Echoing the Male Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Le Feste di P’

This is part of an ongoing series on post-MeToo literature & the unreliable narrator.

For the past handful of years, I’ve been researching and writing about unreliable narrators in “MeToo Literature.” I define this category loosely as stories written in an era after the mass confessional narrative movement that turned the culture upside down in late 2017.

I’m thinking about major popular and award-winning works of fiction like Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, for example, whose deployment of the unreliable narrator directly serves their feminist purposes, drawing from the larger context of ‘unreliability’ around stories of gender-based violence and abuse.

Indeed, I argue, if #MeToo represents a collective storytelling movement that did take survivors at their word––in which the culture made space for them to be reliable narrators of their experience––then we might see fiction written in the aftermath as responding to this new space, and to the raised consciousness that accompanied it. These writers manage to implicate the reader’s bias, not only the character’s, in their narrative framing.  

In building this bibliography of unreliable narrators of abuse stories, I’ve come to understand that I’m looking for not truer stories, but more resonant ones. I’m looking for a level of resonance commensurate with the way it all…weighs. I’m finding these stories in unexpected places, and from authors who aren’t primarily feminist-identified in their public intellectual life. In the case of Jhumpa Lahiri’s new short story, “P’s Parties,” released this summer in the New Yorker and then as part of her new collection, Racconti Romani (Roman Stories), I’m considering the way the experience of being looked at against your will can become an act of resistant co-creation. I’m also considering how Lahiri’s public image might shape our reading of what I’ll call her creepy autodiegetic male narrator. 

I’ve been reading Jhumpa Lahiri since I was the age of my current students, high school seniors. She won the Pulitzer for her first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, in 2000. I own a signed copy of The Namesake, the book of hers that won me over to her completely, whose sweeping scale does not diminish its intimacy. It’s a book that makes you love not only her characters, but books themselves: indeed, her protagonist is named Gogol. It’s the name Gogol’s father Ashoke Ganguli chooses because he was reading “The Overcoat” when, as a young man, he survives a train derailment in the middle of the night, 200 kilometers from Calcutta:

He remembers the page crumpled tightly in his fingers, the sudden shock of the lantern’s glare in his eyes. But for the first time he thinks of that moment not with terror, but with gratitude. “Hello, Gogol,” he whispers, leaning over his son’s haughty face, his tightly bound body. “Gogol,” he repeats, satisfied.

Like Gogol for Ashoke, Lahiri’s books started out for me as havens, as pages to hold tightly to. Later, they became models for style, works I’d assign to my young students. Lahiri’s career tracks the 21st century, yet her work cannot be simplistically categorized. We, her fans, have especially delighted in her last decade’s metamorphosis from voice-of-diaspora, American-literary-superstar, into… well, Italian. Her latest collection Racconti Romani is Lahiri’s third published book in Italian.

Roman Stories got its own English translator. Lahiri has mostly chosen not to translate her work in Italian back into English. Her memoiristic essays Translating Myself and Others (2022) provide something of a justification for this, particularly in an essay called “Where I Find Myself: On Self-Translation,” where once again literary classics serve as touchstones for modern meditations on the meaning of storytelling:

My reluctance to translate myself stemmed partly from the lesson of Narcissus. I feared that turning back to that text, looking at it for a prolonged period in a new language, but nevertheless from my point of view, would be too self-referential, amount to a hall of mirrors to an infinite and untenable degree. I knew that I would have to re-encounter the same story and reconfigure sentences I’d already written. I wanted to avoid that moment of painful, inevitable recognition when Narcissus claims “I am he!”

She would instead aim for the experience of Narcissus’s counterpart, Echo: the one condemned to repetition, using only the words of others to speak. In a particularly moving and feminist reading of the mythic nymph, Lahiri aligns herself with Echo, and with the role of giving life and meaning to another’s voice: “It is Echo who looks beyond herself, who sings alongside others, who survives him, and whose voice resonates and remains.”

Narcissus seeks himself. Echo seeks resonance. Narcissus and Echo do not directly feature in Racconti Romani, but encountering them in Translating Myself and Others made me wonder whether Lahiri had them in mind when she wrote “P’s Parties,” the story of a man who can only see his own desire, and of a woman who becomes his unwilling mirror. 

