Opinion In this parasocial world, our bubbles of aloneness
Acute aloneness, the seeming impossibility to communicate with anyone outside their tremulous selves, the legitimising of online stalking have led to human beings constructing detailed paracosms.
Some letter receivers would go on to reply, become letter writers themselves. At almost the same time “parasocial” was being declared the Cambridge Word of the Year, a student in a creative writing workshop was reading her letter to Slash, the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses: “To Slash (birth name: Saul Hudson; born 23rd July, 1965), I hope this finds you shrouded in an appropriate amount of cigarette smoke and creative genius. See, we’ve always worked well together. When you’re on stage, I’m in the 200th row. When you release a song, I match my walking pace to its BPM. This synergy is what our relationship is built on. But lately, the Slash Experience is starting to deviate from its core specifications. I’ve compiled a list of items we need to address before this becomes a systemic issue. We can work together to fix this,” wrote Samaira.
Soon after, Aarushi shared her letter to Shakespeare, whom she addressed as “Dear Sir Rhymes-A-Lot”: “I encountered you for the first time four centuries and six years after your death, in the year of two thousand and twenty-two, and you have since stuck to me like a bad case of the bubonic plague… Did your time have the concept of a fan? An admirer, perhaps, or an addict? That is what you have made of us… Should you have any defence to offer from beyond the grave, I await your correspondence.”
A week later, Prisha shared a letter she was writing to “Matt”, which ended with “Matt, why do you keep drawing the curtains at night these days? You know it makes it hard for me to see you.” It was a “stan” letter — “stan” is a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”.
My students were responding to a module on epistolary literature that I teach as part of an introductory course on creative writing: Rabindranath Tagore’s letters to his niece Indira, Rainer Maria Rilke’s to the “young poet”, Franz Kafka’s to Milena, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers from prison, Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, among others. We discuss how “literature” derives from “litera”, letter, and that it was in it that the impulse for literature would first germinate, the reaching out to someone outside oneself, first the letter-reader, the addressee, then the stranger-reader. Some letter receivers would go on to reply, become letter writers themselves. That form would create what we would come to understand as literary culture — letters becoming reviews, responders reviewers, literature an open letter. Such an instinct, of recording and responding, marks the earliest fiction in the English language — the epistolary novels of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, with the names of the letter writers and receivers providing their titles. Its clunky protocol of giving and receiving, as if life were structured like Christmas morning, must have gradually made the form of the epistolary novel unattractive to novelists. But it’s returning now — we read an excerpt from one such novel in this course: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The protagonist of Ocean Vuong’s novel writes letters to their mother — she has no English, and won’t be able to read them. It’s a sign — a signal, if you will — that we are living through a time where the letter will be addressed to a person who won’t — or can’t — read it.
That is the kind of letter my students often write — to their “younger self”, to an imagined “older self”, to a dead grandmother, a friend or teacher with whom they are no longer in touch, and, of course, to the famous. Acute aloneness, the seeming impossibility of communicating with anyone outside their tremulous selves, the legitimising of online stalking (‘What’s the last Instagram account you stalked?’ is a common talk show question) have led to human beings constructing detailed paracosms. Fanfiction and the epistolary form have become a natural outlet for the parasocial impulse, where the tragicomic urgency of utterly one-sided relationships give these forms an intravenous drip.
I wonder whether it’s a sign — writers are writing for someone who doesn’t exist, someone imagined: The reader?
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor, Ashoka University. Views are personal
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