In February of her sophomore year at Harvard, Selin, the narrator of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, meets a boy at a party who invites her back to his room. Because part of her brain “is always generating a commentary,” she reflects on the discrepancy between her expectations about sex and its raw, strange physicality (223). Language has failed to prepare her for experience: “Here was another thing I had heard about: the gap between the signifier and the signified. Where the term ‘hand job’ sounded generic, mechanical, and tough, the act itself felt specific, organic, tender, and sort of gross” (222). The scene is more than an occasion for a joke about semantics. It is also revealing of one of the book’s central preoccupations: what is the relationship between the classroom and the bedroom, between education and experience?
Can education and experience even be distinguished from one another? We tend to think of sex as an embodied experience and a physiological threshold—one is either a virgin or not. But as Selin reminds us, sex also marks an epistemological boundary, one much more flexible than simply either/or. We come into our first sexual encounters primed with representations of sex, which can make for an almost ludicrous contrast between what we thought we knew and what we discover in the act. Selin has seen enough movies to know that sex ends with that which is often “symbolized…by geysers or fountains or a lawn irrigation system.” But when it finally happens, Selin finds it bathetic, ludicrous, almost cute: a “helpless little spurt, like a new spring plant” (223).
While this case of overblown expectations might be harmless enough, Either/Or is ultimately a novel of education concerned with the damage that novels of education do. Nineteenth-century novels, especially, teach us that sex and love are the proper “subjects of great art,” and that they must entail female suffering.[1] Batuman recalls that when she herself was in college, she read Anna Karenina as suggesting “it was part of the rich, ineluctable fabric of the human condition for women to ruin their lives over unsatisfactory men.”[2] Similarly, in Either/Or, Selin has internalized that to be the novelist she wants to be, she must experience “that other kind of love”—not the innocent, unrequited crushes of her adolescence, but the kind of love “where ‘something happened’” (166). However, when the time comes, she finds that her literary education is inadequate to the predicaments of coming of age as a woman at the end of the twentieth century—especially because nineteenth-century novels, with their marriage plots, have little to say about experimenting with casual sex. Attempts to translate between canonical literature and contemporary life, between language and experience, only reveal how misleading and pernicious an education in novels can be.
Either/Or picks up on the concerns of its predecessor, The Idiot, itself a novel of education and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2017. In The Idiot, Selin, then a freshman, treks between linguistics, Russian, and an art studio class called “Created Worlds,” nursing an unrequited crush on a math major named Ivan. Eventually she follows him to the Hungarian countryside for the summer, where she teaches ESL, judges a village competition to determine which boy has the best legs, and discovers that the more she learns, the less she knows: the last sentence of the book (spoiler alert) is, “I hadn’t learned anything at all.”[3] Ending a novel of education by reaffirming the heroine’s ignorance is funny! But it is also subversive. In refusing to structure The Idiot around romantic conflict, climax, and resolution, Batuman suggests that a woman’s story is worth telling even if it is not principally defined by her interactions with men.
The reception of The Idiot is proof of just how powerful and pervasive the conventions of novelistic romance can be. Critics celebrated the book for its piercing observations and elegant sentences, even as they criticized its lack of narrative momentum. Part of the reason The Idiot stalls is that the relationship between Selin and Ivan is never consummated. Reviewers described the book as “chilly” and cerebral, all brain and no heart.[4] In the New York Times, Dwight Garner lamented the absence of a thirty-page sex scene, describing the book as “a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast.”[5] Disappointed readers sidled up to Batuman at parties and complained that they were “just waiting the whole time for [Selin and Ivan] to consummate their relationship.”[6] A member of my general interest book club wondered if the narrator might be autistic.
Either/Or tackles these critiques head-on. The relationship between literature and life is a familiar theme in Batuman’s work, from her first book, the essay collection The Possessed: Adventures in Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, through The Idiot and Either/Or. But Either/Or politicizes the relationship between literature and life in a new way by exploring how Selin’s intellectual and sexual coming of age is complicated by the male coming-of-age novels she has inherited. Like Anna Karenina, Selin reads too much literature for her own good—but the problem is explicitly that this literature is by and for men, that it reflects a world in which men are dominant. Either/Or attempts to work within the tradition of the novel of education, but also to interrogate it. Batuman draws attention to the patriarchal limits of the canon while imagining what it might look like for women to have some agency within it.
