Cyborg Storytelling: Virtual Embodiment in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”

ABSTRACT

Responding to criticism that Jennifer Egan’s 2012 Twitter story “Black Box” was a failed social media experiment, this paper argues for its critical bearing on contemporary cultural and literary concerns, including theories of new humanism, the value of beauty as an ethical dimension of art, and the role of storytelling in the digital age. The story’s dystopic future world refigures technological mediation of the self as a deeply political and ambiguously ethical act. Though lacking in the type of formal play we might expect from a Twitter story, “Black Box” mobilizes traditional storytelling conventions within a non-traditional medium as a means of bringing distracted digital readers into a reflexive relationship with their own modes of technological embodiment. In this way, “Black Box” does more than tell a story about human experience in the digital age; it actively contributes to such experience and serves as a kind of treatise for a new mode of online, cyborg storytelling.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Katy Waldman of Slate memorably described the story as “a delicate literary soufflé that crumbled in on itself,” going on to say that “Egan’s beautifully composed tweets were like foreign travelers who had no idea where they’d turned up.” Lisa Gee articulates similar criticisms in her Independent piece “Black Box, by Jennifer Egan: The Spy Story with 140 Characters.”

2. Though marginalized in a theoretical tradition that has long emphasized hermeneutics and metaphysics, beauty  and aesthetics are receiving renewed attention in the current critical landscape. See for example Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s introduction to “surface reading” in the 2009 special issue of Representations on “The Way We Read Now”: “In the last decade or so, we have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths” (1-2).

3. Though it doesn’t directly say so, “Black Box” presents a continuation of the relationship forecasted in A Visit From the Goon Squad between Lulu and Joe, the grandson of a Samburu warrior who “will go to college at Columbia and study engineering becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement” (Goon Squad 62). In “Black Box,” the narrator (Lulu) periodically reflects on her marriage to a government scientist who, we deduce, is connected somehow to her undercover work.

4. A term from the field of design studies introduced to literary studies in Caroline Levine’s 2017 Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network.

5. This decision is rife with implications about the ways in which story order might be experimented with on Twitter. Consider, for example, if Cole retweeted the story according to their first appearance within the Twitter network rather than in the order that he originally wrote the story. The social network’s formal elements present new orders of logic for conceiving of narrative time and chronology.

6. Arguably the most memorable example of Egan’s experimentation with new media forms comes in A Visit From the Goon Squad’s penultimate section, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” which is formatted as a PowerPoint presentation.

7. In this paper, citations from “Black Box” consist of the page and section numbers (respectively) of the story as it appears in its compiled, republished form in The New Yorker.

8. See Safiya Umoja Noble’s discussion of the matter in Algorithms of Oppression, especially her concluding interview with Kandis, the owner of an African-American hair salon, which considers the “consequences of the lack of identity control” (173) within the business advertising platform Yelp.

9. Lulu worked in Goon Squad as a marketing specialist in the music industry, devising discreet and infiltrative tactics for persuading people to attend concerts. She is an example of what Katherine D. Johnston describes as a “handset employee” “whose invisible labor emulates that of housewives and mothers” (162).

10. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression is again instructive here, as it examines how patriarchal worldviews that have long structured social experience become built into digital algorithms, which have the additionally nefarious feature of appearing neutral and unbiased, leading users to equate racist and misogynist attitudes with objective fact.

11. The story locates a source of relief beyond the Dissociation Technique in reflecting on the fact that the narrator’s work is voluntary, not paid, distinguishing her from a sex worker: “Remind yourself that you aren’t being paid when he climbs out of the water and lumbers toward you. Remind yourself that you aren’t being paid when he leads you behind a boulder and pulls you onto his lap” (85.7).

12. This link tracks with more recent approaches to posthuman theory that conceive of materiality and embodiment as central to virtual experience. See Mark B. N.; Hansen’s Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media and N. Katherine Hayle’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.

13. See also Julia Kristeva’s recent work on new humanism, wherein she proposes a “democracy of proximity” based in a “respect for a vulnerability that cannot be shared” (Hatred and Forgiveness 42, 30).

14. Celebration of these lines alone harken back to the eighteenth-century phenomenon of culling extracts from famous novels and collecting them in small books called “beauties.”

15. Egan’s commitment to ambiguity and the unknown is even more radical when considered next to Twitter’s abuse by political figures like Donald Trump who use the tool’s immediate and short-form style of delivery to spout unformed and uninformed thoughts. “Black Box” encourages a search for higher orders of truth at a contemporary site of truth’s ongoing embattlement.

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Jennifer Gutman

Jennifer Gutman is a joint Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University. Her work explores experiments in contemporary fiction and the anglophone novel, especially at their intersection with digital media.