The new book “Working on My Novel,” though it bears on its cover the name of Cory Arcangel—the New York artist known for his creative exploitations of technology—is an aggregation of the work of several dozen more obscure writers. I say “work,” but really what I mean is tweets, a distinction that the book invites the reader to consider. Before it was a book, “Working on My Novel” was a Twitter experiment, or performance, in which Arcangel systematically retweeted tweets containing the phrase “working on my novel.” The book presents a selection of those tweets, each of which is given a page all its own, like heirloom aphorisms cased in an imposing white emptiness.
It is hard to imagine a book more of its time than “Working on My Novel.” The first thing to be said about it, in this sense, is that it is remarkably short. Here’s how short it is: I finished it not in one sitting but in one standing. I signed for the delivery, opened the package, and then read the book from cover to cover right there in the hallway, feet shoulder-width apart, in a readerly attitude of casual triumphalism. I had spent so little time away from my desk that, when I finished the book, I barely needed to refresh my Twitter time line.
The project could, of course, be read as a sly commentary on the dysfunctional relationship between creativity and social media, between talking about writing and the significantly less common phenomenon of actually doing it. None of these people announcing that they’re working on their novels are doing so, at least not at the particular moment when they happen to be announcing it. Some of them are doing a lot of other things, too. “Working on my novel and watching Family Guy. Oh yeah!!” writes Monique J. Pacheco. “Sitting in Panera, working on my novel. Stop in and say hi!” tweets Don Johansen, one of many remarkably gregarious practitioners of the narrative arts featured here. Zach Barnes, meanwhile, is “Working on my novel while watching the 25th anniversary phantom of the opera on PBS.”
Some of Arcangel’s novelists, or novelists-in-waiting, take a more utilitarian approach to tweeting about their writing, often tweeting simply to announce that they’re writing and therefore can’t be sitting around tweeting. Here’s Barblieber, for instance: “#Offline, working on my novel! =) Be back later!” And here’s Erin, Creative Soul in Motion: “Going off the grid—need a night to decompress after staring at Excel all day and then coming home and working on my novel #tired.” And then, in the middle of the book, there’s a run of tweets that are more or less identically blunt assertions that the tweeter is “Working on my novel.”
So the book is pretty funny; and it’s funny, in a fairly narrow sense, at the expense of the people Arcangel quotes. (The most astringent irony of the whole enterprise is one that’s basically incidental to it: the indirect and absurd route by which all these aspiring novelists have wound up getting published by Penguin.) But it’s by no means a straightforward point-and-titter exercise, and it would be a mistake—not to mention a waste of a very small amount of time—to read it in this way. Arcangel is probably best known for his decontextualized tweakings of video games, most famously the Warholesque “Super Mario Clouds,” from 2002, in which he hacked an old Nintendo cartridge so that what remained was a blue background with little white puffy clouds silently creeping from right to left. In 2009, he made a series of three videos that spliced together footage of cats walking on piano keyboards, creating a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal solo-piano suite “Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11.” And before he started collating tweets from people who were (or were not) working on their novels, he had a Web site that gathered tweets containing the phrase “follow my other Twitter,” and a blog that curated other people’s blog posts apologizing for not having posted on their blogs in a while. Much of his work, in other words, involves a crafty appropriation and reassembly of previously existing stuff, an ongoing exercise in content farming for art’s sake.
On the surface, the process behind “Working on My Novel” is a textbook example of the retweet-a-random-person school of Internet insult, the rhetorical content of which is often reducible to “Hey, look at these clueless mugs.” (I would estimate, in fact, that somewhere around thirty to forty per cent of the entire Internet is reducible to “Hey, look at these clueless mugs.”) And it could equally be viewed as a fairly textbook example of a book written less in order to be read than to be discussed and written about by people like me; at any rate, it’s hard to imagine a book providing a more solid pretext for discussions of social media and creativity, or the death of the novel, or any number of other means by which the think-piecing superego might impose itself on the culture. At first glance, that is, the whole thing might look like an exercise in cynicism and entry-level irony. But that’s not quite what’s going on here.
In a Profile of Arcangel in The New Yorker, from 2011, Andrea K. Scott pointed out that projects like the Follow My Other Twitter site and the Sorry I Haven’t Posted blog “have clever conceits, but over time they become bittersweet commentaries on aspiration and failure.” With “Working on My Novel,” there’s a comparable sort of pathos, which accumulates through the reading experience and arises from a similar repurposing of a preëxisting technological artifact. You feel a distant affection for these fleetingly glimpsed souls, with their distractions (“Having way too much fun on Pinterest … should be working on my novel”) and their general chillness (“Currently working on my novel and listen to really nice music. Yeah I’m a writer deal with it”) and their drastic emotional investments (“THAT’S WHY I’M WORKING ON MY NOVEL SO I WON’T FEEL SO PATHETIC ANYMORE”).
The repetition of that single four-word phrase—“working on my novel”—has an estranging effect. You might, in other words, find yourself wondering what this thing is that everyone keeps referring to as “my novel.” None of these people are writing anything so indeterminate as “a novel” or “a book project”; they are each of them, separately and identically, bringing into fruition a particular opus that is theirs alone, given and foreordained. The use of the first-person-possessive determiner brings to mind the pervasive superstition that everyone has a novel “in them,” some inner reserve of pure creative potential awaiting realization and recognition. Arcangel has reflected something poignant about this collective yearning for creative individuation, about how technology seems to facilitate self-expression while effecting a strange obliteration of the individual—a symbolic compression of the self into the repository of the personal brand. The paradox of social media is that it offers a channel through which to communicate yourself while the technology itself shapes and limits what is communicated, and how. All these people, each of them tweeting a tiny Whitmanesque song of himself, are largely indistinguishable.
The identity of one of these tweeters is easily missed on a first reading. Underneath one of the handful of tweets that simply read as terse announcements of current activity—“Working on my novel”—is the name Cory Arcangel. The playful suggestion here seems to be that “Working on My Novel” is itself actually a novel, as opposed to an installation in book form or just a bunch of stuff the artist found lying around on Twitter. Arcangel seems semi-seriously invested in this categorization: the book is identified as “fiction” on its rear cover, and in a recent interview with Vice online he repeatedly refers to it as a novel. But if it is one—and who am I to say that it is not?—it’s worth thinking about how its vision of character and agency reflect a culture in which these ideas have come to seem increasingly fragmented and distant and unreal. And whether it is a novel or something else entirely, it reflects a climate of distraction hostile to such things as novels—to working on them, and to sitting down and reading them.