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Many people go to college, perhaps especially Harvard, expecting an elite education in the Western canon. Many also look forward to getting a crash course in adulthood, away from the prying eyes of parents. It bothers Selin to pretend that these two types of education are separate—as if it were possible to compartmentalize the life of the mind, and well, life. But since Harvard has “no department of love” (10), Selin, as an aspiring novelist, must take her education into her own hands, searching in books, in college social life, and in travel for knowledge of how to live. And not just how to live—but how to live in a way worth writing about.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the Western canon and late-twentieth-century hook-up culture exert similar pressures on romantic decision-making. Most of Selin’s favorite books tie maturity and aesthetic accomplishment to sexual initiation. In a comparative literature class, she discovers Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, an 1843 philosophical investigation into the difficulty of reconciling ethics and aesthetics. It becomes an unlikely script for her desire to be a novelist, to live a life that deserves to be recorded. But she worries that Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic relies on female oppression: “In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This is what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl?” (225).
Even though Selin recognizes the pressures exerted both by her favorite books and by her environment, she has trouble imagining alternatives. One hundred and fifty years have elapsed since Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, but to Selin’s eyes, a woman’s worth remains tied to her sexual development on a college campus of the 1990s. Even as sex work is destigmatized (Selin notes that it would be “unfeminist” to think of female sex workers as victims [93]), it remains acceptable to insinuate that a promiscuous female student is being a slut (112). Meanwhile, Selin recognizes the unspoken rule that “once you had a new boyfriend, you were happy” (136). Not having a boyfriend doesn’t mean freedom, it means being constantly harassed about when and how you intend to go about acquiring one (179).
Faced with these dilemmas, Selin briefly investigates écriture feminine, the French theoretical movement emblematized by writers like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, who aim to challenge Western, male conceptions of the rational subject. Écriture feminine sounds, on paper, like something Selin would find appealing: it valorizes a lack of narrative closure (see: The Idiot), even as it celebrates the female body. Either/Or certainly does not shy away from the indignities of embodiment: the narrator’s inability to put in a tampon is a running joke, and there’s a scene in the novel which involves not just crying, and not just masturbating, but both at the same time. But écriture feminine, though it explores female subjectivity, is just so much less aesthetically pleasing and absorbing than a nineteenth-century novel. As Selin fumes, “I didn’t get it: why did we have to write stuff that was hard to read and didn’t have an ending, just because men were wrong?” (178). Fair: it’s hard to imagine curling up with Speculum of the Other Woman the way one curls up with Anna Karenina. But it is also hard not to be skeptical of Anna Karenina and the patriarchal culture it reflects after reading Speculum of the Other Woman. Perhaps that’s why Either/Or attempts to find the sweet spot between nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century theory: as a novel that exposes the limits of the novel’s implicitly male, rational subject, it is both feminist and pleasurable to read.
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In The Possessed, Batuman argues that the novel-form is defined by the protagonist’s quest to repurpose “his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.”[7] For Don Quixote, one of Batuman’s favorite characters, this meant imagining the hard-scrabble landscape of seventeenth-century rural Spain as a setting for chivalric romance. For Selin, steeped in the nineteenth-century European novel, it means falling in love and losing her virginity. But Ivan, object of her unrequited affections, is largely absent from Either/Or, and even his brief reappearance (via a phone call from his ex, Zita) is a minor event, interrupted and overshadowed by another call in which Selin finds out that her mother has breast cancer. Frustrated by the plotlessness of her life, Selin looks up the email of the boy she met at the party and schedules her loss of virginity, hoping that it will “restore to me my sense of my life as a story” (228).
But life after virginity proves to be even more shapeless and confusing. Over the summer, Selin travels to Central Anatolia to update Harvard’s travel guide, Let’s Go. A string of experiments with men along the way reveals the messiness that makes life profoundly unlike a novel—especially one several centuries old. In nineteenth-century fiction, sexual initiation and the Grand Tour sometimes converge: think of Middlemarch and Dorothea’s red-eyed morning-after with Casaubon in Rome. But nineteenth-century novels are focused on marriage; there is, to echo Selin’s words about Kierkegaard, “a problem with application” when these books are brought to bear on a twentieth-century context in which casual sex is not only possible but often celebrated.
Because sex is useful life experience for an aspiring writer; because novels present sex as the proper subject of narrative; and because the hook-up is a normal part of campus life and even a source of cultural capital, Selin has difficulty saying no, even when she wants to. Attempting to rationalize consent, she sees herself as fighting against her own culturally ingrained prejudices. When a bus station attendant named Mesut follows her to her destination and insists on taking her to dinner, then propositions her for sex in his car, she says no, and he asks why. Selin considers that her refusal might be coming from a place of racism or xenophobia, and subsequently agrees to sex. She can’t see that Mesut’s behavior—following her, insisting that they dine together, pressuring her to get into his car—is just as culturally conditioned as her initial desire to refuse him.