**

In 2012 Lahiri, then a professor at Princeton, moved her family to Rome for three years after a period of studying Italian with a teacher in New York. Her memoir In Other Words explores this language acquisition process with exquisite insight: first, it was about reading, then speaking, and finally––on a train, with a journal––it became about writing. 

It is plain to me that Lahiri’s Italian turn is about actualizing a dream. It’s a dream I recognize: a mission to burrow far enough into a language so as to be unable to turn back. To have your tongue changed. To want to exact more from your own mind’s capacity to express. To work to turn lessons into instincts, and instincts into habits. Lahiri’s first language, Bengali, arrived to her as instinct. To acquire a language later on is to reconstruct the architecture of your own mind. 

And so, in middle age, after decades of decorated novels and stories in English, Lahiri started writing fiction in her new tongue. When I mainlined her 2019 novel Whereabouts, I didn’t know its original title was Dove mi trovo, literally “where I find myself,” the phrase on which the translation essay is based––but which felt inadequate for the book’s translated title. Instead, Whereabouts. It’s a word I usually precede with a personal pronoun: my whereabouts, your whereabouts. Where I’ve found myself: in these whereabouts. The imprecision of ‘abouts’ and the doubled self in ‘I find myself’ rhyme; they fit snugly with the parallel wheres. 

And that ‘where’ is decidedly still Rome in Lahiri’s new collection. Even after moving back to the States and taking up a professorship at Barnard College, Lahiri has published almost exclusively in Italian, in addition to translating work by major Italian writers like Domenico Starnone. She made herself a new literary home, but she nevertheless reaches back for her original readers, the ones who read in English. Returning home, speaking once more in an older tongue, one can feel like Echo; the strange elsewhere makes home feel not like an original, but like the sound of what has already been. 

“It took time for my Italian to mature to the point where I could begin building a story on this scale,” Lahiri shares in an interview with the New Yorker, who first published the story “P’s Parties” in their July 2023 Fiction issue. The chaptered story has already lived an interesting life since its original release in Italy in 2022. It began as “La Festa di P,” singular. Lahiri tells the New Yorker’s Cressida Leyshon that while she did collaborate with her translator, Todd Portnowitz, she “just couldn’t face going back inside” the story to do the translation herself. She calls the piece her “most significantly revised” story to date. 

Of the title’s framing, Lahiri paraphrases one of her beloved Russians by asserting that “each party is happy and unhappy,” filled with people experiencing “uneasiness and ease” at the same time. What struck me about the story, however, was not so much its party setting, but rather (surprise!) its unreliable narrator: the way his point-of-view teaches us about the workings of a particular kind of genteel male gaze operative in rape culture. In this essay, I want to complicate the role of this autodiegetic narrator by trying (perilously, perhaps) to think about the inevitable paratextual dynamic of the author’s identity in this story’s representation of a casual fixation on a beguiling foreigner. 

**

The narrator of “P’s Parties” is a middle-aged writer from Rome, a married man with a grown son living abroad. The pretense for the tale first seems to be a desire to relive and recount a golden age of beloved parties hosted by a friend of his wife, P. His is a point-of-view steeped in nostalgia––the pain of return, the kind Lahiri rebuffs when she decides not to translate herself. When we wander into this narrator’s memory of one particular party, he tells us that “something out of the ordinary occurred, an ultimately banal disruption that remains a caesura in my life.” Ultimately banal––but nevertheless instrumental to his story.

And then we get an actual caesura: a series of them, really, in the form of numbered chapter breaks. This structure works to build suspense, to give us moments of pause to consider each movement of the unfolding tale. Maybe each caesura frees us, momentarily, from the grips of this narrator’s controlled storytelling, whose details, we begin to suspect, are shot through with something willfully narcissistic.

No one in the story has a name. P is P. It’s her party. The narrator’s wife is his wife. Later, we meet L, and L’s son, and husband, who exist in relation to L. The rest of the characters are insignificant party guests, extras in the movie. This choice could be a signifier of objectification, though my first instinct was to see it as a tool for verisimilitude: a mood of redaction, or even privilege through privacy. Maybe, since it’s all “ultimately banal,” this choice keeps the narrator as central as he wants to be.

