Reading characters Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) Heidi Lucja Liedke This article is concerned with two dimensions of reading: the dimension of fictional enactments of reading specifically in the lives of writer personae; and the dimension of an imagined reader’s stance, who is invited to navigate between different forms of reading. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) presents reading, in particular of emails, as a metafictional, metanarrative and meta-authorial reparative practice, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s sense, who conceptualizes reparative reading as being invested in pleasure and seeking heterogeneity. In this article I argue that it is in their emails - and in reading those emails - that the friends Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon (the former a famous novelist, the latter an editor) create a non-place in which they do not have to perform being knowledgeable but rather come to cherish the value of friendship, thus engaging in practices of (self-)care. In exchanging those emails, Alice and Eileen, initially paranoid readers of their lives, rehearse a reparative, meta-authorial position. The reparative process of knowing as unraveled in writing and reading strips the performance of being ‘knowledgeable’ and witty, as practices the characters engage in outside of their written communication, of its artificiality and instead turns reading into a texture of hope, in a novel in which the characters are doing their best to connect. When we think about reading, we think of it either as a professional (for instance, for academic scholars, teachers, critics) or a leisure activity. Studies and histories of reading regard it as a practice that has oscillated between the private and public; reading has also, throughout history, served the purpose of fulfilling different needs or desires, from education, to pleasure, to moral improvement, to ‘reality hunger’ (see Shields 2011). In the digital age, the focus is also on the different forms in which reading occurs and the ways in which it, on the one hand, competes with more visual AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0005 Heidi Lucja Liedke 78 forms of information or other forms of entertainment, and, on the other hand, finds new spaces, what Murray has called the “digital literary sphere” (2018). At the same time, precisely because of these developments, reading - consciously and deliberately - becomes a specific marker of social status, of cultural capital, and may reveal something about readers themselves - and the writers. The latter are mostly not (primarily) conceptualized as ‘readers’, which creates a somewhat awkward binary between writers and readers as two separate entities. Writers read other writers and, sometimes more, sometimes less consciously, also read their own work as responding to others, as in the case of Sally Rooney, whose work this article turns to. Reading - both in and of a novel - can become, as I will explore, a ground for considerations of the practice of reading and writing in the twenty-first century and potentially a playground for ethical practice and a reparative position. Depictions or enactments of reading can also provide a frame for an assessment of reading from within the genre of the novel. Considerations about reading are taken up in fictional texts as metafictional and meta-authorial questions of what happens when writers write about writing and reading. Research into reading has recently turned in particular to reading communities (for instance Baron 2021; Davies et al. 2021; Rehberg Sedo 2011), pointing to “reading as a contextualized social practice” (Birke 2016: 5) and also often aligning reading with different forms of criticism, be they scholarly (see for instance Martus and Spoerhase’s engagement with disciplinary praxeology in academia, 2022) or amateurish or non-professional (see Fuller & Rehberg Sedo 2013 and 2023; Nakamura 2013). While these considerations are a necessary backdrop for any assessment of reading, in this chapter I want to specifically turn to the role of reading and its reparative potential within the specific figure of the writer persona. This article, therefore, is concerned with two dimensions of reading: the dimension of enactments of reading specifically in the lives of writer personae but, crucially, not while they are ‘at it’ professionally, but as they use reading (and writing) practices privately in emails; and the dimension of an imagined reader’s stance, who is invited to navigate between different forms of reading. Put differently, in my case study I, first, engage with the question what role reading has in the private life of those who write for a living and how this intertwinement is, second, played out on a metafictional, metanarrative and meta-authorial level in a selected novel, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021). The Irish writer Sally Rooney’s novels are populated by writers and readers. Rooney herself studied American literature at Trinity College Dublin and all of her novels contain at least one student of literature or writers (or both). Her stories take place in a microcosm of educated 20-30-yearolds and her characters are eloquent ‘overthinkers’, they know their -isms and theories. Yet, her novels do not merely present complacent fictions Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 79 about the vanities of the literary business and love relationships, but feature forms of reading in the digital age as organic processes of connection and reparation. In his review for The New York Times, Brandon Taylor commented on the experience of reading Rooney’s novel of 2021, Beautiful World, Where Are You? as follows: “an overwhelmed white woman in a major urban center sighing and having a thought about the warming planet or the existence of refugees”. The author then went on to say that [c]haracters acknowledging their privilege and access to capital has somehow come to be seen as actual class critique in one’s art. With its sleek, minimalist