Kelroy/Crary/TheFollowing

Today I finished reading Kelroy. The dramatic incidents comes thick and fast in this final section of the story, but not before an episode involving the Gurnets, a nouveau riche family who are the focus of an unusually comic moment in an otherwise dark novel thanks to their ridiculous aspirations to mix with the well-bred. The episode is a reminder of the fact that, although the majority of the novel depicts the upper class as an internally divided group, they are perfectly capable of closing ranks and sneering at their inferiors when required to do so. On the whole, however, intra-class conflict is the focus of the novel’s conclusion. The relationship between Emily and Kelroy comes to a disastrous conclusion when she receives a letter apparently written by Kelroy that declares that he no longer cares for her. Emily is devastated by this news, and to make matters worse, soon after Mrs. Hammond dies of a stroke that robs her of the power to communicate, even though she seems desperate in her last hours to communicate something. We find out what that is when Emily later finds evidence that the letter she received from Kelroy was in fact written by Marney, who turns out to be conveniently adept at imitating others’ handwriting, so much so, that he also wrote a letter to Kelroy in Emily’s hand, declaring that she was no longer interested in him. Worse still, the originator of this plot was Mrs. Hammond, Emily’s own mother, consumed by her hatred of Kelroy. Traumatized by this betrayal, Emily soon dies and Kelroy, after he learns of both the plot and Emily’s death, dies in a shipwreck. A sop is thrown to the reader when the book ends with Emily’s friend, Helen Cathcart, marrying Dunleavy, but this ‘happy ending’ serves only to accentuate the cynicism and darkness of this novel. Despite the similarities of Rebecca Rush’s work to that of her contemporary Jane Austen (Kelroy was published in between Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice), Rush’s treatment of the relationship between love, marriage, and money is much more bleak, and satisfyingly so.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Crary provides the following useful definition of what he means by a 24/7 culture: “In its despoliation of the rich textures and indeterminations of human time, 24/7 simultaneously incites an unsustainable and self-liquidating identification with its fantasmatic requirements; it solicits an open-ended but always unfinished investment in the many products for facilitating this identification.” In many ways, ‘products’ turns out to be the most important word in that quote, because Crary’s main focus in this section of the book is on the various forms of (online/digital) technology that facilitate the expansion of 24/7 culture. Crary is undoubtedly correct to challenge the facile techno-optimism that has all too often greeted the advent of the internet age. The problem, however, is that Crary goes too far in the other direction. Not exactly Luddite, Crary is definitely a techno-pessimist, and perhaps even technophobic. Typically, such a negative attitude toward technology is accompanied by a negative attitude toward its users, who feature only as more or less passive drones. Crary disallows completely the possibility of transformative and politically progressive forms of technological usage and in doing so massively oversimplifies the problems and challenges that a 24/7 culture undoubtedly creates.

In the third and fourth episodes of The Following, we learn more about Carroll’s followers, who are a motley crew of individuals who fall under his spell when they visit him repeatedly in prison (sidenote: the maximum security facility that houses Carroll has one of the most open-door policies in penal history. I’ve seen malls that were harder to get into than Carroll’s visiting room). One of the interesting things about this part of the series is that Carroll being back in prison allows (actually, necessitates) that more attention be paid to developing the characters of the followers. This is mostly done on a sparingly ‘need to know’ basis, with the exception of Emma (the nanny) and Jacob and Paul (the ‘gay neighbors’). The question of the sexual orientation and behavior of these three characters comes in for special attention, especially the issue of whether or not Jacob and Paul are actually gay. On one level, this issue is unambiguous in the sense that it’s made very clear that they were pretending to be gay in order to trick their neighbor (Carroll’s victim). On the other hand, it’s also made clear that they did have sex while they were ‘undercover,’ so to speak, and it’s also strongly implied that Paul may in fact be in love with Jacob. Moreover, Jacob and Paul are referred to repeatedly as the ‘gay neighbors’ in the ‘story so far’ review that begins each episode. This is a very clear example of ‘The Following’ trying to have its cake and eat it, too: the notion of gay serial killers is formally repudiated, presumably to avoid accusations of homophobia, and yet the killers are still ‘queered’ as sexually deviant. More generally, network tv crime drama once again shows its preference for the combination of sex AND violence as its default mode.