Uber was once the most valued startup in the world and is used in over 700 cities. In Voci da Uber: Confessioni a motore (Voices From Uber: Motor Confessions), Mucchi Editore, 2019, Maria Anna Mariani performs the experiment of steering conversations with Uber drivers toward revealing intimate details of their lives—toward confession. These confessions are then written into a narrative. Her writing articulates the nuances of communication in the way that only the best of dramas can otherwise capture. This is perhaps the by-product of the oscillation between small talk and confession, where the positions of speaker and listener change so fast one only has time to recalibrate after the fact. I was drawn to the subtle tensions and evasions that contour the openings of contact, empathy, and understanding in such a dynamic terrain of communication. Here, Maria Anna Mariani talks about the process of writing the book and the unique space of Uber that allows for confession.
—Maya Nguen, March 2020
What is a repetition: JOHN
Route: Streeterville-home
Time: 38 minutes
Traffic: tricky
Car: gray Hyundai Elantra
Average rating: 4.95Select the material with an eye to variety and alternating themes, discard if there’s already a similar story and cut any nationality that appears twice. This is what I’d decided on when I began writing these pages. Structural constraint number one: avoid repetition. But now I have something to ask you: is a murdered brother a repetition? Which story about a murdered brother should I cut to avoid repeating myself? The one about Aisha or the one about John? Telling someone else’s story without permission, the story of a still breathing someone, is the supreme form of violence: we frequently debate the ethics of exploiting biography, and rightly so. But an even more treacherous problem, it seems to me now, is what to leave out: what I abandon to the unsaid as flawed—flawed because it retraces another life, in its ordinary but also extraordinary moments. What is a repetition?
Maya Nguen (MN): In John’s chapter, you write that you are “telling someone else’s story without permission,” even when that someone, John, wants to tell it. Yet, in Aisha’s chapter, she is reticent and you actively urge her on with your questions. Can you talk about your process in writing this book?
Maria Anna Mariani (MAM): Everything started during one of my rides. The driver and I were doing a bit of small talk, as you usually do when you get into an Uber. And then, all of a sudden, he revealed to me the most personal thing about himself. It was so personal and so haunting. For many days after the ride I found myself thinking about that interaction. What happens to communication when two strangers find themselves locked inside a moving capsule with no way out? How is it possible that the conversation can oscillate between its two antithetical poles: impersonal and stale small talk and the most intimate and daring confession? I wanted to find out. And so I decided to pay the utmost attention to the interactions during my subsequent rides and to retrace these conversations in my writing. But then something else happened. I started manipulating actual conversations in order to push them to their limits, already fashioning them into narratives. The writing got the upper hand. And it became a performance.
MN: How do you refer to each short chapter of your book: “John’s story,” “confession,” “fragment,” or simply “chapter”?
MAM: Any of these is perfectly fine. “Conversation piece” would also work. Or “micro-biography.” Or “micro-assemblage of biography and autobiography.” I was trying to craft a form that mirrors its object.
MN: What does “micro” convey in your form? Can such a form represent an entire life?
MAM: “Micro” conveys mostly the rapidity with which the exchanges took place (usually twenty minutes, the equivalent of two-three pages). Is this length enough to narrate a life? It can be, if you compress that life into a couple of gestures or sentences, in a few moments where time coalesces.
MN: The subtitle of your book is “Confessioni a motore” (Motor Confessions)—how do you define confession? Is it the car that drives the confession?
MAM: I would define confession as a speech act in which you utter something revelatory about who you are, and that puts you in a position of vulnerability before the other, the recipient of your confession. I think that all confessions are driven by some common engine (the fear for the consequences of what you are saying, of how it can be judged) but the time-space of Uber is particularly intimate and sealed, and thus especially conducive for a revelatory speech act. Also, as you noticed, you are not occupying a public space but the driver’s private car, which is a sort of extension of the person (sometimes you can find personal objects scattered around or hanging from the front window). I find all this very fertile ground for confessions and for the performance of confessions.
MN: A driver must look ahead at the road, whilst the passenger can look at the driver or out the side-windows. This builds a space with a possibility for confession. Why is the time-space of the Uber ride so conducive to confession?
MAM: There are many similarities between the time-space of an Uber ride and psychoanalytic therapy. The fact that, as you pointed out, you and the driver cannot look at each other directly in the eyes alleviates some of the awkwardness of being so close, and it can liberate unconscious thoughts. In both cases, sessions are timed: you know exactly when it’s going to finish, the precise moment in which you’re going to stop talking (even the variable of the traffic is contemplated, thanks to GPS). And you pay—in both cases you pay: the other’s listening is always the object of a transaction. But Uber’s time-space offers an even more intense opportunity for confessional release than the one provided by therapy because the involved subjects are two strangers who are never going to see each other again. And with someone who you will never see again you can be much more reckless, terribly reckless.
MN: Would you say that narrative serves as a counter-logic in response to the capitalist logic of use value?
MAM: According to the capitalistic logic of use value, a driver is nothing but the sum of his or her rating stars. This is how drivers are inscribed in the archive of the sharing economy. The entirety of their existence is conflated with the evaluation of their working performance. A narrative, instead, tries to restore part of the complexity of a person that necessarily escapes the passenger’s scrutiny.
MN: So much of the intimacy and intensity of your exchanges occur one-to-one. Would this project be possible in UberPool? What would change with the physical presence of the third person?
MAM: With a third person the premise of the interaction radically changes. As you said, there is an external ear, an external gaze that disrupts the intimacy of the connection. In one of the stories I mention this and retrace a flawed interaction caused by the presence of a third person.
