Autofiction and Selfie Aesthetics

I. Social Media and Narrative

In 2019 Kendall Jenner was photographed poolside reading literally show me a healthy person, a relatively obscure autofiction novel by Darcie Wilder. The author herself, as well as many literary Twitter users, were struck by the seeming incongruity of a massive social media influencer reading the underground novel: "After the Hotel du Cap photos, Wilder said she remembers being 'shocked and amused at the absurdity of it, also confused. It doesn't make sense but I'm into it.'"1 Jenner was quoted explaining her new reading habit as therapeutic: "It's kind of nice to focus on and look at something that's not your phone screen."2 Though Wilder classifies her novel as part of a small literary niche, "one that caters to the social-media-savvy leftist literary creative type," it's actually part of a broader trend. These novels include LIVEBLOG by Megan Boyle, which we will discuss at length shortly, PERSON/A by Elizabeth Ellen, which endeavors radical emotional transparency to the point of including the rejections the novel itself received before Ellen finally published it through her own press, David Shapiro's Supremacist, which catalogs the author's obsession with the skate brand Supreme and the depth to which it impacts his behavior and self-perception,as well as other works by authors like Tao Lin, Rob Doyle, Scott McClanahan, and Sam Pink. Elements of this style and approach (which will be investigated thoroughly in section II) can even be seen in more mainstream autofiction, such as 10:14 by Ben Lerner and Outline by Rachel Cusk. In short, of the concurrent styles which populated the literary landscape in the 2010s, autofiction is perhaps the most emblematic, and within autofiction a distinct and curious strain is emerging. What are the characteristics of this strain? Based on the descriptions of the novels above, we already see they share quite a bit of similarity with Jenner's social media habitat: the emphasis on the personal minutiae of daily life, radical openness, tweet-like prose styling, brand awareness and identification, even self-publishing.3 But these are only early and superficial indicators of a much more fundamental influence that social media has had on this strain of autofiction and, indeed, literature as a whole. The shift to social media-influenced autofiction, which I will call New Autofiction (a category including a significant percentage of texts previously referred to as alt lit), corresponds to a radical shift in authorial self-perception and expression. Social media and New Autofiction are effectively manifestations of the same emerging assumptions about the nature of the self and what constitutes a life story, assumptions which position the self not as an essential value but as a paradigm which trades the narrative conception of a life story for a data set which can be read along multiple trajectories and which has no ultimate boundary. Ultimately, Jenner and Wilder are not operating in such vastly different ways as the invocation of the transmedia dichotomy of the screen and the page might first suggest.

This theory draws from the dynamic shift between traditional and networked media as described by Lev Manovich: movement from the prioritization of the syntagmatic (narrative) to the prioritization of the paradigmatic (database). In Manovich's argument, narrative media (such as the novel, or even television) obscures "the database of choices from which narrative is constructed," rendering the database (the paradigm) implicit, "while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit." 4 A syntagmatic text, such as a novel, in other words, is an explicit expression drawn from a range of possibilities, from the possible actions of a single character in a scene down to the possible words that could have been chosen in a sentence. With the shift to networked media, however, the range of possibilities is what becomes prioritized as the full data set becomes visible: "the narrative is virtual while the database exists materially."5 When the database is foregrounded, narrative becomes more subjective. Narrative, understood as a complete (terminal) story composed of sequential parts, is not furnished explicitly by a database; instead, narratives are composed provisionally by users as they access that data.6 In other words, though a single reading may produce a narrative from the available data, this narrative is not definitive. Multiple, even infinite, narratives of equal priority can be formed from the same database, which is, in essence, a broad set of interchangeable narrative components. These narrative "parts," which in a syntagm are arranged into a prioritized sequence, are deprioritized and disassociated when the paradigm from which they were elevated becomes visible. Such paradigmatic logic is dominant online. Fan cultures rewrite traditional narratives, changing romantic pairings until all combinations are explicit. DJs create remixes, sometimes combining whole albums — such as The Grey Album, which interpolates Jay-Z and the Beatles — or source material that is almost unidentifiable, even beside the point — like the work of Girl Talk. Memes allow users to participate in online discourse using not written language but hyper-specific images which have been radically disassociated from their original contexts. According to Baudrillard, we live in a world with "more and more information and less and less meaning,"7 which Manovich might rephrase as a world where more visible data produces less coherent and durable narratives. The internet naturally prefers paradigms because the internet is fundamentally constructed from databases, which are utilized by users through algorithms. Online media — which includes all networked media (text, audio/visual, personal and public communication, user generated content, advertisements, etc.) — manifests as a database of interchangeable fragments foregrounding a heterogeneous but singular texture, which we will refer to as the mono-media texture. From this paradigmatic texture, provisional syntagms are assembled and dissolved subjectively, at the level of the individual user. Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan stresses the difficulty of reconciling "narrativity with interactivity," but as we see online, interactivity becomes narrativity: how we move across the mono-media texture produces the narrative we see.8 Manovich's analysis stops short of the web 2.0 phenomenon of widespread social media, but the fundamental dynamic shift he describes continues to illustrate the nature of new networked media even as that media becomes personal.9Social media brings Manovich's account of the shift from narrative logic to database logic to bear on the construction of the self, asking users to create not narrative representations of the self, but databases which develop, across multiple platforms, a paradigm of the self. This global shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic necessarily troubles the notion of a concrete self and the idea of a life story, as both of these constructs rely on a concrete set of signs (a chronological one in the case of the life story), not an interchangeable matrix of modular components with no clear boundaries. In an autobiography, an author representing their life draws on the data set of their experience and renders, from that data set, a narrative expression of finite words and pages. This autobiography, or syntagm, does not contain the entirety of the available data set, but it is the definitive expression of that life, as it is the only (or one of a few) public version(s) of it. This autobiography takes priority over the author's life because the author's life does not exist explicitly as visible data, whereas the text of the autobiography does. This is the nature of the novel as well, including the autofictive breed: it is a syntagm built on syntagms, from sentences to paragraphs to narratives. Each novel is the single definitive expression of a range of possible inclusions. If the autobiography represents the syntagmatic mode of self-construction, social media represents its opposite. Users' self-representations are scattered across the web, subject to constant alteration and addition, a collection of moments, tweets, comments, and selfies which remains temporally unfixed in the internet's "amplified present."10

