Cuckolded by Modernity
by Gracie Bialecki
When I went to see Ian McEwan speak at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, I wondered how they would arrange the seating. The library is in one of the oldest townhouses in the Marais, Hôtel de Lamoignon, dating from the late 16th century. From the street, massive wooden doors open onto a courtyard surrounded by the stone building. The long lobby has glass cases featuring archival maps and posters, and even if the librarians moved the historic documents, there would barely be space for an audience. The only other option is the stately reading room with its high ceiling and gilded beams, filled with rows of heavy wooden tables and chairs.
I arrived early, inured from squeezing late into enough readings, and the library was unchanged. The crowd gathered in the lobby until they let us into the reading room and I laughed to my writer friend, Nafkote Tamirat, that they’d made only one special accommodation—all the chairs were turned to face the same direction. Despite our mutually responsible arrival, it was impossible to see the unelevated table at the far end of the room where McEwan and his interviewer sat.
I wondered briefly why I’d braved the cold to sit and listen to something that was being recorded. In a few weeks, I’d be able to hear the conversation in the comfort of my apartment. Still, I told myself, sometimes the most important thing is showing up. As McEwan’s disembodied voice came clear over the audio system, I thought about a failed long-distance fling from my past. Our video calls and constant texts were thrilling until they became inadequate stand-ins for physically being with each other. Even though McEwan was invisible, at least I was in the same room as him.
McEwan was discussing his novel Machines Like Me, which was published last April. It’s set in an alternate 1982 that’s re-written to technologically surpass us. In the novel, there are androids for purchase whose capabilities extend beyond their ability to attend your every need. Even their personalities are programmable. Naturally, the protagonist’s love interest falls for the android whose anatomy is functional enough for them to make love. In the aftermath of this robo-human liaison, the protagonist comforts himself with the novelty of being sexually rejected in favor of an android. He was “cuckolded by modernity,” McEwan tells us, eliciting a knowing laugh from the audience.
In a March 2018 interview at South by Southwest, author and psychotherapist Esther Perel brought up a similar form of cuckolding that’s already impacting our society, no science fiction necessary. She was speaking about how technology creates loneliness and isolation in the couples she works with:
“The amount of people, the last thing they stroke before they go to bed is their phone, and the first thing they stroke before they go when they wake up is their phone… It creates a new definition of loneliness. It has to do with experiencing kind of a loss of trust and a loss of capital while you are next to the person with whom you’re supposed to not be lonely with.”
Futuristic sexual encounters aside, we’re constantly betraying our partners and friends with technology. In any interaction, a phone is liable to appear with or without explanation—shifting a dual-sided conversation into a regrettable love triangle. As Perel says, this “loss of capital” can be harder to accept than outright betrayal. My confident, rational self knows I’m more interesting than a smartphone, yet every time someone turns to theirs in front of me, it’s a blow to my ego. I still remember the deeply unsettling realization that my long-distance ex instantly responded to my messages not because he loved me but because he loved his phone.
At the talk the woman next to us had the foresight to bring pen and paper, and as Nafkote and I tapped quotes into our phones, she paused her elegant scrawl to look over at us disapprovingly. Of course we gave the impression of disinterested youth who were slighting McEwan’s intelligence with our lack of attention. There was no way of proving that I was taking notes for this essay, and of course, I did feel rude, but I also needed to use what I had. McEwan admitted that he spent years adamantly opposing the smartphone that was now in his pocket. I’d gone through a brief, similarly futile, resistance and now have a standoffish relationship with my phone. Even if it never enters my bedroom, and I try to keep it out of conversations, its endless functionality always gives it a reason to appear in my hand.
In the final question from the audience, a man asked what McEwan viewed as the novelist’s role in predicting the future. He turned back to the ubiquitous smartphone—no author predicted those, and no one knew how deeply they’d affect our lives. “We’re going down a smooth tube into the future with no sense of control,” he finished decisively.
No one was in a hurry to go back out into the winter night and the audience reassembled in the lobby. “That’s him,” I said to Nafkote as we eyed the signing table. McEwan was wearing glasses and a tweed jacket, his gray hair floppy on the sides. He couldn’t have looked more like the author of twenty-four novels. We stared for a bit anyway, his physical presence giving necessary closure—now we could say we had seen Ian McEwan.
While studying literature at Pomona College, I read McEwan’s novels On Chesil Beach and A Child in Time. They were assigned for two different survey courses, each attempting to consolidate the modern literary canon into a semester. McEwan is on the Time’s list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” I wonder if by going to his reading I was performing the role I'd been taught—the literary student who studies the great masters. In an industry that seems to both be dying and evolving, books, interviews, and ideas have never been more accessible. We can study however we choose, yet there is still something in me that wanted to be present for McEwan's talk. Showing up felt both important and antiquated, kind of like the reading room where it happened.
After we left the library, Nafkote and I ended up drinking wine in a laughably cliché French restaurant. The walls were covered with bright paintings in crooked frames. There were tall candlesticks burning on each table and behind the counter we could see the chef in a blooming white hat. Our conversation was uniquely bookish—it twisted past our work to what we’d read and were reading. It was easy to forget the robot romances we’d been discussing at the Bibilothèque Historique, and the only time we consulted our phones was to look up the author of Exit West, whose name I’ve already forgotten again.
Near the end of our carafe of wine, Nafkote had an idea. “I think I’ll write a short story,” she said, “where you can either live your life at its normal pace or take a smooth tube into the future, not knowing where you’ll end up.” I thought it was an intriguing idea for a science fiction piece, even if according to McEwan, it’s what we’re already living.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
