Either/Or

As a literature major, Selin is required to take a “tutorial,” a small class in which she and other students discuss literature. She finds it tedious and is struck by how uninteresting most of the commentary is. After tutorial, she goes to the library to read Either/Or, and on the way, she finds Ivan’s prize-winning senior thesis. Because he is a math major, most of it is symbols and equations that she cannot parse. She finds Either/Or. It is divided into two volumes: the collected papers of narrator “A,” who lived aesthetically, and the collected papers of narrator “B,” who lived ethically. There is also a short novella entitled “The Seducer’s Diary”; according to the book’s introduction, this novella is the only portion of Either/Or that most people read. Kierkegaard apparently did not advise this manner of approaching the text, and although Selin is struck by how humorous she finds Kierkegaard’s advice, she also skips to “The Seducer’s Diary.” She is appalled by the parallels she sees between the story in “The Seducer’s Diary” and her own email-based half-romance with Ivan, and it upsets her to see his cold behavior described as a “good” seduction technique. She shuts the book and returns to the literature department, where she is supposed to watch The Usual Suspects for tutorial.

Selin is further troubled by The Usual Suspect’s representation of deception, and she sends Ivan a lengthy email outlining all of his baffling behavior and asking for an explanation. His response, a poorly written poem, is equally baffling. After reading the email, Selin meets with a group of students from the past summer’s Hungary program, and one of the girls asks about Ivan. Peter, the program’s leader, asks Selin if she has Ivan’s current email address at Berkeley. Having graduated, Ivan is now a graduate student there. Selin asks Peter if Ivan is a bad person, and Peter responds that although some might characterize him that way, he is not. Peter wonders if Selin has gotten this impression from someone named Zita, but Selin has no idea who that is. It becomes clear that Ivan has multiple romantic entanglements, and Selin feels like crying.

Selin continues reading “The Seducer’s Diary” and grows even more disturbed by its parallels to her relationship with Ivan. The seducer is “impossibly cruel,” and in his various machinations and manipulations, he echoes how Ivan interacted with her. Finishing the text, she is stricken but tells herself that the story is fabricated; Kierkegaard himself would never have behaved so terribly, so he must’ve created it to make a broader point about ethics and aesthetics.

Selin finds Svetlana and tells her all about The Usual Suspects and Kierkegaard, and Svetlana’s response is that Selin needs a therapist. Selin recalls with distaste her past experiences with psychologists. During her parents’ divorce, a female therapist asked if there were camels in Turkey and whether or not Selin had to wear a veil. Selin patiently explained “how important secularism and science were in the Turkish national identity” (46). The previous year, she saw another therapist when her grade in Russian fell to a C, and he was impatient when she wanted to talk about Ivan. To him, her issues stemmed from her parents’ divorce.

Selin, who wears a size 11.5 shoe, has finally found a pair of women’s boots that are not unisex. She wears them, along with her new army surplus shoulder bag, to her first “chance in literature” class. There, the professor explains that in realist literature, characters were, for the first time, fully formed humans with personalities rather than allegorical representations of ideas or qualities. Selin learns about Balzac, Freud, Darwin, Conan Doyle, and Baudelaire. She gets so excited during a portion of the lecture detailing surrealist Breton’s own excitement that she has to leave early. When she arrives home, dormmates Lukas and Oak have left a stingray in the sink. She starts to ask about the creature but decides that it doesn’t matter and heads to the library to read Either/Or. Now that she’s finished “The Seducer’s Diary,” she is less inspired by the text, and the section on ethical living is tedious and confusing. She disagrees with its endorsement of marriage and family and reflects wryly on the stressful, but also somewhat absurd, experience of her parents’ divorce and her father’s remarriage.

At the dining hall, Selin meets a Finnish student named Juho who is 23 and already has doctorates in chemistry and physics. He is at the university working on a computer science project. After eating, she audits an ethics seminar on quality of life. Although the professor is brilliant, she finds it unsatisfying.

Selin’s friend, Lakshmi, who works on the literary magazine, encourages her to join the staff. Although Selin has no interest in working for a real literary magazine after college, she applies and is accepted. She also decides to get a job. Freshman year, her mother balked at the idea of Selin working, urging her to focus on her studies, and offered to give Selin money, even though she would have to withdraw funds from her retirement account to do so. Selin had instead volunteered as a tutor for students pursuing their GED. Because on-campus positions are either work study jobs, for which she is ineligible, or low-paying, uninteresting positions, Selin finds work doing data entry for a gardening catalogue. Although she makes good money there, the paid-per-word work gives her shooting pains in her wrists, and she is forced to quit. She then finds a position at the Ukrainian Research Center on campus.

Selin is a member of the Turkish club, although she finds many of its members stressful and does not speak Turkish as well as anyone else. Growing up in the United States as a Turkish American girl, she often encountered people who, on finding out that she was Turkish, immediately brought up the Armenian genocide. Although Selin had never heard a Turkish person say anything derogatory about Armenians, she knew that Americans loved to talk about “ethnic hatreds.” She finds this focus on whether or not the Turkish killing of Armenians constituted genocide somewhat confusing.

Selin is greatly interested in Russian class, and she and Svetlana are tasked with memorizing a portion of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Svetlana suggests using a memorization aid taught to her by her father that assigns one part of each passage a particular location along a route, such that when the speaker visualizes the route, they find it easier to remember the passage. Selin is happy to be reading Onegin, which was the second Russian text she ever read. The first was Anna Karenina, which she thinks is much more her mother’s book, given how her mother reads herself into the text. Selin considers herself much more objective than either of her parents.

Selin goes shopping with Riley, Priya, and Joanne and buys a corduroy shirt and a charmeuse skirt. The friends look at various secondhand items and settle on a doormat decorated with a drawing of cats whose tails spell out the word “Welcome.” Back at their common room, they are joined by a few pre-med students, and they all share a bowl of cookie dough while trading stories. Selin finds the conversation stressful and, telling everyone that she’s just remembered she has to read a book, leaves abruptly. She fabricated the need to finish her homework, so she wanders around campus until going to the library.

There, she begins to read Breton’s Nadja and is “nonplussed” about his claim that it’s a waste of time for novelists to try to transform real people into characters. Selin feels this kind of transformation is precisely what a good novelist should do, and although she was excited to read Nadja, she finds Breton’s ideas disappointing. She has wanted to be a novelist since before she could read. She always wanted the books her parents read to her to be longer, be more complex, and provide better answers to questions that she had about life—her parents had told her that she was “expecting too much from Frog and Toad are Friends” (84). When she took her first creative writing class in high school, she had been chagrined to learn that storytelling did not come naturally to her. While she was adept at grammar, argumentation, transcription of conversations, and insertion of humor into stressful or mundane situations, she struggled to invent characters. She did not want to write about her Turkish roots because she didn’t enjoy reading “whole books” where the point was that the narrator was from one particular country. However, the kind of writing she did enjoy she soon learned was dismissed as “navel gazing.” She recalls developing an affinity at that time for writer Kazuo Ishiguro, who, although he had a Japanese name, did not write exclusively about Japanese characters. She frets about how she would turn people from her life, like Ivan or her mother, into characters, and she wonders if Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” life could serve as an algorithm for both how to live her own life and how to write about it. After a rocky beginning and a break, during which she has to go to class to recite her memorized passage from Eugene Onegin, she finishes Nadja. Although she finds many parallels in it to her own life and the lives of her friends, there is much about the text that she finds unsettling.