In Dark Times, What is the Artist's Role?

Elif Batuman on writing, protest, couples therapy, and what happens when the loveless come to power.

About a week after the inauguration I started feverishly pulling books from my shelf. Milosz, Havel, the Russian poets—how had they lived through upheaval? How does a citizen, a writer, a community member, orient themselves in a time like this? As I inhaled a Havel biography and exhumed ye olde night guard, I could think of no one I’d rather discuss this with than Elif Batuman, a writer whose way of seeing I treasure. Her perspective is global and historical—and at once deeply challenging and deeply delightful. Elif is the many-laureled author of three books, most recently the novel Either/Or, and a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her engrossing Substack is The Elif Life. Here we talk about art during unrest, childhood injuries, and the perils of self-censorship.

illustration by Maria Mendoza

Jess: In this very intense and overwhelming time, so many of us are asking, "What is the right thing to be doing?" For those of us who are writers or artists, the question is "What is the role of artists right now?" What do you think?

Elif: I’ve been thinking a lot about James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street [published in 1972]. You really see him toggling between his political responsibility, related to current events and civil rights, versus his responsibility to shut himself in his room and write his books. He talks about feeling people are disappointed with him. And I'm sure someone was always complaining that he could have gone to this thing or that thing, if he hadn’t been too busy hanging out with his rich friends.

At one point he’s in California working on the screenplay for The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and at the same time, he’s fighting to free his former bodyguard who’s unjustly imprisoned in New York. Every time he goes back to California, he feels like he’s giving up the battle in New York. But he doesn’t. And “in a way, they are the same battle.” That knowledge, “in a way they were the same battle,” is so important and so hard to hold onto. One involves an actual guy in prison. The other is more abstract, but maybe does also involve other actual people in prison.

It’s the exact same battle, at different levels of abstraction.

Here’s the thing. No Name in the Street is one of the most truly moving political and literary texts I know, but it doesn’t feel finished. It feels like it was torn away from the writer. And it was—by sickness, he had hepatitis—and by his publishers. They basically yanked it away from him in 1970. It was years late.

So he sticks on an epilogue where he’s like, this book has been so delayed by trials and assassinations and funerals: “This book is not finished—can never be finished, by me.” And here’s what’s going on in the country. You can feel how exhausted he was.

When I look at James Baldwin's career, I don't wish that he showed up at more funerals. I wish he took care of himself. I wish he didn’t run himself ragged. Baldwin was sixty-three when he died.

What do I want from artists? Maybe this will sound self-serving, but I want them to take care of themselves and continue to produce art, continue to process reality. We need some people to be physically present in courtrooms, putting pressure on people. But we also need some people sitting at a desk, making some kind of representation we can understand.

I agree. We need it. And Baldwin is a wonderful model. I’m also thinking of Václav Havel, this incredible example of moral courage, who persisted through decades of oppression in Czechoslovakia, through imprisonment. His plays gave the resistance a way to talk about what was happening, at a time when the government had corrupted the language. Though the plays had to be circulated underground.

Right before Trump’s inauguration I was in Japan, working on a story about the novelist Sayaka Murata. I was talking to Sayaka’s English translator, Ginny Tapley Takemura, in a restaurant. Trump’s face appeared on TV. We were talking about how involved we felt we were or weren’t going to be. Ginny was talking about feeling guilty: "I just live in my house in the country, translating Japanese women writers." And I was like, “OK, but this work is super relevant. It's not like you're in the mountains doing tanka calligraphy, or learning how to play 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' perfectly." Of course there's value for those things, too, but it's different.

Translation allows us to see realities and possibilities we don’t otherwise have access to, because they don’t exist in our own language or culture.

By the way, Ginny actually started a collective with two other translators called “Strong Women, Soft Power,” and they’ve put out some incredible books, and really changed the conversation about who and what gets published.

Sayaka’s novels—the most famous is Convenience Store Woman—they’re not overtly political. They’re profoundly novelistic. But they’re also doing an important kind of political work, which has been the purview of the novel for a long time. That’s drawing connections between the interiority of children, and domestic life—everything that isn’t in a newspaper—and political outcomes.

Yes, beautiful.

