Intro
We've talked a lot about how deconstructive and poststructuralist readings don't like to confine themselves to conventional "lit." So, for one more example, let's take a look at a text that folks like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari could only have dreamed about back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when the dinosaurs roamed.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's much-beloved Pride and Prejudice. It was written collaboratively by super-friends Hank Green and Bernie Su, so already we've got all kinds of fun questions to ask about it, like: Is there one real author? and Is it all one text?
But things get even more interesting when you factor in the real kicker: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries isn't a book—it's an online series that aired over the span of a year, across multiple platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Talk about a thousand plateaus.
And ON TOP of all that, the Diaries literally incorporated readers' participation and input. Fans could follow characters' Twitter feeds, and tweet in return; they could "like" characters' Facebook pages, and post on their walls; and, some of the fan fiction and art created by the series' viewers got to be so popular, the Diaries themselves referred back to it. Yeah, we know what you're thinking: rhizome alert!
Quote
Lizzie (holding up a t-shirt): "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. My mom gave each of us one of these last Christmas. I have yet to wear it . . . EVER. Who am I? I'm a 24-year-old grad student, with a mountain of student loans, living at home and preparing for a career. But to my mom, the only thing that matters is that I'm single. My name is Lizzie Bennet, and this is my life."
Analysis
It's kinda crazy to think that all the early deconstructionists and poststructuralists came up with their ideas about texts and hypertexts and un-attributable authorship way before the Internet was even born. And it's also kinda strange to think that so many of the ideas that were so shocking in their time now seem like plain commonsense in our digital world, where adaptation and supplementation and endless networks of active creation abound.
But it isn't enough just to say that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a good illustration of poststructuralist ideas. Any poststructuralist theorist worth her salt would want us to ask ourselves: What does the rhizomatic structure of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries say about the "authenticity" of Pride and Prejudice? What function does the name "Jane Austen" serve, compared to the names "Hank Green" and "Bernie Su"?
Or, for that matter, what does it mean compared to the name "Helen Fielding," whose Bridget Jones's Diary franchise adds another layer of Austenian allusions to the world of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries?
Barthes would probably tell us that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries only makes explicit what was already implicit in Pride and Prejudice: the fact that authors are never singular, and are never doing anything so simple as using language to write. More often, he says, language is using them.
As an example, Barthes would likely point out all the interpretive complications that come out of Austen's fondness for free indirect discourse. That means she lets her supposedly "objective" narration slip into and out of her characters' consciousnesses in a way that was totally off-putting and a little morally questionable to audiences of Austen's time—and it's totally her signature move.
To get specif, in moments like these, it's really hard to tell who's speaking or thinking. Is it the narrator? The character? "Austen" herself? Barthes would say that it's all of these, and more. The novel's language is tied to a whole host of other discursive processes that flicker through the novel: elements like cultural assumptions about how people of certain classes or genders think and act. Or like the unconscious values that inform how we rate some characters' behaviors as better than others'. We're getting profound here.
On the surface, it might seem like online and social media take us far from the language and culture of Regency-era England. But through the lens of poststructuralist theory, we can't help but wonder if The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Pride and Prejudice aren't exactly the same.