aesthetic and perfect, gleaming dialogue, the contemporary novel points toward the restlessness of existing today while allowing none of those problems into actual consideration. As I was reading this one, I kept asking myself: ‘Is that it? Is that enough? ’ (Taylor 2021) In his otherwise appreciative and admiring review, Taylor, a writer himself, expresses a form of critique which Rooney had to face after the publication of each of her novels so far: her debut, Conversations with Friends (2017), was lauded for its “thrillingly sharp” (Waldman 2017) dialogue but ran the risk of being swept away by the ménage-à-quatre in a glossy setting. Her next novel Normal People (2018) convinced critics more by focusing on the coming of age of two young people and was lauded for its intimate and “startlingly graphic” depiction of sex scenes which are also “passionately intimate” (Clanchy 2018). Notably, both novels have already been adapted into mini-series and were available to watch in the German “ZDF Mediathek” and the BBC Player. Categorized as ‘Irish love drama series’, this continues one of the main tenets that Rooney is up against, namely the commodification of literary labor and the dismissal of her work as romance novels in fancy dress. The question ‘Is that enough? ’ points to a question at the background of this chapter, namely what ethical and political responsibility fiction has - a question both Rooney’s characters and potentially she herself grapple with. In other words: is it enough for a novel to describe - in this case - the relatively privileged life of characters who in some form engage with literature, or does it need to criticize this privilege, provide alternatives, send the characters on a path towards a different life? Beautiful World, Where Are You? is to a lesser degree than Rooney’s previous novels a coming-of-age novel, even though, as may be typical for writing by millennial authors, the 30s still seem to be a time in an individual’s life where they can indeed come of age. As if anticipating a certain strand of criticism, the novel is defensive about the moral dubiousness of its aesthetic project which is expressed in some of the statements one of the main protagonists, Eileen, makes in one of her emails to her friend Alice; for instance: Heidi Lucja Liedke 80 do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. (Rooney 2021: 111) Ethical questions permeate the novel, a twenty-first century take on the epistolary novel, with circa half consisting of emails. Beautiful World, Where Are You? presents reading, in particular of emails, as a metafictional and meta-authorial reparative practice, taking the cue from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s chapter “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” in Touching Feeling (2002), in which she conceptualizes reparative reading as being invested in pleasure and seeking heterogeneity. More precisely, I argue that it is in their emails - and in reading those emails - that the friends Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon (the former a famous novelist, the latter an editor) create a non-place in which they do not have to perform being knowledgeable but rather come to cherish the value of friendship, thus engaging in practices of (self-)care. In exchanging those emails, Alice and Eileen, initially paranoid readers of their lives, rehearse a reparative position. The reparative process of knowing as unraveled in writing and reading strips the performance of being ‘knowledgeable’ and witty, as practices the characters engage in outside of their written communication, of its artificiality and instead turns reading into a texture of hope, in a novel in which the characters are doing their best to connect. On a metafictional level, the central use of emails can also be understood as a playing with what William Gass in his On Being Blue has argued readers really want, namely “the penetration of privacy” (1991: 84). Gass, crucially, dwells on the struggles many writers face when trying to capture sex scenes and other moments of “lust and languor” (Dillon 2014) and investigates fiction as a foray into the privacy of others. In Rooney’s novel, the chapters alternate between those that are uneven-numbered and focus on the plot and those that are even-numbered and consist of the letters/ emails, as the characters’ own non-places. These emails do not contain descriptions of seemingly intimate (sexual) encounters. This is reserved for the uneven-numbered chapters. As a consequence, the novel invites reflections on different forms of privacy and vulnerability, allowing the realworld readers peeks into both the privacy of intimate reflections and physical encounters of the depicted characters, while the reading characters (i.e. Alice and Eileen) keep those worlds from the other. The novel, therefore, probes into the different layers and limitations of fictional representations of intimacy, the connection between the body and written or spoken speech acts, ultimately opting for the letter/ email as a medium that lets the reading character have the final, if not concluding, say. Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 81 1. You’re so paranoid, you probably think this novel is about you Beautiful World, Where Are you? is a novel about novels. But also its readers? And its author? Rooney, the novelist, lets Alice, the novelist, speak out about contemporary novelists: “Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism - when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in The New York Times? ” and continues: The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. (Rooney 2021: 95) One is reminded of the provocation with which Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” starts: a friend asked her what it would change if we had facts proving that our worst suspicions about a given historical or political event were true - “Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things - what would we know then that we don’t already know? ” (Sedgwick 2002: 4). Sedgwick then unravels “paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure”, as Tavia Nyong’o puts it in his evocative essay on Touching Feeling in which he discusses it as a central work to introduce affect to queer studies (see Nyong’o 2010: 245). This “demystifying” is based on the assumption that injustices of all kinds need to be made painfully conscious, as if knowledge of these aspects were not already conscious and intolerable. Paranoia, I argue, does not seem to leave a lot of leeway for a more diverse range of responses and assessments and thus takes on the shape of a self-perpetuating avalanche. Applying this specifically to the act of reading novels, to connect it to the quote above, there are two directions in which one can go: either a novel occludes solutions to problems by dwelling on the misery of a given situation, or it - at the risk of facing accusations of being ‘naïve’ - provides glimpses of hopeful moments that may ultimately also provide a call to action for its readers. Alice and Eileen are paranoid readers of their own lives in Sedgwick’s sense, suspicious of how they lead their lives and of the purpose of their professions, but both for a justified reason, one might think. Their main task is that they need to learn that being paranoid is not the only option. Echoing the common motif of estrangement in Irish literature (see, for instance, Hand 2019), they are out of touch with their lives. They are also, as is so often the case with Rooney’s characters, Marxists, who struggle with the fact that they are profiting from capitalism (at least in the case of Alice). Alice, a well-known and rich novelist, prefers the anonymity of Tinder and meeting a man, Felix, who has no idea who she is. He works in a Heidi Lucja Liedke 82 warehouse and is not interested in literature. Eileen, a brilliant student, now has a rather unsatisfying job at a literary magazine and considers herself working class. She is also in an on-off-romance with a man called Simon who is engaged to another woman. Eileen and Alice have been friends since the first year of their studies of English, and also roommates. Simon was part of that circle, and would visit them regularly, “standing with his back against the radiator, arguing with Alice about God [Simon is devoutly Catholic], and cheerfully criticizing their poor housekeeping skills” (Rooney 2021: 30). In the uneven-numbered chapters, where the plot takes place, the female protagonists are introduced first via heterodiegetic narration and external focalization as “A woman sat in a hotel bar, watching the door” (ibid.: 3) in chapter 1 and “At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city center, scrolling through a text document” (ibid.: 19) in chapter 3. As each of the six chapters devoted to each of the characters’ storylines could, theoretically, stand on its own, it is telling that these first sentences are not in the vein of “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (Woolf 2009: 3) - no names, no self-willed action, as they both seem to be sitting, waiting, for something to happen to them. Those first sentences achieve three things: they keep us at bay, at a distance; they anticipate different positionalities in terms of social status of the two women, different positions within the net of capitalist employment (sitting in a hotel bar vs. sharing an office); conversely, they imply a certain comparability of a ‘female existence’, pointing toward a twenty-first century discourse on the woman question and finding a role for women in Irish fiction more specifically. In these uneven-numbered chapters the focus is on capturing realistic conversations but not so much on insight into characters’ interiority. Evoking a kind of paranoia on the side of the reader (Have I missed something? Am I not reading attentively enough? Does that make me a bad reader? What does that say about my reading of other texts? ), it is not until the second half of chapter 3, after ‘the woman’ has had lunch with Simon that we read: With her head on the pillow, the woman rested her wrist on her forehead. She was wearing a thin gold bracelet, which glimmered faintly in the bedside light. Her name was Eileen Lydon. She was twenty-nine years old. Her father Pat managed a farm in County Galway and her mother Mary was a Geography teacher. She had one sister, Lola, who was three years older than she was. (Rooney 2021: 26) Now we are able to connect this to the information given in chapter 2 - an email addressed to Eileen. The effect of this structure, however, is that as Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 83 a reader one is constantly navigating through the almost stage-like rendering of the characters’ lives and dialogue, flirtations and preoccupations. As Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino has put it in her review of the novel, “the great thing about being a character in a Sally Rooney novel is that the person you are obsessed with is always obsessed with you, too. There is no unrequited love in Rooney’s books, only miscommunication that results from a lack of self-actualization” (2021). Reading the chapters occupied with the plot alternating with the emails, the reader can become obsessed with the depicted readers too - and be prompted to consider their assessments of the events. 