I’m working on a post about this now. In War and Peace, Tolstoy is confronting the mystery of the Napoleonic wars. Why would hundreds of thousands of guys one morning march thousands of miles to murder some other guys they never met before? A big part of the book is made up of historical-political essays. They solve nothing. Tolstoy is using history and political science and economic theory and logic—and his conclusion is: “Welp, I guess humans don’t have free will, all this stuff must be determined, because none of the reasons are adequate.”

In the actual narrative about the different families, you see individual characters deciding to go to war. You see how Rostov has to get away from his mother, and Bolkonsky has to get away from his wife. And his dad and his sister. And that—not only the tax embargo with England—that’s what’s pulling the trigger.

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I think a lot of our political woes come from not understanding, not taking seriously, childhood psychological injuries.

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Is this connection between the domestic and the political—do you think—the role of art in these times?

Speaking for novels, I think a lot of our political woes come from not understanding, not taking seriously, childhood psychological injuries. Which is how people first encounter poverty, racism, colonialism, stuff like that—as humiliations in childhood, as their parents’ humiliations, which at that point are life-threatening.

To a baby, a parent’s distress is life-threatening. And I think the tradition of the novel, more than that of even psychoanalytic or psychological writing, is where that connection has been the most vividly and systematically explored.

And where we can talk about how the human heart gets mangled and disfigured along the way, how it arrives in this dysfunctional, sociopathic place.

We're in the dark ages, and once people become more aware of these things, the current political situation is going to look bonkers to a lot more people. Art and novels and literature are a way of getting there.

This makes me think about a point you’ve made that writers–even novelists–often censor themselves in order to spare the feelings of family or friends. But we could also look at that truth-telling as actually having a political dimension.

Yeah, totally. I do look at it that way.

Especially if those secret things that we're "not supposed to talk about" are connected to these larger realities—violence, war, prejudice, hatred.

It's a really direct connection. Maybe there's 30 years between those two things, but it's really direct.

James Baldwin has a line in No Name in the Street about how the greatest danger is when the loveless come to power. Who loved Trump when he was little? People joke about it. But lovelessness is serious.

I want to talk more about self-censorship, and how writers often leave the most difficult truths out of their work. Why does this issue feel alive to you right now?

Because of pride and shame and honor. A lot of self-censorship is from this idea, “We don’t air our dirty laundry.” Families are like cults. You’re not supposed to talk about what goes on. In a cult, we say, “That’s fucked up.” But in a family, it seems natural. “Of course. Let’s not be unseemly.” We feel we have to maintain family pride, and avoid shame.

What we need to do is erode shame. Life is hard, 100% of us make mistakes. Instead of hiding our mistakes, let’s understand them and try to learn. And maybe we let go of pride. So much dire political stuff comes from, “We want to feel proud to be American!” And I mean, why do you have to be proud to be American? Why can't you just be a part of human civilization?

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What if we take childhood unhappiness seriously? The loneliness, the crushing, and the instilling of a need to crush.

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If we lift this dilemma of whether to censor ourselves out of the realm of "Who is it going to upset?" and instead think about its broad impact, on how people might better understand the origin of political ideas and currents—

Right. What if we lift it out of the realm of the personal, and make it into something as important as the Iowa Caucus? What if we give it the same level of importance we give some very rote part of governance on every news channel? What if we take childhood unhappiness seriously? What if we don’t say, “Oh it’s unavoidable, it’s normal for kids to be lonely, it’s normal for kids to be humiliated in school.” What if we take it seriously? The loneliness, the crushing, and the instilling of a need to crush.

And yet for the individual writer, there's still this tension between loyalties. Is the writer's loyalty to the truth and posterity, or to the network of people and love that gave rise to that person? How do you resolve that?

Yeah, exactly. Gratitude is actually really complicated. I thought about this a lot in the context of Russian imperialism. I wrote an essay trying to recontextualize Russian novels in light of the Ukraine invasion. I was rereading Pushkin and thinking about his relationship to the tsar, to the generals who hosted him in the Caucasus. Pushkin is a Romantic, so on some level his sympathy is always with the free running gypsy or whoever. But he’s also very conscious of being the kind of writer he was—which depended, if you go back far enough, on imperial wealth.

