cultural landslide all over the floor: every piece of media mentioned in elif batuman's The Idiot
tracing my life through Selin's story at Harvard
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is a strong contender for my favourite novel of all time. It’s probably my favourite novel of this century so far. It’s the perfect campus novel, and also more than a campus novel, and a bildungsroman, and an anti-bildungsroman. I’ve read it three times and I still think it has a lot to teach me, or maybe it helps me realise I don’t know anything at all (very Selin).
The Idiot and I met when it was brand new (or at least brand new in the UK). It was 2018 and I was working in my first job, a job I did not enjoy, where I don’t think they particularly enjoyed employing me either. My boyfriend had moved to Canada for a year and I always worried what people thought of me when I said I had a serious partner, he just lived in Canada. I’d decided to spend another year in Oxford after graduation and I wish more than anything I could take that decision back now. I was living somewhere with no heating. My mental health was best described as ‘something or other’. I had no idea what I was doing.
If you’ve not read it, The Idiot is the first book of a currently-two-but-hopefully-more-one-day series about a Turkish-American girl called Selin. She starts her first year at Harvard in 1995 and uses her brand new, first ever email account to start a strange non-relationship-relationship with a boy in his fourth year. She ruminates on whether to live an aesthetic or ethical life. She attempts to learn Russian. She accepts a summer job teaching English in a small Hungarian town. Her relationships with Ivan and various European languages are never fully resolved. It’s hard to do a plot summary of a book with very little plot.
Selin became my favourite character in contemporary literature. I wanted to stare at her life more than I wanted to stare at my life. She was lost in the same ways I was, asking many of the same questions over and over again, more and less clever than me in several ways. We both wanted to be clever and didn’t know how to get there. I’ve pressed copies of this book into at least two friends’ hands since then and they’ve said similar things. We’re all in a strange large group chat with Selin, wondering if we all know anything, thinking we might actually not.
If you’re one of my real life friends and you haven’t read The Idiot yet, please go buy a copy and text me to let me know you’ve done it, so I know not to get it for your next birthday.
Reading it for the third time this year (and the first time in hard copy), I knew I wanted to get at least one essay out of it. The first one I thought of is the one I haven’t started writing yet — sorry, I’ll do that one next week — on medievalism. I love doing medievalist readings of books that aren’t expecting it, but there was something else I couldn’t get out of my head when I started rereading with a pen in my hand.
Selin is surrounded by culture, culture of all kinds, bathing and drowning in it. Almost every page of the book shows her engaging with some kind of cultural artefact. Some of these are set texts in the classes she takes at Harvard. Some are books she picks up and puts down in bookshops or fails to read on a plane. Some are snatches of music that drift through from clubs she isn’t standing in. It’s a book about trying and failing to understand yourself and, particularly, trying to find yourself in relation to culture.
Before I’d really thought of what I wanted to do with all of it, I found myself typing out a list as I read of the fragments of culture that come together to construct The Idiot’s world. I briefly had an idea that I was going to go through and read/reread/listen/relisten to every thing on the list in order and keep a journal of that for you. But then I realised quite quickly I was signing myself up to read War and Peace again alongside 156 other bits of culture. I thought I probably didn’t have time for that. If anyone would like me to do that, please point me towards a very large amount of funding.
I gravitate towards this list, though. I loved making it. Selin spends a year of her life working out how she exists in relation to these works of art. I wonder how I exist in relation to them. Staring at them, I wonder what story about myself I can weave through and around them. I wonder if I’ll turn out to be clever or understand life. I want to take that journey that mirrors hers and work out where I fit in the same cage she spends a year in.
I can’t work out if what follows is a short story, or 156 avant-garde short stories, or a pesronal essay, or a crisis. Please do let me know in the comments. If you’re part of the ‘random background information about Emily’s life’ fandom, you’re gonna love it.
This piece is going to include the references from the first half of the book. I originally attempted to include all of them, but then I realised that reading about my life for ten thousand words at once is too much for anyone’s liver to take.
Who am I in relation to 156 pieces of mid-90s somewhat-American somewhat-global culture? Who are you? Do we understand how language works? Do we understand anything at all?
Every piece of culture mentioned in The Idiot
P. 5 - Legends of the Fall (soundtrack)
I have seen around half of Legends of the Fall when my aunt had it on TV at Christmas one year. I always found it very glamorous that she paid for Sky Movies, and her house had movies on the TV just all the time. I have never experienced the soundtrack, because I only saw the second half of the movie and the sound was off. I remember thinking Brad Pitt needed to get over himself. My mum said I didn’t understand what was happening and it was actually very sad. Potentially if I had heard the soundtrack I would know why all that business with the bear was necessary.
P. 6 - the Holy Bible
While my parents are passionate lifelong atheists, I took the family by surprise by getting really into medieval theology. So I know a lot of Bible bits, often from having read them in spun out translated Anglo-Saxon retellings. But I can’t say I’ve read the original in any detail unless I was using it for a close reading. My instinct is that very few people in the UK have actually read the Bible unless it was assigned reading for them at one time? Perhaps I just don’t know many people who are very observant about Christianity. I do know that I associate ‘Bible study’ as a major use of one’s time with being something Americans do.
P. 8 - The Double (Dostoyevsky)
When I was thirteen or so I got the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe for Christmas and the first story I fell truly and deeply in love with was ‘William Wilson’. I told someone how much I loved it and they said, dismissively, that William Wilson was just a rip off of The Double. I can’t remember who I even had that conversation with but every time I remember it I still want to walk into the sea.
Just googled it and I think ‘William Wilson’ might actually have been published first. Damn.