2. Books about people, or: when writers write about themselves Critics have pointed to how Rooney only writes about characters and circumstances that seem to be taken from her own life experience(s), being “overly sentimental” and “insufficiently political” (Crain 2021). (After her first three novels did indeed cover a relatively limited demographic and geography, her fourth novel, published in 2024, Intermezzo, turns to two male protagonists - a lawyer and a chess player - who are, in a truly Rooneyan manner, entangled in complicated love relationships. The novel also addresses, more explicitly than the previous novels, the topics of loss and grief.) Yet in addition to treating love and coming-of-age, Rooney’s novels are to some extent metafictional, but also metanarrative and especially metaauthorial fictions about writing and authorship: the craft of it, but also the pressure that comes with it when you are a famous writer. Apart from reflections on fictionality, metafiction is characterized by a high degree of self-consciousness, pertaining to both the fictional status of the text and the role of the writers (Waugh 1984; Lodge 1992: 207). One of the most recent studies on the concept, Yaël Schlick’s Metafiction (2022) updates this field by turning to contemporary novels in particular, and also including considerations on “ludic metafiction” and the ways in which it activates readers. Metanarrative, a term not as popular as ‘metafictional’ in Anglophone narratology, was suggested by Ansgar Nünning (2001) and elaborated by Monika Fludernik (2003: 28) to describe “self-reflexive statements referring to the discourse and its constructedness”. In the case of Rooney’s novel, this especially refers to the emails in which both Alice and Eileen refer to the fact of email-writing, thus displaying a heightened consciousness about the act of writing, as writing is their profession, anticipating a critical reader’s assessment of what they’re writing. While ‘metafictional’ is centered on the (often also debilitating) dimension of self-consciousness, ‘metanarrative’ opens the door to a more productive reflection on the craft and processes of writing narratives. Heidi Lucja Liedke 84 In The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship from 2019 the authors, too, point to the idiosyncratic “protocols of authorial performativity” of literary genres which throw “into relief the manifold ways in which literary creation is enabled and constrained by existing media and publishing formats, forms and formulae” (Berensmeyer, Buelens & Demoor 2019: 8). What all of these engagements with the ‘metafictional’ and ‘authorial’ rightly point to is the performative and self-conscious aspect; an actualization of what Harold Bloom has pompously coined “the anxiety of influence” (1973); the fear of failure, the constant self-questioning characteristic for metafiction. Yet with novels such as Rooney’s I argue it is necessary to speak of a specific kind of metafiction, namely meta-authorial metafiction: fiction that does not only thematize the act of writing or which draws attention to its constructedness, but fiction that showcases at least one author figure and includes comments that readers familiar with the actual author will be able to identify as statements that person has been confronted with outside the diegesis. Notably, in Beautiful World, Where Are You? the writer character Alice at first evades the question when being asked by her date Felix what she does: What kind of things do you write? If you’re a writer. She turned around, bemused. If I am? She said. I don’t suppose you think I’ve been lying. I would have come up with something better if I had been. I’m a novelist. I write books. (Rooney 2021: 11) A main aspect which draws Alice to Felix, it seems, is his ignorance and disinterest of her profession and her person (she is at this point already a well-known writer; at least well-known to those interested in literature). When he asks her, still teasingly, whether she is going to write a book while in her house in Ireland, her brief reply is “I suppose I’ll try”, and pushed to elaborate on what her books are about, she merely quips “Oh, I don’t know, … people”, which prompts Felix to comment: “That’s a bit vague. What kind of people do you write about, people like you? ” (ibid.) Alice becomes the ventriloquist for Rooney, one might argue; not only a self-conscious but also a slightly blasé version of the author, who at the same time repeats a kind of criticism that would have been addressed at Rooney the writer: her inability to write about anything other than people like her. Soon after they begin dating, Alice can no longer hide her fame as one of Felix’s friends discovers “She’s got a Wikipedia page and everything” (Rooney 2021: 48). Her performance of hiding all details about herself is not able to hold up; the clash between her own and Felix’s background and interests turns into a tension that propels their relationship forward. From a meta-authorial perspective, Eileen seems to embody the alter ego of the author (both the fictional author and the real-world author) as Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 85 the almost cartoonish, talented but failed woman of letters. When we meet her for the first time in chapter 3 - before even knowing who she is - she is presented as both a professional (she’s an editor) and private reader, having lunch [a]t a table by the window, eating a sandwich with one hand and with the other reading a copy of the novel The Karamazov Brothers. Now and then she put the book down, wiped her hands and mouth with a paper napkin, glanced around the room as if to ascertain whether anyone there was looking back at her, and then returned to her book. (Rooney 2021: 19-20) Several things are noteworthy about this passage: Dostoyevsky’s novel is nonchalantly juxtaposed with and undermined by a sandwich; at the same time, it is reduced to an ironic status symbol, as the reader’s attention is divided between at least two other things. This attitude contrasts with the weight Alice in an email in chapter 22 attaches to another great Russian author in her list of “great novels”, namely Tolstoy and his Anna Karenina. Considering Rooney’s 2024 novel Intermezzo, a story about brothers that deals with questions of morality and ethics, this casually placed implied intertextual reference to The Karamazov Brothers does not only appear as a tongue-in-cheek meta-authorial reference to Rooney’s reading and inspiration for her work, but also as a potentially irreverent dismissal of and grappling with her literary ancestors: by putting the novel next to a sandwich, it can become less daunting. A poetry reading organized by the publishing company she works for which Eileen attends later parodies, it seems, the literary world, describing an evening centered