Fragments of an Infinite Memory (Maël Renouard, 2016, transl. 2021)

Recent years has seen the advent of a particular book, that we might call “the tech memoir”. These range from being somewhat alarmist (How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell), nerdy (Bitwise by David Auerbach) and critical of corporations (Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner). Mael Renouard contributed to the genre in 2016 in French, an effort that last year was translated into English. 

What separates Renouard from most other tech memoirs is that he comes to these issues from a more literary viewpoint, as he spends his days translating and writing novels (as well as teaching philosophy). I enjoyed his circuitous reminiscences of the intersections of his literary life and his internet use.

Reading the book made me realise that the web has (incredibly enough) been part of mainstream life for going on 25 years now and it’s no longer just computer world insiders who write about it anymore. The literary sensibility that Renouard uses gives rehashed arguments a new spin. Like this little aphorism:

”Who hasn’t gone on the internet looking for past loves and friends not seen for years? Time lost in search of lost time.”

He also is no stranger to coining neologisms, like “Googlemancy”, a kind of supernatural divination with the aid of the today ubiquitous Internet search engine Google. He notices how his Internet use changes his relationship to memory, and how he discovers in himself a new “impulse to share” which he didn’t have before the advent of the share button.

The Internet and its accompanying technologies (cellphones, laptop computers) have changed the playing field for literature, argues Renouard. He notes that a writer like Patrick Modiano “has become impossible since the coming of the the Internet”. Technological change also affects our relationship to images, text messages, paper books, scrolls, libraries. Renouard experiences new situations like hard drive failures (“as I am writing this book my computer broke down”) and how they play into the literary process.

The essays are peppered with lots of references to philosophy (a selection: Derrida Deleuze Bergson Hegel Badiou Malebranche Leibniz Debord Duns Scotus Nietzsche) as well as a fair share of Greek mythology. Particularly notable is a chapter of inspired imaginary meetings of figures from antiquity which conjured up possible internet logs of Augustus Caesar and others (it sounds hokey, but it is well written). A related ploy is the recurring “psychopathology of digital life”, a play on Freud‘s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Other thinkers he plays with are Ray Kurzweil, Chateaubriand and Proust. Just try this little madeleine on for size:

The recollection machine has strange effects. I don’t know why each time I listen to excerpts from Einstein on the Beach on YouTube, and in particular “Knee Play No. 2,” I remember an evening I spent with my father at the Comédie Française in November 1996—I had never heard Philip Glass and Bob Wilson’s opera until I saw it staged in Paris in January 2014. Similarly, I ask myself why it is that whenever I listen to the instrumental version of “Last Dance in Copacabana” by Superfunk, I am beset by images of my first trip to Greece, in 2000—maybe I heard it in a bar at the time without paying it any attention, or maybe it was part of the distant sounds echoing from the island’s only nightclub, now shut down. But I do know that I can retrieve voluntarily, with infallible efficacy, these involuntary associations that have the strength and charm of Proustian recollections.

page 23

Renouard gets into a lot of stuff in this book, and I’ve only mentioned a few of them. Most of it is in the interesting category of things you’ve experienced yourself, but haven’t yet really recognized the noteworthiness of. An example of this is his excursus on the phenomenon of autocorrect when texting. Pretty brilliant.

Summing up, I’ll leave you with my favorite passage of the book. This is where Renouard describes meeting an old man who has become addicted to the attention of Internet platforms. He had previously spent ten years “deciphering the manuscripts of Husserl”, and now he is haggard-looking on Boulevard Saint-Michel constantly checking for notifications and “likes”. It’s written as a 19th century short story, but it very much describes our current situation. It ends thusly:

My presence no longer interested him very much. I watched him take the photograph and post it. He worked at incredible speed. The first likes appeared at once; his eyes lit up. For an instant, he ceased to be the lost man whose silhouette had startled me on the boulevard Saint-Michel. I pretended to have an appointment and got up to leave; he silently bade me goodbye with a wave of his hand.

page 114

Under the Net (Iris Murdoch, 1954)

“… then I had more time for work, or rather for the sort of dreamy unlucrative reflection which is what I enjoy more than anything in the world.”

