Out of Epistolary Practice: E-Mail from Emerson, Post-Cards to Pynchon

Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications By William Merrill Decker. University of North Carolina Press, 1998

To begin at the end, or rather at a point that marks both an ending and a beginning: in The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), Jacques Derrida designated the letter "not a genre but all genres, literature itself" (48), and then announced that "an entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications" (197). Foretelling the end of the logocentric era and so our faith in communication and selfhood, Derrida's incomparable epistolary text is not only prophetic. In the view of J. Hillis Miller at least, it is performative, advancing the transformation of print culture embodied in the postal principle toward the metaphysical "beyond" of his title. At the same time, Derrida's very act of reading the last rites for literature and the letter has coincided with a major renaissance of critical and creative interest in the epistolary. Then again, academically, this is really no coincidence at all: Janet Gurkin Altman's ground-breaking formalist study of epistolary fiction, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982), appeared just two years after The Post-Card. Altman was quick to declare her debt to Derrida, as have almost all those following in her wake, including William Decker. Announcing the end of the letter principle, Derrida heralded a new beginning for letter criticism.

What follows is organized around three centers of interest, giving emphasis to the third: the letter's materiality as a mundane technology; the range of letter criticism across the last two decades; and the letter's absence/presence in postwar American fiction with specific reference to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). If this final choice appears arbitrary it arises from two sources. First, a sense that the epistolary field, as sketched below, remains typically divided into separate lines of inquiry and application, crudely: formalist and historical, thematic and institutional, practical and generic, literary and documentary, political and semiotic, feminist and postmodern. Between these lines, Pynchon's text has slipped as through a hole in a net. Provisionally, we might understand this slippage in terms of his novel's particular engagement with the letter, but also in relation to its publication's historical context--which is to say, in terms of epistolary interest, its lack of a recognized context. And second, this venture is prompted by the specific experience of reading Decker's study of nineteenth-century letter writers--principally Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--insofar as it continually begs the question as to what a twentieth-century version of his project might look like. For to ask in what ways comparable modern major American authors might have worked through letter writing is, inevitably, to ask whether such a study would even be possible on the other side of the millennium. Such questions lie beyond Decker's horizons, but his study does close by noting the renewal of the letter in the dematerialized, hybridic form of e-mail, and it is here that any contemporary reckoning with the cultural meaning of the epistolary as one technology among others must begin.

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The effect of e-mail is to render the conventional letter imaginatively impossible. Like any technical innovation, it is more than a matter of updating acceleration. The ease and immediacy of electronic mail does not just make the physical process of letter composition, packaging, and mailing seem dull and ponderous, it renders the very idea of it interminably futile by visualizing a marathon of avoidable labors: from printing the hard-copy sheet of paper to folding it away inside an envelope, from the purchase and fixing of stamps to finding a mailbox, and then through the endless systems of collection, transport, and distribution, from the postman with his canvas...