ELIF BATUMAN
Elif Batuman is a Turkish-American writer and the author of one non-fiction book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) and two novels, The Idiot (2017) and Either / Or (2022). She has also been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. Both of her novels follow Turkish-American Selin through her first two years at Harvard University in 1995 and 1996, documenting her studies, her epistolary relationship with a Hungarian man called Ivan, and her friendship with a Serbian woman, Svetlana, and her travels in the latter half of each novel (to France, Hungary, Turkey and Russia). The books are deeply invested in the ways that language can be both precise and hopelessly ineffectual at describing the experiences – love, sex, learning – that are circumscribed by the politics of their eras, countries and social cultures.
Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Valentyn Kuzan
Nell Whittaker The Idiot and Either / Or were published five years apart. What happened for you in between?
Elif Batuman I had written the first draft of The Idiot in my early twenties, and then I revised it in my late thirties. The book came out right at the beginning of 2017, the year of #MeToo, and a lot of other political activity. I was in my first non-heterosexual relationship and reading a lot of second-wave feminism for the first time, especially Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich with her theory of compulsory heterosexuality. I began to see The Idiot as a book about depoliticisation, about how Selin was channelling that into literature. She experienced that as a free choice – it is a free choice and I myself made that choice – yet it was conditioned by an ideology that I was actually getting from literature.
NW Either / Or was originally intended to be a series of essays. How did it turn back into fiction?
EB The original plan for the book was that the first half was going to be a novel and the second half was going to be an essay about how novels ruined my life. But the essay had a way of tying everything up that was making the novel come out fake, like I was just queuing up all these situations so I could hammer them in the second half. I ended up trying to raise the questions in a way that the reader could, sort of, answer them in their head as they’re reading – understanding why Selin, in the moment, is making the choices that she’s making, but ideally able to bring to bear the knowledge that we all have from being around in 2022.
NW What else did fiction offer?
EB I wanted to reconstruct how it was. I was just turning 40 and I was so much happier than I had been in my twenties, and I just wanted to know why it was that I made the decisions I had. All of the liberating ideologies that helped me toward middle age were there when I was in my twenties. I benefited so much from therapy, meditation, the whole idea of self-help, feminism, queer theory. All of that stuff existed! I’ve benefited a lot from understanding my own childhood and from reading psychologists like Alice Miller who talk about the effects of childhood on adult lives, and intergenerational trauma. These were ideas I had no patience for when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I just thought, That’s not for me. What I wanted to recreate was, “What was it about the way that I encountered the idea of lesbianism or the idea of psychoanalytic theory or the idea of feminism at that time?” I wanted to restage and dramatise the mystery.
NW Maybe when we’re young we’re hindered by how feminist ideas or gender theory, more broadly, can sometimes feel too obvious.
EB I was really embarrassed by anything that seemed obvious. I thought that the things that were true had to be some huge secret. In the 1990s, there was this idea that there existed a fake ideology of happiness, and to be cool you had to be negative and ironic. I was really influenced by that.
NW In both books, there are moments where Americanness is compared to childishness, which is often quite funny, as where Selin’s host family in Hungary are bemused by her putting the napkin on her lap and ask her, “Do Americans always spill food onto their clothes, like little babies?” You’ve written before about the novel’s relationship to imperialism. To what extent does Selin’s “growing up” reflect America’s and Turkey’s? I guess I want to avoid saying that sex and the descent into authoritarianism are both representative of the loss of innocence, but then again, maybe that is true.
