“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it”: Autofiction at the Intersection of Self, Sociality, and Mediation

Abstract

“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it”Autofiction at the Intersection of Self, Sociality, and Mediation Anna Poletti (bio) Like many other novels that work with lived experience, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This (2021) raises questions about the auto as much as it relies on the fiction of stable selfhood. What, exactly, does it mean to have an auto now? What use is the auto? (Or as Sheila Heti put it in her auto-fiction, How Should a Person Be?) In the aftermath of postmodern literary fiction’s often ironized engagement with these questions, and the rise of memoir as an influential literary genre, recent autofiction reinvigorates the novel as a genre for charting the fraught intersection of interiority and sociality. While novels can deal with almost any topic, they are still one of our most reliable means of reflecting on the perennial call and complex challenges of being with others. As Judith Butler argues in Giving an Account of Oneself (2003) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2010), the knot many of us face in sociality is not a narcissistic attachment to the ego, but that humans are social animals who need to rely on knowledge of the other to organize collective living. A degree of consistent selfhood grounds sociality, politics, and ethics. In light of this, how do we develop, maintain, and communicate a sense of who we are? What can we take as reliable knowledge of others? And what roles can individuality play, and what values can we assign it, in the context of the social? These questions permeate many contemporary political and social events: from young people who cannot vote asserting their right to influence climate policy, to the position of the immunocompromised during the pandemic, to the fate of people in borderlands and detention centers seeking refuge. Identity labels such as youth, medically vulnerable, and refugee may appear to offer the stability people need to make claims on the community, but they also come with the risk of subsuming the individual into a category that misrecognizes who they are in ways that harm their dignity. No One Is Talking about This is presented in two distinct sections that explore this tension from a feminist angle. Moreover, it explores the terrain between individuality and collectivity as an explicitly mediated one. The novel examines sociality as entangled with mediation. The first part of the narrative [End Page 23] enacts and depicts the internet as a diffractive technology. The unnamed protagonist is something of an internet celebrity—living deep in “the portal”—engulfed in the fast tempo of its fluidity, where “attention is holy.” Presented to the reader in fragments, this is a chaotic, socially and affectively rich life in which the protagonist is constantly brought (too?) close to others, taking up their preoccupations as her own, merging her desires and fears with others’: “Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone.” The second section of the novel follows the protagonist into an experience that seems wholly resistant to the dynamic flow of mediation which characterizes the first section. It begins innocently enough: the protagonist will become an aunt. However, her sister’s child is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder (Proteus syndrome) in utero, a life-threatening condition for mother and child. Traveling to Ohio to be with her sister, the protagonist agonizes over the threat to her sister’s life and struggles with her sister’s transition from unique individual to “pregnant woman” in a conservative healthcare regime. Realizing that none of the healthcare professionals will even mention termination as an option while outlining the risks to her sister’s life, the protagonist is overcome with concern: What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive? Such...