"Wish You Were Here": Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards (Part Two)

 “Wish you were here”: Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards 

by Sui Wang

Disembodied intimacy: a paper encounter 

Epistolary communication has always been concerned with performance and interpretation. The former is expressed through disembodiment from the physical bodies and the latter often resorts to semiotic imagining. “Within a discourse of disembodiment, there is a complex relation between the imagined body of epistolary discourse and the real ‘flesh and blood’ corporeality of the epistolary actors (Milne 7).” The conscious references to the embodiments, combined with the materiality of the epistolary medium, make up for the absence of physical bodies and convey a sense of intimacy, immediacy and presence. There is an old Chinese saying that goes “I could visualize you by seeing your handwriting (见字如面).” It is a common greeting at the beginning of, often times, a hand-written letter, meaning that this letter contains the writer’s spirits. Writing as physical labor requires a presence of body thus gives handwriting the corporeality that enables the readers to conjure the image of people. As a proxy of the sender, the postcard turns into an embodiment, a sign of physicality, and a performed identity with visual and textual cues. 

In the graphic novel Griffin and Sabine, London-based postcard designer Griffin enters into an epistolary romance with stamp illustrator Sabine, who lives on one of the South Pacific islands. Their relationship begins when Sabine sends him a greeting postcard expressing her affection for his artwork. They exchange their thoughts on family, school and art. They also exchange their work -- every card they send to each other is designed or handmade by themselves, so the mass-produced feature of postcard does not apply in their case. Sabine writes in one card with an eye and window: 

“I share your sight. When you draw and paint, I see what you’re doing while you do it. I know your work almost as well as I know my own.” 

Sabine convinces Griffin of the telepathic co-presence through their correspondences, in which she writes about how she knows about his work. Suffering from a lonely soul and a miserable past, Griffin develops an intimacy with this stranger. He replies, 

“I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know—please. ” 

Their next correspondence takes the form of a letter, which allows them longer lengths to expound on their life stories. In the letter, Griffin recalls how his parents died and he moved to his mother’s stepsister’s Vereker house. After working under her for three years, he went to art school. When he was about to graduate, he heard of Vereker’s death, which traumatizes him to this day. He adds that Sabine’s correspondence fills the void left by Vereker’s death. It is worth noting that Griffin sees Sabine’s postcard/letter as comfort, company, and an embodiment of her to “fill the void.” Similarly, Sabine develops a yearning for his cards. The postcard exchange facilitates a disembodied intimacy between them, which opens the door for a spiritual communion instead of the face-to-face physical connection. “I have always craved a closeness that I could not find here. Now I feel it with you. My kinsmen are responsive to me—but there is no one to reach my heart, and you who are so far away, have been closer to me than any man on the islands.” 

In this card, Sabine fantasizes bodily proximity with Griffin, while their disembodied encounter makes the proximity ambivalent. After Sabine denies his request for selfie, Griffin comes to a poignant epiphany: Sabine doesn’t exist -- it’s all his imagination. He thus abandons all hope and decides that “I mustn’t write again.” While the previous correspondences confirm their mutual affection, the disembodied nature of epistolary communication eventually endangers their romance and pushes Sabine to make the move. For ages, the fragility and illusiveness of disembodied intimacy have haunted the epistolary romance. In 84 Charing Cross Road, the protagonist, Hanff, had not got to visit the bookstore in person during their twenty-year long correspondence. When she finally visited the place after the owner Doel died, the bookstore was already closed. The same anxiety over authenticity troubles epistolary relationships of today, for instance, email romance and cyber dating. In contemporary cases, there seems to be a lck of any tangible artifact. No postcard, no paper, no handwriting. The material condition has fundamentally changed, hence the reworking of intimacy: people have invented new ways to build intimacy in digital world, which in turn is being tested and performed in a hybrid online-and-offline environment. 

Collectibles in the cabinet 

The postcard has a long shelf life and even longer after-shelf-life. The oldest ones can circulate for decades. Their possible last stop is the collector’s room. Postcard collection completes the cycle of private-public, moving it from the private domain to (quasi-)public exhibit. The life of a postcard as collectible is not completely separated from its life as gift, souvenir or epistolary vehicle. Many tourists send the postcard to themselves or friends for the sake of keeping their collection. A postcard from Chicago in 1908 reads: 

“Dear Elizabeth, 

I owed you a card of Mrs. Palmer’s house knowing you have a collection. It is brownstone however and not this red. We are all well. I suppose father will go to Lake Forest first and after to [Meutor?]. I have enjoyed being at home this winter very much. There is no news. Hope you are all well. 

Yours Nellie.” 

Nellie sent this card to Elizabeth not only for greeting but as a gift for her collection. When a postcard enters into a collection, its textual information and expressivity will be weakened, which shows a process of de-contextualization and de-privatization. As Naomi Schor writes on her postcard collection of Paris: 

“Postcards are organized in series, and their very seriality negates their individual mnemonic properties; what matters in the case of my postcard collection is not the contiguity between an individual card and the environment from which it was detached; rather it is the contiguity I restore between a single card and its immediate predecessor and follower in a series I am attempting to reconstitute, or the contiguity I create between cards linked by some common theme.” (255) 

The fragmentariness of the postcard takes on another layer of meaning. Instead of being an “in media res” of personal narratives, it is put back to a numbered published series. In this case, the “context collapse” does not seem to matter any longer. To be precise, the context is re-invented, or, returns to its barest starting point. In the postcard collection, the visual on the verso often takes the leading role, while the handwritten texts (if there is any) on the recto become the ornamentation. The sides flip again. The postcard regains its commodity value on the collecting market; this time, it is not only a cheap picture carrier, promo card, or a random souvenir that collects dust on the shelf, but a real collectible. Just as the collections of other kinds, the rarity denotes the value of collectibles and the trend keeps changing, responding to the zeitgeist. In this sense, the postcard collection reiterates the previous point on how the postcard serves as “a sign of time”. 

Nowadays, the collecting culture of the postcard is intricately linked with the pen pal community. On the forum of the international postcard association “Postcrossing”, many initiatives of postcard exchanges are for the purpose of collection. By collecting postcards of different places around the globe, the collectors meet new friends, exchange cultural traditions, and curate their typologies of places. “Postcrossing” even has a special section for trading, requests and offers where postcard fiends can specify their needs for cards (written/unwritten, stamped/unstamped, of specific places or themes) and complete their collection. Instead of adhering to the original published order, they can be very creative about their collections in terms of how the cards are picked and arranged. In the postcrossing community, postcard exchanges can fulfill the tasks of greeting, correspondence and trading in a one-time, single move. At the turn of the 20th century, the picture postcard offered a convenient and cheap means for long-distance communication; it brought together families, friends, lovers and strangers, albeit asynchronously. The distance and travelling time have romanticized the sender’s journey, as well as the receiver’s waiting. Its physical weight is light, while cultural weight is heavy. It functions as an epistolary vehicle, aesthetic object, souvenir and collectible. The enmeshed roles render it a cornucopia of meanings and enable it to travel between the private and public domains. Today’s email, mobile message and social media remediate different functions of the postcard, but none of them provides the imaginative mobilities, disembodied but materialized intimacy and curatorial serendipity that the postcard evokes. 

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Trained as a media scholar and a journalist, Sui Wang’s work explore the media history of modern China and Japan with focuses on visual culture and sonic media. She is a second-year master student in East Asian studies at University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on her master thesis, which investigates how the listenership of overseas Chinese radio stations makes their diasporic identities. In her leisure time, she loves rewatching Chris Marker and writing short stories in Amazon reviews. You can read more of her other work at www.suiwang.org