Jennifer Egan’s “The Black Box” has emerged as a unique short science fiction about future citizen espionage. Published in 2012, the story is a bold and triumphant experiment of narrative presented in new media. Besides Egan’s ability to embrace the wide-ranging virtues, forms, and pleasures that accompany traditional storytelling in a digital format, the author succeeds in depicting a number of sensitive and popular themes, especially objectification of women and benefits and dangers of technology in a skillful manner. Although Egan does not follow a conventional approach by presenting her short science fiction in form of Twitterature, she succeeds in capturing familiar themes and offering an unusual and immediate reading experience for individual readers.
Egan has joined a growing number of artists, who have exploited the new opportunities presented by social media, especially Twitter. According to Bao-yum, Twitter has created a new and distinct literary narrative form, commonly known as Twitterature (822). The newly founded narrative form focuses on the use of social media networking sites as a platforms and portals for readership. In particular, Twitterature comprises a variety of genres that include poetry and short fictions and nonfictions. While the author has to observe the 140-character maximum on Twitter, individual authors are free to mix genres to target readers who identify with contemporary image culture. Egan’s prose is a typical case in point because it is not only concise and witty, but also uses poetically rhythmic phrases that adapt to the desired writing style and formation of the medium. For instance, the author has ensured that her opening sentences mimics proverbs and easy-to-read quotes:
“People rarely look the way you expect
Them to, even when you’ve seen pictures” (Egan 85).
The intriguing plot and the cryptic style employed by the author go a long way in giving the reader the much-needed extraordinary and satisfying experience. The author is successful in combining the Twitter technology and the traditional serial form as her posts about the story appear one minute apart. In this way, the tale is presented with elegant precision, qualifying it to an evocative poem that entices the reader. As Gee puts it, serialization in the context of social media platforms is beneficial to the writer because it allows them to react and response to any forms of external influences (par. 5). In essence, serialized content is subject to complements and complaints by readers and scholarly critics.
In addition, Egan’s choice of medium, writing style, and narration format resonate with the ongoing revolution in the field of literature as witnessed in new delivery mechanisms and appealing to the new audience through the depiction of themes that characterize the digital age (Rudin). For example, the undercover spy is lady whose body and beauty are exploited in the seduction and submission and data collection processes to benefit the “good guys” (Gee par. 3). In this respect, Egan uses “The Black Box” to depict how women would continue to be objectified even in the future because her protagonist is a volunteer and does not receive any payment for her risk-laden mission and role. In other words, the success of her mission would be determined by how she submits to the powerful and ruthless terrorists.
Works Cited
Bao-yum, NIE. “Exploring Image Culture through Narrative: A Study on Jennifer Egan’s Twitter Fiction “Black Box.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 5, no. 10, 2015, pp. 820-829.
Egan, Jennifer. Black Box. New York: The New Yorker Digital Edition, 2012.
Gee, Lisa. “Black Box, by Jennifer Egan.” Independent, 2012.
Rudin, Michael. From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of it. Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 14, no. 2, 2011.