Multimodal Print Fiction, Postmodernism, and Digital Literacies

Beyond the Textual: Multimodal Print Fiction, Postmodernism, and Digital Literacies

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature

Daniel Dale

M.A. Wright State University

June 2010

B.A. University of Dayton

May 2008

Committee Chair: Jennifer Glaser, Ph.D Abstract

This manuscript brings together three strings of contemporary American fiction. First, the influence of digital culture on both readers and the texts they consume. Second, the increasing use of multiple kinds of media and technology (including things like the internet, social media, video, sound, and image) within a certain group of American fiction. Third, the move away from postmodernist narrative techniques seen in American fiction.

The goal is to pinpoint the intersection of these three strings and the way the impact one another. Readers develop different reading skills through their interactions with digital technology. As a result, they bring these skills to bear on print fiction. At the same time, contemporary American print fiction is incorporating a variety of media in different ways. These readers, who honed their skills in digital environments, are always-already used to interacting with narratives that combine multiple kinds of media. In essence, readers who have reading skills developed in digital environments are well positioned to make sense of this kind of literature.

Finally, this has an impact on the current movement in contemporary fiction away from postmodernism. Eschewing the pervasive irony found in many postmodern texts, many works of contemporary fiction work to bridge the gap between reader and writer encouraged by postmodern irony. By incorporating the textual alongside a host of other media, these contemporary texts attempt to avoid many of the problems associated with textual representation raised by postmodernism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Reading in the Narrative Archive: 22 Archival Fiction and Digital Literacy

Graphic Literature: Using Comics 64 Theory as a Lens to Investigate Multimodal Print Narratives

Finding Your Way Around the House 104 of Leaves: Literature and the Interface

Wired for a Different Kind of Reading: 141 Children’s Literature and Multimedia Narratives

Bibliography 177

Introduction

In a recent Washington Post article, an ominous warning was sounded: “There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ [digital] devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills. The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.” Digital technology, the story goes, is changing the way we read, shifting us from a deeper, more in-depth kind of reading to a kind of reading where skimming and distraction are the norm. Michael Rosenwald, the author of the piece, portrays the situation as one “of great fascination and growing alarm.” He is worried that readers “seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.”

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing debate on the effects of digital technology on reading and thinking. On January 17th, 2018, for example, The New York Times published a piece called “How Technology Is (and Isn’t) Changing Our Reading Habits.”

Likewise, The Telegraph published a piece in 2016 entitled, “Reading on Computer Screens

Changes How Your Brain Works, Scientists Say.” This echoes a 2015 article in The Guardian with the headline “Ebooks Are Changing the Way We Read, and the Way Novelists Write.” In

2013, Scientific American published a long-form article on the subject, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper Versus Screens.” The trend goes all the way back to 2010

(and probably before), with a Smithsonian Magazine article titled “Reading in a Whole New

Way.”

All these articles, and the many others that undoubtedly exist, have one thing in common: the anxiety about changes in reading brought about by digital technology. Shorter attention

spans, poorer reading comprehension, fewer hours spent with books, are all common red flags raised again and again by these articles. I am not interested in taking a position on the good or bad of these changes in reading. In many cases, these articles have a “Socrates warns Phaedrus of the dangers of writing” feel. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that reading is changing in some fundamental way.

If reading is changing, what does that mean for the production of written fiction?

Likewise, how are readers, who now predominately absorb text through digital technology, approaching text-based fiction? This manuscript brings together three strings of contemporary

American fiction. First, the influence of digital culture on both readers and the texts they consume. Second, the increasing use of multiple kinds of media and technology (including things like the internet, social media, video, sound, and image) within a certain group of American fiction. While visual elements have been used in textual narratives going all the way back to

Tristram Shandy, I will argue that there is something different about the incorporation of multiple modalities seen in fiction written over the last twenty years. Finally, I will tie these two ideas together with a third, the move away from postmodernist narrative techniques seen in

American fiction.

My goal is to pinpoint the intersection of these three strings and the way the impact one another. Readers develop different reading skills through their interactions with digital technology. As a result, they bring these skills to bear on print fiction. At the same time, contemporary American print fiction is incorporating a variety of media in different ways. These readers, who honed their skills in digital environments, are always-already used to interacting with narratives that combine multiple kinds of media. In essence, readers who have reading skills developed in digital environments are well positioned to make sense of this kind of literature.

Throughout this book, I will be using terms that are often contested because they signify multiple genres, media, and fields of inquiry. In order to discuss these ideas with any kind of specificity, it is necessary to take some time to narrow down these terms into something usable.

The concept of “multimodality” is often used within rhetoric and composition, but rarely in literary studies. Nevertheless, I find the term useful to describe a kind of contemporary American literature that incorporates non-textual elements in their narrative. Terms like “visual literature,” which are more common in literary studies, don’t seem to fit because the literature I will be examining often uses things such as sound and interactivity, which don’t seem to be included in the term “visual literature.” Furthermore, I will often jump between texts that use a combination of just the visual and verbal to texts that take advantage of sound, digital technology, the internet, and video. In order to unify these varying kinds of texts, I want to use a term that signifies not a specific combination of modalities, but encompasses anything that uses multiple modalities, no matter what they might be. While some, such as WJT Mitchell, might argue that literature is always-already visual and verbal, I believe a distinction lies in the way certain kinds of novels intentionally mobilize multiple modalities in the production of meaning.

Another term that I will be using extensively is “digital literacies.” Essentially, I see digital literacies as the kinds of reading skills that one develops through their interactions with

digital technology. Like any learned skill, our literacies are influenced by what and how we read.

A culture in which most reading is done on scrolls encourages readers to develop skills that help them navigate and make use of that technology. Likewise, the skills that one develops reading print books are somewhat specific to that medium. Of course, some general skills exist.

However, at the same time, various kinds of reading technology use different navigational and information presentation strategies, which readers need to adapt to if they are going to use that medium effectively. However, these skills, while learned via certain media, are transferable. The skills we develop through our interactions with digital technology don’t stay there. Rather, they are brought to bear on other kinds of media, such as print fiction. While this is usually boiled down to fears of more skimming, shorter attention spans, and less close reading, I believe that some of these digital reading skills actually compliment print reading skills. That is to say, while the reading skills developed in digital environments might lead to a different kind of reading, that reading isn’t inherently worse than the kind of reading that was honed in a predominately print culture. Rather, when readers with digital reading skills use them on print fiction, interesting kinds of reading arise. This is especially true when those reading skills meet multimodal print fiction, since readers with digital literacies are well equipped to tackle narratives that make use of multiple kinds of media.

Since the terms “postmodernism” and the debate about what, if anything, is happening in the wake of postmodernism (if postmodernism is even receding) will take some time to unpack, I plan to devote more time to it. In the next section, I plan to sketch out exactly what I mean by

“postmodern literature” and fiction after postmodernism.

Past Postmodernism

The very idea that literature is moving past postmodernism might be controversial to some.

Robert McLaughlin sees literature in the twenty-first century not as something distinct from postmodernism, but a revision of it. While McLaughlin acknowledges “the conflicted attitude the millennial generation of US fiction writers has toward their postmodern forebears” (285), he nevertheless sees the fiction of writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and

Mary Caponegro as a “retreat, revision, and reiteration” of postmodernism, finally concluding that “postmodern fiction hasn’t changed all that much at all” (294). To McLaughlin, while many fiction writers of the late 90’s and early 2000’s might share an apprehension of postmodernism, they ultimately use the same tools to work towards similar goals. Some scholars, such as Brian

McHale, believe postmodernism is far from retreating, but has actually gone global in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (“Afterword” 362).

Taking a position that acknowledges the differences between postmodern literature and the literature being produced in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Ning Wang argues, “From today’s point of view, we should say that postmodernism, as a literary and art movement in the Western context, had already become a past event that can only be described using the tools of historical research. Nevertheless, postmodern ideas and ways of thinking have permeated almost all aspects of contemporary culture and are still influential in many humanities fields” (265). To

Wang, while postmodernism might be subject to the lens of history, there is a strong postmodern residue that nevertheless influences contemporary culture. In some ways, Wang is trying to have it both ways: postmodernism is a historical moment that has passed, but postmodernism still has deep roots in intellectual thought and literary production. This is true, in some sense, though.

Postmodernism does still have a huge impact on theory and literature, if only because so many

are attempting to break free from postmodernism’s decades of dominance. Postmodernism matters because, as Wang says, “the specters of postmodernism have now permeated all aspects of our culture and life as theoretical discourse” (263). Postmodernism might be dead, but its ghost still very much matters.

It is hard to argue that postmodernism doesn’t have some effect on the production of literature in the twenty-first century. At the same time, trying to position contemporary literature as another branch or revision of postmodernism seems to miss some of the qualities that makes much of contemporary literature distinctly different from postmodernism. Using Pynchon’s The

Crying of Lot 49 as an example, Rachel Adams believes, “in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pynchon’s novel has ceased to read as a work of contemporary fiction, even though many critics continue to use postmodern and contemporary as synonymous terms” (249). To

Adams, postmodern fiction is a response to certain historical circumstances that no longer resemble the lived experience of people navigating the twenty-first century. The world that

Pynchon and other postmodernist critique has faded into history. If, as Adams argues, postmodernism is “the dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentalism during the Cold

War” (250), what happens when the Cold War and its cultural moment have passed? Similar to

McHale, Adams sees American literature as now participating in a more global conversation.

Adam even coins this new literary moment she describes as “American literary globalism” (250).

However, unlike McHale, Adams believes this is more than postmodernism reaching the non- western world. Rather, this move towards the global marks a shift away from postmodernism, and not an extension of it.

Adams’s argument is echoed by Lee Konstantinou, who points out, “postmodernism no longer adequately described the present” (x). However, while Adams sees the shift away from

postmodernism wrapped up in a more global turn in American literature, Konstantinou believes that a move away from irony is the distinguishing characteristic that separates postmodern literature from the literature being produced in the twenty-first century. In my own examination of what comes after postmodernism and multimodal literature, I am going to hew very closely to

Konstantinou’s framework. Irony may not be the defining characteristic of postmodernism.

Trying to boil postmodernism down to a single, unifying idea is impossible, since postmodernism itself is multifaceted and encompasses both cultural production and the critical theory that surrounds that culture. Still, within the realm of literature, irony has become one of the more discussed, criticized, and impactful veins of postmodernism.

Postmodernism and Irony

As Konstantinou points out, one of the leading figures in the move away from postmodern irony is David Foster Wallace. While I will discuss how Wallace and other writers in the late twentieth and early-twenty first century work past the problems they see with postmodern aesthetics, I quickly want to outline the trouble Wallace has with postmodernism. Wallace consciously sets his own work against those of the postmodernist that came before him. Wallace says, “If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs […]

Because, even though their self-consciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes

[…] their aesthetic’s absorption by U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else” (“An Expanded Interview” 48). In some ways, Wallace’s argument is similar to Adams’. The techniques of postmodernism were a specific response to certain historical circumstances. While these were extremely useful, Wallace thinks, postmodern aesthetics no longer serve the same function. However, while Wallace believes this is a result of postmodernism permeating all parts of U.S. culture, Adams thinks the historical circumstances

postmodernism responds to have past. It is also important to note that Wallace is being critical of postmodern techniques, whereas Adams is simply describing certain developments she sees within literature.

While Wallace acknowledges that postmodernism contains multitudes, and irony is not the unifying framework that unites all of postmodernism, he does argue, “what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness” (“An Expanded Interview” 49). To Wallace, the problem isn’t irony in general.

Indeed, irony and other postmodern techniques like metafiction were an extremely useful response to the historical circumstances of the 60’s and 70’s. However, as irony begins to become the dominant cultural mode of production, irony is no longer subversive, and thus is no longer a useful tool for critiquing the mainstream.

To Konstantinou, Wallace’s critique of irony has coalesced into a more general literary movement: “the project of moving beyond postmodernism has for many theoretically attuned writers found concomitant strategy: transcending irony” (6). While Konstantinou names this movement “postirony,” he acknowledges these writers are “a diverse lot. Their responses to postmodernism, however conceived, have been as heterogeneous as postmodernism itself” (8).

One way, I will argue, that contemporary fiction works past postmodernism is by attempting to rebuild a connection between reading and writer. The idea that a text or utterance does not possess the ability to transfer the internal experience of one person to another is foundational to postmodernism. This is reflected in postmodern fiction through things like irony and metafiction.

Postmodern fiction eschews any kind of relationship between reader and writers through textual representation.

Wallace’s project is, in part, an attempt to rehabilitate this connection. If, as so many postmodern theorists have argued, one’s experience cannot be meaningfully transferred to another through language, what is the point of literature? To many postmodernist, the answer becomes fiction is about itself. If writing is no longer about reaching a reader on the other side of the page, it turns inward and becomes about itself. One main target for Wallace’s attacks on postmodernism is metafiction, one of the many ways postmodern fiction turns the lens of narrative on itself. Metaficiton, in the postmodern tradition, is about turning the attention of the reader to the constructed nature of a narrative. As Wallace puts it, metafiction “reminds us that there’s always a recursive component to utterance. This was important, because language’s self- consciousness had always been there, but neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we ended up seeing why recursion’s dangerous […] It gets empty and solipsistic real fast” (“An Expanded Interview” 40).

Throughout Wallace’s fiction, readers can see how one writer attempts to wrestle with and overcome the problem of irony in postmodern fiction. Speaking about one of his earliest stories, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” Wallace says, “I wanted to get [to] the

Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction’s always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans”

(“An Expanded Interview” 41). One way Wallace does this is by, ironically, going back to metafiction, but for different reasons. In his last (but unfinished) novel, The Pale King, Wallace uses the classic metafictional technique of the author insert. Chapter 9 of The Pale King is actually the “Author’s Forward” and starts with, “Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona […] But this right here is me as a real person, David Wallace, age forty” (66).While those who follow Wallace’s work

might be shocked by his turn to traditional postmodern techniques, it is actually an attempt to rehabilitate metafiction and free it from irony. However, the David Wallace in this section, as certain facts and disclosures from the author’s forward reveal, has a biography that is distinct from the real David Foster Wallace. At the same time, Wallace pleads with readers, “This might appear to set up an irksome paradox […] [but] the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher” (67).

While this may seem like a standard postmodern author insert, it is working towards distinctly different goals. The postmodern author insert is used to deny the reader any kind of connection to the fictional text, since it reminds readers what they are reading is a mediated piece of fiction. Instead of reaching out to the reader, the postmodern author insert folds back in and refers back to itself. Wallace’s insert, on the other hand, is not referring back to the text. Rather, it is reaching out towards the reader in an attempt to deepen the connection they have with the text. Wallace wants readers to identify with David Wallace as author insert, even if this David

Wallace isn’t the real David Wallace. Wallace isn’t the only writer attempting to recuperate the author insert in a way that moves past the ironic author insert seen in postmodernism. In another contemporary American novel, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, we see a similar kind of author insert. I will be focusing more on Ozeki’s novel a little later in this manuscript. However, it is important to note that, like Wallace in The Pale King, Ozeki is obvious about the way she fictionalizes the Ozeki in the novel. Similarly, Ozeki inserts herself in the narrative not to reflexively signal back to the constructed nature of the narrative, but to pull readers closer to it.

One way this kind of post-ironic metafiction achieves this is by conflating fact and fiction. While novels like The Pale King and A Tale for the Time Being are obviously fiction, they sprinkle in just enough reality to blur the line separating it from the fictional universe of the

text. In this way, these writers are not simply eschewing postmodernism by returning to realism.

Rather, by embracing a kind of revised metafiction, these writers attempt to recuperate postmodern narrative strategies in order to towards a different end. Rather than calling attention to the constructed nature of the fictional text, and thus denying readers any chance to identify with the characters of the novel, the metafiction of Ozeki and Wallace use author inserts to help readers identify with the character/author writing the text.

We see a similar kind of blurry line between fact and fiction in multimodal works of contemporary American fiction. For example, JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst’s novel S. uses an array of modalities to create a book whose origins may fool many viewers. S. pretends to be a well-used library book, complete with yellowing pages and a section for stamping due dates.

Furthermore, S. contains extensive marginalia that looks indistinguishable from the notes in a well-used book. Indeed, the form of S. gives almost no clue that readers are actually interacting with a freshly printed book, and not an old text stolen from a library. Rather than calling attention to the fictional aspects of the text, the effect this creates on the reader is one of believability. Likewise, Mark Z. Danielewsi’s House of Leaves creates an impressive fictional publication history that works to convince readers that the mysterious circumstances detailed in the book has some plausibility. Similar to S., House of Leaves uses an array of modalities to enhance the plausibility of the fictional universe it creates. The way multimodal narratives use their form to achieve this plausibility will be discussed throughout this study.

Print is Dead?

Like the death of postmodernism, the demise of print books is something writers have predicted for decades. All the way back to the mid-1990’s, Sven Birkerts was lamenting, “Already it is clear that the new reading will be technology-enhanced. CD-ROM packages are on the way—

some are already out—to gloss and illustrate, but also to break the perceived tedium of concentration by offering interactivity … After interactivity has made its first full inroad there will be no going back” (201). One can see how this comment is a product of its time, considering the fact that Birkerts sees a looming threat of CD-ROM style books on the horizon. Like many of those who see a fundamental worsening of reading and thinking with the increased use of digital reading devices, Birkerts sees nothing positive in the new interactivity brought about by digital literacies and ways of reading. Birkerts makes his view well know early on, given that the title of his book is The Gutenberg Elegies. While I do agree that multimodal texts (both in print and digital form) that take their cue from digital space offer more avenues of interactivity, I believe that this interactivity provides some unique and valuable opportunity for narrative art to encourage a kind of reading that compliments the close-reading that most bibliophiles know and love.

Over a decade later, Jeff Gomez eschoes Birkerts view (we even see shades of Birkerts in the title of Gomez’s book, Print is Dead). From Gomez’s view, in the first decade of the 21st- century, “books are indeed on the way out, while screens keep inching their way in” (13). While

Gomez gives no timetable for this shift, he thinks it is a foregone conclusion. While this argument is popular among technology enthusiast and others that see print as an old-fashioned technology that can easily be replaced by digital technology, it doesn’t pay attention to the many different kinds of print. Gomez often conflates all of print culture with literary and book culture.

For example, he cites declining newspaper readership as evidence for the demise of print books.

What Gomez is ignoring here is the different cultural positionality of the various kinds of print.

Newspapers are designed to present up-to-date information. Before the internet, the morning paper is where many people learned about world and national events. With the internet, however,

this information is widely available before it can appear in print. The main advantage of the newspaper (the ability to get news as soon as possible) is totally supplemented by the internet.

Fiction books, on the other hand, occupy a different cultural space.

The difference between things like newspapers and print books becomes evident when we look at actual consumer usage. If Gomez is correct, we would see print readership declining across the board. While this might be true for newspapers, fiction books saw an increase in sales in 2016, after seeing shrinking sales in previous years (Segura). E-book sales, on the other hand, have been on a downward trend since 2015 (Milliot). What Gomez fails to realize is all of print is not a homogenous entity. Rather, different print objects serve different purposes to readers.

While readers might turn away from newspapers because their use-value is being supplanted by something that serves the same purpose in a better way, readers see something in print books that cannot be replicated in an e-reader. Indeed, as sales data shows, readers are turning away from e- books in favor of print books.

To Gomez, digital technology does everything a book does, only better, so print’s replacement is only a matter of time. Gomez’s view hinges on a rejection of the importance of materiality. Gomez argues that “a physical book is merely a container … its printed form and shape is a concession to the marketplace … What’s important is the knowledge, and most of this knowledge can be contained in a variety of digital formats that are much more efficient than a simple ‘box’ of physical print” (18). Implicit in Gomez’s comment is the idea that information is the only thing that matters in a reading experience. The words themselves are the story and the meaning, and the words can be presented in many forms, but the meaning stays the same.

Multimodal Fiction

As N. Katherine Hayles and others have point out, the materiality of a text should not be seen as a mere container. Hayles believes that “To change the material artifact is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meaning of the words as well” (Writing Machines 23-24). Hayles’s belief that something changes when we move words across media is reinforced by the recent reader response to e-books. Even though e- books offer some distinct advantages when it comes to storage, ease of access, and portability, the fact that more and more readers are returning to print books indicates that there is something in the experience that can’t be replicated by e-books. Of course, this isn’t to say that e-books are going the way of Betamax or the VCR. Rather, it means that print, far from dying out as Gomez and others argue, will exist side-by-side with e-books.

The multimodal fiction that we see today is not an entirely new genre or form of book.

Books have been utilizing an array of modalities for centuries. As Jeremy Griffiths and Derek

Pearsall note, “at least one in forty books made in the later Middle Ages in England had illustrations or other pictures” (31). Furthermore, Nicole Howard notes, “The oldest known

European woodcut dates from 1418 [and] … By the mid-fifteenth century, woodcuts were being used to illustrate entire book” (17). With the advent of print, illuminations began to dwindle as books became mass produced objects to store information and not handcrafted objects which took hours to produce. Similarly, while illustrations and visual elements appear in print fiction from a very early time (Tristram Shandy and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, both incorporate visual elements along with text), by the twentieth-century the vast majority of novels contain little or no visual material at all.

While narrative fiction in the 20th-century tends to be strictly text-based, books that move beyond this were still being produced. For example, Johanna Drucker sheds light on the tradition of artist’s books, a genre in which the materiality of the book is exploited to create physical works of art that take their cue from the traditional codex. To Drucker, “What is unique about artist’s books … is that with very few exceptions they really did not exist in their current form before the 20th century” (The Century of Artists’ Books 1). Here, Drucker is drawing a distinction between books that use visual elements and artist’s books. To Drucker, “artist’s books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form” (The

Century of Artists’ Books 4). Fiction books that simply add illustrations or visual elements are not conscious of the book as a form. Rather, they are simply using the book to store visual and written information, something that could also be done in a similar way on an e-book or scroll.

An artist’s book uses the toolbox provided by the book form to create an object that is specific to that medium.

Multimodal books grow out of this tradition of artist’s books. In some ways, multimodal fiction exists within the larger tradition of artist’s books. Drucker singles out artist’s books that create a narrative as a subset of artist’s book. However, I think there is an important difference between the artist’s books that Drucker discusses and the multimodal fiction we see in the early part of the 21st-century. Specifically, the artist’s books that Drucker discusses are, first and foremost, art. That is to say, they are objects that do not circulate in the same way as a fiction book. The artist’s books discussed by Drucker are, like most art objects, are not mass produced.

They are either one-offs or printed in a small run by the artist or a small press. This gives them the aura of an art object, not something that is meant to be handled and used, like a common print book. Multimodal fiction books, on the other hand, exist as things that have a use-value.

They are meant to be held, read, and thumbed through. To put it another way, one would be hard pressed to dog-ear an artist’s books, believing that they might destroy the pristine nature of the artistic object.

Finally, multimodal books are responding to a very specific set of historical circumstances. I believe this is the most important quality that separates the phenomena of multimodal fiction in the early 21st-century and the larger history of artists’ books in the 20th- century. Specifically, multimodal books are a response to the widespread usage of digital technology.

Digital Literacies and Multimodal Books

Intersecting with this move away from postmodern irony is a renewed interest in the possibilities of the book medium. Since the year 2000, there has been an increasing use of multimodal elements within print fiction. To Jessica Pressman, “these novels exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies” (465). Pressman sees the rise of multimodal literature as a response to the so called “death of the book.” As more and more readers embrace digital devices,

Pressman believes many authors cling to the print form by creating texts that cannot be easily transferred to a digital format. While I agree with Pressman to an extent, I believe that the rising popularity of multimodal fiction is also tied to the changes in contemporary reading practices. N.

Katherine Hayles, one of the scholars most interested in the way digital technology alters reading, notes that the rise of digital literacies is challenging many views of reading widely held within the humanities. To this point, Hayles writes:

Starting from mindsets formed by print, nurtured by print, and enabled and

constrained by print, humanities scholars are confronting the differences that

digital media makes in every aspect of humanistic inquiry … The Age of Print is

passing, and the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it are

now becoming visible as media-specific practices rather than the largely invisible

status quo. (How We Think 1-2)

When Hayles remarks that “The Age of Print” is passing, she is not saying that books and print will disappear entirely. Rather, she is simply pointing out “that print is no longer the default medium of communication” (How We Think 249).

My own study unites the work of Pressman and Hayles. As digital technology becomes the default mode of communication, and more fiction reading begins to take place on e-books, many writers choose to forgo physical books entirely, opting instead for the cheaper and fast route of digital publishing. However, as Pressman notes, this leads to a reaction in which writers cling to print and create narratives that make us of the book form in the construction of narrative.

At the same time, as Hayles argues, our reading practices are increasingly influenced by digital technology. Furthermore, these changes in reading work across media. The skills and tendencies readers develop in response to digital media have implications for the way they read print, and vice versa. Taken together, we have readers who often times develop reading skills in digital environments. At the same time, they are using these skills on print fiction books that are lean heavily on the particular opportunities presented by the print medium.

As Drucker sees it, one of the most impactful consequences of this new kind of digital information circulation is the widespread use of graphics. Taking into account graphics from across media, Drucker argues that “Learning to read these and other visual forms of knowledge production is essential in our contemporary lives. Images are produced and consumed in our current culture in quantities that would have been unthinkable in any previous period in human

history. Graphics of all kinds have become the predominant mode of constructing and presenting information and experience” (Graphesis 4).

While Drucker focuses on graphics of all kinds, she singles out the graphical user interface (GUI) as something that is especially important: “No single innovation has transformed communication as radically in the last half century as the GUI. In a very real, practical sense we carry on most of our personal and professional business through interfaces” (Graphesis 8).

Whether it be on a PC, tablet, Mac, phone, or almost any other digital device, the GUI is the main way humans access information in the digital age. A GUI is more than just a combination of the visual and the verbal. Rather, the GUI is a navigational system that often utilizes video, sound, and even touch. Furthermore, the GUI allows readers to rearrange and remix information to put different flows of information in varying relations to one another. This has huge implications for reading. While I will explore these implications later in this manuscript, I just want to quickly not that this kind of reading prepares readers to arrange and make sense of narratives that utilize an array of modalities. Someone on a PC GUI might start by reading a post on social media, before clicking on a link that takes them to a video. At the same time, they might be texting and browsing on their phone. The reading skills developed in these contexts are much different than the skills readers developed through long, sustained interactions with a book comprised completely of text. Likewise, the kind of reading encouraged by digital devices and technology intersects with the non-linear and multimodal form of the contemporary novels I am focusing on in this manuscript. In my chapter on House of Leaves, I will have much more to say about the GUI and its implications for reading fiction.

Postmodernism, Multimodal Print Fiction, and Digital Literacies

As we shall see, far from dying, many print fiction books are undergoing a transformation, embracing the book form. This manuscript will sketch out these developments and link them to the move past postmodernism. The first chapter focuses on the intersection of the physical and digital archive. Archives, as a selection of curated objects for public display, are one of the main avenues of digital communication. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other similar sites are all spaces where users can pick, arrange, and display various artifacts in a way similar to an archive. In their role as curator, these personal digital archivist learn a set of reading skills. These literacies come in handy when reading the archival novel S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams. This text is a fictional replication of a physical archive. This multimodal novel contains mock documents that have all the qualities of real documents. For example, one document is a map drawn on a real napkin. This text asks readers to take the role of archivist, using some of the same skills they may have learned creating their own digital archives.

My second chapter looks at comics and attempts to use comics scholarship to build a vocabulary and critical toolbox that can be used when investigating multimodal literature. With few exceptions, most literary scholarship is not equipped to analyze texts that utilize an array of modalities. This chapter looks at an array of multimodal texts and borrows from comics studies to attempt to explain certain moments of multimodality within these novels. This chapter focuses on multimodal qualities like the combination of text and image, hand writing, the physical layout of the page, and visual words (the kind of words that attempt to be both read as words and viewed as an image). Through this chapter, my aim is to bridge the gap between comics scholarship and literary scholarship to ultimately develop ways to approach multimodal literature.

The third chapter is concerned with digital interfaces. Before the 1990’s, most users interacted with digital devices using text based and linear interfaces. Since the popularization of

Microsoft Windows, though, the vast majority of interfaces are spatial and non-linear. Like archives, these spatial interfaces teach users certain literacies that can be used in various contexts. One text where these reading skills can be put to use is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Like a spatial interface, this text eschews linear text and embraces a spatial form that is meant to be explored. Readers that have prepared themselves on spatial digital interfaces are will prepared to wander around House of Leaves.

My final chapter looks at the next generation of readers. If reading really is changing because of our interactions with digital technology, these changes should be very apparent in the generation of so-called “digital natives” born since the turn of the century. Focusing on the children’s novel Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carman, this chapter looks at how younger readers are more receptive to multimodal story telling than readers who grew up reading texts that rarely, if ever, reached across different media. Multimodal novels that are aimed at an adult audience are often seen as experimental. However, the young readers of Skeleton Creek don’t look at multimodal narratives as anything different than the regular way they already consume digital media. Rather than being a departure from the kind of reading they are used to, Skeleton Creek is right in line with the kind of literacy skills children and young adults have been honing their whole lives.

Throughout these chapters, I will examine how these multimodal texts attempt to create a relationship with the reader that attempts to move beyond the recursive textual games of postmodernism. The attempt to move beyond postmodernism seen in many contemporary novels goes beyond postmodernism. That is to say, embracing a multimodal form is not the only way

contemporary novels talk back to postmodernism. Rather, multimodality is one important way contemporary fiction wrestles with the legacy of postmodernism.

Reading in the Narrative Archive: Archival Fiction and Digital Literacy

“Someone wrote all over that library book!” More than once, my bibliophilic friends spouted a variation of this phrase while flipping through a seemingly old novel on my coffee table. But it wasn’t a library book, and no one actually wrote in its margins. This book was S. by

J.J Abrams and Doug Dorst. Abrams is the well known director of Star Trek, Star Wars, and one of the creators of the television show, Lost. Dorst, on the other hand, is the author of the genre bending books The Surf Guru and Alive in Necropolis. Together, they created a book that might be more at home as a movie prop on one of Abram’s sets than on a shelf at Barnes and Noble.

S. comes in a slipcover that serves a similar function to the dust jacket protecting most hardcover books (see Figure 1). This black slipcover contains information on the authors, a barcode, a short synopsis, and many of the other details one would find on the front Figure 1: A page of S., some artifacts, and slipcover From Amazon.com and back covers of a novel. Inside the slipcover is a hardback book called Ship of Theseus by the fictional author V. M. Straka and translated by the equally fictional F.X. Caldeira. Within the world of S., Straka is an author surrounded by mystery. Although he is the author of more than a dozen books, Straka’s identity is completely unknown. A stamp on the title page purports that the book is “Property of Laguna

Verde H.S Library.” The title page also tells the reader that the book was published in 1949 by

Winged Shoes Press of New York. Ship of Theseus actually looks like it is over sixty years old: the pages are yellow and faded around the edges, with stains and spots of mold. Outside of the slipcover, there are no references to J.J. Abrams, Doug Dorst, the fact that the book was actually published in 2013 or any other hints at its true origins, with the exception of a small paragraph detailing copyright information in tiny font on the end paper of the back cover. Indeed, someone stumbling upon S. without the slipcover might believe that it is an antiquated book stolen from a

high school library, instead of a

new book recently out of the

plastic packaging.

