Can I Join You in the Cloud? Or, Longing for the Google Doc:

Rebecca Hussey on Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno

My son and two friends are writing a series of books on Google Slides. They work on the books at school when they can and then my son works on them at home, borrowing my computer and banging on the keys. Sometimes his friends will log on and work on their writing at the same time, their initials appearing in different-colored circles at the document’s top. While pretending not to, I watch them work, sitting by his side on the couch, looking out of the corner of my eye at the children editing their slides, adding speech bubbles, grabbing images off the internet and copying them into the document. They write comments to each other. I can’t see the screen well enough to read them, although I do see my son comment “No,” and I try to figure out what he might be saying no to. But I’m pretending not to watch, so I don’t ask.

I say I’m watching the children write and edit, but is it more accurate to say I’m watching only my son, the one physically present with me? The children are in some fashion together, collaborating in real time, but I’m unsure what this means. I see their comments appear out of nowhere, proof, I suppose, that the other kids are at home in their own spaces, their parents having shared their computers too. Maybe they are in dining rooms or on the living room couch, or maybe they bring their laptops into their bedrooms. They feel each other’s presences, or lack of presence; my son will look up when one of them has to go to dinner and tell me about it. They are together but miles apart in separate houses. They are ten and eleven years old, with little power over where they can go. They have to ask for permission every time they work like this, or at least my son does. I don’t know how things work at the other houses. 

All this can make me sad. We live in a neighborhood with other children, not my son’s writing partners, but other kids he likes, and they don’t play together outside of school or the occasional birthday party. I’ve tried to get kids on the street comfortable with coming to our house or seeing us at their door, but it hasn’t caught on, and I’ve given up. Outside of school, he sees friends on play dates or school events or parties. And he sees them online, as ghostly presences on the screen. 

Tone, by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, was written within Google as well, in a shared Google Doc, one they created out of a desire to think together about the books they are reading. Their book is written in the first person plural, with no demarcation between one person’s words and another’s. Everything within the space of the text has happened to both of them; they feel everything together. They are the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, and the book is one manifestation of their shared body. 

Their project is to explore a problem: “what is tone?” This is work they embark on together because it “could not be undertaken alone.” Why? Because tone, they speculate, is “something like a collective mood.” It’s a communal entity, created by shared feeling, or, if not shared feeling, which implies a certain sameness, then a cloud of feelings created by people in relation to each other, and people looking out on, or in, or through, the world around them. Tone is prepositional. It is about relations, positions, angles, points of view, and how feeling moves in and around these spaces. Tone is created together, and it is best understood, or attempted to be understood, together. 

Their approach uses and subverts academic conventions. They employ the academic apparatus of the abstract, keyword list, and significance statement, but “are still unsure, at the present time, whether we can make the statement for any significance.” They hope that by following this mutual interest “there will be meaning derived from our samplings.” This use of passive voice does not create a sense of formality or remove, but instead invites the reader in. We will be the ones deriving the meaning, or we, in relationship with Samatar and Zambreno, will derive meaning together. The reader has entered the text.

The committee’s method is to gather data through case studies, which consist of the various books they read and think through together, many of them works in translation. As one would expect in a work of academic criticism, the authors bring the work of theorists and scholars into their writing as a contrast to their own claims: they find I.A. Richards’s definition of tone lacking, and they complicate and deepen Sianne Ngai’s interpretation of Quicksand. They bring in the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Lauren Berlant, Mark Fisher, and others to help shape their own thinking. 

Yet, in defiance of academic norms, their approach is tentative, exploratory, and playful. They do not argue for a new definition of tone so much as speculate, ponder, wonder, and question. They try ideas on to see how they feel: “A tone is perhaps a room that we inhabit or are inhabited by.” “Perhaps the study of tone requires attention to positions and how feeling moves between them.” “Could tone be a pheromonal signal?” “The question of tone we suspected had to be solved in the outside, in the green space, in the open air.” 

Late in the book they write, “We still do not possess anything like a conclusive statement about these matters.” The study of tone is a project – a problem – they have taken up but do not set down. Instead, it’s a never-ending study, one the committee might still be working on. Their inability, or more likely their refusal, to conclude creates room for readers to work on the project alongside them. 

In another departure from academic forms, this text is highly personal, bodily, revealing, sometimes a little embarrassing. The authors are present on the page, or it feels like they are. Tone begins with the body, with sound, odor, and light, with “this collective reading body, the zone of our mutual sensitivity, our ground.” 

