Sex for Art's Sake

Elif Batuman's curious experiment in fiction

- Jennifer Wilson

"One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one's native land, one goes abroad; one is europamüde, one goes to America, and so on." In Either/ Or (1843), the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls this ceaseless quest for novelty the defining feature of an "aesthetic life," one in which meaning is derived from pleasure-seeking (rather than from, say, the stable tedium of marriage). Those who subscribe to it are in constant pursuit of new erotic and artistic stimuli, consequences be damned: "One burns half of Rome to get an idea of the conflagration of Troy." Fortunately, for the Harvard student Selin Karadağ—the protagonist of Elif Batuman's The Idiot (her fiction debut, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2018) and its sequel, Either/Or— embracing this quest never comes to arson. A sophomore now, in Batuman's second novel, she can just declare a new major.

For Selin, a narrator who treats course descriptions as manifestos, this portends a drastic shift in worldview and sensibility. At the end of The Idiot, she resolved to stop taking classes in the psychology and philosophy of language. She had just spent the summer of 1996 teaching English in a village outside Budapest, a job she took to get closer-physically and culturally—to her crush, a Hungarian math student named Ivan who has now graduated. When the sexual tension built over the summer crescendoed into nothing more than a brotherly hug in a parking lot, Selin was left feeling adrift—and angry about all the linguistics classes she had taken the previous year. “They had let me down,” she seethed. The blunders and miscues that stalled her relationship with Ivan could not be explained away by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that she had sworn by the idea that “the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.”