Can we ever actually know another person? Part 2 | Sally Rooney’s 'Intermezzo'

~heavy spoilers ahead~

Last week I tried to express an active and dangerous irony that’s at work in the relationship between brothers Ivan and Peter. Because they have such a long history together, they are convinced they know who the other is in a complete and total way. Their certainty is maintained and strengthened not just by memories that the brothers have of growing up, but also by imaginative scenarios that they each create about the other in the present day. The problem with these imaginative scenarios is that they are wrong in a fundamental sense, and the brothers have lost track of who the other is. Their misunderstanding leads to a fight in which they assume the worst about each other. Ivan thinks Peter is simply being judgmental and arrogant, when in fact Peter is trying to look out for his little brother and perhaps even express his own confusion and despair. And Peter thinks Ivan is being foolish and socially inept, when in fact Ivan is taking important early steps in dating a wonderful person. The irony is: the brothers’ knowledge of each other prevents understanding, rather than enabling it. And the further irony is: the brothers’ imaginations work not to open up their fields of consciousness but to restrict and consolidate their attitudes about one another.

All of this analysis suggests that, to know another person, one must be confronted by the truth of them somehow, and one must adjust one’s imagination to incorporate a broader sense of who they are. But how does that happen? And is that even the right way of describing it?

I’d like to start by approaching the following question: why are the brothers so attached to being certain about one another? Not, like, what evidence do they use to generate an illusion of certainty; more: why is certainty desirable? Why, when the feeling that they “know” one another arises, don’t they step back and say, wait, no, that “knowing” sensation feels gross and weird?

Perhaps the answer has less to do with Intermezzo itself and is a more general cultural trend. It feels good to be correct, and to be told you’re correct. It feels good to look at a person or scenario, think, “I get what’s going on here,” and then be told that your interpretation of things is accurate and smart. It feels good to be on top of things, as it were, or to have your arms around life so that nothing can escape you. It feels good to have control over things and to have a clear sense that life is predictable. And maybe these things feel good because they confer something deeper. If I’m acknowledged as correct, that means people like me; and if I have control over life and can predict everything that will happen, that will allow me to be happy.

Maybe this is common: to wish to be loved and to be happy, and, to achieve those ends, to deploy strategies that involve correctness, respectability, pride, the right sort of attention, predictability, and control. Intermezzo calls that sort of thinking into question. In the world of this novel, correctness and control amount to a kind of spiritual death and the obliteration of everything that is holy and useful inside a person. This dangerous kind of logic is active not just in the relationship between the brothers—insisting on being right; believing each other’s motivations are predictable—but also in their romantic relationships.

Peter’s quest for respectability, certainty, and predictability destroys, at least momentarily, his relationships with both Sylvia and Naomi. Here’s Naomi’s critique of Peter, after Peter breaks up with her even though he loves her—one of the novel’s great speeches:

“You tell me you love me and then it’s alright, goodbye, I never want to see you again. Just so you can delude yourself that you’re normal, everything is normal. You’re so fucking sick in the head you don’t even see what you’re doing to yourself. Trying to put everyone in their little box. And if we would all just stay there, then there wouldn’t be any problems. Whatever. I’m sorry about what happened to your friend. I can see it’s horrific, it’s upsetting, I get that. You love each other, obviously. I didn’t understand before. But I’m literally right here, like at this moment. I’m a real person, this is actually my life. I don’t know. Fuck you, to be honest.”

Right: Naomi’s argument is not just that Peter is being mean by breaking up with her, it’s that he’s harming himself by trying to control things so heavily and by acting overly concerned with what other people might think or say about him if they stayed together. In Intermezzo, to be “normal” is to stray from one’s own self, to be on a path away from fulfillment and toward personal disintegration. Naomi’s insistence that she’s “real” seems to connect to my earlier discussion of the imagination, as well. Naomi intuits that, to Peter, she is a character in his head whom he’s simplified so that he can more easily dismiss. The fake Naomi character in Peter’s head is just a woman he’s fucking because she’s hot and financially dependent on him. Her comment is a challenge to him: eliminate this character from your brain and acknowledge the real me, who’s right here. Only by grappling with what’s real, with what’s right in front of him, she thinks, can he make a decision that has a shot at being fulfilling and loving, a shot at the integration of his past, present, desires, and abilities.

