The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (3 page)

The next afternoon, Valya drove me back to the camp, stopping at the Thai embassy to pick up his visa—he was leaving the next day for a math conference. After we said goodbye, I spent some hours wandering around the historic town, its Serbian graveyards and churches. Eventually I had to return to the campground. I was greeted at the gate by the English teacher, closely followed by the bandaged boy leg champion.

“You have been . . .
loafing
,” said the English teacher accusingly.

“Your hair looks cool,” Gábor said.

“No it doesn’t!” snapped the English teacher.

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.

When I got back to school that fall, I couldn’t face linguistics again—it had let me down, failed to reveal anything about language and what it meant. But I kept studying Russian. It seemed like the only possible place to look for an explanation for the things that had happened to me. I even signed up for an accelerated class. Two years later—without, incidentally, having read more than seven or eight novels—I found myself about to receive a degree in literature: after folklore and mythology, the major with the fewest requirements.

Among the not very numerous theoretical texts I read as a literature major, one that made a strong impression on me was Foucault’s short essay on
Don Quixote
in
The Order of Things
, the one that likens the tall, skinny, weird-looking hidalgo to “a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book.” I immediately identified with this description because
elif
, the Turkish word for
alif
or
aleph
—the first letter of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets—is drawn as a straight line. My parents chose this name for me because I was an unusually long and skinny baby (I was born one month early).

I thought of Foucault’s essay again when I recently came across a psychological study showing that Americans tend to choose careers whose labels resemble their names. Thus the name
Dennis
is statistically overrepresented among dentists, and the ranks of geoscientists contain disproportionately high numbers of Georges and Geoffreys. The study ascribed these phenomena to “implicit egotism”: the “generally positive feelings” that people have about their own names. I wonder whether some of the Dennises in dentistry school ended
up there by a different motivation: the secret wish to bring arbitrary language in tune with physical reality. Maybe that’s why I was drawn in by
Don Quixote
: it gave me a way to fulfill the truth of my name in the world’s terms. It would be fitting, since this is the point of Foucault’s essay: Don Quixote decides to prove that he is a knight just like the knights in chivalric romances, and that the world he inhabits is likewise a forum for proving heroism, and so he sets out to find—or create—resemblances between the word and the world. “Flocks, serving girls, and inns become once more the language of books to the imperceptible degree to which they resemble castles, ladies, and armies,” writes Foucault.

Don Quixote, I realized, had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life
and
read books; he lived life
through
books, generating an even better book. Foucault, meanwhile, broke my idea of literary theory: instead of reducing complexity and beauty, he had produced it. My interest in truth came only later, but beauty had already begun to draw me into the study of literature.

My plan for after graduation was still to write a novel—but writing novels takes time, and time is expensive. I took the precaution of applying to some PhD literature programs. I did not consider getting a creative writing MFA, because I knew they made you pay tuition, and go to workshops. Whatever reservations I had about the usefulness of reading and analyzing great novels went double for reading and analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me. I did, however, send an application to an artists’ colony on Cape Cod. To my surprise, they offered me a fiction writing fellowship, on the basis of a seventy-five-page first-person narrative I had written from the perspective of a dog.

One extremely windy and rainy day that March, I rented
a car and drove to Cape Cod, to see just what kind of outfit these people were running. The colony was located on the grounds of a prerevolutionary lumber mill. I made my way over a muddy wooden footpath to a boatlike building, where a man was making a video recording of a machine apparently designed to pour concrete onto the floor out of a vat. When I asked him where the writers were, the artist waved his hand at the window, at the teeming rain.

I located the writers in a trailer, huddled around a space heater, wearing plaid shirts and plastic-rimmed glasses. The program director, a windswept, gray-eyed local writer of romantic appearance, treated me with remarkable kindness, especially considering my status as the twenty-one-year-old author of a first-person dog novella. Nonetheless, we weren’t on the same page. Our priorities and our worldviews were not synchronized.

“What will you do if you
don’t
come here?” he asked. I told him I had applied to some graduate schools. There was a long pause. “Well, if you want to be an academic, go to graduate school,” he said. “If you want to be a writer, come here.”

I wanted to be a writer, not an academic. But that afternoon, standing under a noisy tin awning in a parking lot facing the ocean, eating the peanut-butter sandwiches I had made in the cafeteria at breakfast, I reached some conclusive state of disillusionment with the transcendentalist New England culture of “creative writing.” In this culture, to which the writing workshop belonged, the academic study of literature was understood to be bad for a writer’s formation. By what mechanism, I found myself wondering, was it bad? Conversely, why was it automatically good for a writer to live in a barn, reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?

