Printed Past, Bookish Present, Digital Future - UR Research

Printed Past, Bookish Present, Digital Future:

Media, Materiality, and Design in Contemporary Literature

by

Eric C. Loy

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Morris Eaves and Professor Jeffrey Tucker

Department of English Arts, Sciences, and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

2021

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This one’s for me.

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Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch iv Acknowledgements v

Abstract vi

Contributors and Funding Sources viii

List of Figures ix

Introduction The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book 1

Chapter One “I have the documents”: Material, Method, and the 13 Editorial Aesthetic of Mumbo Jumbo and DICTEE

Chapter Two Some Assembly Required: Bookish Interactivity and Material 61 Narrative Construction in The Unfortunates and Building Stories

Chapter Three Book Fiction in the Age of Remix 113

Chapter Four Bookish Feedback and the Technogenic Loop of 167 Contemporary Fiction Works Cited 214

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Biographical Sketch

The author was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He attended the University of

Nevada, Las Vegas and graduated summa cum laude in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts

degree in English Language and Literature. In 2012, he completed a Master of Arts

degree in English Literature at Creighton University. At Creighton, Loy was awarded a

Full Fellowship to support his studies, and he served as a research assistant for The

Complete Letters of Henry James project. He began his doctoral study at the University

of Rochester in 2013 when he was awarded an Alan F. Hilfiker Scholarship. At the

University of Rochester, Loy served as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Digital

Humanities from 2014 to 2016. In 2018, he was awarded the Edward Peck Curtis Award

for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student for his course design and co-direction

of the undergraduate class Media ABC and the graduate seminar Text & Medium with

Professor Morris Eaves. For the 2018–19 academic year, Loy was awarded a Dean’s

Dissertation Fellowship in support of this project. From 2015 to 2021, Loy served as

Project Coordinator for The William Blake Archive.

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Acknowledgments

As it turns out, completing a PhD is really a team sport. I’m grateful to have had

several talented and caring individuals on my side throughout these years of study.

Thank you—

Morris Eaves, for giving me a shot, for trusting me, and for being a patient,

generous mentor for eight years. Through your example, I learned that we can take the

work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

Jeffrey Tucker, for being an inspiring teacher and a kind and generous reader of

my work. Meetings with you would always leave me energized—needed reminders of the

passion for studying literature that led me to the pursue a PhD in the first place.

Laura Shackelford and Joel Burges, for your time, encouragement, and expertise

that helped bring needed clarity to the many complex ideas I pursue in this dissertation.

And, of course, all my non-academic family and friends who, without really

understanding what I was doing this whole time, still offered their unconditional support.

I will thank each of you in person as time allows, but I will reserve some page space here

specifically for my mom, Melanie. Resources were often tight growing up, but we had

bus fare and we had a library card. Thank you for taking us to the public library and

maxing that card out every week. From a young age, I learned to love books and reading.

Also, libraries and public transit, for that matter. My PhD is the culmination of those

weekly trips from nearly three decades ago. I just keep going back.

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Abstract

This dissertation argues for a recentering of the book medium in the study of

contemporary literature. Recent works by popular authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski

(House of Leaves) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of Codes) demonstrate an artistic

resurgence of this material format, often positioned as an analog response to the

proliferation of digital and multimedia content in current popular culture. Mixing

interpretive strategies from media studies, book history, and literary criticism, this project

traces new historical and theoretical contexts with which to understand this new era of the

literary book. Building on Jessica Pressman’s formulation of “bookishness,” which she

defines as "creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within a digital culture”

(1), the four chapters in this dissertation each demonstrate how bookishness has shaped

recent productions of contemporary literature, in a variety of artistic applications and in a

number of different historical-cultural moments.

Chapter One focuses on the mid-century development of an “editorial aesthetic”

in literary fiction, in which authors borrow design and organizational strategies from

academic books. In the examples I discuss—Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Theresa

Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE—the editorial aesthetic is deployed in service of a subversive

critique of hegemonic knowledge systems. Chapter Two explicates the “bookish

interactivity” of a novel published as an unbound codex, typically labeled as a “book in a

box.” With critical readings of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Chris Ware’s

Building Stories, I demonstrate how literary book design can uniquely shape narrative

structure as well cultivate new kinds of participatory reading modes. Chapter Three

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connects recent literary works to digital culture directly through the concept of “bookish

remix.” Reading Foer’s Tree of Codes and Jordan Abel’s Injun, I contextualize the

creation and reception of these novels within internet meme culture and the creative

copying of remix in a variety of media. Chapter Four addresses the fundamental process

of “bookish feedback” that structures the evolution of the book medium and connects it to

human development. My readings of Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and

Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc illustrate how each novel exemplifies new advances

in the book and the novel through bookish feedback in both material design and narrative

structure.

Fulfilling the promise of this dissertation’s title, my study of all the literary works

in this project ultimately reveals how such contemporary practices of literary bookishness

connect to bibliographic history, interact with the media environment of the present, and

reach to digital cultures of the future.

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Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors

Morris Eaves [co-advisor], Jeffrey Tucker [co-advisor], and Joel Burges of the

Department of English, as well as Professor Laura Shackelford of the Department of

English at the Rochester Institute of Technology. All work for the dissertation was

completed independently by the author.

The images used for figures in Chapters One and Two were captured and

processed by Lisa Wright, Digitization Specialist in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the

University of Rochester. COVID-19 pandemic protocols over the past year prevented

further collaboration with Wright to produce images for the remaining chapters. Images

used in chapters three and four were taken by the author using home equipment.

Graduate study was supported by the Alan F. Hilfiker Scholarship, the Andrew

W. Mellon Fellowship in Digital Humanities, the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, and the

Dudley Doust Writing Associates Fellowship, all from the University of Rochester.

Additional training and education were supported by scholarships from the Digital

Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, as well as the Rare Book

School at the University of Virginia.

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Dust jacket design of Mumbo Jumbo 29

Figure 1.2 Two-page title spread from Mumbo Jumbo 33

Figure 1.3 Collage sequence, page 11 from Mumbo Jumbo 37

Figure 1.4 DICTEE letter facsimile, pages 146–47 44

Figure 2.1 Open-box view of The Unfortunates 75

Figure 2.2 Box contents of The Unfortunates 82

Figure 2.3 Interior box edge of The Unfortunates 86

Figure 2.4 Pulled pamphlet section of The Unfortunates 91

Figure 2.5 Box contents of Building Stories 95

Figure 2.6 Little Golden Book object from Building Stories 103

Figure 2.7 Illustration sequence from Building Stories 105

Figure 2.8 Front of poster object from Building Stories 109

Figure 2.9 Back of poster object from Building Stories 109

Figure 2.10 Folio book object from Building Stories 110

Figure 2.11 Diagram illustration from Building Stories 111

Figure 3.1 Detail of page 14 from Tree of Codes 142

Figure 3.2 XML snippet for Tree of Codes markup 143

Figure 3.3 XML snippet for Tree of Codes markup 144

Figure 3.4 XML snippet for Tree of Codes markup 145

Figure 3.5 Detail of page 16 from Tree of Codes 147

Figure 3.6 XML snippet for Tree of Codes markup 148

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Figure 3.7 Still from Tree of Codes promotional video 150

Figure 3.8 Poem “s” from Injun 161

Figure 3.9 Poem “z” from Injun 164

Figure 4.1 Shannon diagram for communication system 171

Figure 4.2 Darnton’s communications circuit of book history 175

Figure 4.3 Two-page spread from VAS, pages 126–27 188

Figure 4.4 Two-page spread from VAS, pages 270–71 191

Figure 4.5 Still-frame sequence from theMystery.doc, pages 124–25 207

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Introduction:

The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book

The first book I remember from my childhood is The Very Hungry Caterpillar by

Eric Carle. The vibrantly illustrated story captivated my toddler-aged self with a hopeful

message about growing up, some friendly-looking critters, and a wide array of exotic

foods like salami and cherry pie. The book was already a popular classic when I was a

kid, and it continues to be a part of the childhood experience for many kids today. In the

fifty years since its publication in 1969, The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold more than

50 million copies and has been translated into more than sixty languages (Ulaby). The

story is simple: a caterpillar becomes very hungry and eats a lot of food. By the end of

the book, the caterpillar becomes big and fat, spins a chrysalis, and transforms into a

butterfly. The unique charm of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, however, is often attributed

to Carle’s ingenious material device. As the caterpillar eats through the food in the story,

physical holes in the pages of the book represent the bug’s gastronomic adventures. For a

young reader, or someone being read to, this design creates a remarkable effect. Unlike

other books I had encountered previously, this book seemed to be a part of the story it

was telling—the caterpillar was eating through the thing I was holding!

A few decades and academic degrees later, I can better reflect on the impressive

complexity of that classic children’s book. The incorporation of tactility and material

design into the reading experience is worth thinking about, for example. Additionally,

one might comment on the holes’ metatextual effects on narrative structure. Perhaps the

most wide-ranging critical approach, however, would be to consider how the book’s

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status as a material object has changed over time and into the twenty-first century. Unlike

other children’s classics, The Very Hungry Caterpillar is arguably not well suited for an

iPad edition. Transformation into a digital format comes at the cost of losing the physical

holes in the pages. Therefore, it is now equally important to recognize Carle’s design as

not just an innovation in storytelling but also as an innovation that specifically leverages

affordances of the print medium. The holes are precisely what makes The Very Hungry

Caterpillar a fundamentally printed text and what makes it more book-like overall. The

holes call attention to the material object as a book, and readers will often play into this

idea, peering into the holes or poking their fingers through them. Handling the book is

essential to experiencing the story.

Jessica Pressman has coined the useful term “bookishness” to describe this

phenomenon. First introduced as a concept in a 2009 article and later fully explicated in a

2020 book, bookishness refers to “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book

within a digital culture, in modes that may be sentimental, fetishistic, radical” (1).

Bookishness includes aspects of book materiality creeping into other media—a laptop

case that looks like an old book, for example (7)—as well as literary works that play with

bookish aesthetics to shape content and form (22). While instances of bookishness can be

traced throughout the history of the medium, contemporary bookishness, according to

Pressman, has emerged as a nostalgic response to the advent of digital technology and the

supposedly inevitable death of print (1–2). Technological obsolescence becomes part of

an aesthetic appeal, similar to the renewed popularity of vinyl records or tube amps still

providing the most desirable output for electric guitars. Indeed, sales of print books have

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defied doom-and-gloom prophecies: 2020 sales were up again, 8.2% from the previous

year, for a total of 750.89 million units sold in the United States (Milliot). Rising sales

follow a decade-long trend for the print book, running counter to the simultaneous

decline of traditional newspaper and magazine sales (Watson). For whatever reason, the

book remains as resilient and relevant as ever, well into the digital twenty-first century.

The advent of digital technology and culture provides something else, too:

perspective. Because print is no longer the default medium for information storage and

transmission, we are able to see the media landscape in a new light. In other words, the

availability of new media options prompts us to think about what digital media can do

that print can’t, and vice versa. Digital media seem especially capable at illustrating

dynamic connections within large sets of information, for example, while books lend

themselves well to linear expressions of thought. We often skim in one medium and read

closely in the other. Media also borrow from each other—the “pages” that make up an

electronic document, for example, or a book designed with digital software. Readers in

our multimedia moment are involved in a constant negotiation of norms and protocols,

moving back and forth between digital and print strategies for organization and

communication. In such a moment, the production of literature continues as well.

The subject of this dissertation is therefore contemporary literary books that

incorporate bookish material play and an engagement of multimedia performance into

their narrative content. Many authors, working in key moments of print/digital media

evolution, have turned a critical eye to the medium of their work. Steve Tomasula—an

author whose works are discussed in Chapter Four, for example—characterizes his novels

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as explorations of the book medium, challenging its conventional heritage of linear

organization and attempting to “emulate a form of emergence,” or a form of patterned

energy, better suited for the hyper-connectivity and information-overload of

contemporary digital life (302–4). Working with new perspectives of media, such authors

push the print book to new formal extremes, stretching our conception of the book and its

capabilities at the same time.

In this way, the subject of this dissertation is also reading. As all kinds of media

shift about our world, and as the book remains in likewise flux while the experiments of

digital-era authors play out for reading audiences, the effects of bookish literature

inevitably play upon our expectations of what books can do and how we can read them.

In other words, each study in this dissertation is also a historicization of contemporary

reading practices. For a scholar of literature, truly new material literary forms must be

met with new contexts of historical media specificity as well as new, synthetic

approaches to the texts. As much as digital culture influences changes in the book

medium, we must also recognize how much digital culture continues to change us.

This dissertation joins a strong ongoing discussion in the intersecting scholarship

of contemporary literature, media studies, and the history of the book. Pressman’s

Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age represents an expansive look at the culture of

books within digital culture as a whole. In her study, Pressman is simultaneously

interested in how books, as objects, persist as a material form, as well as how books, as

organizational structures, continue to shape our understanding of other non-book media.

Remarking on her own methodology, Pressman writes, “I adopt a kaleidoscopic

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perspective, collecting and curating an array of texts and genres into constellations that,

through their arrangement, show us something about how and why we continue to love

books in a digital age” (19). In this sense, the “love” in Pressman’s book title conveys the

intimate affection for books that seems to contribute to the medium’s enduring

popularity—bookishness is as much about the way we feel about books as it is about their

formal properties. Blending media studies, book history, and traditional literary criticism,

Pressman illustrates the durability of her concept through a range of popular texts, from

Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 House of Leaves to the J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst co-

produced novel S., published in 2013, whose fictional conceit involves the book being an

old library volume that contains communications between two readers in the margins.

While Pressman develops the concept of bookishness, Leah Price seeks to expand

our idea of what counts as a book in the 2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About

Books: The History and Future of Reading. Rather than arguing against the notion that

the book medium is dying, Price suggests that our evolving definition of the book is what

really matters. In today’s digital culture, books are often positioned as a “not-app,” “not-

database,” and “not-website” (22)—the foil to electronic technology. However, as Price

illustrates in her own expansive historical survey, the book has been defined in a variety

of ways and oftentimes has undergone evolutions that parallel today’s digital media. For

example, in one chapter, Price discusses the physical mobility of books in history with

the general purpose of rebutting the marketing of Kindles and iPads, which often claims

an unprecedented freedom from print volumes. In opposition, Price cites “girdle books”

of the Middle Ages as “the earliest wearables” as well as the invention of onionskin

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pages which permitted the Oxford University Press Bible to “slim down its contents as

elegantly as any MacBook Air, without ever throwing lectern-sized Bibles out of work”

(83–84). As I summarize in a review of What We Talk About for ASAP/J, “Importantly,

Price does not claim that reading practices have remained static, attending instead to the

often-complicated mix of new technologies, marketing strategies, and spaces for reading

that drives the evolution of such practices” (par. 6). One important facet of this

dissertation is in recognizing how our shifting ideas of what constitutes a book shapes our

experience of the literature contained within them.

Likewise, the material form of a book often shifts as much as our conceptions of

the medium. In 2018’s The Book, Amaranth Borsuk traces a history of different material

formats that participate in the identity of the book. Borsuk’s history comprises four major

subdivisions: “The Book as Object,” The Book as Content,” “The Book as Idea,” and

“The Book as Interface.” While Borsuk’s project fulfills the usual criteria for a general

history of the book—cuneiform tablets to Gutenberg, for example—her approach is

particularly useful in its synthesis of print and digital perspectives. For example, one of

Borsuk’s working definitions describes the book as a “portable data storage and

distribution method,” citing both Egyptian hieroglyphics and digital video clips as key

historical developments in this tradition (1). This kind of definition takes advantage of

our contemporary awareness of digital multimedia, enabling a more expansive and

flexible approach to understanding books in (and from) the twenty-first century. To make

sense of the present, sometimes we must change our conception of the past. The critical

readings in this dissertation often demonstrate such a contemporary perspective, even in

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the analysis of pre-digital works. This kind of reading is not errantly anachronistic;

rather, such readings acknowledge the anticipation or active creation of new media forms

in pre-digital works. In other words, because such experimental works have contributed

to our new conceptions of the book medium and have reformed the book’s relationship to

other media, it follows that our readings would change in kind. Such readings respond to

the question, “How did we get here?”, not with definitive answers, but rather with a

demonstration of methods that exemplify the line of historical development.

Finally, Alexander Starre traces a theoretical topography of recent literary fiction,

specifically focusing on works that incorporate unconventional book design into narrative

content, in the 2015 monograph Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print

Culture after Digitization. As the title of his book indicates, Starre positions such

experimental works as responses to digital culture, representing a modern renaissance of

sorts for the book medium. A work of “book fiction,” in this case, is defined as a literary

object that interweaves text, design, and paper into an embodied work of art” (6).

Developing this term, Starre uses typical examples of materially experimental literature,

including Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.

Starre’s project therefore closely resembles this dissertation in both subject and scope,

and the following chapters may be considered complementary to Starre’s work and others

similar to it. Ultimately, Starre’s concluding comment on the “dialectic of digitization”

(253–64) for me becomes a mechanism that accounts for the book’s dialectical

relationship with many media and social practices through its history. This perspective

follows in the spirit of Price’s claim that “printed books have consistently been the

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newest of media” (26), as both full participants and influential agents in their media

environments. In this way, the critical readings in this dissertation do contribute to new

understandings of the book’s position within digital culture; however, as these readings

reference relevant histories of the book, the goal is to create more connection than chasm.

“Why have we not heard more about materiality?” N. Katherine Hayles asks

plainly in the experimental scholarly pamphlet Writing Machines (19). Published in 2002

and designed by Anne Burdick, Writing Machines challenges traditional literary criticism

with a sequence of provocative readings on three unconventional texts: an electronic

work, an artist’s book, and the best-selling novel House of Leaves. Through these

readings, Hayles demonstrates the necessity of critical frameworks that centralize the role

of media technology in a literary work’s manner of representation. The form of Writing

Machines, designed by Anne Burdick, also embodies this material awareness, featuring

warped text, fore-edge designs, cited quotations presented in the form of physical cut-

outs, and so on. Twenty years later, materiality has become a principal concept for

literary study that spans both print and digital media, evidenced especially in the ongoing

conversations of book history and literary criticism in the digital age mentioned

previously. We have heard more about materiality, but we have not heard enough. The

modest aim of this dissertation is to fill in a few gaps and make a few connections

previously unrecognized in these rich scholarly conversations—less disciplinary

intervention and more critical continuity. The book remains a dynamic, essential medium

in our digital twenty-first century, and the following chapters offer four different

instances on how the medium has managed such medial pliability in its recent history.

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In Chapter One, the historical development of an “editorial aesthetic” is offered as

a useful starting place in understanding and historicizing bookish material design in the

pre-digital twentieth century. I define the editorial aesthetic as a literary style that

borrows conceptual strategies and material structures from academic book design and the

critical editions being produced in the mid-twentieth century. Using the examples of

Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 DICTEE, I

demonstrate, first, how each literary work participates in and critiques the bibliographic

traditions of scholarly editing and, second, how an awareness of this tradition can inform

new critical readings of these classic works. Ultimately, the instances of editorial

aesthetic and academic bookishness demonstrate the book medium’s historical capacity

for the critical engagement of different modes of signification through its material

properties.

Chapter Two subsequently develops the concept of “bookish interactivity,” which

illustrates how literary book design can shape narrative structure and how such

unconventional design participates in different media traditions of interactivity. Bookish

interactivity today maintains significant links to digital media, but it also participates in

other formats and traditions, such as the Conceptual Art movement in the twentieth

century, which often incorporated indeterminacy and user participation into its methods

of creation and representation. In demonstrating the role of bookish interactivity in

literary fiction, I focus on the “book in a box” as exemplified in B. S. Johnson’s 1969 The

Unfortunates and Chris Ware’s 2011 Building Stories. These works—historically

bookending the advent of digital media—employ the format of the unbound codex to

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achieve comparable literary effects, specifically in regard to the representation of time

and memory. Importantly, bookish interactivity in these works rely on a mode of material

signification that combines book and body to create a unique reading experience. In this

way, bookish interactivity accounts for a newly defamiliarized relationship with the book

medium, demonstrating how the book can reshape its own material configuration in the

capacity of its own historical evolution and/or in response to the evolution of other

contemporary media.

Chapter Three addresses digital culture directly, contextualizing current literary

book production in the digital age within practices of creative copying as seen in meme

culture of the modern internet as well as in traditions of remix found in music and other

media. Developing a concept of “bookish remix,” I connect contemporary literary works

of creative copying to the organizational and representational affordances of digital

media. While creative copying maintains a specific history in books through erasure

projects and artist’s books, I argue that contemporary bookish remix signals a new

symbiosis of digital/print methods. The close readings in Chapter Three include Foer’s

Tree of Codes and Jordan Abel’s 2016 Injun, two works that remix original source texts

to create new literary outputs. Earlier critical readings of these two works often connect

the material forms of each book back to the heritage of literary erasure within print

culture, but I incorporate the methods of their production into critical readings that

connect to a contemporary digital context. In other words, in the effort to understand

literature and the book “in a digital age,” instances of bookish remix represent an ideal

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opportunity to connect current literary trends to some of digital culture’s most common

practices.

Finally, Chapter Four describes the fundamental process of “bookish feedback”

that structures the evolution of the book medium and connects it to human development.

In the explicit attempt to advance the book, the novel, and readers’ own conceptions of

material text and literary forms, Steve Tomasula’s 2004 VAS: An Opera in Flatland and

Matthew McIntosh’s 2017 theMystery.doc represent recent literary experiments that

incorporate the process of their own composition into a final published product. In

reading these novels, I propose “decomposition” as a descriptor of this mode of

representation, which seeks to undo the mediating effect(s) of contemporary writing and

publishing technologies. Ultimately, the concepts of bookish feedback and the

decomposed book provide an important theoretical base for understanding bookishness in

a digital age and specifically in an information technology context. These complementary

ideas distinguish bookish forms of representation from their contemporary digital

counterparts while also recognizing how digital media have irrevocably altered our

conceptions of ourselves and, in turn, all of our media.

The common thread that runs through all four chapters is the emphasis that the

book continues to be an active (and reactive) agent of representation in a myriad of

multimedia contexts. The book’s capacity to make and remake its own material identity

and modes of literary signification support the idea that the book will continue to be an

essential medium in the twenty-first century, whether that essentialness manifests in the

simple persistence of printed matter or in the influence of legacy print structures on new

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digital formats. This dissertation therefore joins with contemporary literary scholarship’s

recent focus on materiality, media, and book history to illustrate different ways that the

book can serve as both concept and medium. In the end, the book is perhaps best figured

as a locus of material conventions, organizational forms, and social practices. The trends

in contemporary literature identified in this dissertation continue the book’s regenerative

legacy into the digital age and whatever lies beyond.

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Chapter One:

“I have the documents”: Material, Method, and the

Editorial Aesthetic of Mumbo Jumbo and DICTEE

I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came to print The Waste Land as a little book [ . . . ] it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never be unstuck. They have had an almost greater popularity than the poem itself. [ . . . ] but I regret having sent so many inquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.

—T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot’s modernist monument of fragmentation is also a case study of

curation. Allusions and quotations, spread across myriad speakers, are the ubiquitous

features of his famous poem, The Waste Land, revealing a poet wrestling with the totality

of literature against the individual experience. No doubt readers wrestle, too. And so: the

text comes with notes. The original function of the notes, for Eliot, was to quell the

accusations of plagiarism that had dogged him in the past as well as to call attention to

the inspiration provided by Jessie Weston’s 1920 work on the Grail, From Ritual to

Romance. Printed in a “little book” and sent out to the world, however, the notes became

an essential part of The Waste Land’s poetics. For readers without encyclopedic

knowledge of literature and art, the notes offer a glimpse into the swirling vortex of

source material that (seemingly) makes up the text. The notes effectively are a rhetorical

tribute to the ostensible genius behind such an assemblage. At the same time, the notes

make The Waste Land a fundamentally printed text, a quasi-scholarly iteration of artistic

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expression that is self-consciously entrenched in modern material production—the notes

are physically attached to the poem. The notes, along with the epigraph and dedication,

give shape to and impose limits on an otherwise unwieldy gesture toward the infinite.

The factual accuracy or earnestness of the notes does not matter in this poetic context,

and Eliot himself recognized the irreversible fusing of literary material with critical

apparatus. The result is not supplement, filler, or aid. The academic mode becomes yet

another literary form subsumed by the poem’s insatiable appetite for cultural content,

indistinguishable from the verse that precedes. But rather than an exceptional case, the

textual spectacle of The Waste Land appears to be a significant precursor to an enduring

motif of contemporary literature.

This opening dissertation chapter is about the twentieth-century development of

the “editorial aesthetic”—a literary style that borrows conceptual strategies and material

structures from the professional scholarly practice of curating and annotating source

material, which are often literary and/or historical texts. Specifically, and in regard to the

works I will discuss, the rise of editorial fiction in American postwar novels can be read

as: initially, the proliferation of scientistic posturing in academic book production; later,

an artistic alignment with literary postmodernism and metafictional book design;

ultimately, a vehicle for the critique and subversion of hierarchal modes of knowledge

production by historically marginalized communities. For contemporary authors and

texts, such fiction typically exhibits one or many of the following material attributes:

• systematic use of collected and arranged source material, either fictional

or (f)actual

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• incorporation of media objects, e.g., photographs, into traditional

typographic layout; i.e., “multimodal”

• simulation or re-presentation of “original” documents through facsimile;

e.g., handwritten letters, telegrams, etc.

• narrative adoption of typographic and bibliographic conventions of

academic publishing; e.g., annotations, appendices, indices, etc.

With such material features incorporated into a literary context, editorial fiction is

accordingly a mode that “systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact” and

frequently displays “the process of [its] construction,” following Patricia Waugh’s

criteria for “self-conscious” metafiction (2–4). The historical systems in question

frequently bear significant resemblance in their material design to academic publications

of editors and their scholarly institutions. Consequently, though postmodernist

metafiction is a more recent historical development, editorial fiction can be read against

the wider ideological frame of scholarly editing and academic book production

throughout the twentieth century. Such a critical framework recognizes historical context

while accommodating both text and medium of the resulting literature. Because while

novels are, of course, [frequently] made of words, they are also [frequently] made of ink,

paper, glue, cord, etc.

In the context of material experimentation in the design of print literature, and in

the evolutionary timeline of bookish fiction, I offer the editorial aesthetic of the mid-

twentieth century as an important—and seldom recognized—historical precursor to the

later digital media influences discussed in later chapters. This is not to say that editorial

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fiction is a pre-digital or nascently digital form, but rather the phenomenon of editorial

fiction provides a clear model to understand direct relationships between media forms

and literary, bookish experimentation. The editorial aesthetic exemplifies the powerful

media feedback loops that fuel the evolution of bookish fiction specifically at a time

when such evolutions in the form of print literature were gaining momentum in the wake

of modernism. In other words, editorial fiction is a useful starting place in the effort to

historicize the trend of bookish literary design that appears in many later contemporary

works. As discussed in this chapter, the authors of editorial fiction apparently found a

cultural influence in academic book design and production, subsequently leveraging such

design practices into parodic critiques of the ideological systems that academic print

forms originally represented and reinforced. As a media form, the book here

demonstrates its capacity to participate in the negotiation of borrowed conventions and

mirrored practices of use. Certainly, academic editorial forms rely on this capacity as

much as the parodic literary critiques that follow.

In tracing the development and influence of editorial fiction in contemporary

literature, I offer two works that engage the conceit to different thematic and artistic ends,

and each specifically at a time of important cultural transition. The first, Ishmael Reed’s

1972 satire Mumbo Jumbo is an utter send-up of academic and editorial convention. The

satirical use of document facsimiles, annotation, and experimental design are precisely

the attributes that characterize Mumbo Jumbo’s critique of Western culture and white

supremacy, as well as its engagement in the African American literary tradition of

“Signification.” That the plot of Mumbo Jumbo concerns a kind of editorial project—the

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recovery of a mysterious and powerful book—only further underscores the textual

emphasis of the novel. The second reading features the 1982 tour de force DICTEE by

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In Cha’s case, editorial practice structures her technique for

fragmentation and collage in presenting a text full of diverse sources, voices, and media.

Cha’s oft-ignored bibliographic notes, in particular, link her book to an editorial history

of women’s writing and translation, producing a powerful metatextual commentary on

her own meditation on gender, race, and national identity. In both cases, mediation and

representation become crucial thematic components of the literary work, and the resultant

metafictional and editorial strategies of the narrative co-opt the material design of the

book. The typical top-to-bottom and page-to-page reading experience shifts to one of

navigation, choice, and the confrontation of a novel sensibility in the organization of

narrative.

Such material characteristics of books have been discussed in a literary context

before. In Paratexts, for example, the systematic narrative theorist Gérard Genette

inventories “a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses of all kinds and dating

from all periods” in which the conceptual whole of a literary work is formed and

informed by its own material and cultural production. From physical phenomena like

cover art and typesetting to the cultural and rhetorical posturing of author and narrator,

Genette delimits these “thresholds” as the boundary “between the inside and the outside.”

Fundamentally, these borderlands of literature provide conceptual shape to every literary

work, materializing an otherwise ungraspable production or signification. On this point,

Genette is unequivocal: “[A] text without a paratext does not exist and has never existed”

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(3). To be sure, Genette devotes an entire chapter to “Notes” of all kinds, including

Eliot’s formation at the end of The Waste Land (333). Genette’s lofty project necessarily

calls upon a variety of disciplines, and, thirty years on from its original publication,

Paratexts represents a strikingly prescient material turn in narrative and literary theory.

Such a study demands a conception of literature that considers the book as both artistic

production and material object. And so, Genette’s labor on the liminal realities of literary

production occupies a liminal space of scholarship as well. In asking, “Where does the

book end and the story begin?” we are also asking, “Where does the bibliographer stop

and the critic start?”

These questions are essential because the manipulation of paratextual material

becomes an essential part of contemporary literary production and, later, a hallmark of

postmodern style. Historically, there is plenty of precedent. The ever-playful, eighteenth-

century classic Tristram Shandy, for example, no doubt occupies a top position if

charting such a literary genealogy. Genette (and the foreword for Paratext’s English

edition by Richard Macksey for that matter) as well as Waugh both rely considerably on

Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century work to illustrate their respective points. Sterne, of

course, brilliantly lampoons the biography, the early novel, and publication conventions

of the era—an original nine-volume printing, mis-numbered pages, the famous “blank

page” and “black page,” as well as scattered notes, dedications, prefaces, etc. Likewise,

modern and contemporary literature bearing such metafictional trademarks respond in

kind to their respective cultural contexts. Within the scope of this chapter, we see that

many contemporary authors apparently found the increasing cultural influence of

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academia and professional literary scholarship a fertile ground for either clever adoption

or subversion.

What was going on? In the latter half of the twentieth century, production of both

American scholarship and literature increasingly turned to the ideological bulwark of

materiality—results you could touch. For scholars at the time, materiality and textuality

could bolster literary studies in more scientific, and therefore culturally valuable, terms.

In particular, the field of scholarly editing during the Cold War era 1960–80 became

flush with federal funding as the United States government cultivated “objective” and

“apolitical” humanistic scholarship for the cultural and ideological fronts of its fight

against the Soviet Union (Gailey). Entrenched in the ideals for creating “pure” texts of

literary works, scholarly editing also created monumental textual objects in the form of

critical editions. Frequently stuffed with paratextual-like features of their own, these

books filled with quasi-scientific method and markup often resulted in more barrier than

border. Notes, symbols, and a general sense of datafication frequently overwhelmed and

obstructed the text for which they were designed to provide access. The best-known

example achieved its infamy through Lewis Mumford’s takedown in The New York

Review of Books of the Belknap edition of Emerson’s journals (3–5). Mumford railed

against the edition and the contemporary editorial practices it represented, namely “the

mock-scientific assumptions governing the pursuit of humanities” at the time. Describing

the Belknap edition, Mumford figures Emerson trapped behind a “barbed wire

entanglement of diacritical marks,” inaccessible and unreadable because of a textual

production ill-conceived by contemporary editors.

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While Mumford may (rightfully) balk at some of these results, it is still important

to recognize scholarly editing as a systematic, professional practice of producing the

literary works we read and study every day. Many readers, and even many literary

scholars, are often unaware of the labor through which their text arrives in a published

edition. Though it shares the same name, this scholarly practice of editing is distinct from

the kind of editorial work we typically think of: publishing-house editors working with an

author on their latest manuscript; a senior editor at a newspaper or magazine, delegating

assignments and managing a group of harried reporters or columnists; a freelance copy-

editor working over someone’s pet project or thesis; a literary scholar organizing an

edited collection of critical essays in their field. Scholarly editing is none of these things.

It is, fundamentally, a form of textual transmission—“the considered act of reproducing

or altering texts,” as G. Thomas Tanselle tentatively defines editing in his useful primer

(10). The “consideration” to which Tanselle refers constitutes the bulk of the work that

scholarly editors do: determining the goals of any particular edition; whether or not to

approach or present a text historically; selecting a viable source or “copy-text”; assessing

textual evidence in synthesizing a completed work; formulating a system of annotation

and emendation in re-presenting source material in the final edition; and so on. Along

with these work practices, perhaps the most useful fundamental concept that literary

scholarly editing emphasizes is the distinction between a work and a text—a “work”

being the conceptual production of any piece of literature and the “text” being our

material access point. For example, Hamlet cannot be passed on directly, but its textual

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records can—and, especially in the case of Shakespeare, these records have been

subjected to significant editorial intervention over the centuries.

Grasping, even in a basic way, the work of scholarly editing and the kinds of

material texts that it produces as a result of its “considered” acts is important in

understanding the cultural history of academic knowledge production that, in turn,

seemingly influenced literary output in the twentieth century. Returning to Mumford, his

critique is likewise essential in recognizing the necessary liminal spaces that produce a

text, as they exist in the real world in historical context. Scholarly editions offer

exaggerated instances of metatextual thresholds in the capacity of critical markup,

sometimes to the detriment of their scholarly goals, but always in a way that

fundamentally shapes both the physical object and artistic production of the work

contained therein. And as with the practices of Cold War editing, for example, critical

apparatus inevitably delimits the cultural and critical contexts by which texts arrive to the

reader. The barbed wire that prevents Mumford from accessing Emerson is precisely the

kind of paratext that allows our own contemporary study to access the controlling ideas

and prevailing legacy of editorial and bibliographic practices of the twentieth century.

Moreover, as the technical production of editing was revealed as problematic, so

too were the cultural processes behind the work. In 1971, Jesse Lemisch published a

report for the AHA newsletter titled “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the

Papers of Great White Men.” The critique focused on the selection criteria of the

National Historical Publications Commission, questioning the ideological priorities of a

public project that appeared to focus solely on the historical papers of elite white men of

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politics and government. In addition to arguing against racial and gender bias, Lemisch

also argued that a focus on the documents of individuals rather than groups was of little

benefit to social and economic historians (Kline and Perdue 14–16). Like the turmoil

surrounding the technical specifics of scholarly editing, the debates and instances of

social progress concerning selection and scope are an equally illuminating look at the

shifting ideology of editing at the time. Simply put, institutions wanted collections of

documents, produced authoritatively, concerning authoritative figures. Pushback was

varied but frequently severe. The crucial realization, however, is that these critiques of

editing focused on method and subject—never, in other words, if such projects were

worthwhile at all. The resolve for documents per se as the basis for scholarship was tacit

but total.

While literary scholarship seemingly struggled with its documentary turn, authors

and artists perceived a moment ripe for adoption, experimentation, and critique. And the

efforts were hardly relegated to the avant-garde or even restricted to the borders of the

United States. In the opening pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell deploys a

footnote that directs readers to the “Appendix” that follows the novel. This peculiar

textual feature, along with extensive passages of “The Book” that readers peruse along

with protagonist Winston, creates a distinctly textual experience with an editorial flair.

Even with such modest experimentation in format, Orwell creates a text that must be

managed and navigated rather than consumed, serially, in the usual way. Do you read the

footnote or skip it? Does it break your narrative or syntactic stride? That is, do you

navigate to the bottom of the page while mid-sentence at the top, as the symbol (usually

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an asterisk) comes to you? Or do you wait until you’ve finished the paragraph? Do you

then flip to the back of the book and read the Appendix? Now? Later? Never? Though

choices may be made casually, their effect on the narrative experience can be significant.