Stuffed inside the pages

of Ship of Theseus are extensive

marginalia, footnotes, and over

a dozen physical artifacts (See Figure 2: A spread of various artifacts found in S. From I09.com Figure 2). These artifacts include letters, postcards, photographs, a map drawn on a napkin, lists on university stationary, and other objects. Additionally, there are many ARG (alternate reality game) elements to S., including various promotional YouTube videos, Twitter accounts, and websites, such as radiostraka.com, that relate to and build on the overall narrative of S. ARGs have become a staple of J.J. Abrams products and were featured prominently on his show, Lost. ARGs take the form of online media that enhance the mythology of certain narratives for dedicated fans. These

ARGs delve deeper into the story for those who desire it, but are not essential to understanding the basics of the narrative, so more casual consumers are not required to seek them out. The

multimedia collage surrounding S. engages a variety of modalities, including the textual, visual, auditory, and tactile. The many elements of S. are not just meant to be read; they are meant to be touched, seen, and heard. Taken together, the book, the various artifacts stuffed in its pages, the many ARGs outside the physical boundaries of S.’s black box, and the marginalia compose the raw material of an archive.

This chapter will read S. in relation to the reading skills developed in the archive. Given the skills necessary to make sense of an archive, the experience of reading S. can be disorienting.

However, having the skills necessary to create a narrative out of the raw pieces of an archive is a skill that many readers have developed through their regular interactions with various digital platforms that encourage the creation and sharing of personal archives. Using S. as an example, I hope to show how the form of contemporary print fiction is taking advantage of reading skills honed by personal digital archives. In the process, these texts give rise to a kind of relationship between author, text, and audience that challenges the prevailing postmodern conception of authorship.

S. itself contains a narrative that folds together many stories in different layers. Ship of

Theseus is a quasi-supernatural noir tale about an amnesiac sailor swept up in an international assassination conspiracy. At the same time, the mysterious sailor is searching for Sola, a woman he loves that might contain a hint to his unknown past. In the margins of Ship of Theseus, two readers meet and form a relationship. One reader is Eric, a graduate student in limbo specializing in all things Straka. He is the one who steals Ship of Theseus from his high school library. He also writes the first group of marginalia, a basic reading of the symbolism and allusions in the text, done in pencil, and presumably built up over multiple readings from high school through graduate school. The second reader, Jen, is an aimless college senior. She finds the book, which

has a handwritten note on the title page advising, “If found, please return to workroom B19.”

Before returning the book, Jen writes a short note saying, “I read a few chapters + loved it.” This short, handwritten exchange spurs a romance in the margins. Eric and Jen bond over their shared passion for Straka and Ship of Theseus. While they do eventually meet, the majority of the relationship we see takes the form of these handwritten notes in the margins, as well as some longer letters stuffed in the book. Many of these notes are focused on an attempt to unravel is the mystery surrounding the identity of Straka and his translator, Caldeira. The plot of Ship of

Theseus, the marginal notes between Jen and Eric, and the question of the true authorship of Ship of Theseus all intertwine and intersect to form the larger narrative of S.

The archive that forms the basis of S. serves multiple functions. For one thing, it is an archive of Jen and Eric’s relationship. Jen and Eric meet on the pages of Ship of Theseus, and the margins of the text is the main place where their communication takes place. Additionally, Eric and Jen are the ones selecting which documents to add to the book. As Jen and Eric delve deeper into the mysteries of Ship of Thesues, they use the book to pass physical evidence back and forth.

For example, in an early marginal note in the foreword, Eric writes to Jen, “Attached my favorite letter … ripping film adaptation of Santana March [one of Straka’s other books]” (vii). Later on in the text, readers will find a streaked Xerox copy of this letter. The position of the artifact in relation to the note referring to it seems to be random: it isn’t necessarily on the page that makes reference to the object. Instead, readers have to flip through the book, passing over other objects, in order to find the one being referenced.

However, the reader often finds holes in the archive. Throughout the text, Eric and Jen make reference to artifacts that readers may think can be found, but actually aren’t present in the book. At one point, Eric describes a recorded confession from another author claiming to be

Straka. Eric tracks this recording down and makes a transcript. In the margins, Jen asks, “Could I see the transcripts? Do you trust me enough?” Just under that note, she writes “((THANKS))”

(64), presumably in appreciation for Eric giving her the transcript. Readers who have figured out the way marginal notes reference documents tucked in the book’s pages will no doubt look for this transcript. However, they will be disappointed. The transcript is not present within the book.

This is especially maddening given the importance of this transcript, which is mentioned over and over throughout various marginal notes. The frustration of missing documents in S. mimics the frustration of the gaps found in many archives. Many researchers know the experience of finding references to important documents or letters, but not the smoking gun of the letters or documents themselves. Through its withholding of documents, S. mimics the sometimes deflating emotions of research in the archives.

Jen and Eric, as the ones selecting and writing the various documents and marginalia in

S., serve the function of both curator and subject of the archive that readers encounter in S. The reader, on the other hand, is charged with reading and making sense of the many documents and notes contained in S.’s box. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “the archive gives rise to particular practices of reading” (15). Robert J. Connors describes the reading the archive encourages as a kind of “play,” tying it to things like a “ramble, something like an August mushroom hunt” and

“the challenge of puzzle solving.” (23-25). Likewise, Lynée Lewis Gaillet relates it to “following a Nancy Drew-like trail of clues” (29). Rather than reading an archive from beginning to end, we start with a random piece or at a random place. From there, we move on to other pieces of the puzzle or other points on the trail. Never wandering without direction, but following no set path.

A piece of the archive catches our attention, pushing us in directions that we initially did not plan. Reading the archives is a non-linear experience in which the viewer sifts through pieces

and remnants, never able to follow a complete string from beginning to end. The disjointed reading style encouraged by S. might at first seem daunting to readers more accustomed to linear print fiction. However, the non-linear archival style of S. mimics the kind of reading already being done by users of online archives.

First, I will outline the rise of personal digital archives and describe the kinds of skills that readers develop when they create and explore personal digital archives; I will also point to S. to show how this text utilizes these skills. It is impossible to approach S. as a linear text. Instead,

Abrams and Dorst provide the pieces of a fictional archive, forcing the reader to create a cohesive narrative out of the fragments. Finally, I will place S. and other kinds of contemporary archival fiction in opposition to postmodernism. Thanks to their non-linear archival form, texts like S. pose a challenge to the notion of authorship presented by many postmodern thinkers.

While many postmodern writers embrace a form of non-linear storytelling, these stories differ from S. in an important way. For example, while texts like Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” tell a non-linear story, that story is consumed by readers in a linear way. Readers cannot change the order of “The Babysitter” on a whim; they consume “The Babysitter” in the same order every time. Other postmodern texts, like B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Marc Saporta’s

Composition No. 1, encourage readers to reorder the text before reading. However, after reordering the text, one reads it in a linear fashion. These texts do not encourage jumping around and exploring branching narrative paths, as S. does.

S. and Archival Fiction

S.’s engrossment with the archive relates it to a larger group of archival fiction that has a long tradition in literature. Marco Codebó tracks the development of archival fiction back to early modernity and defines it as “a fictional genre where the narrative stores records,

bureaucratic writing informs language, and the archive functions as a semiotic frame that structures the text’s content and meaning” (13). While S. follows from the earlier examples of archival fiction outlined by Codebó (novels he mentions include Honoré de Balzac’s The Human

Comedy and Don DeLillo’s Libra), it strays from some of the qualities he defines. For one thing,

S. does not borrow from bureaucratic writing. Codebó is mainly concerned with large societal archives kept by various government institutions and organizations. S., on the other hand, embraces personal archives. Codebó, for his part, stresses the relationship between history, bureaucratic institutions and the archive (67). To Codebó, archives matter because they help shape historical narratives. The importance of archival fiction arises in its ability to question the objectivity of the narratives that arise out of the archives created by large bureaucracies. The documents in these archives are mainly centered on political and economic issues; in other words, the large scale events that usually make up the plot-points of historical narratives. The personal archives that are the center of S. differ from these bureaucratic archives. Rather than being concerned with the macro events of history, the personal archives of S. focus on the micro events happening in Jen and Eric’s life. In the realm of large bureaucratic archives that are concerned with collecting historical documents for posterity, these seemingly mundane personal archives wouldn’t make the cut.

Codebó’s view of the archive is indicative of a narrow view of the archives that holds sway in America. Within the American tradition, Christopher Lee points out that “many types of documentation can serve as ‘personal records,’ but they are only personal archives when they have been transferred to the care of professional archivist within a formally recognized repository” (3). On the other hand, within international circles of archivist, the boundaries of the archives are much wider. The boundaries of the archive were stretched in part by Sue

McKemmish who, in her 1996 essay “Evidence of Me,” argues that “Those of us who … accumulate our personal records over time are engaged in the process of forming a personal archive” (175). For my own purposes, I will be leaning more towards McKemmish’s conception of the archive. Therefore, a personal digital archive would be any collection of personal documents kept overtime using digital technology. This would include collections on technologies like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, various blogging platforms, etc. While personal digital archives would include offline collections, I will be restricting my investigation to archives that exist in shareable online environments. While, as Katie Day Good notes, personal archives are not necessarily private (as an example, Good points towards scrapbooks, a kind of personal archive that was often shown to others), the ease of perusing and creating personal archives in online spaces increases the visibility of these archives exponentially. As will be shown, the ability to curate personal digital archives for public display and comb through other publicly available personal digital archives is important for the development of certain reading skills that will be useful when approaching texts like S.

While S. does depart from Codebó’s view of the archive as it relates to history and bureaucracy, it embraces some parts of the archival fiction aesthetic. For one thing, Codebó argues that the “heroes” of archival fiction are frequently “archivists, clerks, researchers in archives … they can also be laymen who find themselves involved in archival adventures” (15).

Both Jen and Eric serve a number of these functions. Jen is a clerk in her school’s archives and throughout she and Eric’s search for Straka’s real identity, she proves to be an excellent miner of archival material. However, at the same time, Jen’s youth and inexperience also place her in the role of accidental archival sleuth. Likewise, the multimodal form of the book places the reader in the role of archival researcher. Charged with making sense of the various loose documents and

marginalia in S., the reader’s actions are not too different from Eric and Jen’s archival pursuit of

Straka’s real identity. While S. does place the characters in situations that demand interaction with the archives, as Codebó claims archival fiction usually does, it also goes a step further and forces the reader to interact with the mass material of an archive.

Another area where S. both intersects and departs from Codebó’s frame of archival fiction is in the way the book presents archival documents. Codebó points out that archival fiction is a “genre where the narrative stores records.” These narratives usually store records through the use of what Codebó calls “paste-ins,” which are “textual fragments that maintain their original typographic layout event after being transferred to a new text” (32). “Paste-ins” reproduce the words and typography of absent archival documents on the pages of the text; physically, these “paste-ins” are no different than any other page in the book: they appear in a fixed sequence and their order is stagnant. While S. does store textual fragments in its narrative, it does so in a different way. While remaining true to the spirit of Codebó’s definition, S. moves beyond the “paste-ins” technique. Rather than reproducing documents on the page, S. actually contains the object themselves. In a novel that incorporates the paste-ins technique described by

Codebó, an archival document might appear as altered font or in some way set apart from the

“main” text. In this case, the document appears linearly; that is to say, on a specific page within the sequence of the novel. The novel reproduces the document not in a material way, but only in a typographic way. S., on the other hand, attempts to reproduce every aspect of the archival document. If the document is hand-written on yellow legal paper, S. reproduces the yellow legal paper and the look and feel of handwriting. Additionally, the document is loose. That is to say, it is tucked in the book’s pages and can be taken out, moved, used to cross reference other objects and the text of Ship of Theseus, and even missed or lost.

While this may seem like a small change, it actually has far-reaching implications when one reads S. The form of archives necessitates a non-linear reading experience that is duplicated with the real objects of S., but not with the “paste-ins” described by Codebó. Archival theorists note the importance of the specific order of an archive. For example, Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead argue that a reader of an archive needs to have a “clear understanding of how a collection is physically presented and ordered in its original box or container and how this order was debated and decided upon” (7). The physical experience of approaching S. is extremely similar to the way we approach real archives. When combing through the archives, one often stumbles upon boxes of documents arranged by another hand. Like S., these boxes are ordered by one party, and then consumed by a reader in a way that may or not be the order the arranger intended. The order in which a reader consumes an archive changes the narrative of that archive. With “paste-ins,” that order is stagnant. However, in S., it is possible for the reader to manipulate that order. In this way, the reader of S. serves as one of the curators of the narrative that emerges from the archive.

As noted by The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, technology shifts curation from a niche skilled practiced by professionals to an integral part of the web. Additionally, the manifesto puts

“curation on a par with traditional narrative scholarship. It is a medium with its own distinctive language, skill sets, and complexities” (9). While the manifesto is talking about curatorship specifically in a digital context, readers who are familiar with digital curation will inevitably apply those skills to print texts.

Curating the Archive of S.

As mentioned by Steedman and others, curating an archive hones certain kinds of reading skills. Curating is about arranging and describing, taking the bulk mass of an archive and assembling it into a coherent and usable form. The first widely read guidebook to curating was

known as the Dutch Manual published in the Netherlands during the 19th century. The Dutch

Manual collected and disseminated many of the practices of curatorship that would later become commonplace. Above all, the Dutch Manual preached objectivity and the empirical collection and description of artifacts (Ridener 21-25). From the perspective of the Dutch Manual, the ideal archive will not be influenced by the biases of the archivist. The rules and strictures of the Dutch

Manual are designed to prevent such bias from leaking into the space of the archive.

While the objective methods of the Dutch Manual held sway well into the 20th century, they are no longer the prevailing set of guidelines followed by archivist. Terry Eastwood and

Heather MacNeil note an increasing “influence of postmodern currents of thinking on contemporary archival discourse” (xii) that can be traced back to Foucault and Derrida. One of the most lasting postmodern critiques that helped move archival theory away from the objective guidelines set down by the Dutch Manual is Derrida’s Archive Fever. Part ruminations on Freud and part deconstruction of the ideals of archival objectivity, Archive Fever helped set the stage for the changes in archival theory noted by Eastwood and MacNeil. In typical Derridean fashion, he begins his analysis by tracing the history of the word “archive” back to the Greek word

“arkheion,” which, as Derrida points out, was “the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons … The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives” (2-3).

Derrida’s conception of the archivist and archive are in opposition to those standards laid out by the Dutch Manual. Rather than being the one who ensures objectivity, the archivist controls and constructs the narrative of the archive.

The interpretative role of the archivist is now widely recognized within contemporary archival theory. Nupur Chaudhuri and others remark, “as librarians and archivists now attest, the act of collection is a subjective matter involving a series of decisions regarding what to keep, what to discard, how to organize what is kept, and for what purpose” (xiv). Rather than being a simple act of collecting and organizing material, the curatorship of an archive involves the conscious construction of a narrative out of a stockpile of documents and other fragments. The ability to build a narrative out of the collection of an archive is one of the foundational skills of curatorship. “Archives are always-already stories,” Antoinette Burton argues, but “Stories—in whatever narrative form—embed as many secrets and distortions as archives themselves; their telling encodes selective disclosures” (20). The archivist, in the role of the archon as Derrida would put it, is the one selecting the documents to disclose, putting them in narrative sequence, deciding how they are described, and thus, deciding how the story of the archive gets told. Helen

Wood even goes so far as to assert, “Archives are objects of little value until they are received and interpreted” (21). The stories held within an archive only gain narrative coherence through an external reader or archivist.

The reader, in their role as one of the curators and archivists of S., is partially responsible for its narrative. Different readers will order and read the various parts of S. in different ways, leading each reader to experience the text in a way that won’t be completely mimicked by another reader. Additionally, readers can choose to approach the book in different ways on subsequent readings. For example, during my first reading of S., I would usually jump between the marginalia and main text multiple times on each page. This created a reading experience that was disorienting and jumbled. During my next reading, I decided to read the text of each chapter first, before going back to read that chapter’s marginal notes. This created a more manageable,

but still multi-layered, reading. The physical objects within the book present another challenge for readers. Some will take the various objects and documents out of the book, referring to them whenever the marginalia references a specific document. Some readers might happen upon documents by accident; because they are stuffed in the book, many of the documents are liable to fall out while reading. These accidentally discovered documents might send readers on a narrative path that might not have been otherwise explored. Others will move the objects around, placing each object close to the marginal note that references it. Still others will add their own documents to the book, going from curator to participant.

Archives, by their very nature, require an archivist or curator to take the mass of their documents and turn them into meaningful narratives, and S. is no different. As Steedman points out, “You find nothing in the archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities” (45). While an archivist is trained to comb through these fragmented stories and traces in order to make sense of them, how can the average reader of S. do the same? According to Okwui Enwezor, recently “we have witnessed the collapse of the wall between amateur and professional, private and public as everyday users become distributors of archival content across an unregulated field” (13). Thanks to the internet, the allure of the archive is spreading throughout popular culture. David M. Berry goes as far as to say that the internet brings about

“the infinite archive” (2). Likewise, Anne Burdick and others see the internet pushing towards what they call an “animated archive.” (30) While previously within the purview of historians and a few dedicated amateur hobbyist, the experience of creating and combing through an archive is now something that many people do using services like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other online platforms. These digital spaces are akin to personal archives in which users curate artifacts for public display. Likewise, these platforms give users the ability to peruse the archives

of others. But what are the specific skills that readers develop in these digital archives, and how can readers then apply these skills to S.?

As Burton sees it, “The availability of archival sources of all kinds online arguably makes us all archivists now … ‘Googlemania’ is thus at least partially akin to Derrida’s archive fever, with everyone acting as his or her own arkheion.” Many readers of S. will already have the skills necessary to curate and make sense of the archival form of the text. These readers didn’t develop these skills in stuffy archives, but on the web. In an updated version of here groundbreaking essay, “Evidence of Me,” Sue McKemmish investigates the implications of personal archives moving from analog to digital. One of the consequences of this shift is the sharing of archives.

While people have collected and arranged personal collections of documents and artifacts, these collections rarely saw widespread public display. Personal digital archives allow a “witnessing

[of] both our personal and collective lives” (131).

Only certain kinds of online spaces provide the framework for the building of archival skills. In Bernie Hogan’s view, we should be careful to differentiate between online performance and exhibition spaces. Hogan believes these two kinds of sites function in different ways. Sites that encourage performance are built around “real time” interactions between people. Exhibition spaces, on the other hand, are built with a time-delay in mind. That is to say, exhibition spaces involve preparing materials to present to an audience at a later time. This “exhibition spaces,” to

Hogan, are sites where “individuals submit artifacts to show each other” (377). While both are different ways of putting the self online, exhibition spaces are much more akin to archives than performance spaces. Because performance sites are “bounded in space and time” (378), they can only reach viewers who are there at a specific moment in time, unlike exhibition spaces where artifacts can be prepared and displayed over a continuous amount of time. A chat room would be

an example of a performance site: in this setting, one can put the self on display but that display is over once the chat is over; the performance has no permanence. On the other hand, an exhibition space, such as Facebook or Twitter, has the potential to display the self over a sustained period of time.

Managing these exhibition spaces for public display is akin to the curation of an archive.

However, Hogan argues that the actors doing the curating in these exhibition spaces is not the humans that are the subject of these sites. Rather, Hogan sees the “algorithms designed by the site maintainers” as the curators of exhibition spaces. Hogan’s privileging of algorithms in the curation process stems from his view of curation skills. As Hogan puts it, “it is simply impractical to have a human curator pore over one’s social information and devise a unique and relevant exhibit for each person, on demand” (381). Underpinning this argument is the belief that only professionals have the curation skills necessary to create a narrative out of the raw material of one’s archive. However, curation skills can be developed by amateurs in their own personal archive. Nevertheless, Hogan is right to point out that the algorithms and programs of these sites play a role in the curation of personal digital archives. While these factors may form the structure and limit the possibilities of curation, the actual act of selecting and sorting still involves the users themselves.

While Hogan places too much emphasis on the role of computers in the curation of these personal exhibition spaces, his description of the selection process users go through when deciding what artifacts to put on display and why can be useful when we think about how users develop the archival skills necessary to read S. closely. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s concept of sociological dramaturgy and impression management, which posits that people “tweak their behavior and selectively give and give off details” (Hogan 378) for specific audiences, Hogan

argues that the artifacts and information users decide to place on social web spaces are selected in order to create a certain narrative for the audience of that online exhibition. The curation of the specific narrative one gives off in an online exhibition space is similar to the way Eric and Jen withhold certain personal details from each other throughout the margins of S. In one early deception, for example, Eric convinces Jen that his name is “Thomas Lyle Chadwick” by sending her on a fruitless chase through the list of assigned library workspaces (2). In a more serious selective withholding of information, Jen tells Eric a story from her childhood, centering on her running away and going missing for a few hours. Jen carefully edits and withholds certain details of this story in order to give off a certain impression to Eric. When Jen decides to tell Eric the rest of the story, Eric writes her, “So you lied.” Jen, for her part, believes that she “just didn’t tell the whole story,” but Eric insists that she, “revised the whole story” (376). This exchange is not that different from the way users carefully decide what narrative pieces to provide users of their online exhibition spaces. In each case, Jen and online curators are engaged in a kind of

“impression management” focused on controlling the narrative details that audiences see. When it comes to reading S. those who are used to this kind of careful narrative withholding and management will be more apt to question the details that Eric and Jen provide to each other in the margins.

Like Hogan, Katie Day Good links certain online spaces to curated archives. Specifically,

Good links Facebook to personal archives through a comparison to scrapbooks. To Good, both

Facebook and scrapbooks are “deeply social texts … paging through a personal scrapbook is not unlike clicking through the features of a Facebook user’s profile.” Furthermore, Good sees

“social media … as a continuation of earlier scrapbooking habits” (558). Good places both

Facebook and scrapbooks under the umbrella of “personal media assemblages,” which she

defines as, “individualized collections of media fragments both original and appropriated, including notes, messages, photographs, symbolic tokens, and snippets of meaningful items”

(559). When these assemblages are put within a “bounded setting” (such as Facebook or a scrapbook), Good considers them to be “personal media archives” (559). S. works in a similar way to both Facebook and scrapbooks. The various documents throughout S. run the gamut of different media, from personal notes, to fragments from academic journals, to photographs and newspaper clippings. Indeed, Jen goes as far as to call the copy of Ship of Theseus her and Eric pass back-and-forth “a scrapbook of all your younger selves” (76). Likewise, a later note written by Eric calls the book a “scrapbook of us” (293).

With the rise of archival spaces online, the specific skills that one develops reading and arranging archives become widespread. Anne Burdick and others see “Curation … at the core of digital humanities” (17), later calling for a move to “make [undergraduates] active participants and stakeholders in the creation and presentation of cultural materials” (23). Not only that, but education should involve the general teaching of curation skills suited for digital documents. In her study of the practices of the everyday digital archivist, Catherine C. Marshall notes that, while most individual’s curation seems random, it actually follows a logic developed by particular people for their specific archives (100-101). While Burdick advocates a more standardized approach to the teaching of digital curation skills, Marshall points out that the average user’s digital collection is curated. However, that curation does not follow a rigorously standardized frame. Rather, it is cobbled together through trial and error. In lieu of standardized education, amateur digital archivists develop curation skills through lived experience. The organizational methods of a personal archive might seem random on first glance, but with careful observation one can see a certain structure emerge from the chaos.

S. follows a similar ad-hoc logic. While there is no overarching plan apparent in the archive of S. at first glance, a pattern does emerge with scrutiny. While the Dutch Manual saw archives as spaces free from the taint of human subjectivity, the archives are now seen as a space that is consciously constructed by the hand of a creator or arranger. Alexis E. Ramsey notes that

“Digital archives call attention to the created nature of all archives. The digital archive is just as, if not more, created than traditional archives” (88). Almost any casual user of Facebook knows how that digital archive is carefully constructed and vetted based on the particular whims of the owner of that archive. Untangling the logic behind the narrative of a Facebook archive or a particular user’s esoteric file system help readers call into question the constructed nature of every archive. When it comes to S., because extensive marginalia in two handwritings and multiple colors is present on almost every page of Ship of Theseus, readers have to pay close attention to the specific qualities of the marginalia. For one thing, the handwriting is the only clue as to who is writing what note. Jen writes in a cursive script, while Eric prints. Additionally, the color of the marginal note indicates different readings by Eric and Jen. On their first reading, for example, Eric writes in black ink and Jen writes in blue ink. On the second reading, Eric writes in green ink and Jen writes in orange ink. On the third reading, Eric writes in red ink and

Jen writes in purple ink.

Many pages of S. contain notes from multiple readings,

forcing readers to make sense of a jumbled chronology. While the

logic of this colored chronology is not immediately apparent, as

readers explore Jen and Eric’s archive, a pattern does emerge. For

example, the first time a hint at the multiple marginal

Figure 3: Marginalia of S. chronologies emerges is very early in the book. On the page Photo take by author

detailing Straka’s impressive oeuvre, Jen writes to Eric, “Just saying: I don’t think we should assume Caldeira was stupid/insane. There’s got to be more to it” in blue ink. Eric replies ‘“We’

??” in a rather dismissive way in black ink. To this, Jen retorts, “Ok, that was a mistake.” Below this exchange are two more notes. Under a red arrow pointing up towards the word “mistake,”

Eric asks, “Do you still think so?” Jen replies in purple ink, “Absolutely.” The different color inks of these exchanges hints that they took place during different readings. Adding a third period to this chronology are two more notes, this time both in black ink. One is in Eric’s hand and says, “Still?,” with Jen replaying, “Do you really need to ask?” (ii) (See figure 3).

Given the position of this exchange in the book, more than likely it will be one of the first things readers stumble on during an initial reading of S. At first, this exchange won’t make any sense. However, once readers are more enmeshed in the archive, they begin to see the logic behind Jen and Eric’s organization. Catherine Hobbs rightly asserts that “Personal archives arrangements are meaningful because their physical and intellectual arrangement can demonstrate thoughts and actions” (228). Almost every user of personal digital archives knows the logic behind their own organization, as Marshall notes. However, that logic is invisible to outsiders. Only through observation can one begin to see how and why the materials of a personal archive are arranged in the way that they are. As readers continue through S., they will begin to realize how each ink color hints at a different chronology. Furthermore, they will begin to realize how each string of marginalia grows out of specific events happening in Jen and Eric’s life and relationship.

In the example detailed in figure 3, readers’ knowledge of the logic behind Jen and Eric’s ink chronology helps them make sense of this exchange. The first note is obviously a tongue- and-cheek quip in response to Jen assuming that she and Eric form a research team. The second

note, however, is more cryptic. Once readers’ are farther into the book, they realize that the red/purple marginalia was written during a rather turbulent time in Jen’s life. During her and

Eric’s search for the real identity of Straka, Jen is stalked and harassed by an unknown group who has an interest in preventing them from finding out the truth. The notes in red/purple reflect the fear and regret that Jen is feeling at that particular time. The final notes, both written in black, are also cryptic. Eventually, the reader finds out that Jen and Eric run away together to Prague.

The notes in black are written when they are together; the fact that they are the only notes written by Jen and Eric in the same color pen hints at this. In these notes, Jen changes her mind, no longer regretting the close relationship she and Eric formed through their reading of Ship of

Theseus. While these multiple chronologies at first seem to follow no logic, as the reader learns the circumstances and time period of each note, the way they are ordered begins to make sense.

It is the reader’s job to put these chronologies in order from the scattershot marginalia all over the book.

While some marginalia scaffolds off earlier marginalia, other marginalia sends readers on the “Nancy Drew-like trail of clues” described by Gaillet. For example, a note from Jen on page

5 tells Eric to “See p.10 for my response.” This note offers a fork in the trail for the reader. If she wants, the reader can choose to follow the marginal note to page 10, the reader can continue reading the other dozen or so marginal notes on page 5, or the reader can read the text of the book. Each possible option offers a different narrative trail to the reader. If the reader chooses to follow the marginal note to page 10, they are offered more branching narrative paths. Here, a narrative note from Eric explains his tenuous position as a graduate student by telling her, “See:

The Daily Pronghorn, Jan. 8 (p.1)” (10). If S. is in its original order, the excerpt from The Daily

Pronghorn won’t be on page 10. According to SFiles22, a fan community surrounding S., this

newspaper clipping is originally found between pages 32 and 33. Readers wanting to follow the trail that started on page 5 will have to flip through the book until they find the clipping. Along the way, they may run into other documents tucked into the pages, catching their attention and putting them on yet another trail. These choices are everywhere in S. and ensure that no one reading will exactly mimic the narrative steps of another reading.

Along with random flights of exploration and narrative discovery, the various documents and artifacts found in the book are meant to be read alongside the copious marginalia of the book. Indeed, some marginal notes would be meaningless without the context given by a specific document. In one of the later notes written in orange and green, Jen writes to Eric, “Is it ever hard for you to read this section?” To this, Eric tells Jen, “Used to be. Although sometimes it could be real exciting, too” (65). The section that Jen is referring to details the sinking of a ship and sailors lost at sea. These are the only notes on this page in orange and green, the others are from earlier readings and don’t reference these two notes. When first stumbling on these lines, the reader is left wondering what they could possibly be about. Inserted between pages 202 and

203 is a long letter written on a few pages of yellow legal paper. This letter was written by Eric for Jen. In it, Eric tells Jen about a boating mishap that killed his uncle, an event for which Eric feels responsible. With the knowledge of the letter in mind, readers are able to understand why

Jen asks the question she asks. However, such understanding only comes from a document found much later in the text. In this case, readers are forced to straighten out the knotty chronology of the marginalia using various archival documents.

Sammie L. Morris and Shirley K. Rose note that knowing the methods of the production of an archive makes one a better reader of that archive. To Rose and Morris, knowing how an archive is put together helps readers sift and filter the bulk mass of information that is present in

every archive. Most archives are accumulated over time and through different methods, sometimes with very little thought given to outside readers. As a result, having an idea of how and why documents are arranged in the way that they are helps readers build a narrative string out of the tangled yarn of the archive. To Morris and Rose, there is an “invisible hand” at work behind every archive and recognizing how this “invisible hand” works makes one a more astute reader of archival material (51). One of the keys to this is recognizing and keeping in mind the original order of documents. Original order is the principle that a record of the way the user ordered the document should be saved. While the documents may move around, they can always be put back in this original order (54-55). To Richard Pearce-Moses, the importance of original order comes from the way “it preserves the existing relationships and evidential significance that can be inferred from the context of the records” (280-281).

Some readers will jump into S. without thinking about how the “invisible hand” of Jen and Eric is at work ordering the various documents and marginalia found in S. These readers are liable to move the documents around the book without first noting how they were originally ordered in the text and whether or not this order has significance. Others, however, will realize the importance of original order. For example, Audrey Driscoll chronicles her reading of S. on her blog, which includes pictures of the various artifacts from the book with small tags noting their original location in the book by page. This simple system of keeping original order does not come from a professional archivist, but an average reader discussing the book on her blog. As a regular user of online archives (such as her blog), Driscoll is accustomed to tagging and ordering documents and is well aware of the logic behind one’s organization of their archive, so the pays close attention to the way this fictional archive is ordered.

The readers who don’t note the original order of S. are not out of luck, however. Various fan sites dedicated to S. have sprung up around the web, and many of these sites have sections detailing the original order of S.’s documents. The website SFiles22 has a complete list of the original order of each document. The members of fan communities like SFiles22 have taken it upon themselves to act as collective archivist for S. Like professional archivist, they order and catalog many of the documents in S., helping to facilitate the research of other readers. This impulse to work together and share are indicative of an ethos developed in online environments.

Driscoll’s blog and SFiles22 are both examples of the ways readers take skills from digital environments and then transfer those use those skills to make sense of print fiction.