Social media, metonymically represented by the selfie, is often characterized by its surface and its disposability. The selfie is not a narrative device, but what Paul Virilio describes as one in a series of constant arrivals without the "journey" of narrative.11 The selfie encourages users to forgo analysis in favor of the next arrival (another tweet, another update, another selfie). As stated, these fragments exist in the amplified present which undermines clear sequentiality, allowing multiple, perhaps infinite narratives to be expressed from one user's social media sphere. In the era of social media, the syntagm has become mutable as massive patterns of information — paradigms — take the foreground. Social media encourages users to represent themselves as data: lists of friends, favorite movies, preferred products. Across multiple platforms, one user may have a vast cumulative database of personal information. Users don't present themselves online in any overarching narrative fashion, rather they present as a range of modular components which form a story that takes shape only as other users traverse that data. This claim runs counter to existing scholarship including that of Brenda Mandel, who posits that identity formation online is narrative, though "informal."12 My claim suggests that what Mandel calls informal narrative, or subconscious narrative building which manifests in social online spaces,13 does not adequately describe the aggregate data which results from a user's daily interactions with the internet. Though a user may have subconscious or conscious narrative intentions, the recursive, interminable, and interactive nature of self-construction online turns those informal narrative impulses into a slurry of information, a paradigm in which all elements are simultaneously visible. Narrative is not local to the self as database but rather provisionally generated as an end-user interacts with that database online. Ultimately, these narratives are not definitive expressions but what Manovich would call "trajectories through a database,"14 which might be contradicted or dissolved at any time. This supports Ryan's theory that narratives are "cognitively rather than verbally based,"15 in that these provisional narratives exist in the mind of the end-user and not the social media itself. They are unseen and the database is seen. In short, because identity is now constructed paradigmatically, the notion of communicating a definitive life story has been radically compromised. But what stories are New Autofiction novels telling if not life stories? Are they telling stories at all?

If social media prioritizes the self as database over narrative, then New Autofiction replicates this effect aesthetically. What we see in texts such as literally show me a healthy person is not an attempt to tell a story but to generate a kind of database aesthetic within the form of the novel. Functionally, the novel still exists as a syntagm. It is a single, inflexible, finite expression of signs. By adopting stylistic aspects of social media, New Autofiction texts camouflage their narrative components and simulate the experience of moving between narratively disassociated nodes in a database. We will explore these authorial strategies (both on and offline) through more granular engagement with a specific and unusual work of New Autofiction: the previously mentioned LIVEBLOG by Megan Boyle. LIVEBLOG is unusual because it began as a personal blog on Tumblr in 2013 before being published in 2018 as a novel by Tyrant Press. Though a blog is more linear, chronological, and traditional than other genres of social media, it is still networked, meaning that it is attached to the rest of Megan Boyle's social media data set, meaning that it is paradigmatic. When Tyrant Press published LIVEBLOG in print, even though very little of its content changed, it shifted backwards across Manovich's threshold. In the medium of the novel, Boyle's text is removed from the network. It becomes a single, inflexible expression and the paradigm that produced it fades into the background. In short, because Boyle's text is almost exactly the same across two mediums (minor changes to names have been enacted along with some redactions and edits) it provides a control for critical analysis.16 Though autofiction clearly predates social media (the former was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977), the impulses that drive contemporary works of autofiction are so nearly identical to the impulses of the internet's mono-media texture that a text can exist in both media without actually changing.17 LIVEBLOG can help us examine the process of moving the online self onto the page, a move less literally (and perhaps less consciously) undertaken by many autofiction authors.

