Who Goes There: On Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life – William Tidwell
September 19, 2024
“I had a dream it could imitate things.”
– John W. Campbell
I have a friend who used to be a child actor. I met him online. He performed in one film in the 1990s. He played an autistic child who witnessed the murder of his parents. The kid is traumatized, and a psychiatrist is brought in to break through his boundaries and recover the only information that could possibly solve the case. My friend never acted again for reasons I will allow the reader to speculate about. He became a writer later in life, and he was the first person who published me. He also suffers from bipolar disorder. His mania has worsened over the last few years to the point that he has delusions. I recognized my friend underneath his illness, but his transformation frightened me. It was like watching someone walk suddenly up a wall or twist their head off. His talents have not deteriorated, but taken on a new, alien quality. He often suggests to me that he has autism. He has never been diagnosed. During one of his manic episodes, he told me the Wikipedia page for the movie he acted in says that he does not have autism. He suggested the FBI or some such federal agency wrote this to taunt him.
I saw an acquaintance writing a couple years ago that in their day (early 2010s), online communities like Tumblr had a stricter definition of those characteristics we now call neurodivergent. “It was understood…” read their tirade. I’m forced to ask myself: what was understood? The fact is that many questions about consciousness have not been answered by science. Psychology is the prominent example of a field with a replication crisis, yet over a century of its ideas are integrated into regular speech. The language of therapy is increasingly derided, but who has escaped its framework? To gatekeep the status of mental illness would only further prove its transformation into a form of currency. If people reject the group sharing session or “hugbox”, they substitute it with a Fight Club fantasy of clandestine, symbolic violence. These two directions map to the stereotypical images of the two ends of the political spectrum, and more abstractly to feminine and masculine social roles, stemming from what used to be called the war of the sexes. As a friend of mine Evie Sandblom put it, “Yukio Mishima is Sylvia Plath for right wing men.”
Alt-lit begins with Tao Lin. One of his first books was titled you are a little bit happier than i am ,and another Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Calloway’s book is titled a question, arresting and sincere, but it has no mark and is seemingly rhetorical. It confronts the reader with a black and white photograph of her face, where she looks, to use a present day term, demure. The blankness, detachment, and irony likened to the flat affect of autism throughout the history of Alt-lit are all present here. It is not an account of her traumatic life experiences, as one might cynically assume. She hints at them from the beginning when describing her inability to receive pleasure from cunnilingus, but never elaborates on them. It is a document of her relationships and adventures in sex work, as well as other, more ambiguous forms of what she openly calls self-objectification.
The dichotomy of sincere and ironic continues to be a pet topic for many young enthusiasts of literature since the death of David Foster Wallace, who labored to convince people of its importance. I still haven’t seen a clear answer to what makes someone a real person and what makes them a robot. Calloway admits to being called a “sociopath,” but dismisses it as another means of controlling people. It is no more rigorous than whatever people mean by “common sense,” an intuition they have in the moment and follow without much thought as to its over-determined origins. It is a holistic judgment, an overall feeling one gets about something almost immediately, like when encountering the face of a stranger for the first time. I too indulge these feelings in socialization and the experience of art. Sometimes they yield insight, sometimes not.
There are ineffable things that make an author seem real to me. Marie Calloway feels very real, while other Alt-lit figures do not. She feels more real than even Lin. Her automatic, objective style of writing does not interfere with this feeling of presence. My initial reaction to her book was disgust with myself, with sexuality and romance in general, but never the feeling that I was being told to think a certain way. She doesn’t moralize in a proper sense, only sharing whatever received moral ideas she processes her experiences with in a form of italicized aside. This ironic detachment is perhaps a response to sexual trauma. It does not seem to be an entirely conscious artistic choice as some enthusiasts of sincerity paint it out to be. We are objectified as soon as we come into the world. A name is a numbing blow from which we supposedly never recover. These are patterns we repeat in order to survive, being told we cannot otherwise. There is no replication crisis in the production of recognizable personae, only in the recovery of their subjects.
