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They didn’t know that inside my head I had been talking for quite some time. Saying something out loud is different, however. It confers exceptional value on the word spoken. It lends the word weight, gives it life, recognition, as if you’re repaying a debt to it, or celebrating its essence.^[1]

 

Such are the observations made by Amélie Nothomb’s imagined two and a half year old narrator of The Character of Rain whilst contemplating the responsibility that accompanies the decision of which words should be her first spoken aloud. I would not, however, reserve this value solely for words spoken, as written words too are given due recognition as they materialise on a surface. As Nothomb’s narrator acknowledges, this weightiness is enough to give them life and thus potential and value. As shapes, symbols or core components to language, words enable us to reflect upon ourselves, others and life itself.^[2] Through language we are able to tell stories about an infinite amount of things, whether real or imaginary. Life, in this way, is storied. For Roland Barthes, stories are simply there; narratives are so ingrained in everyday life that they become constitutive of life itself. Barthes’ stories are not necessarily fairytales or make believe, they can be accounts of events or histories, wishes or ideas. Stories have the potential to be both mythical and real, the distinction between the two becomes blurred as any account of a past event is necessarily tinged with fiction when told from the vantage point of the present. Stories unfold constantly,  although sometimes barely acknowledged.

 

Furthermore, words can have the powerful effect of doing or performing what they say. The thing described becomes an action done as the letters unfold into a word and eventually a sentence; grounding an ephemeral thought in a form of reality. The stories Barthes describes are instilled within every expression, whether spoken, written or enacted. Everyday speech is saturated with stories that are told as we recollect past occurrences, memories and thoughts and put them into an orderly and coherent narrative within the present in order to manage and make sense of them. The etymology of the verb to narrate exposes language’s more subtle attempts to legitimate the very same narratives it conceives, as it comes from the Latin verb “to know”. Putting together a narrative, in this way, implies forming knowledge of what is being described. This knowledge-as-narration is not insular, but always social - the act of speaking (or more so the act of conversing) requires a recipient, just as the act of writing presupposes the existence of a reader. But whilst spoken words need an ear to hear them before they float away into oblivion, written words will last as long as the material they are inscribed upon. The very possibility for reception is the possibility to prove our existence. Just like words, we crave to ground ourselves and to make our transient existence appear a little more concrete by finding that recipient in which a trace of ourselves may be retained. However, the recipient can be found in many more places than an ear, an eye or interaction between people.

 

An example of this is given in the following fragment of auto-biography. It is a story in which I recall seizing the opportunity to inscribe my name and age on the bathroom wall in my parent’s house before my Dad pasted new wallpaper over the top. The delight that I, aged 6 would be immortalised on that very wall, instinctively wishing to verify and bring my existence into a more solid reality by writing it down. Evidence of this need to record ourselves is everywhere. Pavements, walls, benches, toilet cubicles and countless other places are inscribed and autographed in this way. Close your eyes and squint at the city view before you and the words become uprooted and merge. I imagine the city and its bustle of interaction as the mixing of words, all trying to give themselves weight against a constantly shifting backdrop of more and more words. For some, the social world is a vast flow of ever changing symbolic interactions between people and their environments, each in themselves storied. It is these interactions which give rise to yet more stories, as each person’s stories merge with others, thus adding scenes, chapters, whole acts.^[3] The scribble on the bathroom wall holds a trace of more stories that are ready to be told once provided with an audience. By writing my name and my age on the wall of the bathroom, that tiny autobiography  both described and became who I was and in some ways still am, as for the imagined future readers of that bathroom scrawl, the author is a 6 year old. I became what I wrote as my uncertain audience could only tentatively imagine otherwise. True or otherwise - I am not sure that it matters. By telling stories of what we experience we give ourselves a sense of identity. I think of diary entries but perhaps more importantly internet blogs. The idea of writing a blog from the point of view of someone other than myself or an other personality is tempting, but on the other hand, so is the thought of reading other people’s entries, to seek knowledge through (stolen) insights into what others think, feel and experience through their simulated narratives.