around the theme of ‘crisis’: A young man in glasses recited poetry so abstract and prosodic that no relationship to the theme of crisis became clear, while the final reader, a woman in a long black dress, talked for then minutes about the difficulties of finding a publisher and only had time to read one poem, which was a rhyming sonnet. (Rooney 2021: 61) Listening to this, Eileen types in her phone: “the moon in june falls mainly on the spoon” (ibid.). Her moment of triumphant sarcasm is quickly broken when an unnamed elderly man approaches Eileen to tell her that “You should be up there yourself […] I’m convinced, he said. You have it in you” (ibid.). In the plot-driven chapters, both Alice and Eileen are portrayed as metaauthorial references to the role of reading in an author’s life and both use either sarcasm, detachedness or a seemingly uncaring attitude to distance themselves from and trivialize the role reading and literature play in their lives. In speech acts, it seems impossible for them to express their actual Heidi Lucja Liedke 86 investment in the matters, so it seems easier to either evade the topic or play it down. 3. Penetrating privacy? While William Gass’s On Being Blue is an essayistic meditation on the appearance of the color blue in different media, shapes and circumstances, it also contains metafictional considerations. He writes: It was immediately recognized that fiction could carry us, as the bride over the threshold, into domesticity. Suddenly there are sinks and sofas, hats and dresses, table manners. Intimacy. The movies have relieved this pressure somewhat, but writers remain unduly responsive to it. As readers, that’s what we want: the penetration of privacy. We want to see under the skirt. And while we are peering at the page, though invisible to Prudence who is scratching her thigh, we are not invisible in fact - again an improvement over the ring which costs us the sight of ourselves. Words are one-way mirrors, and we can safely breathe, hoot, holler all we like to assure ourselves of our existence, and never once disturb Prudence easing her itch. (Gass 1991: 83-84) One can find fault with many things in this passage: the sexism, the seedy eroticization, the lusting voyeurism it implies as being characteristic for acts of reading. But the phrase “words are one-way mirrors” introduces an original notion that Beautiful World also plays with. As mentioned, two complicated dating constellations are in the focus of the plot-centered chapters. In a sense fulfilling the readers’ desires as outlined by Gass and following a heteronormative progression of ‘successful’ dating, both plotlines - featuring Eileen and Simon on the one hand, and Alice and Felix, on the other - dwell on the first times the characters have sex. First up are Eileen and Simon who have sex which is twice removed: first, it happens over the phone and second, they indulge in an elaborate scenario in which Eileen is Simon’s stay-at-home wife for whom he also has fatherly feelings. Describing the power dynamics between the woman and man in this fantasy, Eileen says: She loves you very much, but sometimes she’s anxious that she doesn’t really know you. Because you can be distant. Or not distant, but you can be closed off. I’m just sketching in the background so you’ll understand the sexual dynamic better. She’s nervous because she looks up to you and she wants to make you happy, and sometimes she’s frightened that you’re not happy, and she doesn’t know what to do. Anyway, when you get on the bed she’s shaking underneath you like a little leaf. And you don’t say anything, you just start to fuck her. Or what did you say before? You make love to her. Okay? (Rooney 2021: 70) Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 87 At first glance, this passage would fulfil the readerly desire to peer into the bedroom of other people, presenting us not only with a sexual act but the arguably even more private imagined fantasy depicted here. In addition, in the dynamics sketched by Eileen, there is a striking parallel to the way in which authors (‘she’) are dependent on critics and readers (‘you’): when words are a one-way-mirror, authors indeed cannot see their readers, being put into the position of having to expose themselves to a public that may or may not like what they’re reading. The metaphor of ‘penetration’ implies a potentially brutal meaning here, when it is suggested that readers are seemingly undecisive between ‘fucking’ and ‘making love’ to what they are reading. The reader does not merely “see under the skirt”, to take up Gass’s metaphor, but impatiently tears the skirt away, as if merely on the hunt for the story, and not so much its discursive specifics. At the same time, precisely because it is a fantasy, the passage eludes any direct criticism. Alice and Felix, of course, in contrast to Eileen and Simon do not have the familiarity that comes with many years of friendship, which is why it is not until the end of chapter 13 that the text penetrates the privacy of their first sexual encounter, one that is fraught with anxiety: Felix, she said. I haven’t done this in a while, is that okay? They looked at one another uncertainly then - Alice perhaps uncertain of what he was thinking, Felix maybe uncertain of what the question signified. He had taken a little blue square of foil from his wallet. What do you mean? he asked. She shrugged, looking uneasy, and went on pinching at her arm. He knocked her hand away and said: Stop that, you’ll hurt yourself. What’s the matter? It’s not your first time or something, is it? That made her laugh, a little sheepishly, and he laughed too, perhaps relieved. No, she said. My life has just been weird for a while. (Rooney 2021: 132-33) While the two are in immediate physical proximity, there is a distance between them caused by the mutual ignorance of what the other is thinking. It is significant that the two look more than they speak - as if fearing that the conflation of bodily and verbal intimacy would be overwhelming. And when they speak, they ask questions. When