Can we ever actually know another person? | Sally Rooney’s 'Intermezzo' (Part I)

~some spoilers up until oh page 168 or so~

Here’s something strange: you exist as a character in other people’s heads, and people have little imaginary conversations with this character, create spontaneous little scenes with this character in them, such that you exist in both reality, more or less under your own control, as well as in an imaginary universe that you have no control over.

Here’s what’s doubly strange: If this character were to gain form as flesh and blood, and if you were to meet them in a Cracker Barrel or a Señor Frog’s or wherever you spend your Friday nights, you would probably say, “But wait, that’s not me. Who even are you?” (The version of me that exists in my friend Jill’s head, for instance, thinks I have some kind of chili obsession because of one epic bean stew I made back in December of ‘19.)

And so a follow-up question might be: OK? So humans invent strange ideas about each other? Consciousness is a bunch of squirrels trapped in a crawl space? Does that actually matter?

I was thinking about all this while reading Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, which is fascinated by our real and imaginary selves. The story’s central relationship, between two brothers, becomes a kind of parallel universe theory: two people are each leading several lives at the same time—in the world, in their own minds, and in the minds of others. And what the novel suggests—or at least I think suggests—is that these imaginary characters we hold in our heads inhibit our ability to know the real people who those characters are based on.

This week, I’d like to explore how this intimacy-prevention mechanism works, and next week I’ll explore the idea that to know someone, to truly know them, is to relinquish the ideas we have of them and the “character” they play in our minds. But what enables us to do that? To say, “Woah, I guess my ideas about this person were way off”? The novel puts forward a few answers that I’d like to approach, but first let’s explore the issue I’m talking about.

The mechanism that prevents intimacy is put into motion by being convinced you know who someone else is based on your history with them. Peter, thirty-two, is convinced he knows everything about his younger brother, Ivan, twenty-two. As a teenager, Ivan spent his free time studying chess, rather than hanging out with friends or girlfriends, and was often awkward with Peter’s girlfriends. Now Ivan is the person who shows up to their father’s funeral in an ugly, second-hand suit, which, combined with his braces, suggest “the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.” Ivan’s the person who couldn’t possibly put together a fitting eulogy, so Peter takes on that responsibility. And when Sylvia, Peter’s ex-girlfriend and a friend of the family, makes breakfast with Ivan the next morning, Peter has an idea of what Ivan is saying even though he can’t hear the two of them. Ivan’s not asking Sylvia about her life or sharing his thoughts on the death of his father, no way. Instead, Peter imagines Ivan saying, “Nice little outpost for the knight on d5”—what at another point Peter describes as Ivan’s “International Chess English.”

So what’s an older brother to do? Peter could poke fun of Ivan, but he generally doesn’t. Instead, he threads the needle of viewing Ivan as ineffective and kind of embarrassing at the same time that he wants to defend and support Ivan. For instance, when their mother, Christine, makes a cutting remark to Peter about Ivan’s suit at the funeral, Peter chastises her, saying, “Well, his appearance may not have been foremost on his mind this week.” What Peter leaves out is that he believes Ivan’s appearance is not foremost on his mind any week, ever, but the point is made: because Peter knows Ivan so well, and knows that Ivan is fundamentally awkward and not cut out for the social world, he believes his role is to defend Ivan.

And Ivan believes he knows everything about Peter. As a teenager, Peter was an excellent student, well liked, and started dating Sylvia, who was always kind to Ivan, kinder than Peter. Now Peter is the person who takes on the responsibility of giving their father’s eulogy without any discussion and without any input from Ivan. Even though Peter and Sylvia broke up, Ivan imagines Peter is always dating someone intelligent and beautiful, and he has no problems with money or his job, since things come so easily to him.

Ivan even imagines Peter in scenarios the same way Peter does. The death of their father means Ivan’s dog, who had been living with his father because dogs aren’t allowed in Ivan’s shared apartment, is currently living with Christine and her family. Christine is not a fan. She keeps needling Ivan to pick up li’l Alexei and bring him somewhere else. Ivan, doing research on options one night, thinks about what would happen if Alexei’s living situation were Peter’s problem: “[Peter] won’t be sitting in his apartment typing ‘dog foster Ireland help’ or whatever into a search engine. He’ll be in a big room somewhere surrounded by people who think he’s really smart and interesting, and one of them will probably be like the CEO of a dog fostering charity. Peter could even at this moment be regaling the CEO with a story about his loser younger brother who can’t find a temporary home for their dog, and they’re laughing together.” In Ivan’s imagination, Peter is popular, charismatic, effective, lucky, and supercilious. He wants things; they appear.

