Facebook, Death, and Literature

Facebook is killing our souls. Or so culture pundits are claiming, as usual. Zadie Smith's review essay in the most recent NYRB trots out all the usual fears, as she reviews The Social Network and You Are Not a Gadget, the new book by Jaron Lanier, who has been discussed in these pages before.

Smith's take on The Social Network is interesting--it's when she wades into cultural critique of the impact of Facebook (buttressed of course by Lanier) that she goes astray. Smith's fears for the coming generation are somewhat incoherent--she worries, on the one hand, that Generation Facebook is more wonderfully gooey and rich than any of our measly technology allows us to show:

[T]he more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Sweet of her, I guess. But on the other hand, she fears that she already sees how boring our technology is making us, as she compares her old (Harvard) students with her comparatively less interesting new (NYU) crop, and concludes that "it's absolutely clear to me that the students I teach now are not like the student I once was or even the students I taught seven short years ago at Harvard"--because the new students have a "denuded selfhood" unrecognizable to her. (Sucks to be her student and to read this article, don't you think? But I digress.)

What are we losing with Facebook? Principally, depth. The most compelling part of Lanier's argument (as Smith summarizes it) is that technological systems are essentially kinds of representation, and that they can only represent or encode a very small bit of what it means to be human. As Smith rightly points out, literature does this, too, but--and here's the key "difference"--it does it less. What's really on the table here is not a difference of kind, but a difference of degree, and Smith is smart enough to know this, but still unconnected enough (only connect, Zadie!) to want it to be a more dramatic and devastating difference than it is.

At a crucial turning point in the essay, Smith broaches that most literary of topics: death. Death (as we all know from the profound novels we try to imitate) is something that broods over us, coming home to roost in sudden epiphanies like Gabriel Conroy's at the end of "The Dead". Smith models this approach to death nicely as she walks casually to a movie theater to see The Social Network. "Soon I will be forty," she realizes, "then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan." Then she brings home the fundamental question: "Can you have that feeling, on Facebook?"

That's a rhetorical question, of course, and the obvious/ominous answer is "OMG no u tots cant!!!" Having primed us for this answer, Smith looks at how death does manifest itself on Facebook, glancing over the wall of a dead girl and puzzling over the strange new sort of people who choose to leave messages there: "Do they genuinely believe, because the girl's wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive?" Does Smith ask the same question when she sees flowers on tombstones, or when she hears speakers, at a funeral, addressing the dead? I'm going to guess no, but because these equivalent activities take place within social rituals Smith is used to, she doesn't feel the need to tear her hear or beat her breast over them.

The irony is that a substantial portion of Smith's fame comes from a very public conversation she herself has had with the dead. I'd like to ask her how she feels about E. M. Forster. Does she think he's dead, completely? Or, when she engages in a literary conversation with him, does she genuinely believe, because his novels continue to exist and be read, that he is still, in some sense, alive? And if so, is that a bad thing? And if we can't all become famous novelists, is it so wrong that some little bit of us should remain, as a memorial and a site of remembrance, in the space of representation? Or does everyone have to make a masterpiece to be worth that?

A radically different approach to death on Facebook appeared only a short while ago in the Atlantic, and it shows how, in a strange way, the voyeurism of Facebook allows people to feel close to each other in a fashion that would have otherwise been impossible--an example of the manner in which Facebook can actually humanize, rather than dehumanize, relationships that otherwise never would have existed at all. These are the sorts of things that paranoid pundits can't see, because they simply don't want to. People don't live in Facebook, so the lack of certain possibilities in Facebook does not mean the end of those possibilities. People may not have dizzying death epiphanies while logged onto Facebook. But people can't have sex on Facebook, either, and yet Smith doesn't seem to be concerned that we'll stop breeding.

While Facebook certainly conditions how we think of ourselves, its modes of conditioning thought aren't new; they're borrowed from older technological forms (the facebook, the visiting card, the trading card) that haven't destroyed society yet. If there are some people who are shaping themselves around Facebook personae and thereby "becoming" two-dimensional, so be it. There were people who shaped themselves around two-dimensional literary personae before Facebook; there have always been two-dimensional people who have tried to make themselves more interesting by shaping their personalities and social roles in relation to current forms of media.

That, I think, is the truth that a believer in the profundity of every human soul has a hard time accepting. It's harder to see that humanity is full of flat characters when you live in a highly literate culture, because people who borrow their quirks from Joyce and Freud appear more profound and interesting than those who borrow them from Facebook. So in a way, this breezy technology is a boon--it lets us see more of the shallowness of people than before, a vision that's only frightening if you were living in denial of it.

Literary sages are always good at denouncing the new, because it's so obviously different from what they're used to. Ruskin railed against railways in his lectures of the 1860s; by the time Forster was writing Howards End in the early 20th century, it was the railways that seemed to demonstrate a true, old, and stable connection with the land, while motorcars were fast, unpredictable, and destructive. And so Smith steps into the role of sage here, denouncing the technology she isn't yet totally familiar with and peppering it with the paranoid fears of commerce in which sages have always, somewhat paradoxically, traded. But while sages are great at finding flaws, they're incredibly bad at predicting the upside of change. The Atlantic article is one small example of that upside (although it maintains the fashionable skepticism that has to be fit into Facebook stories to make them sell); other upsides will reveal themselves over time. After all, writing itself was once a dramatic technological change, one that meant the end of oral memory--and yet somehow, we seem to have survived, even though our civilization doesn't look like an ancient bard might have predicted. Do any of us regret that?

