Foreign Language 101

Philippe and Brigitte want to go windsurfing. They drink cokes after windsurfing. The lake is blue and clear. What a nice day! But it looks like lightning is coming. Quelle horreur!

Dear Reader,

In high school, I decided I wanted to be multi-lingual; it didn’t really matter what the languages were, only that I would know at least three besides English. While I thrived in high school French classes, so much so that I decided to double major in French in college, I found that my peers in my college French classes were much more adept at speaking the language than I was. Or perhaps they simply did not care about how many conversational mistakes they made, something that my perfectionist self found decidedly shameful. I wish I could have been like them in their eagerness to convey some sense of meaning regardless of how illogical their grammar was or how many faux amis they used.

I was neither the natural polyglot I had hoped to be nor the unabashed forger of strange, but magnanimous linguistic connections. As you might have guessed, I never learned more than an awkward, barely passable French, something I wonder how I might have overcome. That linguistic awkwardness still haunts me and I still wonder how I came off in those classes, not because I have any specific regrets, but more that I was so caught up in my own reality as an 18 yo that the thought that others might have a different reading of the same experience and reality never crossed my mind. The thought that these people might have some other perception of myself that did not fall into line with my innate conception of reality (i.e. me) was completely foreign and eluded my sollipsism.

Some of the things I remember from those classes seem completely arbitrary: the odd French instructor I had for French 3 was an American woman so obsessed with Victor Hugo that she talked about him as if he was her romantic partner; this same instructor insisted that we watch in-class films with French subtitles instead of English ones, which at the time the class hated and I now think is pedagogically brilliant; and I weirdly remember that there was an alarming number of students who wore pajamas to class.

(While some would easily dismiss this last detail as part of the eccentricity of UC Berkeley, it was important for two reasons: 1. That was the fashion of college kids in the mid aughts everywhere (College insignia sweatshirt + plaid flannel pajama pants + worn out Rainbow flipflops); and 2. I refused to follow this formula.)

By the time second semester of freshman year rolled around, I had a much more relatable French 4 instructor, a witty, but overtaxed Belgian woman and a coterie of classmates who suddenly seemed relatable and stood out for various reasons. It was in that class that I met two people who influenced the rest of my college experience. The first, a friend who I have since lost touch with, became one of my closest friends at Berkeley – she walked up to me right after that first day of French 4 and asked me if I wanted to go to coffee. I later learned that she decided to be friends with me because she admired my shoes, a pair of black Adidas with multicolored stripes on the side.

The second was a guy we referred to as a “mountain” because of his huge physicality and goofy demeanor. He was irresponsible and brilliant and good-natured and fascinating. He did not fit into any mold of person I had met. We’d often see him riding around on his longboard on the various hills of Berkeley; with his floppy blond hair and 6’5 frame, he seemed like a time-traveling Viking, stuck in the wrong place and time, more suited to sailing around the North Sea than studying French grammar. Whenever he spotted us while skateboarding, he’d roll past and yell our names, never stopping because he was typically late to his library security job.

I still feel the mystique the Mountain held over me, something I loathed to tell my friend, knowing I would die from the mortification of being intrigued by a guy who otherwise was not worth the attention. He was not classically good looking and seemed to party too much to have any other ambition. I have long wondered why I sometimes recall these arbitrary details from a French language class from almost 20 years ago and still analyze them.

Recently, I started to worry that perhaps I was becoming overly nostalgic for those in-between years of young adulthood, the longing for a moment in which I was less fixed as a person, the opportunities ever boundless, the terror of an unexplored world exhilarating, because I am moving farther and farther away from them in a sort of settled understanding of the world and determined rigidity of how I see my self. Yet as much as I enjoyed my college years, I’ve always hated when people wallow in their past idealization of their youth, the results devolving into sentiments that reinforce an ever-unsatisfactory present and future.