Beginning with this mutual sensitivity, they worm their way through the books they study, crawl through them – float above them? Dance around them? Gaze up at them? – paying attention to what the writing feels like and how it makes them feel. Their thoughts on Nella Larson’s Quicksand come from their sense that Helga Crane is not irritating, in contrast to Ngai’s response. They are touched and moved by Helga; they feel the book’s mournful atmosphere, and in moments it makes them dizzy. From there, they ponder how narratorial perspective works in the novel, and what the novel implies about masks and identity, class and race, and literature itself. 

They close the chapter with another definition: tone “stands for the oral, the presence of the speaking body. It indicates what is absent from writing. Tone is the absent presence.” The committee shows how attention to personal, embodied response to this “absent presence” can illuminate a text, and also how it happens that readers respond to the text differently. Of course they do. Their body, in whatever form it takes, responds in its own fashion to the body of the text, and that will lead it to different relations and perspectives.

Keeping in view the conditions under which they write, the committee begins subsequent chapters with updates on their location in time and sometimes space. Frequently much time has passed; frequently, they are exhausted. It is difficult to wrest time away from other labors. In a gray February, they consider the melancholy and exhaustion of Sebald’s unnamed narrator in The Rings of Saturn (translated by Michael Hulse). For them, this book is about distance and intimacy. Understanding it is like time traveling; its feeling of melancholy comes from “the porousness of memory into other epochs.” Thinking about Sebald in translation, as well as all the voices Sebald echoes and conjures, leads the committee to consider sound as opposed to voice. Sound, using ideas from Fred Moten, is engagement with the world, “the inside meets the outside,” while voice is the individual speaking. It is within sound, the collective, that they wish to do their work, their study. 

They take a walk along the Hudson in April, enjoying a rare opportunity to be in a landscape together and feeling newly inspired “to keep thinking beyond the individual I.” That summer, the authors write about Heike Geissler’s portrayal of the hoard in Seasonal Associate (translated by Katy Derbyshire), which looks at circulation, accumulation, labor, and capitalism, and posits that the hoard conjures a tone of despair. They carve out time to investigate Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory (translated by David Boyd), Mieko Kanai’s story “Rabbits” (translated by Phyllis Birnbaum) and other works. They consider the human/animal relationship and how tone can include the screeching of parrots, the smell of fur and blood, the longing of an encaged polar bear. They wonder what a “glandular literature” might be like. They think about tone as ecological.

In “Guest Lecture, or Reports to an Academy,” the committee attends a conference together and are at their most revealing and most at odds with academia. They are guests in multiple senses: guests of the university hosting the event, and guests within academia itself, not as honored visitors to be touted, but as precarious workers who are expected to perform on call, to always produce, to always be available. They are exhausted. They slip off their shoes in the moments before the talk begins, they carry snacks in their bags and eat them while walking across campus, they feel they need but cannot have more time to prepare. They feel shame about how they answered a question at lunch. They are inhabiting the imposter tone. 

Their rebellion comes through their reading, which allows the “possibility of immersing ourselves in the space of literature, unsystematically, recklessly, and together.” It comes through their writing, which is diaristic, bodily, a “minor literature” that is not evaluated by success or sales. It comes from refusing to feel comfortable as a guest lecturer and instead inhabiting the awkwardness of it. It comes from taking pleasure in students who playfully suggest even more definitions of tone. They feel a longing for Moten and Harney’s “undercommons” where talk and study take place outside the classroom, where it can feel lively and secret and good.

The authors study tone together both because tone is an ensemble entity, and because they experience “a desire for the collective”:

The longing was to reach beyond the limitation of the first person, to find something like a commons. How tired we were of the us that was us, how much we wanted to transcend this Name Name and that Name Name and all of what it meant, our names, our skin. To formalize the shedding we were already experiencing, in our epistolary relationship, in the other ways we have formed community, in the literature of quavering subjectivities in relation to others.

They want to leave their names behind and instead plunge into the communal, where the very idea of an individual self and body begins to break apart. Their body can be singular or multiple. It is distributed and exists in relation; it is in, around, among, and within, others. The nature of this body slips and slides; the body is Tone, it’s the books they read together, it’s on the screen, it’s in the air. Occasionally the body occupies a single, identifiable geographical location. But mostly the committee is “chimerical, a creature of fiction with keyboard fingertips.” 

