In an article about the online world and fiction, Lauren Oyler, critic and author of the newly published novel Fake Accounts, says:
You can’t just ignore it [social media]. The only real justification I can think of for ignoring it is a desire to remain ignorant of just how out of touch you are. Which is fine, but not for a writer … It influences every area of society that is meaningful to a literary or creative type: politics, tech, the media, the academy, the culture industries... The anodyne tweets become the theses of anodyne editorials, which become the anodyne messaging of politicians.
The assumption that a writer must be 'in touch' is an interesting one, not for being particularly objectionable but just as something I’ve never required from books. I suppose it depends on what or who exactly you’re in touch with, and what kind of writer you want to be. Keeping up only with the ‘anodyne’ aspects of modern life, and the established crust of ‘culture industries’, does not seem wholly enticing. Sometimes a work puts you in touch with something you didn’t know you needed to connect with. Perhaps some artists might appear ‘out of touch’, at least for periods of creating, because they’re trying to make something different and, just possibly, transcendent.
I do understand that Oyler is talking about the type of novel that attempts to take the pulse of the human condition as it now beats, yet the statement is presented as a universal maxim. There is a weird lack of address paid to social media and the internet in much of fiction. Of course, most books grapple with the character of their times, sometimes merely by being a product of them, providing valuable insight into these lived experiences. But to believe that this constitutes some sort of writerly duty is prescriptive, and frankly, rather depressing. Fake Accounts, alongside Patricia Lockwood’s new book No One is Talking About This, has been hailed in some quarters as ‘the first great internet novel’. I haven’t read either of these books, but the discussions around them got me thinking about some indirect ways that virtual technologies may have influenced recent writing.
One aspect might be the growth of multi-genre ‘creative non-fiction’ that combines novelistic and poetic rhythms with elements of memoir, literary analysis, history, science, travel writing, environmentalism, polemic, and more. Our minds are magpie-like; research is shaped by innumerable open tabs and access to ever more information, accurate or otherwise. Books become a medieval bestiary of fantastical combined forms: unicorns, griffins and tigers entranced by the sight of their reflection in the hunter’s mirror.
Without simplistically rejecting the digital sphere, many writers are interested in exploring experiences of embodiment, the material world, and the inescapable physicality of life, both good and bad. The importance of these things has been thrown into sharp relief by social media and an increase in online ways of being reinforced by the pandemic. This might partly elucidate the surge of nature writing in recent years, and the launch of exciting publications like Ache magazine, which is dedicated to exploring ‘illness, health, bodies, and pain.’
Two of the books I’ve read recently struck me as thoughtfully expressing certain experiences of embodiment and materiality: Handiwork by Sara Baume and A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (both published by Tramp Press). I’m not suggesting that these works were consciously crafted in response to the internet, only that they struck me as lovely examples of an expansion of attention towards writing through the body and its senses.
A Ghost in the Throat interweaves the author’s life with her fascination with Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the main author of a famous Irish eighteenth-century caoineadh (keen or lament) for her murdered husband Art Ó Laoghaire. Instead of pursuing a conventional narrative of modern-day detective work, steadfastly uncovering a resolved past, the book gives equal weight to both women in a story of ‘how we came to haunt each other.’ Here, history is a relationship, just as vivid and unstable as the present moment. This reminds me of a time when my sister and I were exploring the ruins of Egremont castle in Cumbria. As we stood in the gape of the old hall’s windows, she said something like, ‘Imagine if you were in there feasting hundreds of years ago and our shapes appeared. Maybe some ghosts are just people from the future.’
Ní Ghríofa creates a visceral and highly personal form of historical work and imagination across generations, examining femininity, motherhood, and the archival hostility and indifference that obscures women’s voices. With the repeated statement of ‘This is a female text’, the book claims space for the power of female desire, maternity and domesticity in literary history. Research into Eibhlinn’s life is interspersed with descriptions of Ní Ghríofa’s experiences of giving birth and childcare, probing her ambiguity around whether her instincts to care for others are innate or conditioned. Noting that the Italian word stanza for a verse of poetry means ‘room’, she likens her act of translating Eibhlinn’s caoineadh into English to ‘homemaking’, subverting long-standing hierarchies that present such activity as a drain on creativity.
