“The Repugnant Conclusion”
by Elif Batuman
from the April 25 & May 2, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
I think Elif Batuman’s work is great, and I’m excited for her forthcoming novel, Either/Or, which is a sequel to her debut novel The Idiot (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago) and comes out from Penguin Press on May 22. “The Repugnant Conclusion” is an excerpt or, as it is called in her interview with Deborah Treisman, an adaptation from Either/Or. So if you’re excited to reunite with Selin, here’s a chance to do so before the new book comes out in May. This seems to pick up pretty much just a few months after we left off:
Svetlana got back to Harvard the day after me, though it felt like years. I had already slept the night in my new room, eaten breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, and made numerous trips to the storage facility, having the same conversation over and over with people whose existence I had forgotten. “How was your summer?” “How was your summer?” “How was Hungary?”
“So, how was Hungary? Did anything happen?” Lakshmi asked, with a conspiratorial sparkle. Lakshmi was one of the people I remembered: last year, when we were freshmen, we had exchanged condences; we had both been in love with older guys. There had been certain similarities between our situations, between Ivan and Noor. And, notwithstanding my feeling that a lot of things had happened, I answered the question truthfully, in the sense that I knew Lakshmi intended it. Nothing had happened. Meaning, nothing had happened with Ivan. Meaning, we hadn’t had sex.
Please let me know if you’ve read The Idiot, if you’re excited about Either/Or, and, regardless, what your thoughts on “The Repugnant Conclusion” are.
This story captured for me the idealism of college, when one, for a brief period, might contemplate how to live one’s life (ethically or aesthetically, for example) while also seeking sexual experience and finding a partner. The protagonist is navigating the tension between the practical and the ideal in her relationships with friends and potential lovers. There also seems to be a theme about how tradition frames (burdens?) our understanding of how life is organized, whether it is Kierkegaard, the college Course Catalog or the arranged marriage. My favorite passage: “It was the first time I had heard of anyone having an organizing principle or goal for life, other than just trying to make money and have kids. People never openly said that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed, when I was growing up, the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money.” It was also a reminder of how college was a rare time when you could discuss and be challenged by books, not meant solely for entertainment or diversion, with friends.
The title of this story is absolutely brilliant! I have looked up on Google whether there is such a concept as “The Repugnant Conclusion” . There is, and it is precisely as stated in the story.
We’ve already been introduced to a fictional version of the repugnant conclusion – the nasty seducer, in a “novella” by Kierkegaard, which is summarised earlier in the tale. I’ve looked up Kierkegaard as well, and he did indeed write a book called “Either/Or” in which one part is “The Seducer’s Diary” more or less as in our narrator’s summary here.
The Repugnant Conclusion, in my reading, is of course the heartless and repellant finale of the story: namely the scene in which the young protagonist is raped by a nasty seducer.
The protagonist, Selin, is an idealistic girl with confused ideas about love, sex, marriage, procreation and the meaning of life. Just like most young girls in their second year at college in fact. She looks for inspiration to her friends. One, Svetlana wants a conventional romantic marriage, but finds she has to settle for really boring conversation, and boring uninspiring sex. Lakshmi is looking at an arranged marriage as her future, and embracing the idea, which Selin, although herself from a Turkish family (so presumably of Muslim heritage) finds quite perturbing.
Selin herself, looking for the perfect experience, gets a sordid encounter with a nameless creep who does all that the fictional Johannes did in terms of completely tricking and confusing the girl, and leaving her wondering what, if anything, happened.
A clever idea, with a brilliant kernel. My only criticism is that the story is a bit diffuse, probably because it is part of a longer work. The philosophical ideas might put off the casual reader, who might be looking for a story not an ethical/aesthetic dilemma.
I think Arthur 2Sheds captures the essence of this story well: A young woman, a college sophomore, tries to figure out how to live, based on what she encounters in college — philosophy and books, as well as a couple of friends, and of course boys. The author is making fun of the girl, but in a sympathetic way. It’s probably a partial portrait of Batuman’s younger self.
