My friend Bill and I have embarked on a really exciting adventure.
Bill set up a fictional blog back in 2005, and the narrative is basically set in a futuristic institution, where a number of imprisoned inhabitants use a blog to communicate with each other, moderated by the institution's staff. It is partly a satire about New Labour forms of authoritarianism. It is called Community Fair, which as you can see features on my blogroll.
Bill is an expert on 18th century culture, and has told me in the past about novelists at that time being far more collaborative than they would subsequently become in the 19th century when individualism truly took hold on society. When Richardson, for example, was writing his epistolary novel, Clarissa, in serial form, he would receive letters from readers when it was still incomplete and this would guide the denouement of the plot to a certain extent. Bill was hinting very heavily for such feedback on his blog, but was doomed to be disappointed for a long time.
It was only when I started this blog that I saw very clearly what form such collaboration should take.
On Sunday, I decided to put a comment on one of the postings of Community Fair. I have always been particularly intrigued by one of its characters, Roxanne, who is quite feisty, so I decided to pretend that I was a long lost friend of hers and sent a posting along the lines of "Roxanne, is that really you... where have you been all this time", without telling Bill that I was doing it.
An hour or so later I received a text message from a very excited Bill, and we began to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of developing this fictional collaboration.
We briefly considered the idea of agreeing in advance a meta-narrative that would guide interactions between Sarah (it's funny being a real person AND a fictional character at the same time and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out) and Roxanne. But we dismissed that approach because it's been done before. It's basically the approach that Mike Leigh takes in his improvised plays and films. We want to do something truly experimental. For us it's not enough to do something that's more or less been done before but on a new medium.
So now that Roxanne has replied to Sarah, I have to look back at all Roxanne's previous postings as well as the reply, and compose a response that will move the narrative forward whilst remaining consistent with her past.
The novel has always been connected to a specific period in human development, and maybe it's a bit tired by now, so will it start to be superseded by more collaborative forms of story-telling? Only time will tell.
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Thanks for this interesting commentary, and for the innovative way in which you’ve entered the Community, Sarah. It’s both enriched and complicated my experiment. I’d like to make a few comments if I may on novels, dialogues, and communities.
There’s a consensus that the novel emerges in the late seventeenth and early eight-eenth centuries, at the time when the rising capitalists were consolidating their domi-nance. The new consumer culture escalates during this period and the cheapening of the printing process sees texts circulating as a mass commodity for the first time. The novel, reflecting the individualistic ethos of this class, and deriving some of its form from the self-examination of Protestant spiritual journals, stresses particularity, in-wardness, the development of individual character, and so on. Arguably the first proper English novel, Robinson Crusoe, with its solitary explorer/entrepreneur epitomises this spirit. So I think I’d have to qualify what you say, Sarah, about indi-vidualism truly taking hold of society in the nineteenth century (in fact, you see heroic bourgeois individualism at its most energetic even earlier in Renaissance drama).
But what does go on in this period, alongside this celebration of the striving individual, is the development of the public sphere and the Enlightenment ‘republic of letters’. As famously articulated by Jürgen Habermas, this is a space between the truly private sphere and the state, where, in its ideal form, individuals engage in dialogue with others according to universal norms of human reason. In the eighteenth century, all sorts of arenas arose for this process—coffee-houses, print journals, and so on. (In practice, this universality was qualified since only people with property were truly included, and mostly men, though there are surprising exceptions.) This results, then, in an immense concern with sociality along-side, and in tension with, that individualism, and this can be seen throughout the lit-erature of the period.
And, as you say, early novels, particularly Richardson’s Clarissa, were often written in a manner that participated in this highly dialogic atmosphere (though it wasn’t actually serialized; revisions took place during the circulation of drafts among Richardson’s circle). Ideas and criticism circulated rapidly among this relatively small republic of letters, whose members tended to know each other, and novels like Clarissa—significantly, itself in letter format—were fertilised by discussion, in speech, through letter-writing, and through journalistic criticism.
