PANEL 2B: PRINT MATERIALITY AND THE CONTEMPORARY CODEX

by formsofinnovation

Courtney Traub	Memory, Temporality, and “Multimodal” Narrative Games in Danielewski and Tomasula
Andrew Temple	“The Literature of Exhaustion”: Haunted Labyrinths in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
Ash Ogden	Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Other ‘Anti-Kindles’

CourtneyTraub – Memory, Temporality, and “Multimodal” Narrative Games in Danielewski and Tomasula

Recent experiments in “late postmodern” American literature allude to or create effective crossovers between print and other media, forging what N. Katherine Hayles has called a “multimodal” textuality that drives current efforts to “push the boundaries of the book”. Drawing on the analysis of new media critics such as Hayles and Alan Liu, who have broken significant ground in describing the complex and fruitful intersections between print and digital narrative forms, I will present a 20-minute paper exploring how the use of narrative and visual experimentation in Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006) and earlier House of Leaves (2000) and Steve Tomasula’s multimedia novel TOC, not only assert themselves as literary responses to web, film, gaming, and other technologies, but also pose compelling questions around temporality, collective consciousness and memory in the digital age that merit attention. The temporality of writing and reading is one major area of experimentation that I will focus on: In Danielewski, somewhat comparably to a news ticker tape or online article refreshed as new information becomes available, texts seem to resist the stable, temporally normative status of the print edition by incorporating online material that is scheduled for “updates”; in Tomasula, temporal control is taken out of the hands of readers/spectators, who are required to “run” the text like a program and are effectively made subject to its pre-fixed duration. The paper will also explore how an emphasis on memory and temporal experience in these texts relate to a strong play between utopian and dystopian antinomies, and attempt to partially explain what this might say about the contemporary American literary imagination.

George Temple – “The Literature of Exhaustion”: Haunted Labyrinths in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
The typographical structure of “The Labyrinth” has taken center-stage in the nascency of House of Leaves‘ criticism. Often discussed as “digital hypertext,” the chapter metonymically provides a link between the internet and the book for many scholars. Disagreeing with overly digital abstractions, I contend that physicality is an intractable part of House of Leaves‘exhaustive character: approaching House of Leaves from a digital perspective ignores the novel’s own concern with the contemporary dominance of digital media in reality-construction. This physicality is reinforced by the role of ink within House of Leaves, which obscures—but ink is not only a metaphor for the ash of the house, it also highlights its own representation of the event: the words of physical ink obscure. My paper explores House of Leaves’ physicality through John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and influential short stories from Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, contending that what digital media assumes as its exclusive advantage (and the reason for the decline of print) becomes House of Leaves‘ triumph—Danielewski employs a “dead end” to “accomplish human work” by asserting the potential of the static page to simulate movement and change. Danielewski enacts these “digital” effects, but he does so in a manner which reveals the simulation on which digitally-grounded reality is based.

Ash Ogden – Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Other ‘Anti-Kindles’

The literary scene of the twenty-first century has borne witness to various experiments with the physical form of the book: we find codices with holes in the pages, sections of text in reverse, upside-down, and unbound shuffleable novels. This paper shall examine this resurgence in physical experimentation in light of the invention of the Kindle alongside other digital reading methods. Attention shall primarily be paid to Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 novel, Tree of Codes, in which the text is die-cut from a pre-existing work leaving gaping holes in the pages. In addition to this, I shall also draw reference to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1 and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates as examples of novels which disrupt traditional modes of reading and foreground some of the assumptions inherent to engaging with the codex format.

Once a textual technology becomes commonplace it becomes ‘a transparent container’ for text, rendering the physical properties of the codex a secondary and supplementary means of communicating content. I shall argue that the digitisation of traditional texts has lead to a ‘disembodied’ mode of reading, whilst the success of the Kindle has suggested a desire for a form of textual re-embodiment, albeit one in which all texts have the same uniform body. I shall examine the outlook shared by both Safran Foer and London-based publisher Visual Editions: that the codex must adapt to the current climate by utilising its physical attributes to convey meaning; a technique that resists digital representation.