In my search for Facebook’s antidote, I was struck by the words of the literary theorist Ian Watt, who regards Puritanism as the novel’s original psychological paradigm. In The Rise of the Novel, he writes about the novel in its 18th- and 19th-century forms: [W]e can say of him [Defoe], as of later novelists in the same tradition, such as Samuel Richardson, George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, that they have inherited of Puritanism everything except its religious faith. They all have an intensely active conception of life as a continuous moral and social struggle; they all see every event in ordinary life as proposing an intrinsically moral issue on which reason and conscience must be exerted to the full before right action is possible; they all seek by introspection and observation to build their own personal scheme of moral certainty; and in different ways they all manifest the self-righteous and somewhat angular individualism of the earlier Puritan character. If the classical novel is an instrument of moral introspection as here described, my troubles reframe themselves. The novel is concave; it allows you to spy on the interior realities of fictional people. Facebook is convex; it allows you to spy on the exterior fictions of real people. The opposition, far from being complementary, implies a crisis of the human heart. A reward for looking into the depths, the novel is a catalyst for empathy. A punishment for seeing only the surface, Facebook is a catalyst for envy, and therein lies its inevitable moral exhaustion. “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion,” writes Emerson in Self-Reliance. Taking myself as my own portion will mean, for me, the unequivocal renunciation of all efforts to engage with the world on Facebook’s terms. This will entail a reconsideration of the position of my Berliner friends, whose paranoia and scorn in response to Facebook was always defending itself with arguments in favor of modesty, small-flame warmth, and personal quiet. Facebook’s baroque surfaces are a taunt; the envy one feels as a result is not an incidental personal weakness, it is intrinsic to the structure of the form. It is a form that loves the flamboyant displays of half-truths, and encourages half-truth commentaries to float around them. No individual moment on Facebook, no photo or comment or “like” is any more artificial, any more derivative, than innumerable moments that have accompanied me otherwise, as I, along with the rest of you, have been dragged through a world not always able to organize the trenchancy of expression apposite to its condition of love and suffering. But Facebook, I will insist, is a literary genre. As such it is a cognitive mode, a consciousness-for-hire in which the mind can swim. And it is on these terms that I call it out. It is not its artificial moments, of the kind I live out every day, but its artificial mode, that would steal from me my mind’s meditative, contemplative force, my Puritan spirit—my life lived as a better novel.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 15:04:38 +0000
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