they look, the looks are uncertain. In her reflections on love and commitment, Judith Butler engages with Shoshana Felman who argues that the speech act - as emanating from the body - brings about a bodying forth in the moment of expression: Our body is not simply ‘over here’ as a spatiotemporal given, but is itself given over, exposed, and ‘spoken’ through the speech act […] ‘The body’ is not a substance, but a modality that registers the full expanse of our relations. As such, it is there in the words, spoken or written, even as it is not there, but here. (Butler 2011: 237) Heidi Lucja Liedke 88 To give the characters these moments of silence is in fact to also shield them from the pleasure which hollering words, to come back to Gass, might give to its readers. The scene between Alice and Felix, instead of feeding the voyeuristic readerly desire, becomes a writerly one-way mirror not containing words but silences. 4. “Our correspondence is my way of holding on to life” In contrast to the uneven-numbered chapters, the even-numbered chapters consist of emails exchanged between Alice and Eileen over roughly the course of one year. It is only there that reflections on writing are articulated and thereby fully develop the novel’s metanarrative dimension. In contrast to the plot-driven chapters, the emails directly spell out problems and conflicts, in particular also self-doubts and self-criticism. In Beautiful World, it is indeed the epistolary form (for recent engagement with the form, see, for instance Löschnigg & Schuh 2018) that, while harking back to the eighteenth century, opens up a meshwork of possibilities for the two protagonists to position themselves with regard to the questions of how to lead lives that are ethically responsible and personally satisfying. While Lodge claims that “generally speaking, the modern epistolary novelist is obliged to separate his correspondents by some considerable distance to make the convention seem plausible” (1992: 22), in Rooney’s novel, the emails are a surprising disruption at first - but then, by way of contrast, provide a kind of depth that the plot-driven chapters cautiously lack. This contrast is especially striking with the first two times when Alice’s and Eileen’s emails appear. In the former’s case, the first chapter ends with her and her date feeling bad after an awkward evening, and Alice goes home: “Pausing there on the stairs, alone, she looked back up at the landing. Follow her eyes now and notice the bedroom door left open, a slice of white wall visible through the banister posts” (Rooney 2021: 14). This description resembles that of a painting even more than a stage direction; the narrator is demanding the readers to ‘follow [Alice’s] eyes’ thus already presupposing that we are visualizing the scene. The effect is static, distant, vague. The next chapter, however, starts with Alice writing her first email to Eileen and expressing that: “You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my - otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless - existence on this rapidly degenerating planet…” (Rooney 2021: 15). This is no longer “A woman sitting in a hotel bar” but an “I” existing on a planet torn apart by a plethora of conflicts and a human-made climate crisis. Similarly, Eileen, in her response, makes clear that she feels ‘seen’ by Alice: For me, it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 89 my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I always end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, […] Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content. So when we watch characters in films sit at dinner tables or drive around in cars, plotting to carry out murders or feeling sad about their love affairs, we naturally want to know at what exact point they are doing these things, relative to the cataclysmic historic events that structure our present sense of reality. (Rooney 2021: 38-39) Crucially, Eileen’s first email comes after a packed chapter which introduces her life up until this point and ends in the moment when she breaks up with her boyfriend and is becoming more isolated, as many of her friends are moving away after their studies and her sister is getting married. Put side by side, the letters are indeed also a manifestation of her new-found agency and create a space for both characters not to feel lonely. Both characters are constantly aware of their privilege, somehow stuck, frustrated with capitalism but unsure what to do about it: they are paralyzed with paranoia. Eileen also mirrors the experience the reader has when reading the uneven-numbered chapters: watching characters sit around. The emails tap into the lived experience of this generation of 30somethings and do not only consider the way they live their lives but especially the way they think about them. Notably, the emails are mostly preoccupied with the present and immediate future, but in a historically and temporally unspecific way. It is for this reason that I would read them as textual non-places. For Marc Augé, supermodernity produces nonplaces, which can, for instance, be railway stations, shopping malls, waiting rooms, airports. He also defines these non-places as “not themselves anthropological places” and as being “listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position” (1995: 78). When Augé was writing, emails were not yet a common currency in interpersonal communication but they do not only fall within the frame of supermodernity (and the digital age, see, for instance, Penn 2013; Hammond 2016). They also hold a specific position (on a screen of varying size) in their authors’ lives and function as fleeting sites of memory, while enabling the two friends Alice and Eileen to express things about themselves they are unable to express in their regular environment as it would interfere with the personas they are trying to uphold. What is also suggested, thinking back to Eileen’s question about the ‘problem of the contemporary novel’, is that it is increasingly difficult - for all kinds of readers and