What Did I Miss?: Context and Linearity in Relation to Storytelling

I’ll start by seconding Mickey’s point that Egan and Cole take two strikingly different approaches to using Twitter as a medium of fiction. While both use certain functions of Twitter, they do so to different effects—but not necessarily with different levels of success. Mickey has described the way that “Black Box” utilizes the “update” feature of Twitter, whereby each new piece of the story builds off the previous one. Not only does this create a linear narrative, but it also echoes the “priority placed on recency” that Page outlines in “Celebrity Practice” (100). We can imagine that the original audience for “Black Box” was perhaps reading the story “in real time,” so that the reporting of the story is concurrent with the story’s reception. What is striking to me about this use of the update feature is that while report and reception are synchronized, as is normally the case for Twitter updates, the “event” (which Page says accompanies these two) is sometimes eerily taken out of the “here-and-now” and thrown into the future tense or into a hypothetical. That is, instead of telling us what is happening “today or tomorrow,” it tells us what “will” or what “may or may not” occur. Part of what makes “Black Box” such a gripping story is the way it uses Twitter’s features—but with a twist. Poetry is often described in this way, in that it operates on expectations but then ruptures them; in that light, we might talk about “Black Box” as a form of poetry.

Of course, Cole also uses features of Twitter in constructing his narrative; Mickey has noted the way that Cole “plays with Twitter’s sense of community and interaction.” We certainly see this in the way that Cole publishes “Hafiz” by having his followers post pieces of the story which he then retweets. The “interactive” feature is also utilized in “A Piece of the Wall,” where dialogue is represented by multiple profiles (which Cole has created himself) “replying” to each other. Like “Black Box,” “A Piece of the Wall” makes use of the “here-and-now” function of Twitter, but it does so by representing a conversation as if it is happening in real time. Cole seems just as aware and in control of Twitter’s features as Egan is. So what might lead to the perception that Egan handles her medium with greater success?

If we agree with Mickey’s claim that Egan’s use of Twitter is one “that actually does something for the text rather than simply being a different way to deliver it,” we seem to ignore the ways that Cole, like Egan, uses Twitter to play on our expectations and then rupture them. From both of our accounts, it seems that the main “expectation” that Egan plays with is that of “updates”—which carries with it expectations of recency and linearity. If we argue that Egan is more successful simply in that her posts read in a more linear way, than we are perhaps operating under a definition of storytelling that implies (and privileges) cohesion.

And yet, not all narratives (whether in print form or online) have cohesion as their objective—and I would argue that “Hafiz” certainly doesn’t. In “Teju Cole Puts Story-Telling to the Twitter Test,” published in The New York Times, David Vecsey points out: “If you happened to follow any of the selected participants on Twitter (but not necessarily Cole), you would have seen only a single contribution to the story—an oddly out-of-place, out-of-context nugget, even by Twitter standards.” Contrary to the image of Twitter that Page’s account sometimes evokes, where the audience is always “following” the tweeter “in real time” and experiencing an event with them, Twitter users often come across updates that are older, not first in a sequence, or not clear in what they are referencing. In those cases, the user might have to visit the original tweeter’s profile or search elsewhere on Twitter or the wider web in an attempt to contextualize the tweet. Twitter is, after all, a massive enterprise that only gets more confusing the more profiles you follow. But usually, especially if the tweets relate to pop culture, the Twitter follower will be able to quickly re-contextualize said tweets (even if this leads to multiple mis/readings, as language often does).

Here is where I think “Hafiz” is, in fact, highly successful: Cole plays on the Twitter users’ expectation of a context that can be retrieved, and his poetic “rupture” lies in the denial/frustration of that retrieval. The story begins with an ellipsis, and I myself was unsure at first that this was in fact the beginning. The prepositional phrase “to the subway” seems to make little sense without whatever portion of the story that has been “left out”—elided through the ellipsis.  And with the exception of “FIN” which officially concludes “Hafiz,” the story ends in the way that it begins: with an ellipsis. Again, a prepositional phrase (“without a word to us”) seems to lose its meaning in the absence of “what comes after.” This feeling of having missed something, which operates on the level of form via ellipses, is also thematized through the narrator’s observations. The narrator claims that after multiple attempts at finding the unconscious man’s pulse, “only then did I notice his chest subtly rise and fall.” The narrator does not state that “only then did his chest subtly rise and fall,” but instead frames the action as something “missed” or overlooked; it is not the man’s lack of breathing, but the having-not-noticed the breathing, that the reader is made aware of.

“Hafiz” is gripping precisely because it is not perfectly cohesive or linear—because the reader is forced to confront the entirety of the narrative together, only to find that something is indeed missing. What better medium than Twitter to tease our understandings of storytelling? What better use of fiction than “Hafiz” to question Twitter’s obsession (and by extension, *our* obsession) with a post that perfectly builds off the last, “updating” us to the new, referencing only those events occurring in the here-and-now, rendering everything that came before old and therefore “obsolete”? Cole uses the features of Twitter perhaps to tell a story about it—adding a layer of reflexivity (nods to Seltzer) to a medium already steeped in it.

An Insistence on the Body

In “The Posthuman Body,” N. Katherine Hayles focuses our attention on the cybernetic construction of the posthuman, critiquing its tendency to erase embodiment and seeking another approach (still rooted in cybernetics) that would instead insist on the body itself.

Hayles writes, “Thus the contest to define the posthuman is deeply bound up in the debate over whether humans are more aptly viewed as inscriptions or incorporations…At stake in my reading of [Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash] is not so much a decision to side with either the human or the posthuman, as a search for versions of the posthuman that do not erase embodiment and do not consider human beings as inscriptions that can be frictionlessly transferred into another medium” (247-248).

This privileging of the body finds resonance in the chapter “Posthistoricism,” in which Walter Benn Michaels offers analyses of Snow Crash and American Psycho that are concerned with measuring the force of a text by the effects it has on the body. By pain or by sickness, the body reacts to a “text” that is either forcibly carved onto the skin or channeled directly through the brain stem.

Turning to Snow Crash, Michaels writes, “But when some people catch the virus and some people don’t, we don’t think of the sick people as disagreeing with the healthy ones. Indeed, this is precisely what it means to begin to conceive the text on the model of the virus; it means to understand differing responses to the text as different effects produced on different bodies by the same cause” (73).

Michaels later uses this argument as an analogy for text vs. interpretation, which I won’t delve into here. What draws Hayles’ and Michaels’ arguments together is an emphasis on the presence and relevance of the (post)human as body as opposed to code. Hayles resists a definition of the human as DNA, written and transferrable. Michaels similarly draws a distinction between the body and text by imagining the latter as something that attacks, infects, inspires, or otherwise exerts force on the body—but remains separate from it. The body is still something that reacts to, rather than becomes, code/text.

However, while Hayes powerfully argues for the materiality of the body as something to embrace in the face of lifeless automation, Michaels’ offers a much bleaker outlook by only emphasizing the body as something that is helplessly overcome by something else; whether injured or inspired, the body is not really the hero of subjectivity that we might hope it to be, but the mere site where feelings emerge (but from whom?) and where differences occur (i.e., you are not sick/inspired but I am, thus we are different).

What I find myself searching for in both of these readings is something more than yet another dichotomy—which is in this case a dichotomy between the human as body or the human as code. Where does such an analysis leave us? What about the soul? What about emotion, experience, heritage, and so forth, which so much of human art is founded on and in preservation of?

In defining/describing the human, any dichotomy is futile. And arguing for the body as opposed to text is to have already decided that the human is one or the other, and nothing in between.