Modern Languages Building is the home of the English department and one of the novel’s most revealing campus spaces: a place of teaching routines and comic spectacle, but also of asbestos removal, uncertain memory, and William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s first stirrings of a return to writing. Its halls register the university’s changing culture, while its offices and classrooms hold the private and professional disturbances that the campus’s ordinary routines cannot quite contain.

Setting and Campus Change

At the building’s outer doors, two notices offer a compact portrait of a university whose public life has shifted over the decades. One advertises a donkey basketball game between administration and faculty; the other reports the cancellation of an Army ROTC M-16 practice because its ammunition has not arrived. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. contrasts this casually irreverent campus with the institution he encountered more than twenty years earlier, when such announcements would have been unthinkable. The donkey game mocks not only university administration and academic life but the idea that the institution can still preserve its dignity. Devereaux looks forward to playing, joking that the donkeys may compensate for his age and inability to run a fast break.

The building also stands at the end of a yearlong asbestos-removal project. A campus newspaper reports that the work is nearly complete, with Modern Languages Building the last remaining site. The notice appears alongside news of the dedication of the Technical Careers Complex, setting a new campus development against the unfinished work of making an older building safe. When Rachel identifies the disturbance overhead as asbestos removal, Devereaux responds with alarm that the whole building is being detoxed. The work becomes an immediate, physical presence: the ceiling tiles vibrate while the renovation proceeds around the department’s daily business.

Departmental Life in the Corridors

The building’s early-morning quiet reveals the department’s rhythms. Before most offices open, the corridor is empty and dark except for the rooms of instructors assigned to eight o’clock classes. Finny chooses those early classes five days a week, every term, and also teaches late in the afternoon. He enforces strict attendance and spends the first three weeks of class distinguishing restrictive from nonrestrictive noun clauses. Students leave in such numbers that his seminar dwindles from the usual twenty-three to seven or eight. Finny presents the result as the fair application of university standards; the narrator sees a method that sharply reduces the teaching burden while leaving Finny long stretches of free time between classes.

The building’s corridors have also witnessed a more startling episode. In the final days of the Vietnam War, after stopping his medication, Finny became first unusually talkative and then appeared in full regalia: a black satin dress, pearls, and high heels. He moved through the long hallways calling out in celebration and urging people to let a dragon loose. Reactions around the department ranged from fear to teasing: Teddy Barnes, then department chair, shut himself in his office; Paul Rourke threatened Finny; June Barnes offered advice about when pearls were appropriate; and Billy Quigley welcomed him with a drink and a joke. The episode ended when Finny’s wife had him hospitalized and medicated. After a month of convalescence, he returned to teach in Modern Languages Building with new grammar exercises, and his later presence there is marked by routine rather than another public eruption.

Offices, Memory, and Work

The building’s offices provide a more private stage for Devereaux’s unsettled thoughts. In a men’s room near his office, surrounded by mirrors and carrying a book he has taken from Dickie Pope’s office, he notices a droning sound and tingling in his extremities. He wonders whether his recent temporal gaps signal illness, recalling that Lily used to notice him disappearing during conversations and that his daughter Karen could tell when his attention had slipped into another world. He also considers whether the gaps might accompany the possibility of another book after a long creative silence. The building is not simply a backdrop to these reflections: its mirrors make Devereaux confront his own image, while the book in his pocket gives his abstract question about authorship a material form.

Back in his office, he enters through a private door, shuts it quietly, and turns on a small desk lamp rather than the overhead light, seeking a few moments of peace. The droning sound grows more pronounced there, then suddenly stops. Rachel has found him a new blotter. He takes the book from his pocket intending to put it away, but opens it and begins to read. When Rachel calls over the intercom, he tells her he is thinking about writing another book. Her worried question about whether he is there registers the uncertainty that has followed him through the building: his body occupies the office, but his attention may be elsewhere, in memory or in the work beginning to draw him back.

A Building Under Strain

Modern Languages Building gathers several kinds of unease into the same working space. Its asbestos project is a literal process of removing a harmful material, and the vibration in the ceiling makes that effort perceptible even during ordinary office hours. At the same time, the department’s routines include Finny’s calculatedly narrow seminars, his remembered breakdown, and the narrator’s concern that his own lapses might reflect illness—or the first pressure of a new book. The resemblance between institutional detoxification and personal disturbance is suggestive without making them identical: both intrude upon the apparent steadiness of work.

The building’s significance lies in this overlap of the mundane and the unstable. Notices on its doors document a campus willing to turn academic dignity into a joke; its corridors hold both conventional classes and Finny’s brief, vivid departure from convention; its offices shelter a professor who has begun to imagine writing again. As the final site in the asbestos-removal project, it is at once an aging workplace undergoing repair and the setting in which Devereaux’s creative attention starts to stir.