EB I’m not completely sure how to answer that question in terms of current events, but it is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. The essay that I’m writing now is about revisiting the Russian novels that really formed me when I was younger, and informed Selin, especially [Leo Tolstoy’s] Anna Karenina and [Alexander Pushkin’s] Eugene Onegin. Either / Or thinks about the way that both books are about young women who ruin their lives because of love, who don’t have a lot of options for excitement and romance and adventure. The only possibility for attaining that is romantic love, which is heterosexual love, which is doomed, so the novels are about the unavoidability of emotional suffering. I was in the middle of that revisitation in 2019 when I went to Ukraine, where I encountered the imperialistic critique of Russian literature almost for the first time. I had encountered Orientalism after I got really into Edward Said, as Orientalism [1978] is a book that everyone reads in Russian studies, but I read Culture and Imperialism [1993], which is about how the rise of the novel and the rise of imperialism happened at the same time and the two were feeding into each other, which again, seems really obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’ve been going back and thinking about the ways that Eugene Onegin and Anna Karenina also reinforce imperial norms. At first, when people in Ukraine said, “We can’t read these novels any more because they have the same rhetoric as the fake news that justifies the occupation of Crimea”, I was like, “Whoa, this is some war-trauma stuff”, but no, it’s true. Especially in Eugene Onegin, where the sex and love story and the imperialism story are super tied up in each other. I think they must be all the time, though I’m not completely sure why that is, other than that they’re both the deforming of human relationships, taking them out of the sphere of the human based on a hierarchy of types of people. I don’t know if that’s enough for it to be connected, but that was something I was thinking about at the very end of Either / Or, when Selin goes to Turkey writing for Let’s Go [travel guides written by Harvard students]. Selin is encountering imperialistic norms for writing where to be objective is to choose the side of Let’s Go, because that’s the one that has a tradition of objectivity. The novel is a plane that ironises everything and relativises everything so while it’s supposedly not endorsing anything, it’s located in the West and valorises the West. She’s finding herself stuck in that, while also drawn into these sex relationships that don’t leave her as much freedom as she wants. They’re definitely connected, and also connected with what was going on in the US, a growing normalisation of the story of the Native American genocide and the role of slavery in building wealth and the need of reparations and all that stuff. There was a parallel thing happening in Turkey, where it’s just much more normal to talk about the Armenian Genocide now than it was when I was a kid.
NW Selin says to herself, “Maybe sex is what will restore narrative to my life”, but when she’s having sex with different men the novel becomes fractured, especially the pacing. What can sex do to narrative?
EB A lot of the media conversation at the time I was writing was framed in terms of this conversation about bringing non-consensual sexual encounters into the light. I don’t want to downplay the importance of that at all, but I was more interested in the complexity of consent. I consented to everything, but then when I looked back, what did that consent actually mean? How free was it? Every day, you get 5 billion end-user licence agreements; if you need surgery, you have to sign paperwork giving consent, but if you don’t sign, you don’t get the surgery. I was interested in exploring the ways that we consent to our own oppression nominally, or in some other way. Another motivating strand of this book is the opening conversations that she has with all these people where they’re like, “Did anything happen in Hungary?” Meaning, did she and Ivan have sex? Even though she thought a lot of stuff happened, she has to say, no, nothing happened. So there’s this way that your life literally doesn’t form a narrative unless you have penetrative sex.
NW Sex puts particular demands on language. #MeToo developed this focus on writing as the ultimate art form with which to describe experience.
EB And be assertive – this is rape, this is rape culture. While I was in some stage of writing and editing Either / Or, I got really interested in [Céline] Sciamma’s films, and I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire [2019]. I think it’s quite standard in queer storytelling and lesbian film to push the definitions of what sex is, but in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the sex scenes see them drawing pictures of each other, or one putting drugs in the other’s armpit. You’re like, “Oh, they’re having sex all the time.” I found it really expanding and liberating. Now I’m thinking about the word “penetration”. When you try to translate concepts like that between different languages, they start to fall apart. I guess in French, it’s probably pénétration or something, and maybe it means about the same thing. But if you get a little bit further away, there would be different things in it. French speakers wouldn’t talk about a penetrating voice or a penetrating idea. What different concepts are bundled up in a word?
NW The final line of Either / Or sees Selin thinking that she has found herself – maybe – “outside the script”. Can that be a permanent state of being?
EB I wrote Either / Or from a feeling of having acquired a sense of liberation and openness. While I’m writing about a time in my life where things were quite closed, I didn’t want to completely close it off. Novels didn’t ruin my life, but they slowed me down a lot. But I’ve gotten to where I am now, because of the novel. I wanted to leave some openness and some sense that Selin is going to become the person capable of writing the book, so I wanted to end it with her feeling at least that digressing from those social scripts is possible. There’s a tendency in essays to progress – first, this was my mental state, and then I realised this, and then my life was different – but I increasingly have trouble with the word “realise” because it implies that something happens just once. I like “recognised” better because it feels like whenever I have realised something I’ve realised it 4,000 times.
NW My friend has a diary and recently she thought, “I wonder what I was doing on this day this time last year?” And she had just written the exact same epiphany that day as she had on the same day last year.
EB That’s incredible. ◉