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A way of finding stories in the deluge.

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This book is unique as no other novel can claim to be: one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations of the same work of fiction. Inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Tristano  was first published in 1966 in Italian. But only recently has digital technology made it possible to realise the author’s original vision. The novel comprises ten chapters, and the fifteen pairs of paragraphs in each of these are shuffled anew for each published copy. No two versions are the same. The random variations between copies enact the variegations of the human heart, as exemplified by the lovers at the centre of the story. The copies of the English translation of Tristano  are individually numbered, starting from 10,000 (running sequentially from the Italian and German editions). Included is a foreword by Umberto Eco explaining how Balestrini’s experiment with the physical medium of the novel demonstrates ‘that originality and creativity are nothing more than the chance handling of a combination’.

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Twenty

As I write this, with not only books and notebooks, printed pages and scribbled post-its,  and pens of three colors lying about,  but also 9+ applications open on my computer with two browsers with many dozens of tabs open, I can’t help but see Turkle’s hypothesis demonstrated before my eyes; theory brought down to earth.  How can  my composition style not be influenced by these forces? Just as Nietzsche’s was by his use of a typewriter.  

I hope to revise this, cutting it into blocks of aphorisms and quotations that will then be hyperlinked, giving the reader an opportunity to explore the themes, making connections of their own that I perhaps cannot even predict.   Like Jackson’s novel, this paper was patched together from many sources, written in chunks and reassembled, moved around, cut up and stitched together.

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Hopscotch

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NINETEEN

I have laid out several  historical and theoretical arguments for the role media plays in restructuring identity and consciousness, using Shelley Jackson’s paradigmatic hypertext novel The Patchwork Girl as a media specific analysis, an example of this shift, as well as the potential of this new medium of writing and reading text. 

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Vito Acconci, “Trademarks” (1970)

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“SNOW”

(with my apologies)

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Eighteen

Shelley Jackson, whose novel The Patchwork Girl has become the paradigmatic example of the hypertext novel, describes herself, and her work, and the fiction of the work’s author, as a patchwork. The novel itself is fragmented, meant to demonstrate to the reader the way in which all unities are composed of fluid and fragmented parts. Jackson tells the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s aborted attempt to make a bride for his monster, a patchwork girl completed by Mary Shelley herself.  The construction of identity, gender in particular, is central to the tale, and in this sense I think it resonates with my previous remarks on gender and identity as performed.  One can’t help but think of Donna Haraway, whose own writings on postmodern identity must surely have influenced Jackson. The “knowing self,” she writes, is “…partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly; and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.” Jackson’s choice of using the hypertext novel, incorporating image and text, as opposed to a print novel is in part an admission that digital technologies better reflect contemporary understandings of identity.  She writes that hypertext “blurs the distinction between subject and object.” Furthermore, this new novel (if you still want to call it that, she says,) is shaped more like her own thoughts.  In fact, the hypertext “is what literature has edited out: the feminine.”  The novel traditionally problematized gaps, forced linear narratives and a logic that she claims is masculine.  The ‘banished body’ is not necessarily female, but it is feminine, it is “amorphous, indirect, impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive,” that is all the things we have learned to call bad writing.  Hypertext recuperates this banished body, it challenges the ‘natural form’ of the book, just as its narrative challenges the natural form of the body.

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SEVENTEEN

The drive for more communication is always about loneliness, about reaching people who are absent.  Eros is lack.   Communication is trying to address that.   But this is not a new story, but seems to come along with the introduction of any new media, no matter how old or technologically unsophisticated.  Remember, each new media was cutting edge and advanced upon its introduction.  Anne Carson recounts an example from literature, taken from the Roman-era, Greek writer Achilles Tatius, in his novel Clitophon and Leucippe. 

Clitophon thinks that his lover Leucippe is dead, and becomes engaged to another.  Before the wedding, he receives a letter from Leucippe.  He immediately writes back: "I am miserable in the midst of joy because I see you present and at the same time absent in your letter."  Even in ancient times, long before industrialization and mechanization, before electricity and digitization, man expressed both hope and sorrow in the face of new technologies.

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Sixteen

Many critics of new media, from the common citizen to distinguished theorist,  have expressed anxiety regarding a loss of authenticity.  This is nothing new, as we have seen, but rather a reaction to the introduction of any new medium.   In this line of reasoning, traditional face to face communication is what counts as  authentic, and any mediation is a step away from this, and therefore another form of alienation.  Leo Löwenthal, the Jewish-German sociologist and associate of the Frankfurt School for Social Research writes that “for true communication entails a communion, a sharing of inner experience.  The dehumanization of communication has resulted from its annexation by the media of modern culture- by the newspapers first, and then by radio and television.” (“Communication and Humanitas.”)

However, one has to ask what makes face to face communication more authentic than newer forms of mediated communication.  Peters, quoting Cooley, notes that the face is just another symbol to be read like any other.   He continues that for Cooley,  "A person can be "more truly present" in letters, literature, of fantasy than "in the flesh.""(Cooley, 186) It is surely important to bear in mind the fact that we are embodied beings, but our communication is always already mediated, and being physically present is not any guarantee to more effective communication.  Communication breakdowns can, and do, occur in all forms of communication, technologically mediated or otherwise.

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The original Kindle, with “E-Ink”

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Call me a pessimist, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.

I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

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FIFTEEN

As any simple history of the written word will reveal, text is no more tied to the book than music is tied to a vinyl record.  We can engage with the book as a specific medium, but we cannot be trapped by it.  An e-book, or whatever form digital text takes, is no more a book than a scroll is.  As with music, so with print.  Many are predicting the death of print, particularly with the success of the Kindle e-book readers and the recent release of Apple’s iPad tablet.  These forecasts are not only mostly inaccurate, but they focus on conditions that really only existed in the last century or two.   It seems inevitable that eventually the business will shrink somewhat as more of the public generates their own, free, content, but there will always be publishing houses creating handsome, material, books by deserving authors. The paradigm might shift, but it can shift in a way that is inherently more democratic and less elitist.  Some might worry that this will mean a decline in quality, but I would remind those who make such objections that junk fiction has historically outsold works considered to have greater literary merit.