Not long ago, we used to exist in space and time. Physical presence was a condition of being. In any given place, we were the features and attitudes we showed the world; at any specific moment, we were the things we did and said among our fellow humans. Today instead we are a conjured-up phantom on a solitary screen, a pseudonymous and unharbored e-mail address, a disembodied voice that can be summoned by anyone, day and night, like a spirit at a seance. We have solved Hamlet’s question: We are and are not simultaneously. We have become ghosts.
Fame, by the 35-year-old Daniel Kehlman, is a novel made up of nine ghost stories. In each one, the protagonist’s existence is virtual, and depends on something outside him or herself: a mobile phone, an uncritical audience, a stranger’s imagination, a constantly changing technology. In the first story, a man’s identity is usurped (or replaced) by a cellphone with calls intended for another. In the second, a pretentious writer conceives of a novel without a protagonist, trapped in an illusory world that technology has rendered real. In the third, a fictional character refuses to die, or, as the narrator puts it: “When it comes to death, Rosalie is hard to impress.” Like a Pirandello character, the terminally ill Rosalie exists in her author’s mind, but also outside. Of her own fictional free will, she (the only victorious heroine in Fame) has managed to break through the strictures of literary convention, and will not come to her established end.
“Yes,” confesses the narrator, resigning himself to the loss of his own creation, “it could have made a really good story, a little sentimental, granted, but with humor to counterbalance the melancholy, the brutality offset by a touch of philosophy. I had worked the whole thing out. And now?” Now the doctor who would have helped Rosalie commit suicide disappears. Rosalie is cured. “And while you’re at it,” the author tells her in a fit of literary generosity, “be young again. Start from the beginning again!” Rosalie may do just that.
Kehlman’s remaining characters complete a kind of virtual pageant of forlorn identities: an actor given over to his dramatic self; a woman lost in a desolate place, perhaps Central Asia, whose cellphone is no longer working and who is unable to communicate with the locals; a best-selling writer of self-help books who is incapable of helping himself; an electronic wizard who communicates in a fictional cyber-language (“Not a spark about how lordoftheflakes, icu_lop, rubendaddy, and pray4us had responded to my postings”) but knows himself unworthy of a fictional story; a communications expert who believes in wishful thinking; a couple dropped in the middle of an African war zone with their now useless electronic devices.
Kehlman relentlessly weaves his stories in and out of one another, so that his characters appear and reappear as on a minuscule stage; it’s as if their vaunted world of limitless communication were in fact a tiny patch of criss-crossing paths and destinies, of surface only. “Mind you,” reflects one of them at the end of the book, “if this was a story, something would happen and things would become hard, and if they didn’t become hard, then it wasn’t a story.” Things don’t become “hard” in Fame, and therefore there isn’t a story here in the traditional sense. What happens to each of the characters is a consequence of the world he or she believes in, that virtual realm of make-belief bereft of narrative drama. Beneath the surface, however, run the disturbing questions Kehlman asks regarding the nature of communication and the representation of reality. Fame is not reality; it is the image we value in what counts for us in reality, the made-up face we show the world.
In this sense, the real subject of Kehlman’s book is language: its fiery possibilities of granting us a name, its humiliating shortcomings in telling who we are, its ignominious deceits and false promises, its ingenious devices to help us translate the experience of ourselves into the experience of another. In Kehlman’s hands, language sometimes grows into baroque excrescences and convolutions, sometimes shrinks down to cryptic text messages, as if trying through the very large and the very small to cover all possibilities for expressing our everyday world. Carol Brown Janeway’s translation is an extraordinary feat: She has been able to render, with humor and verisimilitude, and without the slightest feeling of artificiality, the various styles and vocabularies that Kehlman so deftly uses.
In his best-selling novel, Measuring the World, Kehlman used his verbal skills to follow his 19th-century characters in a tangible, painfully physical exploration of our planet; in Fame, he has turned his eyes on the unwitting explorers themselves, survivors in the 21st century, oblivious of their own identities and overconfident in their devices. By and large, Kehlman seems to say, we have relinquished reflective thought, memory, perspicacity and our sense of self to these gadgets that speak to us from nowhere or anywhere, take pictures of things that our eye doesn’t bother to see, display dwarfish images for us to peruse with Lilliputian keenness, pretend to link us with countless supposed objects of desire, while they incessantly repeat, like the genie in the bottle: “Ask me anything, and trust me, trust me, trust me.”
“I find it eerie,” says one character about her recently acquired cellphone. “It makes everything unreal.” That obvious unreality has become what most of us take for real. It has come to stand, not as an instrument to link us to the world, but as the world itself, that which we take to be the world’s true image and sound.
Alberto Manguel’s A Reader on Reading is published by Yale
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