OLM Favorites: This Drifty State of Being
/The IdiotBy Elif BatumanPenguin Press, 2017
The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out.
One of the most riveting aspects of The Idiot is that, despite this project and despite its numerous moments of exultation and generosity, it ends in a spectacular darkness, and in a return to a kind of terrifying wordlessness. The book is preoccupied with the idea of riddles, and in some sense it is itself a riddle, or a series of them: what is the distinction between love and pity? Where, on that scale, do we place compassion? What about this world (Dostoevsky's, our own) makes someone striving to be morally good a “fool”? (I think of one of the most vivid lines from another Dostoevsky novel, Notes from Underground, in which the narrator, a kind of polar foil to Myshkin, cries out: “They won’t let me… I can’t be… good!”)I have seriously condensed the plot of the Dostoevsky novel, but Batuman's endeavor is easier to summarize—there's not much plot in a traditional sense. (I should note here, to be clear, that I don't consider that a disadvantage.) The Boston Globe blurb I cited earlier gets most of the major occurrences in: Selin, a freshman at Harvard, stumbles through her first two semesters and goes to Hungary for the summer, mostly for the sake of Ivan, an “unusually, almost unreasonably tall” Hungarian math major with whom she strikes up an ambiguous, correspondence-based relationship. Batuman moves episodically and at an unhurried pace through this year of Selin's life, letting us see how pretentious professors, classroom acquaintances, unsuccessful attempts at community service, unremarkable excursions off campus, and more are, quite sincerely, the drama of Selin's days. Along the way, plenty of texts slip into the story: Selin's oddly mesmerizing Russian homework, her emails to and from Ivan, and Selin's own references to other writers' work. The novel starts out with the air of a bildungsroman and moves into a kind of picaresque as Selin arrives abroad, though it flouts the arc and closure traditionally followed in both forms.If any of this sounds familiar, might it be that you have read Batuman's The Possessed? In the collection's introduction, Batuman tells the story of what brought her to graduate school, and that story is her Idiot condensed into five pages, without the pretense of fiction. The baffling linguistics class propositions are there; so is the strangely absorbing story the narrator is asked to read for her introductory Russian class; so is the mysterious older Hungarian student with whom the narrator falls in love. Even the “boys' leg contest” that the narrator is strongarmed into judging while teaching in a Hungarian village makes an appearance. In interviews, Batuman has said that she wrote a draft of The Idiot in her early twenties and returned to it nearly two decades later—so we can surmise that perhaps this introduction in The Possessed was a condensation of that early draft, a kind of remaking of as-yet-unused material. Still, it's strange to see this story told in such neat summary in The Possessed, just as I found it strange to see the excerpt from The Idiot that appeared in the New Yorker this January, which took small sections of the first 90 pages of the novel and strung them together, with small additions and changes, in a different order. It speaks to a feature of Batuman's book that to me seems worth noting and questioning. Just after recounting this period of youth in the introduction to The Possessed, Batuman writes:
Today this all strikes me as somehow typical of the way things happen, when you try to follow life. Events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won't naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.
[t]he novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn't been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn't exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of preexisting literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against.
This is compelling stuff, and Batuman backs it up beautifully in her essay. One of her touchstones is Don Quixote, which she credits with not only the creation of novelistic alienation, but also with the novel's omnivorous inclusiveness. “[I]n Don Quixote,” she writes, “class and race have no higher an order of significance than, say, a hidalgo's typical weekly diet, or the noise produced by a textile mill...” Don Quixote is also one of the texts most obviously referenced by Dostoevsky in The Idiot, and the difference between what the two authors highlight in Cervantes's novel is telling—Dostoesvky wrote in his diary that Don Quixote is
a great book, not the sort that are written now; only one such book is sent to humanity in several hundred years... Man will not forget to take this saddest of all books with him to God's last judgment. He will point to the fact that humanity's most sublime beauty, its most sublime purity, chastity, forthrightness, gentleness, courage, and, finally, its most sublime intellect—all these often (alas, all too often) come to naught, pass without benefit to humanity, and even become an object of humanity's derision simply because all these most noble and precious gifts with which a person is often endowed lack but the very last gift—that of genius to put all this power to work and to direct it along a path of action...
Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely “usual” people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility.
Dostoevsky's narrator then identifies the people in his story who are “ordinary,” and describes how this ordinariness affects their roles in the tale he's telling. But he also suggests that “such people even acquire a kind of typicality”—and, more importantly, the passage points out a major question intrinsic to both Dostoevsky and Batuman's books: if not everything is in fact interesting to readers, how do you decide what to omit or exaggerate or change? How do you make the mundane surprising?Dostoevsky's narrator seems to imply the answer to such questions in the passage above. The narrator is the key, the current running underneath—his presence, and his relationship with the reader, carry it all. And the two Idiots take near-opposite approaches to this structural concern. The most obvious distinction is that Batuman's book is told in the first-person, whereas Dostoevsky's is in third omniscient (although, as will be discussed later, this omniscience is at odds with a kind of ethos of intrigue and concealment). But the differences extend well beyond this choice. Whereas Dostoevsky's narrator seems to strive to guide the reader—to, in a sense, explain what is unclassifiable, as in the example above—Selin's entire presence is based on her unwillingness or inability to do so. The unclassifiable and ordinary are her entire world. At one point early in her college semester, she describes her life at Harvard this way: “Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.” She feels unable to interpret any of what she's learning or seeing, and she compares her interior blankness to a passage in Chekhov's “The Darling,” which she quotes:
She saw objects round her and understood everything that was going on, but she could not form opinions about anything and did not know what to talk about. How awful it is not to have an opinion! You see a bottle, for example, standing there, or the rain falling, or a peasant going along in his cart, but what the bottle or rain or peasant are for, what sense they make, you can't say and couldn't say, even if they offered you a thousand rubles.
