The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled Le Buffet de Vauvenargues, it showed a gigantic black sideboard scribbled over with doors, drawers, pigeonholes, moldings, and curlicues. Two roughly sketched figures, one big and one small, flanked the sideboard. The sideboard was the thing between them. Svetlana said I had to take a more proactive view of my personhood. She said it wasn’t okay to identify with furniture. Indeed, Sartre had illustrated “bad faith” using the analogy of thinking of oneself as a chair—quite specifically, a chair. Objective claims could be made about a chair, but not about a person, because a person was in constant flux. I said the buffet was also in flux. I said its existence preceded its essence. Of all the museums we saw, I thought the Picasso Museum was the most interesting, because it was all about one person, and because it reminded me of Ivan. At the same time, if you looked at it a certain way it seemed like a monument to destroyed women—their ossified bodies and shattered psyches.