Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

For Pleshette

2017; State University of New York; Volume: 7; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/phi.2017.0010

2155-0891

Kas Saghafi,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

For Pleshette Kas Saghafi P. P. That's what I called her. P. That's what I said day and night. I called her name. And I have been calling her name ever since. I am here before you today to say a few words in Pleshette's honor. For me, it is indecent to talk about her rather than to speak to her. However, if I did have to speak about her, as much as it would pain me to do so in her absence, I would want to say a few words about her name (her first name and last name). Her name, its spelling, its pronunciation, its composition and its etymology, its violation of orthographic rules (the capital D, the small e and the capital A with no space between them) was always a topic of conversation and queries wherever she went. She and her family pronounced her name this way: Pleshette DeArmitt. Her first name was given to her by her father, a great admirer of the actress Suzanne Pleshette. Her father, whose apparently French Huguenot ancestors had somehow made their way to central Pennsylvania, the second oldest state of the United States, believed that he was giving his daughter a French name, whereas it turns out that Suzanne Pleshette had an Eastern European Jewish background and the name was to have been a variation of a name in Hebrew. This past year my fateful travels led me to her home state of Pennsylvania, allowing me to discover information that Pleshette never had and was always in search of. [End Page 133] P. The P that she wanted in the spelling of our child Seraphine's name rather than an f. The very name that I saw for the first time in the byline of an article in Le Monde during the year that the two of us were in Paris on a fellowship. An article written by Sérafine (avec an f), believe it or not, Bedarrida. I swear. I have the cutout of the article somewhere. P. The letter that our daughter's middle name begins with. Pari. A name Pleshette chose. A Persian word meaning "fairy" adopted into the English language but spelled and pronounced differently. Pari sounds like the French pronunciation of the city her mother loved. It is also the word that the philosopher Pascal made famous: pari de Pascal, or Pascal's wager, the wager that it's worthwhile to believe even in the absence of proof, the wager that without hesitation one has to make, the wager that as a forty-year-old woman, despite what the doctors suggested, P made to have a child. P for "like two peas in a pod." That's how people described us. We were so incredibly close that more than half of my being has been lost. P is for "Plush," "Pippy," "Poopskaya," and numerous other P-names that I called her over the years. I used to joke that they belonged to an open chain of "nonsynonymous substitutions." When I summoned enough strength to speak at her memorial service right after she so unexpectedly, so suddenly, left me, I foreswore making any personal statements in front of my colleagues, some of whom were present. I didn't say a word about how long I had been with her, about having known her for twenty-eight years, about being married to her for twenty-five years, about having attended the same universities with her as an undergraduate and a graduate student, about having held three consecutive academic positions at the same institutions with her. This was because I was continuing to keep private what a conservative academy worried about—the fusion of identities of academic couples, especially when starting out. It was only much later in our life together that we took the plunge to partake in collaborative work, something we had always wanted to do. This was what we had been doing, in a way, all along, but especially toward the end, working on a book project and meeting daily to translate an almightily daunting text. P for "path," the very unpopular path that we decided to take as a young...