Beware the Siren Servers: How Techlash Novels Like Dave Eggers's The Circle and Jarett Kobek's I Hate the Internet Make the Need for Change Feel Real

Beware the Siren ServersHow Techlash Novels Like Dave Eggers's The Circle and Jarett Kobek's I Hate the Internet Make the Need for Change Feel Real Roy Sommer (bio) In a recent contribution to the international edition of The Guardian, Alex Clark (2017) predicts the return of the protest novel. "From Ali Smith's Brexit book to Howard Jacobson's Trump satire, writers are responding to the political moment," she observes: "But can art bring real change?" This question is probably as old as art itself, and one that neither writers nor literary critics and narrative theorists will ever be able to answer conclusively. After all, the aesthetic experience of reading a book about the experiences of literary characters bears little resemblance to lived experience (except for the precious hours when reading is life), writers are not politicians, and protest novels, at least the better ones, stay away from political propaganda. The cultural relevance of the novel cannot depend on its ability to change the world. [End Page 51] What fiction can do, however, is generate new perspectives on reality that may make us reconsider the current state of affairs in the light of possible alternatives. Brian McHale (2011) has suggested viewing novels as thought experiments designed to produce not just models of the world, that is, mimetic representations, but models for the world. The latter can then develop a life of their own, in their readers' minds. This is true not only for science fiction, McHale's main example, but also for the social novel, including the emerging subgenre of the techlash novel, that is, narrative fiction concerned with the excesses of digital technology and culture. In the context of a narratological discussion of the complex relationships between ideology critique and narrative form, McHale's distinction between literary reflections of cultural models and the generation of alternative possible worlds helps us understand literature's specific contribution to ideology critique: the possibilities range from satirical exaggeration to utopian or dystopian visions of future societies, as well as social realism.1 Dave Eggers's bestselling novel The Circle (2013) offers an intriguing blend of these generic conventions, allowing the reader to experience how a narrative of social mobility gradually turns into a story about self-delusion, corporate propaganda, and surveillance culture. In contrast to classical dystopian fiction, Eggers's novel is not about the individual's fight against a totalitarian state, but a warning against the consequences of "mind change" (Greenfield 2015) caused by social networking technologies. My reading analyzes key aspects of the novel's narrative design, such as the use of focalization for representing consciousness, and its potential effects, with a focus on empathy. It draws on the conceptual framework of rhetorical narratology, which links the textual dynamics of narrative world modeling to readerly dynamics. It then briefly contrasts The Circle with Jarett Kobek's novel I Hate the Internet (2016), which covers similar themes but chooses a completely different approach to narrative mediation. By contrasting Eggers's social realism with Kobek's Archimedean use of heterodiegetic narration, the essay sheds light on the wide range of fictional responses to digital ideology. [End Page 52] Giving Siren Servers a Face: A Rhetorical Reading of Dave Eggers's The Circle First published in 2013, The Circle quickly became a bestselling novel, bridging the gap between literary fiction and the young adult novel. The Circle has even made it onto the reading lists of high schools in Germany, superseding classics like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's 1984 (1949), or William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954). That is rather surprising, given the conservative nature of curricula, which often remain largely unchanged for decades despite the literary studies debates about the canon. The appeal of Eggers's novel is, therefore, also indicative of concerns among educators that the early generations of digital natives are growing up in, and are conditioned to accept, a new kind of surveillance culture, where the threat to privacy and freedom no longer comes from the state as an authority seeking to increase its power over its subjects. The greatest risk to individual freedom, Eggers reminds us, is no...