Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction

Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction By Mehdy Sedaghat Payam A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2014 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 Abstract 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Experimental Print Fiction Before Hypertext 22 Chapter Two: Hypertext Fiction and the Remediation of Experimental Print Fiction 64 Chapter Three: From Graphic Surface to Graphical User Interface, Metatextuality in Works of Web-fiction 111 Chapter Four: Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction 156 Conclusion 225 Appendix 226 Bibliography 234 3 List of Figures Figure 2.1. Storyspace Map View 83 Figure 3.1. A screen grab of the GUI for Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales 129 Figure 3.2 – 3.5 Three stages of the appearance and disappearance of the text on the screen in Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales 128–131 Figure 3.6. Interface of 10:01 142 Figure 4.1. Ground Air Emergency Codes 222 4 Acknowledgements There are so many people to whom I am indebted for the completion of this thesis. First of all, my supervisor Brian Opie whose insightful guidance, support, and wisdom was my guiding light during the last four years. Then I need to thank my family who supported me emotionally and financially during the time I was studying abroad. They were an unending source of motivation in the rainy days. Last but not least I should thank my friends, for their support, kindness and invaluable conversations which we had. Without your help and support, this thesis would have never seen the light of the day. 5 Abstract This thesis argues that the future envisaged for the novel by the early hypertext theorists, that the digital medium would displace print and open up a variety of new possibilities for novelistic fiction, can now be differently understood by exploring the materiality of the medium in works of print, hypertext and web-fiction composed in the past fifty years. Michael Kaufmann‘s analysis of modernist experimental print fiction in his book Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print and his use of the term ‗metatextual‘ to locate the distinguishing feature of novels in this tradition will be extended to the works of hypertext and web-fiction in the new media, demonstrating that works of hypertext and web-fiction can be regarded as continuous with experimental print fiction. This analysis, which is also grounded on the concepts of the graphic surface and the materiality of the text, is further confirmed by considering the use of metatextual features of works composed in digital media in experimental novels published in the digital era which continue the tradition by publishing in print. There are four chapters in this thesis. In the first one, metatextuality of the print novels in the pre-digital era is explored through the theory and practice of William Gass who has insisted on the materiality of language and the medium in almost all of his theoretical works. Moreover, the first chapter establishes a point of reference for the discussion of the shift from print to digital media in novel writing by discussing an experimental print novel, William Gass's Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Each of the following chapters identify significant issues in the development of hypertext and print for the phase investigated in the chapter, and present two or more case studies of specific texts. The second chapter explores the development of the novel through the electronic textuality of the early computers. This chapter analyses the first hypertext novel, afternoon, written by Michael Joyce, and how and in what ways it took advantage of the capabilities of the computer and in what ways it tried to remediate print. In order to show how the print novel has been becoming more media-conscious, the second chapter ends with an analysis of a print novel, Fax Messages From a Near Future by Jorge Wilheim which highlights the role of medium in its narrative. The third chapter follows the line of argument of the previous chapters by exploring the relationship of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web and analyzing the trends which appear through the way the Internet has been used to write novels. The case study section of this chapter includes two novels; 10.01 by Lance Olsen, and Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales by Edward Falco. The final chapter brings the whole line of inquiry back into print in order to examine what effects the arrival of digital media has had on experimental print fiction and how these novels push the boundaries of the print medium even further. There are three novels in the case study of this chapter, each of which provides a unique insight into the potentials of print and how they bring the materiality of the print to the foreground. The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock makes the book a multimodal work of art by incorporating the painting and the words. Mark Z. Danielewski‘s The Fifty Year Sword and House of Leaves make us see the book as a physical object which can be read in a variety of different ways. 6 Introduction: Metatextuality and Other Concepts In the early phase of the introduction of personal and networked computing, it was widely supposed that print fiction/literature would be displaced by hypertext fiction/literature as a consequence of the shift from one dominant medium, print, to a new dominant medium, computing. Experimental print fiction at times had experimented with the way the materiality of its own medium can be incorporated as within the narrative of the novel. But before arrival of the digital media, the range of these experiments was more limited and even the authors who had done their best to experiment with a variety of print features, had not continued their experimentation into their next work(s). The introduction of digital media to the literary scene encouraged a number of experimental novelists—some of whom like Michael Joyce had published novels in print—to try their hand at this medium to create works which were both written on the computer and necessarily had to be read on the screen as well. These writers who were later known as hypertext novelists experimented with the materiality of this new medium, and made its materiality an explicit part of the conception of their novels. Although some conventions of the print medium were discernible in the works of these writers, the arrival of the Internet and the developments in digital media provided a significant opportunity for these writers and the new generation of writers to experiment with new conventions for novel writing in digital media. Moreover, these experimentations with the materiality of the medium encouraged the experimental print novelists of the digital era to experiment more extensively with print as a medium. This thesis will explore how the materiality of the medium, either print or digital is used by experimental novelists from the 1960s to 2000s, and how foregrounding this materiality has altered the conception and practice of fiction. As will be seen, materiality has been a factor in experimental fiction, but literature is not the only social discipline in which this term provides a new angle of interpretation. Paying attention to the materiality of the objects and the way they affect the end-result has become a legitimate subject of study for a wide variety of fields. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, editors of Material Powers; Cultural Studies, History, and the Material Turn (2010) claim the term ―material turn‖ should be used for the change of focus in a wide variety of social studies. 7 What has come to be called the ―material turn‖ involves analyzing the materiality of the objects in relation to the place they occupy in relation to other—human and non-human—agents. In their own words, analyzing materiality means analyzing the ―differences they [objects] make in their own right as a consequence of their specific material properties considered relationally‖ (8). What needs to be stressed here is that materiality by itself does not have agency and it is through its placement within a ―network of relations‖ and dealing with a ―human agent‖ that it is activated. Analyzing a wide range of socio-economic topics, from the role of the filing system in creating the bureaucracy in Colonial India, to the role of road building in Inca Construction at Macchu Picchu, to the role of museums in Australia in shaping the perception of the Aboriginies, the contributors to Material Powers show how the very materials of construction/creation and their maintenance affect what is produced by/through them. Bennett and Joyce define material turn as a matter of taking account of the distinctive kinds of effectivity that material objects and processes exert as a consequence of the positions they occupy within specifically configured networks of relations that always include human and non-human actors. (5) An implication of adopting this approach is that it highlights the materiality of the communication and its role in the ―network of relations‖ of social science. When it comes to literature, the definition of Joyce and Bennett sits quite well with the way materially-foregrounded fiction works. The ―specifically configured network of relations‖ in respect of literature has at least three main components of author, text and, reader. Each novel as a textual object with an in-built/designed reading process has (broadly speaking) at least two networks of relations. The first of these ―specifically configured‖ networks is its internal relations which includes both semiotic aspects (signifying strategies) and the design features (physical resources).

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