A couple of weeks ago, I learned that Marcel Cornis-Pop passed away at the age of 79. I had heard a while before this that he had been ill for some time.
Marcel, who often spelled his last name Cornis-Pope, I think because that’s closer to how it was pronounced in Romanian, was a long-time faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University who came to VCU in 1988, the same year I began work on my MFA in fiction writing. Back in the day, he was quite the influence and mentor.
Our paths actually overlapped before VCU, sort of. Marcel, along with his wife (I believe his children were born in the U.S.), came to America from Romania, first to the University of Northern Iowa in my hometown of Cedar Falls. I have a good friend who took a class or two from him while he was at UNI on Fulbright Scholar appointment. At the time, Romania was a Soviet satellite and one of the most repressive and brutal regimes in the Eastern Bloc, led by Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. I don’t know if Marcel was ever imprisoned or threatened per se, but I do remember him talking about how he was involved in the underground publishing and distribution of books published by famous American authors. So I was always under the impression that, really, he had to leave Romania.
Marcel was my introduction to critical theory, I believe in my first semester at VCU. I don’t remember a lot of the details, but there are two things about that seminar that stand out for me still. First, Marcel was not all that interested in “covering” every theory and topic he had on his syllabus if the natural progression of the course took things in a different direction. Someone told me (it might have been my friend at UNI) that they had a class with him where Marcel and his students abandoned most of the planned readings and spent the entire semester analyzing the Henry James short story/novella “The Figure in the Carpet.” Second, the one school of thought/critical theory that he was not at all interested in teaching or entertaining in any serious way (at least way back when) was Marxism, probably for obvious reasons.
As an undergraduate English major at the University of Iowa in the mid-1980s, I had no direct exposure to literary/critical theory in any of my classes. I think that was fairly common then. I knew a couple of different people from Iowa who went off to PhD programs in English after undergrad and then bailed out early when they figured out that at the graduate level, it was no longer about reading and “appreciating” literature. I found the theory all quite fascinating, in no small part because of how Marcel introduced it to his students.
I took an independent study with Marcel, I think in my second year. I remember meeting with him about what this independent study would be about. I suggested a couple of different authors he rejected, and then I mentioned that I had read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as an undergraduate, and I think I had also by that point read V. on my own. That piqued his interest. I said, “I am kind of interested to try to read Gravity’s Rainbow,” but…” and before I could even get out the rest of my sentence, that Gravity’s Rainbow might be way too much of a project to take on, Marcel said, “That, do that. I’ll do an independent study with you about Gravity’s Rainbow.”
That was the most intense self-study experience in close reading that I have ever had. For those unfamiliar: Gravity’s Rainbow is a 760-page novel that is perhaps best compared to books like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in that the complexity of it all is intentionally baffling. Sometimes it would take me a couple of days to read five or six pages of it, and without the help of the excellent book by Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, I’m not sure I would have made it through. So an intense reading experience, and I did finish the book, though I don’t know if I could tell you now anything about what it was “about.” As I recall, I wrote an essay that focused on the trajectory of the V2 rocket; the book begins with the line “A screaming comes across the sky,” and it ends on the last page in a section called “Descent,” where “it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death.”
Mostly though, I remember Marcel for various pieces of advice about academia at the time. I asked him his thoughts on whether or not I should go into a PhD program and what kind of program, something more like literary studies, or something like this new thing I was exposed to at VCU called “composition and rhetoric.” The main thing he advised, something I tell students now when they ask about graduate school, is to go as quickly as possible because there is no point in being a graduate student any longer than necessary. I perhaps took that to an extreme in my PhD (I finished in 3 years), but I still think he was right about that.
Marcel went on to a long and illustrious career at VCU: he was chair of the department in the early 2000s, was one of the founders of a PhD program in Media, Art, and Text, and I believe at one point he was a dean as well. I never thought about it when I knew him way back when (our paths crossed a couple of times after I left Richmond in 1993, at the MLA convention and only briefly), but he too was more or less at the beginning of his academic career in the US when we met.
Rest in peace, old friend.