writers, but especially writers of fiction - to escape reading for instant gratification, as Mark McGurl discusses it in his Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021). Crucially, perhaps, the emails - even though they represent remote communication - in their Heidi Lucja Liedke 90 occasional pointlessness in terms of the plot cleverly reappropriate the expectations of the novel to be instantly consumable in a neoliberal sense. They showcase writing and reading for their own sake without any immediate, marketable purpose. The effect that is created through the almost triumphantly heterodiegetic narration (triumphant as the narrator, it seems, enjoys putting her characters into these static frames) in contrast to the more tentative and personal emails establishes a general atmosphere of ambiguity and vagueness. Reflecting on the legacy of Freud, Sedgwick concludes that “in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant” (2002: 125-126) - at least paranoia is not a diagnosis anymore, but a contagious epistemology. Melanie Klein, whom Sedgwick refers to (128), speaks of positions that can be paranoid, thus already pointing to how paranoia and (being reparative) are practices that can be flexible. In Beautiful World, it is not until chapter 11 that a reference is made to the emails (“The evening after she received this email, Eileen was walking through Temple Bar toward Dame Street”) which then begin to also function as participating in the plot rather than hovering above it. As the novel progresses, the emails also allow readers to compare their interpretations of interactions and events with the assessment of the characters, creating an engagement with the plot that is not unlike that typical for fanfiction where one is given the luxury to ‘hear’ certain characters speak that have remained sidelined or silenced before. This is not to say that emails and the heterodiegetic passages are complementary in terms of content; yet they complement each other in terms of their enactment of different reading modes (figural, as in characters ‘reading’ / getting to know each other in the chapters focusing on plot; literal as in two friends reading each other’s emails) and in the sense that they capture both the characters’ and the readers’ switching between very different forms of reading (novel reading and email reading). In the novel, too, Alice herself reflects on that kind of engagement which she only experiences when reading in a letter to Eileen in chapter 22: I do try to take the novel seriously - partly because I’m conscious of the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to make a living from something as definitionally useless as art. […]. Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. […] it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. (Rooney 2021: 231) Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 91 Looking at a painting does not make her want anything, the pleasure is in seeing it. With great novels (and she refers to Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the New Testament), her sympathies are engaged. To be engaged is to position oneself as a reparative reader, one who “surrender[s] the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable shall ever come to [her] as new”; as a consequence, “to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones” (Sedgwick 2002: 146). Crucially, as Beautiful World progresses and as we see here, it is this conscious positioning as a reader (and writer) of literature that brings about an alternative mode to paranoia, namely forms of a reparative, more consoling kind, that allow both an experience of pleasure and a shift towards a less normative understanding of what it means to, for instance, ‘get’ something out of literature or choosing a particular life path. Before, in contrast, in chapter 6, Alice had written “Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way” (Rooney 2021: 54), stating that, it seems, the worst expectations she has had for her life have now become manifest and she is experiencing them. 5. Conclusion: not beyond repair Sedgwick acknowledges that paranoid methods of reading have helped draw attention to hegemonic class, gender, and race relations. However, she points to two things: first, paranoid reading is only one among many relationships a reader can take to a text; second, even though paranoid reading points out hegemonic social relations, it does not follow that anything necessarily needs to be done about those relations. Instead, she suggests [h]ope […] is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. (146) With regard to Alice’s regret quoted before, a paranoid reading would suggest that there is no element of surprise there because how else could her life have turned out if not in an unsatisfying way? A reparative reading would acknowledge the fact that indeed the past could have developed into a different kind of present and acknowledge the pain of that realization. When in Chapter 25 Alice and Eileen meet - the letters stop for four chapters - we are given a self-referential tableau that shows how the practice Heidi Lucja Liedke 92 of reparative reading as the characters have rehearsed it in their emails spills over into the diegesis, letting them allow themselves to enjoy each other’s presence: On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months […] Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau […], as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue […] as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them? Or […] were they […] glancing for a moment into […] something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world? (Rooney 2021: 250) There is another intertextual, potentially meta-authorial reference in this key moment, in this passage that prefaces chapter 25 and that reads more like a mini essay than part of the novel: as W. H. Auden knew, there is always “some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life” (2007: 88) despite all the suffering in the world; the vulgarity, the pain; capitalism. In