 

If during speech, the existence of a recipient or respondent is a basic requirement, does writing require this same reception? It seems the very possibility that someone could read your computer screen confessions or internet postsecret or that your identity could be read by someone is sufficient to satisfy this desire to make sense of, or to better your sense of social existence.^[4] Sometimes it is difficult to form positive knowledge, but far easier to form its negative - to know what something is not rather than what something is. It would be impossible to positively define male without using the negative definition of not-female, or vice versa. In this way, opposites are not so opposed but intertwined within each other, just as fiction is a necessary component of all non-fiction. Could this be a reason for why “car crash” and reality TV is so popular? We don’t want to be Kerry Katona, but we get a better idea of what (we presume) we are not by watching her stories unfold on the flickering screen in the sanctuary of the living room. It is a constant and continual tension between being and not being that is not all that far removed from each other.

 

Perhaps, as some cultural commentators have diagnosed, so-called cultural voyeurism, fuelled by reality TV, is symptomatic of a crisis in a strong sense of identity - that character who we think, act and speak into existence in our narratives of everyday life.^[5] At the same time, I see positives in cultural voyeurism (rather than Freud’s pathological variety). As we observe day to day life, watch a film, or perhaps more so when we read a book we are not just a passive audience, but actively filling the role of the voyeur, learning about others and by default, about ourselves. The reader of a book eagerly delves into the narration of other people’s lives, finding both positive and negative knowledge of who they are or aren’t. The written and published story in a novel, biography and so on is not so different to a journal entry or a conversation. Each action involves truth and fiction simultaneously, each utterance bears the mark of the producer, but also eventually of the consumer as the words are made sense of once they reach an audience. The reader is, to an extent, in control of the ultimate significance of the spoken or written words, but is also aware of their author.

 

Reading Alexandria Clark’s Were you there when you read this? my self as literary voyeur seemed irrepressibly present.^[6] I was confronted with the printed transcription of the original writing of the book, which took place during a live performance in which the words typed remained on the author’s computer, but were also projected onto a screen where the audience could read them. Whilst all authorship may be co-authorship as the writer is responding to an imagined reader, this collaborative aspect of writing was so overtly demonstrated in Clark’s book that I felt that I was intruding not just on the author, but on the audience who were seemingly very much a part of the storytelling process. By constantly referring to an ambiguous “you”, the author made me aware of the audience’s role in the writing process as she appeared to respond to people coming and going in the room where she was sat. The call to “you” reached further than the immediate location of the performance, as I felt self-consciously drawn into the book as part of the audience, absent but apparently acknowledged. Although the author seemed to invite the readers to explore and encounter her self, that which is constructed as it is written, I could not help but feel uncomfortable. The author is too aware that her inner thoughts are being preyed upon, have the potential to be scrutinised for myself to feel content with this vulnerability. This is neither reading an internet journal nor reading a biography or watching reality TV, it is being enticed to read your friend’s diary by someone who says it is OK, but you know in yourself that it is not. The difference is, that here, the diary writer, the friend, whoever, is the one who is encouraging her own violation of privacy.

 

So why make these thoughts public? Clark successfully confuses and merges boundaries between public and private, and I feel it is this mixing of messages which causes any discomfort that may be felt when reading them. She puts her private thoughts out into the open, and correspondingly narrates her inner self, that private persona not always revealed, into a public, vulnerable and exposed existence. It is here, perhaps that the vagary of truth, reality, fiction and embellishment comes to Clark’s aid, advantage and protection. Toying with the idea that it could all just be a game, her conversation with the audience in the art gallery mimics the language games played during every day social life. It is important here to stress the necessarily social aspect of life, for if all life is storied and comprised of continual symbolic interactions, meaning can only arise from such encounters. The author cannot successfully communicate if what she has written remains unseen. All identities are social, as without public reception of who we say we are, we are forever waiting to become. We cannot simply reason or think ourselves into existence, our thoughts and ideas intertwine with others in order to become tangible and charged with potential. Clark’s performance is like the inscription on a park bench or the confessions on a secret postcard, but where the words are reciprocal as they interact with and respond to more words that envelop the reader(s). It seems that the performance transcribed is like a saturated, abstracted and re-grounded version of everyday interaction, but which seems to give the reader the benefit of hindsight even though they are reading in the(ir) perpetual present. Reading the book is like watching this fusion of words and identities from afar, but also from within as the reader voyeur finds her or himself through the transcription of the other. Is this the response needed to the all too often empty question “how are you?”. Perhaps we need more stories told in real time and real circumstances, and to be more aware of the stories that are there waiting to be told once they have found a listener.

 

Thoughts become stories which become actions and events.