Sylvia, Peter believes, represents predictability, respectability, and certainty because he’s dated her before. He knows the experience and the feeling. He’s intoxicated by their past and thinks he can in large part recreate it. But when he informs Sylvia that he’s broken up with Naomi to be with her, Sylvia becomes deeply upset. She tells him, about their recent sexual encounter together, “I was not trying to help you get out of your relationship. Okay? You can’t use me like that. I’m a human being.” Her logic isn’t so different from Naomi’s. She’s a human being. She’s not a tool or a means to an end, and she isn’t the imaginary Sylvia inside Peter’s own head who’s been telling Peter that she wants to date him in an exclusive relationship.

In Ivan’s relationship with Margaret, the script is flipped in terms of gender but maintained in terms of generational difference. As with Naomi and Peter, it is the younger character, Ivan, who calls into question the older character, Margaret’s, desire to do what seems most appropriate. Here’s their conversation, just before Ivan’s dinner with Peter. Margaret: “When I was your age, Ivan, I was still very young. I don’t know if it would have been a good idea for me to get involved with someone so much older than I was. Especially if the person had been married before, and we were seeing each other in secret. I’m only speaking hypothetically, but I think I might look back later on and feel that this person had taken advantage of me.” Ivan: “Okay…I get where you’re coming from. But I think it’s different.” Margaret: “What’s different?” Ivan: “Well, I think you’re comparing a scenario you made up in your head with a situation that has real people in it. You know, you’re imagining some creepy older guy, maybe someone who went around preying on young girls or whatever. But that’s not the situation we’re in.”

Margaret isn’t just afraid of what people in town will say about their relationship, especially her own mother; she feels, pre-emptively, that they have a point. And it’s the same point Peter soon makes at dinner: Margaret may be taking advantage of Ivan for her own benefit—pride, vanity, pleasure—before Ivan realizes the relationship is a bad idea.

It seems a bit ironic that Ivan, who is quite similar to Peter in his quest for domination—he’s a chess player, after all—is able to point out how weird it is to try to control, predict, or determine other people’s reactions, but one of Ivan’s winning traits is how skeptical he is of the social world’s values. Perhaps because he is a loner, or was for a long time, he can see through the absurdity of manners and acceptable behavior better than most. As much as he desires Peter’s social ease, he also sees that this ease comes at the cost of assimilating into a system that’s arbitrary and kind of dumb. He, like Naomi, accuses Peter of being unhealthily attached to ideas of “normal” behavior, and it even crosses his mind that his respectable, normal step-siblings are actually deluded and boorish in a larger spiritual sense. And so Margaret’s logic just doesn’t work on him, since what he values is his own inner sense of right and wrong, rather than what other people may say, or what vaguely seems like the case.

Ivan’s critique of Margaret echoes Naomi’s critique of Peter. Ivan doesn’t bring Naomi’s fire and brimstone—because it’s not in his personality, because Margaret hasn’t actually broken up with him—but he shares her skepticism of the character that someone else has created of him. “You’re comparing a scenario you made up in your head with a situation that has real people in it. You know, you’re imagining some creepy older guy…” Yes, exactly, Margaret is imagining a character and ignoring the real Ivan, who, to borrow Naomi’s language, is “right here, like at this moment.” So here’s the imagination doing that thing it does when it gets mixed up with certainty, fear, and a distrust of one’s self: blowing up a good situation because you “know” what’s going to happen next. Ivan, like Naomi, offers a way out: insistence on reality, and an acknowledgment of who’s right in front of you, via conversation.

*

I’d like to pause and say something about my experience of reading the novel that (one hopes!) will become relevant later. When I was reading, when I was deep in it, I felt a greater appreciation for life and a more fervent desire than usual to participate in it through the act of noticing. I wasn’t just enjoying the book. The book was influencing the default attitude I carried through my days. My appreciation came from passages like this, from Margaret’s POV after she and Ivan go swimming in the ocean and are eating dinner out: “In her satisfied exhaustion, with her hand resting on the white linen tablecloth, the touch of Ivan’s fingertips, the candle dripping a slow thread of wax down its side, the glossy closed lid of the piano, Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been.”

I think one of the pleasures of reading a romance plot is that you are reminded what it feels like to fall in love. And you are reminded that falling in love is not just about another person; it involves a hypersensitivity to all of life because you deeply desire, on a subconscious and perhaps conscious level, to remember everything you can about the experience. It is a sense of being yanked out of everyday living—which involves a huge amount of just getting to the next thing, or subverting your desire in the service of finishing some annoying task you’d rather not deal with—and placed on a higher plane, where everything has significance because everything is viewed from a perspective radically widened by someone else and the growing relationship. Falling in love is a way of seeing.

