The Materiality of Books and TV House of Leaves and The Sopranos in a World of Formless Content and Media Competition

Alexander Starre*

In Western societies, the proliferation of ever new forms of digital media has initiated a fierce competition between various narrative media for the time and attention of readers and viewers. Within the context of the increasingly complex media ecology of the contemporary United States, this paper describes the aes- thetic phenomenon of ‘materiality-based metareference’. Building on theories of mediality and metareference, this specific mode is first described with regard to its general forms and effects. Subsequently, two symptomatic media texts are analyzed in an intermedial comparison between literature and television. The novel House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski constantly investigates the relationship between its narrative and the printed book, while the serial television drama The Sopranos (1999–2007) ties itself in numerous ways to its apparatus. As these examples show, the increased competition between media fosters narratives which foreground their ultimate adhesion to a fixed material form. Intermedial studies of metareference need to address the mediality of representations, nar- rative and otherwise, in order to fully explain the causes and functions of the increased occurrence of metareference in the digital age.

1. Introduction: from book to content (and back?)

On September 17, 2009, Google announced its collaboration with On Demand Books (ODB), a company whose product portfolio consists solely of one item: the Espresso Book Machine (EBM). According to the official press release, this machine “can print, bind and trim a single-copy library-quality paperback book complete with a full-color paperback cover” within minutes (“Google” 2009: online). Through the collaboration with Google, ODB gained access to the data files of over two million public domain books scanned by the search engine company. In a video that accompanied the announcement, the EBM

* I would like to thank Philipp Schweighauser, Daniel Stein, Kathleen Loock, and Frank Kelleter for helpful comments and suggestions based on an earlier version of the manuscript. 196 Alexander Starre

appears like a giant Xerox machine that will hardly fit into a regular store (see “Printing Books” 2009: online). Still, we should not under- estimate the effect of this collaboration on the publishing industry. The founder of ODB is Jason Epstein, one of the big players in the Amer- ican publishing sector. Epstein served as editorial director at Random House for forty years, during which he oversaw Vintage paperbacks, created Anchor Books, and founded the Library of America book series, an ongoing anthology project well-liked in American literature de- partments. While it is preposterous to compare the machine’s impact to Gutenberg’s invention of print, as the press statement does, these recent developments certainly give a new twist to the ongoing debate on the future of the printed book in the ever-shifting media ecology of the 21st century. Combining the Espresso Book Machine with a large depository of data to custom-make cheap paper editions signals a return from the digital toward the material. It seems as if the initial e-book enthusiasm has finally given way to the pragmatic realization that most people still prefer to hold a book in their hands. However, the rhetoric employed by the Google representative in the promotional video to describe his reading practices hints at a striking difference between post- and pre-digital books: “The goal of Google Books is to make the information in books more accessible to our users. There’s times when I like to print out the content […]” (ibid.). In using the terms ‘content’ and ‘information’, the product manager unconsciously reveals the ba- sis of Google’s business by denying information a specific form. In essence, Google Books appears to be a misnomer. Its corporate vision is not centered on the tactile medium of the book; rather, its goal appears to be obliterating material artifacts and converting them into shapeless software1. This corporate collaboration is just one symptom of larger-scale realignments in the production and distribution of printed texts. Such reconfigurations constantly occur in the gradual evolution of various media. Within a specific cultural and historical context of media change, this essay outlines a distinct form of metareference in Ameri- can literature and television. Only by opening our avenues of investi- gation to phenomena such as the EBM can we account for materiality-

1 I am aware that in the strictest technological definition ‘there is no software’, as in Friedrich Kittler’s famous dictum (see 1992/1997). However, within pragmatic cultural usage, the rift between hardware and software is still universally reproduced.