Novel by Francesca Serra
Social media is talked about again and again. The need to inform and/or train ourselves is increasingly pressing for professionals and even for parents. To fight school bullying carried out online, parliamentary proposals are being made, associations are mobilising, parents are worried.
But what do we really know about what these young people experience in their private lives? What place do these networks hold in the construction of their identity, in their relationship to others and to the group?
This is what Francesca Serra’s novel invites us to discover. Through the portrait of a teenage girl bullied on social media, the author paints the social fresco of a Generation Z born with the internet at their fingertips. Extracts, decoded…
When Garance Sollogoub starts the equivalent of Year 11, she has a rare beauty of which she does not seem truly aware. “All she has to do is cross the school courtyard in jeans, a white top and trainers to cause small cardiac arrests among the male population”. The well-behaved daughter of a dance teacher in a small town in south-eastern France, the schoolgirl’s life resembles that of many others, torn between the desire to be seen and recognised and the need to build a life. Her life’s course changes when Salomé, a very prominent schoolgirl three years older, “follows” her on Instagram and invites her to the party she is throwing for Halloween. From then on, her only desire is to fit in with this gang of older teenagers who will “intern her on the Internet” and make her experience the cruelty of the pack to the point of nausea.
Without giving away the plot, we have selected a few episodes from Garance’s life to help us better understand the existential questions of these adults in the making…
Telling your story in order to exist: To build the feeling of existing, you have to recount your experiences of the world to someone. These constructions may be complex or very simple, and in the absence of a real interlocutor, we build ourselves an imaginary companion. With social media, the body becomes a fragmented object, worked on in the smallest detail to be shown and to say something about oneself. An eyebrow, a gaze, a mouth, a lock of hair: so many elements that stage the teenage girl, in a frantic concern to get feedback on herself and reassurance about her beauty. Comments are both vital and cruel. They make it possible to take in a complete image of oneself or, on the contrary, to disintegrate under the too acid gaze of another.
Garance enters a beauty contest that will propel her much further than she imagines. For Salomé, the head of the gang, who plays on her seniority and her place in the pack, she is a definite competitor. Driven by the desire to keep her place and her reputation, she turns Garance into a friendly rival, at her beck and call and ridiculed. Seeking reassurance and control, Salomé visits Garance’s profile and thus assesses her opponent’s life:
“head tilted to one side, to the other, tongue out, eye winking, index and middle fingers spread to make a horizontal V, fake grimace, cute pout, gloomy look, lock of hair on the right, lock of hair on the left…” So many poses and attitudes to say something about a teenage life. For it is indeed through her body that the girl speaks about herself. The proof: of the 2,993 photos, there are 1,726 selfies that Salomé examines and decodes. Jealous, she concludes her inspection by saying that her rival is shallow.
Managing the distance that separates you from others: Every relationship is a matter of distance. Too close and we lose our identity, too far and we feel abandoned. These anxieties, particularly strong in adolescence, are heightened in a romantic relationship and sometimes hard to bear. On social media, the desire for contact and closeness can become an obsession that occupies Garance at every moment of the day, night and day, in her room, in her bath. She is waiting for a sign from Vincent, the good-looking one of the gang who has left the region and now lives in Grenoble. After their steamy encounter, the girl thinks only of seeing him again “ It has been 2 weeks since Vincent left. In the first few days, when she was still expecting a message from him, the slightest ringtone made her jump. That screen between hope and disappointment, discovering the name displayed, it was as if her heart were bungee jumping.”
How can she fight this separation anxiety that takes over her whole being? The phone as a physical object becomes a transposition of the bond she wishes to maintain with this ideal boy:
“She was permanently on the alert; she could hear her phone even when it wasn’t ringing. Or she would run her finger over the sleeping screen, to stimulate it. Gently… In crisis phases, she tapped her Messages icon a thousand times a minute, harassed her WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat apps; she could not force Vincent to get in touch but it was a way of staying active. After a week of accumulated resentment, the phone had become hateful.”
Showing yourself and hiding at will: The desire to show oneself comes first in human beings: the baby looks in its mother’s gaze to find out who it is. Then each of us tries to discover ourselves in other people’s responses to our appeals: this is the desire for “extimacy” that teenagers revisit intensely. On social media, this desire quickly tips into exhibitionism. Understanding who one is involves experimenting with one’s bodily limits. The screen allows a disinhibition conducive to excess. Circulating within a group, images are scrutinised, shared, judged. The condemnation in return can be scathing, to exclude one of their members. That is when the bullying begins. The young person, banished from the community, is judged by all unworthy of belonging to it. Cyberbullying continues the work of exclusion in the evening through social media until the target is exhausted.
By posting an intimate video to Salomé and Vincent, Garance thought she was strengthening their physical bond and creating an indelible secret pact between them. That was without counting all the rivalries and interpersonal stakes in gang relationships, or taking account of the masterful and untameable power of the internet. Out of revenge or because it was impossible to keep a secret of this kind, we will not know what intention lies behind the school bullying of which Garance is subsequently the victim. The 15-year-old girl for whom everything had gone well in her conquest of herself comes crashing cruelly back down to earth, even to hell.
“Since the start of term, they have changed their spot at break. Under the plane trees, others gather; groups are forming everywhere and Garance belongs to none. They make fun of her, on the networks, because she is alone”.
Now alone at school, she uses strategies to hide and experiences the loneliness that disconnection brings:
“She eats lunch alone every day, goes home alone in the evening, shuts herself in her room alone to go online, and the only thing that consoles her is the testimonies of people as alone as she is on forums dedicated to school bullying. Loneliness is not a simple reorganisation of her place in the world. It is a concrete and repulsive substance that she oozes and that covers her, a coating on her skin, like chyle exuded from her pores, which she cannot wash off, it sticks to her skin. She is not only alone; alone is who she is, now.”
Beyond a fresco of adolescence scrutinising bodies, emotions and relationships, this novel conveys all the melancholy of everyday life sustained by hyper-connection. Used as a magnifying mirror of their inner lives, we live with them the loneliness when they disconnect, the anguish of their incomplete, and therefore distorted, image on social media, and the tragic weight of the gang, heightened by the internet’s lack of limits.
While some may see in this a pessimistic view of the situation of teenagers today, we can also appreciate coming so accurately close to what they experience in private. For adolescence has never been plain sailing, and a fine understanding of their inner life is far more complicated than the outward appearances they show.
Thank you, Francesca Serra, for helping us with that.
Sophie BRUNETEAUX is a clinical psychologist and EDA (Education Development Learning) practitioner
