[This is Essay #7 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for archives.]

Men of Letters

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Samanth Subramanian

More than a decade ago, over the course of three essays written for the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes pondered the correspondence of three Frenchmen: the poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and the painter Gustave Courbet. The essays, brought together in a chapter titled “French Letters” in his essay collection Something to Declare, are marvels of a very forensic style of literary analysis. Using these letters, Barnes builds astonishingly detailed character portraits of these men. He never knew them, of course, but their letters provide enough to pitch him to a level of camaraderie, if not outright intimacy, with them.

Barnes is thus able to conclude, for instance, that “Baudelaire…is a fawner and a wheedler, a calculator and an operator; his sturdy egotism “is increasingly purified of affectation.” Courbet has anti-establishment beliefs and “a genuine desire to cleanse the mucky stables of French art,” but there was about him a touch “of the approved rebel calculating how far he could go, and knowing how to turn outrage to his own advantage.” Mallarmé is a neurotic, ambitious schoolmaster who becomes courtly, wise and reticent after he becomes a Parisian intellectual. It is correspondence of substance indeed that can reveal such depth of detail, even if it is to an eye as hawk-like as Barnes’.

So what will we do, we who hope to ponder similarly over the letters of Julian Barnes and others of our age 50 years into the future? How will we even scramble up to a level of rudimentary acquaintanceship with people who, today, deal with written letters only for the purposes of official correspondence and possibly not even then? Will there be any romance or any insight to be had by sifting through Jonathan Safran Foer’s GMail account and its lifetime of 317,549 emails? Do people ever distil their soul into something as effortless and frequent as an email? Can they, even if they wished to?

There’s no immediate answer for that, even though I’d like to believe it to be possible. I’d like to believe that as much can be told from handwriting in letters as from punctuation and grammar in emails, that we tend to be as expressive off paper as on it, and that email is simply a near-perfect replacement of hand-worked correspondence. A change of tools, as it were.

Or perhaps, in fact, it is even more. A skein of emails can be a record of conversations, or of manuscript revisions, or of negotiations. Purchase confirmations read like a travel log, or a history of movies watched, or books bought, or even subscriptions to porn web sites. An assortment of folders is a clue to the mental organisational map of their owner. Portfolio updates are records of investments and tax returns. Your average email account is nothing less than an annotated biography.

Insight, therefore, may still win out; romance, though, must slouch away in defeat. It mirrors a similar dichotomy among the practitioners of literary portraiture. Biographers, to whom facts are singularly important, are presented with a definitive source to check their information – as long as they have the password, of course. But without the abstraction and the elbow-room for interpretation that a good letter can afford, character-sketch essayists like Barnes will have their work cut out for them.

[Samanth Subramanian is a freelance journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He has written for The Hindu, Outlook Traveller, the Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Indian Express, The Economic Times, Man’s World, and Diplomacy & Trade Europe. Visit him at http://samanth.blogspot.com]