Explanation
There’s a short story by Max Beerbohm that sometimes comes up in philosophy classes. Enoch Soames, a Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties (1919) tells the story of Max Beerbohm, the author-as-character-within-the-novel, and his encounter with Enoch Soames, an unsuccessful writer and hanger-on in the London cafe scene in the 1890s. Enoch is frustrated that no one recognizes his genius, so he makes a deal with the devil to go forward in time and read about himself in the future where, he is sure, history will vindicate him.
In due course he and Max meet the devil himself in one of the cafes, and Enoch disappears, to pop up in 1997, where he searches the British Library to find out what we’ve thought of him. Some time later, he reappears back in the cafe, despondent. Before the devil spirits him away he explains to Max that he found only one reference to himself, in a work of fiction — a short story by Max Beerbohm! And then he and the devil disappear.
Max-the-character explains that he feels compelled to write this story about Enoch, as it will be the only way his friend will be known at all, despite the fact that it will be classified as fiction. He begs us to take it as biography.
The philosophical problem is, who and what is Enoch Soames? Within the framework of the story, are we to take him as fictional (as we do, and as the author-as-author does), or as “real,” as both Enoch and the author-as-character insist that we should? The logical knots in this seemingly simple puzzle have yet to be fully untangled.
But meanwhile, while the philosophers sort things out, I decided to bring Enoch “back,” on Twitter. I have been intrigued with the fictional and performative aspects of invented online identities for some time. Cyberspace is the perfect place for a fictional character who insists on his own reality.
So Enoch tweets from his vantage point in cyberspace. He is telling his story, but this is not a simple re-posting of the Beerbohm book. I am writing, not a novel, but Enoch himself, as a re-enactment or performance, a kind of “novel-less” character. He still critiques and reacts to the art world of his time, which included a number of flamboyant heavy-hitters: Aubrey Beardsley, John Keats, J.M. Whistler, and Walter Sickert, to name just a few (he has a lot of past scores to settle).
But Enoch also reacts to today’s culture, and has found many sympatico writers and artists in the intervening century that support his point of view, and share his worries about existence. His main interests are the arts, reality, fame, the devil, and the existential dilemma presented by the idea of nothing (or should I say, “nothing”). Of course Enoch loves Nietzsche! But he also loves fan fiction, Henry Darger, MMORPGs, the web, and print-on-demand books.
Follow Enoch on Twitter: @enoch_soames.
Read the Max Beerbohm short story on Project Gutenberg.
My other Twitter narratives include In Search of Adele H (2009-2010), and Shackleton (2011-).
— Peggy Nelson, new media artist, tweets as @otolythe