II. New Autofiction History and Style

First a working definition for autofiction should be discussed as the term has come to apply to a spectrum of works over time. Marjorie Worthington helpfully lays out a history of usage in the introduction to her 2018 book, The Story of "Me." When Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977, he defined autofiction as something very similar to the contemporary understanding of memoir, where memory and perspective might skew or reorder events, though the events themselves are basically true.18 Doubrovsky's use of the term was intended to emphasize the impossible nature of true autobiography, the inherent disconnect between the referential text and the life to which it refers (what is necessarily lost from the substance of life as it is reduced into the authorial expression of the syntagm). Worthington, however, prefers Gérard Genette's definition, which defines autofiction as "more fictional than not," citing The Divine Comedy as an autofictive ur-text. Genette's definition of autofiction best describes a particular breed of postwar American metafiction by authors such as John Barth (The Seven Voyages of Somebody the Sailor) and Philip Roth (Operation Shylock). The two main versions of autofiction coming into the new millennium could be grouped as follows: a French poststructuralist memoir that was essentially referential, and an American metafiction that was essentially non-referential. Worthington helpfully traces this literary pedigree but stops short of broader, non-literary cultural influences. Dan N. Sinykin categorizes autofiction as one of the two primary literary genres enabled by the conglomeration of the major publishing houses in the 1960s.19 Sinykin's study on the profitability of autofiction no doubt provides a plausible reason for autofiction's ubiquity at the turn of the millennium, but its subsequent mutation (and indeed the mutation of the publishing industry as a whole) has been the result of larger, internet-driven self-presentation trends. What I refer to as New Autofiction is not exactly memoir, though it does err closer to referentiality than postmodern invention while simultaneously deprioritizing traditional narrative almost entirely. Though New Autofiction is published by large publishing houses, it is also being published in volume by small and independent publishers.20 These authors' novels do not draw attention to fictional artifice by juxtaposing the author's name with clearly fictional situations (as Barth, Roth, and Vonnegut do), but neither are their projects in the same spirit as the French poststructuralist autobiography, which still aimed to establish a self through story, even if this story was acknowledged to be relative or constructed.21 This new, apparently earnest strain of autofiction is a distinct project linked to the internet and dependent upon the assumptions and aims of social media.

In the beginning, many of the movement's proponents (and detractors) referred to it as alt lit. For the purposes of this article, we can think of alt lit as the first phase of New Autofiction. As Frank Guan describes in his n+1 article, "Nobody's Protest Novel," the alt lit movement galvanized around Tao Lin both on and offline in the late 2000s. Lin published print books such as Eeeee Eee Eeee, Bed, and his breakout novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, but he also maintained an aggressive online presence through his blog. Lin met Megan Boyle through his online community and launched her literary career (and others') through his press, Muumuu House.22 Tao Lin's work both as writer and publisher marks the shift in autofiction to the new mode discussed here, which adopts not only linguistic and aesthetic elements from the internet, but its assumptions and goals as well. Frank Guan compares Lin's relationship to the internet in Taipei with DeLillo's relationship to television in White Noise. But while DeLillo presents television and advertising as a way of ameliorating the fear of death, Lin's commentary on the internet is less of a critique and more an inhabitation of a new "totalizing and amoral" medium.23 Lin's challenge, as Guan describes it, is "to successfully assimilate to literary art the mutant sensibility of a new mass medium."24 And while Lin crossed an important threshold, newer authors have developed more ambitious methodologies for assimilating the "mutant sensibility" of the web's infinite mono-media texture into the finite pages of the novel.

To begin to more concretely consider what differentiates New Autofiction from its antecedents, we return to the genre's definitive work, LIVEBLOG by Tao Lin's ex-wife and acolyte Megan Boyle. On the surface, the objective of New Autofiction is extremely direct, and Boyle, in typical style, begins her text with the following apparently straightforward mission statement:

Starting today, March 17, 2013, i will be liveblogging everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability... as time has been passing, i have been feeling an equally uncontrollable sensation of my life not belonging to me or something. like it's just an event i don't seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake.25

Boyle's self-stated project is to write down everything she does. Her text will be one defined by what Ryan calls "relative simultaneity," meaning that she is reporting on the events of her life as they occur, like an overclocked diary.26 Another way of putting this is that she is creating a database of everything that happens in her life, everything she thinks, and she is doing it mechanically, in the manner of an algorithm, which Manovich describes as "a sequence of simple operations that a computer can execute to accomplish a given task."27 She is not telling her life story like Doubrovsky, or guiding us through a fictional world as an author-as-character, she is writing down everything she experiences and feels in order to build a database. Traditional autobiography, as stated, creates a dominant narrative by emphasizing certain events from the data set of the author's life. Boyle's goal is to show us the whole data set. We see her consider how she might organize this project: "[I] made a text document of how i'd organize the days of liveblog in groups of four" (184), but she ends up simply noting the date at the top of a page before a series of timestamps marking discrete thoughts and events, such as "7:33am: ate 1 mg Xanax," or "1:13am: dad seems to be chuckling in his sleep," or "6:53pm: I'm stalling shit. Why do I stall like this. Pay attention to your stalling Boyle" (216, 207, 106). Many of Boyle's entries are much longer than these, occasionally extending for multiple pages. Even when not actively deploying timestamps, other New Autofiction follows a similar methodology but to a less acute degree: public self-construction through a presentation of self as database. Many authors trim Boyle's unbridled inclusivity by erecting certain parameters, such as the conversations of Outline or the family vacation cycle of Leave Society.28 Within these selective parameters, however, the aesthetics of total transparency remain intact.