The original order of certain documents found within Ship of Theseus often matters. For example, at one point in the narrative, Eric searches for F.X. Caldeira in South America. While he is there, he sends Jen a series of postcards riddled with codewords. In the original order given by SFiles 22, we can see that these postcards appear in chronological order within the text. The first card readers will find in the book is the first one Eric sends to Jen, as the last one readers find is the last card Eric sends to Jen. Taken together, these postcards detail a subplot that is only hinted at through other documents and marginal notes. The place of each postcard within the text indicates the specific time Jen read the note. Presumably, Jen would read the postcard before adding it to the growing mass of documents tucked in Ship of Theseus, building on the scrapbook her and Eric have been co-curating. In some marginal notes, Jen will reference reading the postcards, “Best breakfast ever: triple Americano, chocolate croissant, + a postcard from Brazil”

(112). Thanks to the way the chronology of marginal notes is apparent through ink colors, readers can cross reference the postcards with the specific notes Jen wrote during that time

period. This can give readers a sense of how these postcards changed Jen’s larger relationship to the text and how the new information presented in the postcards altered her readings.

S. and Postmodernism’s Author Problem

The kind of reading developed in online archives and encouraged by the nonlinear, multimodal, and archival form of S. raises questions about the nature of authorship proposed by postmodernism. S. is not alone in this. Other texts such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of

Leaves, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, and Anne Carson’s Nox all embrace the aesthetic of the multimodal archive. Additionally, comics such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My

Mother?, as well as Chris Ware’s Building Stories and Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, also involve archival documents and artifacts presented through a variety of modalities. Taken together, the archival form embraced by these texts points towards a way out of the authorship conundrum raised by many postmodern thinkers. Using S. as an example, we can see just how these multimodal archival texts grapple with postmodernism’s authorship problem.

The problem of authorship as raised by postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Barthes, and

Derrida relates to the hold they see the concept of authorship having on textual interpretation.

The foundation laid by these thinkers leads to the widespread belief that the author concept limits reader’s interpretation by placing the ultimate meaning of a text on the author’s intention. To

Seán Burke, postmodernism’s problem with authorship is derived from the philosophical movement’s underpinnings which hold that “knowledge and the subject are seen to be fictive emanations of a language and a writing which endlessly subvert all attempts by the human agent to assert any degree of master or control over their workings” (14). Since language and writing cannot be used to say exactly what one means, the intention of an author is irrelevant to the meaning of a text. This complete erasure of the author from the interpretive process, in Burke’s

view, is a response to an earlier conception of the “‘Author-God’ of criticism” who is regarded as “the univocal, absolute subject of his work: he who precedes, directs, and exceeds the writing that bears his name” (23).

This tension between a completely eradicated author and an author in complete control of meaning, Burke argues, is actually the result of postmodernism (and Barthes in particular) overinflating the importance of the author to criticism. As Burke sees it, Barthes, “is led to an apotheosis of authorship that vastly outpaces anything to be found in the critical history he takes arms against … Barthes’ entire polemic is grounded in the false assumption that if a magisterial status is denied the author, then the very concept of the author itself becomes otiose” (26).

Burke later adds that “The Author in ‘The Death of the Author’ only seems to be ready for death precisely because he never existed in the first place.” In essence, the author concept that postmodernism kills only existed as a strawman created by postmodernism in order to be torn down.

In order to get around this either-or problem that is posed by postmodernism, Burke advocates a return of the author to the interpretive fold, but not the kind of author that postmodernism banished in the 1960’s. Rather, Burke advocates “returning the author to the house without shaking its foundations, quietly, inconspicuously, an author who can leave by the front door only if he enters from the back (31).” Burke finds this middle ground by advocating a conception of the author as “the principle of specificity in the world of texts. So far from consolidation the notion of a universal or unitary subject, the retracing of the work to its author is a working-back to historical, cultural, and political embeddedness” (202). This concept of author

“embeddedness” allows Burke to bring the author back into the discussion without allowing the intentionality of the author to drown out other interpretations. The author should not be

completely removed from interpretation. Rather, the particular political, social, and historical circumstances that authors are enmeshed in should be considered when interpreting texts.

Becoming just another string in the vast woven tapestry of meaning, the embeddedness of an author is one more thing that critics can reach for in order to untangle their interpretation of a text.

Eric and Jen’s investigation of the real authorship of Ship of Theseus and the true identity of Straka is an example of how knowledge of the specific circumstances of an author can enhance and change our reading of a text. In the beginning of Eric and Jen’s collaborative reading, Eric encourages Jen to take a familiar postmodern stance towards the author. Eric tells

Jen to be “Careful RE: Linking everything in a book to the author personally” (17). Eric’s view at this point of his reading is echoed by the book itself. The mysterious sailor searching for his own identity is one of the main focal points of the text, but Ship of Theseus also questions if the search is even worth it; “How much could one person’s identity matter,” (337) the main character asks himself. This sentiment is again raised under the guise of intentionality, when one of the characters wonders, “Can you ever make another person fully understand the choices you’ve made?” (358). Jen and Eric’s search, and the subsequent way their search changes the way they read Ship of Theseus forces us to question the ways in which our own readings might be changed when we consider the embeddedness of a particular author. The multimodal archival form of S. allows readers to ride-along as Jen and Eric peel back each layer of the mystery of

Straka. Because each reading is documented chronologically by a different color ink, readers can see how Jen and Eric’s interpretation of the text shifts as they discover more clues about the true identity of Straka and his translator, Caldeira.

The meaning that Eric constructs during his reading of Ship of Theseus is very different than the meaning that emerges through Eric and Jen’s joint-reading. For one thing, Eric is, at first, adamant in his belief that Caldeira is crazy, saying, “he’s a complete crank,” something that

“every serious Straka scholar ever has thought” (title page). A few of Eric’s assumptions will prove to be incorrect. For one thing, F.X. Caldeira will turn out to not be a “he” at all. Rather,

F.X. Caldeira is Filomela Caldeira, a Brazilian translator. She is also far from crazy, something

Eric finds out after meeting her in-person. Jen is the one who first finds this out, after combing through passenger manifests from ships coming to New York City (29).

This will be one of the first times Jen’s archival sleuthing helps Eric reformulate his original interpretation of Ship of Theseus, but it will not be the last. Thanks to Jen’s skill in archival research and her general reading skills, Eric comes to read the text in way that he would not have been able to without her help. Many of the early notes written between Jen and Eric are about the gap between their differing interpretations of the text. Eric, as the hardened, close- reading graduate student, looks for things that can be supported through textual evidence. Jen, on the other hand, bases her interpretation of the text on affective intuition. Rather than being centered on rage and revenge, as Eric believes, Ship of Theseus is actually about love. When Eric asks her what her “support for this is,” her only response is “A feeling” (xiv). By the time readers finish combing through Eric and Jen’s marginal notes, they will see that the interpretation Eric and Jen come to is actually a combination of their disparate arguments.

These widely different interpretations begin to come together when Eric and Jen start to peel back the layers of obfuscation surrounding the identities of Caldeira and Straka. The information that Eric and Jen find out about the embeddedness of Caldeira and Straka leads them to conclude that their wildly different readings might actually overlap. When Jen first tells Eric

about Caldeira’s real identity, he tells her that it “changes everything.” (29). This is the first chink in Eric’s hardened confidence of his own interpretation. Still, Eric is reluctant to allow his knowledge of Caldeira’s true identity cloud his own interpretation. When Jen underlines a line that she believes shows Straka’s “regrets,” Eric once again tells her, “You have to be careful. Not everything a writer writes is about the writer” (35). This will be constant theme in Eric and Jen’s first reading: Jen will often look at lines as some sign of emotion or affect being expressed by the author to the reader. Eric will then tell her something along the lines of “That’s another reach”

(39).

Jen’s knowledge of the embeddedness of Caldeira leads her to come to certain conclusions about the text. Namely, the love story interpretation is driven by her connecting of

Caldeira to Sola, a woman that the main character of Ship of Theseus is constantly searching for.

To Jen, the main characters desperate search for this woman mirrors Straka’s feelings for

Caldeira. Jen tells Eric that “If you go through this book + read Sola as a stand-in for FXC, it becomes a much different book” (48). According to Jen’s suggestion, if we focus on Caldeira not as a man who was “a complete crank,” as Eric says, but as an intelligent and thoughtful translator who possibly had a relationship to Straka, the entire tone of the book changes. Jen hangs on to this reading. When Eric points out how a section of the text is ruminating on art and capitalism,

Jen reminds him, “What about love? Where does that fit? […] I’m sure it was for Filomela.”

Rather than rejecting this outright, as he previously did, Eric considers the idea, writing, “I guess that’s one of the big questions” (57). As Jen shows Eric more information about the context behind Straka and Calderia’s relationship, and how that intersects with the narrative of Ship of

Theseus, Eric begins to move from his skeptical position.

While Jen is responsible for pushing Eric to reexamine his reading of Ship of Theseus,

Eric’s own archival discoveries also force him to adjust his interpretation. Eric finds evidence of a hotel registry with information that may help find Straka’s true identity (124). This registry hints that Straka might be Vaclav Straka, a factory worker thought to have committed suicide.

Vaclav instead joins up with a group of revolutionary writers who take him under their wing

(127). This confirms Eric’s interpretation: Straka was involved with a group of revolutionaries.

Combined with Jen’s discovery of Calderia’s identity, they can piece together how certain characters in Ship of Theseus line up with other writers and members involved in Straka’s revolutionary band. With the help of additional archival research, Eric and Jen are even able to find out how certain events in Ship of Theseus line up with real events in these lives of these writers. For example, Eric and Jen conclude that Straka may have accidently led government agents to another writer (171). While they do have evidence for this, Eric is careful to remind

Jen, “Straka was a writer. He made things up. Not every detail has to be drawn directly from real life” (169). While Eric is right, knowledge of the embeddedness of the author and translator of

Ship of Theseus leads Eric and Jen towards interpretations of the text that they could not have arrived at without that knowledge. Nevertheless, this knowledge does not ensure that this interpretation is correct. There is still the possibility that Straka just “made things up.”

In the end, Eric and Jen are sure they know the identity of Straka and Calderia. However, they never find the smoking gun in the archives that proves their argument. What they feel about the author and what they can prove about the author are separate things. A publisher Eric meets finds their theory intriguing but she tells Eric that she “can’t give him my money to chase ghost.

I can’t publish what can’t be proved and this can’t be proved. Period.” (445). While Eric and Jen hold out hope, the end of the book leaves readers wondering if they can ever prove to scholars

who Straka really was. While knowledge of the embeddedness and circumstances surrounding an author can lead us to many interesting interpretations and readings of a text, knowledge of the author never closes off interpretation. Interpretation does not stop once we gain knowledge of the circumstances of the author’s writings. Rather, this knowledge only forces us to dig dipper, reevaluating our previous readings, but never allowing us to find the “ultimate meaning” handed down by some Author-God.

Thanks to the rise of personal digital archives and collaborative webspaces, readers of S. can engage in a collaborative reading similar to the one Jen and Eric undertake. In a sense, these collaborative reading projects show how the meaning that comes out of a reading changes when that reading is done by a large group, rather than an individual. Henry Jenkins sees technology bringing about a “participatory culture” in which more consumers of media become active participants in that media (3). Participatory culture takes many forms. One of these forms is an increased presence of texts across different media. For example, the Harry Potter books have spread beyond its pages, taking root in message boards and other fan communities that debate the text and add their own spin to stories in “fan-fiction.” To Jenkins, “Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers” (18). When it comes to S., many fans have gathered on various online spaces in order to debate and dissect some of the larger mysterious of the novel. These readers mimic Jen and Eric: they exchange information and build relationships around the many unanswered questions riddling S.

The aforementioned SFiles22 is one such space where fans come together to engage in a collaborative reading of S. These fans obsessively catalog and collect every piece of evidence they can find in a unified online archive that they then use to decode the enigma of S. Here you

can find a bibliography of all of Straka’s previous works, a detailed collection of every footnote and marginal note, a list citing every mention of the number “19” in the book, and every instance of a word being circled or squared by Jen or Eric. Some of these lists make perfect sense: having one spot where readers can compare and crosscheck the hundreds of marginal notes and footnotes makes their investigation much easier. Other things, such as the collection of every reference to “19” and what words are circled, serve as starting points for hunches that may grow into something more.

Referencing the TV show Survivor, Jenkins calls it a product “for the Internet age— designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued” (25). We can make the same comment about S. One defining feature of S. is the way it invites readers to solve the many puzzles present in the text. For example, there is a code in the footnotes that serves as a way for

Straka and Caldeira to communicate in secret. Jen is the first one to stumble on this code, using a similar code found in another Straka book. She tells Eric, “The Eötvös wheel is the key to decoding the puzzles in Coriolis, right? Maybe it would work here, if these [footnotes] are coded?” (3). Eric provides a wheel for Jen and together the crack some of the codes in the footnotes. This wheel is one of the artifacts included in the books, so readers can see if they can find more codes that Jen and Eric don’t discuss in their notes. SFiles22 has a section dedicated to the Eötvös wheel. One intriguing thing this section references is a site that comes up when readers Google “Eötvös wheel.” This site called Dossier of V.M. Straka purports to be a fan- made site dedicated to finding the real identity of Straka. However, as SFiles22 notes, Dossier of

V.M. Straka is more than likely a part of the larger multimedia ARG surrounding S. because it reproduces photographs that are not contained in the original text. The site is extremely cryptic.

The owner, J.W. Dominguez, tells readers “to be patient. I’ve been … it’s been a tough few

years.” However, there is a way to contact the owner of the site, which some fans have done

(they are still waiting for a response). In this case, we see how S. encourages the kind of investigation that requires the collective participation of a number of readers. The various clues and puzzles in S. can’t be deciphered alone; they require a community of likeminded readers working together in a collaborative reading project.

Jenkins draws from Pierre Lévy’s conception of “collective intelligence,” which Jenkins defines as the “ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members” (27), in order to conclude that “New forms of community are emerging … defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments … These communities, however, are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge” (27). The many fan communities that surround S. are an example of these. Together, these readers uncover things they could not have otherwise without the help of one another. For example the site Mysteries of

S. posted a link to whoisstraka.com, another site in the ARG ecosystem surrounding S.; the site flashes codes and other bits of puzzles spread out over random intervals and allows users to download a .asc file. The blog post on Mysteries of S. doesn’t delve much deeper than this. The poster has to stop the investigation because she had “to get to work.” Later, an update to the post informs readers that another member of the S. community, Moebius, tracked down another

YouTube video using one of the codes flashed on whoisstraka.com. Using the information posted by Moebius and other users of Mysteries of S., readers can build on this knowledge to solve other puzzles present in the text, something that they may not have been able to do without the help of fellow community members.

The various community blogs and wikis dedicated to solving the mysterious of S. use all of the tools at their disposal, including what Burke would call the embeddedness of the authors.

Reddit users look to the embeddedness of S.’s authors in order to draw conclusions about the book. On this site, there is a thread dedicated to finding connections between S. and one of

Abrams other popular projects, Lost. Other readers take any piece of information the authors give them in interviews and other communication in order to help drive their overall investigation.

One user on the SFiles22 blog, ObFuSc8, encourages the other community members to “Assume nothing-as Doug Dorst said in the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, ‘Nothing is out of bounds’ … Per Dorst, there is still pieces of ‘S’ out there, online, that haven’t yet been found.

It’s not clear whether solving more ciphers/codes would lead us to any of these ‘pieces.’” Here, we can see how the interaction between these fan communities and the authors encourages certain kinds of reading practices. Because of the encouragement of Dorst, many of these readers focus their attention on the puzzles present in the text, in lieu of focusing on other aspects of the text.

Nevertheless, this kind of interaction can be important to keeping these fan communities alive. Indeed, by telling these fans that there are more mysterious in the text, Dorst encourages further discourse within that community. As Jenkins notes, “What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (54). Without the need to solve more puzzles or uncover some information, these communities lose their raison d'être. Periodically, Dorst and Abrams will inject new pieces of the puzzle into the community, spurring speculation and fan interaction as they scramble to make sense of these new narrative wrinkles. For example, one of the mysterious surrounding

Ship of Theseus is the missing tenth chapter. The chapter that is present in the text is what

Caldeira puts together using the fragmented notes left behind after Straka’s apparent murder. Six months after the book was released, many fan sites, such as Osfour’s Cage, received an anonymous email containing a password protected file that needed to be opened. As the members of Osfour’s Cage say, “after cracking it open we got this,” before posting the text from the “lost” tenth chapter. Other sites, such as SFiles22, received different versions of the tenth chapter. By giving different fan communities different versions of the chapter, the team around

S. encourages the different communities to work together. This stirring of the fan community pot is still going on more than a year after the book was released. In December of 2014, Abrams and

Dorst tweeted out a short YouTube video telling fans about a scavenger hunt like contest. This contest centers on 5 autographed copies of S. hidden in different cities around the country.

Abrams and Dorst will tweet out clues that the community can then follow to find these hidden books. While this kind of prodding can keep the reading community together, at the same time, however, this kind of author encouraged reading closes off other potential readings. While this kind of interaction between readers and author is important to keeping the knowledge pursuit of the community going, it also pushes the meaning made by that community in a specific direction.

The construction of Ship of Theseus also calls into question the idea of the unitary,

Author-God. Indeed, the very existence of Ship of Theseus is because of the collaboration of

Caldeira and Straka. For one thing, Straka would often write in a language that he was familiar with, but not fluent in. Caldeira would then translate these manuscripts into English (x). Jen and

Eric later find out that this is actually the product of elaborate codes Caldeira and Straka would use to communicate, but it also hints at the fact that, while most of Straka’s books bare only his name, they are actually created through a back-and-forth between Caldeira and Straka. In this

way, the translator is just as involved in the creative process as the writer. Additionally, in the process of meeting Straka for the first time face-to-face, Caldeira walks in on an unknown man

(presumably Straka) being beaten and carted away. In the room, Caldeira finds the remnants and fragments of the last chapter of Ship of Theseus. She edits and collects these fragments into a publishable form, and it is her final chapter that appears in Ship of Theseus (xii-xiii). Far from being the creation of a unitary Author-God, Ship of Theseus shows how texts are brought to life through the collaboration of multiple authors, editors, and translators.

This collaboration of authors and others is also brought to bear on the creation of S. Part of S. involves deploying the materiality of the physical book in meaning making. That is to say,

S. consciously ties meaning not just to the text of the book, but to the way the various objects look and feel. According to N. Katherine Hayles, the design aspects of a physical book can be just as important as the text itself. To Hayles, the specific materiality of a book is “an emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact”

(How We Think 33). Because of this, the designers of a materially conscious book are just responsible for the end product as the authors themselves. Indeed, S. would not be possible if it weren’t for the collaboration of Abrams, Dorst, and many other designers and artist. The copyright information on the backcover’s endpaper attests to the many individuals that come together to produce the multimodal collage that is S. The dozens of contributors to S. include the designers Paul Kepple and Ralph Geroni, the illustrator Christopher Wormell, and the photographers Dale Berman, Lynne Ciccaglione, and Celia Hueck, among others. Additionally, many of the photographs are collected from online photography archives like Flickr,

Shutterstock, and iStockphoto. These sites collect images that users can then use in their own work. While many of the photos on these sites need to be licensed, others are available royalty-

free. The widespread ability to share one’s photography through an online archive allows for this kind of widespread collaboration to exist.

The archival form of S. and the form of other multimodal fictional archives is an example of a text that allows for a different kind of contact between reader and writer. The physical archive gives readers a chance to dig into the life of another person or other people in a way that moves beyond what is possible with typed reproductions. While S. is a mass produced object, it goes to great lengths to appear as a unique, one-off. This illusion allows for readers to delve into

S. as if it were the only copy of the book stuffed deep in some university repository. This unique auratic illusion is important to the way readers interact with S. According to Johanna Drucker, convincingly reproducing the physical experience of an archive in the form of a fictional book

“presents the viewer with the raw materials of personal memory and experience … It allows one to replicate the act of going through someone’s private and intimate papers or documents” (The

Century of Artists’ Books 99). This “process of intimate discovery,” Drucker argues, “has the potential to provide a private space for communication and exchange across vast spaces of time and geography” (The Century of Artists’ Books 357). These private spaces described by Drucker achieve a more pressing importance in the wake of the rise of digital technology. Indeed, S. and other multimodal archival books, are one pocket of activity in a larger “aesthetic of bookishness” described by Jessica Pressman. To Pressman, texts since the year 2000 use their materiality in the service of story-telling as a response to the rising discourse surrounding the “death of the book” (“The Aesthetic of Bookishness” 465). Like Drucker, Pressman sees physical books as important nodes in the web of human communication; as Pressman argues, “Books are not discrete, isolated objects; rather, they are shown to circulate within a network of readers and readings” (“The Aesthetic of Bookishness” 479). We can apply this idea to S, which

acknowledges the role of the book in communities of readers. Readers of S. are seemingly dropped in the middle of a larger conversation taking place between readers. Due to the many multimodal ARG’s and puzzles surrounding the text, readers are also encouraged to add their own voice to the existing interpretation Jen and Eric lay out in the margins,

The kind of intimacy that Drucker is describing is echoed by archival theorist in their writings on real archives. Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch call archival research “a reciprocal cross-boundary exchange, in which we talk with and listen to Others, whether they are speaking to us in person or via archival materials” (24). To Glenn and Enoch, research in the archive is comparable to an embodied, in person exchange. In the same vein, some theorists have argued that archival material calls attention to the lived experience of the creator of that archive. For example, Neal Lerner stresses that “archival research is not merely about the artifacts to be found but is ultimately about the people who have played a role in creating and using those artifacts”

(196). Lerner warns against focusing too much on the material documents themselves, without also remembering that real people created these documents. Rather than being completely out of the picture, as they so often are in postmodernist theory, the creator of a document should play a part in the narrative a researcher brings out of an archive. Ann Cvetkovich sees certain archives as “archives of feeling,” which she defines as, “repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception” (7). It is important to realize that many archives are created by individuals through certain, sometimes extremely emotional, lived experience. This lived experience seeps into the documents of the archive and is reflected in their creation.

The kind of “cross-boundary exchange” that is noted by Glenn and Enoch seems to be connected to the embodied experience of viewing the physical documents of an archive.

However, the physicality of this experience is important. When this physicality is lost, the

“cross-boundary exchange” described by Glenn and Enoch does not remain intact. Renée M.

Sentilles believes that research can be guided and helped by digital reproductions of archives, but

“they never send me on flights of imagination like paging through original newspapers and getting the dust of two centuries under my nails.” Sentilles even believes that one can begin to know another personally through the physical, handwritten letters they leave behind (155). This kind of experience, to Sentilles, relies on the physical experience of the archive, which cannot be reproduced through digital technology.

If we read Eric and Jen’s relationship through Sentilles, we can see how they come to a similar conclusion during their relationship in the margins of Ship of Theseus. At one point, Jen tells Eric, “You realize that passing margin-notes isn’t exactly the most efficient way to get to know each other, right? We could text + still keep the mystery, if we want.” Eric tells her that he likes “to keep [his] life analog” (115). In a marginal note written later on, Jen again suggests using a digital communication method, instead of communicating in the margins. Again, Eric tells her that he prefers using the physical book; he insists, “I like having everything we’ve done/found/noticed in one place. Easier to spot connections. Not very practical, I know … But I still love that we’re doing it. Love hearing you in the margins” (292-293). Like Sentilles, Jen and

Eric feel like digital text is lacking something that the physical act of writing in the margins has.

Linda S. Bergmann believes that handling physical documents is a meaningful experience because “One touches the actual paper and reads the actual words directly as they were written, and it is hard not to feel drawn into becoming a part of the particular, personal audience for whom they are written” (230). Physical documents and handwriting feel more personal than digital reproductions, but this aura melts away when the documents are transferred to a digital

form. While the widespread access to archival documents through digital technology has definite benefits for those who lack the means or time to visit these documents in person, there is no replacement for holding and handling the actual physical documents themselves.

The personal experience of reading another’s handwriting will be especially important when investigating comics. As will be shown in chapter 2, the physical handwriting present in comics creates a more personal reading experience than mass produced type script. Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, highlights the personal and emotional experience of reading another’s handwriting. In this novel, the main character (also named Ruth Ozeki), finds a diary washed up on the shores near her home. In general, Ozeki compares handwriting to type, arguing, “Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.” Just below this passage, Ozeki describes the writing in the diary in detail,

“The fingers that had gripped the purple gel ink pen must have belonged to a girl, a teenager. Her handwriting, these loopy purple marks impressed onto the page, retained her moods and anxieties, and the moment Ruth laid eyes on the page, she knew without a doubt that the girl’s fingertips were pink and moist, and that she had bitten her nails down to the quick” (12). Unlike handwriting, Ozeki sees print as a uniform and ultimately anonymous style of information dissemination. The materiality of handwriting, on the other hand, is infused with meaning. The very shape and style of the letters hints at an embodied creator. When it comes to comics, the style of handwriting is one of the basic units that adds up to the larger meaning of the text.

Likewise, the handwriting found on documents in the archive can also be scrutinized for subtle clues that may be absent in a similar, but typed, document. Perhaps this is why Jen and Eric cling

to the margins of Ship of Theseus as the space for their relationship: the ability to charge handwriting with emotion cannot be easily duplicated through impersonal type.

At many points throughout S., the question of whether or not readers can come to know another through their writing is raised. From its earliest pages, S. presents arguments on both sides of the postmodernism present/absent author debate. In the end, however, S. ends up in a similar position to Burke: we can have a sense of a present author behind the text, but that sense of an author is nothing close to the Author-God torn down by Barthes and other postmodernist.

In the translator’s foreword to Ship of Theseus Caldeira chastises the readers who are obsessed with Straka’s true identity, “the focus on the Writer and not the Work dishonors both. Only in the author’s private life—which was and is nobody’s business—might it matter ‘who’ he ‘was.’ The few verifiable public statements Straka issued confirm that he, too, believed the authorship controversy was misguided” (viii). In many ways, Straka and Caldeira’s criticism of “the authorship controversy” is similar to the postmodernist position that the text is the only thing that matters, and not the producer of that text. At the same time, however, later in the foreword

Caldeira says, “I feel no urge to identify him because I knew him. I saw the world through the eyes of his characters; I heard his voice in his letters and in our discussions in the margins of his typescript. I felt his gratitude” (x). This tension between being able to conclusively identity an author or writer of a text, but at the same time being able to come to know another through their writing is a constant theme in S. Furthermore, the idea that two people can develop a deep connection through the exchange of handwritten notes and marginalia will also bear out in Eric and Jen’s relationship.

Eric’s belief that it is impossible to get a sense of an embodied person on the other side of writing is quite ironic, considering how he and Jen form such a close relationship through

nothing but handwriting in the margins. Jen

even points this out to him when he

characteristically chastises her for trying to

Figure 4: Photo Taken by Author draw conclusions about a person through their writing. When Jen comments on the reasons why Filomela Caldeira would go through so much personal hardship for Straka, she concludes that it is because “She wouldn’t do all of this if she didn’t sense Straka was returning the feeling in some way.” Eric tells her, “Can’t assume you understand her completely. All you have is her writing—and not much of it.” The hypocrisy in this statement is evident to Jen, as she writes, “You realize what you just said wrote, right?” (77)

(See Figure 4). In a later marginal note, Eric takes the complete opposite stance. When he first makes his feelings for Jen known, she tells him “you don’t know anything about me;” Eric replies, “I know the you who’s in the margins” (83).

These exchanges, in many ways, encapsulates S.’s stance towards authorship and writing.

On the one hand, extreme feelings, emotions, and relationships can be formed and exchanged through the act of writing. It is possible to get a sense of an embodied person on the other side of writing. Indeed, it is even possible to fall in love through nothing but writing, as Eric and Jen do, and as Caldeira and Filomela do. However, the text also indicates that these relationships formed through written correspondence cannot replace and do not completely emulate in-person relationships. Jen and Eric’s relationship in the margins leads to their embodied relationship which is closer and more affective than the one they developed strictly though writing. Strake and Caldeira never meet, and it is apparent that the relationship they formed through correspondence is missing something that can only be provided in the space of an embodied, in- person relationship. Jen’s writing in this passage reinforces this idea. The writing in the margins

can approach the intimacy of embodied speech, so much so that she can mistake her writing for speech. At the same time, the fact that she strikes this mistake out hints that, while writing can come close, it cannot fully emulate the experience of embodied interaction.

Still, the relationship that Jen and Eric, as well as Strake and Caldeira, form strictly through textual means is evidence of the communicative power of text. Communities and bonds can be formed through and around texts. Indeed, contrary to the postmodern conception of the author, questions about the relationship between text and author become questions that drive both the relationships within the universe of S. and the many fan communities that have sprung up online, dedicated to delving deeper and deeper into the text, sometimes with the help and encouragement of the authors. Rather than being a wall between writer and reader, as many postmodernist think, a text can actually be the thing that encourages meaningful communication in the first place.

Graphic Literature: Using Comics Theory as a Lens to Investigate Multimodal Print Narratives

Comics theorist Douglas Wolk has argued, “Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices” (14). This view of comics as a medium distinct from others has been extremely valuable for comics studies, allowing the field to develop its own critical toolbox. This attempt to wall comics off from other media is also evident in the work of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen,

Charles Hatfield, and others. Indeed, part of the process to legitimize comics as a worthwhile scholarly pursuit has been an attempt to show how comics can do things that other media cannot.

This strict demarcation of the “ninth-art,” as comics is known throughout Europe, may have been a valuable tactic in comic’s struggle to gain a foothold within the academy.

Nevertheless, this walling off of comics from other media has made it difficult to cross pollinate between literary studies and comics studies. However, because certain works of contemporary

American literature continually embrace a multimodal form, it may be time to look at how the scholarship within comics studies can be applied to contemporary literary narratives. Multimodal literature makes use of techniques beyond the textual, looking towards the visual and tactile.

Comics have always been concerned with the combination of word and image, as well as the physical materiality of the book itself. Because multimodal literature also looks to these qualities, looking towards comics theory might be a useful way to make sense of this branch of contemporary American literature1. This is not to say that multimodal texts intentionally use the

1 Specific examples of this group of texts include J.J. Abram and Doug Dorst’s S. and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, both texts are discussed in other chapters. 64 techniques of comics art, although sometimes they do, as is the case with Karen Tei Yamashita’s

I, Hotel. Rather, literary theory should borrow the vocabulary and concepts found in comics theory, which is always-already interested in a multimodal blend of the visual and verbal.

Using comics theory as a lens to look at multimodal contemporary literature will also help us see why contemporary literature is looking beyond the textual. Recently, many contemporary authors have worked to remove the authorial distance created be the prevalence of irony in postmodern fiction. If postmodern fiction uses irony to eradicate the illusion of an author/reader relationship, multimodal narratives attempts to rebuild this relationship through the mobilization of the visual, tactile, and material. Multimodal books invite readers into the text, encouraging them to inhabit a different space that has the traces of another’s embodied perspective. That is to say, multimodal fiction encourages readers to think about how the experiences of another come through book objects. Within literary theory, it is common to think that personal experience cannot be represented using textual means. Multimodal literature avoids this common criticism of textual representation by moving beyond the textual to the tactile and visual.

As many comics theorist point out, the visual/verbal blend found in comics requires the reader’s conscious and constant interaction with the text. To Hatfield, comics theory is pushing towards a view that sees comics as a medium that eschews a passive reader, “Comics, in recent criticism, are not mere visual displays that encourage inert spectatorship but rather texts that require a reader’s active engagement and collaboration in making meaning” (Graphic Women

33). Comics theory is well versed in looking at a close relationship between creator and viewer because comics require an active readership that is willing to work. Part of this work is tied to, as

Hillary Chute says, “The effect of the gutter, the rich empty space between the selected moments

65 that direct our interpretation, is for the reader to project causality in these gaps that exist between the punctual moments of the frame” (Graphic Women 8). Unlike postmodern literature, which uses various techniques to complicate and obfuscate any perceived relationship between reader and writer, comics depend on a close alliance between observer and creator. Multimodal literature attempts to build a relationship in much the same way, using a similar toolbox.