There are even more disturbing encounters later on. Feeling that there are “only two options” in sex and finding it hard to theorize cases when an acceptable option might be “no,” Selin rationalizes away her ambivalence (324). She lets a hostel worker named Volkan attempt anal sex, using sunscreen as lubricant. When she can’t get him to stop with her words (it burns, obviously), she has to resort to kicking him. About another man whom she realizes is intellectually disabled, she thinks:
Did I secretly want to have sex with him? Dora had thought she didn’t want to have sex with Herr K, and hadn’t it made her sick? With Koray, I had kissed him, and thought he was handsome. And I had already done it with three people, so what did one more matter? True, he might have had a mental disability. But wasn’t it shallow and elitist and somehow snottily feminine to hold that against him? (334)
Selin’s college education has made it difficult to analyze the relationship between desire and sexual ethics. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams has taught her that even if she doesn’t think she wants to have sex, she must unconsciously need it. Nineteenth-century novels have suggested that it’s only the moment of initiation that has narrative and moral importance: after that, “What did one more matter?” And the sex-positive feminism of campus culture, at least as she has interpreted it, has suggested that sexual experience is intrinsically feminist and therefore valuable: “wasn’t it shallow and elitist and somehow snottily feminine” (as opposed to feminist) to refuse to have sex?
Although Selin’s reasons for sex are often conditioned by social pressures, it would not be accurate to say that she has no positive experiences of desire. Her affair with Mesut got off to a rocky start, but it teaches her new ways to find pleasure in her body: to understand why sex “was desirable, how to appreciate it, and how to draw it out”—an experience that she compares, funnily, to being able to follow Shakespeare for the first time (308). But Selin’s “constantly generated commentary” suggests that there is no such thing as pure, unmediated desire; even the best sexual experience comes back to the father of the English canon. The pressures of one’s education will be felt, whether because of the analogies or the frustrating discrepancies between literature and life.
By the end of the novel, however, such discrepancies are transformed from a source of sadness into a source of potential empowerment. Although Selin is still tempted to think of herself as a literary heroine like Henry James’s Isabel Archer, and to see her life as a novelistic undertaking, she finally realizes that she can step “outside of the script,” embracing the incommensurability between her education and her experience (354). So continues the Batumanian tradition of ending on a paradox. The Idiot is a novel of education that records its protagonist’s continued ignorance; Either/Or is a coming-of-age novel in which the heroine can only come of age when she finally understands that her life is not a novel and never will be.
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Selin’s epiphany that life exceeds novelistic bounds makes it unlikely that there will be a follow-up to Either/Or. Then again, I was surprised to learn that there would be a sequel to The Idiot at all. The Idiot felt like a self-contained work, an exercise in nostalgia for coming-of-age at a time when the Internet was new and when it was possible for someone like Selin to feel that both she and America were innocent. Indeed, as she begins to recognize in Either/Or, innocence is not only an epistemological condition, or a developmental one, or even necessarily a strictly personal one: it can also be ethical (or unethical) and collective. As she notes wryly, to her relatives in Turkey and to all the people she encounters in her travels, Americans cultivate a false innocence, “with their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift…. With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the ‘reality’ that happened elsewhere” (272).