There are intellectual concepts that populate what purpose did i serve in your life. A “Lolita complex” is mentioned. She and the writer pseudonymized as Adrien Brody are called feminists. There is mention of commodification, brainwashing, Marxism, and of course trauma. None of the characters appear greatly interested in the history of these ideas. Calloway uses them as objective tools for understanding her experience. Adrien Brody speaks about developing romantic relationships with his students, and claims that he hated when this happened. He nonetheless assumes a mentorship role for Calloway, as do many other men in her book. Calloway similarly seduces a younger artist who is called John, and cheats on him for the forty-something Brody. John sees Calloway as a genius, a figurehead of “the Internet writing subculture,” and looks up to her as a role model. He spends large amounts of money on her. Calloway feels that John does not see her for who she really is and relays this to Brody.
The editor Gordon Lish, whose ideas on fiction writing have influenced Alt-lit and associated circles, also slept with his students. Carla Blumenkranz describes in her essay “Seduce the Whole World” how Lish taught his students at Columbia to seduce the reader. He invited them to write about their most “shameful secret,” the “one thing they will never live down,” and once they finished the exercise, having shared about things like nearly committing vehicular manslaughter or being homosexual, Lish quipped that the secret didn’t have to be something true. The only remaining dictum for literature, as far as Lish’s behavior tells us, is the act of seduction and not any external truth, nor any kind of inner transformation and healing. If we are not seducing someone else, then we are seducing ourselves. Lish’s classes naturally became about seducing him into sex and publication. Objectifying oneself is the final game of the artist.
Where we are not certain about the meaning of what grabs our attention, we may nonetheless be seduced by it. We continue reading a book or talking to someone to see where this inkling leads us. We become haunted by the idea of the other person no matter how close we get to them. Calloway’s search was not for power or fame, but for meaningful intimacy, someone who sees her as “an actual human being.” She accounts for her attempts to find this as plainly as possible. She calls herself a voyeur; she wants to see what people are made of. It is not surprising that a person constantly accused of being fake would undertake a search for something real.
My friend’s psychosis involved the idea that the world was fundamentally parodic. This is not a new idea. Yes, sometimes life seems to be a joke. He has said this in many different ways before. The only change was the bizarre conviction that it was true and that he could uncover the hidden joke of every symbol he encountered. He was still my friend, but taken to a warped extreme. He had become a parody of himself, flattened and distorted, a cartoon. He somehow knew it was happening at the same time, being detached from it but unable to stop. He saw it as the result of what others did to him, the judgments that both doomed and sanctified him with the fate of being an artist. This seduction of oneself often ends in disappearance: into madness, incomprehensibility, privacy, and death. In the space of the absent, mythological character, others come to imagine their own fulfillment, the loose ends and lacunae serving to feed the new beginning.
Calloway disappeared too, deleting her blog and refusing to do profiles on her book even a decade later. Was it because of all the words pasted into her section titled “criticism,” the internet comments, even by other women, who called her an attention whore, histrionic, ugly, “most likely autistic,” “predictably ‘unpredictable’,” an amateur trying to impress her mentor Tao Lin, gross, sad, and just dumb? Was it the death and rape threats that came afterwards? Is it not strange how they indulged in the very thing she claimed to get off on: objectifying her, degrading her, coming up with more ways to call her furniture, giving her what she claimed – but “never understood why” – she wanted? It is not strange, because it was done to them too, and they do it to one another. The diagnoses are abundant, the treatments are scarce. The treatment seems to be: die, kill yourself, but you first and not me. Maybe that was the treatment that preceded the diagnosis. That might be the message of objectification itself. That was what she was doing: killing herself, and what she invited others to participate in. It reminds me of Josh Harris, founder of Pseudo.com, and the last part of his art piece “Quiet: We Live in Public” where he wired cameras throughout his apartment and broadcast his domestic life with his girlfriend online 24/7 until she freaked out at him for trying to have sex in the living room and stormed out. Harris lost his wealth, his company, and his girlfriend in his exploration of the limits of human dignity. Calloway’s book is a document of a generation’s deformed concept of love as it came of age, focusing on a woman who explored its logic as far as she could go. First she sought meaning through relationships, then through art about them, then through the idea of herself as an artist exploring relationships, all along mediating it electronically through the self-images of others more or less indifferent to the causes of their desires and the meaning of their words as her, but maybe not as willing to investigate themselves, to risk themselves, being more ashamed than her. The controversies surrounding figures like Tao Lin and Steve Roggenbuck have only cast what purpose did i serve in your life in a starker light. It is enough for art to describe a problem without mystifying anything, to pose a question without giving an answer, rather than to reach prematurely for the essence of the other and start giving advice.