I’m tempted to say that, when I read or watch a romance plot, this question serves as my guide for whether the artwork is good or not: Is there something happening that transcends the characters in front of me and has more to do with the cosmic recognition of life’s specialness and fleeting nature? Is what I’m witnessing two people who belong together figuring out how to do that, or is what I’m witnessing the expression of a higher law, that life is happening all the time, and everything involved in life is happening all the time, and communing with that feeling is the surest way to rise above the idea that life is basically a long list of chores?

Margaret’s thought, “This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been,” feels easy to dismiss. Falling madly in love is “all there has ever been”? Um, I don’t think so? On account of like, all the other stuff? But the romance plot is saying: you’re wrong to believe that falling in love is an isolated, bracketed experience. It is possible to believe, and live inside the belief, that you can fall in love all the time because life is happening all the time. A romance plot is a challenge, in other words. Can you live with the awareness of life’s specialness, and the specialness of other people, all the time? Or most of the time? Or at least when you’re with other people?

Ivan engages in a similar sort of thought that’s occasioned by falling in love with Margaret. Her effect on Ivan is to help Ivan come back to himself, particularly regarding his enthusiasm for chess. At the beginning of the novel he’s thinking of leaving the game behind, but by the middle he’s excited about it again. Thinking about how satisfying and pleasurable chess is, he soon transitions to something grander: “Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.” And how do you live? Well, maybe by acting as though you’re falling in love all the time.

*

The brothers’ explosion of violence when they finally encounter one another again, as disturbing as it is, does serve to clear the air in a way that, at least for Peter, allows him both to communicate why he feels so hurt and experience the sort of understanding that comes from really hurting someone else. When Peter travels to the Kildare house looking for Naomi, he finds that Naomi has gone out with friends but Ivan is there, practicing chess and hanging out with Alexei because the dog isn’t allowed in his apartment. The two get on reasonably well at first. They talk about a chess theory Ivan is studying and chat amicably. Then Peter mentions that he tried to warn Ivan that Naomi would be here, but the call didn’t go through because Ivan blocked Peter’s number. Next comes a non-sequitur from Ivan: “The aspect of hypocrisy kind of jumps out,” he says, a reference to Peter’s critique of Ivan and Margaret’s age difference even though Peter is dating someone almost ten years younger than himself.

Because this statement is a non-sequitur, I read it as practiced. It’s the sort of line that’s been rolling around in Ivan’s head ever since their dinner argument, and now he’s letting it rip. The gambit to instigate an argument with Peter is dangerous, though, because Peter was a championship university debater and is now a skilled lawyer, who’s had his own arguments rolling around in his head. And, after a few more exchanges, Peter transitions into Lawyer Mode. The narrator describes how he physically does this: “Strangely Peter is conscious of smiling now, yes, thin smile, and with an energy inside him, his hands, his arms, hot, towering sensation, he gets up, stands at the empty fireplace.” What is the smile? Not happiness, not joy, but maybe a kind of sick gladness that Ivan has, by opening the door to relitigating their dinner argument, given Peter permission to let loose a verbal onslaught designed to dominate and embarrass Ivan. Standing at the fireplace, he looks like a lawyer about to give closing arguments.

And he does, going back to a topic Ivan remains confused by and even ashamed of, that after Sylvia broke up with Peter and Peter became depressed, neither Ivan nor their father provided any comfort to him at all. Says Peter: “You want to know why I treat you like a child? Because you are a fucking child. When things get difficult, you’re gone. You’re out of the room. And that’s alright, I don’t expect anything else. Maybe with Dad I did, but I learned my lesson. He didn’t want me to be his son, he wanted me to be his protector. And yours. So that’s what I was. All my life, I was looking out for the both of you. And neither of you ever even had the decency to say thanks.”

I read this statement as a kind of explanation for where the “Ivan, Little Brother” character comes from in Peter’s mind. It was the moment when Ivan transitioned from an awkward, inept boy to someone whose awkwardness generated its own form of cruelty in the form of ambivalence. The violence that follows—Ivan pushing Peter, Peter throwing Ivan to the ground—manages to make Peter hate himself even more, while also bestowing on him a level of understanding he didn’t have before. When Peter leaves the house, he thinks, “[Their father] was a good person, he tried. No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.”

What an amazing passage.