This chapter will look to comics theory as a way to explain some of the qualities of multimodal narratives. Rather than looking at a single text, this chapter will look at certain techniques that are employed by comics and multimodal literature more broadly. Using comics theory, I will then show how these specific qualities play into the larger attempt to build an author/reader relationship. Aspects of multimodal narratives that will be investigated include the use of handwriting, the mobilization of the visual word, the use of page design, and the combination of word and image. While comics regularly use all these tools in the building of narrative, multimodal texts do not. Rather, they may use one or two of these techniques in combination with large sections of text. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close primarily uses text. However, it also has small sections of handwriting, images, and innovative use of white space. Looking to comics studies may help us see why Foer utilizes these multimodal qualities in a predominately textual narrative. Along with Foer’s text, this chapter will also glance at Anne Carson’s Nox, Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, Salvador

Plascencia’s The People of Paper, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and others.

My approach draws from the comparative textual media studies outlined by N. Katherine

Hayles and Jessica Pressman. As Pressman and Hayles point out, “print is itself a medium” (vii).

Taking this as a starting point allows us to move around the walls set up by theorists attempting

66 to divide comics apart from other print media. As objects tied up with the materiality of print, both comics and multimodal narratives share a common seed. Similarly, it might be useful to look at the relationship between comics and multimodal narratives as a kind of sliding scale. This is similar to Joseph Witek’s conception of “comicness” not as “an immutable attribute of texts,” but “as a historically contingent and evolving set of reading protocols that are applied to texts”

(149). On this sort of sliding scale, we can see how some multimodal narratives, at moments, slide more towards the comic’s side by utilizing things like handwriting or white space, qualities that are almost always-already an integral part of comics. When these multimodal texts begin to approach the territory usually thought to be the domain of comics, it might be useful to turn to comics theory to help make sense of these moments.

What comics and multimodal share is an embracing of print in a world that increasingly turns to the digital. Both comics and multimodal literature turn to print because it seems more personal. To Will Eisner, “Traditionally art, its style and individuality, has been central to the personality of a comic book strip. This generally results from a singular ability with pencil, pen or brush and has an impact on the narrative quality of the work … Technology has always had the effect of expanding an artist’s reach while challenging their individuality” (172). The uniform nature of digital technology, to Eisner, removes many of the idiosyncrasies tied to the handmade aspects of comics. Multimodal literature, like comics, embraces print as a way to present a reading experience that has trouble being translated to digital devices. Furthermore, by utilizing material objects, comics and multimodal literature encourage readers to engage with the text in an embodied way. The tactile aspects of these narratives are more than incidental. Rather, as this chapter will show, the reader’s physical manipulation of the book becomes a crucial part of the narrative experience.

Text and Image

One of the most versatile strategies that comics creators have at their disposal is the combination of words and images. While acknowledging that the boundary between word and image is itself blurry, Hatfield nevertheless concludes, “responding to comics often depends on recognizing word and image as two ‘different’ types of sign, whose implications can be played against each other … While the word/image dichotomy may be false or oversimplified, learned assumptions about these different codes—written and pictorial—still exert a strong centripetal pull on the reading experience” (37). Like most of the features comics share with contemporary narratives, the relationship between text and image is something that is used constantly in comics, but only turned to at certain points within multimodal print narratives. Texts that incorporate text and image include Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Carson’s Nox, the works of Mark Z. Danielewski, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, JJ Abram and Doug Dorst’s S., among others.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s I, Hotel, for example, incorporates text and image in different ways throughout the narrative. In many ways, Yamashita’s novel is a collaboration between herself as writer and others, working as designers and illustrators. Like other multimodal texts, I,

Hotel utilizes experimental typography with the help of designer Allan Kornblum. Likewise, artists Leland Wong and Sina Grace contribute various illustrations. Grace, a comic book artist, plies his trade within the pages of Yamashita’s narrative. While I, Hotel utilizes some interesting multimodal techniques, it still is predominately constructed using traditional prose. Nevertheless, one section uses an array of comics art. The thematic reasons for the inclusion of comics illustrations is linked to Yamashita’s overall plot. I, Hotel is a collection of short novellas, each centered on the famous International Hotel, a hub for Asian-American life in San Francisco,

68 between the years 1968 and 1977. While some characters appear in multiple novellas, each section usually focuses on a new cast of characters and situation. The novel portrays struggles over immigrant and minority rights, revolutionary politics, questions of tradition and cultural identity, as well as the everyday life of individuals moving in and out of the International Hotel.

The novella that incorporates Grace’s comics is entitled “Aiiieeeee! Hotel” and covers the year 1971. While the year 1971 does not play directly into the narrative of this novella, it instead links to a larger debate over Asian American literature. 1971 is the year Frank Chin’s The

Chickencoop Chinaman was first staged. This happens to be, “the first play written by an Asian

American to be produced on a mainstream New York stage” (Danico 1444). A comic version of

Chin appears in chapter 4 of this novella. Across from Chin is a comic version of Maxine Hong

Kingston, another prolific Asian American author. Apart from being two paragons of Asian

American literature, Chin and Kingston also embody a tension within that particular community.

On one side, Chin argues that Kingston (and other writers such as Amy Tan), “fake the best- known works from the most universally known body of Asian literature and lore in history … and argue that the immigrants who settled and established Chinese America lost touch with

Chinese culture … This version of history is their contribution to the stereotype” (3). To Chin, authors that modify or blend traditional Chinese stories with other cultural narratives are contributing to a kind of “faking” of Chinese culture. In the process, these authors reinforce the idea that Chinese Americans have lost touch with their culture. Chin, on the other hand, believes he is the antithesis of Kingston. Rather than adapting traditional Chinese stories, Chin leaves them unmodified, instead incorporating them into his narrative unchanged.

Yamashita attempts to graphically represent this debate in I, Hotel. One of the themes at the core of Yamashita’s narrative is the question of cultural identity, and how this question has

69 been dealt with by different individuals. The entirety of chapter 4 takes the form of different comic representations of Chin and Kingston. Each panel shows Chin and Kingston at a different point in time, starting when they are young and ending when they are both white-haired (246-

247). Each panel has a caption below it. In one sequence, the reader sees Chin and Kingston dressed in what one might consider to be traditional Chinese clothing. Under Chin is the caption

“Wittman Ah Sing, Fake,” a name taken from a Kingston character modeled after Chin (Lowe).

Likewise, Kingston has the caption “Pandora Toy, Fake,” a name taken from a Chin character modeled after Kingston. Next to these two panels are two more panels, this time showing Chin and Kingston in more western style clothing, and with the words “real” under each caption. Here, we see Yamashita tackling the idea of “authenticity” in Asian-American writing. As writers, both

Kingston and Chin are, in some ways, faking their experiences by transferring them into narrative form. At the same time, these narratives retain a piece of the “real” Chin and Kingston, shown to be different, but still recognizable in the pictures labeled “real.”

This sequence of panels graphically represents the tension surrounding identity felt within the Asian American community. But why present this pictorially using comics art? In comics, according to Hatfield, “the author’s task is to evoke an imagined sequence by creating a visual series (a breakdown), wheras the reader’s task is to translate the given series into a narrative sequence by achieving closure” (41). The series presented by Yamashita is somewhat abstract. She doesn’t give dialog or much text, besides the captions below the pictures. A reader might not even know the identity of the people being portrayed because Yamashita does not include their name. However, if the reader actively works to decode the narrative behind the sequence, it proves to be something besides a random sequence. By showing the tension between

Chin and Kingston over time, Yamashita shows how this debate has carried over into the present.

According to Hillary Chute, a comic “lays out its temporal unfolding in juxtaposed spaces on the page” (Graphic Women 8). By presenting the passage of time spatially, comics can present time in a way that other media cannot. In a comic, the reader can see past, present, and future all at the same time. Yamashita uses the temporal qualities of time to her advantage. The last pictures in chapter 4 show Chin and Kingston as old and white-haired. Under these are the captions

“Matriarch” and “Patriarch.” As an Asian American author, Yamashita can’t help be compared to these writers that come before her. The tension between cultural authenticity and assimilation is inherited by writers like Yamashita, brought down to her by her literary forbearers. By showing the passage of time through two canonical Asian American authors, Yamashita shows how Asian American literature has been stuck debating the same argument for decades.

As Hatfield notes, one important tool of comic art is the way it exploits tensions found within the medium: the tension between word/image and sequence/surface, for example.

Yamashita uses a different kind of tension within I, Hotel: the tension found between different ways of representing the same image. The comic portraits of Chin and Kingston found in chapter

4 are relatively realistic. They differ greatly, however, from the comic found in chapter 6 of the same novella. This comic, called “Chiquita Banana!,” instead uses caricatures based in racial stereotypes. Charles Hatfield believes that many comics depend on a shared knowledge of cultural stereotypes to “convey impressions of people that are seemingly spontaneous yet deeply coded … As many cartoonists and critics have observed, stereotypes are the raw material of cartooning … Yet, as Art Spiegelman has argued, sustained comics narrative has the power to individualize the stereotype, dismantling it in whole or in part” (115). Yamashita’s juxtaposition of different styles of racial representation challenges stereotypes in a similar way. The realistic presentation of Chin and Kingston clashes with the ridicules cartoony character of Chiquita

Banana, a character modeled after South American stereotypes. Chiquita Banana is an anthropomorphic banana dressed in what appears to be traditional South American dress, complete with head wrap adorned with fruit. Another character in the comic, Don Juan Samuel, is a hypersexual stereotypical Latino. By combining these extremely over exaggerated portrayals of racial stereotypes alongside much more serious and realistic portraits, Yamashita challenges the cultural assumptions these stereotypes are based on.

While Yamashita directly incorporates comic art into her predominately textual narrative, other authors incorporate the image in other ways. Salvador Plascencia, in The People of Paper, uses a more abstract kind of text/image combo. The People of Paper focuses on a group of characters waging a war against omniscient narration. The narrator/writer is represented by the character “Saturn,” an all seeing observer of the events of the narrative. In an attempt to hide from Saturn, the characters seek the help of Baby Nostradamus, a character who can obscure his thoughts from Saturn’s view. For most characters, such as

Little Merced, hiding their thoughts from Saturn takes a great deal of concentration. When characters shield their thoughts, it is shown to the reader through blocks and circles of dark black that obscure the words on the page (figure 1). Most characters can only sustain this block for a short period, so bits of text still peak through. Baby Nostradamus, on the other hand, can completely hide his thoughts from Saturn and some of his sections Figure 1 Photo Taken By Author are completely blacked out. At these moments, the textual experience of the reader is interrupted and the book becomes something to be viewed rather than read. Along with these blacked out sections of text, Plascencia also includes drawings of

72 lotería cards, graffiti gang tags, a graph, a food pyramid modified to show “how one could survive on the taste of sadness for years” (111), as well as other images.

This turn towards the visual is tied to larger cultural turn towards images. WJT Mitchell believes that “changing modes of representation and communication are altering the very structure of human experience” (3) leading to a state where “we may find that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the image” (2). As we interact with the world increasingly through images (thanks to technology like the internet and television), the way that images change the way we experience daily life needs to be examined. The flow of information that we currently find ourselves surrounded by is less and less textual and more and more based in images. Contemporary writers also find themselves enmeshed in a visual culture. As a result, they use a combination of text and image in their own work.

Furthermore, many of the images that we experience are common ones. Media coverage of important events, for example, often use similar images in their reporting. As a result, we associate similar media images with a particular event. Because, as Eisner argues,

“Comprehension of an image requires a commonality of experience,” comics artist can use well- known images to communicate ideas to a reader. Using common images, according to Eisner,

“demands of the sequential artist an understanding of the reader’s life experience if his message is to be understood. An interaction has to develop because the artist is evoking image stored in the minds of both parties” (7). In the case of images spread by mass media, the comics artist has to know how these images resonate among readers.

Foer takes advantage of this in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by using images that have become emblematic of the event. One of these images is the famous “Falling Man” picture.

Different versions of the photograph exist, taken by different photographers throughout the day.

One of the most recognized is by Richard Drew and is covered in the documentary 9/11: The

Falling Man. Foer uses another photograph in his text, this one by Lyle Owerko. Like Drew’s photograph, Owerko’s picture shows a person falling from one of the World Trade Center towers. Although Foer’s picture is not an exact reprinting of either Drew or Owerko’s photograph, it bares a close resemblance to both. The picture features prominently at the end of the text, where it takes up the last 15 pages. It isn’t the same picture, however. The first and last pictures in the series show the side of a building. In between, a silhouette starts at the bottom of the page and works its way up. This allows the reader to turn the pages quickly, bringing the figure up in an effect similar to a flip book. The chronological order of the pictures brings the silhouette back up the side of the building, in a rewinding of the tragic events depicted in the photographs of Owerko and Drew. The reader can also flip the pages in the reverse order and see the same shadow falling from the towers, replaying the events seared in the public consciousness.

Rather than text, this series of photographs ends the narrative. In a novel filled with textual description, the last image Foer chooses to leave the reader with isn’t composed of words at all. As Richard Gray argues, “If there was one thing writers agreed about in response to 9/11, it was the failure of language; the terrorist attacks made the tools of their trade seem absurd” (1).

Foer, like many contemporary authors, was at a loss for words. One reason, Gray argues, for this silence is the prevalence of images. Because many saw 9/11 happening in near real-time, Gray believes, authors feel like a textual description of the event will inevitably fall short. Still, while

Gray acknowledges the way word and image clash around 9/11, he does not explore this further.

Instead, Gray hones in on the transnational and globalization issues highlighted by literature since 9/11. Like Gray, Martin Randall puts his finger on a similar question surrounding word and

74 image that he sees being asked on the pages of fiction after 9/11: “Put one way, this can be understood as a kind of crisis … for language. A number of questions quickly arose: How can a writer put into words what had already been watched by millions?” (5) Randall, rather than looking out how the tension between word and image effects the form of contemporary fiction, explores how this friction plays out within the text of contemporary novels (2).

Foer, for his part, addresses this tension by incorporating well known images from the event into the pages of his novel. Strangely enough, notes Chute, neither Gray nor Randall takes much time to look at Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close or other multimodal texts made after

9/11 (American Literature, 604-606). By drawing from a pool of common experience, Foer is able to relate to readers in a way that words would not. As noted by Gray and Randall, there is a prevailing feeling in contemporary literature that words alone are unable to grapple with the tragedy of 9/11. Foer, through his incorporation of images, supplements the textual. By using a recognizable image of 9/11 numerous times in addition to his text, Foer bolsters his prose narrative with vivid images that most readers hold in common.

Mise-en-Page

The interplay between word and image is mobilized to create meaning within comics and multimodal literature. Additionally, the way these words and images are organized on the page is another tool that is used. The term mise-en-page, as defined by Matti Peikola, “is a term used by codicologists for the general [layout] and organization of the manuscript page [which] silently guides the reader towards a certain reception” (28). While this term has its origins in manuscript studies, it has also been applied to comics. Like the manuscript page, the comics page is comprised of the combination of word and image. When comics theorist discuss the mise-en- page of a text, they are looking at the way the words, images, panels, and white spaces fit

75 together on the page. The mise-en-page of many novels, however, works only on the textual level. Many authors do not consciously employ white space and page layout in the service of meaning. Instead, the page layout is generic, designed for maximum readability. Nevertheless, many contemporary novels are beginning to utilize page layout in innovative ways. Authors that are turning to an active mise-en-page include Mark Z. Danielewski, Karen Tei Yamashita,

Jonathan Safran Foer, Salvador Plascencia, and Adam Thirwell, among others. However, literary theory does, with few exceptions, is mainly concerned with what the words on the page say, and not how the words on the page look. If we look at the page layout of these contemporary narratives through the lens of comics theory, we can begin to see how these texts mobilize page layout as an active tool in the making of meaning.

Before turning to the way page layout is mobilized for meaning in contemporary fiction, I want to first briefly outline the way comics theorist and creators treat page layout. Within the field of comics studies, as Charles Hatfield points out, “The idea of comics as active reading has gained ground in critical conversation , and displaced the once-attractive comparison to film”

(33). Comics require a kind of active reading, Hatfield argues, because “From a reader’s viewpoint, comics would seem to be radically fragmented and unstable. I submit that this is their great strength: comic art is composed of several kinds of tension, in which various ways of reading—various interpretive options and potentialities—must be played against each other”

(36). One kind of tension that forms the foundation of the comics medium is “sequence vs. surface.” The comics page “functions both as sequence and as object, to be seen and read in both linear and nonlinear, holistic fashion” (48). In other words, the panels on the comic page are both meant to be viewed and read as individual units and viewed in combination with all the other panels on the page as a single unit, depending on the way we choose to direct our gaze.

The tension between sequence and surface is also evident in some works of multimodal contemporary fiction. For example, Foer, in his innovative text, Tree of Codes, works on both levels. Tree of Codes is a text that, in many ways, is co-authored by Foer and Bruno Schulz.

Foer, using Schulz’s text Street of Crocodiles, creates his narrative by cutting out most of the words of Schulz’s narrative. The remaining words form Foer’s story. The physical form of Tree of Codes reflects Foer’s cut-up process. The words that Foer removed from Schulz’s text are actually cut out of the pages of Tree of

Codes, allowing readers to see the pages below (figure 2). Because of this unique materiality, readers are forced to choose which level they want to view Tree of Codes Figure 2 From visual-editions.com on. On one level, readers can approach the individual words of the text. Here, a narrative emerges. For example, on the level of individual words, the first two sentences read, “The passersby had their eyes half-closed. Everyone wore his mask” (8). However, readers have to consciously work to read on this level. Because of the cut-out nature of the book, it is very hard to read individual pages. The holes created by the cut-outs constantly cause words from other pages to be in sight. In order to read an individual page, a reader has to devise some strategy. I would hold the book in a way that made a single page visible at a time; other readers might slip a blank piece of paper behind each page. Moving to another level, readers can choose to look at the book as a whole. In this case, the book becomes more of an art object, designed to be viewed but not necessarily read. This would put Tree of Codes in the same category as the artist books described by Johanna Drucker.

The ability to choose between these two levels is one way that comics require readers to be active, constantly making decisions that change the way they look at and making meaning from a text. According to Hatfield, in comics, “there is always the potential to choose: between seeing the single image as a moment in sequence and seeing it in more holistic fashion …

Broadly, we may say that comics exploit format as a signifier in itself” (52). This potential to choose is present on almost every page of a comic. Similarly, readers are constantly choosing on which level to view Tree of Codes. Furthermore, the cut-up nature of Tree of Codes also allows readers to choose to form their own narrative using Foer’s text, just like Foer makes a new text out of Street of Crocodiles. Readers can use the holes left behind by Foer to create new sentences by making the words of later pages visible. While most of the narratives that readers form will be nonsensical, the physical nature of Foer’s text nevertheless encourages readers to experiment. In this way, Foer is pushing readers to engage the text in a more active way.

The concept of mise-en-page is being used by contemporary authors in other ways as well. In a piece of advice given to aspiring comics creators, Eisner writes, “the page as well as the panel must therefore be addressed as a unit of containment” (65). To Eisner, the way the entire page fits together is just as important as the individual panels on the page. Taking this philosophy to print fiction, one might say authors should pay attention to the way the words look on the page, just as they do to the words themselves. Bonnie Mak argues that “The page transmits ideas, of course, but more significantly influences meaning by its distinctive embodiment of those ideas. Discernible in this embodiment is an ongoing conversation between designers and readers. As writers … configure and revise the page, in each case they leave redolent clues about how the page matters to them” (5). This idea is echoed by Keith A. Smith who argues, “the page should be permitted to speak as well as the text” (119) Comics creators, as

78 evidenced by Eisner, believe that the page matters a great deal. However, if we look on the pages of many print novels, we don’t see this same evidence of attention. Rather, we see the same typeset pages and block paragraphs.

Nevertheless, some authors are turning to page layout to engage readers in the kind of

“conversation” described by Mak. That is to say, some contemporary authors are using the page to promote an active readership similar to comics. One text that uses page layout in this way is

Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! Thirlwell’s narrative is a multilayered beast, complicated by the strange typography used to tell the story. On one level, we have the narrator in London. In

London, he hears a story about the Arab Spring from a cab driver. The narrator decides to create his own story about the Arab Spring using the bones of the story he hears from the cab driver. In a narrative sense, this fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation and disorientation experienced by those in the Arab Spring. Going a step further, however, Thirlwell doesn’t only recreate this disorientation through a complicated narrative, he also formats the page in a way that physically disorients the reader.

Thirlwell uses page layout to disorient the reader in different ways. For example, some pages have fold-outs that reveal sideways texts that require the reader to turn the book (figure 3).

Other pages have blocks of text embedded in the main text, sometimes in random directions, again requiring the reader to turn the book. Other times, Thirlwell creates shapes with the words.

While this all may seem very experimental and postmodern, Thirlwell actually is using these experimental techniques in a way antithetical to postmodern experimentation. In a postmodern text, this sort of disorientation would be used to distance the reader from the text. As Brian

McHale notes, textual experimentation was a direct response to the realist idea that “Nothing must interfere with fiction’s representation of reality, so the physical dimensions of the book

79 must be rendered functionally invisible” (Postmodernist Fiction 181). Postmodern writers call attention to the book as object by engaging in textual experimentation in order to counter the idea that books can capture lived experience.

Thirlwell, on the other hand, uses textual experimentation to help the reader imagine

what another’s reality might be like.

The Arab Spring was an extremely

muddled experience for both those on

the ground and those watching

through mass media. Indeed, as

Thirlwell shows, those on the ground

Figure 3 Photo Taken By Author were sometimes befuddled by the large amount of information available through social and mainstream media. As a way of helping readers feel the embodied experience of those on the ground, Thirlwell presents the reader with a twisty and vertiginous narrative and textual form. Rather than pushing the reader away, these features actually require an active readership to get close and more involved with the text, narrative, and characters. Furthermore, the disorienting experience of reading Kapow! places readers in a position similar to the characters.

While Thirlwell shares a relationship to comics creators through the way both pay attention to the design elements of the page, other authors embrace different aspects of comics design. One thing that Salvador Plascencia uses is the panel. In The People of Paper, Plascencia occasionally breaks from a standard textual format to present the narrative in side-by-side panels.

Each page contains two long panels, similar to the thin blocks of text found in a newspaper.

When the book is open, a total of four panels are visible to the reader at any one time. Each of

80 these panels gives the narrative from a different character’s perspective. As Eisner points out, panels serve as “the containment of thoughts, ideas, actions and locations or site … The artist, to be successful on this non-verbal level, must take in consideration both the commonality of human experience and the phenomenon of our perception of it, which seems to consist of frames or episodes” (39). The idea that the panel draws from a common experience or perception is an interesting one. If we experience or perceive reality in a certain way, Eisner argues, that lived experience has to be mirrored by the pace and feeling of the comics page. Plascencia is doing something similar with his panels. If human experience does not consist of one uninterrupted linear narrative, but a fragmented piecing together of episodes or moments, by breaking the narrative up into discrete units, Plascencia textually captures lived experience.

Along with the panel, the gutter is another fundamental building block of the comics page. The gutter, as defined by Scott McCloud, is the “space between the panels [where] human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them in a single idea” (66). The space between panels allows the reader to actively engage with the text. Because comics leave parts of the narrative in the gutter, it is up to the reader to fill in the gaps of the narrative. McCloud points out that other media use this technique (known as “closure”), most notably film, but comics require readers to piece together gaps in the narrative multiple times on every page. Closure is even something that can be used within contemporary literature. As Mak points out, “the spaces between words, between lines, and around the text block can be understood as visual and cognitive breaks … By leaving space on the page unfilled, designers provide opening for readers to pause and consider the thoughts that they have … and may even be encouraged by the empty spaces to add their own thoughts to the page” (17). Closure does not require images. Rather, authors, using only text, can encourage the reader to practice closure.

While contemporary multimodal narratives might not require readers to practice closure constantly, as comics do, they still utilize a kind of gutter (or white space) in order to invite the reader into the text. By bringing readers closer to the text, these narratives encourage readers to imagine the lived experience of another. The use of the gutter in textual based print is noted by

Carolyn Williams in a short article entitled “The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick’s A

Dialogue on Love.” As Williams notes, Sedgwick “self-consciously uses open space to represent and convey moments of sudden access to emotion or affect during ongoing subjective processes in general” (195). Similar to Ozeki, Sedgwick reaches a point where textual representation cannot reach the emotion and affect that she is trying to express. As a result, she eradicates the text, allowing the white space to speak in a way that text cannot. Rather than using the page as a passive container for words. In this case, Sedgwick deliberately designs the page in a way that takes advantage of the meaning making potentials of the page.

While Sedgwick is utilizing the gutter effect in a non-fictional narrative, we can see similar strategies being employed in fictional narratives. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly

Close, Foer also uses white space to supplement text. Foer’s novel focuses on Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy living in New York City just after 9/11. Schell’s father, Thomas Schell, was killed in the attacks, and the novel deals with Oskar’s trauma in the wake of his loss. More specifically, the text mainly details Oskar’s discovery of a mysterious key, and his search for the lock it opens. Through his journey, Oskar delves into a history of his family of which he was mostly unaware.

One use of white space is quite expansive. At different points of the narrative, Foer inserts sections that detail Oskar’s family history. In one of these sections, readers get a glimpse of Oskar’s grandfather and grandmother. Oskar’s grandmother has been writing her life story in

82 a book she calls “My Life.” She shows this book to Oskar’s grandfather. However, he finds that the book is empty. From the perspective of Oskar’s grandfather, Foer writes, “this was all I saw”

(120). At this point, Foer ceases writing, instead inserting multiple blank pages. These blank pages allow the reader to briefly inhabit the subjectivity of Oskar’s grandfather. Rather than simply reading a description, we actually see the blank pages in a way similar to the character.

Additionally, the blank pages change the pace and rhythm of the prose. To Eisner, turning the page is similar to the effect of the gutter. Eisner believes that “when the reader turns the page a pause occurs. This permits a change of time, a shift of scene, an opportunity to control the reader’s focus” (65). By forcing the reader to pause and reflect, the blank pages inserted

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close creates an effect mirroring that of the gutter.

The relationship between page design and narrative pacing is something that comics creators are always wrestling with. One way that Foer utilizes pacing is by inserting blank pages in the middle of his narrative, but Foer uses white space in other ways as well. At one point in the narrative, Oskar is spying on his mother and his psychologist by placing a stethoscope against the door.

Oskar can only catch bits and pieces of the conversation.

The words that he can hear are reproduced on the page interspersed by much larger chunks of white space representing the words he cannot make out through the door (figure 4). Foer’s use of white space, like the blank pages earlier in the narrative, serves to help readers glimpse the subjectivity of the character. Rather than reading about Figure 4 Photo Taken By Author Oskar’s experience, we experience something similar. Like Oskar, the reader is forced to piece

83 the larger conversation together from the pieces they have. The actions the reader takes in this instance mimic Oskar’s actions.

Visual Words

Along with a combination of word and image, and the design of the page, multimodal literature is calling attention of the visual aspects of the written word. While most novels and textual narratives utilize a uniform style of type, some multimodal narratives use fonts in a way that turns words into images. These visual words demand to be both seen and read. Texts that utilize visual words include Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, the aforementioned Extremely

Loud & Incredibly Close, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Like handwriting, visual words are regularly used in comics, but more sparingly used in multimodal literature. Many times, comics use visual words to denote sound or emotion. In figure 5, from Will Eisner’s A

Contract with God, we can see how the character’s dialog is written in a font that indicates both the texture of sound and the extreme emotion of the character speaking. The shakiness of the lines indicate a kind of wavering screech, while the boldness and prominence of the letters shout at the reader. Similar techniques are common place in many comic narratives, and visual words are one of the basic ways comic creators convey meaning to readers.

Before turning to specific examples, I want to first focus on the concept of “visual words.” As

W.J.T. Mitchell notes, the written word is always- already a visual image: “all arts are ‘composite’ arts

(both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, Figure 5 Photo Taken By Author channels, sensory and cognitive modes … Writing, in

84 its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the ‘imagetext’ incarnate” (95). In Mitchell’s view, the written word has both a visual and verbal side. It wouldn’t make sense to talk about purely verbal written words. While Mitchell is correct, many written words are designed in a way that plays down their visual side in favor of the verbal side.

In the Elements of Typographic Style, a handbook for typesetters and designers modeled after

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Bringhurst notes, “The principles of typographic clarity have … scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century” (10).

These principles rest on the idea that “typography must often draw attention to itself in order to be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency” (17). That is to say, most texts are designed to be read first and foremost. The actual visual side of the written word takes a back seat.

While this is the case with most print books, comic books make full use of the visual power of words. McCloud points out that “comics creators have struggled with dozens of variations in their desperate attempts to depict sound in a strictly visual medium.” One variation that has stuck is “the variation of lettering styles … to capture the very essence of sound” (134, figure 6). This practice is more prevalent in main stream comics published by Marvel and DC,

but it is still used in some “literary” comics. For

example, Chris Ware regularly attempts to capture

the texture of sound using visual. To Gary

Kannenberg Jr., within the comics of Ware, “text

is used as a visual element every bit as illustrative

Figure 6 Photo Taken By Author as the images” (309). In Jimmy Corrigan: The

Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware visualizes sound through the use specific fonts. In one scene,

Jimmy Corrigan is seen sitting on the coach. Somewhere in the background, his father types on a typewriter. The soft sounds of the punching keys are visualized for the reader through small blue letters. Off the panel, the phone rings. Jimmy, startled, recoils. The visual qualities of the words adds to the overall scene. The cool blue letters of the typewriter contrast with the abrasive red letters of “ring.” Although the ringing phone can’t be too loud, Jimmy’s fear is made evident to the readers by the specific visual appearance of the words (figure 7). Taken together, Ware’s use of visual words creates a multi-sensory effect on the reader.

Like Ware, Ruth Ozeki utilizes visual words to convey sound to readers. Unlike Ware, however, Ozeki’s use of visual words takes place on the pages of a print fiction novel. Her text,

A Tale for the Time Being, focuses on two main character. One character, also named Ruth

Ozeki, finds a mysterious journal washed up on the shore near her home. This journal is written by the second main character, Japanese teenager, Nao Yasutani. The narrative alternates between Ruth’s experience reading the diary and the text of the diary written by Nao. Most of the time, we Figure 7 Photo Taken By Author think of a journal as a private document. However, Nao intends for her journal to be read by another, but not anyone specific. She plans on writing the journal and then abandoning it for a random person to find. Eventually, Japan is struck by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Nao’s journal is consumed by the waves, eventually washing up on the coast of North America for Ruth to find.

One main theme of A Tale for the Time Being is the idea that a text (in this case, Nao’s journal) can be a kind of communication between two different humans. Nao says that when she writes, “It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!” (26). For her part, Ruth feels the same sense of intimacy with the text. A large part of this feeling of intimacy comes from the handwritten nature of the diary. Ruth thinks that “Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin” (12). Echoing Nao’s belief that her writing is somehow “reaching forward through time,” Ruth describes the experience of the journal as evoking “a felt sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence” (12). While this sense of presence does not match real, embodied presence, it is something that runs counter to the postmodern idea of a completely distant, absent author.