The presentation of the self as database in the offline medium of the novel requires the New Autofiction author to fulfill a few stylistic functions, beginning with the all-important feature of onomastic linking. Dan N. Sinykin describes the broader genre of autofiction as one featuring "protagonists whose characteristics and situations so closely resemble those of the author—often down to their name—that such novels invite the reader to mistake fiction for real life."29 Indeed, this naming, this onomastic linking, is the first and most fundamental similarity between social media and New Autofiction. Onomastic linking, in its traditional usage, is simply the linking of an author to a character via a shared name meant to facilitate the understanding that the author and the character are the same entity. This linkage, as Worthington claims with regard to autofiction, is both "fictional and referential,"30 and this remains true of onomastic linking in the era of social media. However, now we do not simply associate an author and a character but rather an author and an array of fragments constituting a paradigm. Consider Kendall Jenner, who is onomastically linked not to just one character in a television program but a proliferation of official and unofficial accounts, images, tweets, videos, etc., all of which are identifiable as belonging to the Kendall Jenner paradigm through either her image (the selfie) or her name (the onomastic link). This amalgamation of media is Kendall Jenner's self, not as character but as data set, which, through her name, represents Kendall Jenner even as this set ranges outside of her direct control. In terms of a social media account, everything under the umbrella of the account is linked. This is the case, as well, in LIVEBLOG. Boyle's text operates like an account in that everything that is written is assumed to be linked to Boyle even when it isn't explicitly linked. At many points, Boyle even drops the first person pronoun from sentences because of its redundancy: "10:34PM: halved one of dad's slow-cooked melons and lost interest a few bites in" (177). Clearly, Boyle is the one eating slow-cooked melons here, but, to avoid starting every sentence in her novel with "I," she drops the pronoun and simply begins the sentence with the verb. In social media and in the New Autofiction novel, the author is always the subject; the subject of the selfie is always the self. The name of the author is the name of the database and so the subject of any value in the database is always/already the author, even if another secondary subject is present as well. The content of Boyle's blog and the novel that followed it are so suffused with Megan Boyle as to render the "I" functionally purposeless. Boyle is the explicit paradigm and nothing in her blog or her novel exists outside this paradigm, and so there is no need for a sign to represent her. Such is the logic of onomastic linking, which, in New Autofiction and the social media that has influenced it, links not just author and character but author and any value in the database. In Megan's text, unless stated otherwise, it is Megan who is acting and thinking. Of course, there are non-onomastically linked accounts on social media, where authorship is secondary or obscured, such as Twitter accounts like @horse_Ebooks or @Helen_Keller. But these accounts are in the minority, with one study finding only 6% of Twitter's users are fully anonymous and 20% partially anonymous (meaning an account contains only a first or last name).31 Indeed, if social media's aesthetic has any precursor in media beyond reality television, it's in the advertisement. In a commercial, the product must be mentioned by name because the purchase of the product is impossible if the product is not onomastically linked.

In New Autofiction, when the character-self is onomastically (except in certain cases such as Taipei, where the linkage is paratextual) linked to the author, it produces a tension as the reader negotiates the persistent awareness that the author and the author-as-character are different entitles.32 This tension, however, is not stressed as in some earlier autofiction, but rather eased through a continual, self-conscious plausibility. We are encouraged to forget that the author and the author-as-character are not the same. Nothing in LIVEBLOG or the other new works of autofiction mentioned is obviously fictional. Boyle is never whisked away to the palace of Sinbad the Sailor. She doesn't imagine herself in an alternate timeline where Axis powers won World War 2. Everything in LIVEBLOG may not be "true," but everything is plausible, a characteristic which minimizes irony and metafictive anxiety while allowing for the self-evident aesthetic of data. Still, any art form derived from the internet (and containing the word "fiction") cannot be taken completely literally. Later in Boyle's disclaimer she says: "THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING," which is a funny thing to read at the beginning of a 700-page novel (5). Of course this note acknowledges the audience even as it half-heartedly diffuses its expectations. Though Boyle calls her project "A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP [HER] FEEL LIKE IMPROVING [HERSELF]," it is obviously public (5). Not only is it obviously public due to its existence as a novel (and blog) but it also signals Boyle's consciousness of her readers by anticipating how interested they might be in what she's doing. As David Foster Wallace noticed about reality television personalities, these autofiction authors are only "seeming[ly] unwatched," and this public element is crucial to the project of self-construction in the age of the internet.33 So, even as New Autofiction often presents itself as an act of extreme personal divestment, it's also a performance, which requires the deployment of certain techniques to appear authentic.

Onomastic linking is simple enough, and many autobiographers have turned their lives into stories in the past by featuring protagonists bearing their names. What is so different between a character in a narrative and the proliferated self-as-data that Megan Boyle is constructing in LIVEBLOG? The simple answer is that the difference lies in the position where the narrative is constructed. In traditional autobiography and even earlier autofiction, the author constructs a narrative which dominates the data from which it is drawn, becoming the definitive narrative of that data, that life. However, when the data is brought into the foreground and presented not as a narrative, but as a database, as it is in social media, it's not the author but other users who create provisional narratives based on their trajectories through the database. Social media is modular and atemporal. It can be broken down to component parts, such as tweets, posts, links, memes, and — perhaps the most granular aspect of a user's social media paradigm — selfies. A selfie is a single onomastically linked fragment representing only a moment.34 To achieve the aesthetic of the selfie, Boyle and other New Autofiction authors have to construct their novels in ways that appear non-narrative; they have to mimic non-narrative fragmentation in the linear medium of the novel. Geert Lovink sees the selfie as "an impulse to locate and protect an authentic looking self through self-portrayal," which, as we have seen, is more or less the stated mission of LIVEBLOG and the occasionally less explicit goal of all New Autofiction.35 For a generation raised on the internet, native to the "amplified present," the self is drawn and redrawn, edited endlessly, in a series of arrivals without journeys.36 The self of the selfie is provisional, momentary, "a perfect loop in the transitory moment of now."37 Similar to the selfie, the tweetlike prose of literally show me a healthy person and the timestamps of LIVEBLOG indicate associations with particular moments — snapshots, instances, fragments — which are bounded only by the name governing the profile they are presented on. We might also notice Lovink's use of the phrase "authentic looking," which speaks to an acknowledged distance between the user and the image: "the selfie is not a tool to know thyself, but instead to control one's self."38 Indeed, programs like Photoshop or Facetune — "a photo editing app which allows you to smooth cellulite, shrink waistlines, whiten sclera, and disappear acne with little technical skill" — allow users control over their selfies beyond even lighting or posing.39 This parallel between the selfie and New Autofiction is very instructive with regard to the "fiction" portion of autofiction. These New Autofiction authors are not invested in definitive portrayals of self, such as one finds in memoirs and autobiographies, because these representations are fixed, they end. These authors reflect the new ethos of the user, who expects to be able to edit, change, and remap the self; to curate the data from which other users will draw provisional narratives.