… I find myself wanting to sing, too. I know how unqualified I am to attempt my own translation - I hold no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip - I am merely a woman who loves this poem. The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems, but because the process seems so close to homemaking.
… For months I work methodically, deliberating between synonyms, stitching and re-stitching the seams of curtains until they fall just so, letting my eye move back and forth between verbs, straightening the rugs, and polishing each linguistic ornament. Like my housework, the results of my translation are often imperfect, despite my devotion … I often ignore cobwebs. I often stumble. I continue anyway.
A Ghost in the Throat reminds us that words begin in the body, and a reliance on written texts has not always been humankind’s primary means of record:
… literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song […] The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies …
Sara Baume’s Handiwork explores creativity and craftsmanship, juxtaposing her daily rituals of writing and handicraft with the migratory patterns of birds. These reflexive, often inefficient avian journeys parallel the compulsive urge humans feel towards making. I was moved by Baume’s descriptions of her late father, a sandstone quarry worker from whom she inherited her penchant for making things. His tacit, practical acts of love were instantly recognisable to me as ‘a Dad thing’: he builds her a studio after graduation despite his disinterest in the art world, and respects her achievement in publishing a book but never reads it.
I love Handiwork’s pairing of the process of writing with physical work. Words are punctuated by images of the small carved birds that Baume sculpts, from albatross to pied wagtail. I’m fascinated by the relationship between art and writing, which seem alternately complementary and opposing forms. I often envy the physical expression inherent in practices like painting, dancing, costume-making, or wood-carving. I think this is why I like to write by hand when I can. But words do possess a kind of physicality for me, even if they’re not describing something visual or sensory. Some sentences are chewy and indigestible; others slip neatly down the throat like good gin. In an interview for The YourShelf Podcast, Baume says:
I feel like I learned how to write from studying sculpture as much as I did from studying writing. So I always approached a book as if it was a project … I thought of my materials as sentences and language as opposed to wood or plaster… I’m not quite sure where one ends and the other begins.
Handiwork describes many of the objects and clutter around Baume’s house. These things, her repeated actions, and the spaces she inhabits, become more and more multi-dimensional, creating a dynamic interplay between material and imaginative realms. Like A Ghost in the Throat, the house is a place for creativity, home to both art and domesticity.
The sickles of dried paint I never have the patience to fully scrub from the clefts of my fingernails mirror the row of brilliant white crescents along the living room wall - as if I am the house, or the house is me.
And lastly, as I’m conscious of this issue stretching out, I want to mention one of the key features of Baume’s book, which you can see from the above image: the use of white space, surrounding the text like a picture frame. This allows for pause or even meditation, so unlike social media’s encouragement of doomscrolling, and the temptation to zip between online articles and Google searches. It is almost as though the text itself is breathing between words. In the same interview, Baume says that she wanted to summon the feeling of the white walls of an art gallery, spaces which encourage a visitor to peer in close. The tangible page, lit at times with the ghost of the text under-leaf, opens up a landscape for reflection.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, and that it has inspired you to check out some of the works mentioned. You can buy A Ghost in the Throat here and Handiwork here. Fake Accounts is available here and No One is Talking About This here.
If you like in-depth book discussions, I highly recommend The YourShelf Podcast, which I listened to on Spotify. There’s also a great episode featuring Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
And if you’re interested, I wrote through the body in my own piece of creative non-fiction for DearDamsels, about the experience of having chronic eczema.
How have you noticed the internet and social media influence literature and writing? Do you have any recommendations?
Really loved this; the physicality of writing is such an interesting concept. I also think that there are loads of books that cover social media and its use, or at least weave it into a story. But often they are not considered "literature" in the same way as others. In some respects including the non-physical aspects of life seems reserved for less "highbrow" books and do you think this disparity is intentional?