Back in the early 1990s David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young American novelists to find a way to come to terms with the role of television in contemporary life. He believed they were going about it the wrong way, but at least they were trying, which was more than he could say for the generation of older writers he complained about in the same piece (‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction”).
One of these, an unnamed ‘gray eminence” who ran a graduate workshop that Wallace attended in the 1980s, scolded his students for including ‘trendy mass-popular-media” references in their work. Treating of such things, he insisted, would only date their writing, pegging it as belonging to the ‘frivolous Now” instead of to the proper province of literature, the ‘Timeless”.
Twenty years later, in the current frivolous Now, Wallace’s essay itself seems a shade dated, because today’s novelists confront a very different communications behemoth in the form of the internet.
The internet, as we are always being told, is different. Only certain parts of it are passively consumed, and others have completely supplanted longstanding realms of daily activity and human interaction.
Some vast number of people now meet their partners through the rationalised sifting of online dating services rather than haphazardly at parties or bars. Smartphones prevent us from ever getting lost, unintentionally or on purpose. Social networking routinely returns long-gone friends, lovers and enemies into the unfolding of our present-day lives. People we’ve met in person once — or never — start to seem like bona fide pals and, unlike the ‘friends” we once fantasised TV characters to be, these people friend us right back.
The internet has altered our lives in ways television never did or could, but mainstream literary novelists — by which I mean writers who specialise in realistic, character-based narratives — have mostly shied away from writing about this, perhaps hoping that, like TV, it could be safely ignored.
Bleeding-edge technology
They’ve ceded the field to authors of speculative fiction, such as William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, whose hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology, or thriller writers who concoct ingenious but outlandish tales about the potential nightmares lurking in same. (Take, for example, Daemon by Daniel Suarez, whose bad guy is already dead when the book begins; his evil deeds are perpetrated posthumously by the computer program he designed before succumbing to cancer.) There have been some gimmicky stunt novels — routine romantic comedies told entirely in emails or status updates or text messages — but more searching depictions of how technology is embedded in the lives of ordinary people have been pretty rare.
It remains to be seen what Wallace himself made of it, when his final work, The Pale King, is published in April). It is what the internet lures out of us — hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions — that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV’s power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, whereas the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude.
This paradox lies at the root of so much of the uncivil and downright cruel behaviour that everyone complains about in online interactions: you can insult someone without lingering to witness the damage you’ve done, make messes you’ll never have to clean up.
Nevertheless, because the internet will (sometimes) listen to us, the internet, unlike TV, can compel us to listen to ourselves. The paradigm of the anti-TV insurgent is Howard Beale, from the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film Network, a newscaster turned mad-as-hell everyman who refuses to ‘take it” any more. By melting down on the air and venting his rage against what another character describes as television’s ‘common rubble of banality”, Beale becomes a hero to millions.
Because TV requires only that its viewers ‘take it”, Beale’s simple refusal is enough to constitute a principled insurrection. His fury has no real shape or purpose; its virtue lies in the contrast between its singular, uncompromising, heedless intensity and the pablum all around it.
Here’s the thing, though: unlike TV in the 1970s, the web has a surplus of Howard Beales. He may have been the only guy on TV who yelled at TV the way countless guys at home were yelling at their TVs, but on the internet, yelling guys are a dime a dozen.
Losing it
This is what Walter Berglund realises in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. He loses it, Howard Beale-style, at a press conference for an employer who has tricked him into betraying his environmentalist ideals, and ends up screaming: ‘WE ARE A CANCER ON THE WORLD” from the podium.
After years of playing nice, he abandons the role he refers to as ‘Mr Good” and proclaims his long-suppressed misanthropy, the kernel of flinty self-righteousness that, in the age of Network, passed as the equivalent of integrity. A video of Walter’s tirade makes it to YouTube and he becomes a viral star, travelling the country with his assistant-turned-lover, speaking to cheering cadres of ‘the 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites [radical animal rights activists]”. He can’t, however, fail to see in ‘the loony rage of his readership” a mirror of his own. By allowing him finally to express himself to the world, and to congregate with people who wholeheartedly agree with him, the internet presents Walter with this unsavoury fact: he is a crank.
What if, on the introduction of a new medium that allows everyone to speak their secret, supposedly unique selves, we discover that thousands upon thousands of people are saying pretty much the same stuff in pretty much the same words? What if the individuality we hold so dear turns out to be indistinguishable from the individuality of countless others? How individual is it, then, really? What if the ‘common rubble of banality” is, in fact, us?
In a world where everyone’s a critic because otherwise they wouldn’t quite exist, isn’t it inevitable that we will someday soon begin to review one another? This is, of course, a vamp on the bewildering instructions every novelist gets from his or her publisher these days: you need to be on Twitter, on Facebook, blogging. The fact that authors are able to write books precisely because they aren’t spending hours every day online tends to get lost in the hunt for new ways to shore up sales.
The internet is more than just the way we live now; it is the world we’ve made for ourselves, out of our selves. Like it or not, we’re stuck with us.–