The Double-take of Seeing: On Teju Cole's Small Fates

From February 2011 to February 2013 Teju Cole posted Small Fates, a series of tweets condensing news briefs from Nigerian papers. His main source of inspiration for this literary project was Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, a series of faits divers famous for their literary style published in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin. In his recommendations for the new millennium, Italo Calvino urges literature to “aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought,” considering the accelerated lifestyle this “postindustrial era of technology” should bring about. Teju Cole’s choice of the fait divers as a model for Small Fates is particularly interesting in this regard. Just as Cole’s microfictions, Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines are anchored in the cultural context of mass media and the feeling of acceleration and compression they occasion. As phrased by Luc Sante, Fénéon’s writings are narratives “compressed into a single frame, like photographs.” The literary effect of Cole’s tweets likewise relies on condensation at the levels of length and narrative, which allows for the instant perception of the entire literary work through sight. Their textual density, however, slows down the rapid and distracted form of reading usually associated with digital media.