I have been so immersed in a book culture that even the
notion of defining the book at first struck me as a ridiculous question when I
first started thinking about it a few years ago. A book is a book. It’s
printed. It exists between two covers. It’s static. Yet we are all becoming involved in the
redefinition of the book.
The question of what the book is transforms into a question
of what we need it to be, and then, what can a book be? I think some of the ‘games’
that my children ‘read/play’ should be marketed to parents as the new form of
the book, because that’s really what they have become – game series like
Assassin’s Creed and The Elder Scrolls. They await the new releases just as I
await the latest books from my favorite authors. They immerse themselves in the plot, unlock the narrative
and experience the story through film, text, music and by creating the action
with their playing.
Literature – fiction and non-fiction - is how we tell each other stories and create a
shared experience and understanding. As our reading moves online, and we
explore the text plus world to enhance our reading experience, it is going to
become richer. But as Glenn’s son said, the experience of moving through text
and following new information can take you places that you didn’t expect to
reach. One thing about the 19th century book, you could always return
to your earlier experience and relive it;Chapter three stayed put and you
could go back to it. I find myself longing for a way to put an electronic lock
on my online experiences so I can readily re-access them. Like the Hotel
project that Coover describes, it can be disconcerting to find that your
favorite character has left the digital world, never to be found again. It
reminds me of a Zen haiku bit of internet humor that circulated a while back –
positing that Microsoft Error messages should be replaced with haiku:
With
searching comes loss
And
the presence of absence:
"My
Novel" not found.
So the answer to what a book is and what it will become also
depends on where and what its purpose is – is it an electronic textbook, an e-art
book (and wow, does that definition change from the old coffee table book
notion of an artbook), a novel for mass consumption, or a game-like experience?
There’s still a mass market, and I wonder if readers will become exhausted by
the new opportunities.
I went down a Peter Robinson
rabbit hole while reading Jared Jenisch. Robinson writes in WHERE WE
ARE WITH ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY EDITIONS, AND WHERE WE WANT TO BE and would
just end with a quote from him on scholary texts and how hypertext transforms
us from readers into editors:
“Scholarly editing has for
centuries distinguished between editors and readers: we, the editors, are
gifted with special access to the materials, and we are licensed by the academy
to make editions which you, the readers, accept. This [hyperlinked] approach
attacks this distinction. All readers may become editors too, and all editors
are readers before they are editors. This does not propose that all readers
should become editors all the time: most of us will be content to accept, most
of the time, what Gabler tells us about Ulysses, or Werner tells us about
Dickinson. But any good reader must sometimes be an editor. Gaps may also
appear in other barriers, long present within the academy: that between documentary and critical editing, that between textual scholarship and
literary scholarship. We are all engaged in the business of understanding:
distributed editions fashioned collaboratively may become the ground of our
mutual enterprise.”
Very interesting and reflective post Judith. I'm thinking of GISELLE BEIGUELMAN's The Book after the Book (http://www.virtualart.at/database/general/work/the-book-after-the-book.html).
ReplyDeleteI'm also thinking about that idea that 19th C books were "static" in that sense that we could go back to a chapter (as you explain). But, what about other books and stories like Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar, Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino, Life: A User's Manual (1978) by Georges Perec and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino. These are just some stories, especially Hopscotch, where the author deliberately tries to prevent the reader from retracing her/his steps. Similarly with Calvino and Perec, they wove narratives that encouraged us, as readers, to lose our *spots*. These books too, today, might be said to facilitate a game-like experience.
I also love your Zen haiku rather than the usual Microsoft error message. We should be able to download an app that changes all computer errors (and 404s) to that!
I'm not familiar with the books you reference, so read a few reviews on Hopscotch. Its different pathways and voices sound foreign film-like to me; also more like the way we experience life - learning things years later about people that alter what we thought of them at the time, things that disorient us because they alter what we took for truth - auntie so and so gave up a child for adoption, so and so is really her mother and not her sister, Newt Gingrich had an affair - okay, some things are less surprising than others.
ReplyDeleteMaybe hypertext is giving us back some traditions we've lost - the notion of fixed text between editions and copyright versions of things that cannot be altered is a relatively new phenomenon. I think it was Dickens who would drive his publishers mad because he would sell one version of his story to one and another version to someone else. And the ability to create our own texts harkens back to the former practice of commonplace books, where people transcribed passages of books they found thought provoking, creating their own 'book' over time. Robert Darnton argues that we are overemphasizing the shift from text printed on paper to digital text; here's a link to an interview he did with Publisher's Weekly after the release of his book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. He is by no means dystopian about the future of the book and embraces the e-book as it could be, but has some thoughtful perspectives on books of the past and cautions us not to lose sight of the journey of the book.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20090914/451-on-the-ropes-robert-darnton-s-case-for-books-.html