Copyrighted Material
I ntroduction 3
works and devices are used in everyday life and, ostensibly, with no more interest or knowledge than most everyday users might possess. Harry is an “Internet idiot” who has “Internet escapades” courtesy of an online dating site. He asks a man he is e-mailing in a small village near Durban, South Africa, if he has the Internet, to which the man replies, “ ‘Of course, that is how we are talking. . . . [We] have our own satellite.’ ”6 In less conspicuously digital encounters Harry “log[s] onto the computer to cancel [his] lunch date”; he reserves accommodation to visit his niece and nephew’s school online, and the “school’s Web site has a list of local accommodations”; he locates “Ryan” (a rabbi in training, now AWOL) “by methodically searching the web and little postings, like rabbit droppings . . . his thumbs-up ‘like’ of a site called ‘Embracing the Gap (Can Jews and Gentiles Really Be Friends?)’ is what leads [Harry] to him.”7 There are some anachronisms here and elsewhere (“Web site,” not “website,” or “site” even), but it is in moments like these that this novel is a contemporary fiction that lives with contemporary technology. Toward the end of the novel Harry’s nephew, Nate, brings a friend home from school: “Nate’s friend Josh is dyslexic. He calls Nate ‘Ante.’ ” Nate explains that whenever Josh texts, he types “Ante” instead of “Nate,” and “the nickname stuck.”8 The detail of typing rather than writing appears significant—it appears to distinguish a particular kind of communication—but throughout, the novel’s characters frequently switch between writing and typing in ways that express these actions as interchangeable.9 For Roland Barthes, literature’s “reality effect” resides in such asides; details that are “neither incongruous nor significant.”10 Technology is in the background of the everyday life of the novel; the characters have “absorbed . . . , invisibly and unremarkably, the forces of mediation.”11 While there are moments in May We Be Forgiven where digital media is foregrounded as a concern, especially for Harry, life is de facto mediational, and so digital media is also, more ambivalently, the implied context for everyday life. For example, when Harry is writing his book, the reader likely assumes he is working on a digital device: “I work for an hour or two. I move paragraphs here and there and then back again.”12 In May We Be Forgiven technology is a banal sort of figure because it is neither a properly delineated subject nor entirely absent. Instead, the technological is effaced in deference to the narrative: information is googled, e-mails are sent; in other moments, facts are learned and