Of course, prose is different than the selfie in that it has the potential to represent thought and the causality central to narrative: "only language can explicate the relations that turn individual events into a story, such as 'x caused y' or 'a did p because she wanted q." 40 These features of language trouble the fragmentation we see in social media. However, the New Autofiction author is not without their own tools, and they deploy stylistic devices in order to mitigate the sequentiality and interiority of prose, to render their sentences, paragraphs, and novels more like an image. Frank Guan refers to this approach as the concrete/literal style, in which "physical objects and activities take almost total precedence over thoughts."41 Guan attributes the development of this style to alt-lit godfather Tao Lin. In Lin, the concrete/literal style — which flattens the self into a series of discrete images and actions, litanies of drug and food consumption, a series of instants — has become the overarching choice of his literary descendants. And if any one author has pursued this style to its logical conclusion, it's Megan Boyle: "10-11:59: ordered coconut oil for mom and me. did other online things. jesus. barely remember. received package from masha containing adderall, vyvanse, fish stickers. one fish had a caption above his head that said 'dando'" (147). Not all New Autofiction is this extremely fragmented throughout, but it typically embraces some degree of fragmentation to generate a database aesthetic. As with causal sequentiality, interiority and reflection are also minimized because they interfere with the constant arrival of the mono-media texture. Boyle's LIVEBLOG includes what might at first register as interiority, but these thoughts rarely accumulate into any greater meaning and exist more as tweet-like fragments: "pictured me buying beer and pickles & pies and thought 'mercy'" (445). This is technically interior, but it's an interiority that reveals nothing. These endless descriptions of instances do not gesture towards a whole but only towards themselves, their own arrivals, a particular moment or situation externalized. In short, and in her own words, Boyle is "typing the specific content of something which seems more interesting as a sum/method of relating its contents than its specific content" (273). Selfies, posts, status updates, and even long-form prose rendered in the concrete/literal style never make an overt claim towards a complete self (and certainly not a coherent life with "meaning"); rather, they provide a catalog of fragments from which a self could be heuristically inferred. The selfie is always a fragment because the whole body cannot be captured in the frame.

As we can see, New Autofiction is a literary genre derived from the mono-media texture of the internet, specifically social media. New Autofiction is successful insofar as it onomastically links an author to an array of non-narrative fragments which are presented with a flat affect in order to deemphasize any causal relationship that might arise from the sequential nature of the novel as whole. David S. Wallace, in his 2018 New Yorker article on Boyle, connects the autofiction revival of alt lit to the internet but stops short of a full explanation, instead posing the question: "Why would anyone want to do this?"42 Another way of phrasing this question is: what impulse drives social media and, by proxy, New Autofiction? As we've begun to see through analysis of the history and style of the genre, the relationship is undeniable. But should we take Boyle at her word, seeing her project as "A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP [HER] FEEL LIKE IMPROVING [HERSELF]" (5)? And is this the impulse of social media? There must be more to the widespread cultural project of assembling a public self — over and over, on multiple platforms, through selfies and blogs and profiles — than self-improvement. Let's take a moment and see if we can address Wallace's question in detail.

III. Why Would Anyone Want to Do This?

Marie-Laure Ryan argues that modern notions of fiction rose with the advent of the printed word, saying, "it is no coincidence that modern science and the modern novel were both born in the century that followed the invention of print."43 As science used text to provide verification and foundation for belief, fiction allowed for make-believe, which could be entertained without the requirement of belief. Anyone who could write had the tools to create their own world and the medium of the novel became the manifestation of this new possibility: a proliferation of worlds which readers could visit without the burden of assuming their reality. To some degree, the printed word provided the why for fiction in the same way that the internet provides the why for autofiction. Let us theorize this relationship more specifically.

First, as I imply with my term "mono-media texture," if the internet is modular — meaning any fragment can be "accessed on its own" — the internet can be considered one text.44 Media (as with LIVEBLOG) can exist on- and offline, but when it's online — digitized and accessible in database form — it becomes part of the texture. Consider the scene in Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone where Hagrid tells Harry he's a wizard. A popular meme takes this quote, "You're a wizard, Harry," and one still frame of the scene and deploys it completely out of its original context. Hagrid's supportive face and his encouraging revelation can be thus accessed from any other spatiotemporal point on the mono-media fabric and is no longer primarily a sequential moment in the story of Harry Potter. Boyle's blog posts, when online, function in the same way if not at the same scale. Any piece of media rendered digitally must be quantified into data and can thus be broken into component parts and rearranged; any text can be copied and pasted, any image reposted. This isn't a function of intertextuality, as when a novel references another, but a function of textual singularity.