The tsar was a huge pain in Pushkin’s butt. But the tsar took Pushkin hugely seriously. It’s basically a parental relationship. So much of the rhetoric of empire is identical to the rhetoric of parenthood. The imperialists always talk about the colonized subjects as children. If they’re rebellious, it’s because they’re ungrateful, or ignorant. They don’t understand how everything is for their own good, and this is real love.

So yeah, gratitude. I think anyone who's escaped from the horrible roiling sea of misery and gained the wherewithal to write anything is—if they're not completely oblivious—going to be near-paralyzed by it. And gratitude makes you beholden to people.

How are you thinking about this question of telling the truth now?

When I look at my past, I feel gratitude for a lot of things, and I feel critical of a lot of things. I think if I work as hard as I can, if I describe my experience accurately—“this is what happened, and this is the pain I felt”—then I can do it without it being an indictment of anyone. I believe that. If you describe what made you suffer, and the priority is your experience and your perceptions—I think that’s something everyone is entitled to do. And if other people feel betrayed… at a certain point, that’s on them. Of course that involves having some support network. If you really thought you would be alone against all of society, I don't think you could do it.

And unless you're a shepherd or a monk, you're always going to be writing somewhat about your experience with others. It's going to show up somehow.

Even if you're a shepherd or a monk. Even if the others are sheep.

The idea of “dialogism” has been important to you. It's a concept from the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, describing literature in which many voices are in dialogue with one another, and none is considered the correct perspective. It also refers to the idea that every text or utterance is shaped by the context in which it’s uttered, including who is hearing it.

This feels so relevant to everything happening now politically and socially. What captivated you about this idea, and why is it pressing for you?

One thing that I always struggled with as a writer, when I was a student, was this idea of creative writing as disembodied, imaginative—by definition not autobiographical. The way writing was taught, there was a heavy emphasis on the imagination. However much you could erase the “self,” that’s how good an artist you were. Whereas, the writing that I always wanted to do was really hard to separate from who I was and what relationships I was in.

There's a passage in Mark McGurl’s book about creative writing programs. He talks about a short story by Robert Olen Butler—how virtuosic it is that Butler could write a first-person story from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman who was impregnated by an American soldier. How humane of him to be able to transcend himself.

So OK, today, that story would not get that reception. People would talk about appropriation. (And I do think it’s possible to go too far in that direction—to no longer see any humaneness in the effort to think through another person’s subjectivity.) I had a real problem with the idea that creative writing involves forgetting who you are, or the embedded relationships that you're in. That’s what I found therapeutic about dialogism. For Bakhtin, the writer’s language is never neutral or transparent. It’s always conditioned by time and place and experience. I see it as a way to be more granular, more honest, more connected.

There's also this idea in Bakhtin that anyone speaking or writing is thinking not only about the actual listener or reader, but about this imagined entity he calls the "superaddressee"—a being who understands the speaker perfectly.

That makes me think about being in an argument. You’re always imagining, "What would an objective person say?" And somehow the “objective person" always agrees with you.

Something that was really useful for me in this context was couples therapy, which I highly recommend to anyone. Even if you're not in a couple! You go with an argument, and you get to hear what another person is thinking—someone who really is objective, in that they’re sympathetic with both people. And you realize the argument is almost always not about what you thought it was. So all your “objectivity” was misplaced. Maybe you really were being objective about the dishwasher, but nothing was actually about the dishwasher.

Something somewhat similar happened with me in writing. I wrote my first novel, The Idiot, I didn’t show it to anyone. Then it came out and I did an intense period of promotion and interviews. I got to hear what actual sympathetic readers thought. It really informed how I wrote the next book. It changed the superaddressee.

I am curious to hear how you learned to write. I learned to write by writing letters to friends I'd met in high school at speech and debate tournaments in northeastern Wisconsin. I wasn’t lonely, because we'd write these long letters. And so my writing education was the process of trying to communicate to a specific person—a specific consciousness—and anticipating what would make that person laugh, what they would be interested in.

Did you start out writing letters?

Yes! But I never think about it. That’s so funny. I wrote journals, and I always think of the journals. I totally wrote letters, to kids I met at camp, or through music—anyone I knew who didn’t go to my school. I remember waiting for the mailman. I used to cover shoe boxes with wrapping paper, and keep all of the letters that people sent me.

