Dancing with the Digital: Cathy's Book and S

doi: https://doi.org/10.26262/gramma.v23i0.5404 Dancing with the Digital: Cathy’s Book and S. Danuta Fjellestad Uppsala University, Sweden. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Discussions about the future of literature and reading tend to assume a paper/digital technologies divide. A similar divide between literary and media studies is entrenched as regards institutional structures and curricula. In reality, the relationship between literature and the Internet/digital media is much more ambiguous and complex. To explore some of these complexities this essay focuses on two print novels that “dance” with the digital: Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233 (2006), written by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, and illustrated by Cathy Briggs, and S. (2013), written by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. While vigorously asserting the primacy of print (not least through their extensive appeal to touch), the novels nudge the reader to enter the digital world, prompting, among others, a re-thinking of the concept of the author and of genre classification. Self-consciously and cautiously, the paper proposes the term “web-augmented novels” to describe the type of texts that Cathy’s Book and S. stand for: the novels that offer a “bounded” reading experience, while acknowledging the Internet-saturated reality of today’s readers. Keywords: genre classifications, web-augmented novels, joint authorship, Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-823, S. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Heavy doses of pronouncements about the impending demise of the novel, of the book, and of print, in general, must have clogged my brain so much that it took me a few seconds to understand what was going on the cover of a newly-arrived book: “Let me state this for the record: The internet is not dead. Digital will not disappear. Print will not kill the web. It’s easy to forget that when physical books were invented, news websites ignored them, and laughed at them as a niche pursuit for geeks” (Losowsky). This delightful mockery of the all too familiar discourse on the imminent demise of print technology and its prime embodiment, the codex, is premised on a provocative and startling reversal of media history.1 Seemingly reinscribing the all too familiar dichotomy, Andrew Losowsky in Fully Booked (2013) surprises the reader with a turnabout: “Print or digital? That question is as redundant as asking which is better, red or green? We are in a print AND digital world, and they are better for each other's existence.” He sees print and the digital as “engaged not in a fight, but a dance.”2 I find Losowsky’s metaphor of dance suggestive, but I cannot but wonder what kind of a dance he has in mind; there is, after all, a world of difference between ballroom and stomp dancing; a tango mixes eroticism and combat, proximity and distance, while a disco dance may feature individual bodies bumping randomly against each other. In any case, I would like to appropriate Losowsky’s dance metaphor as a pretext for my discussion of novels that not only make extensive use of the affordances of the print medium but also engage the digital in 1 Spoofing the rhetoric promoting digital devices seems to be somewhat of a trend today. For instance, IKEA promoted its 2015 paper catalogue by posting a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video, “Experience the power of a bookbookTM,” which mocks an iPad launch video. 2 Andrew Losowsky’s introduction to Fully Booked starts as a blurb on the front cover page and runs for six unnumbered pages. GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism; Vol.23, 2016; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2016 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Dancing with the Digital: Cathy’s Book and S. 77 a broad array of ways. As will become clear, my interest in these novels is not merely scholarly: institutional and pedagogic considerations underline my engagement with the novels. My concerns here relate to recent transformations in the field of literary studies, the most remarkable of which is the rapid rise of Digital Humanities, a rise which Matthew G. Kirschenbaum claims is as momentous as the emergence of the Birmingham school of Cultural Studies or the Yale school of deconstruction (58).3 According to Kirschenbaum, there are “some half a dozen reasons” for English departments to be “hospitable settings” (59) for the work done by Digital Humanities. However, since none of the reasons he lists pertains to the core enterprise of literary studies, sense-making, I am skeptical about literature departments accommodating Digital Humanities in the near future.4 I see it just as unlikely that English departments will wholeheartedly make room for born-digital literature in their curricular as that Media Studies departments will focus on canonical texts. Rather, in all likelihood, literature departments will continue to have the codex in the spotlight, while electronic (or born-digital) literature will be studied in Media Studies departments, at Digital Humanities centers or in institutes. Thus since the type of institutional changes that N. Katherine Hayles, Kirschenbaum, Jessica Pressman, and others have been championing lies in a pretty distant future, a classroom engagement with novels that “dance” with the digital may be a productive way of making students combine their digital and print literacies.5 The assumption that, having grown up surrounded by all the “toys and tools of the digital age” (Prensky 1), students are digitally literate is one of the myths surrounding the Net Generation. Unlike their teachers, who are “digital immigrants” (2), students of the Net Generation, it is presumed, not only consume web-based information but also produce content and share it with others; their familiarity with digital technologies and textual productions, such as computer games, one could suggest, makes them positively inclined towards electronic literature. However, while, on the whole, appreciating being informed about the existence of electronic literature, these “prosumers” (Chang qtd. in Kennedy et al., “The Net Generation” 519) or “produmers” (Towers et al. qtd. in Kennedy et al., “The Net Generation” 519) generally show remarkable reluctance to engage with “born digital” texts in a substantial way.6 My (admittedly limited) classroom experience is corroborated by the findings of empirical research. For instance, in their study “The Net Generation Are Not Big Users of Web 2.0 Technologies” (2007), Gregor Kennedy et al. report that, while a majority of students frequently search for information on the web and mobile devices, few produce and 3 For an overview of the short but intense history of the term itself and what it designates, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” (2010). 4 A word on nomenclature may be in place here. While “English departments” are used in the U.S. as shorthand to indicate institutional sites for studying Literature, in European settings, such departments are likely to host language training, linguistics, and literary studies. 5 See for instance N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Think (2012), a collection of essays, Comparative Textual Media (2013), edited by Hayles and Jessica Pressman, or Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s “What Is Digital Humanities.” 6 I have but anecdotal explanations for this surprising reluctance, based on my teaching experience. Some students find it frustrating not to be able to get the story at a few clicks; some find electronic texts trivial; others associate dealing with texts on the computer with the pleasure of playing video games and feel a bit embarrassed to have this “low” intellectual activity be part of the “highbrow” setting of the university classroom. Danuta Fjellestad 78 publish material online. Other surveys show that “the transfer from a social or entertainment technology (a living technology) to a learning technology is neither automatic nor guaranteed” (Kennedy et al. 119). Thus though Hayles may be right about our students “incessantly” (How We Think 57) reading and writing in digital media, their engagement with digital devices is mostly in the service of collecting information and communicating. Moreover, while they may use digital technologies for many tasks in their daily life, in classroom situations they tend to be conservative and hesitant. My interests in how students can be encouraged to develop and combine digital and print- based literacies are akin to those of Hayles’s and others’.7 But on some points our thinking is quite divergent. For instance, preoccupied with the interpenetration of print and electronic textuality, Hayles resorts to the metaphor of “ecotomes” (Electronic Literature 160), that is, zones between two major ecological communities, to describe the relationships between print and “born digital” (160) texts. “Like biological ecotomes,” Hayles writes, print and electronic texts “engage in a wide variety of relationships, including competition, cooperation, mimicry, symbiosis, and parasitism” (160). While Hayles emphasizes zones of interpenetration, I would like to retain a sense of boundary between the materialization of the text as a discrete physical paper entity and its enhancement on the Internet. Hence the appeal of the dance metaphor. In what follows, I discuss two instructive examples of print literature’s “dancing” with the digital: the bestseller Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233 by Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, and illustrated by Cathy Briggs, published in 2006, and the cult novel S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, published in 2013. Both novels are particularly interesting because they exuberantly flaunt the affordances of paper at the same time as they also are extensively supplemented with materials available on the Internet.

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