While Ozeki does not include any instances of handwriting in her text, she does try to move beyond the “predictable and impersonal” nature of type. This, combined with her inclusion of an author-like “Ruth Ozeki” character, gives a sense of presence to the reader2. Ozeki captures this feeling of presence by using unpredictable typography. In one example of unpredictable font use, Ozeki, like many comics creators, attempts to capture the feel and texture of sound in writing. When the fictional Ruth is looking for evidence of Nao’s fate after the devastating tsunami, she stumbles upon an article in an online database. Before she can buy access to the full article, Ruth’s rural home loses power. When she tries again, the article is unavailable. Ruth’s

2 Author inserts are common place in postmodernism. However, Ozeki chooses to insert herself into the narrative for different reasons than those seen in postmodern fiction. Within postmodern fiction, as Brian McHale notes, an author insertion is often used to disorient the reader. Using author inserts, postmodern writers call attention to the constructed nature of the text (202-206). Ozeki, on the other hand, is not playing textual games with the reader. Rather, her use of an author-insert is a sincere attempt to communicate with the reader on a personal level. As an example of this, Ozeki includes a letter in the epilogue which gives readers information on the real Ozeki and how she intersects with the fictional Ozeki (402-403). 87 first cry of anguish is registered in regular type, but in capital letters and italicized: “NO!”(173).

This is about as visually expressive as Ozeki can get using conventional typography. The next time Ruth yells, just a few lines down the page, the font is much different. It increases in size with each letter, reaching a peak in the middle before becoming smaller and smaller. It is set apart on its own line, and can’t help but catch the full attention of the reader (figure 8). This technique of using lettering to attempt to capture sound is common throughout comics. To

Eisner, “dialogue executed in a certain manner tells the reader how the author wishes it to sound.

In the process it evokes a specific emotion” (4). In

this example, Ozeki reaches beyond the standards of

conventional typography because it is not expressive Figure 8 Photo Taken By Author enough. In order to capture the trauma of Ruth in this instance, Ozeki must resort to extra-ordinary typography that stands out. In this way, she is able to “touch” the reader in a specific emotional way through the text.

This isn’t the only way Ozeki uses unpredictable typography to express feelings that can’t be captured using conventional type. Rather than using type to capture sound, Ozeki uses type to help readers imagine another’s bodily and mental experience. When describing the

“temporal stuttering” she feels after spending too much time online, Ozeki says that it is “hard to put into words” (227). However, even if this experience is hard to put into words, Ozeki is in the position of describing this experience through written prose. In order to capture the experience as best she can, Ozeki moves turns away from the conventional standards of typography. She describes the experience by changing the font and size of letters and eliminating the space between words (figure 9). The resulting text is jumbled and somewhat hard to read. However, when one does read it, the experience is one of varying speed. The size and format of the letters

88 cause readers to slow down or speed up on certain sections. As Ozeki writes, “this is what temporal stuttering feels like” (228). These jumbled letters suddenly end, leaving almost a page- and-a-half of white space leading up to the word “stops” in small letters on the bottom left of the page. In order to more accurately represent the experience of another for a reader, Ozeki must resort to textual experimentation.

Ozeki’s use of text to convey a mental feeling has its antecedent in earlier modernist literature. Indeed,

Faulkner uses a similar technique in The

Sound and the Fury. However, the way

Faulkner uses type to convey a specific mentality is different than Ozeki’s. In Figure 9 Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Photo Taken By Author

Fury, readers get a glimpse of a person in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. Like Ozeki,

Faulkner is attempting to convey a character’s mental state to a reader through text. Unlike

Ozeki, however, Faulkner never moves beyond the conventions of regular typography. As

Quentin’s breakdown worsens, Faulkner eschews all grammatical conventions and the section becomes more and more incoherent: “it floated on it was quite still in the woods I heard the bird again and the water afterward the pistol came up he didnt aim at all the bark disappeared then pieces of it floated up spreading he hit two more of them pieces of bark no bigger than silver dollars” (161). As we can see, Quentin’s narration takes language and fragments it. Faulkner, as a modernist, believes that one can capture the mental processes of another using only language.

Ozeki, on the other hand, believes that simply resorting to language is not enough. Some mental

89 states are “hard to put into words.” Because of this, sometimes we must supplement the linguistic with the visual. Ozeki is not simply resorting to modernist techniques. Rather, she is trying to go a step further by consciously utilizing the graphic qualities of the written word. Faulkner’s words are meant to be read, and not necessarily viewed as an image. Ozeki’s words, on the other hand, are both visual and textual.

Ozeki isn’t the only contemporary novelist exploiting the visual power of words in a way similar to comics. Steven Hall, in his novel The Raw Shark Texts, also uses typography to create visual effects. In comics, everything can be used as an image, and the words on the page are an example of this. And, although he does so in a different way, Hall also ties words and images together. Like Ozeki, Hall’s use of typography is more than just ornamental; rather, the inclusion of visual type is connected to Hall’s view of the reader/writer relationship. Echoing Ozeki, Hall believes that certain kinds of writing serve as an act of communication between reader and writer. The main character of The Raw Shark Texts is Eric Sanderson. At the opening of the novel, Eric wakes up with no memory of his own life or who he actually is. The main plot of The

Raw Shark Texts focuses on Eric’s search for answers. In the process, Eric finds himself threatened by a Ludovician, a shark-like creature which “is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction … The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history are now a vast, rich and bountiful environment” (64).

The idea that “streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge” flow around and between individuals is echoed by Sanderson’s belief in the power of the written word.

Throughout The Raw Shark Texts, Eric finds notes written to him by the pre-amnesic Eric

Sanderson. One of these notes tells Eric:

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake … Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s

obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the

lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if

you never know me, or never know anything about me … Behind or insider or

through the two hundred and eighteen words that made up my description, behind

or inside or through those nine hundred and sixty-nine letters, there is some kind

of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties

to gravity or time, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours

(54-55).

The Ludovician shark hunts in these streams. More importantly, this stream is not dammed by the text itself. While the flow may be ephemeral or faint, perhaps a mere trickle, there is nothing completely blocking this flow from one to another. The idea that words can become an image in another’s head is reinforced by the typography of the text itself. One strategy for tying words and images together is Hall’s use of words in the creation of visual images (figure 10). In the

provided example, words take the place of actual

images. The eye of the fish becomes the word, “eye,”

and the scales the word “scale.” In this case, the word

becomes the thing being described.

It is tempting to link and compare Hall’s use of

words to create pictures with the older tradition of

concrete poetry. While there are similarities, some

Figure 10 fundamental differences between the two lead to some Photo Taken By Author important divergences. For one thing, concrete poetry is designed to be read. While the words do

91 form an image, the image reinforces the words of the poem. For example, a poem about a butterfly might use the words to form two connected wings. We see a similar kind of strategy in the concrete prose described by Brian McHale (Postmodernist Fiction 184-187). Hall, on the other hand, does not privilege the word over the image. Rather, the words are present only to form the image and not to be read. In this case, Hall is showing how words can be used to create images in a literal sense. However, by doing so, Hall reinforces the idea that words create mental images as well.

Similar to Hall, Ozeki conflates words and

images for comparable reasons. Like the Eric

Sanderson character in The Raw Shark Texts, Nao

(from A Tale for the Time Being), sees words and

images as deeply connected. As Nao writes in her

journal, “In Japan, some words have kotodama, which Figure 11 Photo Taken By Author are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of now felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail that looked something like this” (98). Under this line, Ozeki provides a picture of a fish with the word “nooow” inside of it (figure 11). Later on in the text, Ozeki does a similar thing with the word “crow,” using the letters of the word to form an image of the object

(349). In each case, Ozeki and Hall reject the purely textual view of words. Indeed, to Ozeki and

Hall, words are more than textual things, they are visual things. As W.J.T. Mitchell noted, written words are always-already images. However, many authors do not take advantage of the inherent visibility of words. Rather, as the standards of typography dictate, the visual side of a word should not get in the way of its meaning.

While Ozeki and Hall are two contemporary authors that are exploring the rich opportunities provided by visual words, they are indebted to a longer tradition of visual/verbal texts. Mitchell tracks what he calls “visible language” back to Blake, but the use of word and image has been used in print texts since Tristram Shandy, and before that, the combination of word and image was a regular part of manuscript culture. Furthermore, the first print texts utilized a visual/verbal blend because they attempted to mimic the look of handwritten and illuminated manuscripts. The use of visible language, according to Mitchell, is a response to the valorization of the written word over the image. While Mitchell turns to Blake as an example of a writer who utilizes a visual verbal blend, his argument is mainly concerned with the way postmodern theory has lead to a situation where “We live in an era obsessed with ‘textuality.’”

This emphasis on textuality leads use to “exclude or displace … the image” (113-114). As a response to this pushing aside of the image, according to Mitchell, artists and writers “construct a

‘visible language,’ a form that combines sight and sound, pictures and speech—that ‘makes us see’ with vivid examples” (114). Curiously, Mithchell does not show us how contemporary artist and writers are working through this problem. Rather, he turns to Blake to show how a historical writer dealt with it. Nevertheless, contemporary writers find themselves faced with a similar conundrum, and they work around this problem in a similar way to Blake. According to Mitchell,

“Blake wants a writing that will make us see with our ears and hear with our eyes” (150). This is exactly what Hall and Ozeki provide with their brand of “visible language.”

Handwriting

Utilizing the graphic qualities of words is not the only way that contemporary multimodal narratives incorporate a visual/verbal blend. Handwriting is another form of visual words, and it is starting to be used in place of type on the pages of a select group of contemporary books. For

93 example, as chapter 1 explores, S. places a huge chunk of its overall narrative in handwriting.

And, although it is used more sparingly, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and

Carson’s Nox also turn to handwriting to give a sense of intimacy that type cannot. Will Eisner says of handwriting in narratives, “Personal calligraphy assures that no two letters will be exactly alike and thus adds a recognizable ‘human’ quality to graphic stories” (26). Handwriting is an act that leaves evidence of an embodied presence, something that differs it from type. To Ellen

Lupton, type removes the embodied elements of handwriting: “Words originated as gestures of the body … Typefaces, however, are not bodily gestures—they are manufactured images designed for infinite repetition” (13). It is important to note, however, that, while comparisons between the use of handwriting in multimodal narratives and comics can be made, these two media don’t use handwriting in the exact same way. In many comics based narratives, handwriting is used regularly, while type is used only sparingly or not at all. In most multimodal narratives, on the other hand, handwriting is used at specific moments. In these moments, we can turn to comics theory’s ideas on handwriting to help explain why.

Anne Carson’s Nox is not a book in the traditional sense. Rather than being bound, the pages come in a box that resembles a hardback book. Inside the box is a long sheet of paper folded like an accordion. The “pages” that are formed through these folds resemble old uncut books and contain pictures of typed and handwritten scraps of paper, as well as reproductions of photographs. Carson explains Nox by saying, “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” As a part of her mourning,

Carson collected bits and pieces of items related to and reminding her of her brother and collected them in a notebook. Nox is a replica of that notebook; in a sense, it is a full-color reproduction of a scrapbook eulogizing her brother. One main feature of this scrapbook is a letter

94 that Carson’s brother wrote to their mother. This letter is torn apart and scattered throughout the book. Additionally, Carson’s own handwriting appears near the beginning.

The handwriting is mixed into a book that mostly utilizes type. Turning to comics theory, we may begin to see why Carson chooses to break from type at specific points to include moments of handwritten inscription. One of the first images of the book is the word “Michael”

(the name of Carson’s brother”) written in a thick, black marker. Each instance of the word is unique. One can imagine Carson sitting down to repeatedly write the word on a sheet of white paper. The traces of Carson’s hands are all over the page. The ink from the marker is smudged with finger prints and bleeds onto the other side of the paper, causing the type on the pages beneath to run.

Carson’s use of handwriting intersects with the eulogistic nature of Nox. A eulogy grows out of the close relationship of two people, the eulogized and the eulogizer. While this may seem obvious, it is easy to assume that the eulogy is primarily about the subject, the one being memorialize. However, how a eulogizer chooses to remember the life of the eulogized says as much about the person speaking. Carson repeatedly writing her brother’s name sheds light on this aspect of a eulogy. The subject of the eulogy is her brother, but that eulogy is inscribed by

Carson herself. Additionally, the fingerprints smudged on the page are the material indication of her involvement in the eulogy. In a sense, they are the evidence that her “fingerprints” are all over the text. It is Carson who chooses what to put in this scrapbook memorial, and it is she who ultimately draws a picture of her brother for the reader. The portrait that comes out the other side is filtered through Carson’s memories and experiences with her brother. Far from being an objective remembrance, this eulogy is more a testament to the complicated relationship between

Carson and her brother. This is the only time Carson chooses to include her own handwriting in

95 the text. After indicating her involvement in the eulogy, she steps back, focusing instead on the memory of her brother and his writing.

Carson’s use of a specific writing utensil and the way she forms her script also convey meaning. Carson’s thick black cursive script differs from the comparatively calm looking writing we see later on from

Michael. The physical qualities of a line signal emotions to readers, as noted by Scott McCloud. In his seminal work of comics theory, Understanding Comics, McCloud hones in on the importance of a line. To McCloud, emotions can “be made visible” (118) to a viewer through something as simple as a Figure 12 Photo Taken By Author line. As McCloud argues, “In truth, don’t all lines carry with them an expressive potential?”

(124, emphasis in original). When we compare specific examples of lines given by McCloud

with Carson’s writing, we can see how Carson’s

emotions come through her embodied written

inscription (see figures 12 and 13). Carson’s lines are

somewhere between the “savage and deadly” and

“weak and unstable” lines shown by McCloud. Given

Carson’s view of her relationship with her brother, the

conflation of these two lines makes sense. As Carson

points out, her brother leaves the country many years Figure 13 Photo Taken By Author before his death, and she has very little communication with him afterwards. Her brother’s abrupt departure devastates her mother and the anger Carson feels towards her brother’s abandonment of his family comes through her writing. The reader can

96 see the ink bleeding over onto the next page, hinting that Carson did not write with a light touch.

Additionally, the felt tip of the marker leaves faint outlines of where letters should be, hinting at the physical absence of her brother, but acknowledging a faint trace left behind.

As I mentioned before, while this is the only instance of Carson’s own handwriting within Nox, the text features many instances of her brother’s handwriting. This handwriting is derived from one source: a letter Carson’s brother sent their mother after his girlfriend’s untimely death. This is one of the only letters her brother sent the family during his time overseas. The letter is torn into bits and carefully placed throughout the rest of the text. At some points, Carson interweaves her own type with her brother’s handwriting. At other points, she allows his handwriting to stand alone. The fragments from her brother’s letter range from single words to whole paragraphs.

One may wonder why Carson chooses to reproduce her brother’s handwriting in a book that is primarily comprised of type. The inclusion of the letter, in my view, is connected to the book’s state purpose as eulogy. Traditionally, a eulogy is given to an audience that knows the person being eulogized. Therefore, the audience has knowledge of who the person was in life.

The eulogizer can use this shared relationship as a basis for the eulogy. This contrasts the eulogy to the obituary, which assumes the audience has no knowledge of the deceased. This puts Carson in a strange position. How does she give the reader a sense of her brother? This is complicated for Carson because she did not know her brother later in life. In order to build a picture of her brother for readers, Carson includes his physical traces. In an interview for the Kenyon Review,

Carson notes that “it is a very strange thing that people bodily disappear on us while remaining very present otherwise.” In a sense, Carson’s brother’s letter (the only letter of his that Carson has) stands-in as the closest thing to presence that Carson can muster. While this letter does not

97 replace the body of her brother, it is the tangible evidence of his embodiment. Handwriting is an act that leaves evidence of an embodied presence, something that sets it apart from type, as noted by Lupton. If this letter was reproduced as text, this sense of embodiment would be lost. The trace of Carson’s brother would disappear behind the anonymity of mass produced type.

English novelist Philip Hensher catalogs numerous testimonials describing the personal side of handwriting in his book, The Missing Ink. While Hensher is a little hyperbolic with his proclamation of an end to handwriting (6-7), his collection of interviews reinforces the idea that many readers associate handwriting with embodied individuals. Hensher quotes a novelist and writer for The Times Literary Supplement who believes, “Our sense of each other’s personality in the office probably was bound up with our sense of each other’s handwriting” (43). Later on in the book, Hensher quotes a political lobbyist who says, “your handwriting, that is a mark of you, isn’t it” (143). Compared to handwriting, Hensher writes, type is “more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the highest happiness and the deepest emotion” (16).

While handwriting is sometimes overlooked in literary scholarship, one field has devoted close attention to it: comics studies3. Handwriting is one of the main components in comics.

Indeed, comics that use machine type are extremely rare. One theorist that has extensively explored the use of handwriting in comics is Hilary Chute. To Chute, “there is an intimacy to reading handwritten marks on the printed page … Handwriting underscores the subjective positionality of the author” (Graphic Women 10-11). Type is divorced from the human traces left behind by handwriting, Chute believes, which is not replicated through type. While Chute is specifically talking about comics that are drawn and handwritten by the same person, we can

3 Other fields such as history and archival studies also pay close attention to the material qualities of handwriting. 98 extend this idea to a text that incorporates handwriting that does not belong to the author, like

Nox.

Chute’s emphasis on the importance of handwriting is tied to her overall view of comics.

Chute sees comics as a way to bridge the postmodern gap between writer and reader :

the force and value of graphic narrative’s intervention, on the whole, attaches to

how it pushes on conceptions of the unrepresentable that have become

commonplace in the wake of deconstruction, especially in contemporary

discourse about trauma. Against a valorization of absence and aporia, graphic

narrative asserts the value of presence, however complex and contingent.

(Graphic Women 2)

Chute believes that comics are a medium that provides a toolbox suited for concretizing one’s experience for another. In other words, comics allow one to glimpse the subject position of another, something that postmodern theory denies textual representation. The reason comics can overcome this gap is related to the “rich visual-verbal form of comics” (Graphic Women 3). If, as postmodern theory holds, the textual cannot be used to represent the experiences of another,

Chute believes that the combination of the visual and verbal might provide a way around deconstruction’s linguistic conundrum. This “risk of representation,” as Chute calls it, is especially pertinent in narratives about trauma and memory. Part of the visual/verbal mix of comics is the way they encourage readers to look at words as if they were pictures. Handwriting is a part of this. Within comics, the text is both something that is meant to be viewed and read.

The way the letters are written tells the reader something.

This ability to represent trauma and memory through handwritten texts is not only on display in comics, it is also put to use in multimodal literature. Texts like Nox also turn to

99 handwriting to help readers glimpse the subjectivity of another. Carson’s inclusion of her brother’s letter is indicative of multiple layers of trauma. On the surface, the inclusion of the letter signals Carson’s grief. As one of the only material traces of her brother’s body, the inclusion of the letter is a way for Carson to directly confront the trauma she feels at her brother’s death. Another layer of trauma lies in the letter itself. The letter is actually to Carson’s mother, and it details the death of her brother’s longtime girlfriend. Enough fragments of the letter are present in Nox for the reader to piece it together. By including this letter, charged with trauma and emotion, Carson is able to provide a sense of her brother to the reader. Finally, the letter represents the larger family trauma surrounding her brother’s long absence. As one of the only pieces of communication from her brother, the letter assumes an almost reverential significance for Carson’s mother. In the absence of her son, his handwritten traces are the closest she can come to his presence.

One specific form of handwriting Carson includes in Nox is the signature, and one signature she includes is her brother’s (figure 14). Presumably, this signature is from a different letter than the one predominately featured throughout the text. The ink is different, and the color and texture of the page do not match. However, nothing definitive in Nox indicates where the signature is from. Perhaps the most meaningful mark of the hand is one’s signature. Culturally, we assign a huge amount of importance to the signature. From a legal standpoint, the signature is a mark that authenticates consent. Within popular culture, the signature is a tangible collectible.

The signatures of celebrities and historical figures fetch huge sums. One of Hensher’s

“witnesses,” as he calls them, says, “It does feel like a personal thing. It’s your signature—it’s part of your self” (143). From this perspective, the drive to collect

Figure 14 100 Photo Taken By Author authentic signatures is a way to possess a physical trace of one who is not there. According to

Dennis Baron, “a signature is an accurate stand-in or replacement for the person behind the message. As a means of validating a written text such as a credit card receipt or a love letter, it’s the next best thing to being there” (125). In this case, Carson uses her brother’s signature for the same reasons she used his letter: to provide readers with a physical trace of her brother.

Along with Nox, one fictional book that incorporates signatures is Foer’s Extremely Loud

& Incredibly Close. While Carson uses her brother’s signature as a kind of stand-in, Foer uses signatures to encourage the reader to reenact the actions of a character. Early on in the narrative,

Oskar’s journey leads him to an art supply store. Oskar finds the key that starts his quest in an envelope with “Black” written on it. Believing that anyone working at an art supply store is an authority on color, Oskar begins his investigation there. Coincidentally, the clerk shows him a pad where customers try out pens. On this pad, Oskar finds his father’s signature. Rather than describing this scene, as most novels would, Foer actually includes a color reproduction of the pads (figure 15). Foer includes four pages of these pads, and readers can find Thomas’s signature in red on the fourth pad.

Like Nox, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a

book that is predominately told through normal type. What

does the visual reproduction of the signature offer that a

textual description cannot? As mentioned by Chute, Eisner,

and others, handwriting lends a personal quality to words that

type cannot reproduce. In a non-fiction narrative like Nox, the

reasons behind the inclusion of these personal items is evident:

by including the handwriting of her brother, Carson is able to

Figure 15 Photo Taken By Author

101 offer a physical trace of her brother for readers. This explanation does not fit with a fictional text like Foer’s, however. Looking towards Chute, we may be able to make sense of Foer’s choice.

As Chute believes, the use of a visual/verbal blend helps readers imagine the trauma of another.

In this case, Foer provides four pages of random handwriting with one meaningful signature,

Thomas Schell’s, buried in the mess. At first, readers will assume that nothing of significance lies on the pads. Indeed, Oskar doesn’t even look at the pads with his father in mind, he is there investigating colors. Readers probably won’t notice Thomas’s signature on the first pass.

However, after Oskar discovers his father’s signature (50), readers might go back to see if they can find his signature for themselves. This puts readers on a Where’s Waldo style search, slowly combing over the handwriting for the specific signature. In this case, the reader’s search emulates Oskar’s perusal of the signatures. By including the samples of handwriting in the place that he does, Foer encourages readers to emulate the actions of Oskar, putting them in his shoes.

In this moment, readers are closer to the subjectivity of the character than they would be had

Foer just described Oskar’s search in prose.

Conclusion

Taken together, the many texts that incorporate handwriting, visual words, page design, and images all are part of a larger group of multimodal texts that include graphic content to supplement textual content. As previously noted by Mitchell, the 21st century is increasingly an era of images. While writers still use textual narratives to make sense of and challenge this hegemony of images, they can also use visual tools to do this. Nevertheless, words remain the centerpiece of all these novels. The image can be used by contemporary literature, but only at times when the written word won’t do. At these moments, it makes sense for literary theory to borrow the vocabulary and ideas found within comics theory, a field that is well-versed in

102 looking at the interplay between text and image. Images provide a counter-balance to primarily prose narratives, breaking in at times that emphasize the words on the page. Never working along, the images in multimodal texts depend on the words. Words will always be the backbone of literature, but that doesn’t mean images can’t play their part.

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Finding Your Way Around the House of Leaves: Literature and the Interface

Developing a reading list is one of the more challenging parts of designing a course. For literature teachers, building a reading list for courses composed of students who aren’t majoring in English presents unique challenges. Picking books that are both intellectually engaging and appealing to undergraduates is a tricky balancing act. Sometimes, it works out; other times, we drag students through a text that obviously misses the mark. When I decided to read Mark Z.

Danielewski’s House of Leaves in one of my undergraduate courses (filled entirely with non-

English majors), I thought that it might be a bit risky. House of Leaves is notorious for its difficulty and defies easy categorization. In a New York Times book review, Robert Kelly praised the book’s tricks and turns. Not every reviewer was so enthralled by the books maze-like structure, however. Writing for The Guardian, Steven Poole believes that the many overlapping narratives work “ultimately to the novel's detriment.” One’s engagement with House of Leaves depends on how they approach this difficulty. To some, it ultimately adds to the overall experience of the narrative, while others find it needlessly obtuse.

House of Leaves focuses on many different plot threads that intersect and obfuscate each other. On the one hand, we have Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist and general hedonist. Truant stumbles upon an academic monograph in the apartment of a deceased blind man named

Zampanò. This manuscript isn’t ordered or complete. Truant finds the pieces of it in an old trunk and attempts to put the fragments together. Zampanò’s study focuses on a documentary film by

Will Navidson. This film, called The Navidson Record, was originally intended to be a video record of the Navidon’s family life as they move into a new house with his children and partner,

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Karen Green, but it quickly becomes something much different. As Navidson and his family soon discover, the house is actually attached to an endless labyrinth. This labyrinth appears through a doorway that mysteriously forms shortly after the family moves in. Most of the documentary Zampanò is commenting on focuses on Navidson’s exploration of the mysterious labyrinth and the problems that arise from his obsessive quest. Alongside these three narratives

(Truant’s, Zampanò’s, and Navidson’s) are a series of letters detailing Truant’s relationship with his mother and her battle with mental institutionalization. These narratives come together through the physical form of House of Leaves. What the reader encounters, within the world of the novel, is a book written by Zampanò and edited by Johnny Truant, who provides many footnotes detailing his own struggle with the mysteries of The Navidson Record.

Turning back to these undergraduate students, I was worried how they would deal with this challenging text. Much to my surprise, House of Leaves was the most popular book among my non-major students. They jumped right in. While it was a difficult read, they treated it more like a game, overcoming the tricks and turns the book presented. Why did these students find this book so engaging, despite its laboriousness? I think the answer can be found in the type of reading most students are used to doing. The millennial students that I teach do a large amount of their reading on digital devices. While the devices they read on may differ (Apple computers,

PCs, various tablets, phones, laptops, etc…), no matter what they are reading on, they are reading on a digital interface. Lev Manovich believes that the screen, the digital interface’s medium, “is rapidly becoming the main means of accessing any kind of information, be it still images, moving images, or text … We may debate whether our society is a society of spectacle or of simulation, but, undoubtedly, it is a society of the screen” (94).

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A digital interface is the meeting point between a piece of technology and its user. To

Steven Johnson, the interface “shapes the interaction between user and computer. The interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between the two parties, making one sensible to the other” (14). In the case of computers (including tablet computers and smartphones), the interface is what turns the raw data of the device into a form that regular users can understand. As noted by Johanna Drucker, “data does not have an inherent visual form” (Graphesis 7). Rather, that data has to be put into a visual form through an interface. While interfaces can take many forms, most computer interfaces embrace similar methods of presentations. That is to say, most interfaces employ similar navigation, exploration, and organizational structures. Various internet browsers, for example, use a spatial metaphor for moving around the internet. Users scroll up and down a website, while they move backwards and forwards between websites. Likewise, many interfaces embrace the windows style of information organization, blocking separate programs apart using windows-like boxes. In this chapter, I will look at how reading on these interfaces prepares readers to tackle the difficult layout and narrative structure of House of

Leaves. In the process, I hope to show how the nature of the computer interface intersects with the layout of multimodal narratives like House of Leaves. Finally, I will show how the reading encouraged by the format of these multimodal narratives moves beyond many of the problems associated with postmodernism.

Print Hyperlinks

Before the widespread usage of the internet, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday point out, the book was “the standard format for storing printed material because it possessed clear advantages over the only other form of storage retrieval available—the scroll” (7). Now, of course, the internet is quickly becoming the go-to repository for collecting and disseminating

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knowledge. This leaves the book in an interesting position. Before the book, the scroll was the normal medium for information storage. When the book took its place, the scroll virtually disappeared. The book almost completely supplemented the scroll because the toolbox offered by the scroll did not allow writers, designers, and printers to do things that they could not already do with the book medium. It is sometimes believed that the screen will totally supplant the book, much like the book did to the scroll. However, the tools provided by the book form prove to be rather resilient.

In a broad sense, we can consider a book to be a kind of interface. Interfaces are designed to aid navigation and understanding. Books have tables of contents, page numbers, headings and sub-headings, chapter titles, and many other navigational aids that help readers access information in a way akin to a searchable database. Drucker, however, cautions:

Describing a codex book as an interface is glib if taken too literally. But just as

the graphical user interface should not be thought of as a thing—reified, fixed,

and stable—but as a mediating apparatus, so the graphical features of the book

should be understood as a spatially distributed set of graphical codes that provide

instructions for reading, navigation, access, and use (Graphesis 139).

The book, like all interfaces, is a way for a user to access information. Additionally, the interface of the book is never stagnant. Rather, it is a thing that changes due to cultural and social circumstances.

N. Katherine Hayles, for example, believes that the pages of a book can function in a way similar to internet hyperlinks. The physical book can “create multiple reading paths by making the sequentially of bound pages function hypertextually” (Writing Machines 68). Hypertext is more than the blue text one sees on almost every website. Johnson sees hypertext functioning, on

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the most basic level, as a way to stitch information together (116). Hyperlinks are a tool that helps to filter and connect massive amounts of information. They help readers navigate a maze of information that would be hard to traverse without this guidance.

If we think about hyperlinks in this way, not defined by its preeminence on the web, but as a way to organize information, it is easier to see how they can be deployed within print books.

Hyperlinking in books does not come about as a result of digital technology. That is to say, authors and editors do not mimic the hyperlinks they see on the web when the design and write in print. Rather, the creation of a web of information linked through text goes all the way back to early print culture. In early-modern print workshops, Thomas Corns argues, “complex reader- interfaces could be and were constructed … texts or parts of texts could be related to each other in what we could perceive as a hypertextual structure” (98). In this way, Corns believes, early book interfaces “anticipated” internet hypertext by showing how “non-serial access could both make the texts more usable and could shape the ways in which they are used” (103).

The specific ways book encourage the same kind of reading as hyperlinks is explored by

Rhodes and Sawday. They see things like footnotes, different typefaces, systems of sections and subsections, indexes, and table of contents as examples of early hyperlink-type information organization (7). These aspects of print books are not necessarily things that are carried over from the pre-print forms of the manuscript and scroll. Rather, they are developed through the trial and error of early print book design. As a result, many readers might not have been familiar with this new style of information management. In early print culture, “The reader had to learn how to participate in the construction of a text, searching it in ways that the author might never have anticipated, yoking ideas together which were to be located at different points in the work, even comparing the ideas or texts to be found in different sources” (Rhodes and Sawday 7).

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House of Leaves, for example, organizes the information found in the main text, various appendices, and other sections using over four-hundred footnotes. While this is not the only navigational tool given to readers by House of Leaves, it is one of the most common.

While non-fiction books have used this organizational style for decades. Fiction books, with few exceptions, do not utilize these tools. Rather, they simply present information in a linear, non-linked way. Nevertheless, while some books, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite

Jest or Nabokov’s Pale Fire, do use things like subheadings or footnotes to organize information, the vast majority of fiction books do not. However, multimodal books like House of

Leaves, S., Night Film, Only Revolutions, and others have embrace a form that encourages the same kind of access described by Rhodes and Sawday. That is to say, these fiction books are laying out information in a way that encourages non-linear reading, linking, and reading across texts. As Jessica Pressman points out, House of Leave’s “substantial print body contains an extensive hypertextual navigation system connecting multiple narratives and reading paths”

(“House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel” 107). The footnotes in House of Leaves, for example, organize the information found in the main text, various appendices, and other sections using a system similar to internet hyperlinks. While this is not the only navigational tool given to readers by House of Leaves, it is one of the most common.

Unlike a text like Pale Fire or Infinite Jest, which use endnotes in a traditional sense by having readers flip back and forth from the endnotes section to the main text, House of Leaves uses footnotes to weave a dense web that readers are forced to traverse. That is to say, House of

Leaves builds a complicated, interlocking system of footnotes that offer choices and often loopback to previous footnotes. Borrowing from the scholarship of Reed Doob, Espen Aarseth differentiates between literature that operates on a unicursal level and literature that operates on a

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multicursal level. A unicursal text functions in a linear way, while it can be “winding and turning,” a unicursal narrative will only encourage readers along one possible trail (5-6). In a multicursal narrative, on the other hand, the reader is constantly facing choices. That is to say, they are often prompted to decide between different narrative strings (6). In a multicursal narrative, readers have to make choices; they can’t navigate the narrative without doing so.

