I. A Hermeneutical
Approach
The theory of interpretation is, of course, a necessary
theoretical prelude to any actual act of reading, but it is particularly
obvious in the case of the modern classic My Immortal. To begin with,
the at times bizarrely agrammatical and almost invariably misspelled text can
be disorienting to those unprepared; and, what’s more, the story is one of the
most densely metatextual pieces of literature in existence, with not only the
“author’s” personal comments (and, indeed, psychological peculiarities) being
brought to the level of text, but also a pervasive pastiche of pop-cultural
semiotics and evaluation informing both characterization and plotting. (Not to
mention that such references are often, themselves, garbled or erroneous.)
Probably the most pertinent issue in hermeneutics for our
present purposes is the validity and significance of the “death of the author”
concept, a popularized element of post-modern critical theory. In broad terms,
“death of the author” signifies that, in stark contradiction to older models of
interpretation, authorial “intent” has little or no actual influence on the
meaning of a given text. However, there are still at least two major options to
consider as the locus of meaning in a text: “above the text,” which is to say,
in the reader’s own response to the words; and “in the text,” that is, inherent
in the combination of words regardless of the intent of the author who writes
it and the reader who responds to it. It has been increasingly common for the
former to be regarded as the primary (or sole) locus of meaning—the supposed
impossibility of accessing a world external to the perceiving mind, or at least
of communicating or transmitting values across or between
communally-constructed “worldviews” making it such that meaning can only ever
be found in the personally constructed world of the individual reader (or, at
best, in a given cultural community). However, “in the text” has been suggested
as the locus, as well, perhaps most significantly and famously by T.S. Eliot,
with his championing of the “objective correlative.” The objective correlative
concept dictates that the artist’s aim is to produce a sequence of words (or
other signifiers, depending on the medium—mutatis mutandis) that will
produce in the audience exactly the emotion or response which the author
purposes. In other words, the author is to produce a “formula” for a given
feeling, and the failure to evoke precisely this feeling is the failure of the
artist. (Eliot, of course, notoriously declared that Hamlet was exactly
this sort of failure.)
It seems, however, that the “death of the author” has
been declared somewhat too hastily (rumors of the author’s demise have been
greatly exaggerated). There is, we suggest, some validity in locating meaning
in any of the three logical “spaces”: “below” the text, “in” the text, and
“above” the text. To deny the intention of the author any sort of significance
at all is surely going too far, as this would deny to written communication
what is obviously of interpretive significance in verbal, with the expressions,
body language, and intonation of the speaker shading our understanding of the
communicated words. (“I’d love to,” said sarcastically, is, after all, exactly
opposite in significance to “I’d love to,” said excitedly.) Then, too, the
total “death of the author” would fly in the face of basic assumptions we make
and cannot help but make in all sorts of circumstances. Translation from one
language to another, for instance, would be entirely impossible without
denaturing the text completely, since both the text and the reader-response
would be wholly other from the original. (A non-Germanophone, for instance,
will hardly respond to Der Zauberberg in the same way as to its English
form, The Magic Mountain. The former would only, inevitably, cause
confusion, and perhaps frustration.) A rigorous understanding of the death of
the author would make not only traditional literary interpretation, but even
mundane communication, entirely fantastical.
There is, however, something also to be said for the
residence of meaning in the text itself. Consider a political polemicist, who
begins his career as a fervent Marxist, later to consider himself utterly
mistaken, and come to champion the cause of free market republicanism. The
author’s reconsideration of his earlier stance does not mean that his early
Marxist propaganda now means its opposite, any more than his prior radicalism
makes his later capitalism ironic. The text as text has its own coherence
(perfect or imperfect, as the case may be), and its evaluation as a text must
take this into consideration. An argument imperfectly presented in one instance
is not made better by its later presentation in a sounder way, though we are
entitled to (and perhaps ought to) make note of the development of the
argument as presented by the author. Eliot’s objective correlative is surely
too naïve and brash (since, of course, the reader himself is not a cipher—there
probably does not exist any possible combination of signs that evokes in
all readers, equally, the same feeling, and likewise probably not any
combination that does so even for a “typical” reader), but it does not follow
that certain “correlatives” are not better or worse-suited to evoke given
feelings. (The skillful artist can, however, manipulate even the “unfitness” of
a given image to greater effect. Eliot himself did so masterfully—consider the
“pleasantly unpleasant” image of the evening sky as “a patient etherized on a
table”—as did one of his most significant influences and English-language
forebears, John Donne, in whose work, for instance, a lover is compared to a
bucket of chum.)