I have shoe boxes of letters too!

I don’t have mine anymore. And of course I don’t have the letters I wrote. I wonder if that’s why I don’t think about the letters as much as the journals.

My ex-boyfriend unceremoniously gave me back all the letters I’d ever written to him, in a garbage bag, after we broke up! Maybe that’s why I think about them. <Laughs>

But I’m thinking of Bakhtin again, who believed every act of speech “exists on the boundary of two consciousnesses." The words I’m speaking right now are shaped by how I imagine you, Elif, will receive them. When I'm writing a letter to one specific person, certain ideas and a freedom of speech come forth because I have in mind a specific consciousness. Somehow, those disappear if I'm writing for an imagined generic audience. The recipient gets sort of genericized or averaged-out in my mind.

Have you ever tried, when you're writing something for a general reader, to write it as a letter to a particular person? That's something that I always want to do.

I have tried it, but I feel like my subconscious always knows that it's a trick. How about you?

I've also tried it and it's never worked. Around 2012, I was super-blocked and depressed. A friend of mine was writing me emails. I really like this person's published writing—they're a very good and accomplished writer. But their emails seemed so much funnier. And I was like, “What is this kind of performative formalness that comes out when we’re writing for the public? How do we counter that?” I kept trying to write around it, to write a novel in the form of emails, or capturing the energy of the emails, but it never worked.

I find this to be almost universally true—people's emails are sharper, weirder, funnier than what they publish. Why is this?

I don’t know. It might be related to self-censorship—to writing for one person and knowing who is, and who isn’t, going to read it. The relief of knowing. Once when I was writing about some emotionally difficult stuff, one of my editors, someone who was a friend, said, "Why don't you just imagine that you're writing a letter to me? Then you wouldn’t go on about all that irrelevant stuff.” But when I tried it, a coyness came in, like, "Well, my dear So-and-So, we both know about that.” I haven't found a way to make it work.

Same.

During the really depressed writer’s-block time, that was when I started therapy. I was working through a lot of stuff. I went twice a week and talked non-stop for the whole hour. Later I’d try to remember and write it down. But it was hard. And the therapy was so expensive, I was already doing extra work to pay for it. At some point I asked the therapist, "Can I just record these sessions, so I have a material record?" Later I started transcribing the recordings. And in the past couple of years I've been working with the transcripts, using them in my writing.

At some point I was telling my therapist about this– how I had turned one transcript into a play, but it was more like a monologue. He said, "What's the role of the other person?" The thing is—I hadn’t been using anything he said. I had been thinking about the therapy session as a formal device, a literary device. I don’t have the time, or the short-term memory, to follow every idea, the way I would if I was writing, so it’s a content-filtering device. But of course it felt very rude to tell the person I was talking to, "I don't think the other person plays a big role." And then when I thought about it… it must play a role.

I think it does. Even if the other person says nothing, I really think what we say is shaped by our imagined reception of that person's specific consciousness.

Yeah, and epistemologically by what they know. By your knowledge of their knowledge.

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If I had known about meditation earlier, would I have gone into a different line of work?

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I also love Bakhtin’s idea that any text, any utterance, “always develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses"? The idea that our communication is being shaped by and with the recipient is very exciting to me, because it means each encounter enables new language that wouldn't be possible any other way. It encourages a social way of developing ideas.

Brian Eno has this idea that instead of thinking about "genius," we should think about "scenius," the genius of a scene, a network of people. Ideas actually come out of the interactions among many people rather than individuals.

That’s interesting. Not to bring everything to therapy, but I actually did therapy right before this. As usual, I was talking almost the whole time. Every now and then he would say something. At some point he said, “I’m conscious today that every time I talk, I'm derailing your story.”

This made me think about meditation. I’ve been using the Headspace app for a while. I find it really helpful. Sometimes they tell you to let go of storytelling and the storytelling mind, and be open to whatever's here now. When I can do that, I feel a burden lifting off. Then I go back to my day job, which is the construction of stories. Sometimes I wonder, if I had known about meditation earlier, would I have gone into a different line of work?

But I had this thought that my therapist’s questions were keeping me in the present. So that could be a sweet spot between narrative and being present in the moment. Conversation. Dialogism.

I love that. Conversation as a kind of meditation.

