E-mail
Print
Generation ‘I’
In a world where everyone wants to be the idols of their own shows, the characters of their own books and the stars of their own movies, is there anyone left who cares to watch?
By Diego Costa
If we all start writing about ourselves and only ourselves, if we all start to just read our own blogs and stare at our own immortal photographs, who will we expect to serve as witness for the lives we lived?
Orthographic coincidence or not, it seems rather appropriate that the most evident emblems of our times begin with the letter “I.”
From MP3 players to the virtual world, all it takes is that letter (which inevitably, and conveniently, reverberates the self) for it to gain contemporary, immediate and compulsory status.
The literature of the “I” has become, among many other things, a way of saying “no” to years of formulaic and escapist writing.
Denying “he,” “she” and “it” their role as reiterating forces of status quo prose can be a subtle way of going against the kind of writing that reinforces claustrophobic literary rules and artistic convention.
There is a big, political abyss between the apparent simplicity of saying “I went to the forest” as opposed to “Annie went to the forest.” Even if “Annie” can be an allegory for so many other people, including the author and the reader, or for ideas.
It is much more than a matter of style or psychological stratagem, or even unabashed egotism.
Choosing to tell stories or recount sentiments using the “I” instead of “the other” as a character is an unavoidably, if accidentally and merely symptomatic, countercultural turn in literature, for better or worse.
When an author uses “he, she, it” to unravel his or her message, we are made to be the audience. To witness a world outside of ours.
But when they unapologetically embody the authors’ own characters (with or without a commitment to “the truth”), they allow us to inhabit the writing in ways that “ancient” literature didn’t.
In a sense, the text makes us work, it is less about witnessing the world in words and more about being transported into the other’s skin. It is a less careful way of plunging into the endless depths and ramifications of literature. Which is a good thing. It is hard to think of a way to change the world (of ideas, at least), without getting your hands dirty or even bleeding a bit.
The moment one writes something, one is translating thought into readable code. Right there it seems evident that even the “I” is deceitful. And we, as readers, should know that for both intellectual and emotional sake. But apparently we don’t.
The controversy over James Frey’s fabrications in “A Million Little Pieces” reveals our small, uninitiated and naive way of looking at literary works. Expecting a “memoir” to be this or that and being appalled when we discover inconsistencies with the truth of the world is amateurish and stifling.
The mentality that a “memoir” must be a specific thing allows it no room to breathe; it expects a restraining, timid and lifeless nature from literature that writers and readers should never accept. Let Hollywood label its “oeuvres” in clearly defined genres, but let literature conserve its door-less possibilities without punishing the authors.
The same “I” tendency has evidently been somatized by other art forms. Cinema, encouraged by an increasingly possible crew-free approach to filmmaking, has also become largely a vehicle for self-expression — meaning expression of one specific self, even if that particular self echoes ideas beyond its immediacy (Alex Bag, Jonathan Caouette, Sadie Benning and every other experimental filmmaker).
More and more, we see the camera directed toward the “film author,” just like literature has become progressively more comfortable with investigating the more immediate self (or perhaps it always has, and it is just that now everyone’s journal is made public).
Even if writing about others is a way of writing about our own selves via projection, the fact that authors are more comfortable with not hiding personal experience behind certain pronouns is both liberating and gloomy.
It annunciates an eon where the need for outside gaze and recognition can be even greater than the need for the psyche’s defense mechanisms, which were already pretty big. So we feel a greater need for introspection and we allow ourselves the honesty of self-exposure, but we also get addicted, or at least, overtly dependant on the eyes of the other to validate our own experience. And on the recording of our inner and outer lives, as if our memories weren’t enough authenticators of our personal trajectories.
In a world of unstoppable sign-making, perennial recording and neurotic memento gathering, we grow dependent on the physical proof of things (a blog posting, a writing on a Facebook wall, a photograph forever inserted in a virtual folder — our “history” folders!) for us to convince ourselves that our moments actually existed.
If our hours cannot be duplicated into some other form to be re-experienced by “the other” it seems like they weren’t real, or worth it, or lived. So our daily struggles begin to aim for qualifying for spectacle (that which can be re-watched, reread), not personal fulfillment. If there is no audience, there is no show.
So literature, in all of its sloppily postmodern forms (blogging, emailing, instant messaging, texting), ends up being responsible for the weight of the confirmation of human experience. A validation that it may be able to handle, but not without acquiring a different kind of fabric, of elasticity — one that may corrupt its artistic core.
If we all start writing about ourselves and only ourselves, if we all start to just read our own blogs and stare at our own immortal photographs, who will we expect to serve as witness for the lives we lived?
Life will become an endless egotistical self-stimulation; a plethora of six billion monologues spewed out by delusional souls under the impression that anyone gives a damn.
> Comments