the experiment that wasn't

A couple of days ago this showed up in my Twitter stream:

Take a look at @tejucole's twitter feed. Something is happening there: https://t.co/i5nvHEktx8
— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) January 8, 2014

I had followed Cole on Twitter for a couple of years but eventually unfollowed — I don't remember why. In fact I thought I was still following, something that can happen when the people you follow on Twitter retweet someone a lot. But I went to check it out, and sure enough, something was happening: a story was unfolding.

You can read the whole story here, under the title "Teju Cole orchestrates his Twitter followers into a collective short story," but the really important thing to note about this event is that it was not a "collective short story" — though that's what it appeared to be at the time. When I checked it out the story was about a dozen tweets in, and my assumption (which was also the assumption of thousands of others) was that Cole had gotten the story going and then was choosing the replies that in his view best moved the story along. Now that, I thought, was interesting.

But as it turned out the many people who submitted their own tweets in hopes of having them chosen as parts of the story were wasting their time: Cole had written the story in advance and was just asking some of his followers to tweet parts of it, making sure that the last word was given to a TV host with three times as many followers as Cole:

FIN
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 8, 2014

The tyranny of the single author continues unchallenged!

Later, Cole wrote:

I wrote a story, and we told it. Great thanks to my generous and self-effacing collaborators. http://t.co/wtn1MApOkR
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 9, 2014

Well, sort of. When the story depends on people agreeing in advance to tweet its parts, parts written for them by someone else, and on their being retweeted by the author according to his plan and his schedule, the collaborative "we" element of this is trivial. A number of people in my own feed expressed some disappointment that the "event" wasn't anything like what it had at first appeared to be.

What Cole did may be sort of cool — maybe — but it wasn't a "collective story" and it wasn't what some called it, an "experiment in narration." But if someone actually tried what thousands of us thought Cole was doing....

I can't improve on these statements

Chadwick Matlin:

The purgatory scenes are a symptom of what, in retrospect, was Lost's greatest flaw. It refused to follow its own advice and let dead be dead. In the early seasons, Lost prided itself on its willingness to kill off any character it wanted. This, we were told, was proof that on the island the stakes were high. But then Lost's writers fell in love with their characters, and people started wearing bulletproof vests, recovering from harpoons to the heart, and returning as Demon Spawn. By granting the characters' souls eternal life, in purgatory or elsewhere, the writers diminished our interest in their actual lives — the ones audiences spent six years watching. Lost's writers should have taken a lesson from their characters and learned to let go.

Will Wilkinson:

It is the sloppy promiscuity of our undiscerning sentimentality that allows us to project our feelings from one character across worlds to his or her non-identical counterpart. . . . Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think I’m not such a pushover. I don’t want to marry a bundle of repeatable attributes. I say I’m in love with an individual, a solid substance and its singular quiddity. I could give f•••-all if her counterpart in some untouchable precinct of the multiverse wears an eyepatch, wins the Pulitzer Prize, or is torn limb from limb by cannibal dwarves. None are my beloved. The finale of Lost pretended to be about the ultimacy and redemptive power of love, or something like that, but it exemplified instead the incoherent ruinous mess of our needy scattershot attachments, our whorish readiness to be doped by the dull, warm, indeterminate golden light. Speak not to me of love, Lost, if you know not love.

I’m not a fan of large sweeping apocalyptic statements, but here’s one for you: the current fascination with possible worlds, an infinite number of alternative universes, is death to narrative. Death to narrative because our stories draw their power chiefly from the limits of our lives. If death is the mother of beauty, limit is the mother of story. I’m not sure why or how the makers of Lost got caught up in this — in the recent reboot of Star Trek it seems that J. J. Abrams glommed on to it because it offers infinite expansion of the franchise: one world in which Kirk and Spock are enemies, another in which they are best friends, several in which they die young, a few in which they live to a ripe old age. . . .

But whatever one’s reasons for embracing this model, it renders every particular story vacuous. Why weep when Lear enters, bearing the dead Cordelia in his arms, or when Juliet awakens from her drug-induced sleep to find Romeo dead? Much easier to turn our eyes to those alternate worlds in which Lear and Cordelia crush their enemies, and Romeo and Juliet unite the houses of Montague and Capulet, world without end, amen. Or, rather, world that goes on until we get bored again and decide we want a bloodier cosmos, just for a change.