literature – W. R. Bywater

I don’t know if this matters much, but I write this blog under a pseudonym. I do this for a number of reasons. On more of a practical level it affords a certain amount of privacy, it makes me as an individual less vulnerable to criticism; WRB is something of a shield I can hide behind. It’s not that I’m writing as anyone other than myself, but I want to distinguish myself as a person from myself as a writer – I can’t necessarily take responses to WRB IRL because the domains of a blog on the internet and conversation between two individuals are completely different, and I can’t have the same kinds of discussions across them, I don’t think. It’s a way of containing discourse, and it means that what I write doesn’t taint who I am and who I am doesn’t taint what I write. For me it’s the best way of maintaining a secure sense of who I am. I always found it difficult setting up online profiles, responding to emails etc. because it felt like I was projecting a self somewhere it didn’t belong, and I was always worried that the self I projected to one domain wouldn’t match up with the self of another domain. Using a pseudonym allows me to avoid this difficulty because I am not claiming any kind of continuity between me and WRB (I do, as a matter of fact, think there are many continuities, but I’m not claiming them as given, meaning I don’t have to account for any differences). It might be an arbitrary distinction to make, but its one that I stand firmly behind.

I’ve always been intrigued, perhaps tormented, by the idea of a ‘self’. I’ve never been particularly sure of what kind of self I am. When I was younger and started creating profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I initially found it liberating, because I could create whoever I wanted and that was me and it was great, I was free where I’d always felt oppressed as a living person. But then I’d get carried away, and the person I’d project into these internet spaces would run away with itself and I’d find this massive distance between me and them. And then curious things would start to happen; people IRL would talk about things internet-me had done, and I’d find myself unable to respond because of this gap that had formed between them. I was always flabbergasted that people could be the same person online and IRL! That was something I never mastered, even to this day.

I think social media is great, but personally I was always troubled by the idea of having an online profile. I think there is an assumed identical correspondence between IRL self and profile self, but I was always confused because to me the differences between them were glaringly obvious. And I think mysterious things happen with the creation of an online self. It seems obvious that there is an original ‘me’ who exists in the world and the online self is a simulacrum / representation of that, but I found that increasingly the online self was starting to constitute the ‘original’ self; it seems the ontology had got mixed up somehow.

I feel like that was full of postmodern jargon, so I’ll use an example to let me fully understand what I’m trying to say. When I was about 13 I started using the internet heavily, excessively I think, and I started to find myself there. I identified myself as gay, found this new world I could relate to, and I became a fucking massive Lady Gaga fan. I created this online self who had at least a hazy understanding of who he was. But IRL I was a nothing; I’d spend hours and hours reading about Lady Gaga online, but if someone talked to me IRL about her I’d have nothing to say, there would just be a blank and the conversation would move on. I was curating an online persona at the expense of an IRL persona. For a long time it felt like the only self I had was the online one, which was distressing because to get by in the world I needed a firm sense of self and I didn’t have one. I still struggle with this to this day I think, but I’m definitely getting better. I decided that I needed to hone who I was as a living self because I couldn’t keep up with the online self I’d created. Herein lies, I think, one of the inherent dangers of the internet; it encourages the creation of a particular kind of self that leaves the one IRL sadly lacking.

This is not to say I think that the IRL self is better or more primary than the online self; I think they are expressions of identity in two different metaphysical spaces, and neither takes precedence. I do, however, think that a balance needs to be struck between these two things. Selves are utilities in that they allow us to do things in the world, but if one of those selves is not doing its job then there’s a problem. For me, having a solid sense of self online is pointless if there is no equal counterpart IRL. Maybe I’m being old-fashioned; perhaps the world is heading towards a place where the internet is a more primary space than IRL, and so it’s a waste of time to try and hone a self IRL. But the point, if I can try and remember how I got to talking about this, is that to call two things the same name when they are so vastly different is inherently confusing, and for me it created many difficulties both psychological and material. For me, the movement beyond this started by deleting my Twitter account and creating an anonymous Instagram profile (I like Instagram, and wanted to partake in it without facing the turmoil of online self-curation). I keep Facebook posts to a minimum, and am wary of when the self I am creating differs too much from me.

Back to pseudonyms. I’ve always been obsessed with pseudonyms. Some of my favourite people use pseudonyms: writers, musicians, drag queens, porn stars. I’m interested in pseudonyms because of what exactly it is that they create. Some drag queens report a complete character change when in drag, others an enhancement of character, some no difference at all. I know that it’s more than just a name which creates this difference, but I think to name a thing that one does with one’s body differently to the normal use of the body constitutes a splitting of the self and so increases this sense of a personality split. I’m drawn to pseudonyms because I think the self is inherently fragmented, we becomes new selves as we do different things with our bodies, and so there’s perhaps something more honest in using a different name. Why not? There’s the Jekyll-and-Hyde appeal as well: I can don the mask of WRB, commit whatever debaucheries I would like on this blog, and then take off the mask and no one can pin it to me, the person who sits and types and goes about the world. I’m being emphatic here; I think I’m being honest in what I write; these are thoughts I’ve had in my head throughout the day. But I think it generates interesting questions. What, exactly, is WRB? Even as I tell you that WRB is not a person in the sense that you might envision it, I think it’s incredibly difficult to not think that there is a person named WRB who sits down and writes. The use of the different name makes it impossible not to consider the relationship between writer qua writer and writer qua person. The equivalency we are compelled to make might not be all that simple.