Finally, there is something to be said, indeed, for the possibility
of meaning on the reader-side of the text. This is not to say (necessarily)
that the reader is free to demolish and rebuild the text as he or she sees fit.
It is, however, to note that all discourse occurs in context, and that what is
germane to one context may not be to another, even if the principle behind it
is valid. So, for instance, Euclid cannot possibly have imagined the particular
array of circumstances that, in our era, make human flight possible. Nor does
his Elements make mention of the possible aeronautical applications of
his theorems. However, in the mind of the aeronautical engineer, part of the
significance (and hence also the meaning) of Euclid’s observations is
their use in the design of sound aircraft. The “cognitive horizon” (to borrow a
phrase) of the author is not the same as that of the reader, but the meaning of
the text finds (valid) expression in both, assuming that the meaning is not
false. (Perhaps also if it is, albeit in a rather different way. This is part
of why the criticism of literary art is not perfectly quantifiable: its outcomes
are not demonstrable in the way that, say, a geometric proof is.) Indeed, it is
probable that this open structure is part of the very stance of the
communicative (or at least artistic) act: consciously or unconsciously, one
writes or speaks with the intention that the reader or hearer will take the
words conveyed, wrestle with them, and make them his or her own, appropriating
them to him or herself, not by doing violence to them, but by making them part
of an integrative grasp of his or her own understanding of things.
All of this discussion brings us to the issue at hand:
how ought we to interpret My Immortal? To begin with, we must settle at
least some preliminary questions. First, who is the author? We have
acknowledged that the provenance of a work is not, or not entirely, irrelevant
to its meaning. Whence, then, My Immortal? The text itself (or rather,
the original textual apparatus online) claims that its author is one Tara
Gillesbie, allegedly a teenage girl who (fantastical and obviously false claims
to live in Dubai aside) lives or lived in Connecticut. In a unique way, for
reasons that will become clear, the nature of this personality is central to
the interpretation of the text. The principal question being, as will be known
to many readers of this work, whether or not Tara is what is commonly known as
a “troll” (i.e., one who deliberately adopts an attitude or opinion, or who
tells a story, in order to provoke anger or confusion in the audience). My
Immortal is, after all, a story riddled with absurd leaps in logic, bizarre
appropriations of existing fictional characters, aggressively stupid and
reductionistic models of human behavior and reality at large, and generic
errors of sundry kinds. It is tempting to ascribe this simply to the
incompetence of the author, and to take all of the textual apparatus at
face-value, on which view Tara Gillesbie would be simply an empty-headed
adolescent misguidedly and stubbornly attempting to express her incoherent and,
indeed, downright vicious outlook on life. This, however, is clearly a mistake.
The very consistency of certain grammatical and/or lexical errors, the
aggressively decontextualized take on certain characters, certain recurrent
elements of the apparatus (chiefly relating to the putative author’s
relationship with her “real life” friends), and at least one pop cultural reference
(namely, the sudden and singular invocation of Back to the Future, which
a real-world equivalent of “Tara” would almost certainly not know, still less
make use of in fiction) drive us in a rather different direction. “Tara
Gillesbie,” whether or not that name also belongs to the true author of the
text, is nothing other than a hugely original and brilliantly constructed
fictional persona, a true narrator-character in the class of Melville’s Ishmael
and Doyle’s Watson, albeit one involved even more than they in the metatextual
tangle which has become a hallmark of post-modern literature.