I would argue that one’s ability to be “perfect,” to provide the right kind of support, is dependent on how fixed someone views their role and the role of other people within an established social dynamic. The more rigid the roles, the more limited the avenues of action. Ivan views his role as the kid brother: in need of support, kind of clueless and embarrassing, not wise, not in a position to help or provide comfort to Peter because he’s never had to in the past. And Ivan views Peter’s role as the big brother: worldly, wise, cutting at times, always a step ahead, never in need of help, because that’s what’s been true in the past. At the moment Peter is having his breakdown, Ivan continues to cling to his ideas about their respective roles, and because of this he does not provide the kind of support Peter needs. It’s Peter, he’ll be fine, I wouldn’t know what to say anyway is more or less Ivan’s attitude. The flip side of this dynamic is that Peter is counting on Ivan to adopt a different kind of role and provide support to him—to be a loving brother, no longer just a kid brother, because that’s what Peter would do (or perhaps, what Peter and Sylvia would do together) if Ivan was collapsing emotionally. Ivan is only a teenager at the time, a high school student, so his inability or refusal to reconsider their dynamic is understandable, but it’s also not difficult to imagine this dynamic playing out between more mature friends or family members. How dangerous it is to think that way: No, no, no, I don’t show love to that person in that way.

What I notice, too, is how Peter’s thoughts switch halfway. “And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing.” Here Peter is relinquishing his own subjectivity in favor of others’ subjectivity, seeing himself through the eyes of another. Peter is, for the vast majority of the novel, rather self-obsessed in the manner of a depressed person, so this kind of switch is, uh, new. Peter spends a huge amount of time in a mode of very active self-hatred, and what’s ironic is that he makes the first move out of this dynamic not by forgiving himself but by forgiving his father—and then seeing himself in his father. That is, by extending love to someone else, this move allows him to extend a more loving attitude toward himself. He has a very long way to go before any amount of self-forgiveness or self-love grows within him—“you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead”—but I would argue that he’s made the first move here. He just needs to figure out the full implications of forgiving his father. (If I forgive my father for not giving me what I needed when I was low, and both Ivan and I are not giving each other what we each need during our period of grief, then…)

So the novel enters a sequence of forgiveness, but there’s something else that’s begun, too. Peter has experienced a negative physical reaction, disgust frankly, against his desire to be knowing. Knowing, in this scene, does not heal the relationship with Ivan. For now, it does the opposite. Speaking one’s truth can lead to violence, it turns out. To be correct, to be right: maybe these aren’t the best things to desire. But what else is there?

Well, there’s despair, the desire to disappear. What’s disturbing to me is that Peter has devoted his whole life to being right, to cultivating persuasive skills, and when he deploys them to tremendous effect against Ivan, they cause misery. It makes me wonder what skills are worth developing in the first place. What exactly am I getting good at, and am I sure these are the right things? Most of Peter’s self-hatred after this scene seems to come from the act of violence he commits against Ivan, and the fact that he could have kept going if not for seeing how Ivan reacted, but perhaps some is from the dawning realization that his values are the wrong ones. Rhetorical prowess can send you backward, farther from contentment and love.

Or maybe, more accurately, Peter mistakes professional and academic skills for interpersonal ones. Unless he’s engaging in a jargon-laden tit-for-tat with Sylvia, or put in a position of language-free care (giving Naomi money, getting meds for Sylvia), he genuinely doesn’t know how to interact with the people he loves.

But despair is just another kind of knowing, isn’t it? I mean, despair is a form of certainty about the future? I know what’s going to happen next, and it’s not good, and there’s no escaping it. So Peter, despairing, still isn’t out of his bind. It’s Margaret who first provides, for the reader, a meaningful conversion from certainty to openness. It seems to me (is this an obvious rule?), suspense in a plot does not grow out of the question, “What’s going to happen next?” but from the question “What’s going to happen when…?” Having enough information to know that a certain thing will happen, but not how it will happen. In Margaret’s storyline, both she and the reader are wondering: what will happen when the town finds out about her and Ivan?

The answer is disconcerting. Margaret’s mother insults her, her thoughts start spiraling, and she gets angrier and angrier until she finds out from Ivan that Peter, too, is judging her harshly, at which point she becomes hopeless. The narrator describes her thoughts: “This was how things went, this was what her mother had tried to warn her about. To know herself the object of disgust and vilification, not only imagined but real, and not only by her own family but Ivan’s.” Her language is so sure of itself. “This was how things went…to know…” With only two real data points—her mother’s mean-spirited reaction, and Peter’s vague disapproval—Margaret creates an entire narrative.

