We live lives without half-lives.
My brother recently found some of our father’s love letters. In one from 1982, a woman breaks up with him: “Here I am again, staring at a blank page. Seems I’m still feeling like I have to explain something that maybe can’t be explained…. You said you wanted our relationship to always stay the same; I don’t think it is possible for a relationship to stay the same. People get closer, or they separate…”
We know that once Henry James got a typewriter, his style flowered into prolixity. Similarly, messaging has sent such letters to the dustbin. Means of communication define the limits of our communication. Texting means dislocated witticisms, late responses and jumping here and there. It is anathema to profundity. Communication is always possible; it is never important. When we’re with someone, magnetized and atomized by our devices, we’re alone together.
Once I was dating an Italian in Paris. The night before I left, he said, “I wish I would never see you again.” He was always this awkward. “I will never say addio and mean it,” he said. “I wish I could always remember you like this.”
With messaging, relationships decay into tedious, superficial exchanges of anecdote. Relationships survive, but as hideous shells. Hasty communications trap us in the triviality and imminence of the passing moment; letters or emails outstrip the ephemeral, synthesize, turn skeleton into flesh.
New means of communication are inseparable from the multiplication of possible relationships. These technologies have sapped relationships of legitimacy. Even the names of the sites are cynical: “Plenty of fish,” “OK Cupid.” Dissected, deprived, depraved. The quantity of possible encounters becomes a quality: We’re sold in bulk. We no longer have the breakup letters of yesteryear (e.g. 1982): We talk of ghosting — don’t like him? Cut it off, block him, disappear and it’s done.
Nor can we communicate with ourselves. Before, we had the diary. It was a technology of the self, of a self that merited “the care of the self.” The slowness, the physical effort of writing, the intimacy of pages stuffed in the drawer — the blog killed that. Private thought became public. With WordPress, LiveJournal, Xanga and now Tumblr, authentic intimacy — I only write for me, no secrets, no success — becomes false intimacy. The thinking I becomes a performing I. No return, no remedy, except refusal.
In her awesome diary, Dawn Powell wrote that Henry Miller’s writing “is like observing somebody belch — now he feels better but it doesn’t do you any good.” Perfect description of today’s young literature: Where blog bleeds into book. The typewriter still had ribbons, cutting and pasting; the word processor unleashes unstoppable, unreadable logorrhea. The authors of so-called “affectless realism” pop Adderall sit before the MacBook and publish directly to their community websites. No editing, no effort: They compensate banality with superficiality, adorning it all in a childish nihilism. We’ve denigrated the self but staged a Copernican revolution: Society’s dead! Politics is a lie! The family’s a hologram! Everything turns around the self. Hence this literature: onanistic prostitution.
The girl-writers resort to the one thing society shall always afford them — their sex — and write Thought Catalog tales of blow jobs and publish Tumblr selfies of their tits. But where’s the taboo? They do exactly what post-’68 media demands in a mood of stillborn protest. Their narration is encrusted in an epidemic of negative narcissism: “I don’t know what I am, but all I know is myself, it’s me that I sell, I am what I sell.”
The self is now a surface: event and reflex. Introspection is the sacrificial lamb of the age of the blog. Henceforth, we live in documentation. The self remains but is left prostituted, pillaged, flying without papers. A delicate thing can take only so much sun. More words, but less me: Narcissism enters necrosis, and writing becomes necrophilia. The author is dead; long live the author.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