The Wire and Treme: David Simon Keeps It "Real"

Every once in a while, I open to an article in the New York Review of Books that makes me feel like I've accidentally stumbled into a guest lecture at some kind of intellectual retirement home. The subject matter seems exciting and relevant, the author seems promising--then it devolves into an explanation of basic cultural phenomena to an audience assumed to be hopelessly out of touch.

That's how I felt when I read Charles Petersen's "In the World of Facebook" earlier this year. Its rants describe "the mechanics" of superficial Web-era friendships in a way that seems almost calculated to excite "why-I-never" cane-shaking among anyone still fighting the good fight against the Internet. That's also how I felt recently when reading Lorrie Moore's piece on The Wire.

I always get excited when I see writing about The Wire. That excitement comes partially from hometown pride, and partially from the fact that I think we're living in the golden age of television, and we should be talking about TV shows a lot more than we talk about, oh, Jonathan Franzen for instance. Add to that the fact that Lorrie Moore is a great writer, and you'd seem to have the perfect formula for a great article. (I don't know if Charles Petersen is great, because according to my superficial Web-era scholarship, he appears to be a deceased Danish boxer.)

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that Moore's piece more or less describes the entire series to an audience who is assumed not to have heard about it, or to have heard of it only to call out "HWAT'S THAT DEARIE?!" and turn up the volume on their hearing aids. I kept waiting for Moore's incisive account of the series to materialize, but instead I got summary sprinkled with helpful glosses that remind us that "the game" is what "the drug business is called." Thanks?

Most surprisingly, Moore never questions the blue-collar snobbery implicit in much of what The Wire thinks it's teaching us. Instead--perhaps out of guilt for her own relatively white and relatively middle-class subject matter?--she argues that the series's use of the inner city

might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success.

Well, sure, the series certainly wants to be seen that way. Its form of realism is one that denies "reality" to anyone who isn't taking part in a life-or-death struggle of some kind--which makes for great drama, but leads to characters whose three-dimensionality fades as their socio-economic status climbs higher and higher above the poverty line. As a result, there's a serious omission from the otherwise breathtaking sweep of The Wire's social survey of Baltimore: the residents of leafy neighborhoods like Guilford, Roland Park, and farther north into the county, the kinds of places where I spent my first 18 years.

All of that gets classed as "Leave-It-to-Beaver Land" in the phrase from The Wire that Moore admires, but I keep asking myself what to make of that exclusion, and what it means for The Wire's ability to accurately represent the kinds of social and economic transactions that lead to urban problems like Baltimore's. In Simon's work, the upper classes are offstage presences who serve alternatively to mark social immobility (like when D'Angelo Barksdale looks despairingly around the Prime Rib in season 1) or to initiate and benefit from the misery of "real" Baltimoreans (like when Nick Sobotka heckles Carcetti's conversion of the waterfront into condos, or bemoans the re-classification of his family's rowhouse as a "Federal Hill" property). The politics of what counts as real in The Wire is one of the most insistent and problematic parts of its social vision, and it's disappointing to watch Moore let it pass with nothing but a polite golf clap.

Compare Moore's largely congratulatory descriptions of The Wire with Nicholas Lemann's take on Simon's latest project, Treme. Lemann's analysis appeared only a week earlier, but his descriptions of what goes right, and wrong, with Treme are wonderful. He recognizes the series's insecurity about proving itself as a "real" depiction of New Orleans, and the awkwardness that results as Treme repetitively flashes its street cred to audiences. Lemann also rightly identifies Simon's inability to portray wealthy families clearly. He makes a mistake, however, in assuming that issues of reality and authenticity weren't a problem for The Wire, where Simon and his writers could more easily access a local perspective. The issues are there, but they're muffled by their alignment with the typical conflation of the low with the real.

There is, in other words, a big portion of society--in fact, the portion that used to be called Society--that never really makes it into Simon's view of the world. You have to wonder how that impairs his ability, and his projects' ability, to tackle the issues they claim to depict so accurately. It's a weird reverse ghettoization: wealthy North Baltimoreans see the origins of social ills in the form of the occasional member of the underclass who comes into their neighborhoods to steal from them; advocates of the underclass see the origins of social ills in the form of the wealthy who come into their neighborhoods to steal from them. Simon is a master of the second version of the narrative, and he does it beautifully, powerfully, and unforgettably. But at some point it seems as if maybe, to effect any real kind of change, we need a new story.

Isolationism and American Writers

Not too long ago, Horace Engdahl--permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury--attacked American writers, arguing that no American had a chance of winning a Nobel in literature until we stopped drinking our own urine and marrying our siblings. (At least he'd read his Faulkner.) Many American luminaries responded in kind. Personally, I was shocked that the Swedes, who are known primarily for their cooking skills and hairy, eyeless faces, would suddenly turn on our culture, which has looked so lovingly upon them for so long.

Anyway, it took about two years, but now we have a weightier, more thoughtful response to Engdahl, in the form of a recent review essay by Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books. Parks, an internationally-based writer of British birth, reviews a few recent publications designed to redress concerns about American writing and the novel in general. He comes to a number of great conclusions that ring true, among them the fact that it's actually very difficult, if you remove place names and other cultural markers, to tell the difference between writers of any nationality.Writing about the recent publication Best European Fiction 2010, he observes a broader trend:

Each writer appeals confidently to an international liberal readership at the expense of provincial bigotry and hypocrisy . . . Across the globe, the literary frame of mind is growing more homogeneous.

I doubt Parks means this as the damning statement that I hear when I read it. In any case, his review does a fantastic job of addressing both the state of contemporary European writing and the statistics that would seem to support European internationalism over American isolationism. It's worth a read.