Another of the usual Great Books of the twentieth century raises the stakes further

still. Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 Pale Fire is, by fictional conceit, an edition of a 999-line

poem accompanied by critical commentary. Nabokov utterly commits to the pretension of

the project: table of contents, a foreword by the [fictional] scholar Charles Kinbote,

commentary, and index are all included. Simply put, the narrative structure of Pale Fire

subsumes even the physical characteristics of its material production. Lest such structural

experimentation be considered a passing fad, three decades later David Foster Wallace

would adorn his self-described “gargantuan” Infinite Jest with an equally gargantuan

“Notes and Errata” appendix. Even in the generously proportioned 10th Anniversary

Paperback Edition by Back Bay, 388 endnotes spread across nearly 100 pages of the

novel’s total 1079. Often described as part of an “encyclopedic” performance, the notes

dive in and out (mostly out) of relevancy to anything recognizable in the plot of the

novel. Naturally, the endnotes are supplemented with many of their own footnotes. Like

Eliot’s annotations to The Waste Land, the notes for Infinite Jest encourage notoriety;

note 216 simply offers the reader “No clue.” (1036).

From Eliot to Wallace, these are undeniably among the hegemonic exemplars of

editorial aesthetics in the Western canon. As clever co-options of biblio-scholarly

methods, these works augment their own literary heft through manipulations of their

material form, in a way that leveraged the cultural assumptions of their era concerning

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scholarship and knowledge production. While editorial aesthetics in general deserve more

discussion and historical contextualization, in this essay I argue for a focus on the critique

and subversion of such hegemonic structures as exemplified in two important twentieth-

century novels—Mumbo Jumbo and DICTEE. The benefits of this approach are two-fold.

First, by structuring a reading of bibliographic features in such works through

comparative critique, affordances of book media that have become so natural to our eyes

that they have disappeared are suddenly made visible again. In other words, when such

enduring conventions are satirized they can once again be revealed. Of course, political

critique works the same way. Therefore, and secondly, the alignment of bibliographic

critique with critiques of race and/or ethnic identities remains fundamental to the political

potency of these contemporary works in an American literary context. Writing in the ‘70s

and ‘80s, Reed and Cha serve as an iconic pivot in the thinking around book-forms as

related specifically to cultural critique. They recognized, simply and profoundly, that the

way we make books often reflects the way we make ourselves. More than basic

teardowns of hegemonic knowledge structures, the two novels discussed below represent

two different reassertions of agency through the appropriation and reformation of a

historically white and/or male space. They are the book rebuilt, repurposed, and

reinvigorated.

In this way, the legacy of Reed and Cha helps us understand where we came from

and how we got here, through books—their construction and reception—in America.

Ultimately, understanding this key moment is a crucial step in assessing important new

works that carry on this literary aesthetic and political legacy, from Marie Calloway’s

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2013 feminist provocation what purpose did i serve in your life, to Siri Hustvedt’s 2014

scholarly-narrative mashup The Blazing World, to Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 documentary

evocation of the modern immigrant experience in Lost Children Archive, to name only a

few. By working through historical precedent, we can serve these new novels with

specificity and care, through awareness of tradition, medium, and aesthetic form.

Seeking Its Text: The Editorial Signifyin(g) of Mumbo Jumbo

The critical legacy of Mumbo Jumbo is generally one of elusion. Contemporary

readers were often left stunned, in both slack-jawed bewilderment at the form and

admiration of its audacity. At the time of publication, Alan Friedman’s response for The

New York Times Book Review seems to capture the scope of the matter: “[Mumbo Jumbo

is] a book of deliberate unruliness and sophisticated incongruity, a dazzling maze of

black-and-white history and fantasy, in-jokes and outrage, erudition and superstition [ . . .

] Wholly original, [Reed’s] book is an unholy cross between the craft of fiction and

witchcraft.” In regard to classification, about all Friedman can muster is, “I suspect that

for Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo is something a good deal more than a novel [ . . . ] he

casts a nonfiction spell, he weaves an incantation with footnotes” (1). Encouragingly,

Friedman does make this small gesture toward recognizing the faux-academic posturing

implied in the textual layout.

Academics have not fared much better in pinning the book down. “[A]n historico-

aesthetic textbook [ . . . ] Reed’s [novel is a] dissertation on the metaphysics of

consciousness and, simultaneously, a film-script,” writes Robert Elliot Fox (50). Barbara

Foley places Mumbo Jumbo in the tradition of New Journalism and the nonfiction

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novel—rising to popularity at the time. Myriad others follow up on deconstructionism,

new ethnography, and the detective novel (Ingram; Swope; Weixlmann), this last

framework encouraged by Reed himself. The most productive readings, however, focus

on the novel’s method of meaning-making and its relation to African American tradition.

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traces the practice of “Signifyin(g),” a

collection of rhetorical tropes in the black English vernacular that relies on the double-

voice space between the [received, white, conventional] figures of language and the new

meaning created through black voices in black contexts. In Mumbo Jumbo, Gates reads a

Signifyin(g) text that performs, self-reflexively, on the canonical texts of the African

American novel. The practice is apparent immediately:

Reed’s Signifyin(g) on tradition begins with his book’s title. Mumbo Jumbo is the received and ethnocentric Western designation for the rituals of black religions as well as for black languages themselves. [ . . . ] The Oxford English Dictionary cites its etymology as “of unknown origin,” implicitly serving here as the signified on which Reed’s title Signifies, recalling the myth of Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who, with no antecedents, “jes’ grew”—a phrase with which James Weldon Johnson characterizes the creative process of black sacred music. Mumbo Jumbo, then, Signifies upon Western etymology, abusive Western practices of deflation through misnaming, and Johnson’s specious, albeit persistent, designation of black creativity as anonymous.

But there is even more parody in the title. Whereas Ellison tropes the myth of presence in Wright’s title of Native Son and Black Boy through his title of Invisible Man, Reed parodies all three titles by employing as his title the English-language parody of black language itself. [ . . . ] From its title on, Mumbo Jumbo serves as a critique of black and Western literary forms and conventions, and the complex relationships between the two. (220–21)

The double-voicing in Reed’s method necessarily depends on a plethora of source

material and becomes a “novel about writing itself [ . . . ] a book about texts and a book

of texts, a composite narrative composed of subtexts, pretexts, post-texts, and narratives-

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within-narratives” (220). Yet the method described by Gates is ultimately a rhetorical

one. What of (material) form?

Beth McCoy expands the critical view, offering one of the few readings to focus

on those footnotes that Friedman remarked on decades before. Invoking Genette, McCoy

promotes a study of “Paratext, Citation, and Academic Desire” in Mumbo Jumbo.

Crucially, McCoy connects such “citational desires” to the experiences of

underrepresented groups in the academy, and, “at the very moment when the profession

was beginning to democratize in terms of race and gender, this preternaturally tempting

kind of citationality seems to have caught [Reed’s] eye” as a focus for his critique on

white supremacy (606). “Specifically,” McCoy writes, “he establishes academic

paratextual spaces and the citational desires surrounding them as prime vectors through

which power understood as white supremacist has been diffused, especially in a post-civil

rights era” (607). For McCoy, the paratextual experience accounts for the novel’s

invocation of the textbook tradition, traced back to sixteenth-century scholar Peter

Ramus. However, the textbook here is invoked to approximate a visual or formal

experience of citation, which is a prevalent tool but not a fundamental organizing

principle—in the end, more metaphor than method. My desire is to synthesize the

premises of both Gates and McCoy and to offer the more specific framework of scholarly

editing in reading Mumbo Jumbo. I believe this editorial frame supports existing and

future readings of the book with greater specificity to its material cultural heritage. By

doing so, readings can further incorporate the physical properties of the book into

consideration of its literary content. Scholarly editing’s distinction between text and work

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helps highlight how both elements serve narrative in books such as Mumbo Jumbo.

Ultimately, Mumbo Jumbo is not so much a textbook but rather a text-book—an edited

collection and material production of annotated, multimodal source material.

To read Mumbo Jumbo as a text-book is also to place it comfortably within

Reed’s editorial oeuvre. As an accomplished professional editor, Reed has produced

literary anthologies throughout his career. Often advocating for new generations of

experimental minority writers, Reed published collections such as 19 Necromancers

From Now in 1970 and Calafia: The California Poetry in 1978, extending to his latest

collection in 2015, a contemporary discussion of African Americans in show business

with Black Hollywood Unchained. While in these edited collections Reed is not

performing a documentary approach to historical text—one form of the “considered” acts

of scholarly editing previously discussed—he demonstrates in such anthologies the

profound editorial capacity to gather together voices, through text, and arrange them into

a new work. Such a capacity is always accompanied by an awareness and advocacy for

the multitextual affordances of the book medium. Therefore, while in one sense this essay

figures Reed and the narrativizing force of Mumbo Jumbo to be kinds of editors, Reed

himself also literally fulfills this role in his life and work.

This editorial performance in Mumbo Jumbo begins, in fact, with the dust jacket

designed by Reed with Allen Weinberg. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates helpfully

remarks on the cover’s invocation of doubling and the importance of the rose and

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medallion symbols in both the Voodoo and French romantic traditions (221–22) (Fig.

1.1).

Turning the book over to the back of the jacket, however, the reader encounters an ironic

collection of pulled review quotes from a variety of publications. “‘The Work’” of

Figure 1.1: front cover dust jacket design of Mumbo Jumbo.

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Ishmael Reed is a ‘Laying on of hands’ for American writing,” reads the jacket. “He

unites divergent factions: … .” The back cover proceeds to list nearly a dozen responses

to Mumbo Jumbo ranging from dismissive to hostile. Irving Howe in Harper’s writes,

“Unlike other young black novelists whose work I did praise, Mr. Reed has not yet

written a book worth taking seriously.” The Journal of Black Poetry simply reports,

“Crazy.” Of course, the collection of disparaging remarks is played out to comedic effect,

yet their critical capacity plays an important role in framing the novel. If Mumbo Jumbo

is to be a genre-busting, convention-defying work, the book must, at the very least,

position itself as antithetical to current critical taste, and consequently, antithetical to its

own formulation of white supremacist literary culture. To be sure, Reed was aware of his

status among contemporary (white) reviewers. Irving Howe’s quote from Harper’s, for

example, actually concerns Reed’s earlier 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

The review dismissively pans the novel in a brief paragraph. Reed followed up Howe’s

review with a letter to the editor several months later, detailing Howe’s “[illiteracy] of

Afro-American literature written prior to 1938; a fact which raises serious doubts about

his ability to intelligently evaluate this novelistic tradition which dates back to 1854.”

Reed continues:

Thirty years ago during Mr. Howe’s heyday, this would have worked for Afro-American artists who naively believed that White criticism arose from the loftiest motives instead of serving as a subterfuge for certain political, cultural and sexual interests….

A dying culture will always call up its intellectual warhorses, no matter how senile they may be, when pagans are breaking down the gates. Mr. Howe’s hysteria—LeRoi Jones is called an “anti-Semitic Bulgarian”—proves that we have drawn blood and we will now do what pagans have always done when confronted with a racist, imperialist, tyrannical system. We will move in for the kill, and this is what the Seventies will be all about. (16)

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Howe responded in kind, briefly once again. Two years later, Reed published Mumbo

Jumbo, and Howe’s response to the Harper’s letter landed on the jacket.

It is important to recognize the material design of Mumbo Jumbo, as crafted by

Reed, in this seemingly arbitrary instance of a dust jacket because it both physically

manifests the political and thematic aspirations of the text as well as literally envelopes

the narrative with the critical and political stakes of the work. Specifically, the use of

“jacket blurbs” in this manner constitutes an ironic subversion and cultural

reappropriation of the literary hegemony that Reed and the novel act against. It is

fundamentally a gesture of editorial Signifyin(g), as the words of critics are collected and

re-presented, doubled and reversed, to comedic and politically charged effect. The inner

jacket flaps likewise spend less time previewing the plot of the “HooDoo detective

novel” contained within and more time expounding on its metatextual goals:

The Big Lie concerning Afro-American culture is that it lacks a tradition. MUMBO JUMBO attempts to piece together fragments of an ancient aesthetic Reed calls Neo-HooDooism. This has nothing to do with sticking pins in dolls but involves conjuring, cursing, prophesying, exorcising, signifying, talking that talk, practicing malice, getting people and institutions told, and all the other elements which comprise The Work.

When read in context with the back cover, references to “The Work” are necessarily hazy

among Mumbo Jumbo, the rest of Reed’s oeuvre, and the African American literary

tradition at large. Precisely to the point of demonstrating such a tradition, however,

employing the collective singular “The Work” creates necessary associative relations

among those options. “The Work” is, in fact, all of those things and more. “The Work” is

both the literary “fragments of an ancient aesthetic” as well as the process for collection

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and unification. Moreover, such a method of expansive metatextuality comprises the

ambition of the Mumbo Jumbo text proper. As the back cover claims, Reed does indeed

use this method to “[unite] divergent factions,” ranging from critical comments about his

book to the entire African American literary tradition. Subsequent publications of Mumbo

Jumbo—such as the common Scribner paperback first published in 1996—do not

reproduce Reed’s original 1972 jacket design (published by Doubleday), resulting in

missed opportunities for readers and students to appreciate fully Reed’s narrative vision

as well as to learn to read the entire book object.

Reed’s method of editorial Signification continues in the color design of the

novel’s opening sequence, now through the invocation of the novel’s multimedia format.

Gates and others frequently remark on the novel’s cinematic tendencies, in both book

format and narrative structure. Gates, specifically, identifies Mumbo Jumbo’s prologue as

a simulation of opening credits for a movie (227). I would add, too, that an editorial eye

observes that the inside covers of the 1972 first edition are colored stark red, perhaps

serving as an opening and closing curtain for the multimedia spectacle contained within.

The inner red covers also recall the “drawn blood” identified in Reed’s letter to Harper’s,

emphasizing the tenacity of Reed’s project and his political aims for the seventies.

Concurrently, the red layout provides contrast for turning the page to the opening title,

calling attention to the whiteness of the paper and the subdued gray “Mumbo Jumbo” text

at the bottom of the page. Powerfully symbolic, “Mumbo Jumbo” seems to be emerging

from the white ether, taking shape yet not fully articulated. Turning the page: an

inversion. A black page with white text comprises the first set of copyright information in

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the book. Suggestive of the cinematic qualities that Gates remarks upon, the page figures

as a “fade from black” open, with credits rolling. Aptly, a note on Reed’s previously

published excerpt for the book describes the story as a “Coming Attraction” (2). The

color inversion, however, also demonstrates the level at which Reed’s racial crusade

comprehensively critiques existing book structures. In attacking the white hegemony that

Reed identifies in his letter to Howe and Harper’s—a hegemony that only serves to

contextualize African American tradition through its relation to white counterparts—

Reed flips and estranges this conception: first, through the color inversion of white text

on a black page, i.e., now white language in a black environment; second, at the level of

paratext, i.e., concerning the material conventions of knowledge creation and

Figure 1.2: two-page title spread from Mumbo Jumbo (8–9).

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dissemination in the Western tradition. The color inversion of the first copyright page

also anticipates the more extensive layout of the second title page, a full spread of facing

black pages featuring the publication and author information in white lettering, as well as

identical gray “Mumbo Jumbo” text from the first title page (8–9) (Fig. 1.2). Indeed, it is

the sequence of increased, spreading color inversion in these copyright and title pages

that conveys the driving momentum of Reed’s critique, as well as presages the viral

nature of “Jes Grew” in the novel. Is it any wonder Doubleday’s pagination for the novel

begins with the first title page as page 1? Paratext becomes text.

The scope of Reed’s critique is thus not only conceptual but also formal and

material. Certainly, the practices of Signifyin(g) and doubling in the novel occur through

various thematic and narrative devices (Gates 221–22), but they also occur on the

physical and conceptual planes of material design. The materials, in Mumbo Jumbo’s

case, are made of academic and scholarly print conventions and paratext. Gates rightly

identifies these materials in his reading, emphasizing their role in formulating Reed’s

parody of intertextuality, creating in Mumbo Jumbo “the great black intertext, replete

with intratexts referring to one another within the text of Mumbo Jumbo and also

referring outside themselves to all those other named texts, as well as those texts

unnamed but invoked through concealed reference, repetition, and reversal” (223).

Focusing on the “Partial Bibliography” at the end of Mumbo Jumbo, Gates recognizes the

appeal to scholarly authority that frames the novel’s intertextual argument. Specifically,

Mumbo Jumbo argues that “all texts [ . . . ] are intertexts, full of intratexts” and that our

“notions of originality [ . . . ] are more related to convention and material relationships

35

than to some supposedly transcendent truth” (223). Gates’s comment here strikes at the

heart of Mumbo Jumbo’s material formation and its context in the Western academic

print tradition. Reed’s parody of these forms, as I will continue to illustrate, is the key

synthesis of Signifyin(g) and book design. But rather than “textbook,” the novel is

decidedly editorial in both method and appearance. Mumbo Jumbo is not simply a parody

of a material form, as implied by the textbook format. Rather, it is an active collecting

and commentary upon disparate materials—the creation of a [physical] text through the

synthesis of gathered texts. This creation mimics the “considered act” of scholarly

editorial work that Tanselle describes, which in turn authorizes the knowledge production

of this format—authoritative texts produced by authoritative experts. This entire process

is the scope of Reed’s parodic satire. Additionally, while Mumbo Jumbo’s argument for

intertextuality is indeed expansive to the brink of infinity, it is the paratext deployed

through an editorial aesthetic that ultimately provides shape and accessibility to the

work’s ambitious satire.

While the book’s material form embodies these ideas, the plot of Mumbo Jumbo

sets them in motion. Mumbo Jumbo is the story of feuding racial and political factions at

the time of a 1920s outbreak of “Jes Grew,” which is a “psychic pandemic” of apparently

African origin. Symptoms include wild dancing and a vague prognosis associated with

VooDoo spirituality, non-Western philosophy, and general anarchy. Jes Grew outbreaks

seem to start in black communities but quickly spread, knowing “no class no race no

consciousness” (5). Secret societies like the Wallflower Order and the Knights Templar

work together to suppress Jes Grew, at this moment as well as throughout history.

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Opposing these (white) factions is PaPa LaBas, the central character of the novel, a

“Haitian Vodou houngan” (alternatively, “VooDoo priest”) working out of Harlem’s

Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. LaBas works primarily as a detective, searching for the roots

of Jes Grew as well as a disappeared book that may hold the key to an alternative

Afrocentric history of the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions. The movement of Jes

Grew itself, however, is an essential part of the novel’s metafictional and intertextual

modes. While Jes Grew is figured as a potent virus and characterized positively “by

ebullience and ecstasy,” it is also limited and threatened by this immaterial form. The

crux of this plot point is laid out at the conclusion of the prologue:

So Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text. For what good is a liturgy without a text? In the 1890s the text was not available and Jes Grew was out there all alone. Perhaps the 1920s will also be a false alarm and Jes Grew will evaporate as quickly as it appeared again broken-hearted and double-crossed (++). (6)

In fact, Jes Grew of the novel mirrors the practice of editorial assemblage of Mumbo

Jumbo itself—yet another instance of Reed’s Signification and doubling at work.

Immediately following the passage quoted above, a page of artifacts begins Mumbo

Jumbo’s documentary mode: a photograph of dancers—cited on the second copyright

page as courtesy of The New York Times Company (10)—followed by a quote from

Louis Armstrong and concluding with a definition of “Mumbo Jumbo” from The

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fig. 1.3). The assemblage is

awkward and forced, poorly set on the page, with little context or explicit connection

among the objects. But a rationale—like Jes Grew seeking its text—is emergent. The

reader is to understand that Mumbo Jumbo will compile, quote, and comment. The novel

will appeal to the infinity of intertext, practically spilling over its own (traditional)

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material bounds to engage the cover, dust jacket, title pages, copyright pages, epigraphs,

notes, bibliography, photographs, facsimiles, and more.

Figure 1.3: opening sequence from Mumbo Jumbo (11).

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Footnotes make up the earliest and most consistent appeal to editorial authority.

Generally deployed to define terms and cite sources, these footnotes, like the notes of The

Waste Land, illustrate the swirling vortex of source material informing the narrative. The

sources are legitimate, too: contemporary nonfiction works like The Harding Era by

Robert K. Murray and Our Times by Mark Sullivan; references to the quasi-scientific

work of R. Buckminster Fuller; the classic study The Conquest of Epidemic Disease by

Charles-Edward Amory Winslow; dancer Irene Castle’s autobiography as well as her and

her husband’s treatise Modern Dancing. However, the application of these footnotes

reveals their satiric intent. For example, the first footnote cites Murray’s work on the

Harding administration, confirming a (very real) 1920 campaign slogan. In Reed’s

fiction, however, the footnote is appropriated for the cause of absurdity:

The Wallflower order attempts to meet the psychic plague by installing an anti-Jes Grew President, Warren Harding. He wins on the platform “Let’s be done with the Wiggle and Wobble.”* indicating that he will not tolerate this spreading infection. All sympathizers will be dealt with; all carriers isolated and disinfected, Immumo-Therapy [sic] will begin once he takes office. (17)

In 1920, Harding did indeed run on a platform against the “wiggle and wobble,”

disparaging the supposedly erratic Wilson administration of the previous eight years

(McGerr 170). Reed literalizes the slogan, of course, and “wiggle and wobble” becomes a

reference to the wild gyrations and ecstatic dancing of those infected by Jes Grew.

Though the comedy works well enough on its own, the satirical punch here and

elsewhere in the novel is carried out by the conspicuous placement of a real footnote at

the bottom of the page. With this invocation of an editorial aesthetic, it becomes apparent

the footnote itself is the joke. While the content of the novel is frequently beguiling and

39

absurd, the footnotes provide a deadpan implication: someone researched this text;

someone collected material and assembled it, twisting these parts into an incredible

whole. Again like The Waste Land, these instances of (parodic) paratext also provide a

point of access for the reader. In Mumbo Jumbo’s case: a borderland not for one to

traverse but to occupy.

The editorial aesthetic of Mumbo Jumbo continues with the numerous facsimile

re-presentations of documentary sources—an explicitly satiric appeal to the “authority”

of archival recovery and the implied factuality of such “hard evidence.” As a piece of

detective fiction, Mumbo Jumbo not only grants PaPa LaBas with the jurisdiction to

snoop, but this method for discovery is also the guiding rationale for the assembly of the

text. The most consistent strategy for facsimile in Mumbo Jumbo arrives through the

subtle manipulation of typography. While the plot and exposition are deployed through a

traditional serif font (Times New Roman, for example), the insertion of researched or

archival textual fragments into the novel is simulated through an abrupt shift. For

example, early in the novel the reader is presented with an extended excerpt from

Sullivan’s Our Times (21). Rather than matched to the typography of plot and exposition,

the excerpt exhibits bolded type with increased margins, offset from the rest of the text

and featuring a citation note. The result looks like a clipping or photocopy—not simply

an integration of content but also of materiality. The headlines of newspapers are also

frequently discussed and quoted in the novel, and for readers they are represented through

a bolded sans-serif font (such as Helvetica, for example). For example, when antagonist

Hinkle von Vampton leaves the offices of the fictional paper “New York Sun”, he sees

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and hears the headlines just cooked up a few moments ago (and a page preceding):

“VooDoo Generals Surround Marines At The Poor Prince” (59). Though newspapers

traditionally employ serif type, the effect in Mumbo Jumbo works through contrast with

the plot’s Roman type. Sans-serif (or simply “sans”) fonts like Helvetica are frequently

employed for their directness, clarity, and supposed liberation from ideological baggage

(Hustwit) as evidenced in the ornamentation of more baroque typefaces. Because the

newspaper headlines in Mumbo Jumbo are almost always evidence of inaccuracy (at best)

and the cynical manipulation of media by institutional power (at worst), even the

selection of font in this case falls under Reed’s method for Signifyin(g) and satire. The

clarity of such headlines is merely an illusion, a result of visual rhetoric inherent to the

medium of print. That readers be made aware of such illusions and suspicious of

platforms that take advantage of them is entirely the concern and target of Reed’s satirical

work in Mumbo Jumbo.

Complementing the editorial aesthetic of the narrative, the text features numerous

facsimiles of documentary material. The documents range from newspaper photographs

to playbills, and they are sourced from historical and university archives as well as

newspapers and record companies. A complete list of these illustrations comprises the

majority of the second copyright page, with “[g]rateful acknowledgement” for the

ostensible permission for their use (10). The list itself is a striking paratextual feature of

the already complex opening sequence of the novel. From the outset, readers are made

aware that they will encounter a heavily illustrated book, but the illustrations created for

the novel will not serve as mere decoration or visualization of the action. Like the

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footnotes in the novel, the permissions list demonstrates a methodical effort of research

and curation. From the Bancroft Library at the University of California to the Deutsches

Archaeologisches Institut in Rome, the illustrations are imbued with the character of their

identifying institution. An ironic appeal is once again made to accuracy and authority.

Similar to the textual excerpts in Mumbo Jumbo, the photographs and facsimiles

work for Reed’s editorial bait-and-switch. For example, a rather innocuous photograph

collected from the Ohio Historical Society Library of Warren Harding’s Pullman train car

is inserted into the text following a fictional account of conspiracy and murder.

Historically, Harding died while in office in 1923, after arriving in San Francisco while

embarked on a cross-country tour. Cause of death: heart failure. But in Mumbo Jumbo,

Harding’s death is portrayed as an assassination by slow poison while riding the train car

west. The motive for assassination was the discovery of alleged evidence in support of a

rumor that Harding was, in fact, a black man and sympathetic to the spread of the Jes

Grew virus. Harding is killed for his part in the race war of the novel. Reed makes an

editorial appearance in the interpretation of these materials:

They finish the job at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Harding had the last word though. It is contained in a message he was to deliver before the Hollywood Chapter of the Knights Templar, entitled “The Ideals of a Christian Fraternity.”* (In this way, he points his finger at his killers. Few historians have understood this clue.—I.R.) (148)

The creative blend of fictional and historical events relies on Reed’s incorporation of

edited and annotated material, such as the photograph of the train car. On its own, the

photograph depicts little more than people milling about a train car. In the context of the

novel, though, and following Reed’s account of a Harding murder conspiracy, the

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photograph depicts the scene of a crime. Like the citations of authentic source material in

Mumbo Jumbo, the photographs are incorporated into the ironic conceit of authority

portrayed in the text. Rather than an earnest attempt at deception, though, the heavy-

handed satire and Reed’s ironic method of incorporating source material alerts readers to

the manipulation at work. As much as Reed’s novel experiments with form, the text

implicitly offers readers strategies for interpretation.

An epilogue and “Partial Bibliography” close out the novel’s paratextual features,

completing the conceptual frame of the otherwise unwieldy intertextual performance.

With the significance of the bibliography not to be understated, I will repeat Gates’s

reference to this paratext as “Reed’s most brilliant stroke”:

[I]ts unconcealed presence (along with the text’s other undigested texts) parodies both the scholar’s appeal to authority and all studied attempts to conceal literary antecedents and influence. All texts, claims Mumbo Jumbo, are intertexts, full of intratexts. Our notions of originality, Reed’s critique suggests, are more related to convention and material relationships than to some supposedly transcendent truth. Reed lays bare the mode of concealment and the illusion of unity which characterize modernist texts. (224)

While Gates’s theorization of “texts” is provocative, our language here can be even more

precise. As a point of method, we might supplement this argument with the idea that all

writing, all literary “invention” is, in fact, a series of editorial pursuits—literature as an

endless reconfiguration of past material, or material of the past. The “convention[s] and

material relationships” that Mumbo Jumbo exploits and that Gates identifies are

concretized in the professional practice of modern scholarly editing.

We are faced with an irony in Gates’s comment about “modernist texts,” of

course, because of the curious case of The Waste Land. This archetypal modernist text,

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by its own literary volition, exhibits an obvious and expansive intertextual character

through myriad allusions and quotations and through the notes that follow the poem.

Those notes, something of an accident of history it seems, according to Eliot’s comments

recorded in the paratext of this essay, contribute significantly to a literary method of

materiality seen throughout the twentieth century. What originally was a liability for

Eliot, however, became Reed’s organizing energy. Mumbo Jumbo extends and expands

these materialist, heretical tendencies into a tour de force critique of race in America in

the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. As an editorial project, its definitive subject is

the unjust hegemony of knowledge creation in the West. As a manipulation of such a

method, of document curation and book creation, Mumbo Jumbo teaches skepticism for

the whole system and demands critical readership as the price of admission for the often

hilarious, frequently absurd story of PaPa LaBas and Jes Grew.

“I have the documents”: Editorial Meaning-Making in DICTEE

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a Korean-American author and artist who produced

experimental works of literature, mixed media, performance, and film as a student in the

1970s in Berkeley, California and as a young artist in New York City starting in 1980.

Raised in an immigrant family and fluent in English, Korean, and French, Cha frequently

targeted language as a site of critical inquiry (Lewallen 9). Her final work, DICTEE,

published shortly before her murder in 1982, leverages this plurality of language along

with a range of other multicultural and multimedia explorations of form. DICTEE draws

upon such source material as Korean history and language, Greek mythology, French

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religious history and theory, and more while simultaneously presenting a variety of media

as well, including photographs, manuscript facsimiles, and literary excerpts (Fig. 1.4).

The resulting book is often characterized as performative fragmentation, a manifest

assemblage that eschews continuity and embraces opacity and contradiction. Under an

editorial lens, however, the picture can become much clearer.

Similar to the critical approaches to Mumbo Jumbo, readings of DICTEE are

generally premised with an overt focus on “form” along with the concession that the form

ultimately escapes all attempts at classification. The first concerted effort for critical

appreciation of DICTEE came with the 1994 edited collection by Elaine H. Kim and

Figure 1.4: DICTEE passage composed of a facsimile of a handwritten letter (146–47).

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Norma Alarcón, Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on DICTEE by

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In introducing the critical scope of DICTEE, the following

passage from Kim is frequently quoted: “The first time I glanced at Dictée, I was put off

by the book. I thought that Theresa Cha was talking not to me but rather to someone so

remote from myself that I could not recognize ‘him.’ [ . . . ] Its references to Greek

mythology, and its French grammar exercises, seemed far afield from the identity I was

after: a congealed essence” (3–4). The admission from Kim importantly identifies a

common misstep in approaching the book—the wish for a unified voice. Kim argues that

by letting go of this wish, readers can better access Cha’s exploration of racial, ethnic,

and national identity, which depends on such disjointedness and fragmentation.

Critics thus turned the lens of literary postmodernism onto DICTEE. In the

apparent spirit of Linda Hutcheon’s formulation of “historiographic metafiction” in the

1980s, an isolated but relatively rich critical conversation developed around DICTEE

after the publication of Writing Self, Writing Nation. Contemporary readings tend to

focus on the autobiographical potential (or resistance) of the text, aligning the ostensible

postmodern historiography with a personal exploration of race and identity through

textual experimentation. In Writing Self, Writing Nation, Shelley Sunn Wong

characterizes DICTEE as a refusal of such representation, a work that undermines

historically meaningful signifiers—various forms of (Western) literature and art, in

general—in a way that forces a shift from “representativeness (founded on the identity of

a single type) and authenticity (predicated on original, unmediated essence)” to

“difference and mediation” (104). Literary form and genre are problematized in this

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practice, and, according to Wong, Cha’s invocations of disparate traditions and history in

the text are not meant to “coexist harmoniously but, rather, [to] undermine each other

through a process of reciprocal critique” (106). I would emphasize, as well, that this

process of “reciprocal critique” is equally about visibility, about exposing the ideological

assumptions of received conventions. Wong recognizes that for Cha and DICTEE, these

conventions are often generic, such as the autobiography and Bildungsroman. An essay

by Josephine Nock-Hee Park further illuminates the use of formal conventions in

DICTEE, specifically how the novel establishes and crosses the border between lyric and

epic modes. By invoking such conventions, Cha lays bare their ideological foundations

and ultimate inadequacy in serving her own experience as an Asian American woman; by

subverting such conventions, she creates a new form of her own.

Wong in her essay identifies the critical necessity of tracing such historical

conventions: “Of equal importance for an evaluation of the aesthetic and political

implications of Dictée is the way in which historically specific frameworks of reception

situate and determine the efficacy of Cha’s textual strategies as a mode of social

intervention” (106). Beyond Wong’s own important explication of generic modes of

autobiography and Bildungsroman, among others, this call to reconcile “historically

specific frameworks of reception” with contemporary readings necessitates the

identification of an editorial aesthetic in twentieth-century literature. Like Reed’s Mumbo

Jumbo, DICTEE parodies the pseudo-academic practice of textual curation and

annotation consistent with the production of scholarly books of the era. Though critics

have focused on DICTEE’s formal properties and subversions, it would enrich such

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earlier readings to consider more meaningfully the material characteristics of Cha’s

(physical) book in relation to the organizing principles represented by the curated and

annotated content. Recognition of the discrete materials that constitute the thematic and

material content of the book emphasizes that the work is a synthesis of many texts,

including photographs, facsimiles, and literary excerpts. Like Mumbo Jumbo, DICTEE is

a text-book. There are also notes. This subtle but useful shift in recognition also

reconciles the difficulty most readers might have in identifying a cohesive narrator.

Because the implicit narrative is so abstract—if present at all—the identification of a

cohesive narrator or even poetic speaker seems self-defeating. An implied editor, on the

other hand, serves as a much more useful conceptual base for understanding the

organizational force of the book as well as contextualizing its physical form. Readers are

not immersed in narrative, but rather they are given access to a cache of carefully

researched and organized excerpts, references, and documents.

The benefit of editorial awareness by the reader pays off immediately, in simply

reading the title of the book. The title—as it appears on the cover and title page in the

original 1982 Tanam Press paperback printing (simultaneous first printing for clothbound

edition, as well)—is presented as DICTEE, specifically with majuscule lettering. The title

references a French language and grammar exercise called la dictée in which a speaker

dictates a sample text while students attempt to record accurately. A similar exercise

exists for Korean speakers called badasseugi. The difficulty of such exercises results

from significant grammatical features in each language presenting visually but not

audibly. Even with a cursory knowledge of Cha’s biography and critical focus, we

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understand immediately how this idea might carry tremendous thematic, artistic, and

personal significance for her work. In this particular case, it draws attention to the absent

accent aigu in the book title, clearly demonstrating a playful subversion of the dictation

exercise itself while simultaneously inhabiting the marginal zone of multiethnicity and

immigrant identity typical of Cha’s art. Unfortunately, earlier readers of Cha seem to

have missed this stroke of typographic genius. The presence or absence of the accent

aigu in the title seems haphazard among the majority of scholarly commentary. That the

academic readership of the 1990s interested in Cha’s work would also likely be familiar

with Derrida’s famous formulation of différance, which concerns precisely the linguistic

tension Cha plays upon through DICTEE, makes this omission all the more peculiar. The

foundational Writing Self, Writing Nation collection, for example, includes the mark in

every usage except, curiously, for the cover and title page that even maintain the

capitalization. Reprints of Cha’s book are similarly indiscriminate. The most recent and

popular 2009 UC Berkeley paperback edition, though admirably accurate in its

reproduction including pagination and typography, references “Dictée” on the back cover

three times. Editors, however, pay attention to such things. And in the case of DICTEE,

such attention to textual minutiae is fundamental to the novel’s own material properties,

formal characteristics, and organizational logic.

Any doubt about the significance of punctuation and grammar across languages in

DICTEE is categorically quashed by the end of page one:*

* For long excerpts from DICTEE, I have maintained line breaks and approximated spacing from the printed text. In the practice of scholarly editing, this technique is called “diplomatic transcription.”