Second, the internet is shared; users are not creating a proliferation of singular fictional worlds but rather contributing to a shared mono-media texture. If the internet is a single text being written in relative simultaneity by humanity at large, then it must be based on a common referent-world, the only world which all of humanity has in common: the real one. Of course, through this simulation, the internet produces a second world shared by everyone, the simulated world of the internet, which begins to refer to itself as well, conflating the real with the simulated and generating the pervasive effect our time: an accelerating and near total hyperreality on a completely unprecedented scale.

To determine the why of social media specifically, we must determine in a more granular way how individuals function in the hyperreal and how the hyperreal interacts with self-perception and construction. Fortunately, this process has been gradual and we have access to earlier iterations of hyperreality in the form of reality television. In scripted television, there is not continuity between shows (the world of Mad Men is not the same world as X-Men); they are like novels in this way: discrete from one another, at best intertextual or referential. As Ryan says, they "refer to their own worlds."45 But with reality television the world being referred to, no matter how ridiculously or implausibly, is the real one, generating a [real] world referential to the real world and continuous with itself. This allows reality television to operate as one text, further allowing stars (such as Kendall Jenner, who are onomastically linked to characters in a fictional space referencing reality) to move freely between any [reality] program: their home programs, VH1 top ten countdowns, talk shows, and indeed the mono-media texture of the web. This latitude is afforded in a limited way to entities sharing a fictional world (such as Iron Man appearing in a Spiderman movie via the Marvel universe), but it is afforded completely to onomastically linked characters/people across the [real] world. Kendall Jenner both plays Kendall Jenner and is Kendall Jenner; as such, she can be added to any mediated situation bracketed [real] while also presumably existing as a living human being somewhere. This is an instance of ontological metalepsis, where "ontological levels [become] entangled when an existent belongs to two or more levels at the same time."46 Like pioneers, Real World cast members and Kardashians charted this hyperreality before it fully extended across the mono-media texture of the internet and interpolated the rest of us. Since hyperreality has become quotidian, the techniques of being-in-the-world modeled by these reality television stars have become applicable to everyone. On the internet, a user doesn't need a production team or a major network to author the [real]. Anyone can do it. It's natural, then, that most users, when confronted with this massive and persistent simulated world, which purports to be (and has in many ways become inextricable from) the real one, would add the most important part of their real worlds to it, the part that the simulated world, from their perspective, is most visibly lacking: themselves.

Social media, obviously, allows for the user to do this: to add their simulated selves to the simulated world which hasn't included them by default. This self-representation isn't accomplished by writing an autobiography and adding it to a digital shelf in a digital archive; it's accomplished with the ongoing project of relatively simultaneous updates or commentary which registers the user's thoughts, opinions, or simply online "presence." Though Ryan claims "emplotment requires a retrospective interpretation of the action," she acknowledges, using the analogy of a sportscaster who generates provisional narratives as the game is being played, that a version of emplotment with a vanishingly short retrospection does exist: simultaneous emplotment.47 Simultaneous emplotment leads to provisional narratives which, in the case of a baseball game, are discarded at the end in favor of a single (or a few) dominant narrative(s) of the game. However, when the medium doesn't end, when the scale is so large that no single user can even experience all of it, the provisional narratives do not resolve and instead coagulate into a narrative palimpsest, where no single author controls the dominant narrative but where narratives are instead produced on an individual level as users move through the paradigm. Often a user can entertain multiple conflicting provisional narratives, and these provisional narratives can evaporate just as quickly as they are internalized. One example of this phenomenon is QAnon, where Q acts something like Ryan's theoretical sportscaster, generating provisional narratives in real time based off the news of the day, with no accountability to the past or future. In the case of QAnon, the internet amplifies these provisional narratives and allows them to become massively destructive to individuals accustomed to receiving traditional media narratives (no matter how implausible) instead of endless, contradictory fragments. Just because a narrative is provisional doesn't mean it can't be shared, culturally significant, or even falsifiable. Ryan suggests that emplotting evidences a "residual orality" in the textual medium, and we could say that online there may be a kind of "residual textuality" where we expect or see narratives that have not been assembled even as the internet itself is entirely constructed.48As with most blogs, Boyle's operates on the logic of the simultaneous narrative as well; the crux of her focus, however, is her own life, which she records, as stated, in relative simultaneity, sometimes with a degree of minimal commentary. Many of her entries establish provisional narratives which are abandoned as new fragments accumulate. In LIVEBLOG, like all New Autofiction, Boyle doesn't create a distinct fictional instance but contributes new information to the [real] world. She references other public autofiction writers, such as Mira Gonzales, Sam Pink, and her ex-husband Tao Lin. She fields phone calls from readers in real time in order to make "a noise" to them (216). The blog itself causes drama in her actual relationship with a boyfriend who would rather not be publicly named. She even polls her readers at the end to help discern the future of the project (686). The ghost of the network remains, even in the non-networked medium of the novel, due to an intense intertextuality with the mono-media texture of the internet. Like users of the internet, Boyle outsources this incomplete, fragmented self to the public via networked platforms, and it's this assumption of potential witness and response which generates the simulated self in the mind of a user real or imagined. This requires what Ralph Schroeder refers to as an "abstract audience," a public which may or may not actually witness or respond but which is, hypothetically, always watching.49 Boyle acknowledges this abstract audience on multiple occasions, including when she tells them "THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING." Only through the continued public exposure of these instances does the authentic-seeming self take shape and persist, not in the mind of the individual author-user (which would indicate understanding of the self — a completeness not possible in the selfie) but on the network, among a range of non-localized users, real and implied. Non-local selves overlap their original users and blur, creating Baudrillardian doubles which obscure the original and generate the hyperreal on the level of the self.