The committee finds the preposition that best captures the tone of each book they study: Quicksand’s preposition is “to,” for the intense feelings that emanate from Helga outward to the reader; The Rings of Saturn is characterized by “above,” or “from a great height” to capture the effect of distancing; Seasonal Associate’s preposition is “inside,” as in “trapped inside the hoard”; The Factory and “Rabbits” are about being “between,” as in “between human and animal,” and so on.

So what is the best preposition for Tone? Possibly it is “through,” as in the committee worming its way through texts, fertilizing them, mixing up the organic matter, making room for air and water to get deeper inside. I like this metaphor, as somehow this book feels as though it’s working toward a healthier ecosystem, richer soil, a place where other living things can grow. 

I think the most apt preposition, however, is “among,” as in “among others,” in the group or the crowd. The committee positions itself within each book, among its people and landscapes. It thinks about its relationships within the book’s world and how feelings move among all the elements within and around it. These relationships extend to readers: the committee starts from its composition of two people and invites others to join, to walk among them or follow their trail. I feel welcome to follow and then diverge onto my own path, to find my own position and direction. There is no formal invitation, but there’s an inviting gesture, an opening we can enter and a space for us to inhabit:

But perhaps, we write to each other, this longing for lighted windows is also an interest in spaces, of not only interior spaces, not only an I, but of imagining this space of and for others. I and you and we. Perhaps, we write to each other, this awareness of others, in their spaces, is something like ecological thinking, in that it approaches atmosphere.

There’s joy in this spacious feeling. There is plenty of room for all; the atmosphere can extend indefinitely and the conversation never ends. This is a form of study, thinking of Moten and Harney and the undercommons, that feels good. 

A long-distance friend and I talked on Facetime last summer, months before Tone came out although we had already read it, about how jealous we are of Samatar and Zambreno, of their friendship and their collaboration. How lovely to find someone to share the space of a Google Doc with, someone who will obsess about the same books as you and write with you without caring whose words go where and that neither of you gets “credit” for your theories and your stories. At least this is how I imagine it went. How fun not to care that it’s unclear what happened to you and what happened to the other. To be part of the “we,” to take pleasure in the uncertainty and the inaccuracies that come up. We wanted to enter that Google Doc somehow. Kate and Sofia, can we be your friends too? 

A few months later, we created our own shared Google Doc. We did it not to write a book, but to create a planning document for a reading group we wanted to start. We weren’t trying to copy Kate and Sofia, exactly, but they planted the idea in our minds, and now we experienced the satisfaction of adding notes and sources and links to our planning document, one picking up the work where the other left off. The plan was to lead a group reading and study of Kate Briggs’s two solo-authored books and two Roland Barthes translations. We knew we wanted to dig into those books more deeply than we had before and we wanted to do it together – we had already talked about the books for hours – and we thought others might want to join in. 

It turns out they did; as of this writing, we are a month into the project and other people are reading with us and sharing their thoughts in various online spaces. We post quotations and photos of our books and where we are reading. We see each other’s faces on Google Meet. We have a website and a newsletter, and we write responses to the books and to each other in comment sections. 

In spite of the planning document, my friend and I are mostly making it up as we go along; we know only that there’s pleasure in working and reading together, that the people who love the books we do usually don’t live in our towns and cities, and that we can carve out spaces – pieces of websites that are often owned by terrible people – to be together. 

Do you, reader, feel a longing to get outside your self, your body, and be a part of something bigger? To stretch your brain in ways you don’t yet understand so it can think new thoughts about what a body can be? To join the cloud and be with others in the atmosphere? I can’t tell if this feeling is growing in the larger culture or if it’s growing among my circle of friends and acquaintances and people whose books I read, or if it’s just me. I want to find the undercommons, to forget about myself, to add to the sound around me rather than hearing my own voice, alone. I read books like Tone, like Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, Eliane Brum’s Banzeiro Òkòtó (translated by Diane Whitty), Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless (translated by Penny Hueston), Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds, Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, Kate Briggs’s The Long Form, Kate Zambreno’s other books and, of course, The Undercommons – books that expand the possibilities of what a self can be – and I feel hope and also longing. I feel my brain breaking open a little bit. I feel a little less despairing. I feel as if I have a project – to break my brain open a bit further – and I feel I have the energy for it.  

My son’s writing project helps keep despair away. I am sad we don’t have the neighborhood I want, and I’m sad the people who read the books I love don’t live near me, but we are doing the best we can. We find community where we can; we write with other people however we can. We use the tools at hand. We inhabit the spaces that are available. We try to create spaces for others. We join the Google Doc and envision ourselves in the cloud.