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Aller à la ligne C’était le premier jour point Elle venait de loin point ce soir au diner virgule les familles demanderaient virgule ouvre les guil- lemets Ça c’est bien passé le premier jour point d’interrogation ferme les guillemets au moins virgule dire le moins possible virgule la réponse serait virgule ouvre les guillemets Il n’y a q’une chose point ferme les guillemets ouvre les guile- mets Il y a quelqu’une point loin point ferme les guillemets

Open paragraph It was the first day period She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks How was the first day interroga- tion mark close quotation marks at least to say the least of it possible comma the answer would be open quotation marks there is but one thing period There is someone period From a far period close quotation marks (1)

Punctuation is not removed in this opening passage. Quite the opposite: the marks have

been transformed—in a certain sense, elevated—into words, language, and symbolic

meaning. Though comprehensive knowledge of editorial theory and practice is generally

unnecessary for appreciating an “editorial aesthetic” in service of critical readings, a bit

of familiarity with the technicalities of the field provides tremendous benefit here.

Practitioners might recognize in Cha’s opening passage a fluidity of W. W. Greg’s

famous distinction between “accidentals” and “substantives.” Originally published in the

early 1950s, Greg’s influential “Rationale of Copy-Text” makes a systematic effort to

outline a governing method for establishing the authority of a primary document on

which to base a critical edition—the “copy-text”—and for managing variation between

other available documents. In the establishment of scholarly editing as a formalized

professional practice in the mid-century American academy, one undergirded by

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“method” and protocol, perhaps no other document has been as significant, influential, or

consistently critiqued. On “accidentals” and “substantives,” Greg writes:

It is therefore modern editorial practice to choose whatever extant text may be supposed to represent most nearly what the author wrote and to follow it with the least possible alteration. But here we need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them ‘substantive’, readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of [her] expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them ‘accidentals’, of the text. (21)

In DICTEE, as demonstrated in the title and opening page and continued throughout the

remainder of the work, Cha problematizes this editorial approach and traditional literary

understanding by flattening the interpretive difference between words and punctuation.

More precisely, in DICTEE the “author’s meaning or the essence of [her] expression” is

one and the same with “its formal presentation.” Because the work depends on such a

rigorous examination of language as it presents across different tongues as well as media,

Cha’s primary literary gambit here is to raise all textual marks to the level of

substantives. In the same way that DICTEE invokes and subverts certain literary

conventions, according to Wong’s reading, the book seemingly invokes and subverts the

editorial tradition as well, problematizing assumptions about representation, mediation,

and authenticity within literary history itself.

DICTEE seemingly dramatizes the dictation exercise in another prefatory passage,

titled “DISEUSE.” “Diseuse” is a French term that gained traction in English as a label

for a woman specializing in monologues and recitation. Importantly, in this context it is

not an accurate label for the reciter of a dictated grammar exercise, but rather the term

connotes an artistic or literary performance. The passage in DICTEE opens with an

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unnamed female character straining to mimic speech that is being delivered to her from

an unknown source and in an unclear context. The experience described is bodily, with

emphasis placed on sounds—“bared noise, groan, bits torn from words”—and body

parts—“she resorts to mimicking gesture with the mouth. The entire lower lip would lift

upwards then back to its original place” (3). The unnamed “she” struggles to make

speech while admitting the detriment required to do so: “Inside is the pain of speech the

pain to say. Larger Still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say.” Working first

with words, trying out different constructions and bending certain rules such as the split

infinitive in the previous passage, “she” then proceeds to “the pause”, where she

perceives breaks in enunciation that demonstrate fluency. She connects this facet of

speech immediately to the written form:

She would take on their punctuation. She waits to service this. Theirs. Punctuation. She would become, herself, demarcations. Absorb it. Spill it. Seize upon the punctuation. Last air. Give her. Her. The relay. Voice, Assign. Hand it. De- liver it. Deliver. (4)

The “DISEUSE” passage can best be characterized as an acquisition of language as the

unnamed “she” character first mimics and then masters. It is an invocation of literacy and

[story]telling—indeed, a classic appeal to the Muse is made in the next fragment—but it

is also a bodily possession and performance of language. DICTEE’s “she” is painfully

aware of how her body must adjust to and accommodate the production of language,

especially a language still “theirs.” By the end of this opening passage, acquisition and

accommodation become ownership: “The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoking. All

the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers

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now. Hers bare. The utter.” (5). At the outset of DICTEE’s ambitious book project, this

opening passage provides a conceptual foundation for the fragmented, multitextual,

quasi-narrative that follows. Just as with the adoption and ultimate appropriation of

language, Cha’s narrator assumes a similar correlation with the book form and narrative

organization. Like Mumbo Jumbo, the resultant “utter” is a radical subversion of

traditional Western forms of textual production.

In addition to its technical usage, the “accidental” and “substantive” model takes

on allegorical significance as well. The “DISEUSE” passage continues with powerful

Christian imagery, specifically the taking of Communion and the Eucharist:

The Host Wafer (His Body. His Blood.) His. Dis- solving in the mouth to the liquid tongue saliva (Wine to Blood. Bread to Flesh.) His. Open the eyes to the women kneeling on the left side. The right side. Only visible on their bleached countenances are the unevenly lit circles of rouge and their elongated tongues. In waiting. To receive. Him. (13)

Here, Cha focuses closely on the process of transubstantiation—the Roman Catholic

religious doctrine concerning the literal transformation of wafer and wine into Christ’s

body and blood during the ritual. One philosophical basis for this process is the

Aristotelian model of “accident and substance” provided by twelfth-century scholar Peter

Abelard. Mixing his study of secular philosophy and religious doctrine, Abelard held that

the wafer was “accidental”—its [arbitrary] physical properties—and the body was

“substance”—its true ontological nature (Bleich 307–8). While focusing on the content of

Cha’s fragmented imagery would correctly identify the tension between Eastern-language

ethnic identities and Western religious dogma, Cha’s careful juxtaposition of diseuse and

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Catholic Communion reveals deep continuities between the acquisition of language and

the philosophical principles that underlie hegemonic belief systems. Like religious

doctrine, access to language (specifically, “acceptable” use of language in public forums)

is restricted to groups in power and in control of fundamental texts. It is essential to

recognize, first, that Greg’s rationale of copy-text is based on inherited Western

philosophical principles as evidenced in Abelard, and, second, that these principles

continue to govern the hierarchies of language and knowledge production today. This

historical connection between religious-philosophical interpretation and Greg’s

formulation of accidentals and substantives is rarely—if ever—acknowledged or

outlined, even in editorial circles. Ultimately, the entirety of DICTEE can be read as the

navigation and negotiation of these hierarchies by a minority participant. Cha’s

experience as a woman of color identifies such sites of contention and oppression.

I have focused in this section on language, punctuation, and the more esoteric

tenets of scholarly editing to demonstrate the work’s thematic awareness of material

representation and its dependence on a reading method that recognizes the materiality of

language itself. In DICTEE, words and punctuation, photographs and handwritten letters,

collected fragments and narrative vignettes are leveraged in equal measure as the

components of text. So, in one sense, DICTEE embodies an editorial aesthetic through a

subversive reappropriation of critical methods for the historical transmission of literary

works. In the second and more textually explicit sense, DICTEE simulates a

straightforward documentary project, the creation of an edited collection in book form

produced from disparate archival materials. This dual-mode of DICTEE, embodying both

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subversive critique and useful adoption of editorial methods perhaps fits best with

Stephen Joyce’s argument that the novel is a product of Cha’s own “double

consciousness”: DICTEE is not only a “radical postmodernist feminist text that

undermines and subverts the traditions of patriarchal historiography, the State, religion,

and Western literature [ . . . ] [but DICTEE] also questions the beliefs underlying

postmodernism and the radical intellectual movements that seek to challenge hegemonic

discourses” (128). Such a duality provides DICTEE with its power as a polytextual

performance of myriad perspectives. Considering Cha’s biography and the complexity of

the Western canon, Joyce questions earlier readings that rely on an uncomplicated and

politically serviceable lens of “subversion” to read the entirety of the novel. There are, of

course, subversive elements in DICTEE; however, the novel also contains earnest appeals

to Western literary tradition, as Joyce illustrates with Cha’s invocation of Hesiod (144–

45), which undoubtedly draw upon Cha’s own multicultural education. Indeed, if Cha

herself contains multitudes, as an Asian American immigrant woman, why not her book?

Another way DICTEE appeals to Western literary tradition is through annotation.

Unlike Mumbo Jumbo, DICTEE generally omits academic paratext throughout the body

of the work; however, the primary text is framed by a frontispiece featuring a black and

white photograph (noted by Wong), an epigraph by Sappho, a table of contents without

page numbers listing the main divisions of the book, and bibliographic notes on the final

page that account for the academic and original sources distributed throughout the book.

Similar to The Waste Land and Mumbo Jumbo, however, the few citations in DICTEE

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appear to be part of Cha’s calculated commentary on the complicated issues of language

and knowledge creation. The sparse page appears as follows:

Notes 1. F.A. McKenzie, The Tragedy of Korea, Yonsei University Press, Seoul, Korea pp. 46 47, 236, 311, 312. 2. The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, A New Translation from the Original Manuscripts by John Clarke, O.C.D., ICS Publications Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C. pp. 140, 168-69, 193, 195, 197. Biographical material in CALLIOPE EPIC POETRY based on the journals of Hyung Soon Huo. Calligraphy by Hyung Sang Cha. (n.p.)

The first text is a journalist’s account of the Japanese occupation of Korea at the turn of

the twentieth century, written by Québécois correspondent Frederick Arthur McKenzie

and first published in New York and London in 1908. Here, though, Cha has chosen to

cite the 1975 edition published by the (Korean) Yonsei University Press. The verso of the

title page of the Yonsei edition states the book to be “No. 2 of a series of reprints of

[W]estern books on Korea.” So, importantly, what was originally a study of Korean

political history and oppression from a Western perspective later becomes a meta-study

of historical conversations about Korea, resituated in the cultural context of the studied

people. The context of this publication history of cross-cultural study offers a macrocosm

of Cha’s own artistic project that spans generations and occupies multiple, and often

conflicting, perspectives. Questions about identity and history become increasingly

complex depending on such fluid contexts, and yet, for Cha, there appears to be

something fundamental in confronting the subjects of these histories as well as the

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complicated ways they are told and passed on. Cha’s editorial selection of this particular

edition of The Tragedy of Korea demonstrates this critique.

The second source further underscores the complicated historical transmission of

(textual) knowledge. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is a well-known figure in Catholicism,

among the most famous saints of the modern era, having lived and died during the last

quarter of the nineteenth century in France. Contributing to her legacy is the

autobiographical “story of [her] soul” published in 1898, a year after her death. The

autobiography was popular, yet its publication history represents another struggle about

power and language in religious contexts. According to the publisher of Cha’s cited

version, the original edition was “highly edited” (“Story of a Soul”) resulting in a tightly

controlled, Church-approved version. It took several decades for a facsimile edition to

appear, allowing readers better access to St. Thérèse’s original language, style, and voice.

Following the success of a contemporary re-publication of another religious volume,

Clarke suggested a new English translation of St. Thérèse be made that remains as

faithful to the original manuscript as possible. In Steven Payne’s preface to the study

edition of Story of a Soul, there are two relevant details about the publication history of

St. Thérèse. First, because St. Thérèse wrote in “ink and pencil [ . . . ] on whatever paper

was available (often of poor quality), and with no thought of eventual publication” the

original manuscript and subsequent facsimile edition are often very difficult to read

(Story of a Soul iv). In other words, and on the one hand, direct or more reliable access to

the original text does not necessarily result in better access to meaning. On the other

hand, better access to meaning in this case equates to the coerced transformation of

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original expression into preexisting standards of publication and communication. These

are indeed the considerations of scholarly editors when working with historical texts. For

example, St. Thérèse’s lack of clear organization prompted scholarly editors to develop a

rather complex system of notation (iv–v): an awkward superimposition of editorial

convention onto an otherwise unique and extemporaneous expression of art. Barbed wire,

of sorts.

Given this publication and editorial history, it is easy to trace the emblematic

similarities between Cha’s own book project and St. Thérèse’s posthumous history in

print—certainly, the stakes are much higher than simply sharing a first name. A woman’s

struggle with and against conventional, hegemonic forms of expression epitomizes both

the content and form of DICTEE, as demonstrated even in the first few pages.

Furthermore, considering Cha’s fluency in French (and thus, her ability to understand St.

Thérèse’s original language), her selection of John Clarke’s English translation seems to

be part of the calculated commentary embedded in the Notes. Like the first citation by

McKenzie, the selection of the Clarke translation reminds readers of the highly contrived

and rigidly structured means of communication that manage, in this case, the publication

of seemingly free expression. In other words, Cha reminds us that all expression is a

struggle with and against medium, with and against the cultural institutions that produce

and support all media. Though Cha’s strategy may appear staunchly anti-book, I argue

that DICTEE represents a speculative resolution of such tensions within the book form.

Editions are built to accommodate the productive paradoxes that Joyce remarks on in his

reading. For example, the final two citations reference her mother’s journal and father’s

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calligraphy, thus formally incorporating her own family history into the swirling vortex

of genre- and content-mashups that fill the book. So while DICTEE is, most readily,

about the painful conformation for literacy demanded of immigrants, ethnic minorities,

and women in cross-cultural contexts, it also demonstrates a masterful reappropriation of

the material forms that often serve as carriers for cultural hegemony—an obvious kinship

to Mumbo Jumbo. Like the protagonist seizing upon punctuation in the opening

“DISEUSE,” Cha seizes upon academic paratext and editorial practice to first secure a

foothold in the dominant literacy and then to adapt these conventions for a new, personal

purpose.

Remarking on the Japanese occupation of Korea, DICTEE’s narrator recognizes

the stakes for such communication and also the liability of conventional expression. For

non-Koreans reading about these events, conventional histories (such as McKenzie) are

“[n]ot physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the

point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this

experience, for this outcome” (32). The narrator self-consciously recognizes that such

traditional—and traditionally formatted—histories govern the expression of this book:

“This document is transmitted through, by the same means, the same channel without

distinction the content is delivered in the same style: the word. The image. To appeal to

the masses to congeal the information to make bland, mundane, no longer able to

transcend their own conspirator method, no matter how alluring their presentation” (33).

DICTEE appears to damn itself, its own method, from the outset. And yet, the book exists

and persists. “Why resurrect it all now” the narrator offers rhetorically. The cryptic

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answer is also the clearest editorial rationale for the book: “To name it now so as not to

repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from

the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion”

(33).

Just as with the structure of the book, the conflicted relationship with

documentation continues through the content of DICTEE as well. On researching and

recording the emigration of the mother from Korea to the United States, Cha’s narrator

says simply, “I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature.

One day you raise the right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass

port. The United States of America” (56). In the narration here, documentation-as-proof

is set against the fluid and complex national identity of the mother now seemingly caught

between two homelands. According to DICTEE’s general method, documentation cannot

be dismissed outright, but rather these physical signifiers are put into a productive

dialectic with Cha’s own experience and knowledge. In other words, documentation is

incapable of carrying whole meaning, yet it necessarily shapes one’s relationship with the

world because, often, it is all we have for ourselves and all we have to communicate with

others. These are the paratexts of our lives. DICTEE consistently leverages this complex

perspective both to interrogate existing material forms of publication and expression as

well as collapse the liabilities of such material expression into language itself.

In both works—Mumbo Jumbo and DICTEE—the roles of narrator and implied

author are supplanted by the role of editor. Rather than using the traditional mode of

representing a controlling consciousness that dictates content to readers, the novels each

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depict an organizational force that governs the material deployment of literary content

through editorial strategies of curation and annotation as well as through the conspicuous

use of paratextual tools typical of academic editions. By recognizing the historical

development of an editorial aesthetic, in both fiction and in twentieth-century

scholarship, we can better account for a major genre of “experimental” print. Following a

study of the editorial aesthetic from the level of medium and materiality, we realize that

these works are perhaps instead what come after the experiments. By adapting fully

realized strategies and tools from book-based editorial scholarship of the twentieth

century, these authors have created new and powerful interrogations of their political and

intellectual movements, as well as provided material models for the future. Mumbo

Jumbo and DICTEE serve as crucial historical pivot points on which contemporary

literature turns to materiality, method, and an editorial aesthetic. Even considering our

current and future digital culture, the material book medium may continue to provide

opportunities for innovation in artistic expression. For print, moving forward may simply

require the occasional look back.

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Chapter Two:

Some Assembly Required: Bookish Interactivity and

Material Narrative Construction in The Unfortunates and Building Stories

Eagerly, but without understanding, I read the words which a man of my blood had written with a small brush: “I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing. It does not work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order. But now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. —Arrival, dir. by Denis Villeneuve Standing in the lobby of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, you see a

massive mural composed of colored rectangles framing the expanse of impressive stone

steps that lead up to the modern and contemporary art exhibits. Given the context, you

suppose this whimsical display might actually be part of the museum’s collection, and,

because of the way the mural’s bright colors work neatly against the dark stone and

modern interior of the museum, you rather like it. Seeing a museum label at the bottom of

the steps, you learn that the mural actually comprises two works by the same artist, Sol

LeWitt. Reading more, you learn that LeWitt did not so much as lift a brush when Wall

Drawing #450 and Wall Drawing #493 were originally painted on the walls of the

Carnegie in the 1980s or when they were restored in 2007.

As an American artist linked to the movements of Conceptual Art and

Minimalism in the 1960s and later, LeWitt is particularly well known for his series of

wall drawings that first exist only as a set of instructions. Like the murals at the Carnegie

in Pittsburgh, these installations are then constructed on location, often by teams of

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assistants and local artists following guidelines that range from explicit to intentionally

vague. Giving a sense of these instructions, for example, the full title of Wall Drawing

#450 is A wall is divided vertically into four equal parts. All one-, two-, three- and four-

part combinations of four colors. During the restoration—or we might call it a new

production—of murals #450 and #493 at the Carnegie, LeWitt’s lead installation

draftsman Sarah Heinemann explained to the local paper that in LeWitt’s works “the final

product isn’t the most important piece, it is the idea. Then it is the collaboration between

the artist and the craftsman and the other artists on the idea of it, which is the artwork”

(McNulty). Heinemann understandably favors a more Platonic sense of the projects,

fulfilling her duty as ambassador of the artist and his ideals. To the credit of Carnegie

curators—surely motivated to find a bit of significance in the art that actually sits in their

collection rather than LeWitt’s brain—the museum label claims LeWitt’s drawings are

working “[i]n opposition to the traditional conception of the artist as exclusive author or

creative genius.”

Conceptual art filtered across all kinds of media during the second half of the

twentieth century. Working in music, composer John Cage achieved rare notoriety in

popular culture. Although active for several decades prior, Cage found fame in the 1950s

and ‘60s as his compositions took on more conceptualist characteristics. Specifically,

Cage would frequently provide instructions for instrumentalists, or experimental forms of

composition such as a complex coordinates system, rather than standard notation. Cage is

most famous for his 1952 composition 4’33” No. 2, which consists of performers

remaining silent for the titular duration. In lieu of a conventional score, the work is

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scored with one sentence that Cage wrote at the first performance: “In a situation

provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action” (Pritchett 144–46).

As Cage and others have since pointed out, 4’33” is not a performance of silence but

rather of the ambient sounds that fill the performance environment (Hermes). In other

words, the musical content of 4’33” remains indeterminate until each performance when

the instructions are followed, and the piece materializes momentarily. Of course, all

performance art, including music, drama, and dance, works in this fundamentally

ephemeral way, but Cage’s work exploits this characteristic in extreme and provocative

ways. As such, a greater element of chance plays into Cage’s compositions, an idea that

Cage explored further with his use of the I Ching. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an

ancient Chinese divination manual (approx. 1000–750BC) that can be used as a kind of

random number generator and decision-maker. Cage’s 1951 Music of Changes was

composed as his second fully indeterminate piece and his first to use chance operations to

drive musical continuity (Jensen 97–98). As with 4’33”, the visual art of LeWitt, and

other conceptual art, the parameters of Music of Changes are carefully delineated, but in a

way that invites performers to fill in the exaggerated spaces of indeterminacy with their

own interactions.

This deliberate complication of the figure of the artist in the production of art

found evident traction in literary circles of the mid-to-late twentieth century as well. In

one sense, academics helped tear the notion of stable authorship apart. Roland Barthes

made his famous proclamation on “The Death of the Author” in 1967—about the same

time LeWitt was getting started and Cage was already established—which strongly

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influenced the next several decades of literary scholarship. Barthes’s primary goal was to

promote a method of interpreting literature that did not incorporate the identity and

intentions of an(y) authorial figure into the interpretation. In Barthes’s theoretical

polemic, literary meaning is not something one unlocks or decodes, with an answer

seemingly hiding in the details of the author’s intentions or life story, but rather meaning

is generated through a collaborative relationship between readers and the text, author be

damned (or dead). As contemporary readers, we are used to this model now, and

Barthes’s polemic has since become a recognizable position on the continuum of

interpretative options. However, the strategy can say little about the material formation of

any given work. Interpretation of any sort inevitably relies on a single, stable textual

source (whether imagined or actual) from which to generate meaning—a fixed position of

literary signification. But what happens, as in the case of LeWitt’s drawings or Cage’s

music, when the physical creation of the work is (also) a collaborative enterprise?

The historical instance of Barthes illustrates a critical enthusiasm in the twentieth

century to reconsider the roles of author and reader in literary practice, as well as

reconsider conceptions of material text. At the same time, as in the cases of LeWitt and

Cage, artists and authors have been occasionally willing to muddle their own authority in

the process—to find such displacement and play at collaborative authorship as a

provocative artistic outcome in its own right. Almost always this collaboration requires

some kind of action on the part of the viewer or the reader to complete or modify the

work. The receiver of art is recruited as a co-creator. In contemporary literature—which

will be my focus—many of these projects are described as “interactive.” Such interactive

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works are narrative constructs that require readers to meet a certain threshold of

engagement and operation to put the story together and make it go. In recent and current

practice, interactivity in fiction is usually aligned with the development of [electronic]

“hypertext fiction,” game books in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure book

series, and, increasingly, the media of gaming, virtual reality, and interactive cinema.

The critical focus of this chapter is bookish interactivity—the physical

engagement of material bibliographic structures, especially in a narrative capacity. In

many ways, bookish interactivity is simply a kind of reading, as our interaction with

printed narrative is always mediated through a material form that we must grasp and

handle.* However, the genre highlighted in this chapter—the book in a box—challenges

prior conceptions of the reading experience through the deconstructed forms that make up

the genre. From a compositional point of view, the removal of the book’s bindings

coincides with the telling of a fractured and shifting story. In their effort to stretch the

novel’s narrative potential, these works involve a mutation of medium as well, which

* The history of the book is replete with examples of material interactivity. In particular, the travel and science books of the incunabula era and shortly thereafter thrived on such material innovation. Bernhard von Breydenbach’s famous 1486 Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (Pilgrimage to the Holy Land), for example, immediately expanded the possibilities for the print codex with the inclusion of massive, panoramic, foldout woodcut illustrations by Erhard Reuwich. In the case of Petrus Apianus’s (Peter Apian) 1540 Astonomicum Caesareum (The Emperor’s Astronomy), interactivity enables the production of data with the book. The primary feature of the book is the many intricately designed “volvelles”—paper charts made of moveable pieces, usually discs—which readers could use to make astronomical calculations. Later narrative fiction examples include Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, originally published serially between 1759–1767. Sterne’s novel includes famous examples of material self-awareness, such as intentionally mis-numbered pages, the “blank page” and “black page,” as well as scattered notes, dedicates, and prefaces—all deployed for narrative effect.

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defamiliarizes the reading experience to the extent that readers must reconsider their

relationship to the physical text. Such defamiliarization is the hallmark of bookish

interactivity, which incorporates the human body into the machinery of storymaking. In

the absence of binding, the hands of the reader bring momentary determinacy to the

book’s pages, materializing narrative in the process. In studying these unconventional

works, we can better understand how material design and the book medium can be used

to structure narrative experience in contemporary fiction.

To meet this challenge, one goal of this chapter is to place these important literary

works in more useful book-historical and media-specific contexts. The struggle is partly

disciplinary, as traditional literary and narrative theories often fail these innovative forms.

However, establishing a kind of critical feedback loop between literary studies and digital

media studies can be a first step towards understanding what these existing texts and

future book forms offer storytelling. For example, the lessons of interactivity in new

media may be fed back into the readings of these complex book forms. For the novels

under study in this chapter, the metatextual themes of story-making, nonlinearity, and

navigation in each story seem to self-determine potential interpretations. With an

interdisciplinary critical strategy, however, we can see how readers embody these themes

through the unorthodox forms of reading and authorship that these new works dictate. I

will illustrate how digital media inform this reconfigured interactivity with books, but

also I will illustrate how bookish interactivity remains distinct from its digital

counterpart.

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Interactivity undeniably has a rich history in postmodern print literature of the

twentieth century. Hopscotch is one well-known example, written by Argentinian author

Julio Cortázar in the 1960s (Spanish edition 1963, English translation 1966). Typical of

such interactive novels, the book opens with a “Table of Instructions” that explains how

to proceed:

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list: [sequence of chapter numbers] Each chapter has its number at the top of every right-hand page to facilitate the search. (5)

In this way, Hopscotch prescribes a meandering path through its episodic narrative.

Readers flip around the text, and this “hopscotching” method ostensibly mirrors the

novel’s themes of exploration and uncertainty as the protagonist experiences life in Paris

and Argentina. Through this kind of interactivity, the story itself does not change, but

readers may alter their experience of it.

Italo Calvino’s 1979 (English translation 1981) If on a winter’s night a traveler is

another well-known example that incorporates a self-conscious reading experience into

the novel’s narrative structure. The book opens with a startling second-person address:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a

traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade”

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(3). The rest of the book follows an alternating structure, with one set of passages

developing the second-person narrative about the reading of the novel, and the other set

of passages containing first chapters of fictional novels of different styles and genres.

Readers proceed through the book sequentially, but the puzzling narrative structure

invites play into the process. As the promotional blurb for the Knopf Everyman’s Library

edition exclaims: “This exhilarating interactive novel—in which the reader, lured into the

text by the enticements of Italo Calvino’s splendid intelligence, turns into the book’s

central character—was its author’s triumphant response to the question of whether the art

of fiction could survive the vast changes taking place in the communications technology

of our world.”

In a final example, Raymond Queneau of the French avant-garde writing group

OULIPO incorporates computation and material experimentation into his 1961 poetic

work Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems). The book

is a simple collection of ten sonnets with one significant recombinatorial twist: each line

of each sonnet is cut onto its own strip on paper; the strips can be rearranged individually

to combine with any other line of any other sonnet, resulting in a mathematically vast

total number of potential sonnets. While narrative is not figured into Queneau’s work,

One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems represents an incorporation of the book form into

a work’s literary content. More significantly, Queneau’s work also represents a material

deconstruction of the book form and a different kind of reading experience.

The most extreme form of a materially deconstructed narrative experience comes

with the “book in a box” genre of experimental fiction, which offers unique examples of

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fulfilling some aspects of narrative interactivity while providing a distinctly bibliographic

experience. Well-known instances of the book in a box include loose-leaf pages or

pamphlets designed to be shuffled and read in any order by the reader, as seen in recently

re-released editions of Marc Saporta’s 1962 Composition No. 1 (2011 Visual Editions)

and B.S. Johnson’s 1969 The Unfortunates (2009 New Directions). Chris Ware’s 2011

Building Stories adds graphic and textual variety to this scheme, distributing a narrative

across “14 distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and

Pamphlets” (back box cover). Primarily a conventional comics artist and graphic novelist,

Ware is not typically given the same literary classification as Saporta or Johnson, but the

published format of Building Stories grants us an opportunity to consider how earlier

strategies of conceptual art may filter through, and persist beyond, the advent of digital

media. In each instance of these works of fiction, the reader must piece together narrative

from a cache of discrete documents. Such a creative process results in a unique reading

experience that challenges existing concepts of media-specific interactivity. In tracing

such congruities across disparate genres and historical periods, this chapter will focus on

The Unfortunates and Building Stories.

Scholar Marie-Laure Ryan focuses on interactivity as a hallmark of new media.

To begin, Ryan finds the critical heritage of Espen Aarseth and Janet Murray to be too

generic to be useful for contemporary digital narratives. In Cybertext, Aarseth develops

the concept of ergodic literature, in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the

reader to traverse the text” (1). In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray describes an

expectation and desire for reader agency in immersive electronic environments (139–45).

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For Ryan, both ergodism and agency can too easily be applied to media of other sorts—

dolls and toy trucks, for example. This lack of specificity limits the usefulness of each

concept. A “genuinely interactive system,” according to Ryan, “involves not only choice

[ . . . ] but also a two-sided effort that creates a feedback loop.” Interactivity in narrative

must involve a text that “kicks back,” as the world does when an agent performs an

action within its boundaries (35). The key issue with understanding how interactivity

works in digital narrative, however, is determining the degree of the kick. At what point

does a text become truly interactive? Ryan proposes a spectrum—an onion, in her

metaphor—on which to map different levels of interactivity. The five levels are as

follows:

Level 1: Peripheral Interactivity Level 2: Interactivity Affecting Narrative Discourse & Presentation of the Story Level 3: Interactivity Creating Variations in a Predefined Story Level 4: Real-Time Story Generation Level 5: Meta-Interactivity

The deeper into the onion, the more complex the narrative becomes (and the more

difficult to execute). Level 1 includes interactivity that affects neither the order nor

presentation of story; speed, direction, and focus could be affected, for example. Level 2

comprises stories that are still “fully predetermined, but thanks to the text’s interactive

mechanisms, their presentation to the user is highly variable” (40). Hypertext stories, for

example, involve Level 2 interactivity—pieces of a unified narrative dispersed through a

network of interconnected nodes that can be traversed in a variety of ways. Level 3

signals the reader’s entry as a member into the fictional world, usually operating as an

avatar and wandering around, gathering items, shooting things, and so on. Many video

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games work this way. Level 4 narrative would involve dynamically generated stories

based on user input, though such texts are still in their technological infancy. Level 5

invites users to modify or create new parts of the narrative world—a new level for a

game, for instance.

Ryan’s delineation of the layers of interactivity within digital narratives is useful

in the way it frees contemporary critical perspectives from the traps of earlier

hypertextual criticism that figured aspects of interactivity as a kind of radical

coauthorship.† While classic hypertext usually includes texts with seemingly infinite

configurations of story, for example, not every configuration indicates a distinct

narrative, or one not already put in place by the original author. Ryan’s formulation

similarly allows us to reconsider the traditions of authorship, interactivity, and art in the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially as they move between analog and digital

media. Often deemphasized in the study of cyber-/hypertextual and ergodic narrative is

that principles of interactivity can be usefully applied to experimental works of print

literature as well.

J. Yellowlees Douglas synthesizes an interdisciplinary method in the 2000

monograph The End of Books—Or, Books without End? Drawing connections among

studies of hypertext, interactivity, and narrative, Douglas highlights a common sentiment

† This position is best exemplified in George P. Landow’s oft-cited Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, published originally in 1992. According to Landow, hypertext necessarily “blurs the boundaries between reader and writer” and reconfigures both roles (4). “Collaboration” accounts for the relationship between author and reader in a hypertext environment, mirror-modeling a dispersed hypertext network like the text itself (90–91). Ryan’s essay is representative of a subsequent critical corrective regarding the author/reader roles in interactive narrative.

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of this time, that the development of texts of endless electronic expanse simultaneously

hastens the demise of the print medium. But, as Douglas illustrates in her book, deep

affinities occur between electronic hypertext and avant-garde print books. Rather than

spin a tale of technological disruption, Douglas creates a more media-inclusive study of

narrative that clarifies the advancements of digital literature while simultaneously

recognizing the contributions of printed counterparts. Douglas opens her discussion with

the problematic critical history of these enigmatic hypertextual digital narratives. She

focuses on the general problem of classification—an utter lack of consensus on the basic

critical applications of terms like “hypertext,” “narrative,” and “interactive.” On

interactivity, Douglas recognizes the contributions of Aarseth as well as Murray. While

perhaps too dismissive of Aarseth’s focus on the technological structure of cybertext,

Douglas favors Murray’s more “participatory” language that better centers the reader in

literary production. “In Murray’s view,” Douglas writes, “the text exists less as an

apparatus to produce collaboration of human and machine [as in Aarseth] than as a

conduit for an immersive, aesthetic experience that invites readers’ participation” (5).

Ryan’s layers of the “interactive onion” therefore represent a subsequent

refinement of Douglas’s work, specifically in the development of the principles of

interactivity. While Ryan dismisses the interactive capacities of ergodic print texts

“because they lack the ability to modify themselves dynamically” (35), there remains an

opportunity to propose new criteria for bookish interactivity, derived from Ryan’s

original criteria. Perhaps for the full appreciation of electronic literature, there is value in

making the nuanced distinction between “interactive” and “participatory,” between

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technological collaboration and “aesthetic experience.” I argue, however, that in the case

of print literature, and in the history of the book medium, the either/or formulation would

be an unnecessary constraint that fails to make a more meaningful distinction between the

material book and the literary work. In other words, the book is inescapably both a

technological apparatus requiring human interactivity as well as a conduit to the

immersive, literary experience contained within. In tracing the affordances of bookish

interactivity and its potential effects on the structure of narrative, the liminal cases of the

book-in-a-box format offer a unique opportunity to better place the book in the evolving

media ecology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At a fundamental level, these

liminal cases expand our conception of what is possible with the book and the novel.

The Space Between: Unbound Ideation in The Unfortunates

B. S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates was originally published, in a box, in

1969 by Panther (London) with the following prefatory note inscribed on the inside cover

(Fig. 2.1):

This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections in any other random order before reading.

While readers make sense of this material gimmick foisted upon them, fingering through

the loose pamphlets on the right side of the box to confirm the bizarre instructions,

Johnson has already slipped his most provocative ploy past the goalkeeper: this thing is a

“novel,” declared as such not once but twice in this opening passage. It is unclear

whether Johnson or the publisher originally devised the instructional note, though the

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note is reproduced verbatim in the 1999 Picador U. K. / 2007 New Directions U. S.

editions,‡ implying that the paratext is integral to the book’s material and conceptual

identity. Furthermore, in the 1969 Panther first edition, The Unfortunates is labeled “a

novel” on the front cover. By declaring his book in a box a novel, Johnson frames the

entire endeavor of reading The Unfortunates in novelistic terms. Readers must contend

with this sustained artistic vision by coping without basic features one might expect of a

contemporary novel, such as linear narrative and plot. With this framework in place,

departures from such conventions, as well as the material peculiarity of an unbound book,

are now read as deviations from whatever expectations readers may already possess. As a

devotee of Joyce and Beckett, Johnson held that the only viable kind of work was writing

that pushed the limits of the novel tradition, that innovated form while also advancing

truth—a “radical aesthetic” as biographer and author Jonathan Coe writes (Like a Fiery

Elephant 31). Therefore, the instance of the prefatory note in The Unfortunates can be

‡ All work concerning The Unfortunates in this chapter is based on the 2007 New Directions edition made for the U. S. market, which maintains the same design and text as the 1999 Picador U. K. edition. Though it is often preferable to base such material studies on first editions, and to compare them with later editions, the 1969 Panther edition of The Unfortunates has been, since Johnson’s death in 1973, a prized item for collectors and is hard to come by. Complicating matters further is the irony that many institutions, including the University of Rochester, bound their copies after originally acquiring some form of the text (though that still does not necessarily preclude a shuffled reading experience). However, the new editions from Picador and New Directions may be argued to be more authoritative than the original 1969 publication. According to a “Note on the Text” that accompanies the introduction: “This edition of The Unfortunates has been prepared from B. S. Johnson’s original manuscript and typescript. Occasional cuts were made for the 1969 edition, in order to bring individual sections down to the required length: these deleted passages have now been restored. In addition, three epigraphs selected by Johnson (two from his namesake Samuel, one from his idol Laurence Sterne) have been included on the inside of the box, as was his intention.”

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read as much as instruction to the reader as it can be understood as Johnson’s self-

fashioning of himself into the Joycean tradition of the literary avant-garde.