Arthur highlights the girl’s discovery that people could (appear to) have an organizing principle to their lives, and he quotes a relevant passage. Later Selin reacts to Lakshmi’s acceptance of arranged marriage: “I frowned, trying to think of how to formulate what it was I wanted to know. It was something about what rules she was following, and with what expectations, and how she had come up with the rules and the expectations.”
She looks for guidance in literature, but the stories she is presented with in classes are not helpful – something from Kierkegaard and a Russian story called “Rudolfio”. Nonetheless she is seduced by literature: “That was what I needed the aesthetic life for: if you lived your life as if it were a novel, then at some point you just had to write everything down.” Romanticism dominates: “Love was dangerous, with an element of something repulsive. To try to escape these things was childish and anti-novelistic.”
Her other sources are equally superficial: Seventeen magazine about putting two hands
on a boy when you’re kissing and her view of oral sex as “queasy”, which she got from a TV sitcom, something like “Sex and the City”, I would guess.
A very valuable strain to the story, in my view, is its humor, based on Selin’s naivete. For instance, when discussing the Repugnant Conclusion, she thinks, “I didn’t get why the extremely unhappy person wasn’t allowed to kill herself before she messed up the average.” Also: “I recognized the professor’s characteristic delight at not imparting information.” And: “Kierkegaard was funny!” When Svetlana has a hickey, Selin wonders, “Was that hives?” Her sense of American childishness in relation to her foreign relatives (I think Batuman’s family came from Turkey) is based on “innocence, Disney, the inability to drive a stick shift”. I especially liked the childhood remembrance of Voltron, in which “the one who was a girl was always abut to be forced to be a sex slave and carry fruit on her head.”
Now we come to sex — the alpha and omega of the story. Selin’s narrative starts with coming back from summer break and her two best girlfriends asking her – indirectly — if she had sex. Lakshmi asks, “Did anything happen?” Selin says, “I answered the question truthfully, in the sense that I knew Lakshmi intended. Nothing had happened. Meaning that nothing had happened with Ivan. Meaning, we hadn’t had sex.” A similar scenario plays out with Svetlana. Neither of the other girls had had sex with their summer boyfriends either.
Selin says: “I never thought about having sex. Nothing I thought about sex corresponded to anything I thought about or wanted.” Yet she is curious about it. All three girls know that sex is important in some way as a rite of passage.
That’s the alpha. The story then goes through course catalogues and literature and other things. Until near the end it returns to the omega of sex. Selin has two sort-of sexual encounters, one with the friend of a guy she knows and one with a guy she meets at a party. Both are casual encounters and in both she tells the boy she has not had sex and he is okay with it and suggests an unspecified alternative to vaginal penetration, which we can infer might be manual or oral stimulation. One boy says “I’ll show you what you can do” and the other said there were lots of other things they could do. Both are agreeable and it doesn’t sound like either one forced her.
But Selin gets nothing from these two encounters and she still needs to find out what this sex thing is all about. So she emails the first boy and tells him, “There’s this other thing I need you to help me out with.” And she explains explicitly how “the situation I had been in when we met I needed not to be in anymore”. I love that construction.
And he calls back almost immediately and we can guess what happens next.
Here is where I part company with Senior History Fan. I don’t get where this commenter deduces that:
“The Repugnant Conclusion, in my reading, is of course the heartless and repellant finale of the story: namely the scene in which the young protagonist is raped by a nasty seducer.”
Or:
“Selin herself, looking for the perfect experience, gets a sordid encounter with a nameless creep who does all that the fictional Johannes did in terms of completely tricking and confusing the girl, and leaving her wondering what, if anything, happened.”
Neither one of these guys seems creepy or nasty to me, they are both willing to modify their desires to accommodate Selin’s fears. The last encounter, which is undescribed, and is initiated by Selin herself in a search for “knowledge”, hardly seems like a rape. If the first two encounters had been so awful, would she have contacted the first boy for a return bout in which she wanted him to relieve her of hefr virginity? There is no indication that this third and last encounter turns out disastrously.