It's crazy how things change quickly. As I said before, my thesis focuses on the characters of writers in American novels and my boss told me recently suggested a book by Richard Powers, Galatea intilulé 2.2, in which the narrator is a novelist and is called, O overjoyed metafictional, Richard Powers. I just started, I just read a dozen pages. The novel dates from 1995 and focuses on issues of science, technology, and philosophy, which in itself is timeless, I guess, but it's fascinating to see how the query is marked, influenced by the times. The narrator, invited to spend a year as writer-resident in his old alma mater, finds himself in a gigantic complex of ultra-modern science and unlimited access to this novelty a bit strange
the world web
I quote a few passages for you to see how much faster can age a narrative that was intended at the forefront of the ultra-sophisticated virtual metaphor (not to mention the considerable effort de sonner comme Don DeLillo, mais bon...):
I browsed the world web. I fished it from my node on a building host that served up more megabits a second than I could request. By keying in short electronic adresses, I connected to machines all over the face of the earth. The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it. (p. 7)
The town had been knotted into a loose-weave, global network in my absence. The web seemed to be self-assembling. Endless local investigations linked up with each other like germs of ice crystal merging to fill a glass pane.
The web overwhelmed me. I found it easier to believe that the box in Pakistan I chatted with was being dummied up in the other end of the building. I didn't know how my round-the-world jaunts were being billed, or if they were billed at all. (p. 7-8)
Et une un peu plus longue, savoureuse:
But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.
The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.
Yet I could not log off. My network sessions, all that fall, grew longer and more frequent. I began to think of myself in the third virtual person, as that disembodied world-web adress: rsp@center.visitor.edu. (p. 9)
Entendons-nous, il n'y a rien de wrong in what Powers said, but it's so dated as discourse, so 90s, it was so often heard these arguments, wary and fascinated at the same time, it really gives the impression of having been written another era. And what's funny is that Powers to some extent, had found a good narrative trick to "secure" his text against old age, by telling his narrator, a little wry comment: "Anyone reading this by accident or nostalgia A Hundred Years From Now Will Have to Take My Word for the novelty. "
Dude, Let's Make That Fifteen Years.
At the time Richard Powers wrote that, when we opened the TV, you could see it:
The Age of Innocence.
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