Like most of us, Maël Renouard has lived through the transition between “two epochs: one in which people didn’t have the reflex to consult the internet on everything, and one in which the first thing we do, more or less systematically, when we hear of something is to offer it up to the Google search bar.” (“Internet” here is a shorthand for smart phones, social media, and everything else that’s wrapped up in contemporary communication.) I’ll admit that still after so many years, I remain delighted at having so many facts at my fingertips—at being able to seem (to myself alone) so knowledgeable! I’ll never forget the banal occasion when I first noticed it: about fifteen years ago when I wanted to make a passing mention, in an article I was writing, of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I was saying about it was exactly right, so I consulted Wikipedia, and found so much information that suddenly it seemed impossible to make a misstatement. At the same moment, I realized that in what I now knew to be an anterior life, I’d have felt unable to mention the parkway without a trip to the library to back it up—and that in the end, rather than make the trip, I’d have cut the sentence as not worth the effort, impoverishing my article. That’s why I part company with Renouard in his belief that writers now stuff their prose with too many facts, just because they are available; I’m sure that’s also true, but I think more about the relevant or even just charming facts that used to get left out because laziness or time constraints prevented us from ascertaining them. Renouard has been a philosophy professor, a speechwriter, and a translator (Chekhov, Nietzsche) but here he writes essentially as a novelist, that is, as someone who sees the internet as something that has shifted the terms of storytelling: “The invention of a fictional plot…that unfolds realistically in the contemporary world can no longer neglect to represent the internet’s total intrusion into the slightest acts of our existence,” leading to “an unprecedented tension with works of the past, which, along with one’s own life, are the natural source for inspiration for the creator of a story.” The craft of fiction will need to be reinvented, but how? It’s got to be something better than the epistolary novels updated as text messaging. Shrewdly, Renouard notices that many of today’s novels are set in the very recent past, just before our engulfment by the internet, and that this is their paradoxical way of encompassing the internet as a working tool, “because it constitutes a marvelously accessible and nearly inexhaustible—or at least richer and richer—source of information about the periods before it came to be.” I mentioned last week that a poet’s prose is a different species from a novelist’s, but should also say that a French novelist’s (nonfiction) prose is a different breed from an American novelist’s, the former tending to be more ruminative, less narratively driven than the latter. It’s probably not accidental that the title under which this book was published in 2016—Fragments d’une mémoire infini—recalls that of a famous book by Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (known in English simply as A Lover’s Discourse). That was a book that proposed to treat “of an extreme solitude.” This one treats of solitude’s disappearance, for, Renouard writes, “Interiority is no longer master in its own house. The world has broken in and crowded it out.” Its truths are ones the reader already assents almost before reading them—the book’s strength and limitation. I’ll conclude with one of those truths, attributed to a certain L., who should have been me, for this is what I thought as I dropped out years ago: “If I had to sum up my Facebook experience, I’d say it’s the continuous revelation of the idiocy of intelligent people.” Let’s write books and keep our folly to ourselves.
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Maël Renouard, Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, translated by Peter Berhman de Sinéty, is published by New York Review Books, New York, 2021.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.