But why this particular gimmick? Why an unbound book of pamphlets? As Coe

tells the story in the introduction to the re-issued editions—included in the box as a

pamphlet—Johnson at the time of writing was working as a football (soccer) reporter in

England for the Observer, traveling each weekend to a new city to cover matches. As he

traveled, Johnson reflected on the repetition of movement and navigation, as well as on

the random associations that occupied his mind as his focus shifted from football to

memories of life experiences and old friends. Of course, associative memory is an

Figure 2.1: The opening spread of The Unfortunates, revised 2007 edition by New Directions.

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established hallmark of the work of Marcel Proust, but what Johnson especially

appreciated about his reveries was their fragmentation and randomness. Johnson

understood this unstructured characteristic to be fundamental to the way people receive

experiences and subsequently remember them, and it was this characteristic that Johnson

wanted to portray in a novel. At the same time, Johnson recognized that the malleability

of memory is “directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book: for the

bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material” (Aren’t You Rather

Young 25; also qtd. in Coe, “Introduction” ix). His resolution to this conflict arrived with

the format that was published: twenty-five randomly ordered sections of varying length—

from one to a dozen pages, generally—with two additional first and last sections set by

Johnson to provide a coherent frame.

To better understand Johnson’s unconventional approach in The Unfortunates, it

is useful to recognize the author’s attitudes towards both the novel and the book form in

his life and work. As Coe remarks on Johnson’s artistic tastes, “[i]t is hard to

overestimate how much, or on how many different counts Johnson [ . . . ] disliked not just

most contemporary fiction, but almost everything [ . . . ] about the novel as a form” (4).

In regard to the “craft” of writing, Johnson expressed only hostility. For Johnson,

compelling dialogue, well-wrought characters, and tight plots are the trademarks of

nineteenth-century writing, now anachronistic in contemporary practice. In a post-

Ulysses world, for example, such anachronistic style would create a self-nullifying

artificiality that could only pull literature further away from the contemporary life it

attempts to represent (Coe 4–5).

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Johnson remarks on the artificiality of storytelling in his most famous quote,

which is pulled from a 1973 collection of essays: “Life does not tell stories. Life is

chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a

story from life only by strict, close selection. And this must mean falsification. Telling

stories really is telling lies” (14). Accordingly, Johnson’s novels can be read as highly

unnatural book experiments, but ones that never seem to decide which specific formal

innovations lend themselves to his own theories of the novel. The most important literary

tasks for Johnson are to fight against outdated conventions and to push the novel forward,

to new applications in new historical and cultural contexts.

Johnson’s literary mission to catalyze the evolution of the novel is distinguished

by a historical awareness of medium and form. Storytelling, in Johnson’s view, is a facet

of popular entertainment that has jumped from medium to medium, to the best narrative

vehicle available at any given time. For example, in the twentieth century, film and

television became dominant new media forms for narrative. In the transition of dominant

media, Johnson recognizes a symbolic significance in the historical fact that James Joyce

was responsible for bringing the first cinema to Dublin in 1909: “Joyce saw very early on

that film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged almost

exclusively to the novelist. Film could tell a story more directly, in less time and with

more concrete detail than a novel” (Aren’t You 11). However, similar to poetry, which

found a new way forward through the “short economical lyric, the intense emotional

statement, depth rather than scale,” and rhythmic expression, the novel needn’t die out in

the face of new media. On the contrary, according to Johnson, the novel may “evolve to

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greater achievements by concentrating on those things [the novel] can still do best: the

precise use of language, exploitation of the technological fact of the book, the explication

of thought” (11–12). For Joyce, this meant the development of interior monologue for

Ulysses. And for Johnson:

It is a matter of realizing that the novel is an evolving form, not a static one, of accepting that for practical purposes where Joyce left off should ever since have been regarded as the starting point [ . . . ] No matter how good the writers are who now attempt [to write a nineteenth century narrative novel], it cannot be made to work for our time, and the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse [ . . . ] Novelists must evolve (by inventing, borrowing, stealing, or cobbling from other media) forms which will more or less satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality, their own reality and not Dickens’ reality or Hardy’s reality or even James Joyce’s reality. (12–16)

In every novel Johnson wrote, inventiveness is the only requirement for form, and the

“reality” of his day was chaos or perpetual change as a “condition of life” (17). In The

Unfortunates, specifically, Johnson connects this condition of life to both narrative and

medium. His book in a box is itself a shifting structure, “a physical tangible metaphor for

randomness” and the nature of change (25). Johnson considered his novel a moderately

satisfactory solution to the “problem” of the imposition of fixed order in the traditional

codex. But placed in the context of media history, the development of the novel,

interactive narrative, and history of the book, The Unfortunates is an essential work at the

convergence of many literary and technological streams. As essential works seem to do,

The Unfortunates draws upon forms of the past while simultaneously reinventing them

for the future.

Scholarship on The Unfortunates rarely undertakes these more expansive

genealogical contexts. Perhaps taking their cue from Johnson himself, critics seem

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content to confirm the disparities between contemporary conventional work and

Johnson’s avant-garde forms, and to compare how Johnson stacks up against his heroes

Beckett and Joyce, rather than search for wider historical or theoretical affinities in book

and media history, for example. Philip Tew, one of the most prolific of contemporary

Johnson scholars, remarks on the frequent pitfalls of this typical critical framing:

Such comparisons make up a large part of the existing exegesis of [Johnson’s] texts, and seem invariably to reduce the innovative qualities and overall value accorded to Johnson’s work. Remarks upon similarities to Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John Fowles most especially characterize Johnson’s criticism, or are even made in brief allusions to his work, and are made in a fashion that serves to cast doubt upon his originality. (131) Literary comparisons themselves are not necessarily redundant, but in terms of Johnson the nuancing is crucial and creates an implied paradigm for understanding his fiction and his life. A pattern of subtle positioning emerges and is found throughout such comparative criticism where Johnson is posited as a quirky (and less successful) offshoot of Beckett and Joyce or occasionally of nouveau roman influences. (162n1)

In other words, comparative models are often necessary for reading Johnson, but to this

point the comparisons have been narrowly applied and the resulting scholarship is self-

limiting. Given Johnson’s reverence of these writers in his writing, it is not unexpected or

inappropriate to draw the initial comparison. The error, Tew is saying, is in placing

Johnson in a subordinate position beneath these writers, as an offshoot from the main

vine of canonical literary achievements. In B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, Tew

resituates Johnson’s works in a variety of popular theoretical contexts, and his model is

useful in demonstrating the efficacy of critical re-contextualization in Johnson studies.

Concerning the ideas of digital media and interactivity, specifically, Kaye

Mitchell puts The Unfortunates into the productive frameworks of “Hypertext, Linearity

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and the Act of Reading.” Mitchell assesses the relationship between the novel’s unusual

form and the reading experience, now complicated by a contemporary reader’s post-

digital sensibilities. As Mitchell observes, conventional models of narrative and reading

are derived from the convention of linear sequence, and linear sequence is the convention

that The Unfortunates dismantles (51). Mitchell’s questions are useful starting points:

“Can this—or any—text truly be described as ‘non-linear’ or does the act of reading (the

particular cognition involved) not impose linearity (and causal coherence) upon it, of

necessity?” (52). Mitchell’s investigation leads to a two-pronged reading rooted, first, in

a phenomenological approach that “conceives of the reader of The Unfortunates as

‘concretising’ that text, making it into the work it is” and, second, in a hypertextual

approach that “considers Johnson’s novel as a prototypical hypertext narrative and

ponders whether [ . . . ] some narratives really are more interactive than others” (52). In

other words, Mitchell wonders whether The Unfortunates, as an unconventional book, is

perhaps also a conventional hypertext.

Similar to LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and many of Cage’s musical compositions—

which exist first as ideas and sets of instructions that require its recipients to bring them

into material existence—The Unfortunates is imagined by Mitchell as “virtual in a certain

way: something that, insofar as it exists, emerges from negotiation and process,

something dependent upon the shifting and indeterminate relations of author, text and

reader, something unfinished, lacking solidity or ‘objectification’ in itself” (52). In other

words, and “in a certain way,” Johnson’s novel is an ethereal, emergent specter of fiction,

something shapeless and ungraspable until set into temporary actuality through a set of

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stabilizing interactions that comprise its publication and reception. While Mitchell’s

perspective is alluring in the way it resituates The Unfortunates in a digital context, such

a reading too greatly ignores the novel’s bibliographic identity. The book itself is a solid

object, one that readers can pick up, hold, read, and share. This material identity is what

ultimately distinguishes Johnson’s work from those of LeWitt and Cage. In Conceptual

Art, a perceptible division exists between idea and the processes of materialization. In

The Unfortunates, however, Johnson collapses this division to the extent that the book

medium allows. While the novel aspires to model the fragmented experience of memory,

Johnson’s true innovation is in the unconventional mechanics of reading that his unbound

book compels from readers.

On this point, Ryan’s levels of narrative interactivity provide an updated frame of

reference. The primary benefit of adapting Ryan’s paradigm is the ability to attribute

characteristics of interactivity to narrative without completely succumbing to the

readership-as-authorship claims of earlier hypertextual scholarship. In Ryan’s model, The

Unfortunates would appear to fulfill some characteristics of Level 2, which constitutes a

hypertext environment: “the materials that constitute the story are still fully

predetermined, but thanks to the text’s interactive mechanisms, their presentation to the

user is highly variable” (40). Ryan defines this hypertextual structure as “a collection of

documents interconnected by digital links,” and the formal characteristic of the network

structure of classic hypertext fiction is the “existence of loops that offer several different

ways to get to the same node” (40–41). As previously discussed, loops are an integral

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part of Ryan’s formulation of digital interactivity, and such dynamic feedback is absent

from bookish interactivity.

However, other types of feedback exist in reading The Unfortunates, particularly in

the trial and error of carrying out the novel’s instructions. When readers first encounter

the book, tactility overwhelms the visual (Fig. 2.2). Opening the box, sliding off the

Figure 2.2: the contents of The Unfortunates box unwrapped and spread out.

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wrapper, arranging and perhaps shuffling the little pamphlets—each subsequent

movement estranges the reader further from the usual practice of reading. “This thing sort

of looked like a book,” one might think, “but then I opened it up and it fell apart.” The

text demands we reconcile with its unconventional material form as a price of admission

to the work contained within. The usual methods won’t work here; we are in a strange

place. Questions arise: What do I do with all this loose paper? Do I shuffle or not? Which

is to say, do I read my sequence or someone else’s? Do I create neat “read” and “unread”

stacks? Does it matter? Can I do this in my normal reading chair, or do I need a table? Do

I need a floor? Do I make one big messy pile like a game of Go Fish? To a book like this,

just what is a bookmark? Reading methods will vary as each reader will work one out for

him/herself, and methods may vary each time a reader opens the box. This negotiation,

however, constitutes bookish interactivity, which complicates related forms of digital

narrative interactivity by incorporating the human body into the materials of the text. In

the bookish cyber-/hypertext—the book in a box—interactivity is not merely a means of

traversing the story; it is the means by which the narrative is physically assembled.

In this interactive reading, The Unfortunates presents itself, at first, as a

conventional book. The object is roughly paperback-sized (approximately 8 x 5.5 x 1 in.),

though its solid boards—and list price of $24.99—suggest a higher production value.

Basic elements of modern book design are present: a “spine” is simulated, for example,

and it features the title of the book, Johnson’s name, and New Directions branding; the

back cover shows a typical summary blurb and promotional quotes, including a knowing

endorsement by Samuel Beckett; there is a bar code; in the place of pages that would be

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visible on the top, bottom, and fore-edges, subtle brown-colored boards contrast the pale

blue covers, slightly recessed so as to suggest the presence of pages. There is little doubt:

the object is meant to look like a commercial book. On the other hand, a cheeky design

choice for the 1999 and 2007 republication of the novel hints at the book’s structural

status: the cover title The Unfortunates appears in what can only be described as “label

maker font”—white capital letters embossed into a red strip. What better to identify the

contents of a box?

The material object works like a book, too, at first. It opens up from right to left,

along the “spine,” before its status changes entirely. At full spread, the object is now a

box with contents. The “spine” is not one after all—there are no pages sewn or glued into

it—it is only two creases on which the box’s boards open and close. The helpful

instructional “note” quoted earlier appears on the left where one would usually start

reading, identifying the pamphlets on the right side of the box as sections of a novel and

explaining that readers may shuffle them to any order. The wrapper that holds the

sections together is printed with a brief-but-blatant author note: “B. S. Johnson (1933–

1973) was an experimental novelist, an admirer of Joyce and Beckett, and his works

combine verbal inventiveness with typographical innovations. His books include [ . . . ].”

It is an accurate characterization, more or less, though mere “admirer” is perhaps a little

precious and contributes to Johnson’s “quirky offshoot” standing that Tew much

maligned. However, to label Johnson as “experimental,” a mad scientist of the book, in

his own novel is the brasher move. Johnson himself, as with almost all other

categorizations and classifications, despised the label:

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“Experimental” to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful.” I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems [ . . . ] So for every device I have used there is a literary rationale and a technical justification. (Aren’t You 19)

The novel’s pamphlets, enveloped in such a deliberate attempt at framing its contents and

author in such “experimental” terms, work in productive contrast to the bookish design of

the exterior box—the imitation of conventionality on the outside, an explicit appeal to

avant-garde and experiment on the inside.

Johnson seems as inclined to name-drop as much as his publishers. Three

epigraphs line the interior edges of the box, requiring some twisting and turning by the

reader and emptying the box of its contents (Fig. 2.3). The unattributed epigraphs are as

follows:

I will tell you in three words what the book is. – It is a history. – A history! Of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself – It is a history-book, Sir (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind. I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. There is something noble in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self.

As the “Note on the Text” (provided by the publisher) acknowledges, the first passage is

by Laurence Sterne, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, while the

second two are from Samuel Johnson’s writings, and the epigraphs were originally

intended by (B. S.) Johnson to be placed on the inside of his novel box. The 1969 Panther

edition did not manage to accommodate Johnson’s original design, but the intention was

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fulfilled for the 1999 and 2007 republication.§ The epigraphs collectively serve as an

artist’s statement for Johnson as well as a thematic introduction for the reader—erudite

yet playful, Johnson’s resolute affirmation of truth coupled with self-deprecating humor.

“What passes in a man’s own mind” does indeed capture the scope of the novel.

Much like Ulysses, the novel, concerns the urban travels and internal ramblings of its

§ Jerome McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism offers an editorial theory that is complementary to notions of distributed authorship. McGann’s basic observation is that all literary works are produced from a milieu of cultural factors—from the technical capabilities of contemporary printers to the receptivity of reading audiences. In McGann’s words, “[a]uthority is a social nexus, not a personal possession [ . . . ] [It] rests neither with the author nor with his affiliated institution; it resides in the actual structure of the agreements which these two cooperating authorities reach in specific cases” (48, 54). This argument supports two relevant claims: first, that any material work may be subject to external forces that (validly) shape artistic content, from LeWitt and Cage to literary examples such as Theodore Dreiser’s revision and republication of Sister Carrie or the strong editorial hand of Maxwell Perkins guiding Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and others; second, that the New Directions republication of The Unfortunates may be more authoritative than the original publication because it incorporates more of Johnson’s original design ideas.

Figure 2.3: interior edge of the box displaying the unattributed epigraph from Tristram Shandy.

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narrator over the course of a day. Per instructions, readers of The Unfortunates are given

a “FIRST” pamphlet to begin the story in medias res. The opening scene reveals a first-

person narrator arriving at a train station only to realize that he has been to this city

before. “But I know this city!” he exclaims, looking around at familiar sights (1). Curious

in-line spaces, or blanks, between select words and sentences on the page immediately

alert the reader to the typographic styling that accompanies the text. On first encounter,

the spaces seem to indicate breaks or transitions in the narrator’s line of thought. The

spaces emphasize the words that follow or precede them. In one of the first instances, the

name “Tony” sits in the middle of approximately two inches of empty white space (1). As

the novel progresses, the reader comes to understand that Tony is the deceased friend of

the narrator, on which the recollections and associations of the novel are based. The

narrator continues his self-conscious reverie:

The mind circles, at random, does not remember, from one moment to another, other things interpose themselves, the mind’s The station exit on a bridge, yes, of course, and the blackened gantries rise like steel gibbets above the Midland red wall opposite. (1)

The narration attempts to typographically model nonlinear, fragmented thinking.

Sentences break midway, accompanied by an exaggerated spacing of text. According to

Mitchell’s reading of the spaces:

The frequent textual blanks suggest gaps in knowledge, imagination or inspiration, the mind’s own blanks; such gaps apparently willfully diminish the authority of the author, inviting the reader to fill them in; they imply a necessary interactivity, communication as exchange, and the incompletion of any text. They also instruct us on the limits of language in representing the truth that so concerned Johnson. (61)

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It must also be added and emphasized that the spaces participate in a media history

particular to Johnson’s interests. Returning to Johnson’s own reference to Lawrence

Sterne, Tristram Shandy is often a highlighted as a bibliographically playful novel. In a

famous sequence from Tristram Shandy, the narrator Tristram gives clear instructions to

the reader to use a blank page in the book to draw a beautiful woman “to your own mind”

(357–59). In this sense, the “invitational” spacing, as Mitchell characterizes it, also serves

as homage to the bibliographic tradition of textual play in the spirit of Sterne. In

examples such as this one, Johnson is not experimenting but rather employing proven

techniques of (unconventional) material design in literature.

Connecting to the concept of bookish interactivity, the spaces or blanks in the text

also mirror the unbound physical structure of the novel. As the breaks in sentences model

sudden shifts in narrative thought, so do the physical spaces between the novel’s

pamphlets. In unbinding the major sections of the book, Johnson has materialized the

rupture that the in-line spaces represent. The physical structure of the book does not itself

connect individual passages. The “binding” is materialized through the hands of the

reader, and the figurative blanks of the narration are filled in and connected by the act of

reading the book. In The Unfortunates, this process of reading through bookish

interactivity models the struggle for writers to represent life events through language and

media. Johnson said that he wanted to make a novel about the random, fragmented nature

of memory, as well as the senseless, haphazard tragedy of dying of cancer that befell his

friend. But like much of Johnson’s work, the resulting text is really an account of his

struggle to find a form that could accommodate those ambitions.

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The first-person narrator of The Unfortunates is, after all, a writer—a sports

reporter. While this detail is relevant to Johnson’s own life, it also supports the theme of

writing and the assemble-as-you-go narrative that fit within the novel’s scope of bookish

interactivity. One pamphlet in The Unfortunates models this concept as the narrator

attempts to observe and document the soccer match he has been hired to cover, as well as

render his experience into a form suitable for publication. The section begins:

The pitch worn, the worn patches, like There might be an image there, I could use an image, there, if I can think of one at this stage of the season, it might too stand for what these two teams are like, are doing. If I can think of one. (1)

The opening passage is a struggle for expression. The narrator is looking for the words

that might serve his purpose of plain documentation as well as infuse his report with his

own writerly impressions of the proceedings. The struggle to write and “find the right

words” is nothing new and often a clichéd postscript attached to any project. But in the

case of The Unfortunates, the search itself, for language and form, is the final text.

Johnson’s narrator does not give the words that result from deliberation, only the

deliberation and the [blank].

The section continues in this manner and adds another stylistic feature to the

narration: italicized text (Fig. 2.4). Reminiscent of other narrative devices built around

italicized text—Faulkner’s frequent use of italics to denote shifts of internal monologue

or perspective, for example—the italics in this section seem to mark the narrator’s more

structured and deliberate attempt to get something written down. The narrator of The

Unfortunates complicates such similar strategies by employing the shifts frequently

midsentence, serving to edit or annotate himself in real time: “City’s goal had a narrow

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escape alter that, cliché, cross it through, later early on when their goalkeeper, the

prehensile or something Phipps dropped a high centre from Lomax [ . . . ]” (2). The

phrase “cross it through” and a later reference to “my pages” (3) suggest active

composition by the narrator, perhaps pen or pencil in a notebook.

The italics, in that sense, suggest handwriting as well. As the match progresses, so

does the narrator’s own worry about his assignment and abilities as well as his

disparagement of his peers’ inauthentic attempts to cover the match:

[ . . . ] when it came to finishing either their shooting was off target or the phenomenally lucky big Phipps got some limb portion of his in the way and saved the side, or bacon, side of bacon Does this bloody reporting affect, destroy even, my own interest in language, sometimes I feel I have mislaid perhaps, not lost, something through this reporting, using under the pressure of deadlines the words which first come into my head, which is not good, relying on the chance of real words which may come in only the two hours of a match and the writing about it, oh what the hell, not to descend to the methods of the Heavy Mob, who have their telling phrases thought out in a notebook already, I’ve seen them at it [ . . . ]. (7–8)

Here, the narrator expresses the primary conflict between the requirements of his

reporting job and his own artistic priorities. He wishes, as in all writing projects, to render

something truthful and new in language, but the obstacles of deadlines and his publishing

medium are often too great in that effort. To be sure, it seems practically a requirement of

the genre to fall back on prewritten “telling phrases” as other reporters do. Despite his

admonishment of lazy writing practices, the narrator does surrender to the idea that, in the

end, a disparity between “events” and “story” inevitably exists and the latter subsumes

the former in language. As the deciding goal is scored late in the match, the narrator

exclaims, “Christ! No! That’s the story, then, the story, as the subs will think. It doesn’t

matter what happens in the last eight minutes, that’s the match, that’s the story” (8).

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Figure 2.4: a pamphlet pulled from the box, displaying a passage of representative blank spaces and italicized text.

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The thought is thrown into the narration, mostly serving as a transition from the

narrator’s description and documentation of the match into production of his report, but

that brief exclamation is coupled with the acknowledgement of the necessary boundary

that arises between the events as they occurred and the events as they are reported. For

Johnson’s narrator, a moment in the game involving player substitutions and a “farcical”

goal seemed to capture the match as he wanted—and he would build a report around that

impression. “Now I must hack this into some shape,” the narrator continues soon after,

“now I must make it into 500 well-chosen words. Yes, 500 they asked for. To hell with

what happens in the rest of the match . . . Get on. By five. In

40 minutes” (9).

An extended blank in the text appears to represent the moments of composition in

which the narrator “hacks” together the report. In a remarkable twist of medium, and

specifically the nesting of media into media, the reader receives not the written report but

rather a kind of transcript of the narrator’s phone call to the paper office:

Copy, please. Soccer, City versus United. Right. City one, United nil. Skill was as uncommon as grass on the bone hyphen bare bone hyphen bare pitch on which City beat United one hyphen nil at home yesterday comma and only a farcical incident towards the end enlivened the tedium and crudity of the match full point new par Phipps comma tall and bulky as Frankenstein comma [ . . . ]. (10)

The phone-call recitation continues, the report given in full, to close out the pamphlet

sub-section of the novel. As this episode in the novel has progressed from documentation

(of the soccer match) and deliberation into composition and production, the narration

ends up modeling Johnson’s fears about writing, without resolution. By dictating (in the

novel’s written narration) the complete punctuation and syntactic changes in the report

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over the phone—as was common practice for reporters—Johnson manages to accentuate

the artificiality of writing while incorporating this sense of the artificial into his overall

attempt at creating something authentic with the structure of his novel. In other words, for

Johnson, properties of language—particularly properties of written language, like

punctuation—appear to be inevitable impositions of inauthenticity upon his desire to

write the truth.

In The Unfortunates, as in much of Johnson’s writing, this tension between truth

and language creates a productive space for innovation and play within established

literary forms and media, such as the novel and the book, respectively. In developing The

Unfortunates, Johnson settled on the unconventional medium of an unbound codex to

create such a space in his book. As with all works of literature and art that depend on

some form of interactivity by the reader to fill in the blanks, as it were, from conceptual

art to digital hypertext fiction, The Unfortunates incorporates the reader into the

storytelling production of the novel. Through this design, Johnson invites readers not to

see his own truth, but rather to experience the writing process and his struggle for truth

against language and form.

Time Travel in Chris Ware’s Building Stories

Into the twenty-first century, the book in a box has not ceded its entire interactive

domain to the rising media of digital hypertext fiction, video games, and experimental

film. Despite the sustained popularity of those new media, a few notable mass-market

entries have been made to the boxed book genre, seemingly part of a wider revival for

experimental book forms as resistance to the digital age. The poet Anne Carson, for

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example, boxed her 2010 collection Nox, though its contents were not unbound pages but

rather a single accordion-style foldout of nearly 200 facsimile pages of a homemade

notebook. New editions of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire have been produced, including

an edition by Gingko Press in 2011 that literalizes the novel’s descriptions of its source

materials—a poem written on a series of notecards along with scholarly annotation—and

presents these discrete objects to the reader in a book-sized black box. In 2012, Chris

Ware enlarged the potential for the genre, along with its material dimensions.

Resembling a board game box, Building Stories measures in at 16.7 x 11.7 x 1.9

inches (Fig. 2.5). As the back of the box explains, the contents include “14 distinctively

discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets” as “everything you

need to read the new graphic novel Building Stories.” In place of a dust jacket blurb—

there is no jacket, of course—the novel mixes material self-awareness with its

introduction of plot and theme:

With the increasingly electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring—perhaps even necessary—to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity—while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep). A pictographic listing of all 14 items (260 pages total) appears below, with suggestions made as to appropriate places to set down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an average well-appointed home. As seen in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Building Stories collects a decade’s worth of work, with

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dozens of “never-before-published” pages (i.e., those deemed too obtuse, filthy or just plain incoherent to offer to a respectable periodical).

Figure 2.5: the eclectic contents of the box for Building Stories.

In one sense, Building Stories is a novel fundamentally about space—physical living

spaces as well as the turbulent emotional spaces of its four primary characters. As a

material object, the novel hopes to take up as much space as possible. Not only is the box

of imposing size, its contents are designed and (cheekily) intended to spill out and embed

themselves into the personal living space of the reader. Where do you usually read

newspapers or magazines? Toss a piece of this novel on the pile. Where does junk mail

get dumped? Maybe that’s a good spot for this pamphlet. This thing looks like a normal

book—it’ll fit right in on the nightstand. Notably, this emphasis on materiality and

tactility—“something to hold on to”—is set up in antithesis to the “increasingly

electronic incorporeality” of modern life.

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A substantial scholarly discussion formed around Chris Ware’s work as he rose to

literary prominence. Part of this scholarly richness is due to timing. Ware’s first major

achievement came with the launch of the Acme Novelty Library serial in 1993. Winning

numerous awards through its run, Acme Novelty Library functioned as a site of

innovation and collation, a publication vehicle with which Ware could re-work material

published elsewhere and earlier during his days as a student, as well as serialize new

material, such as the bulk of content for his landmark graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the

Smartest Kid on Earth published in 2000. Portions of Building Stories were also

originally published in the Acme Novelty Library, and the serial remains ostensibly

ongoing, though it has been nearly ten years since its last installment. The timing of Acme

Novelty Library’s launch in the mid-90s is important because it coincides with the

publication of Scott McCloud’s influential Understanding Comics in 1993. As a literary

medium, comics matured significantly in the second half of the twentieth century,

especially with the 1980s publications of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the tour de force

Watchmen by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. With

Understanding Comics, McCloud provides working vocabulary and theoretical

foundation for comics criticism, as well as rudimentary art-historical contexts for comics

characteristics such as sequence and color. Understanding Comics is also written and

fully illustrated as a paneled comic text, modeling its own ideas as it discusses them.

To clarify, mine is not a study in graphic novels or the comics medium. As I have

indicated, the field of graphic literary studies is a rich and mature one, with a

sophisticated critical history and canon of its own. Of course, comics could very well be

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included in a study on material design and narrative innovation in contemporary

literature, such as this dissertation, and so to omit them is in part a practical limit on

scope. However, the decision is also a careful delineation of critical focus. Whereas

comics studies appropriately emphasize art design in illustrations and its relationship to

text, I am seeking out works that manipulate the medium of the book more generally.

This criterion is what brings Ware’s boxed-form Building Stories into the same

discussion as Johnson’s The Unfortunates, for instance, and what also distinguishes

Building Stories from other work Ware has produced as a comics author.

There are remarkable theoretical congruities in both understanding comics and in

reading a book in a box. One important contribution of McCloud’s Understanding

Comics is his explanation of “closure” and its application in visually navigating comics

from panel to panel and page to page. In short, McCloud defines closure as the cognitive

“phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63).** The phenomenon

depends on the complicated relationship between (limited) sensory experience and the

mind’s ability to stitch sensory fragments together into a cohesive whole. The concept

can be applied to something as general as understanding one’s place in the world and to

something as media-specific as motion-picture, which relies on persistence of vision and

the mind’s capacity for closure to transform a sequence of images shown at twenty-four

frames per second into fluid motion. For McCloud, the concept of closure explains how

** McCloud’s illustrated comics form cannot be reproduced entirely here, although an effort has been made to reproduce the font and styling of the text, which is distinct to the comics genre for visual expression and meaning. In quotations of Ware’s text, the same effort has been made.

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readers are able to navigate the empty space between panels, known as “the gutter.”†† As

McCloud writes (and draws):

HERE IN THE LIMBO OF THE GUTTER, HUMAN IMAGINATION TAKES TWO SEPARATE IMAGES AND TRANSFORMS THEM INTO A SINGLE IDEA. NOTHING IS SEEN BETWEEN THE TWO PANELS, BUT EXPERIENCE TELLS YOU SOMETHING MUST BE THERE! COMICS PANELS FRACTURE BOTH TIME AND SPACE, OFFERING A JAGGED, STACCATO RHYTHM OF UNCONNECTED MOMENTS. BUT CLOSURE ALLOWS US TO CONNECT THESE MOMENTS AND MENTALLY CONSTRUCT A CONTINUOUS, UNIFIED REALITY. IF VISUAL ICONOGRAPHY IS THE VOCABULARY OF COMICS, CLOSURE IS ITS GRAMMAR. (66–67)

In other words, comics panels exploit the space that opens up in narrative sequencing

between one event and the next: Panel A shows two gunfighters facing each other in a

classic Western showdown; Panel B shows one of the gunfighters on the ground dead and

the other gunfighter standing victorious. In a typical novel, this space is usually an effect

of passing time created through conventions of language and typographic style. In

comics, this space is literalized in the break between panels, a “FRACTURE [OF] BOTH

TIME AND SPACE.” In the experimental novel—the book in a box—the effect is

compounded as space is materialized in the space between the discrete objects that

constitute the novel’s material contents. McCloud emphasizes that it is the reader who

actively assembles, navigates, and completes the action left to the space—readers fill in

the blanks (68–69). “Interactivity” in this sense is certainly different in kind and degree

from the interactivity required by ergodic literature or digital hypertext fiction. However,

McCloud’s formulation of cognitive interactivity in comics works as a useful parallel to

†† Comics closure should not be confused with an identical bibliographic term that describes the text-less space where book pages are stitched or glued into the binding.

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the materiality of bookish interactivity—in both Johnson and Ware’s boxes, space

functions to incorporate readers into the novel’s narrative structure.

In a critical reading of Building Stories, Peter R. Sattler demonstrates how Ware

“develops medium-specific methods for simulating the activity of remembering itself,

making that action palpable in the reading process.” In Sattler’s words, the novel

“accomplishes this feat, first, by anatomizing memory into its component parts, teasing

narrative memories away from their visual and episodic counterparts [and then]

reassembles those pieces within the constitutive mind of the reader” (207). The addition

of a “visual” counterpart—in this case, perhaps better defined as pictographic

representation—and its complement to text in the comics format is the means by which

Ware appeals to different aspects and forms of memory, e.g., “episodic” vs. “narrative”

memory. The latter gives meaning to episodic, or fragmented, memories and places them

in “the context of a life story” (210). In the similar attempt to bibliographically model the

nature of memory, Building Stories follows the same structural scheme as The

Unfortunates. Such a scheme—the unbound book—relies on the fragmentation of

narrative materials into component parts. This unconventional narrative structure

produces equally unconventional reading methods, characterizing bookish interactivity.

Ware’s story is really a myriad of stories, and the pieces come in all shapes and

sizes. Opening the box, the reader is perhaps bemused by the dedication and copyright

“page” printed on the inside of the box cover. Amidst the expanse of light-gray

cardboard, this conventional book paratext is recognizable yet uncanny. Similar to the

way the design of The Unfortunates mixes characteristics of conventional books with the

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book in the box, Building Stories offers recognizable landmarks for readers to get their

bearings just as the path deteriorates. There is even Library of Congress cataloging data

(for “14 easily misplaced elements”) and an ISBN. Unlike The Unfortunates, however,

Building Stories offers no instructions for how to organize the materials or how to

proceed. In this sense, the reading experience models the feeling of entering a new space,

whether a physical space like a building, or a conceptual space, like a website. Here is

where decisions are made, and the reading experience becomes one of choices,

navigation, and interactivity. Personally, I like to flip through as much as possible as

quickly as possible. I “scan,” in other words (a reading strategy fostered by digital

literacy), both to begin to cognitively register the variety of types of documents—

pamphlets, foldouts, booklets, etc.—and the nature of their contents. I also quickly look

around my own space to see where I can put all of this material as it spills out of the box

and into my apartment. Lacking a big table and presumably needing the bed to sleep at

some point, I opt for the floor as my organizational platform.

One remarkable aspect of the pictographic content of comics is that it can be

scanned more quickly than text. As one scans, it is quickly apparent that Building Stories

will primarily concern a woman protagonist—she is never named—at different stages of

her life and her experience living in an apartment building with other residents. Each

piece of the book is a vignette of narrative action or character development, with the

building itself given a voice. The vignettes sometimes amount to the equivalent of real-

time action, the course of events of a night or day for a character. Other vignettes are

sequenced like montages, such as the two-page section titled “Paper Dolls” which spans

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an entire life in eighteen panels (Sattler 209). Manipulation of narrative time is a key

innovation of comics in general. As McCloud explains in Understanding Comics, though

comics panels might suggest a snapshot in time, the introduction of dialogue or narrative

text necessitates chronological progression: “JUST AS PICTURES AND THE INTERVALS

BETWEEN THEM CREATE THE ILLUSION OF TIME THROUGH CLOSURE, WORDS

INTRODUCE TIME BY REPRESENTING THAT WHICH CAN ONLY EXIST IN TIME - -

SOUND” (95). But comics’ ability to bend time does not stop there, and the panel itself is

at the center of this genre trait. McCloud continues:

THESE ICONS WE CALL PANELS OR “FRAMES” HAVE NO FIXED OR ABSOLUTE MEANING, LIKE THE ICONS OF LANGUAGE, SCIENCE, AND COMMUNICATION. NOR IS THEIR MEANING AS FLUID AND MALLEABLE AS THE SORTS OF ICONS WE CALL PICTURES. THE PANEL ACTS AS A SORT OF GENERAL INDICATOR THAT TIME AND SPACE IS BEING DIVIDED. THE DURATIONS OF THAT TIME AND THE DIMENSIONS OF THAT SPACE ARE DEFINED MORE BY THE CONTENTS OF THE PANEL THAN BY THE PANEL ITSELF. PANEL SHAPES VARY CONSIDERABLY THOUGH, AND WHILE DIFFERENCES OF SHAPE DON’T AFFECT THE SPECIFIC “MEANINGS” OF THOSE PANELS VIS-A-VIS TIME, THEY CAN AFFECT THE READING EXPERIENCE. WHICH BRINGS US TO THE STRANGE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TIME AS DEPICTED IN COMICS AND TIME AS PERCEIVED BY THE READER. IN LEARNING TO READ COMICS WE ALL LEARNED TO PERCEIVE TIME SPATIALLY, FOR IN THE WORLD OF COMICS, TIME AND SPACE ARE ONE AND THE SAME. (99–100)

The effects of manipulating time and space are compounded in Ware’s Building Stories,

as its comics-based content is spread across a number of discrete objects. Ware extends

the affordance of comics panels to represent time spatially to the breaks between the

novel’s pamphlets, booklets, and strips. A comics reader, in this sense, is perhaps the

ideal hypertextual book reader because of their developed sensibility for spatial and

temporal narrative navigation. In other words, because comics depend already on the

work of the reader to move around the page, navigation between the discrete objects of

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the unbound book comes naturally. Instead of adapting comics to the codex, Ware seems

to have settled on a novel format that matches the structural logic of comics themselves.

