1. Fluidity/Instability

Both the epistolary novel and the blog are inherently fluid, and thus unstable. We see these characteristics in Richardson’s Clarissa as each letter builds on previous letters, adding to the story, and causing the characters’ identities to constantly remain in flux. The reader (and writer) must similarly anticipate new additions and reassess the characters and the story as a whole as it progresses.

Terry Eagleton (1982) pointed to these shifts: “A novel today is usually a finished, seamless product; Richardson’s works, by contrast, are more usefully thought of as kits, great unwieldy containers crammed with spare parts and agreeable extras, for which the manufacturer never ceases to churn out new streamlined improvements, ingenious additions and revised instruction sheets” (p. 20). Eagleton’s (1982) analysis highlights the epistolary novel’s “unwieldy” nature that we confront as we try to read and remediate Richardson’s lengthy novel.

Eagleton’s (1982) use of the term “kit” further implies that the epistolary novel (unlike more modern novels) is unstable and perhaps constantly in progress—very much like the narratives of blogs. In our class, we documented these similarities as we remediated Clarissa in this blog project. We noted that the blog’s reverse chronological order, similar to the epistolary novel, requires a constant reassessment of the story, as each post (and each user’s comments, for that matter) build(s) on the previous story. The fluidity of the blog’s story could perhaps be seen as a result of it similarly functioning as a “kit” for the writer to build something better, something more seamless and improved.

This fluidity of Clarissa and of the blog medium similarly allows for constant refiguring and reassessment, thus leaving more room for discovery for both the reader and the writer as the story progresses. For example, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2007) suggested, the constant building of the character in relation to the day’s or moment’s events compels and requires readers to constantly reassess the character. Elaborating on this point, Fitzpatrick quoted Steve Himmer (2004) who claimed that “as one day’s posts build on points raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage in the ‘discovery’ of the author” (p. 169). Fitzpatrick also described the “instability” (p. 180) of the blog, a term I think that became especially important to our class’s discussion of the blog and the epistolary novel—as both compel us to continue reading as we try to make sense of the content and of the characters performing the various writing roles.

2. Audience Participation

In addition to the fluidity of these two media, audience interaction with the text and participation in authoring the text became important similarities between the epistolary novel and the blog that we noted in our remediation project.

As the scholarship by Rachel Held Eaves and Ben D. Kimple (1968) and by Florian Stuber and Margaret Anne Doody (1999) suggests, Richardson continually relied on readers’ contributions to Clarissa throughout the drafting and revising process. For example, Richardson’s coterie of female readers heavily influenced what he added and deleted in the novel prior to its publication.

Just as Richardson worked through ideas for the novel, making changes according to responses from his readers, we, too, have made “adjustments” to our understanding of the novel as we blogged about Clarissa. We based these alterations on others’ feedback or their initial responses to the letters that were perhaps quite different from our own. The ability to instantly publish comments and contribute to the narrative of the blog certainly enabled us, like Richardson’s coterie of readers, to become authors in a very real way.

In terms of the epistolary novel itself, the characters within the story quite obviously actively participate in and contribute to each other’s stories when they respond to each other’s letters. Clarissa and Anna, for example, heavily rely on one another’s responses to make sense of their own identities and of each other’s narratives.

Furthermore, bloggers and/or letter writers are responsible for future correspondence with their audience members. For example, Clarissa holds on to a thread of hope through her (sometimes minimal) correspondence with Anna and/or her family. Fitzpatrick (2007) pointed to the necessity of maintaining consistent correspondence when she wrote that blogs “offer a form of writing that engages the reader by requiring [the reader] not simply to consume the content presented but also, in some sense, to produce that content, to complete what is present through a knowledge of what is past, an exploration of the ways that that present is situated, and a commitment to return in the future” (p. 169, emphasis mine). Because the reader can become so invested in the past, present, and future events of the narrative in either the blog or epistolary novel form, he/she feels compelled to keep reading, and the author must accordingly satisfy this need for more by committing to completing, or at least continuing, the narrative.