The significance of this is truly staggering. Rather than
merely an example of the culture of the so-called “internet age,” My
Immortal is a profound and complex parable about it. The
structure of it is exquisitely suited to this purpose: a story written by a
narcissistic, vapid, pop-culture-obsessed “author” about a narcissistic,
vapid, pop-culture-obsessed girl, published on that most-fitting website,
fanfiction.net, a notorious gathering place for the unself-conscious
self-obsessed. The real author even responds to criticism of her constructed
persona in a purely typical way, by attempting to destroy the evidence (while
knowing full well, of course, that merely removing the story from the website
could never actually suppress its spread). The intrusion of apparently
irrelevant personal trivia into the story itself (to the point that even the
supposed fictional equivalent of a real-life friend of the “author” undergoes a
massive and rapid re-characterization in response to “real-life” happenings),
the pidgin-English patois of abbreviated and otherwise mutilated words so
reminiscent of teenage texting and emailing patterns, the invincibly ignorant
opinions on pop-culture ephemera and “scenes”—all these are not incidental
features surrounding a barebones plot. They are, instead, the very substance of
the story’s import. The text forces
us to confront not only the vapidity of the so-called “internet age,” but even
the inherent vapidity of art-as-such (art-as-self-expression,
art-as-projection, etc.). My Immortal is, in the best tradition
of surrealism, the confrontation of the reader with a funhouse-mirror version
of himself, an exaggerated but still essentially similar presentation of the
interior nature of this era and us, its products. We ought not, therefore, be
discouraged by periodic difficulties in deciphering individual words, the
meaning of phrases, or even whole movements of the story arc. These are the
author’s acerbic reproduction of that snarl which lies in all our hearts. The
reader must be bold to read on, with the hopes that confronting that inward
beast will be, in the end, enough to beat it down.
II. The Body of the
Text
Chapter 1
The very first bit of genuine
text we are given in My Immortal is an author’s note (invariably
designated by the writer as “AN”), which is significant both formally and
materially. As a structural feature, we are introduced at this point to the
true central character, “Tara Gillesbie” (as distinct from the possible genuine
Tara, the author of the work as a whole), and the chief elements of her
(abhorrent) persona are already at least nascent in the words presented. The
repugnantly stupid punning of “special fangz,” the constant need for external
validation represented by the repeated “geddit?”, the wearisome habit of
immediately dividing the world into the camps of “goff” and “prep” (this latter
only present by implication, however, for the time being)—all are already
present. The actual content of the note, too, conveys some purely functional
information: the name of the narrator, a few details of her persona, her
friendship with “raven.” These will prepare us for later developments, as well
as give us a rough idea of the style and thematic content of the “story” (in
reality, only one element of the metatextual parable which is the text as a
whole) which will follow.
Tara’s “story” is divided from the author’s note by a
border of capital “X”s, a fact which is not unimportant. This method of
dividing the text from the apparatus is clumsy and overwrought, hallmarks of
Tara’s style. Furthermore, they produce a sort of dramatic irony, as it seems
that Tara is determined to make a clear distinction between her own personal
circumstances and the story proper, while we, the audience, know that her
personal circumstances are entirely inseparable from the story. (A rather
ingenious and delicate touch on the part of the true author is that author’s
notes are also inserted in inline parentheses in the body of the text, not only
spatially embedded in the story but also not even rendered grammatically
separate by the more proper use of editorial brackets.)
The first content of Tara’s story is a description of the
narrating character, “Ebony Dark’Ness Dementia Raven Way,” offered in a bizarre
combination of specific but somehow also generic terms, as well as being
accompanied by a pair of references to “goffik” culture (and here it seems
appropriate to note that the title of the work itself is taken from a song by
the quasi-gothic—probably better described as “emo”—music group, Evanescence).
The dominant traits of not only Ebony but Tara as characters are manifest in
this: self-obsession, vapidity and shallowness, a hopeless insecurity in
personal identity tied to a desperate appeal to sub-cultural specificity for
the confirmation of her individuality. Her comment that she would like to be
related to Gerard Way “because he’s a major fucking hottie” hints at perverse
sexual peccadilloes (i.e., the fetishization of quasi-incest), threatening the
reader with the unmasking of his or her own concealed desires. It is possible
that her being described as a “vampire” is an allusion to the Twilight
series of books, a notorious favorite of vapid, stupid teenagers, as well as a
practically fanfic-caliber literary work, which would only contribute to the
cumulative effect of the author’s overall teen-idiot-culture pastiche.
The only actual “plot point” which occurs in this chapter
is Ebony’s (extremely brief) confrontation with a group of “preps” (her
response being one of the work’s most important leitmotifs: “I put up my middle
finger at them”) and her exchange of greetings with Draco Malfoy. Two important
thematic concerns are present in this chapter: first, Ebony’s reflexive
hostility to “preps,” which is a concise and apt representation of the general
“insider-outsider” or “us-them” dynamic which is a common feature of post-modern
accounts of history and the human condition (as Ebony’s efforts at
self-actualization revolve principally around her desperate desire to establish
herself as genuinely “goffik” and, consequently, her vilification of any and
all persons who act otherwise, so, too, the author says, are all of our
attempts at defining “our group” inherently hostile and dehumanizing to that
which is not “our group”); and second, Ebony’s almost schizoid, retarded
sexuality, as her naked fantasizing about an incestuous relationship with her
ideal mate (the aforementioned musician Gerard Way) gives way to a coquettish,
effete flirtation with Draco. Perhaps the author is commenting on the at times
all-too great distance between interior sexual desire and exterior romantic-sexual
behavior: the felt savagery of lust and fantasy being forcibly restrained, we
are left only with vague and groping attempts at genuine intimacy with real
persons.
That the chapter ends with an author’s note nakedly and
directly begging for validation from the reader only underscores the inherent
rootlessness of the Tara persona. Despite her scrabbling attempts at forging a
sense of self from the scraps of quasi-authentic aesthetic and artistic flotsam
she encounters, she is ultimately entirely adrift. Here is the classic
conundrum of the insecure narcissist: her need to perceive herself as excellent
drives her to acquire praise from outsiders, since her fundamental lack of
self-assuredness makes her own self-evaluation hollow and meaningless. Her demand,
“IS it good?” is the lonely howl of the lost and starving cur that is her
inward self.
Chapter II
Here, already, one of the major patterns of the text is
established: repeated descriptions, at length, of characters’ looks, clothing,
and physical possessions. The same element was present in the first chapter,
but its recurring so quickly (after some one or two hundred words) indicates to
us that this is an ingrained feature of the narrative. The Tara persona regards
personal adornment, whether through clothing, makeup, or hairstyle, as basic to
characterization—indicative of her almost defiant banality. Here, the text’s
actual author demonstrates once again not only her facility with prose, but her
bone-deep awareness of literary method and history: there can be little doubt
that the deluge of sartorial and aesthetic data is a conscious or
semi-conscious echo of Moby-Dick, in which the bulk of the text lays out
the fundamentals of cetology and whaling mechanics, rather than directly
advancing the plotline. By inundating the reader so, both Melville and our
author produce in the reader an externally-induced cognitive environment which
is germane to the story itself. In the case of Moby-Dick, it builds in
the reader something like the whaler’s near-religious awe of the whale (so
crucial to the allegorical and symbolic meaning of that novel), while in My
Immortal, it presses on us the truly odious and crushingly barren nature of
our pseudo-protagonist. It immerses us in her thought patterns, in a manner
reminiscent of what is called in linguistics “grammatical modeling” (i.e., the
use of atypical grammar or syntax to evoke a particular mood or response in the
reader, or to demonstrate something about the subject of the text itself).