In The Unfortunates, narrative chronology is relatively straightforward despite the

text’s material complexity: a narrator progresses the action throughout the course of one

day, with flashbacks in the narrator’s mind to earlier times in his life. The reading

experience of shuffled unbound pamphlets is meant to model the random associative

work of the mind conjuring memories—time travel, in a poetic sense. In Building Stories,

however, the chronology is more complex. There are fewer discrete objects to navigate—

14 to Unfortunates’ 25—but the chronological movement that occurs between and within

objects accelerates outward in all directions at an astonishing rate—an explosion of time.

For example, as with the extreme chronology of the “Paper Dolls” strip that traverses an

entire life in 18 panels, Building Stories compresses or stretches time as it moves from

character to character, object to object, moving backwards and forwards in the lives of

the apartment tenants. The reading experience of Building Stories is extravagantly three-

dimensional, a massive box of objects spilling out into the reader’s own living space. But

with such a material design, the narrative experience becomes profoundly four-

dimensional, with each movement between objects corresponding to an extreme shift in

the progression of time. Through his own form of bookish interactivity, Ware has made

his reader into a time traveler.

One exemplary case of such structural logic can be read in the Building Stories

object titled “September 23, 2000.” The object is a cardboard-covered booklet with a

gold-foiled spine, an obvious homage to the Little Golden Books series of children’s

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books published in the United States since the 1940s (currently by Random House). The

inside cover continues the Golden Book conceit with a yellow-tinged floral motif and a

few friendly looking animals, but an open book at the center of the illustration appears

blank (Fig. 2.6). By invoking a popular children’s book series, the story seems to prepare

its reader for the fantastical elements contained within, like the anthropomorphized

apartment building that thinks, feels, and narrates, as well as the suspension of

conventional reading navigation with highly illustrated pages and overlaid text.

Undoubtedly, a Golden Book booklet filled with the adult content of a graphic novel is a

cheeky subversion of the comics-as-kid-stuff cliché. The content of the booklet is a literal

Figure 2.6: opening page of the Little Golden Book object in Building Stories.

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fulfillment of the title’s promise. One page is dedicated to each hour of the 24-hour day

of September 23, 2000, from 12 a.m. to 11 p.m. the following night. Each page moves

between units in the building, in and out of tenants’ lives. Some of the one-page strips

represent just a few moments in time, while others seem to stretch out the action of the

entire hour. The “1 a.m.” strip does both with the assistance of a prominently placed

digital clock next to a young woman in bed, apparently having trouble sleeping and

thinking about her troubled relationship. In eight panels, the action progresses from 1:01

to 1:02 a.m.; the clock in the final ninth panel reads 1:48, and the woman lies awake in

the same position with the same troubles on her mind. In this way, the temporal

progression of “September 23rd, 2000” mostly carries on in the way typical of comics, as

outlined by McCloud. The noteworthy aspect of this sequence in Building Stories is the

highly contrived and structured segmentation of time that incorporates the material

structure of the booklet itself—one hour per page, with panel layouts varying depending

on action. The bound codex format in this way is essential to the chronological

progression of this passage’s narrative structure, representing a fusion of comics

conventions and book technology.

However, this straightforward segmentation of time is contrasted by the three

pages that precede the start of the day. In these pages, the apartment building itself

becomes a four-dimensional narrative vehicle. In the first of these three illustrations,

traditional comics panels are abandoned for an exterior view of the building, and thought

bubbles originate from the building as it sizes up a potential new tenant: “I’VE NEVER

SEEN HER BEFORE thought the building, squarely studying the girl across the

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street who, newspaper in hand, had stopped to stare WHAT IS SHE

LOOKING AT, ANYWAY?” (3). The narration continues in this fashion, with text beginning

in the upper left corner, continuing down the right side of the page, and curling back

under the illustration to the lower left corner: a natural start to the reading experience—

upper left—and an easy-to-follow progression down the page. In the following two

pages, the building opens up visually, and the reading navigation becomes increasingly

more complex. In the second illustration, the narration extends around and through the

building, with helpful lines and arrows to guide the reader from bit to bit (Fig. 2.7).

“Punch-outs,” as a visual-narratorial device, allow the reader to see through the solid wall

of the building’s exterior, into the rooms of a few tenants. The winding text of narration

offers expository history, a classified ad clipping, “this 23-word appeal, composed more

Figure 2.7: illustration featuring apartment building “punch-outs” and narrative description.

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than a half-century ago and preserved unaltered (minus minor monetary updates)

on a limp, well-thumbed index card ” (4).

Though page navigation is more complex in the second illustration, it remains

linear, despite how convoluted that line may be. Up and down, in and out, the reader

follows the lines and arrows and becomes more comfortable with the spatial

idiosyncrasies of the text. In the third illustration, guided navigation is abandoned, and

the reader must take control of their passage through the house. The apartment building is

opened up completely now, exterior walls removed to reveal a three-dimensional cross

section of the rooms. The narration begins, “So, with all 3 of its floors once again

occupied, and though recently ready to resign itself to being a 98-year-old has-been

whose days were numbered— and who, incidentally, had already tallied” (5). The

sentence breaks midway, leading the reader’s eye into a cross section of apartments, in

which each unit contains numbered items and occurrences. A sample:

28 grease fires 39 guns 15,117 books 487 nicknames

21,779 toenail clippings 98 winters 4 criminals 6,577 flowers

469 feelings of “being watched” 23 broken bones

11,627 lost childhood memories

17 changed locks 425 begged forgiveness 3,312 dreams of dismemberment

(5)

Without the assistance of directions, or without any hint of how one might proceed,

readers are left to “wander” the building on their own, putting together the history of the

house one room at a time. And time, indeed, is the central illusion of Ware’s illustration.

With the overlay of the tallied occurrences, readers are seeing the building’s entire

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history at once. In this design, Ware has manipulated comics’ ability to link time and

space to the extent that the reading experience is now a four-dimensional exercise.

As a literary work of heightened material interactivity, similar in material

structure to The Unfortunates, Building Stories invites readers to find their own way

through the story architecture that Ware has built. Also similar to The Unfortunates,

which activates textual and material gaps—between words and passages on the page, as

well as between whole pamphlets of the unbound book—in order to create space for

physical and cognitive reader interactivity, Building Stories uses a similar strategy with

the generic conventions of comics. Such a strategy relies on the principles of “closure,”

panel composition, and the fusion of space and time to create a highly engaged reading

experience that depends on readers to “build” the story as it is read. Moving among

objects in Building Stories is a more challenging iteration of bookish interactivity because

the material format, subject, and composition of each object is different. Though there is

no wrong path through the materials, and no gameplay objective to fulfill, each jump to a

new piece of the story requires the reader to reestablish a reading strategy. Disorientation

is the immediate effect, but “finding your way” becomes one of the novel’s dominant

themes.

To conclude, I will focus on the transition between two disparate objects of

Building Stories: an 18 x 13-inch double-sided poster sheet and a folio-sized hardbound

book. As in the exemplary passage of the Little Golden Book, Ware’s novel continually

shifts between linear progression and four-dimensional navigation. The poster, for

example, literalizes the cognitive time travel associated with memory construction and

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retrieval. Featuring the married woman’s head in the center of the sheet—eyes closed,

introspectively—the layout is scattered with fragments of memory from the woman’s life,

made up of her emotional associations with managing physical appearance and body

image. One of the fragments is linked to another, through lines and arrows that connect

via the illustration of the woman’s head, but the rest are scattered and unconnected,

spanning decades of the woman’s life, from childhood, to college, to marriage and

motherhood (Fig. 2.8). The reverse side of the poster features a similar conceit, though

the composition of fragments lends itself better to a general top-down navigation (Fig.

2.9). Nevertheless, the married woman character displays similar associative memories,

this time of a high school boyfriend who recently contacted her on Facebook after many

years. Like a Proustian madeleine of the internet era, the Facebook contact results in an

outpouring of memories, including the dramatic retrieval of a suppressed moment in

which the woman had broken off their relationship on prom night. The tension between

past and present, between reality and mediation, is powerfully illustrated through the

woman’s struggle to reconcile her Facebook interaction with the memory-sense of the

man:

THE WEIRDEST THING, THOUGH, WAS THAT NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRIED, HE LOOKED EXACTLY THE SAME TO ME AS HE ALWAYS HAD... IN OTHER WORDS, I COULDN’T LOOK AT ANY PICTURE OF HIM AND NOT SEE A SEVENTEEN-YEAR OLD... IT WAS LIKE THERE WAS SOME KIND OF SCRIM IN MY MIND THAT DROPPED DOWN IN FRONT OF MY EYES AND PREVENTED ME FROM SEEING THINGS AS THEY REALLY WERE...

Accordingly, the graphic depiction of the man is a hazy, pixelated shadow. The reader is

therefore taken along with the woman’s associative remembrances in this passage, not

only through narrative content but also through Ware’s compositional design.

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Figure 2.8 (above) and Figure 2.9 (below): front and back of poster in Building Stories.

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In picking up the folio book, the reader’s sensory experience of the novel changes. Out of

all the objects of Building Stories, the folio book is the sturdiest, the most distinguished

in its appearance of khaki-clothed binding and pale green cover, the most recognizable as

an adult book of high quality. The lack of a dust jacket or imprinted words on the spine or

cover conceals its contents. It smells reassuringly of acid-free paper and fresh cardboard

(Fig. 2.10). Of course, the materiality of the folio book belies its contents (Fig. 2.11).

The first page—glued to the inside cover—and second page contain a double-page spread

of diagrammatic illustration on black paper. Holding the book in conventional orientation

quickly proves inadequate for reading. A clockwise rotation allows the central graphic to

Figure 2.10: the folio-sized, bound book pulled from the Building Stories box.

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be read: “I JUST WANT TO FALL ASLEEP AND NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN.” Lines and text

appear to flow in and out of the central, circular graphic, spiraling outward, and the best

reading method seems to be continuing the slow clockwise rotation until returning to

standard orientation. The entire illustration portrays the woman/artist protagonist of the

novel restless in bed, her mind a clutter of anxiety and depression, thinking about the

status of her life and contemplating suicide. The ironic whimsy of Ware’s diagrammatic

illustration—including a graphic resembling a compass rose with the overlaid text “MY

LIFE | COULD GO | COULD GO | COULD GO | every direction possible”—reinforces a sense

Figure 2.11: diagram illustration on the inside cover of the folio book.

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of absurd futility in regard to navigating one’s own life. The expectations of orderly,

linear progress are foiled by chaotic content. Just as there is no wrong way to forge a path

through the material, no ideal exists either, and no decision will receive validation.

Ware’s novel communicates these thematic concerns by introducing choice and

uncertainty to the reading experience. As in The Unfortunates, fragmentation and

memory, as well as the space between cognitive association and lived experience,

become the impetus for an experimental book form. In this chapter, I have discussed two

authors who remarkably settled on the same unconventional format for achieving their

literary and artistic goals. Despite their significant distance apart in both history and

literary genre, Johnson and Ware use the unbound codex—the book in a box—to

reconcile the problem of representing nonlinear stories in a medium that is constructed

through linear composition. This unconventional format results in equally unconventional

reading experiences. Such reading experiences, predicated on a reformed material

relationship with the book object, incorporate a kind of bookish interactivity into each

novel’s narrative structure. The material organization that was previously built into the

binding of the book is taken over by the engagement of readers bodies and the space of

their environments. In bookish interactivity, the negotiation of medium becomes an

integral part of narrative construction, and as such, this unusual mode signals the

importance of considering the role of media and material design in contemporary fiction.

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Chapter Three:

Book Fiction in the Age of Remix

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does. —William Blake

I jump ‘em from other writers, but I arrange ‘em my own way.

—Blind Willie McTell

Virality*—cultural, digital, biological—refers to the propensity of information to

self-replicate and spread. This information could be anything from genetic code to an

internet meme. “Going viral” in the colloquial sense describes content spreading on the

internet at a rapid, exponential rate—a funny tweet going around, for instance, or a video

posted to Facebook that is shared millions of times. This kind of virality signals the

cultural uptake and quick saturation of content within its media environment. Modern

social media platforms are designed for virality. TikTok, for example, features short

*In 2021, virality has come to shape every aspect of daily life. Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted social and professional practices and upended global economies. As of March 1, more than 100 million people have fallen ill from the novel coronavirus, and 2.5 million have died (WHO). At the same time, a different kind of virality has infected the cultural and political institutions of the United States. Fueled by conspiracy theories and political memes shared on social media and internet message boards, extremist groups have rallied around lies about the 2020 presidential election and members of the Democratic Party. The delusional chatter of internet posters subsequently manifested in the real world in significant, shocking ways: in November 2020, two promoters of the “QAnon” conspiracy theory were elected to Congress; on January 6, 2021, a mob of Donald Trump supporters overran the U.S. Capitol, destroying property and killing five people. Furthermore, in February 2021, the new phenomenon of “meme stocks” sent markets into turmoil, as a mass of internet message board users rallied around the struggling stock of the GameStop retail chain, skyrocketing share prices and costing hedge funds betting against the stock billions of dollars in losses. This chapter acknowledges the severity of these occurrences, many tragic, while exploring the ideological formations of which they seem to be culturally symptomatic. Virality seems to be an increasingly fundamental force in contemporary life.

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videos which are created and publicly shared; they are frequently synchronized to music

and often show some act of ironic absurdity or new dance move. Of the more wholesome

examples: the “Yee Yee Juice” challenge, in which users synchronize their own (or

perhaps their cat’s) transformation to country-western aesthetics to the tune of Lil Nas

X’s pop mega-hit “Old Town Road.” According to Rolling Stone, the original concept

video was uploaded by user @nicemichael—real name Michael Pelchat—in February

2019; a few months later, millions of TikToks had riffed on the set-up (Leight). At the

time of Pelchat’s original post, “Old Town Road” was an unknown track by an unknown

independent artist. Less than a year later, “Old Town Road” would hold the all-time

record for most consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Lil Nas X was

the most nominated male artist at the 2020 Grammy Awards. The song’s rise to pop

immortality through internet virality was no accident. Lil Nas X told Time, “I promoted

the song as a meme for months until it caught on to TikTok and it became way bigger”

(Chow).

The contemporary use of “meme” is often attributed to Richard Dawkins’s 1976

The Selfish Gene,† in which Dawkins discusses the similarities between biological and

cultural transmission through imitation and replication. In the book, Dawkins describes

his search for a word that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission,” settling on

a monosyllabic derivation of the Greek word for “imitation.” As Dawkins explains, the

† Dawkins’s idea is not without precedent, of course. In the 1962 novel The Ticket that Exploded, William S. Burroughs describes language as a virus and demonstrates his cut-up composition technique.

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concept of a meme is useful in comparing the self-replication of ideas to genetic

processes of reproduction:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process, which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. [ . . . ] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. (249–50)

More than forty years later, that concept has transformed in the internet age to refer

generally to any content that communicates through a copied structure of visual, textual,

or auditory representation. In most cases, meme structure involves an image with

superimposed text, in all-caps IMPACT TYPEFACE. The text in these “image macro” memes

provides a specific application of the meme’s general premise. Well-known examples of

image macro memes include “Success Kid,” an image of a toddler making a fist and

having an expression that could be interpreted as triumph. Superimposed text might

include, “Didn’t study. Aced the test anyway.” Today’s memes also include the video-

and-music variety, as seen on TikTok. They are more complex than their macro

counterparts but similar in spirit and strategy. But what accounts for the popularity of the

meme format? Certainly, their virality is in large part due to the combined assets of

simplicity and speed. Like a virus, an effective meme deploys its message as Dawkins

describes: the meme transmits content in an instant, and the receiver often becomes a new

host and transmitter, creating his/her own version of the meme and passing it along.

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While memes tell us a lot about how people use the internet today, they also tell

us a lot about how people think about creativity and expression. Importantly, memes

spread by sharing the same content but with a slight twist. According to Paul D. Miller,

aka “DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid,” this idea is all about “the remix—it’s a sampling

machine where any sound can be you, and all text is only a tenuous claim to the idea of

individual creativity. It’s a plagiarist’s club for the famished souls of a geography of

now-here” (5). Miller is focused on music, specifically the traditions of sampling and

remix in hip-hop culture.‡ (It is worth noting that soon after “Old Town Road” hit on the

charts, Lil Nas X remixed his own song, in a new version featuring country icon Billy

Ray Cyrus.) Miller considers sampling as symptomatic of new widespread cultural norms

concerning original expression and creativity, to the extent that it can be difficult to

distinguish between original and copy: “We live in an era where quotation and sampling

operate on such a deep level that the archaeology of what can be called ‘knowledge’

floats in a murky realm between the real and unreal” (10–11).

While my first chapter focuses on the relationship between twentieth-century

academic book production and the development of related motifs in contemporary fiction

‡ “Sampling” involves taking a segment of music—usually a memorable melodic phrase—from an existing song and then looping it (continuously repeating without break) to create a musical foundation for a new song or rap. Examples include: “C.R.E.A.M” by Wu-Tang Clan, which samples the 1967 single “As Long as I’ve Got You” by The Charmels; Kanye West’s “Touch The Sky” (2006) which features a Lupe Fiasco-produced sample of Curtis Mayfield’s 1971 “Move On Up.” “Remix” is a more general category that refers to creating new music through rearrangements of existing music, from individual songs to entire albums. Examples include Danger Mouse’s 2004 underground Grey Album, a mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ self-titled ninth album, usually referred to as “The White Album.”

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(such as “editorial aesthetic”), and the second chapter focuses on the affinities between

bookish interactivity and digital narrative structure (such as hypertext), this chapter

attempts to align the production of contemporary book fiction§ with current attitudes on

creative copying, originality, and writing as informed by digital culture. Put plainly,

contemporary scholarship cannot adequately contextualize books or literature in a digital

age without also grappling with the meme or remix as fundamental cultural components

of this time. Contemporary art, in virtually all media, appears to have reached a

consensus that remixed or altered content is new content, and that the copying process

represents a viable form of artistic expression, whether that expression is the resulting

remixed text or the remixing process itself. Perhaps in accordance with the rise of book

history as a popular critical field, recent experiments in literary design and book

production are often connected to their origins in print culture and set against the current

digital environment. This approach is appropriate for many kinds of bookish works, and I

follow this approach myself in other chapters of this dissertation. However, as

exemplified in the books discussed in this chapter, recent works that emulate remix in

both production and material design of their texts should be addressed within the scope of

digital practices. As I will argue, the book in the twenty-first century has itself been

swept up in a meme-like media environment of signification, as conceptual form and a

material vehicle of meaning, produced through the imitation and manipulation of existing

§ “Book fiction” in this context borrows Alexander Starre’s usage in Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization to describe a book that “interweaves text, design, and paper into an embodied work of art [ . . . ] [m]ore than just a container of a story, the physical codex here comes to function as a narrative device in and of itself” (6).

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forms. Books have become copy machines. While the function of remix blurs the line

between original and copy, between real and unreal, the figure of “the book” also serves

as a necessary stable identifier from which remixed literature takes shape. We can think

of remix book fictions—the primary texts of this chapter—as memes in the way that they

are a simulation of an existing form, a material re-instantiation of a culturally pervasive

medium. Each book calls upon book forms of the past for interpretive coherency while

adding their own modification to create specificity of context and meaning—copy, mix,

repeat.**

Contemporary criticism has increasingly discussed creative copying and

remixing, as both continuing trends of literary experimentation and emergent trends of

the internet age. One of the foundational attempts at understanding remix in the twenty-

first century is Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the

Hybrid Economy, published in 2008. Lessig, a copyright lawyer and activist, is primarily

concerned with intellectual property issues, but his book offers several useful conceptual

premises for contextualizing remix within digital culture. One useful concept is the

distinction between “RW” and “RO” cultures: “Read/Write” and “Read/Only.”†† RW

** T. S. Eliot makes a similar and well-known case for literary history in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. [ . . . ] The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (37). I argue that the same phenomenon occurs with new, experimental iterations of the book, as well as media in general. †† As Lessig points out, his analogy comes from permission settings for digital files (28n).

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culture represents a paradigm in which cultural consumption is complemented by the

creation of more cultural content by individuals. RW culture therefore signifies a kind of

distributed participation and feedback loop of cultural production. RO culture, on the

other hand, closes the loop and turns potential creators into simple consumers (28–31).

Lessig illustrates how the tensions between these two cultures are playing out in the

American legal system, and his analysis depends upon the dual recognition that, first,

digital technology has dramatically augmented people’s ability to copy and share content,

and that, second, remix is at the heart of RW culture in the digital age. In a memorable

example, Lessig discusses the solo music act Girl Talk, popular during the mid-aughts.

Girl Talk created entire albums of tracks made solely through samples, loops, and

mashups of existing pop songs. Lessig argues that Girl Talk’s remixes count as new

content, mirroring a process similar to academic writing, for example, which often

samples from a variety of sources but produces something new through the material’s

reconfiguration among other sources and recontextualization within the writer’s argument

(11–13, 69–70).

Following Lessig’s use of the term, remix can be thought of as both a materially

creative act as well as a metaphor for digital culture. The proliferation of viral content on

the internet, coupled with an increased ability of people to copy, mix, and share their own

versions of content, connotes a widespread RW culture in which participation is defined

through reproduction. The limits of this paradigm have been repeatedly tested in recent

years. Miller’s edited collection Sound Unbound, for example, features the republication

(but of course) of Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” originally

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published in Harper’s in 2007. In the essay, Lethem writes about cultures of creative

appropriation in a variety of examples: Nabokov’s ostensible cribbing of Lolita from a

1916 novel of the same name with the same plot by Heinz von Lichberg; Eliot’s liberal

use of allusion in The Waste Land; the large portion of the Disney animated catalogue

based on existing fairy tales; a Muddy Waters anecdote that recounts the “writing” and

recording of a song that, apparently, already existed. Lethem’s own essay pilfers freely

from a great number of sources and comes with an appendix “key” of sources for “every

line [he] warped, and cobbled together as [he] ‘wrote’” (44). In the traditional sense,

Lethem’s own essay is all recycled content, a seamless synthesis of source material.

According to Lethem:

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let’s go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. (43)

As in the rest of the essay, Lethem is exemplifying his argument. The above passage, as

the reader discovers in the key, is ripped from Roland Barthes (“Any text is woven . . . ”)

and also a letter written by Mark Twain to Helen Keller (“The kernel . . . ”) in regards to

accusations against Keller of plagiarism. Lethem also admits to finding the Twain quote

in a book by Siva Vaidhyanathan, not from Twain directly. Lethem’s essay is a polemic,

but the ironic poignancy of the argument is that it is hardly an original one.

Originality has long been a popular subject of discssion in both creative and

critical circles. Harold Bloom’s 1973 Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

acknowledges the historical emphasis placed on originality, and then identifies six

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“revisionary ratios” through which certain “strong” poets are able to produce original

work despite the dominating influence of preceding major poetic figures. So, in this

“revisionary” sense, Bloom’s formulation of originality still depends on a response to or

reconfiguration of existing work. While Bloom’s work is representative of historical

perspectives on originality, his discussion generally concerns copying and revision at the

level of ideas, forms, motifs, and other creative abstractions. In the digital age, attitudes

have evolved to question the potential originality of copied content, as exemplified by

Lethem’s essay. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) by David Shields, plagiarism is

tested directly. Shields’s book is structured through 618 numbered fragments, grouped

into 26 subsections—one for each letter of the alphabet. Like “Ecstasy of Influence,”

Reality Hunger comes with an appendix of citations for more than half of the 618

fragments that were clipped from other writers. Prefacing this appendix, Shields insists

that the citations were forced upon him by “Random House lawyers,” and he suggests

that readers “simply grab a sharp pair of scissors or razor blade or box cutter and remove

pages 210–218 by cutting along the dotted line” (209). In my library edition, there are in

fact dotted lines near the binding of these pages, though no one has been brave enough to

follow through on the author’s behest.

In Reality Hunger, Shields queries contemporary expressive forms and their

proximity to reality, truth, and human knowledge. But what constitutes reality? In his

review of Reality Hunger, critic Luc Sante writes:

[Reality] can be as simple as a glitch, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters, and reapportions cultural commodities according to

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need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be such a thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. The paradoxes pile up as thick as the debris of history—unsurprisingly, since that debris is our reality. (n.p.)

Sante also looks to the conventions of hip-hop for precedent on aligning reality and

originality with imitation and alteration. Shields’s “manifesto” is not about music,

however, but an argument for the essay as the expressive form of the future, criticizing

most contemporary novels as mere execution of conventionality. Reality Hunger, in other

words, is about writing in and of itself. Yet, the intersections with digital and multimedia

are frequent and unignorable. Shields himself devotes a subsection to hip-hop, which

begins with a trio of famous quotes often attributed—sometimes inaccurately—to non-

rappers Emerson, Eliot, and Picasso‡‡ (87) and continues with both clipped and “original”

commentary on sampling, DJ culture, and pop music, as well as hip-hop’s intersection

with similar modes of copying in art and literature, such as Picasso’s use of newsprint or

Ezra Pound’s “creative translations” (97). Ultimately, Shields makes the case that

copying is a venerable tradition in artmaking of all kinds.

The tradition of copying that Shields identifies connects to the digital age through

the rise of meme culture. Marcus Boon attributes this connection to imitation being a

fundamental part of the human experience. According to Boon, “we are always in some

kind of mimetic framework [ . . . ] [and] copying is pervasive in contemporary culture”

(3–4). Accordingly, Boon sees “the power of mimesis” as essential to knowledge creation

‡‡ “Genius borrows nobly,” “Good poets borrow; great poets steal,” “Art is theft,” respectively.

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and transmission, including in the social sciences “with their attendant popularization in

the form of ‘memes’ and ‘tipping points,’ [explaining] the dynamism of human

communities in terms of imitation” (9). Boon also acknowledges, “[h]ip-hop is an

extraordinary vital example of how to make a culture from copying—how to respond to

the industrial world with its particular discourses of copying, along with its vast colonial

legacies of enslavement and mimetic appropriations of bodies, cultures, and

environments” (69). For Boon, such recent developments in Western art and culture

indicate a sea change in the way imitation is regarded and deployed, and that these new

(positive) attitudes are currently at odds with existing institutional structures, as reflected

in current copyright laws and plagiarism policies, and as described in Lessig’s book.

Boon’s commentary is important because it recognizes how copying is

fundamental to meaning-making as well as how remix is often infused with a politics of

subversion. In regard to meaning-making, Martin Irvine traces a paradigm of remix

through Bakhtin’s formulation of dialogism and hybridity in speech. According to

Bakhtin, speech does not reference the dictionary definition of words, but rather speech is

always an invocation of prior use and other contexts: “Each utterance is filled with

echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of

the sphere of speech communication. [ . . . ] Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements,

and relies on the other, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into

account” (91; also qtd. in Irvine 21). In Irvine’s application, this dialogic principle is

what connects remix to the nature of meaning-making through language (21–22). Remix

mirrors the dialogic process through its explicit references, reuses, and reconfigurations

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of existing media in order to produce new meaning. In addressing remix as political

discourse, Eduardo Navas highlights the historical connections between sampling and

popular music starting in the 1970s. In simple terms, music as an existing political

medium found a complementary logic in the structure of remix; importantly, new

recording technologies made such practices accessible. Music genres rooted in political

resistance and cultural critique—most notably hip-hop, in an American context—

incorporated remix into their own methods of re-appropriative signification (4–6).

Importantly, remix broadly defined does not necessarily maintain a politics of its own,

but rather the methods of remix signification are often incorporated into existing political

frameworks. As Navas argues:

Remix is not an actual movement, but a binder—a cultural glue. Based on this proposition [ . . . ] Remix is more like a virus that has mutated into different forms according to the needs of particular cultures. Remix, itself, has no form, but is quick to take on any shape and medium. It needs cultural value to be at play; in this sense Remix is parasitical. Remix is meta—always unoriginal. At the same time, when implemented effectively, it can become a tool of autonomy. (4)

My discussion of bookish remix in this chapter proceeds under Navas’s premise that

remix is a glue of digital culture, binding together the production and proliferation of

content in all media and to various political ends. This premise works well in its

application to remix books because, while remix books often simulate a misuse or

satirization of book material technologies, they are often produced through the sanctioned

and rather conventional use of digital technologies.

In the production of books, poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith has made a career

out of copying. Also a conceptual artist and teacher, Goldsmith outlines his own

manifesto on originality in the digital age in 2011’s Unoriginal Writing. Though not a

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performance of plagiarism like Lethem’s essay, Goldsmith foregrounds his own thoughts

by citing Lethem as both lesson and object of study in the new mode of “unoriginal

genius” (2–3). The term itself comes from critic Marjorie Perloff in the attempt to update

the concept of genius for our hyperconnected internet age. Goldsmith summarizes:

“Perloff has coined a term, moving information, to signify both the act of pushing

language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She

posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly

conceptualizing constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine” (1–2).

Goldsmith’s own works serve as useful provocations in pushing these imitative

impulses to the extreme: The Weather (2005), “written” with a year of transcribed

weather reports; Day (2003), a single issue of The New York Times reproduced in its

entirety; Traffic (2007), which, as one might guess, is made entirely of traffic reports.

Goldsmith’s projects are procedures as much as they are literary texts. In other words, an

essential component of his work is demonstrating a “writing machine” in action. Often

deflecting charges of nihilism and the abandonment of literary quality, Goldsmith affirms

that quality still counts, but evaluation criteria must change with the times: “While all

words may be created equal—and thus treated—the way in which they’re assembled isn’t

[ . . . ] Mimesis and replication doesn’t [sic] eradicate authorship, rather they simply

place new demands on authors who must take these new conditions into account as part

and parcel of the landscape when conceiving of a work of art” (11). Ultimately,

Goldsmith looks ahead and postulates:

Careers and canons won’t be established in traditional ways. I’m not so sure that we’ll still have careers in the same way we used to. Literary works might function

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the same that memes do today on the Web, spreading like wildfire for a short period, often unsigned and unauthored, only to be supplanted by the next ripple. While the author won’t die, we might begin to view authorship in a more conceptual way: authors of the future will be the ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse, and distribute language-based practices. (11)

In Goldsmith’s estimation, the arrival of computer culture and the internet accounts for

this shift from “traditional ways.” And while the exact kind of virality that fuels internet

memes have not yet made their way into mainstream literature and publishing, in many

other ways Goldsmith’s future is here and now. As this chapter will demonstrate, recent

experiments in literary book production have taken up practices from the related creative

forms of remix and meme culture.

In this contemporary memeification of books, a confluence of technology and

culture has led to the production of literature that can be more accurately described as

literary projects—book fiction that draws attention to the process of its construction

through its material form. An author’s development of the process of construction is often

implied to be the primary or complementary literary achievement (the “writing

machine”), rather than the resulting text itself, creating a complex interpretive situation in

which readers must constantly balance this evident process of construction against the

resulting work’s approximation of an identifiably novel literary work. I use the word

“approximation” here because the works discussed in this chapter are, in fact, wholly

unoriginal. Not merely derivative, these works are composed entirely of sourced material.

As with the arguments put forth by Lethem, Perloff, and Goldsmith, however,

unoriginality in this context is not a disparagement of quality or value. On the contrary,

these works have been received with critical and scholarly acclaim—another sign of the

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times. As representative contemporary projects of literary sampling and remixing, these

works signify an affinity for replications of recognizable forms, and they signal a new

identity for the book in the digital age. At times poetic and at times novelistic, these

generically ambiguous projects remain unambiguously books. Their material form

grounds their identity and reception.

Remixed literature has become increasingly common, from the twentieth century

into the present, even if we have not previously thought of such books as remix projects.

“Altered books”—or “transformed books” as Johanna Drucker describes them—have

long been a staple of the artist’s book tradition. As Drucker explains in The Century of

Artists’ Books:

A book may be transformed from an appropriated or found original through physical or conceptual means—or parts of a work can be cut out and used to make a new work. The book as a form is already a received idea, loaded with cultural and historical values and resonances. But it is a form which permits intervention and innovation. The convention of the book is both its constrained meanings (as literacy, the law, text, and so forth) and the space of new work (the blank page, the void, the empty place). But working on an existing book is not quite the same as either of these—it is not a replication of a conventional form and it is not a completely new statement with the existing vocabulary of forms. The transformed book is an intervention. It generally includes acts of insertion or defacement, obliteration or erasure on the surface of a page which is already articulated or spoken for. (108–9)

Drucker here is writing in 1995, but her prescient observation that the book “as a form is

already a received idea, loaded with cultural and historical values and resonances” takes

on additional significance in the increasingly digital twenty-first century. In the way

samples can be turned into a new song, or in the way a meme incorporates reconfigured

content into its original scheme, the book in the digital age often serves as a mechanism

of assimilation, permitting “intervention and innovation” but ultimately subsuming such

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experimentation into its historical material identity. In other words, “the book” can be the

conceptual form and material container through which weird work becomes literature.

Often sculptural or graphic, historical examples of the “transformed book” range

from the extreme processing evident in Dieter Roth’s Literaturwurst (“literature

sausage”) series from the 1960s and early-‘70s that used existing books and magazines as

raw material for sausage production, to Tom Phillips’s long-running project A

Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, which features Phillips’s drawn, painted, and cut-

up alterations of a found nineteenth-century book. Unlike many transformed books that

are discrete artistic objects and traditionally presented in library special collections or art

galleries, A Humument has been widely published in a series of facsimile books that

spans six editions over five decades. Amateur efforts at altered books have subsequently

become a cliché of the arts-and-crafts Etsy scene online.

Distinguishing between transformed books and remix book fictions often relies on

a spectrum of readability. Whereas works such as Literaturwurst are virtually unreadable

in any conventional textual sense, and works such as A Humument are more dominantly

graphic productions based on the material alteration of the source text, remix book

fictions take similar means to reach more recognizably narrative or poetic ends—it is

often a matter of degree. There is also the aspect of material production to consider when

distinguishing remix book fictions: transformed books in the artist’s book tradition

typically retain a physical remnant of the original book in its new production, whereas

remix book fictions seem to generate meaning through the excision of content from one

material context and its remixed reproduction in another material context. Author-artist

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Graham Rawle, for instance, in Woman’s World: A Novel (2005) takes content (letters,

words, sentences, pictures) from women’s magazines to create a complete cut-up novel.

Woman’s World is presented in facsimile of Rawle’s originally produced cut-and-pasted

book. The published novel—like many books working in this mode—includes a note on

the process of its own construction:

I started writing this book in the usual way. When I had completed a rough draft, I then searched through hundreds of women’s magazines, cutting out anything that seemed relevant to the scenes I’d written [ . . . ] These cuttings were then filed and from them I began to reassemble my story. Little by little, my original words were discarded and replaced by those I’d found. Once the transition was complete, I could start pasting up the pages as artwork.

The method was primitive: scissors and glue. Apart from a little tweaking here and there to enlarge very small type to a readable size, everything was done by hand. The artwork alone took two years.

Working from the library of collected material meant surrendering my writing to the element of chance and forced me to be inventive with the words that were available. The language of women’s magazines from that time is distinctive and although I have taken their words out of context to tell an entirely new story, the voice of the original 1960s woman’s world remains. (439)

Rawle’s method therefore represents a liminal case. While his cutups preserve the

material original, the entire project is less a transformation of a single source text, as in

the artist’s book tradition, and more characteristic of the sampling method in the culture

of remix. Through this method, Rawle demonstrates the remarkably expressive potency

of creative copying, “to be inventive with the words that were available.” Rawle’s

reconfiguration of existing content from numerous sources also demonstrates the

expressive potency of contextual change, in which old words in a new time and place

merit new readings and create new meaning.