their embrace, Alice and Eileen embrace away from the vulgarity while still being in the midst of it. This is a kind of sisterhood, hopeful in its fleetingness, and yet not so fleeting as the letters, which served as the germination ground for it, come back again at the close of the novel. In the penultimate letter Alice is sending Eileen a draft of an essay - a shorter form of prose perhaps to alleviate the weight of the long one - having “completely lost any sense of linear time” (Rooney 2021: 326) whereas the last letter is reserved for Eileen, now pregnant, married to Simon, giddy at how things keep happening. As the email closes, we read a testimony to the potential of reparative reading: “It’s not the life I used to imagine for myself either. But it’s the life I have, the only one” (ibid.: 337). Extending this thought to the bigger question of whether fiction has the responsibility of offering solutions to political questions the answer the novel gives is simple: no. No solutions are offered, nor do the characters find any paths of escape. What the novel does, however, through its specific use of foregrounding reparative reading and meta-authorial writing, is to resist political and professional pessimism and despair; it resists the urge to conclude that there is no point in continuing to love and care and demand more. References Auden, W. H. (2007). Musée des Beaux Arts. In: Selected Poems of W.H. Auden: Expanded Edition. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage. 88. Augé, Marc (1995). Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London/ New York: Verso. Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading 93 Baron, Naomi (2021). How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. New York: Oxford University Press. Berensmeyer, Ingo, Gert Buelens & Marysa Demoor (2019). The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Birke, Dorothee (2016). Writing the Reader. Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter. Bloom, Harold (1973). The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith (2011). Response: performative reflections on love and commitment. Women’s Studies Quarterly 39 (1/ 2): 236-239. Clanchy, Kate (2018). Normal People by Sally Rooney review - a future classic. The Guardian [online]. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2018/ sep/ 01/ normal -people-sally-rooney-review [January 2025]. Crain, Caleb (2021). Sally Rooney addresses her critics. The Atlantic [online]. https: / / www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/ archive/ 2021/ 09/ sally-rooney-beauti ful-world-where-are-you/ 619496/ [January 2025]. Davies, Ben, Christina Lupton & Johanne Gormsen Schmidt (2022). Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dillon, Brian (2014). William H. Gass: on being blue. The Guardian [online]. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2014/ mar/ 15/ william-h-gass-being-blu e-brian-lists-dillon [January 2025]. Fludernik, Monika (2003). Metanarrative and metafictional commentary: from metadiscursivity to metanarration and metafiction. Poetica 35 (1/ 2): 1-39. Fuller, Danielle & De Nel Rehberg Sedo (2013). Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London/ New York: Routledge. Fuller, Danielle & DeNel Rehberg Sedo (2023). Reading Bestsellers: Recommendation Culture and the Multimodal Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gass, William (1991). On Being Blue. A Philosophical Inquiry. Boston: David R. Godine. Hammond, Adam (2016). Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hand, Derek (2019). Feeling disaffection: forms of estrangement in Irish fiction. In: Gregory Castle & Patrick Bixby (Eds.). A History of Irish Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 243-258. Iuvino, Amelia Ayrelan (2021). Sally Rooney’s new novel gives us all we should want from fiction. [online] https: / / jacobin.com/ 2021/ 09/ sally-rooney-reviewbeautiful-world-where-are-you [January 2025]. Lodge, David (1992). The Art of Fiction. New York: Viking. Löschnigg, Maria & Rebekka Schuh (2018). Epistolarity. In: Maria Löschnigg & Rebekka Schuh (Eds.). The Epistolary Renaissance. Berlin: De Gruyter. 15-43. Martus, Steffen & Carlos Spoerhase (2022). Geistesarbeit. Eine Praxeologie der Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. McGurl, Mark (2021). Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London: Verso. Murray, Simone (2018). The Digital Literary Sphere. Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nakamura, Lisa (2013). “Words with friends”: socially networked reading on Goodreads. PMLA 128 (1): 238-243. Nünning, Ansgar (2001). Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Heidi Lucja Liedke 94 Metanarration. In: Jörg Helbig (Ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert, Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Heidelberg: Winter. 13-48. Nyong’o, Tavia (2010). Trapped in the closet with Eve. Criticism 52 (2): 243-251. Penn, William S. (2013). Storytelling in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rehberg Sedo, DeNel (Ed). (2011). Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rooney, Sally (2021). Beautiful World, Where Are You? London: Faber&Faber. Schlick, Yaël (2022). Metafiction. London/ New York: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2002). Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press. Shields, David (2011). Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf. Taylor, Brandon (2021). Sally Rooney’s novel of letters puts a fresh spin on familiar questions. New York Times [online]. www.nytimes.com/ 2021/ 09/ 07/ books/ review/ beautiful-world-where-are-you-sally-rooney.html [January 2025]. Waldman, Kate (2017). Tell me I’m interesting. Slate [online] www.slate.com/ articles/ arts/ books/ 2017/ 08/ sally_rooney_s_conversations_with_friends_review ed.html [January 2025]. Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London/ New York: Routledge. Woolf, Virginia ([1925] 2009). Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Heidi Lucja Liedke Goethe Universität Frankfurt