There is, one could argue, a problem with the brothers’ interpretations of each other. They’re wrong. Ivan, while confused by the unspoken rules of the social world, is not without good friends, and in the first part of the novel he starts dating a woman named Margaret whom he met at a chess event. She is thirty-six and, contrary to what Peter assumes, is not a chess player herself, working instead at a community center. The relationship is going well, and they make each other happy, despite their age difference. Furthermore, while Peter assumes that all Ivan talks about is chess—all that he's capable of talking about is chess—Ivan reiterates again and again to Margaret that he doesn’t like talking about chess and may not even like playing it anymore. And while it’s true Ivan wore an ill-fitting, second-hand suit to the funeral, the reason had less to do with his taste and more to do with an anti-consumerist stance against waste and environmental pollution.

Peter, too, is not quite the person Ivan thinks he is. Peter isn’t adept or happy at all. He is full of self-hatred and totally lost. He longs to date Sylvia and have the life they once had together, but she’s not interested in that. To her, that life, which Peter considered perfect, is gone forever. Further, he’s fallen in love with a younger woman, Naomi, whom he thinks he shouldn’t be with because of her age and tenuous employment selling nude pictures online, and he doesn’t introduce her to his family or anyone in his social orbit for that reason. He works an important job as an attorney representing mistreated people, yet the job provides almost no sense of enjoyment. As the narrator relates about Peter’s mental state: “Thoughts rattling and noisy almost always and then when quiet frighteningly unhappy.”

I think a common-sense belief is that, for siblings or long-term friends, a certain dynamic is established at a young age, and that dynamic is sustained through memory. Sort of: my brother is a socially awkward chess obsessive because that’s who he was as a teenager; oh, remember when we went to spend time with our step-siblings, and all Ivan wanted to do was play chess in a corner. Or: my brother is a combination intellectual-prom king because that’s who he was in high school; oh, remember those intellectual conversations with Sylvia he used to have, and the beautiful Italian woman he dated. A claim is made, and evidence comes forward in the form of memory.

And, when you hang out with them, the person you are seeing in front of you is the person they were at eighteen, or twelve, or whenever. The old dynamic asserts itself, which is why you feel like (and maybe act like) a teenager when you go home to visit your parents even though you’re thirty-five, or why, if you are the youngest sibling, you feel like an awkward doofus around your older siblings more so than around anyone else. You’re remembering an identity you once had and then assuming it. And you’re having a memory of who someone once was and then treating them that way still. All of that is so in Intermezzo, and I think it’s true as far as it goes.

But the argument I’d like to make is that the brothers’ ideas of each other were not merely formed in younger years and then arrested there. No, the brothers sustain and keep alive their dead ideas through the active use of their imaginations in the present, especially when they are not directly with one another. Peter imagines what Ivan is saying to Sylvia during breakfast. Ivan imagines Peter talking to a dog fostering CEO at a party. They do this imaginative scene-creation often; it’s instinctual and automatic. It is the imagination, not mere memory, which does the work of turning people into exaggerated characters. And the brothers don’t realize they’re using their imaginations because they are convinced they know each other so well. They think they’re creating totally reasonable inferences, not incorrect caricatures.

Something I notice, too, is how specific Peter and Ivan’s imaginations are. Peter doesn’t simply imagine Ivan talking about chess; he imagines him saying, “Nice little outpost for the knight on d5.” Ivan, too, doesn’t imagine Peter simply meeting someone who works for a dog fostering organization; he imagines Peter meeting the CEO, at a well-attended party. There’s something almost comic about the logic: well, sure, I’m making an assumption about someone, but the assumption is extremely specific, which means it’s probably true.

I’d like to push further here. Every time someone imagines a friend or family member in an imaginative scenario, there is a danger that the friend or family member is being reduced or exaggerated. “My brother, who I used to view as a certain kind of person based on such-and-such remembered evidence” becomes “My brother, who is exclusively a certain kind of person based on such-and-such fake evidence I just made up in my head.” Yet, rather than seeing how ridiculous the second scenario is, it’s treated with the same weight and legitimacy as the first scenario. The real person gets swallowed up by the invented character without our realizing it.