While Rawle’s novel is an extreme example of literary sampling, other related

techniques for literary remix have flourished in contemporary practice. Ronald Johnson’s

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Radi os, originally published in 1977, is an erasure of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The

current published version (2005 Flood Editions) maintains the word and line spacing

caused by the excised content without any representation of the original physical book

that Johnson used in creating his erasure. It is a curious design choice because the pages

for the 1977 edition were created in facsimile from a nineteenth-century anthology of

Milton (107). The change from facsimile to typeset, however, shifts the focus from

material intervention to literary production—in other words, from a transformed artist’s

book to a remix book. Such a change, I would argue, relies on a new affordance of remix

literature in a digital age, which presumes an equivalency of content across media forms.

One premise of digitization is that information can be extracted from its material

constraint and broken down into processible bits. This presumption is fundamental to the

development of number systems, symbolic language, and moveable type—as I will

illustrate later—but contemporary readers are comfortable with this concept through their

experience with computers. This approach to content is important for distinguishing

remix book fiction from historical predecessors such as the transformed artist’s book and

erasure literature.

Divya Victor’s Things to Do With Your Mouth (2014) is another recent example

that mixes sampling with erasure. To create her poetic exploration and indictment of the

historical suppression of women’s voices, Victor appropriates text from myriad sources,

including religious and philosophical texts, legal documents, medical instructions, and

questionnaire forms. In the foreword, Vincent Dachy suggests Victor is a “gatherer” and

“hunter” (vii). This hunt-gather process of recontextualization is the primary mode of

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meaning-making in Things to Do With Your Mouth, recognizable by readers in the

seemingly innocuous fill-in-the-blank prompts that might populate a xeroxed sheet of

paper in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. In a third example, R E D (2018) by Chase

Berggrun comprises erasures of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (as the title is formatted on a leaf

that precedes the title page). Following the convention of remix books, a “Note on

Process” precedes the content of R E D:

R E D consists of twenty-seven erasure poems. They were produced using a system of formal constraints: text was erased while preserving the word order of the original source, with no words altered or added, according to a strict set of self-imposed rules. The poems use as a source the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. As the text of Dracula, a classic Victorian-era horror novel soaked with a disdain of femininity and the misogyny of its time, is erased, a new story is told, in which its narrator takes back the agency stolen from her predecessors. This work was written at the same time its author had begun their own gender transition. As they were discovering and attempting to define their own womanhood, the narrator of these poems traveled alongside them. (1)

While Berggrun’s note brings a personal, gendered awareness to the themes of

transformation in the erasure project, the commentary is equally important in linking the

process of transformation itself to narrative. R E D is typical of remix book fiction in the

way it explicitly foregrounds its transformation of a source text for the reader. Sequence

and change are fundamental aspects of any narrative, yet the remix book incorporates

change-as-narrative into the metanarrative, material production of the text. Unlike remix

in other media, book fiction remix often depends on this kind of explicit

acknowledgement of source and change, as evidenced in the notes, comments, or

prefaces about an author’s creative process that frequently appear as paratext. As with

Goldsmith’s formulation, the writing machine is equally important to the final product.

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The significance of remix book fiction in contemporary practice comes with

recognizing the critical goals to which the method is applied. For the authors and works

examined in this chapter, the form of remix accompanies political gestures that hold

fundamental thematic relevance to the stories being told. In the first case, remix works as

cultural reclamation. Published in 2010 by Visual Editions, Jonathan Safran’s Foer’s Tree

of Codes stunned the publishing world with a design that ostensibly represents erasures in

situ with die-cut pages—a book full of holes. Foer expands on his previously explored

subjects of loss and the Holocaust through a “sculptural remix” of his favorite book—the

short-story collection Street of Crocodiles (1934) by Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz,

who was murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942. During the Holocaust, several of

Schulz’s literary works were also lost. In the second case, remix serves as postcolonial

critique. Injun by indigenous poet Jordan Abel is a collection of poetry and a satire of

book form. Injun frames its content through its digital method of sampling and remix:

Abel created his poetry through a “source text” of 91 public domain western novels—

total length approximately 10,000 pages—using the basic CTL+F keyboard function to

find occurrences of the slur “injun.” From those found occurrences, Abel shaped his

results into the critique of portrayals of Indigenous identity that forms the book.

In remix literature, the process of production joins the book’s final material form

in constituting the literary content of the work. For such twenty-first-century productions,

their methods of textual sampling mirror the creative copying of new media, as shaped by

digital technology and culture. This symbiosis of print/digital media in remix books

marks a reformed identity of the book medium in the digital age, with the capacity to

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participate in new approaches towards information processing and to maintain old

attitudes in the artistic licensing of existing content. Ultimately, reconciling such new

literature with key aspects of digital culture is an essential step in charting a

contemporary history of the book. This innovative form connects the book to its printed

past while projecting itself into a digital future.

Sculptural Remix: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes

Since its publication in 2010, Foer’s Tree of Codes has been a critical and popular

marvel. Its physical form is something of a bibliographic showstopper: the book appears

to be an ordinary paperback on the outside, but a quick flip-through reveals more than a

hundred pages of precise die-cut holes. Bits of text delicately hang on the remaining

strips of paper, scattered about each page. While impressive individually, the pages also

work together to create a complex, layered visual experience, with multiple holes or

paper strips lining up on top of others, allowing readers sometimes to peer many pages

down into the book. The first encounter with Tree of Codes is often surprising but

gratifying—the feeling that you are holding something special, even if you are not

entirely sure what or why. The feeling fades quickly, though, as you remember this is a

book, and it is probably meant to be read. But how?

Critics have struggled with this question since the book’s publication, often

deploying a range of disciplinary and theoretical methods in search of a satisfying

answer. Jessica Pressman, for example, focuses on Tree of Codes as a memorial project

for Schulz’s work and the Holocaust, extending the theme of memorialization to the book

form in our new media environment. Pressman is particularly interested in how Tree of

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Codes and its performance of “bookishness” “confronts our changing relationship to

books through an aesthetic memorial” (100). Drawing connections to the book’s textual

content, Pressman reads this aesthetic memorial as primarily allegorical, a vague

narrative of loss also embodied in its own material presentation (107–8). Pressman

asserts that the “lament [for] the death of the book” (99) inherent in Tree of Codes is

premature, and that there is no need to memorialize a format that is, in many respects,

doing just fine. If one considers Tree of Codes a memorial to print, then it is indeed

preemptive. But if one considers our contemporary media environment, Tree of Codes is

actually an archetype of print-digital symbiosis, both in its method of publication (heavily

reliant on digital design software) and in its conceptual form. By productively

recombining two media, Foer’s work does not signal the end of an era, but rather the

advent of a new one for books. Still, Pressman’s reading is a useful model for

approaching Tree of Codes in that it synthesizes reading the book’s material properties

with reading its words. As a novel of “bookishness,” using Pressman’s term, or as a work

of “book fiction,” using Starre’s term, Tree of Codes seems to require a reconciliation of

reading the physical along with the textual in a way that few other books do. In

Pressman’s words, “[r]eading this text is not just about making sense of linguistic

signifiers or about comparing content between Schulz’s source material and Foer’s

adaptation of it, but it’s also about how we approach this physical artifact” (108).

While reading Tree of Codes is certainly not just about those things, as Pressman

says, comparative readings have been useful in making sense of the book. N. Katherine

Hayles, for example, compares Foer’s source text—the English translation of Street of

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Crocodiles by Celina Wieniewska—to the Tree of Codes text. Combining close and

distant reading techniques, Hayles crunches the numbers:

Schulz’s translated text contains 37,483 words, Foer’s 3,815, so about nine out of every ten words have been eliminated. The erasures are not random; comparison of word frequency in the two texts reveals patterns Foer used to decide which words to erase. [ . . . ] Even more striking are the erasures Foer performed to reattach the boy’s mother to the father. Schulz’s text rarely shows the two interacting, and as the father retreats to the more remote reaches of the house, the mother seems almost to forget him. In Foer “mother” appears four times more frequently than in the original, making up 0.42% of the words, versus .10% in Schulz. Strategic erasures create a narrative in which the mother and father directly interact. (227)

First, Hayles’s analysis reveals that Foer’s degree of erasure is severe: a 90% excision

rate from Schulz’s original text. The degree of this rate calls into question the accuracy of

describing such resulting texts as “erasures.” Hayles, while using this standard label,

describes Foer’s actions as selective of which words to erase, but the resulting close

reading generally depends upon the remaining words. In this case, the removal of select

words appears to be a means to increase the frequency—thus, the presence—of the

mother character and to push the father and mother into closer proximity. Though it may

seem a trivial semantic distinction, Foer’s book fiction could be considered a sampling

project of Street of Crocodiles, rather than an erasure. Foer’s process centers on the

selection of desired words rather than a suppression of undesirable text. This critical

reading is a matter of shifting perspective to better accommodate the print-digital

symbiosis of Tree of Codes: thinking of the book as an erasure is useful for historicizing

it within conventions of the print medium; thinking of the book as a sampling and remix

project recontextualizes it in contemporary digital culture. In the latter reading, the

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affordances of digitization and information processing are fundamental components to

the production of the text and the book’s complex material design.

In an accompanying “Author’s Afterword” to Tree of Codes, Foer discusses his

longtime wish to complete a die-cut erasure book, but he quickly turns to the metaphor of

“exhumation” in describing his relationship with the original Schulz text (138–9). His

work is an unearthing of a nebulous story latent in Schulz, which is itself derived from an

imagined urtext. Erasure is seemingly the tool with which Foer conducts his exhumation,

and the material absence of these erasures is an essential characteristic of the final

product. Pressman and Hayles both account for the erased words in their readings: in

Pressman’s case, by connecting the physical holes of the book to the motif of voids that

Holocaust visual art often employs; in Hayles’s case, by identifying several main themes

of the Schulz text that have been removed in the Foer text, such as Schulz’s ambiguous

depiction of “questionable sexualities” or of reference to animals. But even here, Hayles

ultimately concludes that Foer’s method enables him to make explicit in his text what

was previously implicit in Schulz’s stories, and “the erasures create new phrases potent in

their suggestiveness” (229–30). When the result is a textual “reading,” it seems odd to

use phrases like “the erasures create”—surely it would feel unnatural to discuss remixes,

samples, and mashups in other media in regard to what they had deleted from their source

texts. The physique of Tree of Codes undoubtedly directs the reader’s attention to this

missing content; however, this perspective addresses only part of the book’s potential for

multimedia discourse. While the process of erasure in the artist’s book tradition focuses

on similar deletion—as a means for the production of material/visual art—remix book

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fiction in a literary context necessarily focuses on what remains and on the process of

selection rather than erasure. In a digital media context, sampling is a useful label for the

technique and sensibilities that govern both creation and reception. As I will argue, the

ability of Tree of Codes to integrate both print and digital media affordances in the

creation of a novel literary text is what makes it an exemplary case study.

Reclassifying contemporary-literature erasure texts as remixes and samples draws

connections to the discourse of digital media. The move has already begun in some

contexts. Lai-Tze Fan, for example, places her reading of Tree of Codes within a digital

era of representation. In particular, one ability of digital media is to abstract content from

materiality—the experience of effortlessly stunning graphics on 5K screens, divorced

entirely from the nitty gritty of GPUs, machine code, and microcircuits. The advent of

such an era inevitably changes our relationship with media, in general, as well as with

books, specifically. Digital media are typically described as “ephemeral,” “dynamic,”

“fluid,” or even “magic.” For Fan, the structure of Tree of Codes aligns the book more

closely to these (simulated) instabilities of digital media rather than the perceived stable

finality of print. Similarly, Aaron Mauro sees the era of digital media as encouraging a

response in the form of print experimentation. At the same time, he claims that “the

normalization of reflowable text is upending the fixity of print and the stability of the

codex” (par. 1). In other words, the (implicit) characteristics of digital media are made

explicit and interrogated by print books like Tree of Codes. We can understand these

techniques of experimental print literature not only as resistance to digital media or as a

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memorialization of the print book, but also as seeking new ways for the book to critically

and meaningfully inhabit the digital media landscape.

In this sense, Tree of Codes has an analog body but a digital soul. Sampling is a

technique that lends itself to digital media because it mirrors the process of digitization in

general, of breaking down content into discrete bits of information that can be

manipulated in some fashion. And this process better characterizes the design,

production, and structure of Tree of Codes, which is not rooted in material erasure, as I

will illustrate, but rather the structure of the book appears to be something akin to digital

remix. One entry into placing Tree of Codes in a digital context is in developing a critical

reading strategy. If the novel is to be read for content in addition to form, it is not merely

enough to encounter the book, but one must develop a technique for organization. In

literary studies, scholars must develop a way to cite it. Given that academic citational

formats are still based on legacies of print media, Tree of Codes maintains a peculiar

elusiveness for being adequately managed by the conventional quotation-plus-parenthesis

format. The book does come with page numbers, but, given its cut-out composition that

reveals words and fragments many layers below the top-most reading page, it would not

be representative of the reading experience to simply quote the text in sequence. Hayles,

already having digitized the text in her distant-reading comparison between Schulz’s

source text and Foer’s book, develops a simple markup to distinguish “hole words” from

“page words,” using angled brackets to indicate how many pages down a “hole word” is.

For example, using this method, the first line from an early page of the book would be

transcribed: “<<<<spread>>>> <<, the>> half- <the bri> hoarse with shouting, <<h>>

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<rising>” (14). Here, “half-hoarse with shouting” is the text on the present page, but the

bracketed words remain visible through the holes of the die-cut pages. Four brackets

equate to four pages down.

Hayles’s technique is manifestly digital as it seems to mimic the hierarchal

structures of popular digital markup schemas.§§ Specifically, XML (Extensible Markup

Language) is a recent iteration of a markup schema*** used in contemporary digital

humanities projects, especially as a way to transcribe and digitize texts in a way that

results in files that are both human- and machine-readable. David J. Birnbaum’s primer

on XML in a humanities context remains the authoritative introduction. Especially useful

is Birnbaum’s identification of the two main reasons that humanities scholars represent

their documents in XML:

1. XML is a formal model designed to represent an ordered hierarchy, and to the extent that human documents are logically ordered and hierarchical, they can be formalized and represented easily as XML documents.

2. Computers can operate quickly and efficiently on trees (ordered hierarchies), much more quickly and efficiently than they can on non-hierarchical texts. This means that if we can model the documents we need to study as trees, we can manage and manipulate large amounts of data efficiently. (n.p.)

The structural premise of XML is rather simple, though its application can be stretched to

meet complex scenarios. A simple application, which Birnbaum provides, would be to

use XML to make a shopping list:

§§ Hayles does not specify what markup language (if any) was used in her own analysis, only that she devised it (229) and the encoding work was completed by two graduate assistants (231n1). *** An earlier version being SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), for example.

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<shopping_list> <item>bread</item> <item>milk</item> </shopping_list> The primary unit of XML is the “element,” which consists of an opening tag, a closing

tag, and the content that occurs between the two. Elements can contain other elements,

which is the mechanism that enables XML to model hierarchy. The indentations of the

example above help illustrate the simple hierarchy of the list. At this point, the

confluence of terminology and concepts is too great to ignore: Birnbaum’s description of

XML code here as “trees” of ordered hierarchy and Foer’s own Tree of Codes text that

complicates a print book’s conventional hierarchy of pages in such a way that quasi-

digital techniques are needed to make a genuine attempt at “reading” it. Mauro, similar

to Hayles, goes as far as to digitize the entire text for both citational purposes and as a

way to create a “prototyping framework for testing the limitations of the presentation

semantics of the web and the inherent meanings held between print and digital versions.”

Elaborating, Mauro writes, “[t]he markup I produce functions as an elaborate quotation

mark that attempts to describe the complex aesthetic experience of reading the material

text of Tree of Codes” (par. 5). While Mauro’s work certainly results in a useful

visualization, in a process that tracks the “loss” of book characteristics impossible to

digitize, the model’s emphasis on the “aesthetic experience” of the book misses an

opportunity to more meaningfully grasp the digitally inclined structure of the text.

Specifically, Mauro’s decision to encode the book using “HTML, CSS, and an open

source page turn script developed by Google” (par. 5) sacrifices the hierarchical ordering

benefits of XML encoding for the display-centric Hypertext Markup Language and

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Cascading Style Sheets that form the foundation of content built for web browsers. Of

course, there are many ways to approach any digitization project, so I offer a different but

complementary approach to Tree of Codes.

To use XML as a controlling principle for a printed document is not without

precedent. Alan Liu, in an oft-cited essay from 2004, theorizes the digital structure of

knowledge production in both content and form. While commenting on XML’s

applicability to writing and publishing in a variety of contexts, Liu also lightly “encodes”

his essay with XML elements that describe the inherent structure. For example, opening

paragraphs are enclosed by <preface type=“general”>, and a later passage by <argument

title=“technologic” subtitle=“the blind spot on the page”>. Liu demonstrates the fluidity

of “structured discourse” across both print and digital content by marking up a simple

poem. Not only is this method most suitable for approaching a more structurally complex

work like Tree of Codes, but, as I argue, it is fundamental to understanding the print-

digital hybridity of its composition and reception. Ultimately, this context of digital

media opens the text to its remix potential and reinforces its relationship to its source text.

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To demonstrate, I will present below my own basic XML encoding of a brief

passage from Tree of Codes (Fig. 3.1).

This technique not only structures Foer’s sampled text, but it allows for the reinsertion of

Schulz’s original text alongside the reconfigured version. XML is both hierarchal and

descriptive, with XML tags enclosing passages of textual data and the ability to nest data

within other data. For example, if we were to encode the entirety of Tree of Codes, the

root element could be something like <book>. Therefore, a rudimentary XML encoding

of the same line from page 14 quoted earlier might be formatted as the following:

Figure 3.1: top portion of page 14 from Tree of Codes.

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As seen in Fig. 3.2, visible layers of text from the vantage point of page 14 become more

easily grasped visually through XML’s inherent hierarchal structure. Nested layers of text

are contained within the element <line>, which provides a structurally and visually

descriptive account of the complex textual characteristics of Foer’s book. Most usefully,

this encoding strategy isolates the first layer of text (the text of the current page) into a

more readable format. The narrative proceeds, “half-hoarse with shouting,” and segments

of layered text peek through the holes of the page, creating the book’s effect of textual

specter for events to come. As exemplified in this case, the mere exercise of encoding the

text helps any reader better understand the materiality and narrative content of Tree of

Codes.

This simple approach of segmenting out and layering the existing text, however,

ignores the holes, spacing, and cover of the book’s sculptural physique. Such information

can be captured in XML, though in a way that muddies its legibility in code (Fig. 3.3).

Figure 3.2: basic XML encoding of page 14, line 1 from Tree of Codes. (The use of colored font in text-editor applications is merely to assist in legibility.)

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The benefit of XML is that, regardless of its visual complexity in a text editor, the

markup can be transformed into a readable display. In other words, and unlike HTML in

which display information is inherent to the markup, XML can focus entirely on

descriptive attributes, while rules for its display are written and stored discretely. While

creating a new digital display for an XML edition of Tree of Codes is outside the scope of

this project, these basic principles of XML’s use in humanities research provide a

rationale to proceed with such a technique as proof-of-concept. Additionally, and

crucially in connection to the topic of remix book fiction, allowing for this kind of

complex encoding reconciles digital approaches to Tree of Codes with the book’s own

capacity for sampling and remix. In other words, through refined digital techniques, we

can make good on the earlier promises of print-digital hybrid approaches to Foer’s novel.

Such reconciliation begins with reconnecting Tree of Codes to its source text, not

in discrete files for a comparative approach as in the Hayles method, but in a restorative

manner that re-places Schulz’s text in its new context. The benefit of this method is two-

fold: first, the XML serves as a visual model of the book’s layered complexity along with

the capacity to reestablish Schulz’s text in situ; second, the XML simulates Foer’s

sampling technique in a way that helps readers understand the relationship between the

Figure 3.3: complex XML encoding of page 14, line 1 accounting for holes, spacing, and cover.

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two texts. As an example, Fig. 3.4 models the first line of pages 14, 15, and 16, with the

addition of the Schulz text embedded in place of encoding holes, space, and cover. This

approach emphasizes textual relationships over the visual presentation of a particular

page, with the complete text of each page—Foer’s selection along with the deleted

Schulz—transcribed and encoded, regardless of what might be visible beneath the

reading layer. Accordingly, the <layer> element has been replaced with <text> in order to

distinguish Schulz’s original from Foer’s sampling. I have included only the first line of

these pages so that they may be seen in relation to each other in Fig. 3.4. It follows that

each line of each page may be transcribed and encoded similarly, essentially creating a

Figure 3.4: the first line of three pages from Tree of Codes in sequence, with original Schulz text interpolated.

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reverse-engineered digital edition of the material book, but one that could toggle between

Schulz’s complete text and Foer’s selection.

The critical payoff for this synthetic, restorative approach is immediate. If we

consider how Tree of Codes is marketed and characterized publicly, readers are

seemingly meant to approach the book as an actual material erasure of Schulz’s Street of

Crocodiles—passages have been physically excised in the final version of Tree of Codes.

Indeed, in an interview for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Foer

recounts his wish to create a book with die cutting: “I [then] started with one of my

favorite books, which is Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, and tried to carve out of it

another story—and I did” (Foer, "Die Cutting a Novel”). ††† However, when structured

with XML, Tree of Codes appears to bear no physical resemblance to any extant material

text. When Schulz’s original text is reinserted into Foer’s version, the size and extent of

the page holes in Tree of Codes do not match proportionally to the words that ostensibly

have been “carved” away. From the pages used as examples above, the first few lines of

page 16 offer a clear illustration. The passage appears in Tree of Codes as below in Fig.

5. I have placed a contrasted background behind the page in order to clearly reveal the

shape and extent of individual die cuts. The photograph shows the top half of the page.

The Foer text corresponds to the third subsection of “August,” the opening vignette of

Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. The full passage is as follows:

The old, wise door, the silent witness of the entries and exits of mother, daughters, sons, whose dark sighs, accompanied the comings and goings of those people,

††† Die cutting is a manufacturing process developed in the nineteenth century that creates products by stamping a pre-formed “die” through selected raw material—cookie-cutting on an industrial level.

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now opened noiselessly like the door of a wardrobe and we stepped into their life. They were sitting as if in the shadow of their own destiny and did not fight against it [ . . . ]. (8)

The rate of excision is high, as we know from Hayles. The surviving text, only a

fragment, reads, “, the silent sighs the comings and goings, we stepped into the shadow”

(16). At first, the outsized die-cuts would seem to correspond to Foer’s high rate of

erasure—there is more hole than text on each page. Yet, in attempting to restore the

Schulz text with simple XML markup, it becomes apparent that the size and extent of

individual die cuts—and of blank line breaks that create the solid paper bridges between

the die-cut holes—bear no relation to the excised text. For example, in Fig. 3.5, the Foer

text moves from “silent” to “sighs” in approximately three full lines and two half-lines

Figure 3.5: page 16 of Tree of Codes with contrasted background to highlight the shapes and sizes of die cuts in the page.

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worth of die cut on the page. However, the Schulz text that has been excised is only 13

words, or 77 characters including spaces—about enough content to fill a single line. In

the next segment, “the comings and goings” appear in succession in both Schulz and Foer

texts, but in the Foer book there appears a double line break, appearing on a strip of paper

between die-cut holes, which separates “and” and “goings.” Subsequent die-cut holes and

line breaks throughout Tree of Codes maintain this incongruous relationship to the

excised text of Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles.

Figure 3.6: rudimentary XML markup of Tree of Codes with green comments indicating discrepancies between textual content and material design.

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Affirming this discrepancy is a crucial first step in critically reevaluating the

work. Doing so reveals that the “sculptural erasure” of Tree of Codes is instead an

impressive feat of bibliographic production rather than the method through which the text

of the book was made. The published version is an incredibly effective synthesis of what

one might imagine such a work to be, rather than as the work actually exists. There are,

undoubtedly, practical explanations for why the final product must be made in this

manner. For the necessity of the book to be finished as a glue-bound paperback for the

first edition (in “perfect binding”), there are matters of basic structural integrity that

cannot be ignored: pages are not much good if they disintegrate upon handling; text

appearing in the middle of a page must be attached to something, and segments of blank

lines provide a foothold in this regard. Yet, the innovation of publisher Visual Editions

and boutique Belgian printer Die Keure to create such an effect is often minimized in

favor of focusing on the author’s treatment of the text. Pressman’s article on the Tree of

Codes, for example, she accounts for its development with the following: “To produce

this visual, physical text, Foer employed a digitally enhanced process of die-cutting to

carve into a book by Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles

(1934)” (97–98). While affirming of the account that Foer gave in his interview cited

previously, this version of the material production of the book is perhaps too figurative to

be accurate in any useful sense. While the die cuts are undoubtedly an astonishing feat of

modern commercial printing, the literary and technical production of Tree of Codes does

not follow-through on a physical carving of an extant copy of Schulz’s Street of

Crocodiles.

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To illustrate the actual process at commercial scale, Visual Editions released a

brief “Making Of” featurette montage of video clips taken on the floor at Die Keure. In

the video, die shapes are designed on a computer and then laser-cut into a wood support

from which dies can be made by hand (Fig. 3.7). Meanwhile, page proofs are printed and

gathered, later to be stamped through by the dies. In the video, excised paper falls gently

to the ground. The cut paper, though, is blank. Foer’s text in the printed proofs is

scattered about otherwise-blank paper. In context, this seems perfectly natural—it would

be senselessly wasteful and impractical to produce each copy of Tree of Codes from an

extant copy of Street of Crocodiles. Furthermore, the possibility of Foer producing a

prototype from which to mass produce the novel (similar to the work of Tom Phillips or

Graham Rawle, for example) would contradict Foer’s initial interest in die cutting as a

process of book experimentation. Despite all of this plain evidence, a disconnect between

Figure 3.7: an employee at Belgian printer Die Keure makes dies for Tree of Codes (Visual Editions).

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the material production of the book and its artistic persona persists—the myth of

“sculptural erasure” dominates both promotional marketing and critical readings.

Acknowledging the actualities of material production of Tree of Codes is not in

the service of a critical “gotcha.” Instead, reconciling this acknowledgement with critical

treatments of the book more accurately places it within a contemporary digital context.

By emphasizing the material production of Tree of Codes as distinct from any physical

engagement of an original source text, new readings can confirm that, while the book’s

material presentation imitates works of erasure, its conceptual and structural strategies are

ones of sampling and remix. The textual content of Schulz’s short story collection is

selectively copied and re-presented in a stunningly novel package. As archetypal of the

digital culture that underpins the work, Foer’s reconfiguration and recontextualization of

Schulz’s text constitutes an act of “unoriginal genius” in contemporary creative copying.

To this point, and as a way to alleviate any discomfort from potentially disserving the

original text, Foer himself seems to agree. In the same interview with the Louisiana

Museum of Modern Art, he says: “When I was working on [Tree of Codes], I didn’t feel

any reverence for [Street of Crocodiles]. I didn’t feel any sensitivity to changing it

because I wasn’t changing the book.” Foer identifies Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de

Kooning Drawing as a contrasting example in the visual arts, in which authentic erasure

work performs on a material original, forever altering (or erasing) it. Foer’s work is

different because “it’s still possible to go buy Street of Crocodiles; it’s not like [he] did it

literally to every copy of the Street of Crocodiles that exists.” Foer’s analogy depends on

a book’s murky material relationship with its textual content, and this comparison

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underscores a material disconnect between Street of Crocodiles and Tree of Codes in his

own process.

Furthermore, recognizing this disconnect highlights the intricate collaboration

required to produce Tree of Codes, as well as other experimental books. While Foer is

responsible for the sampling of text from the original Schulz work, it remains unclear

what his role was in the material design of the final product. At the very least, the

finished book is the result of a complex series of negotiations between author, publisher,

printer, and the material possibilities provided by available technologies. Such a

recognition is not meant to minimize Foer’s artistic achievement, but rather it presents an

opportunity to recognize the essentially collaborative nature of authorship in the twenty-

first century. Foer’s case is typical in many ways—as standard industry practice, the

transformation of a manuscript into a published book is handled by teams of trade

professionals. When a new title lands on bookstore shelves, contemporary readers

understand that in usual cases the author is responsible for its content, not the container.

However, when a finished book incorporates its material design so deeply into the

structure of its content, the concept of the author pushes beyond its typical limits. In the

case of Tree of Codes, in which its entire textual content is copied from another work,

this complexity is compounded. If we consider Goldsmith’s observation on the changing

role of authorship in the age of creative copying, the attribution “by Jonathan Safran

Foer” in relation to Tree of Codes becomes a biblio-archaism of pre-digital print culture.

Single authorship in this case belies the collaboration required to produce the book’s

material form, which is coterminous with its literary content.

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Ultimately, the novel’s final material form ties it to book culture. However, up to

this point of final materialization, the novel’s play on form and the nature of its

production is what connects it to the digital present and the era’s inclination for socio-

cultural transformations through remix. The aesthetic power of Tree of Codes depends

upon its replication and modification of “the book” as a culturally pervasive material

form. Its deviations from convention are the striking hallmarks of its artistic achievement,

yet it must also recognizably reproduce those conventions simultaneously. There are, for

example, all the identifiable parts that make up a book: pages, cover, spine, and yes—

author. The creative copying expressed in Tree of Codes includes both textual content

and such bibliographic materiality. In this way, Tree of Codes is an exemplar of the

meme era, of remix culture, through creative reproduction and alteration.

Jordan Abel’s Digital Remix

Through three collections, method and materiality foreground the poetics of

Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel. In The Place of Scraps (2013), Abel draws from the historical

work of Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer of First Nations

peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Barbeau’s methods, as an emblem of colonial ideology,

are critiqued through poetic erasures of his own work. In Un/inhabited (2015) and Injun

(2016), Abel expands his critique, both figuratively and practically. In these books,

critical explorations of indigenous identity and North American imperial expansion are

structured through the remix and deformation of a large textual corpus created by Abel

himself. Similar to other works of remix literature, Injun includes a note on “Process”

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that details Abel’s method for creating the textual corpus (which he also used for

Un/inhabited) as well as his method for creating the content of the book:

Injun was constructed entirely from a source text comprised of 91 public domain western novels with a total length of just over ten thousand pages. Using CTL+F, I searched the source text for the world “injun,” a query that returned 509 results. After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three-to five-word clusters. Sometimes I would cut up a page without looking. Sometimes I would rearrange the pieces until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together. Injun and the accompanying materials are the result of these methods. (83)

As Abel’s description makes clear, Injun comprises hybrid media aesthetics and methods,

specifically a basic digital technique for textual sampling as well as the crude scissors-

and-paper method for cut-up poetry popularized by William Burroughs in the ‘60s. I

argue that Injun joins other works like Tree of Codes in the emergent genre of remix book

literature. Accurately contextualizing Abel’s work is an important step in affirming this

emergent genre, but such contextualization also recognizes emergent relationships

between new critical media and longstanding postcolonial practices. Taking advantage of

remix’s ability to complement political discourses of resistance and subversion, Abel

synthesizes contemporary digital aesthetics and political critique. And like the other

authors and works in this dissertation, Abel and his book not only result in a compelling

literary achievement, but they also result in innovative book forms suited for our digital

present and future.

Though Abel’s recent rise in the literary world has garnered many accolades,

including Canada’s highest award for poetry, scholarly appreciation has yet to catch up.

The few moments of scholarly attention that Abel’s collections do receive often focus on

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the poet’s contribution to critical ethnic discourse. Max Karpinski, for example, gives a

reading of The Place of Scraps as “both a discursive repatriation of ancestral artifacts,

cultures, and histories, as well as a tactical disruption of colonial epistemologies that

depend on the erasure of Indigenous presence” (n.p.). While Karpinski naturally

acknowledges Abel’s method of erasure in Scraps, his critical reading focuses primarily

on the political stakes of Abel’s poetry as an act of cultural reclamation. Karpinski’s

reading is typical of approaches to Abel’s poetry, and such readings undoubtedly serve as

essential scholarly explication, filling in critical historical context for non-expert readers,

and tracing the full extent of Abel’s engagement with and reappropriation of Barbeau’s

original work. In a scholarly treatment of Injun, Aislinn Clare McDougall places Abel’s

work in the context of Canadian decolonization pedagogies. McDougall opens with an

anecdote about Abel’s public performances of Injun in which he “remixes digital

recordings of his own voice reading the work, disrupting and layering the tracks until

there is an audible breaking down of language” (n.p.).‡‡‡

Though similarly focused on the political stakes of Abel’s work, McDougall adds

a multi- and transmedia approach to Injun, incorporating into her reading both Abel’s

digital creative methods and subsequent public performances. Of particular interest here

is McDougall’s recognition of the remix as a site of indigenous reclamation, citing the

work of Jackson 2Bears. 2Bears theorizes remix in an indigenous context “as a new

media performance conjuration [ . . . ] that becomes about the conjuration and exorcism

‡‡‡ An example of Abel’s reading performance of Injun can be seen in the recording of his acceptance of Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize; follow URL in the Works Cited entry.

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of spectral narratives [ . . . ] that haunt our mediascape; a recombinant act that involves

the slicing, cutting, and deconstruction of virulent colonial mythologies” (27; qtd. in

McDougall). In Injun, these colonial mythologies are interrogated through the digital

textual corpus of pulp western novels created by Abel through Project Gutenberg.

According to McDougall, “Abel uses digital technology to ‘remix’ these colonial texts in

a digital space, but he also remixes digital audio recordings of himself reading the poem

for a live audience, which illustrates how his reclamation of digital space transcends from

the textual to the oral” (n.p.). While Abel’s performances of Injun do indeed create a

complex transmedia ecology around the text, it is perhaps a step too far to insist on the

elimination of Injun’s textuality in the invocation of orality. Abel does not actually speak

aloud in these readings. Instead, Abel performs like a DJ, “reading” through the live

loops and layered manipulations of recorded audio clips. As remix, Abel’s readings

mirror the method used in creating the book.

My critical goals§§§ for reading Injun in this chapter are two-fold: first, to

recognize Abel’s book remix project as another work of contemporary creative copying;

§§§ Following the precedents of Karpinski and McDougall, it is important to acknowledge “my own understanding, awareness and self-reflexivity with regard to the non-Indigenous critic’s selflocation” (Karpinski). Just as my critical goals in reading Injun are modest and limited, so too is the political scope to which I can apply any critical reading. My focus on Abel’s work emphasizes media and materiality, process and product, while also deliberately restricting any argument that would attempt to draw culturally specific conclusions. From the perspective of a white American scholar of contemporary literature and media, I will discuss how Abel’s method and book disrupt conventions of contemporary print bookmaking, employing hybrid digital/print techniques and perspectives. I am able to acknowledge that Abel’s work obviously does serve as a critique of settler ideology and forms, but I am not in a position to assess the significance and placement of that work within Nisga’a and broader Canadian Indigenous cultures and literatures.

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second, to connect Abel’s method for textual (and subsequently, audio) remix to the

bibliographic deformance of Injun. As in Tree of Codes, it is through the remixed form of

the codex that Injun materializes its cultural intervention. While Injun accounts for its

own textual construction via copied and remixed novels, in Abel’s configuration, the

book itself becomes another copied and remixed form of settler ideology.**** In Injun, the

form breaks down, with passages collapsing into unintelligible fragments. Abel’s

readings capture this breakdown as the audio clips distort into an incomprehensible

cacophony. Ultimately, Injun is an ideal case study for contemporary creative copying

because, similar to Tree of Codes, digital practices account for both its material formation

and subsequently developed reading methods. Through these practices, Injun exposes the

misrepresentations of Indigenous identity found in settler writing.

From the book cover and title, it is clear that Injun is about the dismantling of a

prescribed identity. The word “injun” draws upon a long history of ethnic slurs that

populate western (and “Western”) texts, from Hollywood movies to the pulp novels that

Abel mines for his own work. As a derivative of “Indian,” the word connotes the racist

stereotypes of Indigenous populations in historical media, such as the “noble savage” or

“drunken Indian” caricatures that date back to the seventeenth century—from the time of

**** In Native studies and literature, the book is often explicitly tied to colonization. In Storyteller, Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko “[places] herself in two worlds: one world built upon Laguna oral tradition, the other controlled by the written word of the conquering ‘other.’ [ . . . ] The acquisition of written language is tied directly to Euro-American assimilationist policies, by means of which children were removed from their tribal cultures and denied the use of their native languages and traditional practices. Reading and writing European languages was thus an act of oppression” (Carsten 111).