I’ve also noticed some things about the use of the pseudonym. It’s easier to make claims about myself. All of those things I wrote about myself on my introductory post are true facts about me, but it was easier to state them when they were not being attached to me. Maybe this reveals something about my own lack of confidence, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless. Maybe if I can successfully create this online persona then I will have more confidence to be that person IRL; not in the way I did when I was a teenager, but in a genuinely worthwhile and useful way. I can strengthen WRB‘s voice, and since that voice is not all that different from my own I can appropriate it to embolden my own voice. I don’t know if that will happen. We’ll see. I would like to have a professional writing career and this is the name I would write under, so at some point I am expecting to have to unite WRB with myself. That will be an interesting moment. I think this self-awareness of what I am doing will afford me prudence which will mean I won’t get carried away and face the crisis of self I’ve encountered so many times before. Fingers crossed. Who fucking knows what might become of WRB.

WRB

Today I listened to minisode 2 of the podcast Literary Friction and Octavia and Carrie’s discussion was about literary characters they have a crush on. The basis of their debate was that one of them (I can’t remember which, Carrie I think) had to dig really deep to find a literary character she had a crush on, whereas the other could list them indefinitely. I thought it was an interesting discussion; they related it to styles of reading, with the former discussing how there is a critical pane of glass between herself and the literary world she reads about and she finds it difficult to visualise fictional worlds, whereas the latter reads visually and is very much ‘within’ the text. I thought I’d come in and share where I stand on the matter.

I’m personally a reader who very rarely crushes on literary characters. In fact, I struggle to think of a single character I have a crush on. I think it’s important to define exactly what a ‘crush’ is here, because I think there’s a risk of equivocation if it’s not pinned down. I think ‘crush’ operates on two levels: it is romantic and sexual. Although they touched sometimes on the sexual, I think Octavia and Carrie were mainly discussing crushes in terms of romantic attraction, or they were in some way assuming a link between the two.

This distinction is an important one to make, I think, especially in terms of my own identity. I feel romantic attraction very rarely – I can probably name on one hand the number of people IRL that I’ve had a crush on – whereas I feel sexual attraction all of the time. So when I probe to think about literary crushes it is not really a surprise that I struggle to come up with anything, because how I think of ‘crush’ is closely linked to the romantic and the sexual, and since IRL I don’t feel strong romantic attraction it follows that the same would be true of literature. But then I got to thinking about different media, and I realised that I do tend to crush on men in more visual media quite a lot. For example, I think it’s fair to say I have a crush on Bradley Cooper’s character in A Star Is Born, and I do have crushes on celebrities quite a lot (I think celebrities are a certain kind of fictional character, but that’s a discussion for another day). And so I think it must be something to do with the literary text in particular – rather than fictional worlds in general – that makes it difficult for me to connect to.

Let’s unpack this a bit further. I think it must be something about the lacking visual element of the literary text that leaves me indifferent to the characters, because I don’t read in a very visual way. Let’s take Jackson Maine from A Star Is Born as an example. I find him physically attractive, not just aesthetically but in the way he moves, the small inflections of his character, as well in his emotional vulnerability. There are certain crucial aspects of this which are missing from the literary text as I experience it while reading. I think I erect a critical screen between myself and a text and I think of characters in the abstract rather than as real people, unlike in a film where I do consider the characters real people. It’s strange how a visual element can change how I relate to characters – it would be interesting to read a literary version of A Star Is Born and see whether my opinion on Jackson is different. For myself attraction is a very physical thing and so I suppose it makes sense that I would be more attracted to characters in film than fiction; I find it hard to have a crush on something I consider abstract.

At the same time, I find some texts to be very sexually stimulating. I think that desire can be a linguistic phenomenon as much as anything else. I read Hollinghust’s The Swimming-pool Library at the start of 2019 and I found it to be a very arousing text which was successful in its depiction of gay male sexuality (even if some of its encounters were problematic – I’ll probably touch on this in another post). I was very turned on when I was reading the novel, something which I don’t think I’d much experienced before and I found reading the text quite liberating. It gave me a new understanding of pornography, which I had only understood as visual; I’d never thought that I could be much stimulated by text. But having said this, it would be wrong to say that I had a crush on Will or on any of the characters in The Swimming-pool Library. I might have found the actions they performed sexually arousing, but who was performing them was irrelevant. The sexuality they expressed was what attracted me. Perhaps a crush, at least for me, requires a strange combination of physical and emotional attraction, and although literature can capture elements of both it fails to cohere them in a single character, and so pales to film in this regard. (Not that I prefer film, mind; literature is definitely my preferred medium. But I don’t read books to find crushes, so it’s not a massive failing for me.) I’m not saying that I’ll never fancy a literary character, but it doesn’t really seem likely with what I’ve read before.

Another idea to throw out there: maybe it’s to do with sexuality. A lot of the books I’ve read have been in an educational/academic context, and so they have tended to focus on heterosexual romantic encounters. Maybe my inability to crush on literary characters comes from the fact that I’ve been reading heterosexual relationships, and since I don’t see myself in them it follows that I wouldn’t share in their articulations of desire. I’ve not read that much fiction about gay men and so perhaps that’s where my crushes are. But Jackson Maine isn’t queer, so maybe sexuality has nothing to do with whether I fancy someone or not. In the podcast they mentioned that literary crushes can transcend gender and sexuality, so maybe literature is a space where it is about feeling rather than the identities of those involved. As an unromantic person I may be excluded from this system altogether.

I think it’s interesting to think about the relationship between sexuality IRL and in fiction, because I think fiction opens up a kind of fantasy space where you can fancy whoever you want. It operates like porn in that regard. I think there’s a very special relationship between literature and porn, and literary representations of porn are certainly something I’d like to study further. Both in some way seem to dictate the kinds of sexuality that we are capable of feeling.

WRB

Tag: literature

On Pseudonyms

Literary Crushes