Ambrose Bierce, Father of the Emoticon \__/!

Ambrose Bierce, Father of the Emoticon \__/!

I'm back from a week at the beach, and will be blogging this week partly based on various things I read and various conversations I had during the week about new technologies and new ways of thinking about technology. One interesting thing I found out was that the emoticon was invented by short story writer, aphorist, and journalist Ambrose Bierce (aka “Bitter Bierce”), famous for going up against his boss Randolph Hearst and the Hearst newspaper dynasty to oppose the Spanish-American War (Hearst bragged that he created the Spanish-American War as a “publicity stunt” because wars sell newspapers), who knew that Bierce also created the emoticon. In 1912. On (gasp!) a typewriter: \__/! Alex Williams alluded to this in his NY Times piece on emoticons “(-: Just Between You and Me;-)” on Sunday July 29, 2007. The one he quotes from Bierce is meant to denote frivolity---hey, everyone, lighten up, I was just kiddin.’ Perfect that Bierce invented that because he was always getting himself in trouble for being sarcastic, ironic, or just plain nasty at the expense of those in power. Sometimes his radicalism would make him seem “left” by contemporary US perspectives. He exposed the fact, for example, that Hearst totally faked the image of Cubans raping an American woman in order to enrage Americans to support a bogus war that was good for the U.S. and good for newspaper sales but not much of anything else. He was outraged by racial violence against Blacks, Chinese, immigrants. He supported any number of women writers and journalists. Yet at other times, he was, to any contemporary leftist’s way of thinking, appallingly retrograde—sometimes almost a parody of himself when it came to philosophical issues of gender, sometimes on race too. In other words, you can’t characterize the guy. He wasn’t “consistent” in his prejudices and progressive causes, although, to his way of thinking, he was entirely consistent. But he was always getting himself in trouble with his scathing, cynical, satirical remarks. That’s why he invented the emoticon. You never knew when he was being satirical because his point of view shifted so much, so often, so variously on different issues that, without the little symbol denoting that he was kidding, you couldn’t be sure. He was a thorn in everyone’s side, including (some of the time) those he loved and championed most. Thus the emoticon. He used it for the same reason that many of us resort to emoticons in our emails: email is great for variable pov. We don’t necessarily demand consistency in the same way we would in a published essay. But then we can also be misread so we use those little bits of punctuation fluff to let our readers know we’re kidding, just kidding. Different narrative forms require different rhetorical devices—email and blogging need emoticons, and so did Bierce.

If Bierce were alive today, he would absolutely be a blogger, causing trouble just because he believed it was important—really vital, in a democracy—to cause trouble, to shake things up, to enrage, to incite dullards to thinking, whether they wanted to be incited or not. His stories are crazy, again often experiments in point of view like “In a Grove” or “Moonlit Road” that inspired Akutagawa, Soseki, and later Kurasawa in Japan (“Rashoman” is a very close adaptation of Bierce). In 1905, Bierce stories were included in the English-language readers of every Japanese secondary student and they inspired a generation and seemed, to many Japanese, to be very Japanese. They were then taken up by the Magical Realists of South America—Borges and Cortazar—in the 1970s. All those writers, on different continents, are about shifting and variable point of views and factualities of the heart that it is almost impossible to pin down. Emoticon time. \__/!

[Cat in the Stack Disclaimer: I know so much about ol Ambrose because when I started my research for Revolution and the Word, as a Master’s student, I realized that it was a ten-year project in a field that didn’t exist---who cared about popular literature’s response to political moods of the American Revolutionary Founding Fathers, who cared about British cultural studies and early American popular culture? Who cared about lending libraries for women and the working classes, relationships between abolitionism and workers’ rebellions and ideologies of gender? Who cared about printing and the cost of book production, distribution, and consumption? Certainly not anyone in English Departments back then. So I dropped that as a dissertation topic and switched to something “literary”---and easy. All Bierce’s stories fit into one volume. Perfect for a dissertation. And his cranky, uncharacterizable, crazy writing was very much in sync with the Japanese and South American fiction I was reading at the time, as well as with my semiotic interests. So I wrote on Bierce and C. S. Peirce, and called it a dissertation. I would have dropped out of graduate school if I hadn’t been challenged by my director, William Bysshe Stein, to write a dissertation in six weeks so he could nominate it for an award. I did it—wrote probably the worst dissertation ever penned. (And then spent six years revising it into a book. And then an edition of his stories. And then a collection of essays on his work. So much for quickie dissertations.) Bierce remains as inspiring as he is problematic. I still have a blogger’s affection for someone who would write his columns under one name, attack his columns pseudonymously in another newspaper, then attack his attacker, then come in under still another name to be the mediator between the various Bierce’s. He knew how to kick up dust. And he invented the emoticon, too. Gotta love (and hate) the guy. That’s the autobiographical backstory. And, for today, that’s all she wrote. \__/!)