve read for school, that the prominent female characters are either virgins or whores. This is one of the reasons why I love strong female characters, and why I love the ballad of Tam Lin, because it subverts this notion and then some. I mused for an extra moment when Janet asked herself why the women in comedies always seemed more real than the women in tragedies. I will never forget juxtaposing Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro against David McVicar’s production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore-and perhaps this is why I will always appreciate opera buffa over opera seria.
I will also never forget the passage where Janet muses against the roles women are forced to play in history-their child out of wedlock will be a bastard, and they will, of course, commit suicide in shame-compared to the options she has today. She’s lucky to have contraceptives, alternatives, and parents who support her her decision. Thomas, too. And Christina and Molly (but I will get to them later). Her pregnancy becomes a crucial plot point-a feature of salvation, not death. It allows her to discern the truth, looking up Robin, Rob’s and Nick’s names in old books and finally beginning to realise what they are. It marks the beginning of the puzzle’s solution. It ultimately is a result of agency. Janet chooses to have sex with Thomas, she chooses to save him, she chooses to keep the baby. She plans her own future, peripherially aware that she has ‘ruined’ herself, to finish her degree, and to wait to get married.
I also loved all the other female characters-there was such a variety-from Peg (one plot point that didn’t get resolved) to Nora, from Christina to Melinda Wolfe (whom I’m still intrigued by!), I love Christina and Molly actually. These are all shades of woman, ones that want to be doctors and marine biologists and English graduate students. Ones who will stay true to a broken man in efforts to help heal him (Molly) and ones who will walk away, knowing that it will hurt, but they’ve had enough (Janet). This lovely spectrum of female characters might have come at the cost of the male ones, but whatever, we have had enough of the male-spectrum books in Western canon.
On a more self-centered note, Janet reminds me a lot of myself. I’m certainly not as well-read in the classics as she is, but she’s confident, introspective and insightful. She deals with people the way I do, quiet but with resolve, firm, sometimes impatient, sometimes unfair. I liked her conversation with Thomas about Nick. I also like how Dean wrote in what a snob she could be to Christina, because sometimes I catch myself doing that. But Janet is always thinking, reading, self-assessing. She’s also funny: “I’d hate bad prose whether I was mad at Nick or about to marry him…All right, All right, I might hate it but I wouldn’t yell at you about it” (381).
I like the book because it both describes and nearly provides a simulation of what college would be like-it brings forth lots of interesting ideas in literature and philosophy to muse upon. The same problem is that Janet, like Pamela Dean, is just one person’s perspective, which will never perfectly capture the multitude of opinions and experiences that one becomes exposed to at a liberal arts college. Still, I think it does an admirable job, and while some characters may be exaggerated, their spirit is true. College-hat time between adolescence and adulthood, at least in the US-is a fun and exciting time in life, where we get a sort of pseudo-independence that leads to all sorts of possibilities. The story, despite some major structuring issues, was amazing. I almost wish more authors wrote fantasy fiction set in colleges, but Tam Lin, at the very least, is begging for a re-read.
Now that I've written this all out, part of me is wondering if I should revise some of it and submit it as a proposal to Sirens next year. Hum.