In Thomas Moore’s fiction, interpersonal relations and human experiences are dulled by the digital networks and platforms that are inherently intertwined with them in liquid modernity. The influx of cyber communications into our personal lives has saturated them with the vaguest sense of unreality, but not an “unreality” in the sense of “dream-like” or “surreal.” Instead, what Moore’s characters seem to experience is a subconscious unease that I often feel in my own life: “Is this real? Is my life a narrative arch or a simulation of one? Do I even exist at all?” In Moore’s fiction, living is more like lingering, a state of sentience beyond a spiritual death.
Such is the by-product of cyber communications. Instagram and Twitter have largely replaced authentic communities; intellectual, artistic and otherwise. Moore provocatively illustrates these holes within our lives that dull our experiences and emotions. Joy, love, desire, pain, sadness, connection, disdain: when these emotions play out in cyberspace, we simulate feeling these emotions at all. This leaves us pondering whether our lives have any material weight. Moore’s characters experience this confusion as a dulled, gnawing despair and a resigned, pathetic acceptance. Maybe they don’t exist? Maybe that’s ok?
In Moore’s novel Alone, recently published by Philip Best’s (also noise musician of Consumer Electronics and Whitehouse fame) Amphetamine Sulphate imprint, an unnamed narrator endures a prolonged breakup with his semi-involved boyfriend of eight months Daniel. Early on in the novel, the narrator proclaims: “I’ve always been disgusted by my own love.” Moore’s previous novel Into My Arms was broadly concerned with its protagonist’s desire for connection. <i>Alone</i> then is the logical extension of that theme. Its protagonist has resigned himself to loneliness and solitude and is attempting to find peace within disconnected solace.
Darja Bajagic Ex Axes Pink Sweater
In a post on Dennis Cooper’s blog, Moore chronicles the art and texts that were on his mind throughout the Alone writing process. Concepts related to death and spectral lingering post-mortem are the connective tissues throughout these disparate works. A series of screen-printed axes by Darja Bajagic that depict missing and murdered women on the blades, their images continuing to proliferate digitally reminding their loved ones of their absences and their communities of the violence that lurks around the corner. The final three episodes of The Sopranos are iconically morbid – from the attempted suicide of Anthony Jr. to the deaths of three major characters – but the series provocatively robbed its audience of the sense of finality that deaths typically yield, opting to fade to black and allow us to ponder (literally forever) the fate of Tony Soprano (the single greatest character of the 21st Century). The death of Tony isn’t material, he lingers on spectrally. Tony Soprano and all his mediocrity is a stand in for us, and as long as we exist, so shall he.
Finally, Moore cites Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death, a novel in which a man hires a woman to live with him by the seaside so that he can “learn to love.” The attempt fails, with the woman telling him that he has “the malady of death.” This is the mode I choose to contextualize Alone within. This isn’t solely a text about loneliness, it’s a text about the acceptance of loneliness as an acceptance of death itself. In his decision to slowly let his relationship erode due to his innate “disgust with his own love,” Moore’s protagonist accepts his own symbolic death. He immerses himself in the digital world – in Grindr and other vaguely hollow methods of digital communications – and lets go. Is this not cyberspace’s ultimate function? By choosing to live within it, we tacitly accept to vanish from our actual lives. We choose death over life. We float through the web immaterially, averse to our own corporeality.
Duras’s influence is all over Moore’s writing, even if he distills that influence into a hyper-contemporary sphere of digital language and late modern pop cultural reference points. Like Duras’, Moore’s novels are textually short but emotionally rich, meant to be consumed within a single reading session. Duras’ text emphasizes an irreconcilable awkwardness between man and woman. Alone, however suggests that that awkwardness is not limited to heterosexual relationships. This tension simmers between all interpersonal dynamics.
Moore’s character is not devoid of desire or love, he is just uncomfortable with it, and opts out. He opts for loneliness. “Loneliness has been the one constant,” he writes. Loneliness in this novel is a signifier of stability. Moore rejects happiness, seeing it as a temporary kink or perversion that cannot and should not be held onto. “The idea of happiness as a goal rather than a transitional state is dangerous and much more damaging for a person to carry around than just knowing that everyone is fucked in some way,” writes Moore.
In her text on melancholia and depression Black Sun, French literary critic and semiotician Julia Kristeva devotes a chapter to Duras’s The Malady of Death. In Duras’s text, Kristeva finds an “aesthetics of awkwardness” that emphasizes the fundamental gap between the sexes that occasionally reveals “the abyss” of human despair. Moore’s is also an “aesthetics of awkwardness.” Throughout the novel, the protagonist finds himself either incapable of or too apathetic to coherently communicate with his partner and friends. His stymied communications are the origins of his resignation into loneliness. Seeming to comment explicitly on his “aesthetics of awkwardness,” Moore writes: “Language is a lie that we are guilty of and have told so many times that most of the time we either believe it or we are too tired to be able to fight off.”
Jonathan Brandis in It
Moore’s incorporation of the language of the Internet into his literature invites humor into the work while also clarifying his critique of contemporary digital life as a kind of death (of love, of connectivity, of “will to power”). The narrator poses the provocative rhetorical question: “Has Grindr killed psychic gay powers?” He notes the rise of Grindr hookups as the death of cruising and, thus, the death of intuitively primordial connection between men.
Throughout the duration of the novel, the prolonged breakup between the narrator and Daniel is prolonged by the introduction of a teenage prostitute named Joseph. Joseph was a childhood Youtube star (that Moore chronicles the depths of his adolescent child star crushes throughout the novel — from Edward Furlong to the 1990 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It’s Jonathan Brandis — seems pertinent here) and started talking with pedophiles on the Internet as a means of alleviating boredom. Joseph, too young to remember anything resembling authentic intimacy, asks the narrator how men hooked up before Grindr. The concept of a non-simulated and not digitally facilitated desire is alien to him.
A few chapters are solely dedicated to Joseph’s johns and the messages they leave on his dating page evaluating his sexual performance and perhaps even more pertinently how “real” he seemed to act in his performed desire towards them. One such john is increasingly pathetic as he gasps for Joseph’s love and affection. This is all that’s left, Moore suggests, the alienation of the contemporary condition is artificially mitigated by the technology we use to conceal our despair and our loneliness.
Alone’s narrator often ideates suicide. His strongest urge towards suicide, he says, erupted from a spontaneous bout of group sex with two friends. This feeling, he says, was indescribably beautiful. What Moore suggests here is that these acts of spontaneous decisiveness are a portal to the ethereal. In group sex and in suicide, both non-passive, engaged and non-verbal decisions, you grasp the real unmitigated by the trappings of contemporary life. Moore pines for a human existence untarnished by media, technology and communications, for humans to be spirits brought together by desire and death, “Back in the woods, everything makes sense when it’s blurred,” he writes. “I wish that we were all ghosts that could merge onto another, blur and then separate beautifully and alone.”