In Intermezzo, the stakes of this error are the destruction of the relationship. It happens during a dinner in which Ivan tells Peter about Margaret, his first serious girlfriend. At first, the dinner seems like an opportunity for the brothers to grow closer together—in the wake of their father’s death, to lean on each other and let their relationship mature. Peter offers to help Ivan out with money, and Ivan attempts small talk (this is new) and reveals a bit about his inner life, that he misses spending time with Sylvia. Peter reveals, quite remarkably, “To speak honestly, I still love her,” and then the narrator says, “Ivan senses that, for the first time in his life, Peter is speaking to him as an equal.” In this moment, it seems that the brothers’ ideas about each other are collapsing. Peter, it turns out, does not get whatever he wants, since he wants Sylvia and she’s not interested in a romantic relationship. Ivan wants to relate to Peter, be on his level of longing for someone who might be off-limits, so he says, “I get you. With the woman I’m seeing, she has this ex-husband who she’s separated from. So that makes things kind of complicated, as well.”

The scene hinges on how Peter reacts to this revelation, and it doesn’t go well. Peter asks how old she is, then says, “I’m not trying to be disparaging, but do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with someone in your situation?” Ivan: “What are you saying? . . . She’s not normal?” Peter then points out how little Ivan knows about her—which is true—and Ivan says, “I actually hate you. I’ve hated you my entire life.” Peter: “I know.”

Yikes. It’s very bad, yet Peter’s responses grow organically out of his attitude toward Ivan. Even when Peter is implying that something might be wrong with Margaret, he’s not doing it out of pure cruelty. He wants to protect Ivan from a potentially harmful relationship. But there’s a second layer here. With the phrase “someone in your situation,” Peter is implying that Ivan is a bit of a fuckup, and, more than that, he’s suggesting that a thirty-six-year-old ought to date someone who’s wealthier, more gainfully employed, more popular than Ivan—someone like Peter. Peter has slotted into his role of attempting to protect Ivan at the same time that he asserts his own superiority.

But there’s one more layer, too, because Peter himself, a man in his thirties, is quasi-dating someone Ivan’s age, Naomi, who is also facing financial precarity. Peter, by suggesting that there might be something wrong with Margaret, is also suggesting that there’s something wrong himself. Which makes sense; Peter is “frighteningly unhappy.” What’s tragic about this last layer is that Peter, underneath his arrogance, is making a kind of cry for help. At this point, Ivan doesn’t know that Peter is dating someone his own age, but it’s possible to imagine a different route this dinner takes: Peter admits to still loving Sylvia, Ivan reveals his relationship with Margaret, Ivan asks Peter if he’s dating anyone, Peter says yes, they talk about Naomi and bond over the age difference, and Peter eventually admits to being confused and self-hating for pining after a woman who doesn’t want to be with him and spending time with a woman whom he looks down on.

What prevents genuine intimacy between them, despite Ivan’s attempt to relate—“I get you”—is that the two brothers are so rigid in their ideas of each other that they are able to fit any behavior the other exhibits into a belief they already have about that brother’s personality and identity. Sort of a confirmation bias on a micro scale. Ivan thinks Peter must be asking about Margaret out of cruelty and arrogance because Peter is so smart, and his life is so perfect, and all he knows how to do is be judgmental. Peter thinks Ivan must be dating Margaret, a predatory loser, because nobody “normal” would ever want to date Ivan, a person who does not speak in intelligible sentences. Their rigid and mean ideas of each other of course come from memory, how they grew up, but also from their imaginations, the little inventive scenes they create out of thin air that continually fortify their false opinions. It is as though this dinner could have gone two ways, but each time in their lives they’ve activated their memories or imaginations about one another, that activation dropped a brick over the entrance of one of the paths until the more forgiving and curious entrance was blocked. All that was available was anger and misunderstanding.

To be honest, I think it’s uncomfortable to think about how a mental process that seems innocuous—imagining how a loved one would act in a certain scenario—can create space for behavior that is aggressive and hateful. I can’t say I’ve ever popped off at someone the way Ivan and Peter have—“I actually hate you”; “I know”—but I do make assumptions about how someone else will react about this or that, and even though I’m frequently wrong, I keep doing it. Why, why, why? I have such an odd attachment to “knowing,” and it affects my mood, my outlook, my ability to be present with the actual person. The novel does a superb job dramatizing the danger of “knowing,” and I feel encouraged to look harder at my assumptions, my imagination, my tendency to project myself forward in time and react to something that hasn’t happened yet.

Is there a way to the other side of this situation? A way toward genuine understanding and love? How might someone unfix their idea of another person? The above analysis implies a few ways forward, but the novel explores some answers in a deep and (in my view) unexpected way, particularly in its climactic sequence.

I look forward to continuing with part two next week!

UPDATE: Part 2 is now up!