The plot of Tara’s story is advanced minutely in this
chapter (a glacial pace being characteristic of her narrative style, as, of
course, trappings and appearances are of far greater concern to her than even
the most shallow and juvenile of plots): we are introduced for the first time
to Ebony’s friend, Willow, the avatar of Tara’s own friend, Raven, whose
function is (in Tara’s construction) simply to reiterate to us information we
already know, and (presumably) to confirm Ebony’s value as a person, since she
is not a genuine outsider, but rather a central part of the school’s “cool”
clique, the “goffs.” In the author’s construction, however, Willow serves to
underscore the utter narcissism of the Tara persona, as Willow is virtually
nothing other than an accessory to Ebony, a similarly attractive and chic
figure who largely echoes Ebony’s own opinions or assessments. After the
briefest of exchanges between Ebony and Willow, during which Ebony denies her
obvious attraction to Draco (evidently to establish, from Tara’s perspective,
Ebony’s coquettish, hard-to-get air of detachment), Ebony once again encounters
Draco (whose entrance is described in such naked and artless terms—“Just then,
Draco walked up to me”—that the reader cannot help be made forcibly conscious
of Tara’s own guileless storytelling, in which wish-fulfillment is the only
guiding logic), and the two exchange painfully unrealistic flirtations. Draco
goes on to (coyly, because it is necessary that even the male characters
exhibit overtly effeminate characteristics, in order to underscore the
monomania of the Tara persona, as she is entirely unable to empathize with a
masculine personality) invite Ebony to a concert. That the concert in question
is to be performed by Good Charlotte, a rather textbook example of the so-called
“pop punk” genre, only reiterates the hollowness of Tara’s constructed “goffik”
identity. For all her appeals to counter-cultural cachet, she does not even
understand what is in and out of bounds in her chosen milieu. The chapter
concludes with a laughable attempt at inducing suspense, with Ebony only
“gasping.” Here, again, Tara’s sheer pettiness is pressed upon us forcefully:
she expects the reader to so identify with and, presumably, be invested in
Ebony that her slightest decision is regarded as weighty and dramatic.
Chapter III
In the author’s note, Tara openly attacks her critics,
which offers us yet another minute window into her psychology: while she is
deeply sensitive to any perceived attack, she is also desperate for validation.
Despite the fact that her writing seemingly only leads to frustration and hurt,
she is compelled to continue on, driven by the need to be praised and admired.
Further, she divides the audience neatly into two camps: “prep” critics, and
appreciative “goffs.” Here we see her worldview at its clearest—value is
equated with standing as a “goff,” and this in turn with support for Tara.
Opposition to her is equivalent to “preppiness,” and this is the severest
condemnation she can muster. Here is a modern form of the sheep and the goats,
but one whose tragedy comes from its very pettiness. The world of the
twenty-first century is such that we draw our grand, cosmic lines not between
those blessed and those condemned by a transcendent Almighty, but between those
who wear pastels and those who wear black. Look on our works, ye mighty, and
pity us.
In story terms, the chapter begins with Ebony’s
preparations for the concert. Again, her clothing is described at length, along
with her hairstyle and makeup. However, this sequence is also disrupted, almost
violently, by Ebony’s sudden onset of “depression,” leading her to cut herself.
As she bleeds, she reads a “depressing book” and listens to Good Charlotte
(“GC”), another indicator of the hopelessly adolescent quality of Tara as well
as her cluelessness about real-world “gothic” tastes. While, from the
perspective of Tara, this is no doubt intended to further characterize her
personal avatar, Ebony, it also serves as the author’s commentary on the innate
problems in the concept of “cool.” While society at large regards gothic
sub-cultural tastes and values as uncool or, at least, eccentric, gothic
culture is really nothing but the logical endpoint of what seems to be a
persistent theme in most understandings of “coolness,” namely, a streak of
apathetic self-destructiveness. For reasons that may never be entirely clear,
wanton disregard of one’s own wellbeing—whether manifested in comparatively
mild ways like cigarette smoking or risky physical activities like
rock-climbing, or in more reckless ones like the use of heavy narcotics or
binge-drinking—often exert a magnetic pull on the culture at large. Popular
musicians, actors, and athletes are notoriously prone to such habits, and if
there is anything even approaching a consensus on “cool,” they belong within
its bounds. Perhaps it was this to which Freud referred when he spoke of
“Thanatos” and the “death-wish.” And it is certainly this dark, magnetic power
that Tara is attempting to invoke. The author, however, unmasks its basic irrationality
and pointlessness at the very same moment. Tara wishes to impress us with her
fearlessness in the face of death, even evincing an infatuation with it—but the
author well knows that this is only ever posturing. It is only ever whistling
in the encroaching darkness.