I’d already had an idea for a dystopia about the way New Labour’s totalitarian im-pulses and attacks on civil liberties are sanitised by the language of care, community, and social radicalism, a language soured by the grotesqueries of business speak. It struck me as I was reading Thomas Keymer’s book (which discusses some of the ideas above) that that dialectic of novel writing and criticism could be replicated in the blogosphere. Also, that many of the claims hailed this new medium for its democ-ratic and dialogic nature, in a way that reminded me of the noble aspirations of the Enlightenment public sphere (which, despite its limited class interest and contradic-tions still seems to me to embody the communicative rationality that Habermas talks about in later works and point to his ideal speech situation, where human beings con-verse in a free exchange undistorted by manipulation or coercion). So, the novel be-gan, and just as Lovelace’s plot against Clarissa Harlowe is dramatised through letters between her and the other characters, so the ‘diablogic plot’ against the inmates of my Community Centre is revealed through blog exchanges. There are huge constraints imposed by writing in this way, as you’ll realise, some self-imposed: I was going to avoid the sort of non-linear narrative that hypertext invites, though you’ve broken that, Sarah!
However, as will be evident to anyone who perseveres with my—now ‘our’—experiment, my views on the utopian claims made for the blogosphere are sceptical.
And, having spouted at Clarissa-like length, I finally make some sort of point that addresses blogging, though I needed the background above to be set up. My views here, too, do comment obliquely on some of your earlier postings, Sarah, that I didn’t get round to responding to (though I’m unable to comment on your World War I stuff as I have something boiling over on the stove).
The apparent re-emergence of a dynamic and dialogic arena like that of the Enlight-enment but in electronic form is a chimera, history repeated as ironic farce. The lan-guage of inclusion, of radicalism, anti-elitism (particularly this) that is feverishly ap-plied to the blogosphere replicates the fake communitarianism of New Labour and the impotent radicalism of postmodernism and identity politics. There are many discussions over whether a revitalised public sphere exists in the Internet. In real-ity, bloggers do not constitute any sort of new global, democratic community; the web potentially enables this, true, but technology in itself doesn’t initiate social change in any deep sense. What actually exists are islets of the well-meaning, the self-important (see the Euston Manifesto crowd), the de-luded and the insane, and those who simply blog for friends, family or the firm. Blog-gers are not united by any common interest in the way that the eighteenth-century re-public of letters was and whose narrow class interest nevertheless had potentials of human universalism contained within it. Blogging parallels the abandonment of this universal humanism in postmodern thought and coalesces around isolated, discon-tinuous ‘identities’. There’s very little dialogue there—just self congratulation, mutual congratulation, or mutual—and occasionally self—abuse. Hence, my novel, as well as satirising New Labour, satirises these vain claims; the blog subverts its own medium. Bloggers are very defensive about their medium and will, I’m sure, be outraged by this attack (however, I could merely be an old fuddy-duddy who, in my bitterness at not being read, takes that as the very proof of the atomistic nature of blogs).
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in patrician disdain for the upstart vulgar genre of the novel, and in horror at modernity in general, Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which employed the new techniques of novelistic realism only to mock them and undermine them. The endlessly open genre of the novel, the genre that is no genre at all and draws on all others, survived, ironically incorporating Swift’s innovations as one way of increasing its vigour. It may be a bit tired now, Sarah—though look at Roth, and at Pynchon’s new monster (80 pages left to read out of 1100!), but it seems to periodically reinvent itself, often by ingesting such alien things as Gulliver. Though I do welcome your intervention, as does Roxanne, I aspire to novelist status, and have a masterplot that might resist too much collaboration; but who knows where this will lead? Perhaps, though, in the same manner as Swift, my reactionary attack on blogging will be absorbed into some new emergent genre despite myself, and my authorial persona engulfed in the egoless new Community of the blogosphere.
Crucial texts are: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, and Thomas Keymer, Sterne, The Moderns, and the Novel.
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