140 Characters versus Deep Thoughts

Illustrated by Victoria Cheng.

The New Yorker sent Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’ into immediate virality in 2017 with a 140-character abridgement of the story via Twitter: “by her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert”. Twitter’s subsequent proliferation of unmoderated criticism in response to the short story has been viewed as a challenge to the traditional canon and value-based literary model. The platform’s dominion, however, has become incontrovertible and may even be exposing – albeit very inadvertently – of the flawed nature of the traditional literary establishment.

The Twitter virality of ‘Cat Person’ produced a disquieting gendered response, bringing forth discussions concerning the potency of the female literary and critical voice. The creation of a Twitter account, @MentCatPerson, dedicated to heralding misogynistic responses epitomises the dichotomy of the response. The account’s sardonic retweeting of readings of Roupenian’s piece of short fiction as ‘anti-male’ fuelled the wave of acclaim that the story’s publication amounted to female ‘validation on a huge scale’. Meanwhile, criticism at the other end of the spectrum went so far as to complain that Roupenian’s own voice in a reading of her story was somehow not feminine enough. Such an agitated gendered response is symptomatic of a deeper and endemic negligence in the literary field: the female voice. This inattentiveness appears to have trickled down into the readership of ‘Cat Person’. Anna Holmes’s identification that ‘some of the most widely read critics on Twitter are women,’ (Jonathan Franzen brandishes them as ‘yakkers’), paired with the fact that there is a notable absence of male critics on the platform, raises the discussion of the volume of the female voice – both literary and critical - to a more accessible platform. 

This problem of representation is perhaps most worryingly evident in blurring categories of fiction and non-fiction that the response to Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’ produced. It is no secret that the literary market has grown to exist hand in hand with consumerism and popular culture, and so the concurrence of ‘Cat Person’s publication in The New Yorker at the precipice of the #MeToo movement was no coincidence. The deluge of first-person polemical essays, Tweets, and statuses posted and published during the movement, alongside The Atlantic’s labelling of ‘Cat Person’ as the ‘literary adjunct’ to #MeToo, enabled a false categorisation of the story as non-fiction. Roupenian’s authorial voice was mistakenly conflated with Margot’s confessional tone. One reader’s seemingly absurd claim that the short story read ‘like someone’s Facebook post’ was darkly mirrored by a request for Roupenian to discuss her own experiences on a radio show in the assumption that Margot’s experiences were analogous to her own. The ramifications of such a muddling are two-fold, in highlighting the undervalued nature of the short story form and, more disturbingly, the delineation of the female voice as a mere recorder (as opposed to the creator) of experience.

Such an alarming viral response to ‘Cat Person,’ however, questions the extent and legitimacy of the internet’s infringement on traditional literary institutional roles and the critical voice. Robin Sload’s opposition of ‘Team 140 characters’ against ‘Team Deep thoughts’ seems like an inhibitive divide that stems from the kind of male literary privilege that ‘Cat Person’s’ virality exposed. It appears that 'Cat Person’s reception poses less of a threat and more of a diagnosis of the lack of literary parity, a well-discussed phenomenon within the field but one that virality via social media has provided a tangible example, and subsequent accessible discussion, of. In other words, a dialogue that could perhaps be less biased on a more diverse platform. The transience of ‘Cat Person’s’ virality is emblematic of the extent of the ‘threat’ it poses. With @MenCatPerson active for a mere day, it now exists as a relic of the impact and rarity of short fiction’s virality and the role of social media in exposing pervasive patriarchal imbalances within the industry that have trickled down to reader reception. 

Perhaps, then, we need not set up Twitter and traditional forms of criticism as diametrically opposed but mutually informative in highlighting their relative shortcomings. Francesca Baker’s note that Twitter is the ‘modern day stream of consciousness’ highlights to us just how far the scope and acceptability of multiple forms of criticism have come. Either way, Twitter and its propensity to influence and form opinion seem set to stay.