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first sustained contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The

2009 documentary film by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, Reel Injun, traces the

influence of Hollywood portrayals on the modern dissemination of these stereotypes,

specifically through the mischaracterization of Native identities and/or the portrayal of

Native characters in movies by white actors. The cover art of Abel’s Injun cleverly

invokes this history and its simultaneous critique. The cover features a photograph by

Anishinaabekwe artist Rebecca Belmore of a woman wearing a flimsy paper half-mask

with two eye-cut holes that covers half her face. The mask is a replica of a feather

headdress, symbolic of the styles worn by the Lakota and other Plains Nations, but also

an icon of stereotypic “Indian” identity. Such ceremonial headdresses are specific to only

a few Native cultures, yet, as Diamond’s film documentary observes, the headdress

became a ubiquitous symbol of Native representation in white media in the twentieth

century. The mask extends down to the woman’s nose, supplementing the headdress with

the top half of an “Indian face.” The cover image and the book’s title immediately

conjure the racist history of caricaturizing or tokenizing Indigenous peoples in popular

media. But the flimsiness of the paper mask and the uncanny stare of the woman’s half-

covered face unsettle the reader and disrupt the stereotypical identities that they invoke.

The effect works through a combination of absurdity and satire, highlighted by the

obvious artificiality of the mask and its ridiculousness when worn by, ostensibly, a “real”

Native person wearing a simple shirt and jeans in the photograph.

As Amaranth Borsuk and Sarah Dowling explicate in their review of Injun, the

“book’s structure performs a similar confrontation [to the cover art] with what has been

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naturalized or made familiar” (n.p.). Following the title page, a dedication “For the

Indigenous peoples of the Americas,” and a cryptic Mark Twain epigraph, is a table of

contents that outlines the book’s sections, “Injun,” “Notes,” “Appendix,” “Sources,” and

“Process.” The table of contents offers provisional reassurance to readers that this book

will follow the rules, that it is ostensibly authoritative because it has notes, appendices,

and citations. In this way, Injun gestures towards the reification of knowledge production

in the tradition of western academic practices. Correspondingly, the first chapter of this

dissertation discusses the formation of an “editorial aesthetic” in literary practice through

the adoption of print paratextual conventions (notes, appendices, etc.) from scholarly

editions and other academic books. In Abel’s usage, this kind of academic construction

proves as flimsy as the paper mask on the cover, however, with each of these sections

featuring different configurations of Abel’s poetry drawn from his textual corpus of

western novels. In other words, “Notes,” “Appendix,” and so on simply contain more

verse. (“Process” is the exception in that it provides the straightforward account of

Abel’s method.) Therefore, Injun’s material structure does not function as paratext, as

Borsuk and Dowling claim, but rather it negates paratext by creating a self-referential

feedback loop between content and source. Injun models the circular reasoning through

which knowledge—about ethnic identity, for example—in hegemonic systems can be

created.

The poetic fragments of “Injun” are annotated in the second section only through

the same siloed corpus through which the fragments themselves are generated. For

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example, the first fragment of “Injun” (“a,” as they are alphabetically sequenced) appears

as follows:

he played injun in gods country where boys proved themselves clean dumb beasts who could cut fire out of the whitest1 sand he played english across the trail where girls turned plum wild garlic and strained words through the window of night he spoke through numb lips and breathed frontier2 (3)

Each poetic fragment in “Injun” is supplemented with superscript numbers indicating

corresponding annotations in the following section. However, when readers go to the

“Notes” section, they are confronted with more poetic fragments. The “Notes” are

differently configured, each line seemingly from a different source text but formatted to

line up each instance of the annotated word. The annotated words are bolded, while the

surrounding text is grayed out. The first six lines of Note 1 are as follows:

himself clean strain that night, the whitest little Injun on the reservati s along the Missouri River had the whitest lot of officers that it was ev at is spirit. He smiled, showing the whitest and evenest teeth. Such ext ‘Jerry wants to talk to you. He’s the whitest of the lot, if you can call th d not observe that his teeth are the whitest, evenest.” “They make them oked from face to face. “You’re the whitest bunch—I’d like to know— (31)

The notes initially provide context for thematically selected words from the poetic

fragments of the first section. In the first note, the superlative “whitest” is racialized in

context, illustrating the word’s associations with a claimed supremacy in the pulp novel

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source texts that Abel draws from. From the outset of Injun, whiteness serves as an ironic

foil to the flimsy caricatures of Native identity presented in the source texts. Notably,

Abel’s method here does not mimic the erasure of old writing. Instead, Injun is structured

as a sampling and layering of source material.

The poetic fragments follow a progression of destabilization and disintegration.

Starting with the “g” fragment in “Injun,” each subsequent poem introduces increasingly

deformed spacing, enjambments, and, ultimately, an inversion of textual layout. Several

of the middle fragments are entirely incomprehensible, as illustrated in Figure 3.8. The

progression towards disintegration in the poetic fragments appears to correspond to a

symbolic crumbling of the “injun” stereotype under scrutiny. Citing the paper mask on

nd g e P c bi v b cl ar cs jk la n te o va kr si ni sc na y ne sr f m xe kr g as bi m p zn ar a s cr g ty c p c

Figure 3.8: Poem fragment “s” from Injun (21); layout is approximated from original.

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the cover, a preliminary reading might remark on the flimsiness of these “injun”

utterances, the references in the poems collapsing under repeated use and scrutiny. When

we take into account Abel’s method for sampling and remix, however, the poetic

disintegration also models the process of digitization that characterizes the composition

and subsequent performative readings of Injun. While digitization usually refers to the

practice of converting content into an electronic format suitable for computer processing,

a more fundamental understanding of digitization accounts for the poetics of Injun and its

multimedia characteristics.

An essay by Walter J. Ong, “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of

Writing and Today’s Computer,” recounts the parallels between the development of

symbolic writing systems and the rise of the modern computer. Importantly, Ong widens

the definition of digitization to mean “[p]rocessing data in terms of numerically distinct

units” (4), and he clarifies that digitization is not exclusively a function of binary

computer information processing (5). Ong focuses on the historical development of

complex token systems, occurring between the use of tallying and, later, cardinal

numbers. The primary achievement of these advances in numeracy was the development

of abstract thought—any variety of figures could function as symbols for the

representation of things in real life. According to Ong, the same is true for letters and

words, and thus all “[a]lphanumeric systems are forms of digitization” (17). In the

development of media technologies, this principle applies to moveable type and

letterpress printing, to Linotype, and later to computers: “[t]he maneuvers in alphabetic

letterpress printing involved digitization in that they called for operations with discrete

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units in carefully calculated fashion” (17). Importantly, such an account of digitization is

similar to Dawkins’s formulation of meme as a basic unit of cultural transmission: both

approaches are concerned with the reducibility of information into workable bits.

Letterpress printing offers a tangible example of digitization through material type in the

same way that complex ideas can be broken down (in English) into combinations of 26

letters and a handful of punctuation marks.

Ong’s ideas on the history of digitization and the development of writing offer a

remarkable framework for recognizing the narrative capacity of Injun, as well as for

contextualizing Abel’s method for creating and performing the text. Rather than

modeling a turn to orality, as McDougall claims about Abel’s performance methods, the

progression of Injun is towards digitization. The disintegration of poetic form in the first

section of Injun emulates the deconstruction of expressive abstract thought into discrete

units (letters, in this case). The poems, their letters and formatting, are pulled apart like a

Lego model into its individual bricks. As the poetry of Injun is derived from a textual

corpus, this deconstruction is also fragmentation of the source material—the corpus not

reassembled into a recognizable expression but rather disassembled entirely. In this

process, Injun demonstrates the crucial intermediary step of digitization for remix. All

remix projects must first disassemble source material into workable discrete units, and in

this sense, all remix projects participate in digitization, broadly defined, regardless of

their association with a computer. Injun resolves its remix process through the

reformation of poetic composition by the end of the first section. Fragment “z” remains

inverted on the page, but recognizable lines, stanzas, and words emerge (Fig. 3.9). Such

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reformation implies a rebuild from the existing constituent parts, but the poem’s

inversion and uncanny spacing signal an irrevocable change—perhaps that the poet’s

reappropriation of source material and previously prescribed identities is complete.

This basic principle of digitization accounts for Abel’s readings of Injun through

recorded audio files that are layered and looped. Abel’s performances do not constitute

remix per se, however. Given Injun’s digital characteristics in composition, the audio

performances of Injun could instead be considered relatively straightforward

remediations of the material text. Both the material book and electronic audio

a s tea mham mer p lay of p rinci ples a n d w eariness an interc our se of title27 and po sess i o n28

th at br eak s th e fing ers o f the rive r and lea ves m e wild ey ed and e xasp. erat e d by the mu d sp ru ng sh or e

Figure 3.9: Poem “z” from Injun (28); layout is approximated from original.

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performance emulate the fundamental process of digital deconstruction, through which

Abel takes settler literature and ideology apart and puts them back together in new, self-

nullifying forms. In a recent interview, Abel reflects on his performance practice: “My

relationship to my own artistic practice is to find ways to perform my work that don’t

necessarily correspond in a one-to-one way with the text on the page but attempt to

capture the feeling or the conceptual practice or a combination of all of those things with

the text” (n.p.). In the same interview, Abel also remarks on his recent interaction with

digital humanities practices—“what room there was for both artistic or creative

intervention in DH, but also what room there was for Indigenous kinds of intervention”

(n.p.). Abel and his interviewers are referring specifically to computational text analysis,

in regard to his practice of building and manipulating a textual corpus for his poetry. But

the important critical complement to Abel’s interests in conventional DH methods and

computer technology is the connection of digitization and remix to his material cut-up

methods and resulting poetic forms. Digital remix permeates the entire system.

Likewise, these principles of digitization apply to Tree of Codes and many books

of the remix book fiction genre. The impulse to copy and reconfigure existing content is

inextricably linked to the media technology that facilitates remix production. In the same

way that gramophone—and later tape—recording technologies gave rise to musique

concrète, digital storage and transmission shape the way we read, copy, and remix media

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content today.†††† The fundamental technique of digitization—the remediation of content

into discrete units—is the governing principle by which remix samples its source text(s).

In the literary works I have discussed, the book works as a material and

conceptual reference point for new kinds of meaning-making in a digital age. To repeat

Drucker’s observation, “the book as a form is already a received idea, loaded with

cultural and historical values and resonances” (108). In the twenty-first century, this form

calls upon such historical connotations while, through intervention and innovation, it

forges new connections with increasingly prevalent digital media. In this new context, the

print book participates in the culture of creative copying and internet memes. The

remixes discussed in this chapter take the book form as its received template, and their

textual content is composed of copied and reconfigured material. In other words, it is

important to recognize such projects as both remixes and books. Recognizing the print-

digital synthesis of remix book fiction is an important step in evaluating the book’s

changing identity in contemporary digital culture. The emergence of such literary works,

I would postulate, does not indicate merely the arrival of a new avant-garde aesthetic, but

rather such works represent the book medium’s full participation in digital culture.

†††† For an earlier critical history of such media, along with ranging theoretical implications, see Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

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Chapter Four:

Bookish Feedback and the Technogenic Loop of Contemporary Fiction

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. —George E. P. Box

Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. —Friedrich Nietzsche

At the end of the twentieth century, the turn towards digitization was marked by

well-publicized proclamations of print’s demise. Among the most famous edicts of the

time is public intellectual Sven Birkerts’s book-length requiem from 1994, The

Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. In the book, Birkerts

agonizes about nothing less than the entire history of the species—“the soul of our

societal body,” as he calls it, which is “encoded in print.” Birkerts questions if humanity

would simply remain intact as it pushed beyond its analog origins. “If a person turns from

print—finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present,” Birkerts

asks, “then what happens to that person’s sense of culture and continuity?” (20).

Birkerts’s anxieties about the displacement of the printed page by electronic screens

became emblematic of the controlling cultural narrative for the next several decades. As a

result of this drastic and inevitable transition, the act of reading would fundamentally

change—in Birkerts’s estimation, mostly for the worse—and, ultimately, the human brain

would irrevocably succumb to its new computerized masters. Attention spans would

shrink, vocabularies would stall, any sense of history would be lost, individuals would be

estranged from their communities, and literary output would no longer be capable of

deeply focused and sustained analytical thinking (27). Two decades later, Birkerts

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doubles down on his original thesis in the 2015 book Changing the Subject: Art and

Attention in the Internet Age, observing the augmenting effects of ubiquitous internet

connectivity on the mass computerization of culture that had already occurred. Granted,

in the twenty-first century this epochal shift in dominant media, from print to digital, is

undoubtedly well underway, but its effect on the “reading self,” in Birkerts’s phrasing,

has been decidedly more complicated than that of a simple and steady decline. Reports of

the death of print have been greatly exaggerated.

The transition from print to digital has been, and continues to be, a messy one. Jay

Bolter and Richard Grusin were among the first scholars to recognize and delineate the

overlap of legacy media and new media. In their widely cited 1999 book, Remediation

(and its subsequent editions), the titular concept accounts for the ways “older electronic

and print media [seek] to reaffirm their status within our culture as digital media

challenges that status” (5). In general, such reaffirmations often surface through the

tendency of digital media to “borrow avidly from each other as well as their analog

predecessors” (9). For Bolter and Grusin, this characteristic of new media to “borrow

avidly” from existing formats is typical of all media and their historical development,

“[often] presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media.”

The implication for the entire media landscape is comprehensive in its blurring of

transitional boundaries: “No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to

do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation

from other social and economic forces” (15). As a result, and in response to Birkerts’s

original lament on the death of print amidst the rise of digital media, it is a useful exercise

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to observe the ways in which the conventions of print—and older media—keep popping

up in digital spaces: the continued use of the page as a structural and organizational

concept in e-book editions and PDF documents, for example, or the navigation of linear

scrolling on computers and tablets, recalling manuscript technology several millennia old.

According to the principles of remediation, new media frequently incorporate familiar

conventions of legacy media, leveraging such familiarity for easier adoption by the

public. Print is not so much dead in its current circumstance as it is un-dead, shadows of

its analog nature flickering in the electronic arena—zombie books of the digital realm.

Despite the obvious persistence of books and bookish media, Birkerts’s anxieties

about the effect of digital media on the human brain and the “reading self” were not

entirely unfounded. In 2012’s How We Think, N. Katherine Hayles expands on the basic

principle of technogenesis—“the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together”

(10)—and applies it to current developments in/of digital media:

As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis. (11)

Hayles appears to confirm indirectly many of Birkerts’s original anxieties about reading

practices in the digital age, though without the apocalyptic tone or nostalgic sentiment.

Specifically, Hayles contrasts the predisposition of print to close reading and textual

analysis with the ways in which digital media lend themselves to “machine reading” and

“hyper reading” practices—respectively referring to automated analysis, typically of

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large textual corpora, and the type of “skimming” that one finds practical for navigating

content-saturated web environments. The premise is simple yet all-encompassing: that

(human-made) developments in a multimedia ecosystem work in recursion to effect

change in humans themselves. “Contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation,”

Hayles explains, “the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that

both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated

transformations” (81). As it may seem, Hayles’s application of technogenesis to the

human/digital relationship is deeply rooted in the McLuhan tradition of media studies in

both its sweeping cultural implications and provocations regarding human development.

Within these prominent voices of media history is an available synthesis for

understanding the contemporary printed novel’s role in our present environment

dominated by digital media. Through the foundational concept of remediation, we

acknowledge that media of all sorts are constantly engaged in a negotiation of borrowed

structural conventions and mirrored practices of use. The concept of technogenesis,

which acknowledges the dynamic relationship between media and humans, complements

remediation when we recognize that books, necessarily, are along for the recursive ride.

Print culture and technology have not simply passed along their useful traits for digital

media and ceased to exist; rather, print culture and technology have been swept up in the

co-evolution of digital media technogenesis, undergoing a reinvention of their own forms

while simultaneously enabling a reformation of the human self-image. As this cycle of

influence effects change on print and digital media, the figure of the human stands in the

middle simultaneously engaged with, and affected by, the transformative process.

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Specifically, and as I will illustrate in this chapter through examples from recent

contemporary fiction, increasingly experimental print-narrative forms indicate a recursive

evolution in both digital/print media and human identity. Such an analysis is premised by

the conception that both print media and the human have been irrevocably changed by

digital media. In this time of paradigmatic transition, the print book has become a testing

ground to work out the stresses of technogenic change—advances of digital technology

cycle back into new formulations of print literature, and vice versa. So, in one sense, print

culture is perhaps dead in the way that we can scarcely conceive of print except through

the lens of digital media; however, in its new role, the print book has established itself as

a key node in a feedback loop for tracing the technogenic changes brought on by digital

environment(s).

The concept of feedback serves as the linchpin for understanding recursive

technogenic change in print and digital media. While feedback has become a colloquial

concept, my use here is specifically derived from the foundational work on information

Figure 4.1: Shannon’s diagram for a general communication system (Shannon and Weaver 7).

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theory by Claude Shannon in the mid-twentieth century, along with the contributions of

other scientists of the era, such as Warren Weaver, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener. In

his famous paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Shannon sketches a

basic diagram intended to model the fundamental processes of all communication

systems (Shannon and Weaver 7) (Fig. 4.1). While Shannon designed the diagram to

describe telephones and other technical systems, the subsequent development of

information theory—as well as communications, media studies, and many of the social

sciences—led to the application of the model to a variety of non-technical contexts as

well. Just as the basic concepts of the “bit” and information entropy still govern digital

storage and internet traffic today, you often don’t have to look far to find an MBA

waxing philosophical on “signal vs. noise” in the marketplace.

With “feedback” came a crucial later addition to Shannon’s model, as others

adapted his work to other contexts.* In the diagram above, feedback would typically be

represented by a line and arrow connecting the destination to the information source,

though feedback could be implemented at any stage in the diagram’s modeling of

communication. By creating a closed loop in the previously linear model, the concept of

feedback reinforces the idea that communication is necessarily a recursive system, a

cycle that allows messages to be adjusted and refined over time in response to different

* James Gleick’s The Information provides a detailed account of both Shannon’s work at Bell Labs as well as [rival] Norbert Wiener’s simultaneous contributions to information theory, specifically his adaptation and development of feedback as a ubiquitous “agent of [self-governing] stability” within information systems (238). Though in the 1940s and ‘50s Shannon and Wiener represented two competing approaches to information theory—Shannon’s technical applications vs. Weiner philosophical aspirations—their work today is often synthesized into a shared theoretical heritage.

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inputs and outputs. The co-evolutionary processes of technogenesis, as described by

Hayles, can be mapped readily onto the Shannon diagram as a feedback loop between

media and humans. Hayles focuses especially on epigenetic changes in human

populations—“changes initiated and transmitted through the environment rather than

through the genetic code”—which creates an accelerated and compounded effect:

“[Epigenetic change] allows for a second modification, the idea that epigenetic changes

in human biology can be accelerated by changes in the environment that make them even

more adapted, which leads to further epigenetic changes” (10). More simply put, changes

in humans catalyzed by technological developments feed back into our environment,

shaping new outputs of human development, which subsequently lead to new

technological developments, and the cycle continues endlessly. Identifying feedback in

the cycle of technogenesis is crucial because it reinforces the idea that humans are

conscious and (re)active agents in their own development. In many ways, it is an

evolutionary principle fundamentally derived from the basic tenets of media studies as

proposed by McLuhan and others decades ago: media shape us as much as we shape

media.

The book as a media platform has previously figured into important conceptions

of human identity and development, and, in many ways, it has served as the cornerstone

of modern media studies in general. Apart from McLuhan’s 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy:

The Making of Typographic Man, which expounded upon the effect of modern media on

cognition and social organization, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s 1979 The Printing Press as an

Agent of Change represents a more academically conventional (but equally provocative)

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approach to studying movable type and the mass dissemination of text and their profound

effect on political organization and intellectual movements of the last four hundred years.

These two works represent some of the earliest foundational conversations about print-as-

media and its service to historical change.

The use of a communications circuit to model theories about book history has a

strong precedent in the field as well. Specifically, Robert Darnton, in the formative 1982

article “What is the History of Books?”, apparently draws on the contemporary

advancements in information theory to bring some coherence to the nascent field of book

history. In the essay, Darnton observes that the general practice of book history “arose

from the convergence of several disciplines on a common set of problems, all of them

having to do with the process of communication” (65). To assist the aim of book history

to “uncover the general pattern of book production and consumption over long stretches

of time” (66), Darnton “[proposes] a general model for analyzing the way books come

into being and spread through society” (67). Darnton’s model—now common

disciplinary knowledge for book historians—aims to be both elemental and

comprehensive:

[The model] could be described as a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. The reader completes the circuit because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating with other readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a general sense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts, whether they are composing Shakespearean sonnets or directions for assembling radio kits. A writer may respond in his writing to criticisms of his previous work or anticipate reactions that his text will elicit. He addresses implicit readers and hears from explicit reviewers. So the circuit runs full cycle. It transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again.

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Book history concerns each phase of this process and the process as a whole, in all its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and cultural, in the surrounding environment. (67)

Though Darnton never directly references Shannon, Weaver, or virtually any theoretical

precedent, the language with which he describes his model is replete with the language

and concepts of information theory, and indeed we may understand Darnton’s book

circuit (Fig. 4.2) as one of the many descendants of Shannon’s original model. The circuit

is metaphorical, of course, but to imagine a book as the “transmission” of a “message”

within a circuit of communication facilitates the projection of the general historical

patterns that interest Darnton. Most significantly, Darnton incorporates recursion into his

model, allowing for actions from all involved groups to feed back into the system,

spinning off new texts and readings in perpetuity. While Darnton’s model has been

integral in clarifying the aims of book history as a field, it is also a principal example of

how people have centered the role of books in the study of history overall. In spite of

Figure 4.2: Darnton’s communications circuit of book history (68).

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history’s endless complexities—whether assessing economic, social, political, or other

facets—books can often get us where we need to go.

More recent entries in the book history or book-as-media conversation typically

confirm print’s outsized effect on culture and human behavior while simultaneously

expanding the conventional conceptions of print and “the book” on which previous views

relied. Leah Price, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, for example,

draws upon a range of historical precedents to free up the impression of a “standard

book.” In her formulation, “printed books have consistently been the newest of media”

(26) and continue to be so even during the current digital transition. In refutation of

Birkerts’s anxieties about the potential negative effects of digital technology on literature,

Price dismisses the premise altogether by incorporating the printed book into the same

technological timeline as digital media. “The crucial difference,” Price suggests, “may

not be between print and digital but rather among the different uses to which readers put

text, whatever its physical form” (29). Later, she writes, “Digital tools may not be

upending our reading practices any more drastically than changing forms of print did.

What they are revolutionizing is our ideas about reading. In the process, they’re remaking

the printed past” (33). So, for Price, while the entire history of text, print, and the book

flows freely with the advent of digital technology, digital technology does grant a new

vantage point from which to view and understand print. The arrival of a new form aids in

defamiliarizing the old, in some instances making visible what had been forgotten, and in

other instances changing our awareness of what may be possible. On a cultural scale, this

changing awareness is technogenesis in action.

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Consequently, evolving ideas about print and fiction are not restricted to the

publishing or “hardware” end of the process, but they extend to the conception and

execution of literary projects as well. In Track Changes, Matthew Kirschenbaum

documents an emergent literary history of word processing, exploring how the advent of

the personal computer and the development of composition software have forever

changed our notion of writing. As one might imagine, authors caught at the technological

crossroads of electronic vs. analog composition often had (and have) strong opinions on

their preferred method. For philosopher Michael Heim in the late 1980s, word processing

represented freedom from material constraint, a “profound rupture with this history of

material resistance, this push and pull between aching bodies and blank surfaces,

instruments, and inscriptions,” as Kirschenbaum describes (5). Other contemporary

writers, like Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates have obstinately

stuck with their typewriters (21). Sometimes the facts of an author’s compositional

practice contain humorous ironies: William Gibson, for example, famously wrote the

iconic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer on a manual typewriter—a Hermes 2000.

Although, Gibson’s choice was less about preference and more about necessity: he

couldn’t afford a computer (114). Particularly relevant, though, is an anecdote that

Kirschenbaum documents from an interview for the Paris Review between George

Plimpton and John Barth:

“Do you think word processors will change the style of writers to come?” Plimpton asks. “They may very well,” Barth replies, and continues: “But I remember a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins, Professor Hugh Kenner, remarking that literature changed when writers began to compose on the typewriter. I raised my hand and said, ‘Professor Kenner, I still write with a fountain pen,’ And he said, ‘Never mind. You are breathing the air of literature

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that’s been written on the typewriter.’ So I suppose that my fiction will be word-processed by association, though I myself will not become a green-screener.” (28–29)

Barth’s story about Kenner poignantly acknowledges the nature and scale of technogenic

change in response to media evolution. Technogenesis is not simply a matter of

individually opting in or out of such evolutions; rather, as in the case of word processing

and writing, the arrival and spread of a new technology marks the evolutionary event, and

that evolution necessarily reconfigures the entire relationship between a medium and

people. Even if, for example, a writer such as Cormac McCarthy continues writing with a

typewriter, that practice is irrevocably reclassified as a choice against, and in the context

of, digital word processing. The presence of new media choices—among increasing and

evolving options for writing—reveal the mediated characteristics inherent in existing

familiar media. As existing media evolve or when new media emerge, we face questions

of “Why choose that one?” and “What effects (on writing, on composition) do these new

choices afford?”

Kirschenbaum ultimately places word processing in the liminal space between the

“comfortably familiar and the encroachingly alien. Rather than a reimplementation or

remediation of typewriting,” Kirschenbaum continues, “I prefer to think of it as an

ongoing negotiation of what the act of writing means” (23). It is a fuzzy definition, to be

sure, but such critical moves—as in Price’s effort to loosen up our conception of books as

static material objects—place both contemporary literary practices and their products into

the dynamic environment of new and digital media. It is simply easier to define a moving

target with an equally agile definition. Not only is such a critical view essential for

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adequately historicizing contemporary literature, but also it relaxes the boundary between

print and digital literature, allowing the book to evolve more gradually into its post-

digital identity, and allowing scholars to open up the boundary itself to deliberate

analysis. The new conception of literary possibility is what allows for experimentation

from authors and what creates new audiences through a similarly evolving readership.

The key aspects of technogenesis in literature are borne out through this recursive

relationship between authors and readers, and between authors and their literary medium.

Ultimately, the evolving conception, execution, and reception of contemporary

print literature constitutes the broad focus of this dissertation. Whereas prior chapters

identified, explicated, and historicized key moments on the timeline of contemporary

book evolution, this final chapter explicitly engages the evolutionary mechanism by

which the book as a literary medium evolves in a digital and new-media environment.

This mechanism of bookish evolution—technogenic change by digital remediation—is

currently exemplified by an emergent tendency of contemporary fiction to incorporate

digital artifacts and structural conventions into a book’s printed pages. Specifically, this

rising mode of print fiction often remediates artifacts such as computer code, digital

filenames, multimedia files, digital communications like emails or text messages, and so

on. In what are usually considered the most experimental types of these books, the

remediation of digital technology back into print is deployed conspicuously, often in

service of a metafictional narrative in which the materiality and design of the book

contribute to the story being told. At these extreme levels of remediation, such narratives

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aspire to transcend the structural limitations of the codex and to model the expansive,

associative, and fragmented character of electronic text.

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007), for example, is among the popular

entries into the genre of new media experimental fiction. The plot of Raw Shark centers

on an amnesiac narrator being pursued in his mind by a conceptual shark of sorts that will

consume him. While the narrator, Eric Sanderson, is attempting to piece his memory back

together and ward off the shark, the book incorporates a variety of unconventional textual

features into its pages, including code sequences, diagrams, typographic illustrations in a

style reminiscent of concrete poetry, and a flip-book animation. Additionally, one of the

main characters serves as a foil to Sanderson’s narrative quest for stability and self-

preservation. The villain of the novel is described as a scientist who had developed a

process for immortality that turned him into a “huge online database of self with dozens

of permanently connected node bodies” (204). For Hayles, Raw Shark explores the

tensions between narrative organization and database structure through this character

battle, testing “what it would mean to transport a (post)human subjectivity into a

database, at the same time that it enacts the performative power of imaginative fiction

conveyed through written language” (“Material Entanglements” 115). In Julia Panko’s

reading, the peculiar materiality of Hall’s novel acknowledges “the ways in which print is

dependent upon digital media for aspects of its production”—from word processing to

contemporary publishing—while simultaneously problematizing digital storage

technologies in comparison to the textual storage of print on paper. Underscoring the

tension between print and digital media in the novel, Hall revealed shortly after

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publication that each of Raw Shark’s 36 chapters have complementary “un-chapters” or

“negatives” that exist online or are hidden in the real world (“What are Raw Shark Texts

Negatives?”). In a literal sense, Raw Shark’s component narrative structure is spread

widely across media and the map. Hayles’s and Panko’s readings of Raw Shark are also

representative of new-media-based approaches to new-media-inflected novels, showing

both sides of the technogenic feedback loop in which both readings and texts are affected

by evolutions in the media environment. Just as Hall leverages the affordances of digital

design and organization in creating his novel, Hayles and Panko read according to new

critical strategies prompted by Raw Shark and other similar novels.

Such an evolution in reading strategy and media viewpoint is similarly modeled in

the progression of this dissertation, as the bookish theme of each chapter reflects a

historical development of technogenic change that cycles with literary output of the time.

While the fundamental processes of technogenic shifts in media, literary forms, and

reading maintain deep congruities across historical periods, each period is also

characterized by contemporary media ecologies and their particular literary practices. The

primary works discussed in each chapter are, in one sense, exceptional in their relation to

conventional literary output of their times, yet they are also typical in the way they

anticipate and actively create conventions of the future. In other words, as the

culmination of this extended study of material design and contemporary literature, this

chapter both explains the role of the book within the cycle of media evolution as well as

advances a reading strategy for right now. As digital technology saturates culture, our

senses and strategies for reading must (and already have) irrevocably changed in

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response. It makes no difference to be an avowed luddite and an advocate for the print

medium—we are all breathing the air of literature written through and against digital

media.

A comparative approach in understanding our changing sense of books and

literature at the advent of the digital era is perhaps best captured, in both spirit and

articulation, by Andrew Piper in his 2012 meditative monograph Book Was There:

Reading in Electronic Times. Seemingly in conversation with Hayles’s explication of

media technogenesis in How We Think (published in the same year), Piper identifies the

understanding of “how technologies both old and new, shape how we read” as an

emerging professional priority, an undertaking made more urgent because the increasing

complexity of digital technology has outpaced our collective understanding of its

workings (viii). Ultimately, Piper’s “book is not a case for or against books [ . . . ] [nor is

it] about old media or new media (or even new new media)”:

Instead, it is an attempt to understand the relationship between books and screens, to identify some of their fundamental differences and to chart out the continuities that might run between them. Much like my own personal history in which computers and books were interwoven into the fabric of my life from the very start, electronic reading has a very deep bibliographic history. In Gertrude Stein’s words, books were there. It is this thereness that is both essential for understanding the medium of the book (that books exist as finite objects in the world) and also for reminding us that we cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past. Books got there first. Books and screens are now bound up with one another whether we like it or not. (ix)

Characteristic of the last decade of media studies and book history—including Price’s

What We Talk About and Amaranth Borsuk’s widely praised The Book—Piper’s method

mixes the historical excavation of book-media precedents with comparative analysis of

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contemporary digital technologies. Piper thus organizes his analysis according to

conceptual congruities between media realms, including chapters on hands/handling,

page design and navigation, and the act of sharing. While Piper’s method provides a

useful model of critical provocations in this area, there remains an opportunity to

reconcile a comparative approach to contemporary literature with the synthesis of

print/digital sensibilities prompted by technogenesis through remediation. Specifically, it

allows us the opportunity to dismantle the before/after construct and wade into the murky

in-between. In this way, we reject (for the moment) the past-tense posture of Piper’s title

in order to appreciate the emergent mode of contemporary literature that sits firmly at the

boundary of the print/digital divide.

In studying this transitionary period of bookish evolution, I will first highlight the

literary work of author Steve Tomasula and use it to map a complex media ecology of

digital technology, print books, and the human body. Tomasula’s work provides an

archetypal framework for approaching new entries into this emergent genre of

contemporary literature. As exceptionally experimental, hyper-self-aware media

productions in both print and electronic formats, Tomasula’s novels represent the

narrative avant-garde at the current height of print literature’s digital (re)turn. Often

working with graphic designers and computer programmers to create his novels,

Tomasula pushes his literary medium to the conceptual and material limit.

Subsequently, this chapter will turn to a close reading of theMystery.doc: a novel

by Matthew McIntosh. In many respects, McIntosh’s novel represents a cumulative

fusion of digital aesthetics with print materiality, carrying the avant-garde tendencies of

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Tomasula’s novels into, arguably, a more accessible narrative framework. Specifically,

theMystery.doc simulates a playful dialectic between digital media and its own bookish

materiality, creating meaning through its own processes of self-aware remediation. This

synthetic method for meaning-making in the novel affirms its status as technogenic novel

par excellence: cognitive reorganization as prompted by digital technology is cycled back

and represented in the novel’s printed pages, which in turn informs new understandings

and uses of that technology. In other words, theMystery.doc is a novel—and a book—for

its moment of media evolution. Representative of all books produced in this moment, as I

argue, theMystery.doc serves as an elemental point of feedback on which to model our

shifting conceptions and perceptions of digital media, the book, and each medium’s

material relationship to ourselves.

To date, Steve Tomasula has produced four novels: VAS: An Opera in Flatland

(2004), The Book of Portraiture (2006), TOC: A New-Media Novel (disc 2009, app

2014), and IN & OZ (2012). Each entry in his oeuvre represents a thorough interrogation

of media and (biological) evolution, of the novel and form, of the book and the body. For

scholars David Banash and Andrea Spain, Tomasula’s work is fundamentally

contextualized through the epochal shifts in science and technology in the twentieth

century that reshaped both the “human perceptions and experiences of everyday life” and

also the disciplinary fields through which the advancements were made in the first place

(1–2). At stake is not simple speculation about the linear effects of technology. As

Banash and Spain crucially recognize, Tomasula’s literary process foregrounds the

complex recursive relationship between media and humans: “the evolutionary forces and

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material expressions of the biological and the cultural exist in feedback loops whose

resonance produce the worlds we experience” (3, emphasis added). Tomasula’s work

thus responds to such evolving perceptions by developing a novel form that matches the

complex dynamism of its environment. Once again—a dynamic form to match a moving

target. In his critical essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of the Posthuman

Narrative,” Tomasula queries the essential traits “to paint a portrait of our time,” indexing

a litany of digital-age hallmarks, including (presciently)

a world where an outbreak of Avian Flu travels the globe as quickly as this information, or bad loans in One-Horse, Montana cause a town in Iceland to go bankrupt [ . . . ] the fact that [people’s] very DNA can be edited, patented, and rearranged like any other data [ . . . ] the power to make privacy go the way of the dodo bird, publishing our vacation plans, monitoring keystrokes at work, co-authoring public portraits by contributing data dots of when we rise, shop, drive, sleep, what we buy, eat, watch, where we go, how we talk, read, click, scroll, or who we meet, text, or email [ . . . ] (n.p.)

In response to this contemporary reality, Tomasula asks drily, “To depict such a world,

do the techniques of 19th century oil painting suffice?” In the essay, Tomasula focuses on

human conceptions of scale and information, specifically, but the point extends to

virtually any human perception or conception of a shared reality. Of course, the

principles of remediation suggest that such historical techniques persist in the

conceptualization of new forms, and therefore the process is one of negotiation and

transition rather than a radical break. Nevertheless, in tacit agreement with Hayles’s

formulation of media technogenesis, Tomasula argues for the inevitable necessity of new

artistic forms in response to new media environments.

