"Separatism and Return": the one hard prorector class

texture · Fall YDAU term; frame 7 Nov, instanced 11-12 Nov

• When: Across the Fall YDAU term; the class-frame scene is 7 Nov, the term-paper dread is 11 Nov, Hal's Québecathon complaint is 12 Nov.
• What: Among the Academy's joke electives hers is the exception: "the only really challenging prorected class ever for Hal Incandenza is turning out to be Mlle. Thierry Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Québecois History from Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence.'" The difficulty is partly linguistic — "Poutrincourt teaches only in Québecois French" — and partly temperamental: she teaches the material as if it were her own wound, though the text never states her own political affiliation ("Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there's no valid comparison between Québec and our own antebellum South," per Hal's account, along with the R.C.M.P.'s warrantless impound powers), and "Poutrincourt's lecture-voice has gotten quieter and quieter as history's approached its contemporary limit." During the WETA broadcasts that interrupt her last period, "Saluki-faced Thierry Poutrincourt leans back in her chair and closes her eyes and presses her palms hard against her temples." Her students rename the course in dread — Struck's private "History of Canadian Unpleasantness," and Hal's "'And then this term of all terms I take Poutrincourt's insurgency class, which is basically a Québecathon.'" — and fear her grading: Struck, semi-plagiarizing at his terminal, "can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big red triple-underlined QUOI?" under a tortured transition, because "Poutrincourt has a fetishy thing about transitions." ("Haven't you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow?" Jennie Bash asks, over the moaning from Struck and Shaw's room.) Hal alone is drawn in — and the draw is queasy: the contemporary insurgency material gives him a feeling "as if someone had been reading mail of Hal's that he thought he'd thrown away."