Elif Batuman does a very commendable satire of the modern Literature Department. She does explain she was there only to make a living while working on her first novel. Still one puzzles. Could I have put up with several years of that? I can’t imagine myself putting up with the nonsense of the Babel Conference (“Babel in California”) for more than polite 30 minutes.
But perhaps she found it easier than I would. Some of the content of her work clearly meant something to her.
At the end of the term, Matej and I had agreed to collaborate on a presentation about Babel. We met one cold, gray afternoon at a dirty metal table outside the library, where we compared notes, drank coffee, and went through nearly an entire pack of Matej’s Winston Lights, which, I learned, he ordered in bulk from an Indian reservation. We settled on a general angle right away, but when it came to details, we didn’t see eye to eye on anything. For nearly an hour we argued about a single sentence in “The Tachanka Theory”: a story about the transformation of warfare by the tachanka, a wagon with a machine gun attached to the back. Once it is armed with tachanki, Babel writes, a Ukrainian village ceases to be a military target, because the guns can be buried under haystacks.
When it started to rain, Matej and I decided to go into the library to look up the Russian original of the sentence we disagreed about: “These hidden points—suggested, but not directly perceived—yield in their sum a construction of the new Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking.” Even once we had the Russian text, though, we still disagreed about the meaning of “hidden points.” Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long, but I remember Matej saying irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”
“That’s exactly right,” I snapped. “He is a double-entry bookkeeper!”
“Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long”.
I can’t either.
In fact, I don’t seem to understand what these two were saying to each other.
But perhaps this explains it: at one point she quotes what she thinks is a beautiful passage — from Babel, about “flies dying in a jar with milky liquid”: Each fly was dying in its own way.
What other heads find beautiful (or interesting, or logical) can be totally inscrutable. Even beautiful heads.
Elif Batuman, The Possessed, Adventures with Russian Books and The People Who Read Them
Oltre Mare 