In both his non-fiction and literary work, Tomasula is deeply invested in the

coevolution of media and people. As situated in books, historically, the novel represents a

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literary form through which such evolutions can be traced and queried. Banash and Spain

draw parallels, for example, from Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of John Dos Passos’s

U.S.A Trilogy spanning the 1920s and ‘30s, which is a remarkable text because of the

remediated technological forms incorporated into its pages, such as newspaper clippings,

lyrics presented as “Newsreels,” and unfiltered descriptive passages labeled as “Camera

Eye.” In the wake of the proliferation of digital technology and culture, Tomasula’s

novels are best considered not as experimental works, but rather as part of the inevitable

evolution of the novel and its material book form. The techniques of prior generations

and media environments, from Dos Passos to oil painting, are no longer viable in the

service of the novel’s capacity for individual introspection against cultural interrogation.

There is no flaw to the methods of oil paintings or the U.S.A Trilogy, and indeed they

work in fundamentally the same way as Tomsula’s works by incorporating new

perceptions derived from contemporary media into their own artistic applications;

however, their individual efficacy is bound to their historical moment and the media used

to characterize their world view. What was once an innovation in expression becomes a

dead metaphor. In an interview with Banash, Tomasula readily admits to his search for a

form suitable for the contemporary challenges of a new episteme brought on by

technology:

[Writer and theorist Ronald Sukenick] was right, the linear novel no longer seemed to fit, but what form did? Looking back, I think I didn’t get the metaphor quite right—I was thinking of [my earlier novels] more as collages, or a mosaic, where lots of little pieces come together to form a large picture, but now I can see more clearly what I was groping toward was a way to emulate a form of emergence: a form where lots of little actions, all created for their own reasons, come together to create larger patterns [ . . . ] I think you’re right that on one hand the novel seems really inadequate to describe the large scale, or global and

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interlaced nature of contemporary life, or even the massive amounts of information we generate just by living [ . . . ] [but] we’re still figuring out what the novel is good at. At least I am. But the one-to-one relationship that a reader has with a book seems to be part of the answer [ . . . ] The materials of the book also seem to be part of this [ . . . ] I’m simply trying to work out what the novel is as a medium. (302–4)

Tomasula’s search for form is undoubtedly a hallmark of artistic aspiration. The history

of art could easily be characterized as a timeline of formal innovations, with artists

responding to their own respective time and place. In regard to the novel, specifically,

Tomasula appears to figure himself in the same sequence of innovation of Sterne, Joyce,

Woolf, and Calvino. Importantly, Tomasula’s awareness and subsequent fusion of

technology and evolution, specifically, is what most strikingly characterizes his literary

output and marks it as a cultural product of its time. Tomasula also sees his books as

modeling a kind of dynamic pattern or energy, which simultaneously destabilizes the

conventional book form while making it better suited for his purpose of crafting a text for

the digital age. Tomasula concludes his interview remarking, “Maybe that is the source of

the themes you [Banash] identified earlier: technology putting pressure on what it means

to be human; “book” technology putting pressure on what it means to read and write; the

two together contributing to an evolution of the novel?” (304). Certainly, “technology” as

a broad category of human-made media and technics has always served this purpose, but

Tomasula refers here specifically to contemporary advances in digital technology and the

era of an internet-connected world.

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Clarity about the artistic endeavor is one thing, but what’s actually happening in

Tomasula’s books? In VAS: An Opera in Flatland, for example, the allegorical tale of

protagonist Square documents his struggle for autonomy and agency in the two-

dimensional world of Flatland,† which is governed by ancestry, genetic inheritance,

pedigree, and the material representations of these concepts, historically on paper or

† Setting, name, characters, and the primary conceit of a two-dimensional world ostensibly adapted from Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

Figure 4.3: two-page spread from Tomasula’s VAS that mimics a comics panel; the yellowed shade of the paper here is an intentional design choice (126–27).

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screen through 2-D dendrograms—tree diagrams that illustrate hierarchical relationships.

Tomasula complicates the structure of the typical printed novel through the inclusion of

myriad documentary sources, including pulled quotes, pages from old books, collage

illustrations, computer screenshots, scientific charts and graphs (some of which pull out

to accommodate extended ancestral lineages), sequences of genetic code, and so on. At

times the book borrows aesthetic design from its scientific source materials—an absurd

mass of footnotes on a page, for example, indicative of academic publication—but at

other times it adopts illustrative and typographic cues from comics—text bubbles and the

signature COMIC SANS font (Fig. 4.3).‡

Through this unconventional structure, a simple plot unfolds. At the opening of

the novel, Square is in the hospital awaiting his own vasectomy; the novel concludes with

Square prepped for the operation. The intermediary pages are thematically sprawling,

light on characterization and plot while heavy on the politics of reproduction, the role of

evolution in science and culture, and the significance of how documentary representation

shapes these ideas. In this conflation of theme and plot in VAS, the only limit to the

novel’s subject matter is perhaps the reader’s capacity for literary extrapolation. Cristina

Iuli captures the stakes of VAS in her summation of the novel’s modus operandi:

The novel presents a polymorphic structure that defies synopsis and simultaneously calls into question linearity and flatness as crucial logical coordinates securing narrative consistency and development. The story Vas tells is simple, with almost no action and minimal character and narrative development. The plot, however, is expansive, because it is spatially and graphically organized on the double register of the visual and the literal, both at work simultaneously,

‡ Tomasula frequently works with a design collaborator. For VAS, Stephen Farrell is credited with “Art + Design.”

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and both simultaneously engaging several, distinct materials on the same page. (68)

The remarkable feat of VAS is that, in spite of its emergent plotlines, it never settles into a

recognizably conventional structure—material, narrative, or otherwise. As Iuli

emphasizes in her reading, the inclusion of documentary sources is not supplemental to a

standard novel page layout; rather, the patterned effect of materiality encompasses the

entirety of the book. VAS asserts its categorization only through its presentation as a

bound codex and the conspicuous subtitle “A Novel.” Tomasula’s (first) attempt to

evolve the printed novel’s capacity for representation in response to the evolving

perceptions of the digital era depends greatly on a comprehensive and self-aware

deployment of remediation.

Not only does remediated source material operate in sequence across pages, but

VAS also creates dense composites in which many types of media are thrown together in

close proximity (Fig. 4.4). The effect is, at first, disorienting, but productively so. As

readers progress through the book, they settle into a navigational and reading strategy that

suits the novel’s unconventional composition; as pages become more complex over the

course of the novel, readers become necessarily more refined in their approach. In Iuli’s

paradigm, under these circumstances “the viewer/reader is forced to activate a sort of

selective hermeneutics navigating the image-text according to a recombinant logic,

assembling, disassembling, and reassembling a few, basic elements” in the same way the

novel connects DNA sequencing to writing (69). This observation seems to capture the

thematic link between navigational strategy and literary content, but in a more basic way,

it also demonstrates how VAS leverages feedback in the creation of a compositional

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pedagogy that serves both author and reader in the evolution of new representative

capacities for the novel and new perceptions in the techniques of reading Despite its

inscrutable appearance, readers can teach themselves how to proceed.

A divergence from Iuli’s reading must be made, however, at the figuration of the

book medium within this representational scheme. According to Iuli, the printedness of

the novel works as a foil to its otherwise digital preoccupations. Through its status as a

printed book, Iuli says, “Vas belongs to a techno-cultural milieu that is passé, and speaks

of an ‘archaic’ literary environment and its conventional functions (authorship, audience,

Figure 4.4: two-page spread from Tomasula’s VAS that combines internet browser windows, music staff notation, a diary excerpt, corporate promotional material, and more.

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reading epistemology etc.), rather than celebrate the creative possibilities that digital and

scientific outbreaks [sic] technologies have inaugurated for literature” (75). While Iuli is

interested in establishing VAS as an expression of the literary avant-garde, and thus

running counter to contemporary digital culture, this particular perspective relies on the

reductive conception of a print/digital media divide, in which the book is now the

irrelevant dated ancestor of digital new media. To commit to this perspective, as this

chapter argues, is to deny the capacity of remediation in which the book continues to

serve as an evolving material medium and conceptual framework. The shift to digital

culture is dramatic, of course, but the drama plays out through new iterations of the book

and the novel, such as VAS. In the course of human development and technogenic cycles

on a cultural level, one way we can track such shifts is through such challenging

experiments of form. In asking, “What can the book do now?” and “What can the novel

do now?” we are also asking how digital media has changed these forms and shaped us at

the same time—“What can we now do with both?”

The difficulty in tracking these changes, in medium and form, is that newness

often corresponds with inscrutability. At the extreme end of this continuum, in reading

veritably unreadable books—the artist’s book medium of “book sculpture,”

specifically—Garret Stewart describes an approach to such texts that acknowledges a

process he calls “demediation.” “In and beyond the work of book forms in sculptural

reduction,” Stewart says, “demediation names, in short, the process by which a

transmissible text or image is blocked by the obtruded fact of its own neutralized

medium” (413). In the context of Bolter and Grusin’s principle of remediation, from

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which Stewart draws his nomenclature, Stewart calls “demediation” a process that “peels

away the message service, leaving only the material support” (413n3); finally,

“demediation would set in when the singular book is no longer subject even to reading”

(412n2). Simply put, a work of demediation is a book that has been altered so severely

that it can no longer support and transmit its original textual message. One primary effect

of applying the lens of demediation to such works is a renewed awareness of the

“material preconditions” of each work: ultimately, “nonbooks serve to itemize the

features of book-based textuality that may otherwise be subsumed and elided by the

channels of transmission” (414). To track what is lost or altered during demediation, we

must also make explicit the essential characteristics of the book as a medium.

To be sure, VAS and Tomasula’s other novels are eminently readable compared to

demediated book sculptures, but they do represent significant transformations qua

evolution of the novel form and book medium. While these novels are not demediated

books in and of themselves, Stewart’s principle as a conceptual limit is helpful in

establishing a similar framework for understanding these important liminal cases at a

time of historical media shift. As an exemplary case study, VAS operates through an

extreme level of remediation, employing the multimedia collage effect seen in the figures

above. As the documents and media accumulate, the effect pushes the novel further away

from conventional book format, and specifically further away from representing a

conventional writing process that produces what we usually think of as novels. Following

this effect, and in drawing inspiration from Stewart’s classification, I propose

“decomposition” as a descriptor of such post-digital literary books in which the narrative

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is structured and transmitted through its conspicuous refusal of conventional publication

forms. The decomposed book seeks to undo the medating effect(s) of such writing

technologies as word processing in the novel’s published form; in other words,

decomposition sets in when the material form of the novel incorporates the process of the

text’s production into its narrative, rather than presenting itself as a fully realized,

composed final product.§ The brush strokes are not only visible, but, as in Tomasula’s

works, they are often entirely the point.

This visibility ultimately complements the method of decomposition with the

effect of overloading the reading experience. Decomposition is not simply a derivative of

deconstruction, pulling apart the component parts of book and novel and presenting them

as undone to the reader. Rather, in stripping away the mediating measures of traditional

composition, decomposition doubles, uncannily, as a kind of recomposition or even

übercomposition in the reading process, in which the implicit modalities of organization

and publication are brought to the surface. Like a feature film for which the “movie

magic” of editing has been removed and the bulk of raw footage is heaped onto the

reader, data and metadata in a decompositional text become one in a deluge of content.

What most readers approach as a complex “hybridity” of media forms is in fact sensory

overload brought on by the additive de-/re-/übercompositional process. And when the

rules governing conventional structure, organization, and representation are abandoned, a

§ Remix book fiction, discussed in the previous chapter, therefore incorporates aspects of demediation into the material design of novels in the genre. The distinction of remix, however, is that the demediated process involves the copying and processing of existing material.

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reconfiguration of reading method follows. Tomasula has publicly remarked on his

consideration of reader navigation in VAS, in particular, explaining his attempts to

formulate different ways to encourage readers to “read straight down or across a page [ . .

. ] [o]r feel free to assemble phrases in ways that would suggest different meanings the

way genetic letters can make either an oak tree or a mouse depending on how they are

assembled” (Bettencourt 159). While this recombinant reading method complements the

theme of genetics in VAS, it also clearly demonstrates the characteristic of a

decompositional text that leads to a recompositional reading method. When the

conventions of reading and text navigation are pulled apart, readers are often thrust into

the role of piecing the text back together. The overload then quickly follows in

Tomasula’s treatment: regarding one collage in VAS, for example, Tomasula says that his

“hope was that a reader could appreciate the density of the collage—seeing it as a visual

about information overload—without feeling compelled to actually read it, though a

reader could do that too, of course” (159). The decompositional design of VAS is

precisely the mechanism through which “information overload”—the übercomposition—

can be deployed without derailing a reader’s progress through the novel.

VAS is therefore an exemplary decomposition in its explicit commentary on

structures of the book and representations of the body. The “vas” of the title refers to

Square’s vasectomy procedure—the severing of the vasa deferentia in the male

reproductive system—but it also calls upon the etymological Latin root, “vessel” (OED).

The double entendre links the two targets of Tomasula’s thematic interrogation, both

literalizing its medical terminology and metaphorizing the book medium as a bio-biblio

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conveyance or transmitter of narrative. Thus, Tomasula’s desire to query the evolutionary

capacity of media and the human can be tracked through the novel’s deconstruction of the

human form mirroring the decomposition of narrative and bookish forms. For example, in

the first-edition hardcover printing of VAS, the spine of the book is wrapped in a

facsimile of skin that also reveals a ribbon of sinewy muscle underneath. Juxtaposed with

this biological depiction is the remainder of the front cover that appears as raw cardstock:

light brown, with the texture of wood pulp prominently visible. The effect of the cover

design prepares readers for the essentializing of biological and bibliographic components

in the deployment of narrative. The opening sequence of the novel subsequently

underscores the nature of this interaction between body and book: “FIRST PAIN. Then

knowledge: a paper cut.” The passage continues:

On the page in his lap, the truth world he’d been writing into existence was slicing membranes

dead-skin white—paper sans corpuscles— nothing more—the bubble of presence its people and dramas had occupied pricked by less than a sting and he buried them beneath the hospital form he had cut himself on. so effortlessly that it would be bloodless (9–10; original text style and layout approximated)

On the surface of this narration, the competing figures of book-as-body and body-as-book

dominate the opening image, illustrating what will be the primary focus of the novel. The

protagonist Square demonstrates an explicit awareness of this bio-biblio relationship,

describing the paper in hand as “dead-skin white” and figuring it through the language of

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biological material. More importantly, though, this opening sequence, along with the

cover design, models the book as a decomposition and instructs readers on how to

proceed. The layout of this opening block of text will come to characterize the element

most closely resembling conventional formatting in the book, doing so in service of much

of the novel’s expositional content. The effect is uncanny, however, as the enjambed lines

resist the impression of a finished product. Italicized remarks, offset and interspersed,

seem to offer both metanarrative commentary on the text as well as possible substitutions

and revisions—an embedded track changes of narration.

Through such examples VAS works as a decomposition. By incorporating

representations of the bookmaking and text-making processes into its material form, VAS

undoes the mediation of conventional printed novels that, over time, has concealed these

processes. To this point, decomposition is the primary effect of Tomasula’s efforts to

create patterned, dynamic texts through extensive digital remediation. In destabilizing the

material format of his novels, Tomasula prompts a reassessment of what books and

novels can do. According to Tomasula, the novel’s subject focus on the biotech

revolution is more deeply about “the way we are able to manipulate genes the way we

manipulate text [ . . . ] [the book is] a metaphor for the body to mirror how the body is

beginning to be seen as a kind of book: both can be edited” (Bettencourt 158). For

Tomasula, a book/body dialectic can produce new knowledge about both. In the historical

framework laid out in this chapter, the mode of decomposition is often how such

exemplary works of contemporary fiction operate as points of bookish feedback in

media’s technogenic loop. The same decomposition that facilitates instructive feedback

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on the micro-level of individual reading in books like VAS also works to prompt macro-

level reflection and reassessment in the cultural scope of technogenesis. In this final

sense, VAS and other innovative contemporary books do not represent a settled vision for

the future of the medium but rather one moment in an ongoing negotiation of possibility

and meaning. Ultimately, this capacity for negotiation is the hallmark of books in the

digital age, and in our now reformed conception of their historical development as media.

Through the book we work out changes in our environment and in us, and in this process

contemporary fiction can serve as an essential node of feedback for technogenesis as a

whole.

One more concept drawn from information theory serves our new understanding

of such provocative literary works—“information” itself. One of Claude Shannon’s key

innovations was in challenging the previously acknowledged goal of communication to

transmit meaning from one entity to another. Shannon revised this conception by

removing meaning from the equation altogether, instead focusing on the reproduction of

the original message through a signal (Gleick 221–22). Just as feedback plays a vital role

in adjusting input and output in a communication system, so does entropy in transmitting

a message. In colloquial usage, entropy today refers to a breakdown of order, signaling an

increasing lack of predictability or expected outcomes. For Shannon, entropy became

information in his model. To understand how this works, we have to adopt a kind of

Borgesian approach to communication—in information theory, “entropy is a measure of

uncertainty about a message: one message among all the possible messages that a

communications source can produce” (Gleick 280). For Shannon: “information is closely

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associated with uncertainty”; “some messages may be likelier than others, and

information implies surprise”; “information is entropy” (219). In other words,

information brings an otherwise unattainable order to the chaos of the vast possibilities

for any given message. In this manner, redundancy** is an indication of reduced—or

diluted—information transfer because the statistical range for possible messages is

decreased. Particularly entropic environments, on the other hand, foster information-rich

messages. Information necessarily subverts expectation by providing something new for

the recipient (246–49). This formulation, worked out through Shannon’s research and the

proceedings of an annual conference with an interdisciplinary cohort of info-theory

stakeholders, would eventually provide the basis for the modern AI movement, from

Turing’s Imitation Game to the predicative text options in an iPhone’s messaging app.

In the study of contemporary literature, however, Shannon’s principles of

information transfer can help shape our conception of evolving book forms. For example,

and on the one hand, conventional paperback genre fiction relies on the redundancy of

recognizable formats. The purpose of these types of texts is to fulfill expectations of the

readers, from the genre traits of sci-fi or fantasy, to standard print and page layouts, to

chapter length and narrative structure.†† In a Shannon-derived approach, works in

** Redundancy works at a basic linguistic level as well. To illustrate: it is the rsn ppl cn stll rd wrds tht r mssng mny ltrs. Shannon estimated the English language to be 40 percent redundant overall (“The Redundancy of English” 248–49). †† Science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany elaborates on this phenomenon at semiotic, syntactic, and generic levels. In the same way sentences delimit the (wide-ranging potential) meaning of individual words, so does the genre for sentences, e.g., “Her world exploded” appearing in a sci-fi novel. “The point is not that the meaning of the sentences is ambiguous,” Delany writes, “but that the route to their possible mundane meanings and

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established genres contain and transmit little information as nearly all aspects of their

production fall within a reader’s general expectation of the reading experience. On the

other hand, novels like VAS make good on their category label because they subvert

similar expectations and provide the reader with a truly new reading experience. Such

novels are information-rich through their resistance to predictability in form and content.

Of course, all artistic and media forms were at some point truly novel and therefore

information-rich, but the eventual recognizability and popularization of such formats

negatively correlate with their capacity for information communication. For instance, at

their original release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds

communicated a great amount of information, particularly about the expanded expressive

potential of pop music; sixty years later, in the wake of the albums’ outsized influence on

the music industry and listening public, their information capacity has diminished. They

no longer subvert expectations because they have now created new ones on a cultural

level.‡‡ Therefore, when viewed historically, it becomes clear that the role of information

the route to their possible SF meanings are both clearly determined” (27). Over time, experienced genre readers become conditioned to the delimitating conventions of science fiction, and they become better navigators of these literary world. This chapter recognizes that the material design of the literary medium, i.e., books, are incorporated into similar processes. ‡‡ Frederic Jameson remarks on a correlated historical process in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather ‘realistic,’ and this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement [ . . . ] This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics” (4). The discussion in this chapter could be regarded, in part, as a reconciliation of Jameson’s formulation about the historical transition of

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communication in literary form depends on the recursive evolution of both reader and

text. Information, as understood through Shannon’s paradigm, is the final necessary

component of bookish feedback. To effect technogenic change, a work must contain and

transmit a high amount of information. The apparent cultural tendency to continually

reinvent the book sustains the medium’s high capacity for information and secures its

place even an increasingly digital future. Reinvention is the promise of the novel as a

literary form as well, creating an ideal partnership between medium and practice.

Enter Matthew McIntosh’s 2018 theMystery.doc: a novel. Upon first encounter,

theMystery.doc strikes the reader as a formidable, hulking beast. At nearly three inches

thick and weighing over four pounds, the novel’s own bookishness comes across as

humorously ostentatious, its proportions exceeding even the lengthiest printed epics and

perhaps more closely resembling a reference volume than a work of fiction. A ribbon

bookmark protrudes from the pages, completing the overtly bibliographic performance.

The shock factor of encountering this novel plays precisely into the text’s capacity for

information communication—such unexpected physical proportions create in the reader a

renewed awareness of the material realities of the enclosed narrative. Redundancy and

expectation in the usual publication of novels is drastically reduced through

theMystery.doc’s estrangement of its own materiality.

No mere gimmick, the material proportions of the book are basic to the novel’s

primary conceit of digital remediation. As readers quickly discover, the nearly 1700

postmodernity and a media-centric approach to understanding the evolution of literary forms with an application of information theory.

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pages of the book are not filled with traditionally formatted text, but rather, the novel is

filled with a myriad of different (digital or multimedia) source materials, from

photographs and movie stills, to chat logs and illegible computer code strings, to internet

search results, excerpts of classic literature, and even just blank pages. In one aspect,

theMystery.doc creates a productive tension between digital and print media in the same

way that VAS works through the dialectic of book and body. While digital source content

would be clear and accessible in its native context—a chat exchange on a computer, for

instance—its remediated state in print creates an awkward and uncanny experience. One

hallmark of the contemporary digital media experience is the intentional concealment of

supporting computational processes, protocols, and hardware logistics. “It just works”

was the marketing slogan of Steve Jobs-era Apple, and that magical concept still governs

the average user’s computer experience today. Billions of people use email clients,

internet browsers, A/V editing suites, and so on every day, but an exceedingly small ratio

of people possess an awareness of the staggeringly complex set of databases, executable

programs, and engineering designs that make it all possible. In remediation, however,

these implicit characteristics can be made explicit during the transformation process. In

the case of theMystery.doc, the apparent justification for the book’s massive size is the

disparity of storage capability between digital and print formats, illustrating the

consequences of digital remediation into print at scale. All that code, all that metadata,

that gets easily tucked away in a digital environment dramatically fills up the pages of a

printed volume—nowhere to hide.

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Simply put, McIntosh’s novel is necessarily huge because of its (simulated)

gambit to contain as much material as a computer file might contain—specifically, a

Microsoft Word document. The gambit also concerns the treatment of such a file. There

is a freedom that accompanies digital storage today. To the contemporary user, the cost of

filling up space (or even just wasting it) in a word processing document is negligible. The

economic constraints that might govern a conventional, printed publication are

abandoned here. A few examples: late in the book, an incomprehensible series of stars

and colon symbols run for more than a dozen pages (1465–83); the final 25 pages are

blank, but still paginated with a header (1631–56); font and type size fluctuate throughout

the novel, suggesting a sloppy copy/paste method from other sources. In positing this

sizable tome as the ostensible printout of a word processing filetype, the fragmented

structure of narrative takes on the patterned energy of decomposition. The novel itself

resembles a work-in-progress, decomposed, and the acts of assembly that normally would

be subsumed by the mediation of authorship and publishing are incorporated into the

story. If theMystery.doc can be claimed to have a central narrative, it is the telling of

itself.

Certainly, other recognizable plot threads—or, at least, recurring motifs—are

present in the voluminous pages, and all of them work in support of the novel’s

metanarrative pursuit. As the promotional summary on the inside cover describes, “the

book follows a young writer and his wife as he attempts to write the follow-up to his first

novel, searching for a form that will express the world as it has become, even as it

continually shifts all around him.” As a search for a [book] form in the digital age,

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McIntosh’s novel follows in the contemporary tradition of Tomasula, but in doing so,

recalls modernist classics of the same aspiration. Author and comics writer Alan Moore,

in his book blurb on the back cover, explicitly connects theMystery.doc to T. S. Eliot’s

own formal innovation in The Waste Land, for example. This search in McIntosh’s novel

is similarly formal, but it is also literalized through the recurring narrative of the young

writer, first awakening with amnesia and not knowing who he is or anything about his life

(a peculiar similarity to The Raw Shark Texts). The only clue available to the author is a

blank document on his computer titled themystery.doc. As the story of the amnesiac

author resurfaces throughout the novel, he learns that he has been working on his book

for eleven years, with apparently nothing to show for it. Despite representing the most

lucid and conventional aspect of the entire book, the amnesiac author narrative accounts

for only a small fraction of the novel as a whole. Therefore, while it is beyond the scope

of this study to provide a comprehensive analysis of the content of the text—an ambitious

endeavor, should it be attempted in the future—a few key examples will serve to

illustrate the novel’s primary mode of meaning-making through digital remediation as

well as its role as a point of feedback in the technogenic evolution of the printed novel in

the digital age.

Like texts working in a similar mode, the opening sequence of the novel is more

instructive about its structure than it is explanatory in expositional detail. Rather than a

preface or chapter heading, the novel begins with a digital audio file name and metadata,

recorded as “fortellcometell.wav Created Friday, March 23, 2007 10:49 PM” (i). The text

which follows appears to be taken from the audio file, though its unconventional layout—

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scattered about the page—suggests an evocation of the file’s content rather than a

straightforward transcription. This evocation is evident in the transcription’s use of

revisionary repetition across enjambed and variably aligned text. In three early examples:

[1] then to hear a dismal voice a plaintive voice an extremely sad voice

[2] if you wish to reach the guerdon the prize the treasure [3] he finds himself among flowered meadows, flowery meadows, flowering meadows, (ii–iii)

Slight adjustments in the iterations of each phrase suggest a recorded speaker revising

lines as they are spoken. The conceit of the audio file in this case justifies such linear

revision for the basic reason that speech is not composed the same way as writing. Here,

a “raw” unprocessed audio file creates the motif of decomposition in the novel.

Substitution and revision are incorporated into the narration, creating the impressions of a

work-in-progress and a text in search of the right words, the correct form.

Five hundred pages later, a similar audio file, labeled 20070707

210421TheCastle.wav, records speaker “M” in conversation describing the creative

process:

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M: And the Forms are out there and every Idea we have has a corresponding Form out, off in the ether somewhere in heaven. It feels like writing XXXXX . . . the Ideas that I—the way I see it—and I see things in shapes, and I see the castle, and I see the fair, and I see all this stuff—it feels like I’m creating Forms and putting them out there, in heaven; and here we have the Book which is full of the Ideas, but create the Forms through the Ideas—you know what I mean? (521)

In obvious metacommentary on the novel itself, M describes in basic platonic terms the

connections he sees among the conception of ideas and the role of creativity in accessing

universal forms. At the same time, for M, the creative process, along with the ability to

access form, involves a reciprocal relationship with one’s material medium. He

continues:

M: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX as XXXXXXXX XXXXX the book XXXX gets more complex, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX by taking the different ingredients I put into it it creates different forms itself—forms I never saw, forms I never intended—and so the words and the phrases that have already been in there become filled with so much more meaning than they had before, and they all start to finally make sense—more sense than they did, and they take on new levels of meaning, like, the way they now have—here you have this entity that’s been dipped in a totally different color paint, and now XXXX everything that it’s around takes on a different color too XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

(523)

In this second passage, M continues his manic explication of artistic vision by describing

the role of “the book” itself as an independent source of meaning. In one sense, M is

recognizing the dual roles of author and reader, artist and critic, which may be embodied

by the same person. But if figured as part of a communication system, “the book” also

becomes a point of feedback for M. Inputs are made through writing, and as the book

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takes shape, M is able to read each iteration—separate from his original intention—and

adjust as necessary.

Additionally, in both passages, the use of black-bar redactions constitutes another

recurring typographic motif in the novel. As much as theMystery.doc is overstuffed with

all varieties of content, a small but significant portion of text and image is censored from

the reader. The first instance of redaction, in fact, occurs on the title page—a large, black

bar centered in the place of the title, above the Grove Press logo. Thematically, one might

be tempted to read into the “unknowable” nature of McIntosh’s enigmatic book. Content

Figure 4.5: In one example of incorporating multimedia sources into the novel, a license to include movie stills from Titanic were apparently requested but denied. Whether or not this licensing snafu is factual, metadata for the stills is incorporated into the content of the novel as well as an exchange with Twentieth Century Fox (124–25).

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is intimated, outlined, and gestured at through the redactions, and one can often make

sense of the passages through context clues or included metadata. At the same time, from

a bibliographic perspective, the redactions also represent the process of decomposition at

work in the novel. In this case, redacted text signals the hand of a censor working over

existing material. Instead of edits being incorporated into a final version, marks of review

are maintained to imbue the book with a documentary character. There is a before but no

after, and the composition process itself is undone.

Through decomposition, theMystery.doc aligns with information. In the novel’s

“Act III: The Last Days of the System,” the amnesiac author has yet another free-

association outburst:

In my dreams I am solving the problem of order. I have much information compiled, and it is up to me to order it. It is a problem which consumes me. There is an endless number of potential orderings, but only one correct way. It is my job to find the correct order. The outcome depends on the order. It is also my job to compile. The ordering becomes more complicated with each new piece of information. For instance, this transmission will be included, but I do not know where. Information is reactive. Once linked to the codex, this information will form ideas. The ideas will link to other ideas within the codex and form new ideas. These ideas will form further ideas. Eventually the ideas will become energy. Energy is power. And it is power that will move the machine. The machine will remove the girl and myself from the world of the Simulators. It will place us, together, in a world that is finally real. At least this is the current plot. I do not hold on to plots for long, for they constantly change as we move in a forward direction. Yet, there is one ultimate end to the story, and I am trying to find my way there. I cannot simply arrive. I must journey there. And by journeying I must act. And by acting, my journey grows longer. For with each act comes connections. Which must be worked through, then cut off. I am going the long way around. I am living these plots. For that is the only way know how. I will not write the end. Projection is dangerous. If I project the end, I may find myself trapped in an alternate end created by my own mind. Then we would end in failure. (962–63)

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This passage maintains consistency with similar recurring meta-narration throughout the

novel, insofar as the narrator’s theMystery.doc project stands in for theMystery.doc as a

whole. Here, the act of composition is the narrator’s primary obstacle in the transmission

of information. According to Shannon, the chief problem of communication is the

accurate transmission of a message across time and space. In the publication of a book, as

with Darnton’s circuit, the message might be construed as an author’s idea, ultimately

immaterial and contained within his/her mind. The amnesiac author in theMystery.doc

recognizes the inherent pitfalls in putting mind to matter, with the material medium

inevitably incapable of capturing and transmitting the swirling vortex of information that

he imagines. There is the question of individual writing skill as well, but mostly the

author balks at the moment when information becomes “linked to the codex” and the

process of information compilation necessarily ceases. In other words, the amnesiac

author is principally obsessed with communicating the active formation of his ideas, the

process of inspiration, insight, and discovery. The proposed solution appears to be the

unfinished form of the book—decomposition as a rejection of the stasis implied through

conventional publication. Ultimately, the amnesiac author (as a surrogate for McIntosh)

leverages the entropy potential of decomposition to create an information-rich text most

suitable for his goal. In this sense, theMystery.doc represents amplified bandwidth,

potentially capable of transmitting not only complex ideas but also the creative process

that led to the formation of those ideas. Demonstrating a sharp awareness of the

technological context of the twenty-first century, McIntosh has created a novel that

grasps that, fundamentally, all writing is remediation.

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These ideas of theMystery.doc ultimately concern death and loss at both

individual and societal scales. The novel is proffered as a realization of grief in the wake

of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in that attempt the novel dives deeply into literary,

historical, and personal examples: a recurring transcription of an apparent 911 phone call

made from the World Trade Center towers; a couple drowns in a boating accident; a

parent lost to cancer; etc. The novel withholds expositional context for each instance, and

to that end readers must piece together the events through fragmented vignettes and any

accompanying media—once again, a glut of raw content—the übercomposition—

overwhelms the sensory experience. The overwhelming effect here accentuates both the

senselessness of the tragedies as well as the book medium’s ultimate incapability to

process or communicate such loss. Indeed, theMystery.doc represents McIntosh’s search

for form, never the arrival at one.

The novel comprises dozens more plot fragments, movie and television still

frames, chat threads, literary excerpts, newspaper clippings, and more. At the close of the

book’s nearly 1700 pages, an appropriately media-confused “Credits” account for at least

a partial sourcing of documentary material. The physical size of the book and the

dizzying scope of its contents consequently overwhelms any reader. It becomes quickly

apparent that the typical reading strategies for conventional printed novels will not suffice

in making any sense of this enigmatic work. In informatic terms, such conventional

reading methods rely on the communication redundancies of genre and format in popular

fiction. Readers may then ignore such redundancies and focus on the signal of plot,

character, chapter breaks, etc. An entropic literary work such as theMystery.doc,

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however, overloads its signal through uncertainty. With the exception of the bound

codex, readers cannot rely on standards in most aspects of the novel. As a result, the

novel approximates pure information.

Authors at the bleeding edge, such as Tomasula and McIntosh, relentlessly push

their literary medium beyond accepted practice. The push is the point. Readers must

adjust their reading strategies in response, developing and deploying new cognitive

approaches to make sense of the new work in front of them. Just as Tomasula and

McIntosh remediate digital technology into their novels, readers leverage their own

contemporary understanding of how such technologies function. In a synthesis of the

technogenic loop and Darnton’s circuit, the process continually feeds back into itself:

authors innovating books, books challenging readers, readers evolving and thus

challenging authors to begin again. This ongoing process not only changes the way we

read, but also changes the way printed novels might be conceived of, now in our

thoroughly digital culture. As scholars Price and Piper remind us, books seem to have

always been there serving in this capacity, the newest of media, not least because of their

facility to work as a frame of reference in a changing media landscape.

Nevertheless, there is a price to pay for change. Reading theMystery.doc is

challenging and often frustrating in this regard. Coherency is illusive, and the satisfaction

typically gained from appreciating a well-turned story is thwarted. The novel demands

changes in the way we approach narrative and the way we read. In the absence of a

conventional, recognizable whole, one embraces the fragmentation set in place by the

media clips and vignettes composing the book. In an uncanny way, though, readers may

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eventually find this fragmentation to suit their particular rhythms of reading over time.

Spread out over days or weeks, reading a novel often comes through in bits. And to that

extent, so does writing one. The decompositional makeup of theMystery.doc fuses the

writing experience with the reading experience, creating a new kind of cohesive whole.

Ultimately, such a writing-reading experience is the distinguishing link to digital media

and new forms of electronic reading. As Hayles observes, the “information explosion”

that characterizes contemporary digital environments has necessitated these new ways of

reading. Specifically, a kind “hyper reading [ . . . ] enables a reader quickly to construct

landscapes of associated research fields and subfields; it shows ranges of possibilities; it

identifies texts and passages most relevant to a given query; and it easily juxtaposes many

different texts and passages” (How We Think 62). The modern web, for example, is

designed to take advantage of the affordances of both powerful computation—to generate

content with on-the-fly user interaction—as well as savvy users who quickly learn the

most effective techniques to navigate their new environment. Scan, skim, multi-direction,

multi-tab, compare/contrast, search, click, track: acquiring the rudiments of modern

human-computer interaction are not unlike learning the fundamentals of a new musical

instrument. The literary experiments of Tomasula and McIntosh seem to be refashioning

the form of the printed novel into a text governed by such digital logics—navigation and

association instead of close reading; query and relevance instead of holistic approach;

“ranges of possibilities” instead analysis and interpretation. With theMystery.doc, rather

than remembering particular plot details or even grasping a bigger picture, reading

becomes emotionally experiential, one piece at a time, one sitting at a time. The

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embedded message is no less than the scale of grief and the processing of trauma, and,

through this evolution of book and novel forms, McIntosh’s signal gets through. A novel

for its time; reading for right now.

214

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