This, finally, is the "sum/method" of LIVEBLOG and social media: replacing the real as gently as possible, not with heavy narratives but weightless data points which accumulate indefinitely. It doesn't matter whether or to what degree these points correspond to reality; it matters only that they seem to, or that they maintain an aesthetic of realism.50 LIVEBLOG almost begs its readers to accept it as a sincere representation of reality ("IM SORRY IM SORRY I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO CAN SOMEONE PLEASE JUST HOLD ME FOR A FEW MINUTES"), but we know Boyle is seeming unwatched and this creates an irony of which Boyle herself is most likely aware (243). She is sincere in the mode of a reality television persona, social media users, and other New Autofiction authors, in that her transparency is curated. Adam Kelly, in his treatment of David Foster Wallace's conception of New Sincerity, notes that "sincerity is something like the subject of these stories; anxiety is a good description of their form," and this description, though not rendered by Kelly to describe New Autofiction specifically, accurately describes its essence.51 These are stories about sincerity formed by anxiety about its limits. The goal of what is constructed online — whether an urban legend, a conspiracy theory (such as QAnon), a cross platform brand, or a representation of self — is not to create a distinct fiction or to draw attention to artifice but to eclipse and replace reality. But this function is never completely fulfilled because the real is not replaced, only conflated, and users raised in quotidian hyperreality are able to entertain the possibility of this replacement without accepting it. Still, the aesthetic of realism is the dominant aesthetic impulse of the internet because it allows for minimal friction while conflating itself with the real. To represent something online is to create a plausible representation that all users/viewers recognize as potentially false but that nevertheless merges with the actual — as would the map that changes the territory it charts. This is the logic of the simulacrum, and the driving aesthetic principle behind the emergence of New Autofiction.

IV. The Posture of Epiphany

We have now identified the continuities in approach between New Autofiction and social media, as well as their shared goal of replacing the real (including the self). Now I would like to consider New Autofiction's redundancy as a derivative form. As I've argued, much of this New Autofiction is essentially quarantined web media removed from the mono-media texture and stored in a novel, rendering it intertextual but not continuous with the internet. Indeed, LIVEBLOG is a literal example of this transference, but all New Autofiction exhibits some of the characteristic style and goals of social media. Web-native prose is generally more fragmented and New Autofiction novels are generally more narrative, but is there any significant overarching benefit to presenting this content as a novel instead of a blog or a series of tweets? The subset of autofiction discussed here has faced a certain skepticism from the literary elite, an attitude summarized in The New Yorker as "puerile navel-gazing,"52 or expressed by Vice as infantile narcissism.53 The perceived self-obsession and lack of depth, of course, are familiar criticisms lodged at users of social media. And if we look farther back to the skirmishes between fiction and the web's mass media precursor, television, David Foster Wallace took a pessimistic position on those contemporary novels which simply echoed the impulses of the televisual medium, concerned they were too ironic and self-aware to be differentiated from mass culture, leaving them hollow and partial, perennially secondary. Is this the case with New Autofiction and social media? Is the genre a lesser reflection of the anxieties and problematics of the mono-media texture? Can the New Autofiction novel produce the depth and meaning often associated with the novelistic genre? Is it intended to? Or is it simply another outlet for the impulse of the selfie? What separates Boyle's blog from Boyle's novel? And are there solutions or additional value in the translation from the former to the latter?

Though the content is more or less the same (there are some redactions, edits, etc.), LIVEBLOG's shift from web to novel highlights interesting divergences between the media themselves, some of which we have touched upon briefly in section two during our analysis of New Autofiction's style. First, it's important to note that the same content presented in the form a novel contains much less information (it is only a graft of a portion of Megan Boyle's social media paradigm), and this allows for a dominant narrative to take shape. Online, any narrative in LIVEBLOG is submerged into the database; narratives are provisional and temporary, generated by users based on whichever fragments of Boyle they might catch in their feeds, blurred by links to other non-sequential nodes of the texture, complicated by the new liveblog 2.0.54 The elements of narrative as developed by Aristotle — that which is complete, composed of sequential parts, unified in theme, and universal — is at odds with the framework of the database in all but its universality.55 Lev Manovich, who has guided much of the thinking in this article, says that the database "can support narrative," while immediately adding the caveat that "there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation."56 Of course, the novel, as a medium, must be approached from a single direction, evoking Paul Virilio's journey which fades online as spatial and temporal distances collapse.57 Also, the novel ends, which culminates in a sense of wholeness or completeness no matter what stylistic and aesthetic devices are deployed by the author. With sequentially and wholeness (two features completely alien to the internet), the suggestion of more dominant and less provisional narratives appears in Boyle's novel. The novel highlights (or implies) certain moments that are camouflaged on the web into a singular texture.