Aarseth’s distinction is not rigid. Citing the footnote, Aarseth says it “is a typical example of a structure that can be seen as both uni- and multicursal. It creates a bivium, or choice of expansion, but should we decide to take this path (reading the footnote), the footnotes itself returns us to the main track immediately afterward” (7-8).

This is how the endnotes in a text like Infinite Jest or Pale Fire work: allowing the readers a choice, but only down a path that immediately leads to a dead end, forcing readers back on the main path. The footnotes in House of Leaves provide for more possibilities. For example, some of the footnotes encourage readers to jump off the main path by withholding information, but indicating where answers might be found. In one of the early chapters of the book, readers learn about Delial, a mysterious girl that haunts Navidson. As Zampano tells us, “No one had any idea who she was or why it was she haunted his thoughts and conversation like some albatross” (17). Attached to this line is a footnote which says, “Since the revelation, there has been a proliferation of material on the subject. Chapter XIX deals exclusively with this subject.”

The first line is a breadcrumb, enticing readers with a mystery. The next line provides a signpost, pointing readers in the direction they can go for the answer. It is up to readers whether or not the stay where they are or jump ahead. Other footnotes prod readers to explore the many appendices present within the text. Footnote 35 directs readers to Appendix II-A, which is full of drawings

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and pictures depicting the inside and outside of the house. Like other footnotes in House of

Leaves, footnote 35 coaxes readers to break of the linear reading path in lieu of exploring the text’s many supplemental sections.

The different appendices offer various kinds of documents for readers to explore. Some appendices, like Appendix II-A, offer visual materials, such as sketches and photographs of the house. However, other appendices actually deepen the reader’s understanding of the characters and narrative. All these appendices are optional, however. Besides a gentle push by the footnotes, nothing forces the reader to peruse these extra materials. One can get a fairly interesting narrative experience without visiting these appendices. House of Leaves does often try to entice readers into this extra exploration, though. In one of Truant’s sections, the editors of

House of Leaves add a footnote which says, “Though Mr. Truant’s asides may often seem impenetrable, they are not without rhyme or reason. The reader who wishes to interpret Mr.

Truant on his own may disregard this note. Those, however, who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read his father’s obituary in

Appendix II-D” (72). In many ways, this footnote summarizes the challenge House of Leaves puts to its readers: one can read the book on a surface level, almost like a haunted house tale or ghost story. However, those readers that want a deeper understanding of the events behind the text can delve more extensively into the many textual fragments found beyond the main narrative. Through the interface of the book, House of Leaves offers navigational choices that force the reader to reconsider a linear reading of the text.

Reading Books and Reading Interfaces

When confronted with the many branching narrative paths of House of Leaves, readers used to linear print fiction might be at a loss, thinking where they should begin. Readers that are

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used to the graphic interface, such as my undergraduate students, don’t greet the book with the same apprehension. They media they encounter on a daily basis is rarely in a set order. Instead, they take the many flows of information coming from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc… and navigate between theses streams based on their changing interests and needs. The structure of

House of Leaves plays into this, allowing readers to jump between narrative paths whenever the whim strikes them. They can read the scholarly work written by Zampanò. When they want, they can switch to the footnotes written by Truant. If neither of these paths appeal to them, readers can turn to the appendices which offer yet more narrative possibilities. In this way, House of

Leaves is less a linear string of textual narrative and more a space to be explored.

Why would reading on the computer interface change the way these students approach print fiction? For one thing, as Alexander Galloway notes, “Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind” (vii). When it comes to reading specifically, the interface encourages reading across multiple strings of thought. Rarely does a website present a single block of linear text. Rather, most websites contain blocks of text that lead down different semantic paths. We can see how this new kind of reading practice plays out on a physical level.

A well-known study done by the Nielsen Norman Group tracking the eye movement of readers on digital devices vs. print found that our gaze moves around these two spaces in different ways.

This study found that users read print text in an “E” patter, moving evenly from one line to the next. On the web, readers consume material in an “F” pattern. They begin by reading in a linear fashion before skipping down the page looking for specific pieces of information.

In a later study done by the Poynter Institute, these findings were confirmed. However, adding to the Nielson study, the Poynter Institute believes, “the most common behavior is to hunt for information and be ruthless in ignoring details. But once the prey has been caught, users will

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sometimes dive in more deeply. Thus, Web content needs to support both aspects of information access: foraging and consumption” (Nielson). This “foraging and consumption” model can sometimes be used by readers of House of Leaves. At one point in the novel, Zampanò hints at

Navidson’s final (and almost disastrous) journey into the blackness of the house. Although this final exploration takes place later in the novel, Zampanò offers the readers this footnote

“Covered in greater detail in Chapters XVII and XIX” (351). This footnote presents the reader with a few narrative paths that play into the “foraging consumption model.” If readers are happy with the current narrative, they can continue to move down this avenue, choosing to come to these chapters later. If readers what a new narrative path, they can move to chapter 17, foraging for interesting information there. If they are happy with their choice, they can wander further down this corridor. If they aren’t, they can check chapter 19 to see if they like that better.

Whenever they want, they can also switch back to the original page that offered these branching narrative paths in the first place.

When the “foraging and consumption” model of reading becomes dominant, we need to rethink our idea of close reading. For one thing, as John Guillory notes, one way of thinking about close reading is as “a modern academic practice with an inaugural moment, a period of development, and now perhaps a phase of decline” (19). Part of the decline in close reading noted by Guillory is due to the media that readers regularly consume. In Mark Wollaeger and

Kevin Dettmar’s view, we live in “a contemporary society that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over complex narrative and close readings” (qtd. in Pressman Digital

Modernism ix). This view of the pre-eminencies of images and navigation is echoed by Jessica

Pressman, who traces it back to “the mid-1990s innovation in graphical interfaces [which] transformed the text based Internet into the image-laden web” (Digital Modernism 6). This move

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from a cultural emphasis on text to a cultural emphasis on image is one of the main themes found throughout the work of W.J.T. Mitchell. As the media that saturates our world changes,

Pressman argues, we need to rethink the reading strategies used to untangle that media: “We need to recognize how close reading is a historical and media-specific technique that, like other critical practices, demands renovation as we embrace our modern age” (18).

In place of close reading, Hayles argues, we are beginning to see the rise of “hyper reading,” which Hayles believes, “includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts, [and] is a strategic response to an information-intensive environment, aiming to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information, so that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read” (How We Think 12). Close reading and hyper reading do not exist in a binary, however. They are different strategies that readers use in response to different kinds of information presentation. While many lament the decline of close reading, the kind of slow, methodical analysis most professors encourage, Hayles believes that “The problem … lies not in hyper attention and hyper reading as such but rather in the challenges the situation presents for and educators to ensure that deep attention and close reading continue to be vibrant components of our reading cultures” (69). The hyper reading Hayles outlines is similar to Manovich’s

“cognitive multitasking,” which involves “rapidly alternating between different kinds of attention, problem solving, and other cognitive skills” (210). In some ways, multimodal texts like

House of Leaves can be used to bridge the gap between these different kinds of reading.

Danielewski’s text allows readers to jump between narrative paths very often; however, when readers are on these narrative paths, they are consuming sustained linear narratives.

The “renovation” of close reading described by Pressman is seen in the work of Hayles.

Hayles advocates a combination of close reading and what Franco Moretti calls “distant

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reading,” using data driven analysis on literary texts. Hayles believes that these two kinds of reading (close and distant) can be utilized on the same text. For example, her analysis of

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes uses distant reading to supplement close reading, accomplishing an analysis that would not be possible leaning heavily on one or the other

(“Combining Close and Distant Reading”). In How We Think, Hayles trumpets a combination of close, distant, and hyper reading, believing they “can be made to interact synergistically with one another” (74). House of Leaves is an example of the kind of print text that allows readers to practice both skills: searching and scavenging through the different narratives before choosing which area they wish to explore in-depth1.

House of Leaves encourages both the hyper reading described by Hayles and others, as well as the more traditional practice of close reading. Many of the footnotes of House of Leaves point outward to various other texts, movies, and people that exist in reality. Others, conversely, are fictional and reference things that only exist within the fictional universe created by the text.

As a result, readers are often prodded to see which references are real, which are fake, and how they relate to the larger narrative of House of Leaves. This combination of real and fictional references begins on the first page of Zampanò’s narrative. The second footnote of the text references a scholarly article about The Navidson Record. Most readers will recognize this as a fictional reference, since it is about a film that only exists within the narrative. The next footnote, however, references real photographic hoaxes like “the Cottingley Fairies [and] Kirlian photography” (3), as well as other common film hoaxes like famous UFO videos. If one is reading House of Leaves closely, they might recognize these real objects. As a result, they may

1 For information on these kinds of texts, see N. Katherine Hayles article “The Future of Literature” in the journal Collection Management 115

do further research to see why the text makes reference to these real objects and how it intersects with the larger narrative.

This example comes very early in the text and serves as a kind of training to readers. It shows them that some of the references within the text will be worth tracking down in the outside world. Some parts are very hard to understand without the ability to switch between different outside sources and various sections of House of Leaves. Throughout the text, there are nearly a dozen footnotes that are organized not by number, but by different symbols. When reading the main text for the first time, the reader may not know why these symbols are used, unless they have explored the supplemental appendices and conducted some outside research. At the end of the text, in a section describing illustrious that Zampanò wanted to include, is a reference to “page 2-33 in Air Force Manual 64-5” (534).

If readers track down this Air Force Manual (it is easy to find online) and check these pages, they will find a section that describes and shows the “Ground-Air Emergency Code” (8).

The symbols from this emergency code are the same symbols used on the coded footnotes in

House of Leaves. If readers do this extra research, their understanding of the text deepens. They can then go back to these footnotes and read them alongside the codes from the Air Force manual. On pages 114-115, multiple footnotes are signaled using a small black “x.” The Air

Force manual explains that this “x” may stand for “unable to proceed.” If readers know this, they can read these footnotes with that meaning in mind. Each footnote that is coded with this symbol has something to do with the inability to find one’s way in a labyrinth structure. One footnote marked “unable to proceed” reads, “So Daedalus made those innumerable winding passages, and was himself scarce able to find his way back to the place of entry” (115). Alongside this footnote is one that references the maze-like structure of the pyramids, “Doors are let into walls at

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frequent intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed in his wanderings” (114). This footnote is coded using a small symbol that resembles a lowercase “k,” which the Air Force Manual says

“indicates direction to proceed.” Taken together, these two symbols and footnotes references the kind of reading encouraged by House of Leaves. Attempting to find ones way around the text in a organized way is impossible. On the other hand, if readers are willing to move around the text, looping back to sections they have already read, they are able to proceed through the text in a more meaningful way.

Other symbols from the Air Force Manual 64-5 are used as well. One symbol resembles a square with two corners removed. This symbol, according to the Air Force Manual, means

“Aircraft badly damaged.” This symbol is linked to one specific footnote in the text that catalogs a few relationship help books Navidson and Green own. If readers look to see what line sends them to this footnote, the connection will become clear. Here, readers see Karen and Navidson each reflecting on the deterioration of their relationship (62). The Air Force symbol isn’t making reference to a damaged aircraft. Rather, it is gesturing towards the state of Karen and Navidson’s relationship. In a kind of textual Easter Egg, House of Leaves rewards the close reader who is willing to switch their attention across multiple streams of information and engage in outside research.

The beginning of House of Leaves is testament to the amount of close-reading required by the novel. Like the house that the narrative focuses on, the book starts off as a familiar object before morphing into something completely different. Indeed, the introduction is nothing but an uninterrupted string of linear text written by Johnny Truant. Likewise, the first few chapters have footnotes, but only a few of those footnotes encourage readers to break off from the main text

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and explore the book. Most of the footnotes are just faux citations and slices of Truant’s life. The very first footnote of the book, however, hints at things to come. In the opening paragraph,

Zampanò believes that the Navidson Record raises the question of “whether or not, with the advent of digital technology, image has forsaken its one unimpeachable hold on the truth” (3).

This line contains a footnote that tells readers that this is “A topic more carefully considered in

Chapter IX” (3). This chapter happens to be one of the more textually dense and experimental chapters in the whole book. This footnote allows readers to glimpse the things to come. More than likely, most readers will shy away from this chapter, opting to get a better handle on the book before tackling it. By showing readers what is to come, it encourages them to be on their toes throughout the book. Even though readers are often switching between different narrative strings, the complicated layout of the book forces readers to take their time, reading each small section closely for clues and hints to help them untangle the knotty narrative. Even though readers are hyper reading across different narratives, they are still close reading the individual textual pieces.

The Spatial Interface

Early computer interfaces were not spatial. As Johnson notes (150), early interfaces were primarily textual. MS-DOS, the interface many pre-Windows users would be familiar with, used what is called a command-line interface where users would enter textual commands. For example, typing “C:” would provide access to that drive. Users could then type the name of the file they wished to access. Typing “word.exe” would open the Microsoft Word program, for example. According to Johnson, the first early attempts at a spatial interface began in the Xerox

PARC lab in 1972. This interface used a rudimentary spatial interface, which Xerox engineers referred to as a “desktop” (46-47). The dominance of the desktop interface was solidified with

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the introduction of Microsoft Windows 95. Windows 95 did away with the command-line interface in favor of the now well-known desktop interface. This interface, as the name indicates, was modeled on the physical space of the office. Instead of a entering a textual command, users would move to their virtual filing cabinet to find the file they needed. Similarly, if they wanted to delete something, they would move it to the digital recycling bin.

Like many interfaces, the book interface of House of Leaves mimics other spaces and physical objects. While a computer interface is often modeled after a physical office or desktop,

House of Leaves attempts to capture the physicality of a variety of objects. Hayles, for example, points out how a certain section of House of Leaves uses the interface of the page to approximate a movie screen (“Saving the Subject” 796). Additionally, the text attempts to replicate the look and feel of various documents found by Truant. Many of the documents created by Zampanò

(and later discovered in a trunk by Truant) have a certain physical form that the typography and layout of House of Leaves attempts to capture. One is a long section on the explorer Holloway

Roberts. These pages are punctuated with periodic brackets, for example: “There he was, right across the valley, the [ ] buck tasting the air. [ ] I was a good shot” (329). When these brackets first appear, Truant lets the reader know, “Some kind of ash landed on the following pages, in some places burning away small holes, in other places eradicating large chunks of text.

Rather than try to reconstruct what was destroyed I decided to just bracket the gaps” (323).

Another section, which reproduces a scientific study of physical samples from the house’s maze, uses similar methods to show the eradication of text. Instead of using brackets, this section uses the letter “X” set in bold type to replicate sections of documents that have been rendered unreadable. Truant is responsible for the damage; he spilled black ink on Zampanò’s manuscript (376). While the book cannot faithfully reproduce the materiality of these documents

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document, just like a computer interface only replicates the look and feel of a desktop, House of

Leaves does try to represent these documents using the typographic tools at its disposal. In the process, House of Leaves attempts to help readers imagine what it is like to comb through these documents in a way similar to Johnny Truant. Rather than just describing the documents, House of Leaves tries to show what the documents might look like using the means provided by the print book’s interface, thus placing the reader in a position mirroring Truant’s: engaging in active research to untangle the knotty narrative.

This desktop-style interface has proved to be resilient and it is still with us 20 years after

Windows 95 debuted. Almost every computer, tablet, or phone user deals with an interface that takes its cue from the desktop interface. Perhaps the biggest change from the command-line interface to the desktop interface is the move from linear text to space. Previously, a user would have to enter textual commands to move a piece of data. Now, users could grab that file and move it to a different location. Describing the early technology that would eventually become

Windows, Johnson writes, “For the first time, a machine was imagined not as an attachment to our bodies, but as an environment, a space to be explored. You could project yourself into this world, lose your bearings, stumble across things. It was more like a landscape than a machine”

(24).

What place should the spatial interface have within the scholarship of contemporary literature? So far, it has been mostly ignored in favor of investigating how the database changes narrative. Lev Manovich, one of the writers who first advocated a link between database and narrative argues, “the novel and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate—the database”

(218). Instead of presenting information in a linear fashion, as in a narrative, information in a

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database takes the form of “collections of items on which the user can perform various operations—view, navigate, search” (219). This kind of user controlled navigation found in the database is the antithesis of the linear nature of narrative.

Does the database change the way readers approach print fiction? I would say it does not, simply because most users do not access the database on regular basis, instead dealing with the graphic interface, a visual representation of data. Still, many of Manovich’s ideas on the database also apply to the interface. For example, the non-linear structure of the database is shared with the interface. Like the database, the interface allows users to access information in a way and order that is specific to their particular needs.

Manovich draws a distinction between the interface and spatial navigation. On one side, an interface is used to help a user access and find information. A spatial form of navigation, on the other hand, is mainly constructed to “psychologically ‘immerse’ the user in an imaginary universe” (215). On a foundational level, this is true. An interface does not have to be spatial or immersive. It can be composed of nothing but linear text. On a more practical level, however, spatial navigation and digital interfaces are intimately related. Almost all digital interfaces we use in our everyday lives turn to a spatial metaphor to help users find and access information.

While it is still possible to create an interface that is not based in spatial navigation, these kinds of interfaces rarely (if ever) see widespread usage. For all intents and purposes, the contemporary digital interface is spatial.

Like a digital interface that works to replicate the spatial experience of a desktop, the physical form of House of Leaves attempts to capture the movements of the characters as the make their way through the ever changing space of the house. Caroline Hagood believes House of Leaves “has an innovative, obviously architectural textual layout that corresponds to its plot

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and mimics the labyrinthine structure of the house itself” (87). When the book follows Navidson and others as they explore the shifting labyrinth that mysteriously appears in the house, the textual layout of the page attempts to capture the spatial disorientation experienced by the characters. In one chapter of the book, Navidson attempts to rescue a group of professional outdoorsmen who were exploring the labyrinth. Navidson, with his friend Billy Reston and brother Tom, set up a base camp at the top of a spiral staircase in the maze. This staircase,

Navidson believes, goes on for hundreds of feet. However, he soon finds out that this staircase, like the rest of the labyrinth, changes its size and dimensions. Tom stays at the top of the staircase while Reston and Navidson explore the bottom. Their spatial location in the house is indicated by the typography of the page. In this instance, Tom’s narrative is featured at the top of the page, while Navidson and Reston’s are on the bottom of the page. Between these two narrative strings is a large chunk of white space (Figure 1). For the rest of the chapter, this spatial

separation is featured: Tom’s narrative is on the top,

with Navidson and Reston’s on the bottom. This

separation allows for the reader to see the distance

between these characters, while also reflecting the

unique spatial features of the house.

This chapter captures spatiality and movement

in other ways. When Navidson finds some of these

outdoorsman, he learns that their leader, Holloway

Roberts, has become unhinged. Roberts begins to

pursue Navidson and his group through the labyrinth, Figure 1 (Photo Taken by Author) firing a rifle at them as he goes. As Holloway’s bullet tear through the house, the spatial

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typography of the page reflects the action of the narrative. Danielewski writes, “the round powerful enough to propel the bullet into the second door, though not powerful enough to do more than splinter a panel” (232-233). The words “though not powerful enough to do more than splinter a panel” are scattered throughout a mostly blank pages (those eleven words are the only ones present). The scattering of the words mimics the splinters of the door flying through the air.

Here, Danielewski is using the space of the page to capture the movement being described in the narrative. These kinds of textual experiments are repeated throughout this section.

When characters are exploring the house Danielewski uses the physical space of the page to approximate the changing architecture of the labyrinth. In a later chapter, Navidson sets out on a long, multi-day expedition. On this trip into the house, the maze seems to be changing faster than ever before. Danielewski describes how, “the ceiling drop in on him, getting progressively lower and lower until it begins to graze his head only to shift a few minutes later, rising higher and higher until it disappears altogether” (427-430). The words start on the bottom of 427, as the ceiling begins to “drop in on him.” When it starts “getting progressively lower and lower” on

428, the words start middle of the top of the page, before moving down the center, word by word, until reaching the bottom when “it begins to graze his head.” When the ceiling starts

“rising higher and higher” on 429, the words begin to slowly move up the page, creating a kind of staircase effect. Like the previous examples, this specific passage helps the reader envision the spatial structure of the house through the typography of the page.

Using the textual layout of the page to approximate movement, spatiality, or other physical things is nothing new. Indeed, the tradition goes back to concrete poetry, and probably before. However, the impetus behind concrete poetry is different. Writing on concrete poetry and prose, Brain McHale argues, “In such abstract expressionist design […] we are made to

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experience the ineluctable materiality of the book; consequently, these fictional worlds, momentarily eclipsed by the real-world object, are forced to flicker in and out of existence”

(Postmodernist Fiction 187). In other words, these kinds of design are meant to dispel the fictional dream of the reader. By calling attention to the book as a physical object in this way, writers call attention to the constructedness of the narrative’s world. It makes the reader realize that what they are reading is a fictional story. This spotlight on the physicality of the book, to

McHale, is a response to the realist impulse that “Nothing must interfere with fiction’s representation of reality, so the physical dimensions of the book must be rendered functionally invisible” (Postmodernist Fiction 181). In this way, concrete poetry and prose is a kind of anti- realism.

House of Leaves embraces the textual playfulness of many postmodern texts. However, it does so in order to convince the reader of its realism. One postmodern strategy that House of

Leaves co-ops is metafiction by blurring the authorship of the text. While the cover labels the author as Danielewski, the title page places him in the role of a mere presenter, marking the book as “Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” The title page credits Zampano as the author,

“with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant.” In a postmodern text, this authorship play would be inserted to remind the reader of the constructed nature of the text, destroying the reader’s belief in the narrative world. House of Leaves inserts fictional authors for another reason. In this narrative, Danielewski’s deferral of authorship to the fictional Zampanò ups the realism for the reader. House of Leaves positions itself as a kind of found literature. For example, the “editors” of House of Leaves claim that they received the text from Johnny Truant in manuscript form. They then created the print version of House of Leaves using this manuscript as a model. Throughout the text, there are editor corrections to mistakes in Truant’s footnotes. In

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one instance, the editors correct Truant’s reference to a bible passage, “Mr. Truant also appears to be in error. The correct reference is Genesis 25:27” (252).

The “editors” of Truant’s text also insert a “Credits” section into the book. Here, they thank publishers like Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins for permission to use excerpts from

William Butler Yeats and Silvia Plath. Tucked into this credits section is a “Special thanks to the

Talmor Zedactur Depositary for providing a VHS copy of ‘Exploration #4’” (708). Readers of

House of Leaves will recognize “Exploration #4;” it is a tape purporting to show a disastrous survey of the house’s labyrinth. Both the VHS the editors credit and the depositary that they thank are, of course, fictional. However, by placing this fictional line right next to real references, House of Leaves blurs the line between fiction and reality. Not in a postmodern way, to remind the reader of the constructed nature of the text, but to advance a kind of realism for the reader. How the text comes about through the collaboration between the editors and Truant is also hinted at. During a particularly personal and emotionally charged footnote, Truant goes off on a long tangent. At the end of the footnote, he says of his original point, “Perhaps when I’m finished I’ll remember what I’d hoped to say in the first place.” This footnote followed by an editor note which says, “Mr. Truant declined to comment further on this particular passage” (54).

Another tactic House of Leaves uses to advance its realism is grammar and syntax. The footnotes and asides Truant writes are often missing commas or misplacing other punctuation.

Furthermore, he makes common spelling mistakes (spelling “a lot” as one word, for example). In contrast, Zampanò’s narrative is a typical scholarly manuscript; it is also quite polished and flowery. This calls attention to Truant’s rough prose, making reader’s more aware of Truant’s unique style, and adding credibility to Truant’s background as tattoo artist turned reluctant editor and writer. Taken together, the many textual games that House of Leaves plays actually add to

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the realism of the text. House of Leaves wants readers to believe, as much as they can, in its narrative. In contrast to postmodern texts, which would employ these techniques to break the reader’s fictive dream, House of Leaves engages with these common postmodern strategies to create a fictional narrative that has some plausibility.

Windows in the House of Leaves

One way House of Leaves encourages non-linear reading is by organizing information in window type boxes. Readers familiar with a digital interface will be accustomed to this type of information partition. The window has become one of the central organizational tools of computer interfaces. In computer jargon, the window would be the frame that organizes and separates different programs and blocks of information. As Steven Johnson points out, “Thanks to Microsoft’s lavish advertising budgets, the window is now shorthand for the wide array of innovations that make up the modern interface” (76). The window has proven to be rather resilient and is now one of the main organizational frames seen on digital devices, whether it be a tablet, computer, or phone. The windows style of information interface allows users to multitask much more easily. As Johnson notes, previously the command-line style interface did not allow for this degree of multitasking. The command-line interface is linear and textual. Users type commands onto the screen in order to access certain files or programs. If they want to switch to another program, they have to go back through the command-line interface. In a windows interface, though, users can keep these separate programs up on the same screen, allowing them to switch between different windows of information seamlessly (81).

Within House of Leaves, windows are used in a similar, albeit slightly different, fashion.

Like a digital window, the windows in House of Leaves allow readers to quickly switch between different textual strings. Chapter 11, for example, uses the footnotes, columns, and other dividing

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features to approximate snippets of text for the reader. The resulting layout causes small chunks of text to be arranged in boxes (Figure 2). Some pages contains over a dozen different textual boxes divided by repeating letters and lines that separate the footnotes and many blocks of text from each other. This chapter is meant to approximate the textual fragments Truant found in

Zampanò’s chest. House of Leaves does not come to Truant in a completed form. While some chapters are relatively finished, others only exist as brief notes on scraps of disorganized paper.

Chapter 11 is one such chapter. He even remarks in one of the footnotes, “On more than a few occasions I even considered excluding all this. In the end though, I opted to transcribe the pieces which I figured had enough on them to have some meaning even if that meant not meaning much to me” (249).

Truant did not find House of

Leaves in manuscript form. Figure 2 (Photo Taken by Author)

Rather, he arranged it out of the many scraps of paper he discovered. The arrangement (and the meaning that comes out of that arrangement) is, in some ways, arbitrary. The textual fragmentation found in this chapter is meant to capture the feel of finding these fragments for the reader. Likewise, by being open about how he found and arranged these fragments, Truant lets readers know that his order is not the only order in which they could be placed.

These textual boxes, like the textual windows on a digital interface, encourage readers to jump between the many different scraps of text. Furthermore, the chapter is incomplete. Through

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one of Zampanò’s friends, Denise Neiman, Truant learns that the pages ended up in “shreds.

They were in the wastebasket, some strewn on the floor, no doubt a fair share lost down the toilet” (248). What is left of the chapter hints at a comparison between the biblical brothers Esau and Jacob and the Navidson brothers, Will and Tom. At one point, Neiman tells Truant,

Zampanò “eventually got around to a second draft which I felt was pretty polished” (248), before the chapter was shredded. Presumably, the comparison that exists as a trace was once much more detailed and conclusive, perhaps even making some conclusions about which Navidson brother is Esau and which is Jacob.

As it stands, though, the reader is only given the beginning of this comparison. In order to make sense of this chapter, the reader must read these fragments in conjunction with one another, along with engaging in outside research. The text only gives a brief explanation of Esau and

Jacob, so if the reader is not well versed in biblical mythology, some research will be necessary.

At the same time, they must jump from fragment to fragment. Thanks to the digital interface,

Drucker notes, “We are learning to read and think and write along rays, arrays, subdivisions, and patters of thought” (Graphesis 189). Contending with these many different narrative and informational streams is a challenge. However, many readers are used to reading across a wide variety of information streams already, due to their practice reading across the multiple windows of a digital interface.

Chapter 11 is not the only place House of Leaves organizes information in a way comparable to windows in a digital interface. Chapter 9 uses a similar method. In Chapter 11,

House of Leaves attempted to recreate the experience of Johnny Truant’s struggle to make sense of the fragmented scraps left over by Zampanò. Like Truant, the reader is forced to stitch together the semblance of a narrative from barebones. Chapter 9 also wants readers to feel for

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Truant, but this time it is his frustration that is conveyed. While Chapter 11 is confusing, ultimately readers can realistically form a coherent interpretation from the traces Zampanò leaves behind. Chapter 9, on the other hand, denies even this by giving the reader too much information.

In a kind of overload, Chapter 9 contains long lists. These list are presented alongside each other, separated by boxes and detail every part of a house (from nails, to HVAC systems, and dimmer switches), hundreds of architecturally famous buildings, as well as hundreds of famous architects. While I cannot be sure that all these buildings and architects exist in reality, I chose a few at random and found evidence of their existence through a few quick internet searches.

While some sections encourage outside research, the massive amount of information in this chapter makes any kind of research impossibly time consuming.

Why encourage readers to engage in such research at certain points, while frustrating those same strategies at other points? Pressman believes that “The novel procures from its reader a sense of identification with the characters not through emotional empathy but by producing convergence of house and book that puts the novel’s reader in the position of reader within the text” (“House of Leaves” 111). In other words, readers are both inside and outside the narrative world. On the one hand, they are reading a text written by Danielewski. On the other hand, readers are situated within the narrative world as a person who stumbles upon a text written by

Zampanò and edited by Truant. Likewise, as mentioned above, placing the reader in the role of researcher within the narrative is a way for House of Leaves to allow readers to empathize with

Truant. Like Truant, readers are often frustrated by the opaque and dense references left behind by Zampanò.

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House of Leaves and Postmodernism

This emotional attachment to the characters and text of House of Leaves puts it in opposition to postmodern fiction. To Josh Toth, Danielewski is part of a group of novelist that includes “the likes of Richard Powers, Mark Leyner, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan

Franzen” (182); writers who use postmodern techniques to challenge many of the ideas of postmodernism. Specifically, Tosh argues:

Although it may seem to, House of Leaves does not revel even more gleefully in

the postmodern conviction that all has been lost in an infinite maze (or labyrinth)

of sliding signifiers. Rather, and as a representative instance of what seems to be

coming after postmodernism … House of Leaves works to initiate a period of

recovery, but a period of recovery without recovery. Or, put differently, it initiates

a very sincere process of recovery that (because it does follow postmodernism)

knows that recovery can never be final or complete (194).

Tosh believes that the recovery and renewal seen in House of Leaves is contingent. It attempts to recover a sense of closure, but it never allows readers the opportunity for complete closure.

While Tosh is right, House of Leaves does not close off the possibility of finding some way beyond postmodernism, but it also does not promise a definite way forward. I would like to add to Tosh’s analysis. I agree that House of Leaves is attempting to deal with many of the problems posed by postmodernism. However, I believe that House of Leaves is dealing with another problem, in addition to those illuminated by Tosh. Namely, House of Leaves works to immerse readers in its narrative and characters in a way that postmodern literature rejects.

Not all scholars see House of Leaves as a text that diverges from the literary goals of postmodernism. Thomas Davidson, for example, draws parallels between House of Leaves and

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“the postmodern geographies of David Harvey and Jean Baudrillard” (71). Hayles, likewise, believes Danielewski’s novel “instantiates the crisis characteristic of postmodernism, in which representation is short-circuited by the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation” (Writing Machines 110). Finally, Rune Graulund believes House of Leaves has an

“adherence to postmodernist literary conventions” (383). Importantly, though, Graulund argues,

“House of Leaves departs from these [literary conventions] in one very significant way: for confusing as it sometimes is, it succeeds in keeping a strong narrative core” (383). While

Graulund is right, the “strong narrative core” is more than isolated departure in an otherwise conventional postmodern text. Instead, this narrative core, and the characters that it focuses on, is how House of Leaves plants its stake in ground on the other side of the postmodern border.