Having completed her preparations, Ebony meets with Draco
and his “flying car,” which, along with his clothing, serves as the
materialistic prelude without which Tara finds it impossible to conceive of
characterization. He is described rather conspicuously as wearing makeup of the
same sort as Ebony herself—the suggestion, perhaps, of a narcissistic libido?
of onanistic egotism?—after which an author’s note indignantly declares, “a lot
fo kewl boiz wer it ok!” in one of the author’s most delightful parodic
touches. Tara’s defensiveness here is a perfect encapsulation of the voice of
the stunted adolescent female. Her desire is fundamentally for herself, so even
her sexual fantasies revolve, in the end, around reflections of herself. Her
mode of thought is still so fundamentally egocentric that, despite her
heterosexual proclivities, the object of desire cannot be masculine, because
masculinity is “other” to her. The uneasiness of this state of affairs will be
revealed more fully in the bizarrely dialectical attitude Ebony espouses toward
male bisexuality: the male objects of desire are made to participate in a
sexual appreciation of the masculine in order to familiarize and disarm them,
but any actual instance of male homosexuality is treated with disdain. The
males in Ebony’s life must be sufficiently homoerotic to be an acceptable
facsimile of the feminine, but not so much as to challenge Ebony’s own
dominance as a desirable partner.
Ebony and Draco proceed to the concert, along the way
indulging in more “cool” (read: self-destructive) behaviors—“We both smoked
cigarettes and drugs.” Tara (in another beautifully conceived instance of
parody) reproduces Good Charlotte lyrics at length, presumably in another
attempt at establishing her authentic connection to “goffik” culture. The
irony, of course, is that Good Charlotte is not remotely a gothic band, and her
hopeful grasping at insider-status only more firmly shuts her outside. (Of
course, implicit in all this is the author’s own savage critique of the very
concept of being “inside” a circle. The author knows, and communicates to the
reader, that even a successful attempt is fundamentally pointless and has no salve
for the soul-sickness of the lonely.)
In a further elaboration of the psycho-sexual dynamic
core to the story thus far, Draco responds in a characteristically “feminine”
way to Ebony’s acknowledgement of another male’s sexual desirability (in this
case, Good Charlotte front-man Joel Madden): he pouts and falls sullen, until
assured by Ebony that he (Draco) is still the principal object of her desire.
Here, again, the feminization of the major male figure so far, but coupled with
a purely narcissistic self-aggrandizement on Tara’s part through Ebony. Ebony
is established as the dominant figure in the relationship. Draco’s jealousy is
proof of her comparative freedom. Where he is reduced to anxiety with respect
to her feelings, she betrays no such worry, and feels at liberty to direct her
sexual attentions wherever she pleases. This is, however, undercut by another
devastating bit of authorial wit: she immediately turns to a bitter attack on
Madden’s (then) real-life paramour, “Hillary fucking Duff.” This not only
betrays her (Tara’s) actual lack of self-assurance, but also contains within
itself proof of her own failure to grasp her supposed “goffik” identity, had
she but the intelligence to recognize it: Duff, with her “ugly blonde face,” is
very nearly the epitome of those qualities Tara sees fit to label as “prep.”
That her beloved, “goffik” Joel would involve himself with such a woman is
proof positive that he is not “goffik” at all.
Once
more, Tara reveals her total failure to grasp narrative structure: the final
lines of the chapter are redundant in the highest degree (Draco and Ebony once
again indulge in illicit behavior—drinking underage—and the fact that they are
at a Good Charlotte concert is reiterated, pointlessly), and it actually
concludes with yet another ridiculous “cliff-hanger,” as Draco “drove the car into……………………… the Forbidden Forest!”
From the authorial point of view, however, this is all part of the overall
effect of the cognitive environment. Odious as it is, it is necessary for the
reader to be subjected, over and over again, to the patterns and limitations of
Tara’s mind-set.
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