Indeed, one of Batuman’s motivations for writing Either/Or was to expand the definition of innocence beyond Selin’s individual experience, and especially to consider the relationship of innocence to gender. Batuman originally intended The Idiot to stand alone, but conceived a sequel when she noticed that readers often asked her why she had written a “non-political” book—about a character who thinks of her life as a novel but never reads the newspaper. Why didn’t a story about a teen girl’s crush count as “political,” she wondered? On her website, she writes that Either/Or is an attempt to reconstruct her experience of coming to see herself as a “literature person” rather than a “politics person” in college, taking up the question of “how certain people (e.g. young women) are steered away from politics” toward the aesthetic.[8]
Batuman’s emphasis on “politics” might initially seem surprising to the reader of Either/Or, especially because, within the text, the word used most frequently in contrast to “aesthetic” is “ethical,” not “political.” “Politics,” however, has a subtler, more idiosyncratic meaning for Batuman than might initially be apparent. When asked in an interview with Public Books to explain what she meant by “depolicitized,” she cites Nabokov’s story in which the first animal to make art paints the bars of its cage. The point is to suggest that nineteenth-century novels facilitate complacence by aestheticizing the constraints that keep women subjugated to men: “look at these bars, aren’t they interesting, aren’t they beautiful?”[9]
One alternative to aestheticizing female subjugation is to show that women matter outside of the prisons built for them by a patriarchal society—that the development of their minds, as much as their bodies, is worth recording. This is an alternative Batuman goes out of her way to propose at the novel’s end, by staging the encounter between Selin and Henry James. Selin reads both Portrait of a Lady, the 1881 novel, and the famous “Preface” that James added when he edited and republished the book as part of the New York series in 1908. Strikingly, Batuman calls attention to the impossibility of this textual encounter by fudging the details. As she acknowledges in the notes, Selin is quoting from a nonexistent, hybrid version of the text which has both the 1881 edition (which Batuman herself read at age twenty) and the 1908 preface.[10] The subtle fictionalizing of this moment calls attention to how important it is for Batuman to include James’s philosophy of fiction as a counterpoint to her own: for James, the novel is a medium ideally suited to show how “the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering” (qtd. 350). Indeed, the novel can show that women are not just objects but “endowed with the high attributes of a Subject,” capable of living their own version of an aesthetic life (qtd. 350). Selin’s epiphany is thus carefully engineered in a way that calls attention to Batuman’s own Jamesian philosophy of fiction now, a philosophy of fiction that might have been unavailable to her when she was actually Selin’s age.
However, Batuman qualifies James’s insistence on the primacy of the imagination in fiction. Trying to account for where his ideas for made-up characters come from, James writes, “One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstruous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s imagination” (350). Selin repurposes this statement to apply not to the work of invention, but to that of self-fashioning: “I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why” (351). The ultimate political statement that women matter is that, 100 years after James believed himself to be giving them a voice, they can now write themselves.
The final pages of Either/Or, then, provide some insight into why this story is a novel and not a memoir. (Like her fictional avatar, Batuman went to Harvard, studied Russian literature, and chased her crush to the Hungarian countryside; one summer, she traveled to Central Anatolia to update Let’s Go.) Since novels have led us astray, it is only by writing something that resembles a novel that Batuman can set the record straight. But in applying the tools of fiction to the excavation of her own past, she perhaps establishes the value of the female subject more fully than even James could do.
Ultimately, Batuman wants to do for the novel what she credits one of her influences, Céline Sciamma, for doing for film. In a profile for The New Yorker, Batuman explains that Sciamma resists the narrative strictures of “canonical, historically male storytelling” (especially romantic conflict) in order to produce “the images we haven’t inherited.”[11] Either/Or is a woman’s coming-of-age novel that grapples with the impact of coming-of-age novels on women as they navigate the complications of casual sex. It is an unusual and superbly thoughtful book about the relationship between literary tradition and the present day. By definition, we could not have inherited it any sooner, but we are lucky to have it now.
Notes:
[1] Elif Batuman, “Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema,” The New Yorker, March 18, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/celine-sciammas-quest-for-a-new-feminist-grammar-of-cinema
[2] Ibid.
[3] Elif Batuman, The Idiot (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 423.
[4] Constance Grady, “The Idiot is mostly about semiotics. It’s really funny,” Vox, March 29, 2017, https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/29/15072678/the-idiot-elif-batuman-review.
[5] Dwight Garner, “Review: Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ Sets a Romantic Crush on Simmer,” The New York Times, February 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/books/review-elif-batuman-idiot.html.
[6] Batuman, “Novels and Political Consciousness,” Public Books 101 Podcast, Season 2, Episode 2. https://www.publicbooks.org/episode-2-novels-political-consciousness/.
[7] Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 94.
[8] “About,” Elif Batuman (website), accessed June 22, 2022, http://elifbatuman.com/about/.
[9] Batuman, “Novels and Political Consciousness.”
[10] This note reads in full: “The quotes from The Portrait of a Lady are from the original 1881 version—not the New York Edition, which Henry James revised twenty-five years later. (The 1881 version is the one I read at age twenty, and those are the quotes that stuck with me.) The preface, however, is from the New York edition, so it wouldn’t normally be in the same volume with the 1881 text, as it is in Selin’s imaginary copy. Most editions you come across now will have the New York text, but a few, like Signet Classics (2007), use the earlier version. You can find all the prefaces in Henry James, The Art of the Novel (Scribner, 1937)” (358).
[11] Batuman, “Céline Sciamma.”