Jessica Pressman sees the combination of digital and print elements into a single text as a kind of return to modernist strategies. However, she uses the term “modernism” in a very specific way. To Pressman, “digital modernism,” the phase she uses to describe these texts that utilize the print and the digital, is “a creative strategy rather than a temporal period or movement organized around certain key figures. I understand modernism to be a strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices” (Digital

Modernism 4). Under this definition, House of Leaves could be considered a work of digital modernism, and not a text that aims to move beyond postmodernism. This view relies on an idea of modernism as a period, and not a strategy in the way Pressman specifies. Furthermore,

Pressman sees digital modernism responding to a historical period that “is no longer the same cultural epoch as that described by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and other theorist of postmodernism writing in the 1980’s” (Digital Modernism 9). In Pressman’s view, digital modernism is breaking from postmodernism because it follows Ezra Pound’s

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proclamation to “make it new.” It is “making it new,” however, by returning to a modernist impulse to combine old and new media in interesting way. In this way, House of Leaves is both a text of digital modernism and a text that attempts to break from the strategies of postmodernism.

In order to show how a cohesive narrative and characters carries an otherwise postmodern text into different territory, I would like to situate it in a larger contemporary argument about experimentalism and realism in American fiction. This argument, taken up by writers like David Foster Wallace, John Franzen, Ben Marcus, and Zadie Smith, started to take shape in the early 1990’s, before picking up steam at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Wallace, for example, believes that irony and the playing of metafictional games are two parts of postmodernism that have lost their raison d'être. Writing in 1993, Wallace points out, “The best

TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could have dreamed of” (E Unibus Pluram 159). Television has co-opted the techniques of postmodern fiction. Furthermore, Wallace says, metafiction and irony are two ways postmodernism offered another possibility to a mass media of the 1960’ (including television) that was primarily realist (E Unibus Pluram 160-161). However, once television adopts these postmodern narrative strategies, irony and metafiction are no longer “the best alternative to the appeal of low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative” (E Unibus Pluram 173). In essence, postmodern fiction is no longer a viable subversive form because it has become the dominant mode of narrative in popular culture.

Far from simply being the go-to narrative techniques of mass media in the 90’s, metafiction and irony permeate culture. To Wallace, “this wider shift in its turn paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep philosophical change in how

Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our

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willingness to be pleased” (E Unibus Pluram 178). This poses a challenge to fiction writers, in

Wallace’s view, “How to rebel against TV’s aesthetic of rebellion? How to snap readers awake to the fact that our TV-culture has become cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly celebrates just these features in itself and its viewers?” (E Unibus

Pluram 184). In this particular essay, Wallace only offers a quick glimpse of what this kind of fiction might look like. In some ways, Wallace believes, it might be a return to “single-entendre values” and a move to “treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (E Unibus Pluram 193).

The idea that postmodern literary techniques, once used to critique cultural and societal norms in 1960’s America, are a response to historical moment that is no longer with us is echoed in the scholarship of contemporary American literature. Rachel Adams, for example, sees

“postmodernism as the dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentation during the Cold

War [which] … belong[s] to an era of literary history that came to an end in the late 1980’s”

(250). Contemporary literature, Adams argues, is addressing cultural and social issues that have become dominant after the Cold War. Furthermore, while these contemporary texts might borrow from postmodern literature, they use these tools for different purposes. Namely, in

Adam’s opinion, compared to postmodern fiction, contemporary fiction “is similarly complicated in terms of plot and narrative construction, its formal difficulties seem designed less to entrap both characters and reader in a postmodern labyrinth than to evoke the dense networking of people and goods in an age of global interconnection” (252).

Wallace’s call to eschew postmodern irony and metafictional distance in contemporary fiction is a common theme found throughout his work. In E Unibus Pluram, Wallace singles out irony as something that is “critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our

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postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (E Unibus Pluram 183). While irony is a good tool to challenge our preconceived notions about realist narratives, Wallace sees the purpose of fiction after postmodernism to be somewhat different. Now that the “ground-clearing” is done, how can fiction move forward. When asked “What would you like your writing to do?” in an interview, one part of Wallace’s response included, “a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with … I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world” (“Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant”

16). If the point of postmodern fiction is to distance readers from the realist “fictional dream,”

Wallace wants fiction to be “intimate,” to allow a kind of immersion that postmodern fiction worked to pierce. One way fiction after postmodernism can encourage intimacy, Wallace believes, is through empathetic characters. To Wallace, “if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside” (“An

Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace” 22). This call for a kind of fiction that will help readers “become less alone inside” is a direct response to the postmodern aesthetic that has become common place in mass media. The irony and distance of this aesthetic does not allow for the kind of intimacy and identification Wallace calls for.

Franzen makes an argument that is similar to Wallace’s. In a polarizing 2002 essay, “Mr.

Difficult,” Franzen maps out his thoughts on the state of contemporary fiction. Here, Franzen

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breaks contemporary fiction into two broad camps: status and contract.2 The status model

“invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance” and does not place weight on how the text is received by readers. The contract model, on the other hand, believes that “a novel represents a compact between reader and writer … the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness.” Implicitly, this essay ties status fiction to postmodernism. It does this through its representative example of a status novel: William Gaddis’s The Recognition. Franzen calls Gaddis’s writing, for example,

“increasingly postmodern.” Singling out Coover’s Nixon and Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, Franzen writes, “postmodern fiction wasn’t supposed to be about sympathetic characters. Characters, properly speaking, weren’t even supposed to exist. Characters were feeble, suspect constructs.”

Unlike many works of postmodernism, House of Leaves contains characters that do encourage empathy and identification. It does this, strangely enough, in a postmodern way. For example, House of Leaves uses a non-linear web of footnotes and appendices to help readers identify with the mental state of Johnny Truant. Footnotes and hyperlinking have been linked since the early days of the internet. When Infinite Jest was released in the mid-nineties, Matthew

Gilbert noted, “Wallace’s writing style, particularly with its astounding number of footnotes, has inspired many comparisons to computer hypertext” (“The ‘Infinite Story’” 86) Although Wallace wasn’t drawing on hypertext when he decided to use footnotes, the comparisons do show a willingness for readers to apply digital methods of information management to print fiction.

Wallace saw footnotes and non-linear structure as a way to capture the mental processes of human beings, “the way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops … And in a way, the

2 Zadie Smith makes a similar demarcation in her essay “Two Paths for the Novel.” One path is represented by Jospeh O’Neill’s Netherland, which Smith calls a kind of “lyrical realism.” The other path is illustrated through Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, a more theoretically driven novel that has its roots in postmodernism. 135

footnotes I think are better representations of thought patterns and fact patterns” (“David Foster

Wallace” 86).

Lev Manovich sees hyperlinking as a way to control the mental process of viewers. To

Manovich, the process of free association (linking things we read or experience with other things we have read or experienced in the past) is tainted by hyperlinking. Before hyperlinking, readers or viewers were allowed to create these association themselves. Manovich believes that “Now interactive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentence to go to another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations” (61). To Manovich, this state of affairs is related to Althusser’s theory of interpellation. Thus, it is a way to control and normalize thinking. Because “Interactive media ask us to identify with someone else’s mental structure” (61), it will inevitably control and standardize the mentality of viewers. In a fiction text, on the other hand, the ability to use association to help reader’s identify with the mental structure of another is a way out of the authorial distance trumpeted by postmodern fiction.

The hyperlinked nature of House of Leaves allows readers to empathize with Truant as he struggles with the Zampanò’s manuscript. As Truant tells the reader, “At least some of the horror […] you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages” (xvii). The text of House of Leaves is not neatly edited and ordered. Rather, it is a dense web of references, appendices, and footnotes. While the text of

House of Leaves that readers encounter is only an approximation of the rough manuscript Truant finds, the text attempts to represent the feeling of combing through the tangles of pages, dead ends, and cul-de-sacs experienced by Truant. By having the footnotes linked together in a

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sometimes twisting way, readers must make sense of the fragments in much the same way Truant was forced to.

House of Leaves makes readers untangle the knotty narrative through its use of footnotes, but this is not the only way the text encourages readers to simulate Truant’s editorial work. Part of Truant’s experience with Zampanò’s manuscript is tactile: the actual touching and movement of the loose papers Truant finds in Zampanò’s old trunk. Because House of Leaves is bound, it cannot reproduce this experience. However, it does use footnotes in a way that forces readers to engage the book tactilely. One series of footnotes, for example, is arranged in a way that sends readers on a circular journey. Footnote 146, for example, starts on page 120. It takes up the left margin of each even numbered page, leaving room for text on the right side of the page. From the left margin of 120, footnote 146 continues on the left margin of every even page until page 134. At the end of footnote 146, readers are pointed towards footnote 147, which starts on the right margin of page 135. In a kind of mirror image of footnote 146, footnote 147 takes up the left margin of pages 120-135. To read this footnote, readers have to turn the book upside down and move backwards from page 135 to page 120. In essence, footnotes 146 and 147, if followed in order, require the reader to circle pages 120-135. The end of footnote 147 sends readers to footnote 148, which sends readers to the many documents found in the appendices.

In the same chapters as the circular footnotes 146 and 147, other footnotes follow a similar pattern. Footnotes 166 and 167, like footnotes 146 and 147, take up specific parts of multiple pages. After reading 166, readers turn the book around before moving back through the text while reading footnote 167. The end of this footnote points readers to footnote 168, which goes on for a few pages before branching out into multiple footnotes pointing in the direction of various appendices. This tactile involvement with the text mirrors Truant’s own physical

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handling of Zampanò’s original manuscript. Like Truant, the reader is forced to view the text from different angles and in a crisscrossing order. By moving through the book in this non-linear way, readers are able to compare and contrast information from earlier in the text with information found later. Like Truant, who has to contend with the Zampano’s manuscript in an unordered way, the reader is unable to read these footnotes and the appendices they point towards in a set and ordered way. Rather, they are presented with the bulk of documents that they then must sift through in a way they determine.

Within the discourse surrounding contemporary American fiction, we see writers like

Ben Marcus taking up the ground opposed to writers like Jon Franzen. Marcus, in an essay partly written against Franzen’s contract vs. status argument, believes that literature that has “Artistic ambition … the idea that writing might change into something newer and more vital” (43) is being marginalized by rote realism that aims to be commercial and palatable. To Marcus, literary writing with “ambition” should be “more interested in the possibilities of language than in the immediate pleasures of mass audience” (51). Marcus believes fiction that uses literary language in new ways is a better route to realism than the sentimental narrative fiction trumpeted by

Franzen: “If literary titles were about artistic merit and not the rules of convention, about achievement and not safety, the term ‘realism’ would be an honorary one, conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language” (42).

Both Franzen and Marcus (as well as others) break literature up into two broad categories: “easy” narrative, sentimental fiction or “difficult” linguistically experimental fiction.

While these categories are largely constructions of the contemporary discourse surrounding

American fiction in the twenty-first century, the fact that many writers categorize American

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fiction of the last two decades in this broad way is telling. That is to say, many writers are consciously struggling with the tension between, as Franzen would call it, status and contract fiction. Nevertheless, there are some texts that exist in the gray space between this demarcation.

House of Leaves is one of these texts. Danielewski’s novel is both formally experimental and it attempts to allow readers to empathize with its characters.

Danielewski, for example, believes that the novel contains an emotional narrative. In an interview in the now defunct online magazine Flak, Danielewski said, “I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.’ And she’s absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.”3 While House of Leaves, in typical postmodern fashion, blends many genres together, the text is anchored in a narrative that pays close attention to the relationship of Will

Navidson and Karen Green. After all, the original purpose of the documentary Will begins to film about the house was to document the regular day-to-day experience of his family as they move into a new house. As Will himself says, “I just want to create a record of how Karen and I bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children, see how everything turns out” (8). However, as Zampanò notes in his commentary, there is a “significant impetus behind [Navidson’s] project—namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion

Karen Green” (10). As Navidson and Green’s house begins to shift, the narrative also shifts into more experimental and horrific territory. Nevertheless, the narrative still closely tracks how

Green and Navidson’s relationship is altered and almost destroyed by Navidson’s obsessive exploration and investigation.

3 Although Flak was an online magazine, and it is no longer available on the internet, various parts of Danielewski’s interview have been preserved through blogs, forums, and other sources. 139

While House of Leaves is most definitely an experimental novel, it uses an experimental form in order to counter many of the assumptions seen in postmodern literature. The textual games, as well as the strange typography and form, of Danielewski’s text is not meant to push the reader away, as it does in many postmodern texts. Rather, the text uses techniques borrowed from postmodernism in order to create a narrative that is meant to immerse and connect emotionally with the reader. Additionally, the texts similarity to digital interfaces allows for readers who are familiar with the digital interface to more easily overcome the difficulty associated with the experimental techniques found in House of Leaves. Ultimately, the difficulty of House of Leaves is not meant to push readers away. Rather, that difficulty requires readers to work harder and become more connected to the characters and narrative of the text.

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Wired for a Different Kind of Reading: Children’s Literature and Multimedia Narratives

One day while watching my nephew, I noticed him reading a book. That isn’t necessarily strange. My nephew is a fairly avid reader. However, something different caught my eye this time. He kept putting the book down to look at something on his laptop. I thought this might be a symptom of his membership in the so-called “ADHD generation.” When I asked him about it, I was surprised. The laptop was actually a key part of his narrative experience. The book he was reading, Skeleton Creek, basically required the laptop. Skeleton Creek is a children’s novel (and the first book in a series of the same name) by Patrick Carman. According to Scholastic’s website, Skeleton Creek is aimed at students in grades 3-7. Rather than being a unimodal, entirely text based narrative, Skeleton Creek incorporates a variety of modalities, including video and web content, as well as various images and faux newspapers clippings within the print book.

Part of the book is a series of journal entries; another part of the book is a series of web videos.

At certain points in the book, the reader is given a password to a website that contains these videos, which are crucial to understanding the narrative. Carman regularly experiments with multimodal storytelling throughout the Skeleton Creek series and in other books, like the

Trackers series.

Skeleton Creek uses the journal as a model for its physical form and its narrative frame.

Skeleton Creek’s font resembles handwriting. Additionally, each page of Skeleton Creek is lined like a notebook. Some of these pages contain clippings from letters, emails, newspapers, and other sources. The journal that forms the narrative of Skeleton Creek is written by Ryan, one of

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the text’s main characters. Ryan is also the one who collects and saves the various newspaper clippings found within the book. Alongside the print book is a collection of online videos focusing on another main character, Sarah. Finally, there is a promotional website,

SkeletonCreekIsReal.com, which works to blur the line between fictional narrative and reality in a way similar to the promotional material around movies like The Blair Witch Project. The plot of Skeleton Creek, in many ways, fits nicely into the horror and mystery genre. It follows Ryan and Sarah as they investigate a strange death in a small mining town in Oregon. This death took place on a now decommissioned dredge and, as Ryan and Sarah begin to find out, involves many members of the community.

Carman’s text shares many characteristics with other contemporary multimodal novels.

Carman’s text is reminiscent of narratives like J.J. Abram and Doug Dorst’s S., Marisha Pessl’s

Night Film, Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

These texts, and others like them, are often grouped together by critics as novels that experiment with form, narrative delivery, and technology. The utilization of various modalities is not only taking place within the realm of “literary” fiction, though, but is extending to young adult and children’s literature. However, to the young readers consuming these novels, these multimodal techniques are not experimental at all. Rather, the multimodal experience provided to young readers by novels like Skeleton Creek is more in line with the regular way they consume media.

While many reviewers and readers are put-off by this growing group of multimodal adult fiction, the readers of Skeleton Creek and other children’s multimodal texts approach these books with less hesitation.

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The reason behind these varying experiences is what I want to explore in this chapter. By comparing Skeleton Creek to Night Film and Luminous Airplanes, I will show how these different experiences have some basis in the neuroscience of reading. In essence, the young readers of Skeleton Creek are wired from a young age to read across media, whereas the adult readers of Night Film and Luminous Airplanes are neurologically accustomed to reading linear print narratives which are unimodal. In order to do this, I will first look at Luminous Airplanes and Night Film to show how contemporary fiction is turning to multimedia storytelling, and how the reception of these formal experiments is often lukewarm. Then, I will turn to the neuroscience of reading to find out why younger readers are so much more receptive of these kinds of textual experiments. Finally, I will show how Skelton Creek is a multimodal text which uses video, but remains rooted in a print tradition. Along the way, I hope to show how neuroscience and literary theory can be bridged and used together to help understand how and why young readers will continue to be attracted to multimodal texts as they age into adult readers.

For More Book, Check Online: Luminous Airplanes

Young readers who are used to reading across media will encourage more writers to experiment with multimodal story telling. While it is happening today, many adult readers are resistant to reading across media. To them, books are primarily a unimodal experience. We can see this preference arise when we look at the reception of multimodal texts like Paul La Farge’s

Luminous Airplanes. La Farge’s text focuses on an unnamed narrator living in San Francisco in the year 2000, shortly after the bursting of the tech bubble. The narrator, formerly a computer programmer, returns home to the East Coast for the funeral of his grandfather. In the process, he

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reconnects with many figures from his past that he had previously left behind. As noted by

Kathryn Schulz, this novel “is an unlikely project for La Farge, an experimental writer [because] this new book is essentially a realist novel.” While Schulz is right, she also notes that the book does contain an experimental component through “a Web-based ‘immersive text.’” This online portion of the novel is only hinted at on the last page of the print book, where a message tells readers, “Ten Years Later, Entrance to Cave, You are standing at the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave: www.luminousairplanes.com” (La Farge 243). If readers go to this website, they are greeted by a section that matches the beginning of the print book. The website for Luminous

Airplanes actually contains the entirety of the print book, along with material not found in the physical text. The reader navigates between sections using hyperlinks, some of which lead to dead ends or loop back to previously explored sections. On the one hand, critics like Schulz praise the narrative of the print novel. On the other hand, they are much less positive about the web component. Schulz “can’t recommend that you read ‘Luminous Airplanes’ online … the most generous take on this Web project is that it reads like a rough draft of a very good novel.”

Adding to this reluctance to read the online portions of Luminous Airplanes, Tom LeClair writes, “Readers of ‘solid books,’ though may find the hunt-and-click method too much like flying into a ‘digital cloud’ of unknowing.” While LeClair himself is open to this experimental web text, he acknowledges that many readers who are used to reading unimodal print texts might be resistant to La Farge’s multimodal experimentation. Similar to Schulz, The Economist calls

Luminous Airplanes, “an old-fashioned realist novel.” This same review also rejects the online component, “The accompanying website is what a music critic might deem ‘for completionist only.’ Some readers will enjoy exploring its corners, but the web element is neither necessary

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nor forcefully recommended.” Nevertheless, while most reviews had similar views of Luminous

Airplanes multimodal pieces, some reviews were more positive. Writing for Electronic

Literature, Jessica Pishko is much more receptive of the online parts of Luminous Airplanes.

Pishko comments on “the strength of combining the written text with an ‘immersive text’ online.”

While some reviewers of LaFarge’s text were more open to the experience of reading both print and web versions of the novel, most saw it as something that readers either should not or would not read, while still praising the print novel. How can we account for this ambivalent reception? For one thing, the way La Farge combines the print and web text is clunky for many readers. After finishing the print book, they are told a whole other narrative exists online. Once they go online, they see that the web narrative simply repeats large sections of the text they just finished reading. While they will quickly find new material, the backbone of the online text is repeating material found in the print book. This repetition does not encourage readers to seek out the nooks and crannies of new online-only material; even if they decide to peruse the online text, they will quickly realize that what they are reading is largely repeating what they have read before.

Like Luminous Airplanes, the narrative of Skeleton Creek extends to a web-based text.

But these online videos function differently than La Farge’s multimodal experimentation in some very important ways. For one thing, the multimodal elements of Skeleton Creek appear regularly throughout the narrative. The integration of multimodal pieces encourages readers to seek these non-print elements out. The first video that appears in the book is a good example of how

Skeleton Creek prods readers to explore material beyond the physical text. Writing about this

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first video, Ryan says, “It’s so simple. Just go to Sarah’s name online. Sarahfincher.com. Enter the password houseofusher. Then click return. One click. Do it, Ryan. Do it” (24). This passage contains some fairly overt instructions for the reader. By focusing so much on the videos,

Carman is indicating how important these videos are to the overall narrative. The next chapter picks up where the video leaves off. If readers try to skip this video and continue with the print narrative, they will be missing important elements of the story. The way the print text introduces the next video reinforces the sense that these non-print segments are required if readers want to understand the narrative. Right before giving readers the password to the second video, Carman writes, “I have to watch what she sent. I have to watch it right now” (37). Like the sentence preceding the first video, this passage contains a thinly veiled plea to the reader, who needs to switch from the book to the video if they want to piece the narrative together. Furthermore, the narrative actually ends not in the print book, but in a video. Readers hoping to find a satisfying ending to the story have to seek it online.

By incorporating these videos in a way that both requires and strongly encourages readers to partake in these multimodal bits, Skeleton Creek avoids many of the pitfalls seen in Luminous

Airplanes’ web-text. The web-content of Luminous Airplanes is, as some reviewers have noted, largely optional. Readers can get a “complete” narrative experience without venturing online. In the standard tradition of realist novels, readers are provided some kind of closure that makes the narrative feel “finished.” Because Luminous Airplanes provides this within the pages of the physical book, there is little incentive to go beyond this satisfying ending. Adding to this feeling for the reader is the fact that they are greeted by material that is already in the book. In many ways, Skeleton Creek operates in the opposite way. Rather than providing a full narrative

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experience in print form, with only supplemental or non-required online material, Skeleton Creek denies a coherent narrative experience to the reader that only engages with the print book. In essence, the multimodal material of Skeleton Creek is an integral part of the overall package; in

Luminous Airplanes readers can take or leave the online material and still experience a consistent narrative.

Apps and Books: Night Film

While Luminous Airplanes separates its digital material from the main print narrative, later novels, such as Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, integrate digital pieces into the text-based narrative.

Like Luminous Airplanes and Skeleton Creek, Pessl’s Night Film is a narrative that exists mainly as a print book. Night Film focuses on Scott McGrath, a disgraced journalist who fell out of favor after an investigation into the reclusive director, Stanislas Cordova, goes horribly wrong.

The main narrative tracks McGrath as he is pulled back into the mysteries of Cordova following the strange death of Cordova’s daughter, Ashley. The narrative features many details of

Cordova’s oeuvre and the obsessive cult of fans who revere it. Throughout the narrative, Pessl adds digital media such as websites, videos, and audio recordings that can be accessed through a smartphone app that accompanies the novel. In this way, Night Film’s form is closer to Skeleton

Creek, since Luminous Airplanes does not spread its digital components throughout the text.

However, Skeleton Creek and Night Film differ in the importance they give the digital parts of the narrative. In Skeleton Creek, these parts are essential to even a basic understanding of the narrative. Night Film, on the other hand, treats these digital parts like Easter eggs, adding to the experience for the reader that seeks them out, but they are not required viewing.

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These digital Easter eggs come in a variety of forms. Readers access these through an app they must download on their smartphone. Using this app, readers must take pictures of specific pages; these pages are marked in the bottom corner with a small drawing of a bird. After a reader takes a picture of one of these pages, the app opens some piece of supplemental digital material.

One contains a syllabus for a Cordova film course taught by an eccentric Columbia professor, another features a recording of Ashley, a musical prodigy, playing the piano. This recording even acts as a kind of background music to the section where it is found. Other recordings feature

Ashley’s psychiatrist discussing her treatment and a selection from an audio book. Finally, there are short films, collections of posters for Cordova’s movies, and a diary written by an actor who worked on an early Cordova film. In addition, Night Film’s physical book includes many visual elements, such as newspaper clippings and photographs.

Because Night Film interweaves its digital elements throughout the text, it avoids some of the problems associated with Luminous Airplanes. The online component of Luminous Airplanes feels like an afterthought, something tacked on to the end of the print text that doesn’t compel readers to explore beyond the boundaries of the novel’s covers. Night Film makes these multimodal pieces of the text a regular part of the narrative. Additionally, the plot of Night Film adds more motivation for readers to explore the non-print elements. Night Film takes its cue from the mystery genre. Like most narratives of this genre, Night Film strings readers along, giving out information at careful intervals to keep the reader enticed. These conventions of the mystery genre add a compelling layer to Night Film’s digital Easter eggs. The reader, always hungry for more clues, is more likely to seek out these extra, non-print elements. Unlike Luminous

Airplanes, Night Film’s narrative gives readers a reason to seek out extra pieces.

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Like the reception of Luminous Airplanes, though, the multimodal sections of Night Film were often overlooked or rejected by many readers. While Joe Hill, for example, mentions Night

Film, “asserts itself as a multimedia presentation more than an old-fashioned book,” his review otherwise ignores the digital side of Night Film. Likewise, Mark O’ Connell, writing for Slate, doesn’t even gesture towards the digital components of Pessl’s narrative. Other reviewers who pass over the digital bits of Night Film include Meg Wolitzer, Elena Seymenliyska, and David

Ulin. Ron Charles mentions the “accompanying app,” but does not go beyond this. While many reviews take note of the visual aspects of the text that appear within the print book, they mostly ignore the online multimodal components. Some reviewers do comment on the novel’s interweaving of physical and digital narrative, but it usually isn’t positive. In The Guardian, for example, Steven Poole dismisses these elements as “a hopeful stab at transmedia virality.”

When we look at the receptions of Luminous Airplanes and Night Film, it is apparent that reviewers objected to (or just ignored) the overall combination of a traditional print narrative with multimedia elements. Why do older readers seem to resist reading across media, while younger readers don’t? If we look at this question through the lens of neuroscience and literary theory, we can see how the millennial readers of Skeleton Creek are always-already neurologically prepared to read across media in the ways required by multimodal narratives.

Thanks to their regular interaction with a wide array of media, the young readers of Skeleton

Creek already have the literacy tools necessary to make sense of narratives that move across media.

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The Neuroscience of Reading

Before looking at how neuroscience and literary theory can help us make sense of Skeleton

Creek, I want to quickly outline some basic ideas about the neuroscience of reading. As N.

Katherine Hayles and others have noted, the science of reading has undergone a shift over the past few decades thanks to advancements and discoveries in the field of neuroplasticity. Drawing from work being done in the field of neuroscience, Hayles believes that our interactions with digital technology are rewiring the parts of our brain associated with reading. In How We Think,

Hayles points out, “recent work in neurophysiology, neurology, and cognitive science … has shown that the brain, central nervous system, and peripheral nervous system are endowed with a high degree of neural plasticity” (11). Neural plasticity is the theory that the brain is constantly wiring and rewiring its neural network. Previous theories assumed the brain was mostly done developing by the time a person reaches adulthood. New work in neuroscience shows that the plasticity of the brain allows for change throughout life. As we engage in various activities, our brains change in response to these activities. For example, in a study by Marc Banger and Eckart

Altenmüller, volunteers without musical experience were taught some basic piano skills. Over the next five weeks, they were told to practice. After returning, researchers found that brain scans revealed that activity in the section of the brain associated with musical knowledge had increased. The brain had built-up this area in response to training.

Our reading follows a similar model. As researchers like Pamela Nevills, Marilee

Sprenger, and David A. Sousa have pointed out, unlike speech, which the brain is wired to do from birth, brains are not structured with areas ready for reading. Rather, the brain has to be wired for reading through practice. Maryanne Wolf summarizes the development of reading on a

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neurological level: “Whenever we learn something new, the brain forms a new circuit that connects some of the brain’s original structures. In the case of learning to read, the brain builds connections between and among the visual, language and conceptual areas that are part of our genetic heritage, but that were never woven together in this way before” (“Our ‘Deep Reading’

Brain” 8). Additionally, as Sousa shows, the reading brain also changes overtime. A beginning reader’s brain is wired differently than a more advanced reader (54-55). On a neurological level, reading is not a stagnant or predetermined cognitive ability. Rather, reading is something that develops because of conscious effort by humans. Likewise, how our brains are wired for reading changes over time and in different ways depending on how and what we are reading.

While we are born with dedicated areas for vision, speech, and language, we are not born with brains that are wired for recognizing or making sense of words on the page. As Marilee

Sprenger puts it, “Language is a human ability beyond comparison. It is hard-wired in the brain, so there are specific language areas already in place and waiting for the right experiences to help them connect … there is no prewired pathway in the brain for reading” (23). According to

Maryanne Wolf, the earliest evidence of written language can be traced back to between 3300-

3200 BCE (31). Given the time humans have been on this planet (about 200,000 years), reading is a rather new development. This makes sense when we remember that brains do not have pre- formed areas dedicated to reading.

So, then, how do brains develop the wiring necessary for reading? According to Stanislas

Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist who has studied reading, “the brain circuitry inherited from our primate evolution can be co-opted to the task of recognizing printed words. According to this approach, our neuronal networks are literally ‘recycled’ for reading” (2). As previously

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mentioned, the brain does not have areas dedicated to recognizing written language. Instead, parts of the brain that are dedicated to other tasks must be converted to read. Dehaene calls this process “neuronal recycling.” Dehaene believes that “human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate a fringe of variability. Part of our visual system, for instance, is not hardwired but remains open to changes in the environment … visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading” (7). Rather than being a stagnant structure, the brain is able to change due to outside stimuli. It is this flexibility that allows areas of the brain that are not genetically pre-disposed for reading to develop the wiring necessary for this complex task.

Specifically, the brain recycles areas dedicated to vision and hearing to allow for reading.

Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf breaks down the brain processes that go into reading a word. This process is different in someone who is learning to read and someone who is an experienced reader. In the experienced reader’s brain, reading starts in the frontal lobe. Specific areas in our frontal lobe develop, through practice, to recognize visual language. As we are taught what is and is not a letter, the visual areas of our brain develop areas that are able to recognize certain shapes as letters, while ignoring shapes that do not look like letters. Seeing that shapes are letters, and not just random shapes found in nature, takes the brain about 50 milliseconds (145-

147).

After our brain recognizes these shapes as letters, it goes to work decoding these letters.

At this point, our brains decide if these letters form a recognizable word or if it is just a random assortment of letters. As Wolf puts it, “Another contributions to automaticity in the sequence of our eye movements concerns out ability to recognize when a group of letters forms a permissible

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pattern in our language (bear versus rbea), and whether a permissible word is a real word or not

(bear versus reab)” (149). This recognition takes another 50 or so milliseconds. Next, we connect these letters to sounds. Depending on how common or recognizable the word is, this phonological reconstruction of the word can be automatic or conscious. If we don’t recognize a word, we might sound it out. However, if the word is easily recognizable, this transition from visual recognition to phonology happens on an unconscious level. Finally, we connect this fully formed word with meaning through a “semantic processing,” which Wolf says is “when the varied meanings and associates of words become activated” (153). This is where we connect word to meaning, and also connect our own experiences and memories to the meaning.

This whole process takes about 500 milliseconds from beginning to end (152-154).

During this time, something interesting happens which has implications for the way we read and interpret literature. David Swinney, a researcher mentioned by Wolf (9), points out how we deal with ambiguous words. The word “bat,” for example, could signify a winged creature or a wooden stick used in sports, depending on the context. In one of Swinney’s study, this process is investigated. Swinney gave participants different sentences that contained ambiguous words. In some of these sentences, the context made clear which definition of the word was meant. One sentence Swinney used was “Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of his room” (650). Obviously, given the context of this sentence, the specific usage of the word “bug” is clear. However, Swinney found that, no matter how much context readers were given, “the evidence suggests that not only are both (all) meanings for an ambiguity momentarily accessed, even in the presence of a strong biasing context … but that all

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meanings are also immediately and momentarily accessed even when materials have a priori biases largely toward just one of the ‘senses’ of the word being tested” (657).

This neurological process may explain how readers find enjoyment in word play. When readers see a particular word, part of the reading experience includes, at least momentarily, all the different definitions of that word. Fiction writers and story tellers have used this neurological process to their advantage. By choosing specific words, writers can use the way the brain processes the written word to invoke certain shades of meaning. Whether they know it or not, writers that utilize word play are taking advantage of a specific way our brains process language.

