Abelard x Heloise, Tumblr Youths

My internet coming of age took place during the heady heyday of LiveJournal. At the age of fifteen, I began meeting online strangers who would eventually become friends, future roommates, bandmates, travel partners, and coworkers. Like any social space, LiveJournal had its own set of rules and mores that were learned through the act of participating in its communities. And like any social space, the full range of the human experience was on display: some users engaged in romantic relationships with one another, while some comforted others in times of grief, held fundraisers for friends who had fallen on hard times, and offered an audience for the day to day experiences of people they had often never met. There were also arguments, cliques, and fights, many of which were negotiated in ways that would be foreign to those who preferred to participate only in real life drama.

In many ways the platform was a contradiction: the title itself indicates users were to think of the site as a journal, generally understood  in recent times to be a private, personal affair. But the site itself depended on privacy only insofar as it was needed to create a feeling of intimacy and community. Users were allowed certain controls over their content not easily accessible in other blogging platforms at the time, such as privacy locks and select circles of ‘friends’ who could access journal entries. The exclusivity of these circles encouraged users to make frequent, engaging posts which maintained the interests of those on their friends list while also helping to attract new friends. Private and public spaces were constantly renegotiated. While a given LJer might post as if they were writing only for themselves, it was with the knowledge that what they were saying would be read by others.

I was thinking of the experiences I had on LiveJournal as I set out to translate Abelard and Heloise to the digital age. The site itself is no longer easily available, so I sought to find a platform which replicates at least some of its feel.

I eventually settled on Tumblr. To some degree it feels like a step back from LiveJournal. Short posts and memes are favoured over longer, more reflective entries. But it does feature at least the ability to make longer posts, unlike Twitter, and is geared at least to some degree to finding and sharing text amongst groups of followers. Its ‘ask me anything’ feature makes it easy to imagine a 21^st century way for a friend to ask advice of Abelard, and the ease of reblogging makes a quick back and forth between two separated lovers simple to render visually.

There is often the sense that one is writing with one audience in mind, but that this perceived audience does not preclude other readers. In this I saw a useful analog for the beginning of Abelard and Heloise’s correspondence. Given that medieval audiences would not have necessarily seen their letters as private, it follows that they would to some degree consider their audience. But it is possible that one could imagine a letter circulating amongst one group of associates, only to have it fall into the hands of an unexpected reader. Similarly, a chain of reblogs might leave a Tumblr post in the lap of someone who was never meant to see the original content.

Once our virtual Heloise has access to Abelard’s blog, she is able to engage with him in a series of blog posts they send back and forth to one another. The immediacy of reblogging allows for her to reply to his argument in full or only part of it.

Of course, this is not a perfect match for medieval literary practice. Two factors stand out as most wanting: firstly, the medieval letters of Abelard and Heloise are carefully crafted, rhetorically sophisticated, relatively lengthy pieces of writing. While it is of course possible to create something similar on Tumblr, the tone of the site prefers briefer works. Secondly, the ability of Abelard and Heloise to communicate in real-time on Tumblr diminishes to some degree the sense of Heloise’s isolation. If Abelard is truly so close, then there was never a reason to wait so long to make her case to him.

 Still, despite these shortcomings, reimagining Abelard and Heloise as modern-day Tumblr youths is an interesting exercise. Even with the limitations of the format, they do not seem particularly out of place. In a blog far, far away, perhaps Heloise is still writing to her Abelard.