Part of me thought that nothing would be here anymore—that I would come up the escalator and there would be only snow. Instead I found brick walls, Balzac, frozen yogurt, alveolar fricatives, everything just the way I left it. I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren't commensurate to me in any way.
Ivan, despite Selin's interest in him, isn't commensurate to her either, and that word, linked to ideas of correspondence and coextensiveness, describe a state of relation to oneself and the world that is not accessible to Selin—or, if it is, it's refused to Batuman's reader. In this sense The Idiot differs from the book to which I believe it most truly attempts to pay homage, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (the first two volumes in particular—Batuman uses a quote from Within a Budding Grove as her epigraph). Like Marcel, Selin is interested in the strangeness of what is normally not noticed, and, like Marcel, she is trying to figure out how to be a writer without precisely knowing what to write about. But Proust's novels are predicated entirely on a sense of phenomenological linkages: the way time strings together, the way one sight echoes another, the way a relationship carries both present and past selves in its tide. There are moments in which Selin—and, more importantly, Batuman—seem interested in this idea, but the overall effect of spending time in Selin's mind, especially as the novel moves through its meandering second half, is one of almost obstinate refusal to allow any grandeur of connectedness.This reticence gives Batuman's book a mysterious aspect, a sense of concealment. Dostoevsky's novel is full of mystery, too—the difference is in what this mysteriousness suggests about narrative and, by extension, life itself. While the entire weight of Batuman's book rests on Selin's remote-seeming subjectivity, the narrator of the original Idiot's position in relation to its characters and action is not as fixed as initial moments in the novel might lead the reader to expect. Though he is capable of moving from character to character and leaping forward and backward in time, there are also limitations, whether they are to be read as conscious withholding or actual obstacles to “knowing,” to what he can tell the reader. An example from the start of the second part of the novel, which begins with Prince Myshkin's sudden departure from Petersburg, ostensibly to claim an inheritance:
It was said then that there might have been other reasons for such a hasty departure; but of that, as well as of the prince's adventures in Moscow and generally in the course of his absence from Petersburg, we can supply very little information. The prince was away for exactly six months, and even those who had certain reasons to be interested in his fate could find out very little about him during all that time.
There are several layers of restraint here. “It was said” implies a kind of hearsay-based information-gathering; the narrator also explicitly tells us that there is a limit to what he can tell us about. (Does it have to do with things happening in Moscow versus Petersburg? Is the narrator embedded in a particular time and place?) And there is, in that final sentence, an adjective that, like “extraordinary,” appears innumerable times in the book: “certain.” People are forever going to town on “a certain matter,” “a certain person” is interested in X or Y, or “certain information” is withheld—in this way, Dostoevsky's book employs an almost detective-story-style intrigue, and keeps us wondering who or what's behind that “certain” thing.All the masking devices in the passage I've quoted above, and in Dostoevsky's book in its entirety, posit that behind them is a whole tangle of connectedness and motivation. Selin's world is not posited on such a thing. In an interview with Book Page, Batuman characterizes Selin's brand of alienation, particularly in the second half of the novel, as a “feeling of falling outside of plot,” and as a “devastating” experience:
I think for all or many people there are times when one feels like a character in a book or movie, and everything that happens feels meaningful, picturesque, like it’s heading towards something; but it’s possible to lose that feeling, sometimes quite suddenly, and then for a time, sometimes quite a long time, life feels like just a list of occurrences or experiences with no order or meaning.
This logic—very reminiscent of the passage from The Possessed quoted earlier—seems unimpeachable: what Batuman describes is a recognizable feeling. But does it need 400 pages to make itself clear? The experience of reading was, for me, marred by Batuman's insistent and exclusive focus on this drifty state of being, combined with
Above him in the trees a little bird was singing, and he started searching for it with his eyes among the leaves; suddenly the bird flew away from the tree, and at that moment for some reason he recalled the “little fly” in a “hot ray of sunlight,” of which Ippolit had written that even this fly “knows its place and participates in the general chorus, and he alone was a castaway.” This phrase had struck him earlier, and he remembered it now. A long-forgotten memory stirred in him and suddenly became clear all at once.It was in Switzerland, during the first year of his treatment, even during the first months. He was still quite like an idiot then, could not even speak properly, and sometimes did not understand what was required of him. Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every “little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus; knows its place, loves it, and is happy”; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.
This passage is startling both for the similarity between the feelings described here and in parts of Batuman's novel—the sensation of somehow falling out of the world's inclusive order—and for the difference in the way this alienation is conveyed in each book. Dostoevsky draws on images of nature that might seem to some clichéd, but he pairs them with the strange, original detail of the “little fly... in a hot ray of sunlight”; he allows the pacing of the sentences, as the passage progresses, to stretch out into lyric, patterned lament. I hear what Selin is saying when she expresses her loneliness and bafflement, but, here with Myshkin, I also see and feel it.Perhaps what I object to in Batuman's book is not Selin's reticence, but a kind of implication, by way of the novelist's choices, that such reticence is the best way to truly render lived experience. The only nonincidental reference to Dostoevsky in Batuman's novel (Tolstoy gets many more shoutouts) occurs in a conversation between Selin and Ivan in Hungary, after Ivan describes a dog's eyes as “Dostoevskian,” and she says Dostoevsky is “so-so.” He asks her:
“So what don't you like about Dostoevsky?”I thought it over. “He makes me embarrassed and tired... He invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them—like, it's hell, it's intolerable humiliation, it's the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can't get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired.”