MN: Your justification for excluding a story that repeats another story is that it is “flawed because it retraces another life.” Would you say that you are also, in some way, retracing another life in each chapter of the book?
MAM: Yes, I am. Each chapter can be read as a fragment of a particular driver’s biography. It’s a splinter of a life, conveyed through narrative. The fact that it is a narrative is crucial because this book is also an attempt to counter the reifying logic of evaluation that dominates the sharing economy. Storytelling against (rating) stars: this could condense the driving force governing these pages.
MN: Your preferred mode of narration in John’s chapter is free indirect speech rather than direct speech. You write: “When he gets back home and sits in front of the TV, John continues to think about what he told his passengers during the day.” Is this you continuing to think about what John is thinking as you get back home? Or did John tell you what he does when he gets back home? Or is my inability to tell which is which precisely the point of your book, in its intertwinement of biography and autobiography?
MAM: Yes, that is exactly what I tried to achieve. Confessions are not one-way confessions, and biographies are not pure biographies. Listening to a piece of the driver’s biography triggers in the passenger a desire for a parallel autobiographical story (authentic, or imaginatively reworked). Biographies and autobiography take shape simultaneously—they echo each other, they entwine. The result is an assemblage: an auto/biography, where sometimes the boundaries between self and other become blurred. That is precisely why I avoided direct speech, which signals with clarity who says what, and I favored a more porous free indirect speech.
MN: A formal difference arises between confession and the performance of a confession. Could you speak about this difference?
MAM: What performance does, mostly, is to radicalize the delivery of a speech act, which is very theatrical per se. I’m profoundly convinced of this. I’m also aware, though, that it may seem that the aspect of performance undoes the very essence of confession, which is truthfulness. But is truthfulness really the essence of confession? Think of Rousseau, and the answer is no. Authenticity is at its core. And authenticity does not demand that language reproduces a reality.
MN: Thinking about Voci da Uber, I cannot help but hear Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices of Chernobyl, the belated, strangely related, translated title of the original Chernobyl Prayer. This in turn makes me think of the rendition into English of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo as Survival in Auschwitz, which makes me think, yet again, about the title of your book. Can you conceive a similarly radical opening of otherness into the heart of your book through its translation?
MAM: An English translation of this book would be a dispossession, but also a restitution of the original soundscape in which the conversations took place. It would be a reverse translation, with a surplus of estrangement. I would be curious to feel this vertigo.
MN: North American and Italian norms of social interaction, among strangers and among friends, are vastly different. Do these differences of cultural contexts change the role of confession?
MAM: Most of the drivers I interacted with were immigrants. As soon as the driver detected my foreign accent, a bond of solidarity established itself. It was automatic: it was a connection based on a negative nationality. When the driver was North American it usually took longer to break the ritualistic surface of small talk. But I can’t infer from this a general consideration about cultural differences and confession. I’d like to have an answer, but I don’t.
MN: Before coming to the United States, you spent several years working in South Korea and also wrote a creative non-fiction based on your time there: Dalla Corea del Sud. Tra neon e bandiere sciamaniche (From South Korea. Between Neon and Shamanic Flags), 2017. Do you find a productive connection between making life in a new place and making a narrative?
MAM: It’s when I was chronicling my years in Korea that I started thinking about negative nationality as an affective bond. While I was there I developed very strong connections with other expats. Some of them became simultaneously mothers, fathers, teachers, nurses, and scapegoats. I thought that those bonds were destined to last forever. Instead, as soon as I left the country, I realized that they were surprisingly ephemeral, and the reason was precisely negative nationality: the fact that what glued us to one another was simply a lack, a shared sense of non-belonging. If there is something in common between that book on Korea and the book on Uber and Chicago it is an experience of estrangement, and an attempt to transform this uprootedness into a way of knowledge.
MN: Testimony and autobiography are also enduring strands in your academic research, with your latest book bringing together Primo Levi and Anne Frank in a critical conversation for the first time: Primo Levi e Anna Frank: Tra testimonianza e letteratura (Primo Levi and Anne Frank: Between Testimony and Literature), Carocci, 2018. Did writing Uber confessions raise new conceptual questions that will feed back into your academic production?
MAM: Working on the Uber stories definitely raised new conceptual problems, but it did so in a completely empirical manner. What is the connection between small talk and confession? How would one theorize the entwinement of biography and autobiography? What is the narrative impact of performance evaluations? I would be intrigued to explore more thoroughly the theoretical implications of these questions by addressing them in a scholarly book.
MN: Was there any further contact with John Uber or any other drivers?
MAM: No, there wasn’t any further contact. I gave myself a couple of essential rules for writing this book. I couldn’t reveal to any driver what I was doing and I had to limit the interaction to the specific time-space of Uber. Sometimes these rules began to crumble, but they never did entirely, because mine, as I said, was for the most part a performance. And yet, John’s story was so devastating that it still lingers in my memory.
Maria Anna Mariani is the author of the fictionalized reportages Voci da Uber. Confessioni a motore (2019), and Dalla Corea del Sud (2017). She has also published two books of literary criticism: Primo Levi e Anna Frank. Tra testimonianza e letteratura (2018), and Sull’autobiografia contemporanea. Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi (2012). She teaches Italian literature at the University of Chicago.
Maya Nguyen (b. 1996) is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist working at the boundaries of sound, text, and image. Her work excavates the power relations inherent in human interaction and the environments that facilitate these interactions, such as the domestic sphere, the colonial subject, or border zones. She is the assistant poetry editor of Asymptote Journal, holds a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and is an MFA candidate in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. https://soundcloud.com/maya_nguyen
*****
Read more interviews on the Asymptote blog: