Rumor Has It

In Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl and the accompanying CW TV show, the plot is book-ended by a blog written by an anonymous character who calls herself/himself “Gossip Girl” (GG). In the book, there are therefore two narrators—the narration provided by GG and the third-person omniscient narration of the “actual” story. GG starts and ends the books and provides sporadic commentary at the beginnings of some chapters.

The function of GG is not to move the plot or give the moral framing, and by “moral” here I mean whatever lesson or code the characters must understand. Instead, GG serves as a parody of the ponderous first person narration that permeates both young adult media and works targeted at Women (here, I mean whoever is assumed to occupy the marketing space that can be identified by “chick” as an adjective). In young adult novels intended primarily for Girls, this narrator turns inward, setting the emotional landscape that must be overcome or understood, as in Judy Blume’s Are you there God, it’s me, Margaret? which starts with an italicized diary-like commentary: We’re moving today. I’m so scared, God. In the chick oeuvre intended for Women, this voice-over functions more directly to set up what will be learned, as in voice-over for Sex and The City, which represented snippets of Carrie’s appalling column: “After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breath and reboot.” (Sidenote: in this episode, Miranda’s mother’s death is un-critically paralleled with Carrie’s computer crashing.) Carrie’s column owes much (sadly) to the saccharine meditations of The Wonder Years voice over: “All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners & change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak & hope. All the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us.”

In contrast, GG’s lineage is more directly linked to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, especially in her status as an simultaneous insider/outsider: “Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.” But although GG owes much to this style in form, she does not in substance—she is not the angsty masculine individual who smokes in the corner and rebels through whining (“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad”). She is gossip as a phenomenon, and as such is a reliably unreliable narrator, proclaiming statements that are later revealed as false or at least misleading by the third-person omniscient narrator. In an unexplained lead on her blog, GG proclaims: “S seen dealing on the steps of the Met” (37), referencing one of the leads, Serena van der Woodsen, who the third-person omniscient never describes dealing drugs in the story. But of course, what makes GG as gossip brilliant is that her narration is not concerned with reliability, but with stories qua stories, which in turn makes the narration unreliably reliable. GG meticulously reports sightings confirmed by the third-person omniscient; she is never seen to make up where or when or who, only why and what. Gossip here is the making of stories that are unhinged from ideas of truth, and therefore also from the lesson narration that this framing device mocks. Certainly, S was dealing, but in the sense of dealing with, the primary preoccupation of teen novels.

Here the stories of the anonymous GG are like Sedwick’s nonce taxonomy, ideas about people that are told once, made and un-made into “new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world” (from Epistemology of the Closet.) Nonce has several meanings: in technology, it is a number generated for a specific use, sometimes random, sometimes as a marker. Nonce here means “number used once” or “number once”. Outside of tech, nonce means “for now” or “for one purpose.” Gossip’s taxonomy, or ordering and hierarcherizing of the world, is not dependent on its reliability—that the shared information be true for always or for every purpose—it is inherently particular. Unlike the universalizing impulses of narration in chick and young adult genres, GG relies on this instance, often closing with “that’s all for now” (emphasis mine, 38, 117).

In defense of gossip, it is often suggested that gossip serves as an important method of information transmission among marginalized groups, and that it is devalued because it is identified with these groups and because the information passed on is resistant to dominant ideology. (There’s a logical fallacy with this reasoning: (a) gossip is identified with marginalized people therefore (b) its information must be resistant.) Certainly, though, this view has merit. When the power structure makes stories, they are called knowledge, and these stories reproduce and validate those in power. So it should come as no surprise that those devalued by this knowledge have their own sources and methods of knowledge that are in turn ridiculed and policed. And gossip does on occasion resist dominant ideology by the mere fact that it is sometimes about passing information about people illegible in the structure. That being said, certainly anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of what we mostly call gossip knows, it’s often one of the most effective means of policing difference and thus reinforcing power structures.

What Sedgwick says in defense of gossip is more nuanced, and ultimately, more descriptive than laudatory. She recovers gossip as a tool, sometimes the master’s, sometimes the slave’s, but one that receives devaluation because of where it is found and who is supposed to wield it, not what it does. She explains: “I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world. … projects precisely of nonce taxonomy.” Gossip therefore functions as process for negotiating an epistemology and an ontology of those authorized to use it.

GG’s narration represents examples of all of these descriptions of gossip: there’s a certain amoral grappling with who exists in the world of the Upper East Side, of what kinds of people make up the inside and what kinds of people this leaves on the outside. Sedwick’s description of gossip, of the precious, devalued arts, is beautiful, but Gossip Girl points to an additional trait, which I think contributes equally to its marginalization as a knowledge process and its perseverance. Gossip is fun. It’s super fun. In the sort of Derridean deconstruction of knowledge, it is essential to point out that it is privileged as serious. The aforementioned ponderous narrations that GG parodies therefore can claim access to knowledge only through some amount of seriousness. Freeing up knowledge from this particular hierarchical construction allows then for a breaking away from the idea of guilty pleasure. Gossip girl is already on to us; she makes this clear with her sign-off, proclaiming boldly: “you know you love me.” Yes, yes we do.

xoxo, J