Some parties are a coveted invitation. “At P’s parties, I felt embraced, cared for, and at the same time blissfully ignored, free,” our nameless narrator divulges. “We were detached from our flawed, finely-tuned lives, from our frustrations.” Or at least it felt that way. And in that suspension, what fantasies may come.

The narrator sees L before he speaks to her. And like any crush on someone based solely on their appearance, she’s a projection. “She was a foreigner, you could tell right away from her facial features,” the narrator describes, then limning her “prematurely weathered beauty.” “She must have been around ten years younger than my wife, with a sharper gaze and, I felt, a more turbulent inner life.” 

Younger, more turbulent. Weathered. She’s not real, and yet the details he conjures are human, and humanize her in contrast to a nameless wife, a son who’s left home: their “frustrations.”

More parties, more encounters. The narrator becomes just a little bolder each time, seeking L out, excited each time she’s present. He’s never had an affair, but he has crushes, like on a young woman who swims at his gym, who always gives him a warm smile and hello. 

But he’s not sure what exactly he wants from L, just that he knows he wants her. Next time he’s at P’s for a party, he tries to catch her eye: “I looked at her, waiting for her to look back. Hoping for what, I don’t know — a smile like the one the girl would give me by the side of the pool? But she remained absorbed in her anecdote.”

Undeterred, he continues staring expectantly. “Her husband was gone, my wife in the next room. The more I looked, the more she evaded me, unfazed. Until all of a sudden she lifted her gaze, for an instant, and revealed her eyes to me—filled (I thought) with fury and exasperation, blinding eyes that were shining (I hoped) for me.”

“Fury and exasperation.” He sees it; he identifies it. Her eyes are blinding, and also shining. What kind of light shines from L’s eyes? There, bundled in parentheses, are his own blindspots: thoughts, hopes. Her fury and exasperation do not affect him morally; he is not chastened. For her to feel anything at all about him looking is, for him, enough to keep going. The story takes a turn here for me, because he hasn’t just given himself permission to fantasize. He has also decided to look, and to keep looking, when he knows his gaze is not entirely welcome.

“Until all of a sudden she lifted her gaze, for an instant, and revealed her eyes to me—filled (I thought) with fury and exasperation, blinding eyes that were shining (I hoped) for me.”

**

I could argue that Narcissus and Echo map onto this character dynamic, but the more time I spend with this story, the more I am convinced that Echo is not L, but Lahiri herself, the author. The man who seeks his own reflection; the woman whose voice borrows the words of others. This is the structure of narration on which this story relies. For if the author is there to channel the words of another, she is also there to mediate them with her presence.

The creepy autodiegetic male narrator (CAMN) of this particular flavor is of course familiar in literary history, most notoriously in Nabokov’s Lolita. We also get a CAMN in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Before “P’s Parties,” my favorite CAMN story was Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees, about a decorated scientist who’s been imprisoned for sexual abuse. What’s notable about that novel in particular is its frame narrative, which adds a layer of knowingness to the choice. The frame narrator is himself a man, but rather than latent creepiness, he displays a kind of fact-checker’s righteousness. Part of how he frames the central narrative––the CAMN’s memoir penned from prison, where he’s serving time for child sexual abuse––is by annotating the memoir with footnotes, a literally marginalized frame for the direct diegetic account of the CAMN’s life. The CAMN’s memoir becomes his defense in the court of the reader’s imagination, the frame narrator his loyal advocate prepared to contextualize the increasingly obscured act of violence implicit in the CAMN’s prison sentence.

What is creepiness, exactly? We experience it in “P’s Parties” mostly as this gazing: this lingering, louche way of possessing others through observation. But it’s complicated; the writer, too, looks for too long. We ogle. Lahiri’s narrator has what in film we might call a scopophilic gaze. He takes pleasure in noticing, more than once, a “triangle of bare skin,” “that divot of flesh outlined by her collarbone and shoulders.”

At one of P’s parties, he gets to dance with L––a moment of both “torment” and “triumph.” “We would lock eyes for a moment, here and there I’d feel my body brushing hers, a shoulder, a hip. The two of us were still nailed to our respective lives, but underneath it all I sensed that we were being reckless, conspiratorial.” How willing is L? Is she in on the conspiracy, or not? We can only guess.