•   •   •

I turned down the writing fellowship. The director of the writing colony sent me a postcard with a photograph of a sailboat on it, wishing me luck. My boyfriend at the time, Eric, had been offered a job designing intelligent radar detectors in Silicon Valley, and I had been offered five years of funding in the comparative literature department at Stanford. We moved to California, a place I had never been before. Under rolling green hills, positrons were speeding through the world’s longest linear accelerator; in towers high above the palm trees lay the complete Paris files of the Russian Imperial secret police. Stanford was essentially the opposite of a colonial New England lumber mill.

For many years, I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism. In 2006,
n+1
magazine asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the
Best American Short Stories
anthologies of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy day on Cape Cod.

I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of “craft.” I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: “Show, don’t tell”; “Murder your darlings”; “Omit needless words.” As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.

I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the
Best American
stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns—like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest
possible words. The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter
e
. They all began in medias res. Often, they answered the “five Ws and one H.”
*

The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value—so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan.
†
Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: on the one hand, John Briggs and John Hillman . . . on the other, Sybil Mildred Clemm Legrand Pascal, who invites the reader to call her Miss Sibby. On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived—unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In “Lady with Lapdog,” Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless.
No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog.
They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence—like the “compassionate” TV doctor who informs her colleagues: “She has a
name
.”

But names don’t work that way. As Derrida once wrote, the singularity of the proper name is inextricable from its generality: it always has to be possible for one thing to be
named after
any other named thing, and for different people, like the characters in
Anna Karenina
, to be called by the same name. The basic tension of the name is that it simultaneously does and does not designate the unique individual. As someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida—that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle—I nonetheless felt that Derrida had been right about names. More important, he had really
thought
about names, about how special they are, so that, even if
Of Grammatology
was more painful to read than the
Best American Short Stories
, still it belonged to a discourse that tried to say something about what things mean.

Moreover, even if the literary criticism discourse is no less susceptible than the creative writing workshop to charges of self-sufficiency and hermeticism, it has one crucial advantage: its fundamentally collaborative premise. Each work of criticism is supposed to build upon the existing body of work, to increase the sum total of human understanding. It’s not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It’s supposed to be cumulative—it believes in progress.

The creative writing workshop, by contrast,
seems
to have a collaborative premise, and does indeed involve a collaborative
process
—but the signs of that process are systematically effaced from the finished product. Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling
with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.

I don’t know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that “theory” had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?

This isn’t to say that graduate school was one long walk in the park, especially not at first. I did have the good fortune to strike an immediate friendship with one of my classmates, Luba, a Russian émigré who had grown up in Tashkent. I feel very lucky to have met such a wonderful person at that delicate point in my career. In between sessions of a seminar on an obscure school of 1920s Russian filmmakers, known for their “eccentric” use of circus paraphernalia and human-size rubber mannequins, we would take long walks around the graduate-student housing complex, invariably getting lost, and once even falling into some kind of a ditch. Like Mann’s hero in his first weeks on the Magic Mountain, I thought: This can’t last much longer.

In fact, between classes, conferences, teaching, and endless lunches, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get anything but term papers written at Stanford. At the end of the year, I filed for a leave of absence and moved to San Francisco where, between odd jobs, I wrote a great deal. Nonetheless, the result somehow wasn’t a novel. It didn’t
have a beginning or an end. It didn’t seem to be telling any particular story. This was surprising and difficult for me to understand. It had occurred to me to worry in advance about writer’s block, but the production of a huge non-novel just wasn’t a possibility I had anticipated.

I was thinking over the problem on the evening of September 13, 2001, while running to the Golden Gate Bridge, when I tripped over some kind of plastic barrier, erected, I later learned, with the intention of protecting the bridge from terrorists. Some other joggers helped me to my feet. My arm felt very strange. I walked to the nearest hospital and spent some hours in the waiting room, where a ceiling-mounted television showed endless footage of bodies being excavated from the World Trade Center. Eventually I was admitted to the emergency room, where doctors removed the gravel from my knees, x-rayed my arm, informed me that my elbow was broken, and outfitted me with a cast and sling. The bill came to $1,700. This experience caused me to take a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed. What was I doing, running around this world—a place about which I clearly understood nothing—with no health insurance and no real job, writing an endless novel about God knows what? A week later, the department head called and asked if I wanted to return to Stanford. I said yes.