FICTION: Black Box, By Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 57pp. Ebook only, £1.99
ON MAY 24TH the New Yorker began serialising Black Box, a new novella by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan. As serialisation has been passé since Dickens passed away, it might seem a bit odd to revive it now. Well, the big deal was less the fact of serialisation itself than that the delivery method was Twitter. The text was written as a series of tweets, and for 10 evenings instalments of these were posted. It was a move that in one way united science and fiction as part of the same statement, though in another it was a kind of back-to-the-future event, symptomatic of our current state of not knowing where we are or how best we can make a contribution, much less a difference.
Technophiles and Twitterati were delighted, and the buzz was terrific.
There is already a considerable amount of Twitterature out there, in cyberspace and in print – anyone for The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less? An Institute of Comparative Twitterature exists, a founder of which, Jean-Yves Fréchette, has written a manifesto, Tweet Rebelle.
But this departure put such activities on Broadway, as it were. And on the basis of formatting as a PowerPoint presentation one 50-page chapter of her recent, highly regarded A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan might well appear to be an author likely to take to Twittering next. She even suggests a kind of kinship between the two works by making the protagonist of Black Box a character from its predecessor.
Among readers, though, the response has been mixed. Whatever about its initial delivery method, the novella itself is not a gimmick; far from it. But doubts remain as to whether it’s just one more example of that contemporary condition in which form is an overdetermining element in how we are encouraged (or as conspiracy theorists might say, permitted) to experience the world, a condition that tells us that everything has already been prepackaged, prescripted, or both.
Twitter is a noteworthy contributor to this condition. For all its populist appeal, the system attenuates, as much as it facilitates, the shout in the street. Now that the 10-day wonder that was the initial release of Black Box has evaporated and it is possible to read the thing, it emerges that Egan herself is alive to some of the issues arising from what she has undertaken.
The story is simplicity itself. A “citizen agent”, on assignment in the south of France for some nameless American state entity, carries out her mission, such as it is, regardless of cost to herself. In doing so – and in not getting paid for it, a point emphasised a couple of times – she has identified herself with “the new heroism”, a collective ethos dedicated to saving the US from external threat (as opposed to trying to save the US from itself – there’s a telling tweet about the US’s respect for human rights, followed immediately by another one stating: “When someone threatens our human rights, however, a wider leeway becomes necessary”).
The primary instance of the sacrificial service that the narrator gladly embraces is her acceptance that her body is no longer quite her own. Not only is she wounded in her mission’s culminating gunfire, but, in the role of a “beauty”, she prostitutes herself, however reluctantly, with the “designated mate” on whom she’s spying, an experience she survives by an out-of-body technique of dissociation acquired during training.
In addition, she has been equipped for her mission by various electronic prostheses that lend a cyborg dimension to her identity: a camera in her eye area, a recording device in her ear, a “data surge” capacity that has a point of entry between her toes and that, when used to download what the bad guy has on his smartphone (called “handset” here), is a form of ravishment. “Your physical person is our Black Box; without it we have no record of what has happened on your mission,” one tweet reads. The patriotic citizen can do no other than let herself be occupied and altered by the machine, pretending – or needing to pretend, since her husband is “a national security hero” – that she loves it and that it loves her too.
But Black Box is not as simple as its story. The complicity and intimacy between agent and instrument that make the mission viable, and that give the story its incidents and trajectory, are also very much a decisive aspect of the novella’s format. The constrictions of tweeting are reproduced in the protagonist’s limited scope for action, and these limitations are imposed not only by the focus she must bring to bear on her task but also by her training, her sense of patriotic dedication and the abject state in which she finds herself when these conditioning factors fail her.
In addition, Black Box is not only a spy caper of sorts; it’s more a series of glimpses at the agent’s awareness of her mentality, her interpretation of others’ body language and other observations she makes about the interstices between appearances and what they signify. These glimpses are the substance of the tweets, although every so often her record of her awareness is interrupted by the superior awareness of those who command her, those surveillance merchants on whose screens she is always a dot. The tweets’ minimalism is an intriguing means of introducing questions about choice and that great American watchword, freedom. It is as though, in Black Box, we are again in the realm of the last frontier pioneered by such princes of paranoid fiction as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
One other intriguing aspect of this novelty publication is that, in its initial iteration, it might have appeared to be another assault on the book. But of course, in order to be fully absorbsed, Black Box has to be retrieved from its original ephemerality, as the New Yorker itself always intended, it seems; the magazine printed the full text before its Twitterisation (what a word!) was complete. Rather than replace the book, it validates the venerable delivery system, just as the reappearance of Dickens’s serials as books helped them outlast the transience of the moment and facilitated a fuller appreciation of their overwrought citizens and the forces that drove them. Though sounding a note of plus ça change should not mean that the technologies of containment that Black Box mimics and exposes are not worth attending to.
George O’Brien is emeritus professor of English literature at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His latest book is The Irish Novel 1960-2010