Autodiegetic narrators who are in fact anti-heroes: their leering and overtly scopophilic looking is allowed to stand because it delivers up the story, its details. But it doesn’t stand alone. In the case of “P’s Parties,” it stands beside the author’s gender, and other aspects of her identity such as “foreigner”––that freighted term the narrator uses to characterize L and her family. It’s not that L must be a proxy for Lahiri; it’s too easy to collapse fiction and reality as such. But L’s point of view is an echo of the narrator’s, doled out to us only through the screen of fixation––a fixation unaffected by the flash of recognition that Lahiri makes sure to depict. 

**

You can read this story straight. Of course you can. You can take the narrator’s side, or at least withhold judgment at where his eyes wander. Alternatively––and here’s where I’ll ruffle some feathers––you can read it as a story by a woman. She’s an author whose gender apparently signifies here––if we let it. The question is not, How could a woman write a story that endorses such masculinist creepiness? The question is, What kind of new looking at creepiness can we do when the creep appears to be under control inside a narrative frame? 

This is not the same as indulging Humbert Humbert’s point-of-view by identifying Lolita as ‘nymphette.’ In her new book Triste Tigre published in French this fall, Neige Sinno revisits Nabokov’s creepy autodiegetic narrator through the lens of her own sexualization and abuse by her step-father. Sinno walks right up to Lolita and listens with her authorial knowledge: she listens for the ‘no’ Lolita spoke despite not being heard. “The few times she gets to speak,” writes Sinno in French (translation mine), “we understand that what she feels and perceives is entirely different from what her step-father tells us.” And then Sinno cites Lolita's protestations, reminding us to listen again.

And to look, to look back with. “I remember being punished as a child for staring,” begins one of the most influential pieces of theory by the late feminist bell hooks: the oppositional gaze, which, in her book Black Looks. explores the “black female spectator” of cinema as the model for one who chooses “not to identify with the film’s imaginary subject because such identification [is] disenabling.” Choosing, with fury and exasperation, to participate without obliging.

L, Lolita: they aren’t real because their creator, the narrator, is looking without seeing, and without awareness that he, too, is being looked at. We watch him, readers: as watchfully as our author did.

Haunting this piece is, for me, a red flag word, a word from the MeToo-denial camp: “harmless.” How can this narrator, his comfortable cohesive worldview, possibly be doing harm as he gently, and mostly mentally, stalks his beloved? And does he believe he is in control? Instead of L’s “fury and exasperation” serving as a check on his fantasy, it only emboldens him. But Lahiri ensures that we know of L’s boundaries. We know of her autonomy from the fantasy her narrator projects, even as meticulous description gives us permission for scopophilia, too:

She was wearing a special pair of gloves for handling the anchor chain. I admired how deftly she tied and untied the mooring line. I noticed the ease and economy of communication between husband and wife… L had picked up a tan, her husband, too… I glimpsed L’s dark, muscular legs, a scar on her thigh. She was barefoot, sweaty, her hair a windblown mess. She quickly slipped into a sheer beach cover-up, a pair of elegant but well-worn sandals.

I wanted to break up the scene right then and there. I wanted to sneak down into the cabin, on that boat, with her. As if driven by the mistral, like the waves beating steadily in one direction, an impulse intensified by my own imagined version of our affair, I now yearned to kiss her mouth, to taste her salty skin, to solidify our connection at last without having to share it with anyone else. Instead, when she stepped off the boat, we greeted each other with a handshake, and all she said to me was “Ciao.”

I suppose unrequited yearning does not always entail violation. Windblown, well-worn, scarred: this human beauty before him cannot be possessed, but with his words, he has her. It’s ultimately banal; it’s harmless. But to fixate on someone else can be a manner of denying them freedom. What Lahiri has done, perhaps both like and unlike Nabokov, is to make L an echo of a narcissist’s nostalgized longing, an echo who, nevertheless, gets the last word, just like in the myth. It is Echo, Lahiri reminds us in Translating Myself and Others, who speaks Narcissus’s last words: “Adieu.” With L’s perfunctory handshake and “Ciao,” the spell is broken. The party always ends, but the story remains.