Email Romance? Elif Batuman’s 'The Idiot' as the Narrative of an “Unloving” Relationship

Abstract

Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot has garnered a great amount of critical attention for incorporating in its text emails that interweave the narrative of the first half of the novel. Taking into account both the on- and the offline intimacy depicted in the text, this article attempts to theorize the relationship initiated to a large extent through exchanges of emails between the protagonists. By drawing upon some recent sociological inquiries on digital intimacy but extensively utilizing the framework Eva Illouz offers in her recent work, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relationships, to explain the “negative structure of contemporary relationships”, the present article characterizes the email romance in the novel as productive of an “unloving” relationship. This “negative structure of contemporary relationships”, Illouz argues, is anchored in “the fact that actors do not know how to define, evaluate, or conduct the relationship they enter into according to predictable and stable social scripts” (Illouz, The End of Love 9). This article engages with the question of uncertainty Illouz’s argument underlines and uses some of the formulations through which she conceptualizes uncertainty. By elaborating on the protagonists’ suspicion about the reality of the correspondence, the lack of any distinct narrative structure in it, the unexplained and unpredictable exits of the heroine’s love-interest at times, and her experience of chaotic emotions, this article demonstrates how the (presumed) love the heroine experiences is fraught with existential, procedural, normative, and emotional uncertainty.

Keywords

• digital intimacy
• unlove
• illouz
• batuman
• the idiot