Or a kind of narrative that’s happening in real time.

Responding to the person in front of you also requires a certain kind of vulnerability, because it means that you're willing to be changed by the other person. When I look at the parade of people running things at the moment, I see the opposite of this kind of responsiveness. The caricature is Silicon Valley tech bros reciting facts at each other. But I also wonder if we train men out of that kind of vulnerability, of being willing to be affected by another person.

You can see the gears turning behind their eyes, like, “How can I get us back to the thing that I want to say, in as unchanged a form as possible,” and that's the definition of good politics. It's bonkers.

Right. Dialogism is the antithesis of what we're seeing. But maybe also the path out of it.

The most politically utopian "scenius" scene that I ever experienced was in 2013 in Istanbul. There were these anti-government protests throughout Turkey. A huge coalition formed of really disparate people who were all opposed to Erdoğan–ultra-right people running arm-in-arm with Kurdish liberationists or LGBTQ people.

There was momentum behind the idea that governance should be based on coalitions and conversation. There were neighborhood meetings where people would really plan political actions and community infrastructure stuff. It was really exciting. But I went to a couple of those meetings and it was really hard. They took forever. They were confusing. But I was an outsider—I didn’t live there for very long, so I still wonder if there's a sustainable governance that could come from conversations in small groups.

It goes back to couples therapy—when you're forced to actually pay attention to how the other person is feeling, how you're feeling, what's below the words, this allows for a much deeper form of communication.

I wish we could do couples counseling on a national level.

Oh my god, that would be incredible. One of the most profound insights for me from couples therapy was to look for the emotion underneath the conversation. What is the core hurt that is governing the entire interaction?

Exactly. You think that your issue is whether the window is open or closed at night, and then the therapist is like: "Can you see this scared person in pain?" And suddenly you do, and of course that's so much more important than anything else.

I remember having this huge breakthrough with my husband. Our therapist uncovered that underneath this specific argument, at that moment he felt fear.

It was always fear. It was always fear.

I was being very hard-headed about this issue, and the therapist just looked at me and asked, "Do you want him to feel afraid?" I was like, "No! I love him!”

Right! All you want him to feel is happy, like he's playing with a puppy.

Exactly.

While we’re on the topic of love, you wrote about George Saunders' "Love Letter.” I just read the story. [Briefly, it takes the form of a letter from a grandfather to his grandson, advising him not to help a friend in political trouble—they’re living within some kind of totalitarian regime.] I’d love to know what you think about it now.

I don’t know if I have anything to add to what I already wrote. But what did you think? I'm curious.

I thought it was sounding a note of optimism and urgency at the same time. I thought the "love letter" of the title is actually to the reader.

I love that.

It's a love letter to the reader, who is a past version of the grandfather. I think Saunders is saying to us, the reader, there is the possibility of action, but there's only a narrow window for it. And if you don't act during that window, then you are going to be like the grandfather, and just have to take solace in nature and family because you won't have any rights anymore. That's still a life worth living—nature is still beautiful, and love between people is still important. But the warning is that if you don't act in the critical window, that's all you're going to have. That's my interpretation. What do you think?

I've been thinking about that time in Turkey. The Gezi protests. That was a big deal for me. Before then, I had never seen political action that didn’t just look to me like posturing and grandstanding. Like having a bumper sticker that says, "Not in my name" about the Iraq War. You're driving a fucking car! So to see people who had something at stake—and to see that it was actually doing something– it was so moving. There was communication between different social groups. And it was changing the conversation, not just in Turkey.

Although afterwards, basically all of those people were put in prison. There was a crackdown. A ton of people lost their jobs. So was my optimism misguided?

The most recent thing that gave me a feeling of optimism was the one day before the election when I went canvassing with a labor union I belong to. It’s UAW, it’s super-diverse. Teamsters were there. A lot of people I would normally not encounter in daily life. And to see that we were on the same side with a lot of basic issues—it was a wonderful feeling.

I did grow up feeling like activism was for whining complainers who wanted to display things about themselves, rather than accomplish anything. As an adult it has been a gift to see some of the actual work of activism, and to see that sometimes it really changes things that seemed unchangeable.

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The End of Bias: A Beginning, my book about how real people and communities become measurably less biased, is now out in paperback.