It made me so nervous to read that, because her certainty that their relationship is self-serving and embarrassing has the potential to blow it up. The novel has shown this process before. She’s created an Ivan character and a Peter character in her mind, and she’s created a Margaret character who exists in the minds of her neighbors and in the mind of Peter, and there’s a danger she’ll base her decision based on those characters instead of what’s happening in front of her.

But she doesn’t. Her spiraling thoughts are interrupted by the physical presence of Ivan; his touch gets her thoughts off track, and they bifurcate downward into basic physical reality and upward toward spiritual truth. The narrator: “Her body, in his hands, was differently capable, something different, she was not the same. To lose now this new capacity, this new body she inhabited in his arms, unthinkable.” I read “this new capacity” as the sexual excitement she engenders in Ivan, an effect she hasn’t had on a man in a long time. Her thoughts soon become spiritual: “To let him fill her like that, however much he wanted to, again and again, and what else could matter. This, enclosed in ordinary existence, the desire from which all human life derived, the origin of everything.”

Immediately after sex, Margaret is in a more reflective mood, explaining how she was obsessed with “being perfect, being in the right” with her ex-husband, and how her sense of duty toward him made her feel trapped. In opposition to this is Ivan’s feeling of openness. As he tells her, “I mean, we’re both young, in reality, anything is possible. Life can change a lot.” And by the end of the conversation, she agrees, thinking that the relationship could crash and burn, hurting both of them, “or in ten years’ time, against the odds, they might look back and laugh together. Maybe. Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open.”

The physical body possesses an ultimate reality whose presence and effect are undeniable. To be in front of someone, to speak to them as a spontaneous and unpredictable being, to touch them with care and attention: these serve as the most viable ways toward knowing someone. The crushing certainty that comes from viewing someone as a predictable character results in disrespect, harm, and poor decisions. People do not belong in boxes, their motivations are not easily understood, the future is not clear, and it’s worth revisiting when someone’s identity hardened for you because they may be as ashamed by their behavior as you are angry at it.

Back to Peter. It’s tempting to say that the most useful alternative to despair is hope. Things are bad now, but they’ll get better in the future, and let’s imagine what that’ll be like. It seems logical in terms of character arcs or whatever that Peter, saved from suicidal despair by Naomi and Sylvia, would end the novel hopeful about his relationships. But that’s not where the novel ends up.

In a climactic conversation with Sylvia, he apologizes and tells her he loves her, but he’s not exactly happy or hopeful. About their relationship together and with Naomi, they argue, and Peter finally says, “Maybe there is no solution. What do you want me to do? Pretend to have a different problem that’s easier to solve? I’m just trying to be honest for once in my life. I have no idea what to do.” This is perhaps the first time Peter has stepped away from certainty and a determination to be right. And it opens him up to the same sort of conclusion as Margaret: who knows what the future will bring? Or, in the words of Ivan, “Life can change a lot.”

To my mind, this is beautiful, the idea that the alternative to despair is uncertainty. Is hope better? I don’t know, maybe! But if you can’t get to hope, if hope would involve self-deception, then uncertainty is still a very useful place to be. As Peter phrases it to himself, “See what happens. Go on in any case living.” Yes, exactly. To cultivate uncertainty. To look around and say honestly and with conviction, “I have no idea what to do.” To stick around and commit to seeing how the show ends up, with you in it: that’s the most you can do sometimes, and sometimes that’s enough.

*

Can we ever actually know another person? Considering how much trouble the characters get into on account of their attachment to certainty, predictability, rightness, perfection—all the disreputable cavalry that the ego marshals to assert itself as the ultimate reality—it seems hard to commit to the idea of knowing. Words or phrases like “maybe,” “I don’t know,” “I’m sorry,” “see what happens”: these mark the origin of understanding.

Maybe this is true: to love someone is to get to know them and then, once known, to admit that they are deeper and more complicated than you could ever predict; to cultivate uncertainty about their reactions and mentality; to continually rediscover the mystery and complexity of the beloved, rather than trying to fix them in our minds; to believe that their interior terrain isn’t and can’t be fully surveyed. It is only when the characters give up the ideas that they know to be true that they are able, in the open plain of uncertainty and mystery, to feel free, whole, and happy.

So no, you can’t ever know another person fully, but you can do something better. You can fall in love with them, again and again.