When considering what narrative becomes visible in LIVEBLOG's novel even as it emulates its online, paradigmatic version, it's important to note that we don't necessarily see or understand more of Megan Boyle, real or simulated. That function (to control the self through doubling) of the text operates best when the text is plugged in, when we are interacting with the text as users not readers, when other users and assumed users respond and comment on Boyle, when we have access to Boyle's Twitter and supplemental social media profiles and accounts. Without the multiplicity of connections, interactivity, and the broad surface of the network, Boyle's self-representation strategy is actually somewhat obstructed because we have access to less information about her. Even as she adopts the aesthetic of the database, the novel cannot compete with the scale of her actual online self-as-database. In the novel, the fragments of Boyle listed in LIVEBLOG remain as opaque and unelaborated as the blog, but they lose the reflective quality brought by an implied network of users. Still, even though we may not get a broader view of "Megan Boyle" in the novel, we do get a clearer picture of her "sum/method," her technique of constructing a self which both replaces and becomes the real, than we could in the native noise of the mono-media texture. Simply by removing Boyle from the web, the apparatus of her "sum/method" becomes clearer because its perimeter is suddenly defined. This value is emphasized by the book itself, which manifests a physical weight of 707 pages from the "infra-thin"58 surface of the web.

I've argued generally that the novel produces a dominant narrative because the novel is a medium where the syntagm is foregrounded over the database or paradigm, even if that syntagm is designed to emulate the database (in the case of New Autofiction). To conclude, we'll examine one particular element of narrative: the climax. In the case of LIVEBLOG, Boyle's "epiphany" functions as the climax. Social media resists epiphany, which is not a phenomenon native to the mono-media fabric. As stated, social media users use onomastic, plausible self-representations to create malleable hyperreal selves, a process Boyle might call "extreme looking at a computer" (179) These representations are not entirely referential or fictional but a merging of the two using branding strategies and social media infrastructure in an ongoing project of self-replacement, rather than self-discovery or self-understanding or even self-improvement. This process does not require epiphanies and actually flattens moments that could be considered epiphanies into a normalized fabric of "general arrival."59 The pleasure is not in finally understanding (anything) but in altering the self through onomastic, plausible self-constructions which are always left unfixed so as they can be changed or, indeed, constructed by other users. This is not a coherent, pre-packaged narrative of self, a life as presented in autobiographies or antecedent autofiction, but rather a self in endless fragments, some of which contradict and none of which are synthesized by the user/author but are rather outsourced for interpretation to the implied network. "i'm not learning anything from this goddamned liveblog," says Boyle on page 542 before cataloging the meaningless changes that have taken place during her project (she was given two lamps, now uses an e-cigarette, is slightly more depressed but perhaps better overall). This reads as something of an epiphany in the novel, though it draws attention to what has otherwise been the complete lack of epiphany. She has externalized, with apparent sincerity, thousands of instances of herself, but she has not discovered anything, learned anything. She has only replaced the Boyle of those months with something slightly different, more controlled, which she substituted for herself in relative simultaneity. This construction will now forever obscure, blur into, the real experience of those months, and so we can say, even though Boyle hasn't learned anything, she has achieved the goal of social media, the "why," of the new dominant mono-media texture in that she has replaced herself in real time.

Though this first epiphany is something of a non-epiphany, it does return with more weight later in the novel. With the momentum of so much text behind her and the novel drawing to a close, Boyle seems to finally step back and realize not anything permanent and true about herself but something about her relationship with the blog (and her sum/method): "liveblog is overtaking my life in a negative way and is a source of anxiety and counter-productivity. mostly i feel a self-imposed sense of obligation to update and because of that i'm losing interest" (585). This is a seemingly literal extension of Baudrillard's analysis of information increase and its tendency not to produce but to erase meaning: "rather than communicating, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication."60 Boyle is exhausted with LIVEBLOG. She is exhausted with communication. At first, this feels like a very comfortable conclusion to Boyle's project: a lesson about the futility and dissatisfaction inherent to constant social media self-construction, a lesson those who read books are likely to enjoy. But perhaps this lesson only appears in the text as novel. After all, online this is simply an aesthetic deployment of realism, another moment of construction, a selfie. In the novel, Megan seems to say that she must turn away from the screen. And perhaps we can entertain this epiphany in the quarantined space of the novel. But online, in the face of the limitless horizon of the mono-media texture, we understand that there is no turning away from the screen because the screen has become a ubiquitous panorama. The internet is already conflated with the real world such that the boundaries between the two cannot be parsed, as Boyle expertly demonstrates by conflating her empirical self with her online self in such an encyclopedic and granular way. So epiphanies like Boyle's, which are generally present in New Autofiction where (and perhaps because) we expect to find them — near the end, after a climactic moment — may achieve a satisfying and sense of epiphany on the page, even presenting a critique of the mono-media texture which has so deeply informed the text. Still, these epiphanies leave a lingering and unsettling duality in New Autofiction. Though Boyle's epiphany, in the novel, seems like a lucid moment, online it's just one of millions of equalized instances of self-replacement, a momentary posture and flash.

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Joseph R. Worthen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. His previous scholarship has appeared in the 2020 issue of Reception. His current research focuses on the relationship between the internet and contemporary fiction. His website is www.mezacht.com

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Banner Image: Steve Gale on Unsplash

References