All of this stood out because I recently finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2017) and had been grappling with what to make of it. The key, I think, is in where Batuman starts - she opens with this epigraph:

“In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.” --Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol II: Within a Budding Grove

Proust, in his ever-revelatory In the Search of Lost Time (1913), captures exactly the sentiment I had been struggling to articulate – how the perception of ourselves and others as we move through adolescence and adulthood are ever shifting, even when we find ourself “fixed” in our identities. It is in that formation of one’s self in our youth that we make the most startling discoveries because they are, in fact, what is truly new; they are never previously experienced moments with no past baggage to sway us one way or another.

(In fact, I read the complete novel (all six volumes) in a class (“the Proust class” – a Berkeley English major achievement) my senior year, but that moment was years away from my first year of college, a completely different self than my French 4 self.)

This epigraph is exceedingly fitting for The Idiot, which in many ways, follows the structure of a campus novel, as its first person protagonist, Selin, recounts her freshman year at Harvard and the seemingly strange cast of characters she finds herself around. Yet before the book stumbles into the land of a social satire like Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) or the modern horror of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), The Idiot is about the ways we are shaped by the random and arbitrary events of our young adulthood and the first moments of “independence.” An intertextual counterpoint to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Batuman directly asks her readers to consider: who in fact is the idiot in this book, Selin or the reader or someone else? Is youth wasted on the young? Or is the purpose of youth to be idiotic because we only learn through those moments we look back upon with chagrin?

Like my own experiences during my freshman year at college, Selin is dramatically shaped by her classes, particularly in Russian, the strange friends she becomes enmeshed with, and her own ability to perceive a reality outside of herself. In fact, for readers well versed in the Russian classics and linguistic theories, the novel has an incredible depth of sly commentary and witty asides. The Russian language story about scientists in Siberia that the entry-level class has to act out which only uses the present tense (having not learned other cases) is particularly hilarious.

What makes the novel perplexing though is its emotional distance, which in other text is off-putting; here, though, it relies on Selin’s emotional detachment to sneakily devolve into the territory of the unreliable narrator. It’s not clear what Selin’s innate feelings or reactions to the world are – some of it seems purposeful in her not wanting to admit certain things to the readers, while at others it seems as if she lacks the language and experience to fully understand what is transpiring. In fact, a major theme of the novel is between the tension or distance between language and mutual understanding, whether in translating between different languages or interpreting the true meaning of language and its uses through literature, philosophy, and even math.

To avoid too many spoilers, I will not describe too much of what happens to Selin as she meets a fascinating classmate or ends up going to rural Hungary one summer to teach English. Part of the beauty of this narrative is being able to be equally uninformed as the college students embarking on misadventures for the first time. There were many moments where I empathized with Selin, recalling my own similar situations and feelings, hoping she might make a better decision. While Selin’s experiences seem specific to Harvard in the 1990s, I think many can read her experiences as parallel to their own. As I was reading, I hoped that I was not as foolish as her.

But I, too, perhaps followed a few too many college guys who were unworthy of my time, endless coffees and study groups and poetry slams that never seemed to go anywhere. But how could an intellectual student not get caught up in the curious puzzle of those who rhapsodize about Proust and arthouse film and quote Nietzsche? I still smile thinking about all the times the Mountain rode past me on his way to the library and waved hello, his odd gestures at other times, the thrill I got whenever we were paired together in French class. I always felt like I was the idiot in those moments. Now I look back and think it was perhaps us both.

What I Would Like to Re-Read

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (1913)

The professor who taught the Proust class I took my senior year, who sadly died from cancer a few years ago, told us he’d reread the complete 6 volumes every summer. I’ve never reread Proust and I think it’s well time I did again. For each stage of your life, you apparently notice something radically different. There are very few books that are life-changing and this was one.

What I Would Like to Read Next

Either/Or, Elif Batuman (2022)

Like all good things, there must be a sequel and it must be built on binaries. I’m excited, especially if it means more ridiculous stories about college language classes and how we all make impossible decisions.

What I Recommend With Reservations

The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman (2010)

I have not read this book in years, so I’m not sure how well it’s held up, but at the time I very much enjoyed reading about these different writers at an English-language newspaper in Italy and the role of translating news, culture, and politics for those who do not fit into the mainstream language of a society.