While this is the way an experienced reader goes about identifying written language, someone who is just learning to read has a different neurological process. For someone learning to read, the portion of the brain responsible for turning written language into phonological language is much more active because they spend more time mentally sounding words out.

(Sousa 54-57). Additionally, it is important to note that these different stages of word recognition do not happen in a linear series. In some ways, the explanation that Wolf provides is an attempt to make an extremely complicated mental process intelligible. However, as Dehaene notes, while the brain follows a certain procedure for recognizing words, this process is not neat and orderly.

We should not imagine reading as a process where neurological signals cleanly move from one area of the brain to another. Rather, as Dehaene notes, “a ‘bushy’ vision of the brain, with several functions that operate in parallel, has replaced the early serial model” (64).

Neuroscience and the Phenomenology of Reading Fiction

To Paul B. Armstrong, the phenomenological experience that is unique to reading can be tied to neuroscience. Armstrong is one of the first literary theorists to examine the role

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neuroscience plays in the experience of reading literature. While the field of cognitive literary studies is well established, Armstrong’s study is very different. For one thing, many cognitive literary theorist, such as Lisa Zunshine in Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, use psychological concepts such as “mind reading,” the ability to tell what other people are thinking, and not ideas drawn from neuroscience. As Armstrong puts it, “I have been disappointed, however, by the absence (with a few notable exceptions) of serious engagement with neurobiology. Most of the cognitive critics focus on psychology and its studies of the mind rather than on neuroscience and its analysis of the brain” (xii-xiii).

Armstrong, for his part, wants to add neuroscience to the field of literary studies. This sets him apart from many of the cognitive literary theorists who look at the “mind” and not the physical properties of the brain. Armstrong’s “central argument is that literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance that set in motion and help to negotiation oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning” (ix). In other words,

Armstrong wants to tie the way the brain processes the world to the experience of reading literature. Furthermore, Armstrong believes that many descriptions of the experience of reading literature found within literary theory match up with neuroscience’s explanation of the way the brain processes information; to Armstrong, “We have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance, and the experiences that have so widely and typically been reported about encounters with art and literature are correlated in interesting ways with basic neuronal and cortical processes” (x).

It is important to note, however, that Armstrong is not trying to distill literary experience to neuroscience. That is to say, Armstrong is not attempting to explain all aspects of the

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phenomenology of reading through neuroscience. Rather, Armstrong is trying to tie neuroscience to already existing theories about literary experience. Furthermore, as Armstrong says, “There are things that aesthetics and literary theory can tell us about the experience of reading that the perspective of neuroscience cannot, and the reverse is also true” (xi). Armstrong does not want to replace literary theory with neuroscience. Instead, he wants to see how neuroscience matches descriptions of the phenomenology of reading while also seeing how neuroscience can supplement and clarify these theories already found in literary studies.

The Neuroscience of Skeleton Creek

As Wolf’s research indicates, reading is an activity that always-already involves vision and hearing. At least on a neurological level, reading is always a multimodal experience. When we read a word, the parts of the brain associated with vision and hearing (along with other parts of the brain) are doing work. The idea that written language is always already both visual and verbal is also found in literary theory. W.J.T. Mitchell has trumpeted the connection between written and verbal language for decades. To Mitchell, “Viewed from either side, from the standpoint of the visual or the verbal, the medium of writing deconstructs the possibility of a pure image or pure text … Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal” (95). Skeleton Creek and other multimodal novels take advantage of this aspect of reading noted by Mitchell, Dehane and others by providing an experience that utilize the existing multimodal aspects of reading.

One thing that sets a children’s novel like Skeleton Creek apart from multimodal fiction aimed at adults is where Skeleton Creek’s audience is neurologically. According to Pamela

Nevills, a specialist on neuroscience and learning, students in the age range of the intended

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audience of Skeleton Creek (4th-7th graders) are in a crucial transitional stage. Students in this age group are, many times, no longer learning to read by sounding words out. They have moved from a predominately phonological kind of reading to a more automatic kind of reading that is less dependent on sounding words out. Because of this, students are ready to learn the higher functions associated with reading, things like making connections between texts, making inferences about future events using information from the present and past, and other skills associated with higher levels of learning. As Nevills puts it, students in this age range “require intensive support to organize information in ways that make sense. They accomplish this feat by providing meaning for words or ideas that are similar or different, putting small incidentals into big meanings, forming generalizations, and developing conceptual thinking to align with the way the brain is structured to learn” (12).

Skeleton Creek provides the perfect fodder for these young brains. The multimodal nature of Skeleton Creek encourages the kind of “conceptual thinking” Nevills thinks is so important.

Thinking back to their grade school experiences, many people would remember the periods between 4th and 7th grade as a time that reduces the amount of multimodality in reading. Students often go from reading books that regularly incorporate text and image in the early years of elementary school to texts that lean much more heavily on the unimodality of text in middle- school. Within this context, Skeleton Creek offers a different path. By combining text, image, and video, Skeleton Creek allows for readers to hone their ability to read across media at a time when they are being encouraged to read increasing amounts of text. Being able to read long strings of text is, of course, a useful skill that needs to be focused on in the course of literacy education. However, as the world students live in becomes increasingly multimodal, they also

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need to be able to read across media. Skeleton Creek is the perfect text to help them practice this skill.

Skeleton Creek offers this chance by requiring readers to pay attention to all its various modalities that encompass the narrative. On the one hand, readers must deal with the text of the printed book. However, it is impossible to get a complete picture of the narrative by reading the book alone. The first video readers encounter during a chronological reading, for example, is crucial to understanding the rest of the narrative. The printed text often references events found in the videos, usually right after the password for that video appears. The narrative of Skeleton

Creek is built in a way that assumes readers will watch the videos at specific points. If readers skip the videos, larger holes begin to appear in the narrative. Furthermore, one of the main characters in the novel, Sarah, almost exclusively appears in the videos. Taken together, there is a huge amount of Skeleton Creek’s narrative that exists outside the boundaries of the print book’s cover. This forces readers who want a complete picture of the events of the text to read across various media. Part of the experience of reading Skeleton Creek is putting the various pieces of the narrative gleaned from the videos and texts together in a cohesive way. As mentioned by

Nevills, this kind of synthesis of various narrative strings is the kind of reading that, neurologically, young readers need as a part of regular literacy development.

Multimodal Storytelling and Genre Theory

Why are the young readers of Skeleton Creek more open to narratives that tell their story across many devices? While we see texts similar to Skeleton Creek marketed to adults, the digital side of these multimodal narratives are very often rejected or ignored. However, the young readers who devoured the Skeleton Creek series might be more open to the experimental digital

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storytelling seen in books like Luminous Airplanes and Night Film because they are already well versed in reading a single narrative across multiple modalities. By turning to genre theory, we can understand how Skeleton Creek prepares young readers to read similar texts as they grow older. According to Peter J. Rabinowitz, when readers approach a text, they must “make a choice about what key to use to unlock it, and that choice must often be based on an intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch” (418). Readers have to choose what lens they are going to use to view the text. The lens they choose is, in part, based on their experience with other texts in the past.

This idea forms the crux of Rabinowitz’s genre theory, which posits, “one way (but not the only way) of defining genres is to consider them as bundles of operations which readers perform in order to recover the meanings of texts rather than as sets of features found in the texts themselves. To put this crudely but more modishly, genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts” (419). Readers learn these strategies through exposure to different kinds of texts. If a person reads a lot of mystery narratives, they will pick up the conventions of that genre. As the read other mystery novels, they will apply these conventions to these texts, causing the reader to pay attention to certain details and to draw certain conclusions from those details. To Rabinowitz, this process works the same whether a reader is engaging with a mystery novel, a literary novel, a romance, or any other kind of novel.

We can extend Rabinowitz’s theory beyond the realm of fiction into reading more generally. All reading involves a process of picking up certain strategies and skills based on what and how we read. Children who have grown up reading across media won’t be put off by the need to pick up a computer or tablet to engage with a narrative beyond the boundaries of a print

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book’s covers. Adult readers, who are more used to reading narratives in a unimodal way, are not used to multimodal narratives like Luminous Airplanes or Night Film. The readers of Skeleton

Creek have no problem putting a book down to Google something or watch a video; it is always- already a part of their reading experience from a young age. The adult readers who reviewed

Night Film and Luminous Airplanes do not have these same skills. Thus, they have a harder time engaging with a text that asks readers to move beyond the physical book.

The Neuroscience of Genre

The process described by Rabinowitz has parallels in the neuroscience of reading. When looking at how traditional theories of reading line up with what neuroscience tells us about the brain,

Paul Armstrong turns to hermeneutics; specifically, the hermeneutic circle, which postulates,

“one can understand a text (or any state of affairs) only be grasping in advance the relation of a specific part to the whole in which it belongs, even if one can only arrive at a sense of the whole by working through its parts” (Armstrong 54). Armstrong ties hermeneutics to the neurosciencetific “‘bushy’ model of the brain as a decentered, multidirectional ensemble of parallel-processing operations” (54). To Armstrong, both hermeneutics and the bushy model of the brain indicate a kind of pattern recognition that is deployed by individuals in order to interpret events (or, in the case of reading, texts). In Armstrong’s view, hermeneutics and neuroscience both argue that we understand situations by interpreting those situations based on similar situations that have occurred in the past.

This ability to distinguish patterns is especially important when the information we have about a text is incomplete. Part of the pleasure of reading, to Armstrong, comes from the way texts “play with the brain’s recursivity and its contradictory need to create constancy and to

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preserve flexibility. How this happens … is suggested by phenomenological accounts of reading as a process of gap filling and consistency building. These descriptions of reading are fully consistent with neuroscientific explanations of the hermeneutic circle” (84). When a piece of literature, like a mystery novel, leaves holes in the narrative puzzle that must be filled by readers, the text is taking advantage of the way the brain is wired; or, in Armstrong’s words, literature is

“playing with the brain.” We fill in the puzzle by using skills picked up from previous readings.

Rabinowitz’s genre theory takes a similar position. If we are used to reading mystery novels, for example, we will know what textual clues to pay attention to based on our experience with other mystery novels. Texts can often play with these expectations, leading us in directions, only to subvert those expectations later. In either case, though, these texts are playing with the brain’s natural ability to fill in gaps based on our previous experiences.

When compared to Luminous Airplanes or Night Film, Skeleton Creek’s narrative is better situated to take advantage of this ability found in the brain. As many reviewers mentioned, the online components of Night Film and Luminous Airplanes were icing on the narrative cake.

The digital pieces of these two novels are not important to filling in the puzzles the text lays out.

In many ways, they serve the same function as the extra features on a Blu-Ray or DVD: they are there for fans that want to seek them out, but they are not required viewing. Skeleton Creek on the other hand, has a narrative that requires readers to engage with its digital material. If they just read the narrative found in the print book, they will miss whole chunks of the plot, making it almost incomprehensible. While this route might provide an interesting reading experience, it won’t be one with a coherent narrative. The print books of Luminous Airplanes and Night Film give readers all the pieces they need to fill in the narrative puzzle; Skeleton Creek, on the other

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hand, places some of the pieces outside the print book, forcing readers that want to complete the puzzle to search for them online.

Harmony, Dissonance, and Multimodal Literature

Looking beyond the hermeneutic circle, Armstrong thinks that the neuroscience of reading helps explain the feelings of harmony and dissonance readers experience. To Armstrong, the brains natural ability for pattern recognitions extends to harmonious and dissident reading experiences.

Starting with harmony, Armstrong defines it as something that “can be pleasurable either because they resonate with recognizable patters or because they suggest new relations. Some harmonies may activate particular modes of integrative, reciprocal interactions that are familiar from past patterns of neuronal processing, while others may reconfigure cortical areas in new ways” (43). In other words, a reader has a harmonious reading experience when a text corresponds to other kinds of texts that particular reader has experienced before or when a text builds on those same patterns. This could explain why certain readers go back to texts from the same genre: they enjoy reading texts that map onto their expectations and offer similar reading experiences. Armstrong is careful not to suggest that harmony is a natural component of texts.

Rather, readers find a text harmonious depending on whether or not they have the neuronal wiring from exposure to similar texts. Two different readers might find the same text to be either a harmonious or dissonant reading experience, depending on their past experience. Similarly, a single reader might find certain sections of a text harmonious, while finding others dissonant.

Like a harmonious reading experience, a dissonant reading experience is tied to pattern recognition. To Armstrong, “Dissonant art defamiliarizes by violating a norm, and this requires the invocation of the norm, the structure that is laid bare by being transgressed, opposed, and

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overturned. Further, these acts of violation are themselves meaningful patterns of contestation and reconfiguration, which is why they are susceptible to routinization and habitualization” (49).

Unlike harmony, which is caused by one’s recognition of how something fits into past patterns, dissonance is caused by having an experience which somehow breaks from these past patterns.

When it comes to reading, dissonance is an experience which is caused by an exposure to an unfamiliar text. Similar to Brecht’s concept of the “estrangement effect,” dissonant literature challenges a reader’s preconceived notions by taking something familiar and twisting it until one can’t recognize it. However, as Armstrong notes, what is dissonant can become harmonious, as a reader is exposed to these patterns more and more. An unfamiliar, dissonant text is “a result of how writers manipulate contingent, cultural contents, and in doing so they teach us to read in new ways (what was unnatural can become recognizable and familiar), but some experiments with form may be simply too much for the brain to handle smoothly and routinely” (46).

Armstrong points to texts like Ulysses or the work of David Foster Wallace as examples of experimental literature which, even with practice, never quite fits into a harmonious reading experience. Still, with practice, readers begin to develop the mental tools necessary to recognize patterns in texts that share certain qualities.

It is important to note that a harmonious reading experience is not always a pleasurable reading experience, just like dissonance is not always part of an unpleasant reading experience.

Rather, some readers might seek out a harmonious or dissonant experience, depending on many factors. Some readers like to be challenged with experimental literature primarily because it does not match their previous reading experiences, causing dissonance. What unites harmony and dissonance is how they play with the brain’s natural ability to find patterns.

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Although Luminous Airplanes and Night Film have a form that is very similar to Skeleton

Creek, the intended audiences of these texts have very different reading experiences. The adult readers of texts like Luminous Airplanes and Night Film is one of dissonance. Skeleton Creek, on the other hand, provides a reading experience that is in harmony with the way its audience already reads. The young readers who come to Skeleton Creek, in many cases, are used to reading across media, so the experience of Skeleton Creek is nothing new. The approach the text in a way that is already familiar to them. Readers who are more used to unimodal reading experiences, like many of the readers of Luminous Airplanes and Night Film, find these texts that split their narratives across media to be a departure from their normal reading habits, causing these readers to feel dissonance. While this dissonant reading experience might be a worthwhile one, and some readers might seek it out, many others will be put off when they expect a familiar mystery or realist narrative, only to find novels that are experimenting with a multimodal form.

As the young readers of Skeleton Creek grow up, they may approach texts like Luminous

Airplanes and Night Film with a different perspective. Growing up with multimodal texts like

Skeleton Creek, and already being used to reading across media, these readers may not have the same dissonant experience that many reviewers of Luminous Airplanes and Night Film reported.

Rather, as these young readers grow up, they might find these texts fit into the patterns of their past reading experiences. They won’t look at texts like Luminous Airplanes and Night Film as experimental.

Orality, Literacy, and Neuroscience

How technology changes patterns of thought has been a topic of discussion within literary studies for decades. Walter J. Ong, for example, explored how the transition between oral culture

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and written culture reformulated consciousness. Writing in the 1980’s Ong preceded many of the developments in neuroscience that seek to understand reading. Nevertheless, we can see how his theories match up with the way neuroscience explain the mental processes behind reading. In

Ong’s view, humans are “beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not thing as it does … More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness” (77).

While Ong tracks how orality and literacy change human consciousness by way of description, Wolf looks at how reading might have influenced the neurological wiring of the human brain. Writing over twenty years after Ong, Wolf, a neuroscientist, echoes Ong’s literary theory; to Wolf, writing “rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history” (3). Rather than explaining the impact of reading in two different ways, neuroscience and literary theory take remarkably similar position, even though they arrive at those positions in different ways. Ong, by examining the narratives of primarily oral cultures, is able to trace specific differences in their thinking, when compared to the textual production of literate cultures. In Wolf’s case, she is able to see how reading changes our neuronal wiring by scanning the brains of readers and non-readers. In both cases, Wolf and Ong conclude that reading fundamentally alters the way our brains think and processes information.

Ong and Wolf share more than this general conclusion. Additionally, they see similar changes in the thought processes of literate and non-literate cultures. Ong, for example, believes

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that primarily oral cultures are “homeostatic…That is to say, oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing of memories which no longer have present relevance” (46). This persistence of the present has implications for long- term planning, which is harder to do within this mindset more divorced from codified time. On a more practical level, it is hard to remember plans for the future without the ability to write them down. Oral cultures would have to constantly remember these long-term plans, reducing the specificity and nuance necessary for intricate planning. Wolf sees the same increase in thought processes related to long-term planning and analysis in the changing wiring of the reading brain.

According to Wolf, reading strengthens the neuronal connections between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for “analysis, planning, and focused attention” (Wolf 34). As we read, this part of the brain becomes more active and more connected, causing our thought patterns to shift in ways similar to those described by Ong, becoming more focused on linear chronology and planning.

With this conception of chronology and time, the way we digest narrative also changes, impacting the way stories are told and the way readers create meaning out of these narratives.

The importance of a conception of time has been noted by both literary theorist like Ong and neuroscientist. Armstrong, for example, ties the phenomenological explanation of the passage of time with neuroscience, arguing that our response to narrative is “inherently temporal” (92).

Armstrong, drawing from neuroscience, is restricting his investigation to brains that are already literate. However, as Ong shows, the temporality of narrative is, in part, a product of the reading brain, and there is nothing “inherent” about it. Narratives that come out of oral culture, in Ong’s view, demonstrate a different conception of temporality, when compared to narratives produced

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by literate cultures. Ong, for example, notes that oral poets had a “disregard for temporal sequence” (139), adding later that the “lengthy climactic plot comes into being only with writing” (141).

As Ong notes, the introduction of writing technology changes the way we think, tell, and digest narratives. But what about digital technology? Texts like Skeleton Creek, Luminous

Airplanes, and Night Film are evidence of a rise in a different kind of storytelling, one that is influenced by the long, linear plot of written narratives, but one that also takes into account how technology is changing literacy. While Ong was writing before the internet had taken root in society, he does mention other electronic technology, specifically radio and television. To Ong, these technologies are actually ushering in a kind of “secondary orality.” Radio and television are secondary to a primarily literate culture because, as Ong says, the technology “depends on writing and print for its existence” (3). In a way, secondary orality is the kind of orality that has been filtered through literacy. It is orality with a veneer of literacy. While a TV show might be primarily visual and auditory, that TV show is originally a written script.

The internet, in some ways, changes this relationship between electronic media and literacy/orality. While radio and television are oral media that utilize print in their behind-the- scenes creation, the internet puts these different media (writing, image, sound, video, etc…) side- by-side. In this way, orality is not secondary on the internet, but is a primary mode of presentation along with writing and other modalities.

Adding in neuroscience, we can see how these changes are actually physical. In an often cited study by Gary Small, people who had no experience with the internet had their brains scanned using an MRI. These results were compared to regular internet users. When compared to

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the “Net Savvy,” as Small coined them, the “Net Naïve” exhibit different brain activity when searching the internet. More generally, Small and his team concluded, “prior experience with

Internet searching may alter the brain’s responsiveness in neural circuits controlling decision making and complex reasoning” (“Your Brain on Google” 116).As Ong notes, advancements in technology shift the thought patterns of users. Like the shift from orality to literacy, this change brought about by digital technology is altering we think.

In a later study, Small argues that these changes do not take long, sustained exposure to the internet. Rather, they happen very quickly when the “Net Naïve” begin to regularly use the internet. Small took a group of the “Net Naïve” and scanned their brains. Like the previous study, Small also brought in a group of more experienced internet users to compare. As expected, these groups exhibited different kinds of brain activity. However, in this study, Small had the

“Net Naïve” use the internet for an hour-a-day for five days in a row. After those five days,

Small brought them back in for another round of MRI scanning. In these scans, Small found that

“After just five days of practice, the exact same neural circuitry in the front part of the brain became active in the Internet-naïve subjects. Five hours on the Internet, and the naïve subjects had already rewired their brains … This particular area of the brain controls our ability to make decisions and integrate complex information” (iBrain 16).

A Catastrophe for Thinking?: Attention Span, Distraction, and Multimodal Literature

While scientist and literary scholars are beginning to track the impact digital technology is having on the wiring of our neurons (and thus, the way we think), many don’t see this change in a neutral or positive light. Rather, many see these changes as a harbinger of an era of brains negatively altered by digital technology. As Sven Birkerts argues, for example, “We are at a

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watershed point. One way of processing information is yielding to another” (27). Birkerts, somewhat apocalyptically, claims that “We are living in a society and culture that is in dissolution … Our historically sudden transition into an electronic culture has thrust us into a place of unknowing. We have been stripped not only of familiar habits and ways, but of familiar points of moral and psychological reference” (20-21). We see echoes of Plato’s Socrates in

Birkerts, warning young people that the newest technology will ruin the way they think.

While these changes might be more evident or pronounced in digital natives, even longtime readers, like Nicholas Carr, report some change in their reading:

I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself

in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the

narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long

stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now, my concentration starts

to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for

something else to do (4).

Carr is concerned that his own mental processes are changing, harming his ability to concentrate enough to read for a sustained period of time. Carr sees this kind of reading not as something with its own strengths and weaknesses, but as a lesser form of reading, a product of, as Carr says, a “shallower” mind: “We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding” (141).

In a study done for advertisers, Microsoft tracks how technology is affecting attention spans. In a comforting tone, Microsoft lets readers know, “Today, multi-screening is a given, so

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it’s reassuring to know that multiple screens don’t reduce the (potential) impact of advertising”

(2). While viewers’ propensity to switch from screen to screen (or from medium to medium) still leaves room for advertisements, what consequences does it have for attention? According to

Microsoft, “Overall, digital lifestyles deplete the ability to remain focused on a single task, particularly in non-digital environments … Multi-screening trains consumers to be less effective at filtering out distractions—they are increasingly hungry for something new” (4).

The average attention span, in Microsoft’s study, dropped from 12 seconds in the year

2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. That may not sound like a lot, but in a comparison that made headlines in many newspapers, Microsoft notes that the average goldfish has an attention span of

9 seconds, one second longer than the average human (6). Furthermore, the older one is, the more likely they are to have more sustained attention (17). Finally, Microsoft sees a connection between digital device usage and attention span: “Long-term focus erodes with increased digital consumption, social media usage, and tech savviness” (18). Perhaps this explains the attention gap we see between the young and not-so-young. Younger readers, many times, have a more sustained and deeper relationship with digital media, causing their attention spans to reflect this media consumption.

Other research echoes Microsoft’s findings. In a 2013 study similar to Microsoft’s, Time

Inc. tracks changes in attention across age groups. Time Inc. broke participants into two groups.

One group, digital natives, focused on people in their twenties at the time of the study. The other group, digital immigrants, was comprised of people in their thirties, forties, and fifties. This study found, “Natives spent significantly more time with digital platforms (49%) compared with

Immigrants (22%)” (2). Perhaps the most disparate finding in the Time Inc. study is the gap

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between digital natives and digital immigrants reading. Although this study did not look at print books, it found that digital natives showed “no usage” of newspapers. They were also less

“emotionally engaged” with print sources (such as magazines) overall, when compared to digital immigrants (3). Finally, when it comes to attention span, Time Inc. observed, “Based on the behavioral analyses, Natives averaged 27 platforms switches per nonworking hour, compared to only 17 switches for Immigrants. This represents a significant 35% increase in attention shifting of natives compared with Immigrants” (3).

To be sure, “attention span” is a hazy concept that doesn’t have a clear definition. Naomi

Baron, for example, cites a study by Lloyds TSB Insurance which states that the average attention span is “5 minutes and 7 seconds—less than half the amount reported ten years earlier”

(165). Nevertheless, evidence does show that, whatever we mean by “attention span,” an increase in the use of digital technology does correlate to a lessening of the ability to concentrate for prolonged periods of time. I don’t mean to sound alarmist here. Unlike many doomsayers, I do not believe that technology is ruining humanity’s ability to think. Rather, similarly to N.

Katherine Hayles, I want to highlight how digital technology encourages a different kind of thinking, and thus, reading. As Hayles says, different kinds of reading “each have distinctive advantages and limitations; nevertheless, they also overlap and can be made it interact synergistically with on another” (74). Some novels, like Skeleton Creek, for example, likewise encourage certain reading strategies that conflate print and digital reading strategies.

171

The potential impacts of these shorter attention spans on reading (specifically, the reading of literature), have been noted by multiple scholars. Chapter 3, for example, noted some of the different kinds of reading described by Halyes1. The kind of reading skills associated with shifts from one stream of information to another, what Hayles calls “hyper-reading,” is something that many authors and readers view as a negative. Baron cites German novelist Katharina Hacker as someone who “is concerned that authors’ ‘writing and thinking is being marginalized’ because onscreen readers have trouble concentrating on long, complex texts” (165). When looking at how technology is altering reading and thinking, it is important to realize that humans have always changed in response to their interactions with technology. As Ong notes, writing almost completely changed the way humans use, store, and process information, and digital technology is no different. Rather than looking at these shifts as the end of something, or the drastic shift to some dark age of thinking, it is more accurate to view these shifts as just the latest development in an ongoing reciprocal relationship between humans and their technology, where humans change technology and technology changes humans.

It is true that reading is changing, but that does not mean reading is getting worse, or that close reading is going to go away. It might be better to think of hyper reading as a way to engage with texts in ways that close reading do not encourage2. Furthermore, certain books or narratives encourage readers to us certain kinds of reading, which is similar to approaching a book with

1 For more information on close, distant, and hyper reading, as well as the synergies and differences Hayles sees in these kinds of reading, see Chapter 3 2 Of course, the same could be said about close reading: it allows us to looks at texts through lenses that aren’t offered by other kinds of reading. 172

certain genre expectations. Skeleton Creek (along with Night Film) are examples of these kinds of narratives. In the case of Skeleton Creek, the narrative allows readers to break off from the linear print narrative to go engage with other media. The videos are interspersed throughout

Skeleton Creek in such a way that a reader is never on one narrative string for too long. Rather, they switch between video and text at somewhat regular intervals. Similarly, Night Film places its multimodal elements throughout the text in a similar way. In both cases, hyper reading, or the ability to quickly switch between different streams of information, is a kind of reading that is encouraged by the form of these two novels. Luminous Airplanes, however, does not work in the same way as the other two novels. Because Luminous Airplanes places its multimodal elements at the end of the print narrative, readers are not switching between media, like they are with

Night Film and Skeleton Creek.

Conclusion: Skeleton Creek: A Multimodal Book Anchored in Print

While these narratives fit nicely with the literacy skills associated with hyper reading, they also ask readers to utilize the more traditional skills associated with close reading and print books. Skeleton Creek, for example, is deeply entwined with the mystery/horror genres that it grows from. The text makes explicit reference to texts that would be considered “canonical” within the genre. Many of the passwords that readers use to access the videos are pulled directly from these texts. For example, the first video is accessed using the password “HouseOfUsher,” while the second can be found using the password “The Raven.” Additional passwords reference more Poe stories (such as “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado”) or other

“classic” horror texts, such as Dracula or The Turn of the Screw. While some of these texts are

173

referenced directly, others are only gestured towards using character names. Skeleton Creek never mentions The Turn of the Screw, instead using the character Peter Quint.

Skeleton Creek does more than just mention these influences. It would be easy enough for a reader who is unfamiliar with these 19th century horror texts to ignore these references.

However, the narrative of Skeleton Creek subtly prods readers to search out these allusions.

When Ryan receives the password to the penultimate video, he writes, “I’ve heard that name—

Lucy Westenra—but I can’t place it. Who is that? Peter Quint, I knew—but Lucy…I know I’ve heard that name before. I’ll have to look it up later. Now, I have a video to watch” (170). By drawing attention to these names, and creating a mini-mystery around them, Skeleton Creek encourages readers to look outside the text for answers. Helping this process is the fact that the majority of readers will already be heading to a computer to look up the video. Skeleton Creek not only creates an intertextual web with earlier text, but it encourages readers to explore this web.

Through both its narrative and form, Skeleton Creek, emphasizes the importance of engaging various types of media, both physical and digital. While Skeleton Creek is somewhat innovative in its use of digital storytelling tools, a constant theme emphasizing the necessity of physical and material writing also runs throughout the book. When we first meet Ryan, he is just arriving back from a two-week hospital stay, the result of an accident which happened during one of he and Sarah’s explorations of the dredge. One of the first things he records in his journal is, “Two weeks in the hospital without a journal left me starving for words” (3). This is especially concerning for Ryan because writing “always made [him] feel better” (2). The text’s focus on writing from the beginning balances the paratext around Skeleton Creek, which mainly

174

focuses on the digital side of the narrative. The promotional material on Scholastic’s website, for example, emphasizes the way the text uses “technology in an innovative new way.” Additionally, the slipcover the book comes in prominently features stills from the video, further stressing the visual qualities of the narrative. Nevertheless, by highlighting the importance of writing from the beginning of the text itself, Skeleton Creek reminds readers that, while technology will play a large role in the story, the narrative’s foundation is the physical, print text.

Ryan reflects on the importance of physical print in his journal; Ryan writes, “One thing I hate about writing in the digital age is that everything disappears eventually. It’s like writing letters that evaporate into thin as they’re read. Which is why I keep copies. Paper feels permanent” (60). Although Skeleton Creek uses technology to tell a multimodal story, it remains anchored in a tradition of physical books. Ryan, given the option, chooses to represent his emotions using writing. When Sarah and Ryan’s search into the mysterious of Skeleton Creek become too fraught, for example, Ryan deals with these heightened emotions by turning them into written narrative. In an email (printed out and pasted into Ryan’s journal), he tells Sarah,

“Listen, Sarah, I don’t think I’m going to make it unless I turn this into a story. I’m going to crack under all the pressure. I can feel it. So it’s a story, right? I’ll call it “The Ghost of Old Joe

Bush” … I have to give it a name and write it down so it won’t scare me so much” (76).

The sense that writing can help one make sense of trauma and other complex emotion is echoed later in the text. Similar to the above example, here Ryan uses writing to help understand a specific event (in this case, a video sent to him by Sarah), “Why am I even writing this?

Because it calms me down. That’s why I’m writing. It calms me down. I think better when I write” (118). It is interesting that Ryan takes information gained from a digital medium (Sarah’s

175

video) and translates that experience to physical, written print (in his journal). Throughout the text, Skeleton Creek spotlights how Sarah and Ryan use different media to understand and represent their experience. As Ryan points out, “She can be consumed by filmmaking in the same way that I am with writing” (17).

However, rather than being set against each other, writing and visual forms of representation are viewed synergistically. Ryan believes that he and Sarah’s “creative obsessions seem to draw us together like magnets, and I had a hard time pulling away when she was determined to drag me along” (17). Rather than privileging one form of media over another,

Skeleton Creek relies on both video and text to tell a narrative that one medium could not alone.

Nevertheless, while both media contain parts of the narrative that are essential, Skeleton Creek is firmly anchored in print. It is conceived, marketed, and sold as a book-bound narrative with videos. While this may seem largely inconsequential, I believe it actually has a notable impact on the book’s intended audience. It shows young readers who might think of reading in books as a primarily textual experience that books are a versatile medium that allow for many different kinds of storytelling.

176

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