I have been meaning to get to Iris Murdoch for a long time. Why? Because I was curious about what people meant when they called her books “philosophical fiction”. I’m not sure I am particularly more informed on that point after having read Under the Net, but then again I suspect this might not have been the best example of Murdoch’s style. Anyway, it is her debut novel, and it concerns a man in his thirties who loafs around London working as a translator and thinking about girls and where to sleep for the night.

Murdoch was 35 when this was published, and it feels very much like a first book – it’s a lightly comic, picaresque sort of novel in which the protagonist finds himself in complications with locked doors and stolen dogs. It made me realise that this sort of fare must have been common in the mid-50’s, and it was popular, too! It didn’t do much for me nearly 70 years on… but it was somewhat interesting as an example of the zeitgeist of 1950s London.

Upon starting the book, Murdoch had been to France, and as she was partial to philosophy, she ingested a fair share of Sartre. This influence is echoed in her main character who translates from French and call parts of London “contingent”. My thoughts also lingered on the topic of gender, or more specifically the book made me think of instances of where a female writer makes the protagonist male or vice versa (as Murdoch does in this one). I couldn’t recall a single book I’d read where that was the case. Curious. I remember my father commenting on a book he read when I was a child that he was impressed that the female writer could express the male mind so well. I can’t recall the name of that writer, though. I later learned that Murdoch typically wrote male characters. I don’t know if that carries any real significance, but it was interesting nonetheless. South African J.M. Coetzee wrote the book Elizabeth Costello with a protagonist of the opposite sex. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of that practice historically (of course women wrote as men for centuries because of oppression, but I’m thinking about more recent times).

The title Under the Net is meant to refer to the Net of language, which we all are trapped in. Somewhat wittgensteinian… I found the philosophical content in this rather poor, but it was also encouraging to read about people who had philosophical thoughts. That, I suppose, must count as a kind of philosophical writing? The philosophical parts are clearly lifted from Sartre’s la Nausée, and most of it is exposed in a series of conversations with Jake’s friends who are philosophy teachers. I was curious if there would be any novel ideas on linguistic determinism, seeing as how I once wrote an essay on it for my linguistics professor. I didn’t find much about the titular net in the actual book, and will have to continue looking elsewhere, possibly next in S.I Hayakawa‘s Language in Thought and Action.

The book is filled with markers of things that (I assume) were cool in 1950s, like judo, masked Asian theatre, communism, the movie business. Part of the novel is set in Paris, and that whole segment is one big (if you’ll excuse the term) namedropapalooza. I guess it was important to Murdoch to show in writing that she knew the name of each and every street… I must assume her writing abilities improved after this, seeing as how she wrote a total of 26 novels before croaking at age 80. I remember seeing the biopic about her last days (where she is portrayed by Judi Dench) but have no real recollection of its contents.

Summing up, I won’t be returning to Murdoch anytime soon, as I didn’t particularly enjoy her style, at least as showcased in this book. But it wasn’t a waste of time reading such a well-known book. Now I at least know a bit about her writing.

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Notes on the 1954 club
As soon as Kags and Simon announced that the next club was to be themed around the year 1954, I went looking around about what kind of book I would choose. I found I had read some of the most famous ones from that year, like Tolkien, Golding, Sagan. I found a Turkish book, The Time Regulation Institute, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-62) which I figured would be a good choice. I’ve never read a Turkish book before, so I thought it would be fun, and then put it out of my mind for a few months. As April approached, I started reading the book. I got about 100 pages in until I had to give up. It was too boring! Then I found Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi‘s People of the City, but I decided against it. I thought briefly about Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade‘s collection Fazendeiro do Ar, but I don’t really know how to review poetry…so I had to abandon that idea too. In all this confusion I found Iris Murdoch, which struck me as a bit of an unimaginative choice, but I figured it was for the best. So I went with it.

Also considered:
Randall Jarrell – Pictures from an Institution
Max Frisch – I’m not Stiller
George Lammings – Emigrants
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