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Waiting† for Godot†On the future of books, or not
MICHAEL E. ROSS | 4.30.2010
The renegade act of reading a real live book has been under siege for a while now, first from the 24/7 nature of the modern world itself, then from the onslaught of e-reader devices that are dragging the literary world kicking and screaming through our relentlessly wired era. “Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir,” Ander Monson’s book of provocative, finely-wrought essays, is the latest shot across the bow of the bound book.
The book, published in late March, has found its champions, most recently Jennifer McDonald, who speculates on the possibility of Monson’s work being “the Book of the Future” in a recent blog in The New York Times.
In a series of essays that shift from his experience as a juror in a criminal case to memories of his dying mother, Monson dissects postmodern culture and the ways the individual expression, the assertion of “I,” both dovetails with and differs from the “I” of the collective culture, as expressed in YouTube videos and blog posts. Monson ricochets from his own experiences as memoirist to wider observations and criticisms of culture at large.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read Monson’s book in its entirety; since this isn’t a review of the book in the conventional sense — assessing the acuity of its language, the power of its narrative — that really isn’t problematic. My issue is with how many of Monson’s ideas employ the use of the dagger (†) as an indicator of a wide range of ancillary material — from thoughts to videos — that aren’t in the narrative of the book itself.
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The daggers, which appear in Monson’s book frequently enough to be considered a defining feature of its architecture, are intended to ferry the reader to the author’s Web site, Other Electricities.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, you just sent me a link to a Web site, you’re sending me somewhere else. Isn’t that the same service, the same function Monson is offering in his book?”
Therein lies the dilemma, the cross-purposes of using the analog at the service of the digital in the way Monson has. It totally works here, online where embedded links identified by a slight change of color or an underlined word easily tip the reader to where that underlying information lies, and how to access it with a click of the mouse. When Monson’s book rolls out in the iPad environment, readers may have the opportunity to touch the device’s screen and be transported to the source of these alternate thoughts and considerations.
Readers don’t have that option when they’re experiencing Monson’s book in print form. That’s the firewall between print and digital, and it’s one that deserves to be there; in fact, for books as we’ve known them to have any kind of future, that firewall has to be there.
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Other writers have tried to push this envelope. McDonald mentions Walter Kirn’s 2007 novel, “The Unbinding,” published as a book after being originally published in serial form on Slate. Kirn’s book used bold face type to indicate where the links were to the corresponding online publication.
In his print introduction, Kirn writes that “an Internet novel … should look and feel — and even sound, perhaps — like something new, disorienting, wild. A buzzing, humming, electronic circus teeming with hypertext lions and virtual clowns.”
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But Wallace’s approach gives a reader the satisfaction of discovering that further elucidation of ideas somewhere within the book s/he is holding (sometimes in footnotes that are paragraphs in length). You’re not chased out of the comfortable analog house Wallace has just invited you into by his alter ego wielding a digital dagger.
McDonald, the Times writer, finds merit in Monson’s approach, with reservations. “[I]ndeed it does seem to work in this, a book of nonfiction, a book of ideas, one trying to replicate the action of synapses firing,” she writes. “But would daggers (or links, in an e-book) be too distracting in a novel, or would they be engrossing, drawing the reader even further into the fictional world?”
Her question seems to invite another one: How would Monson’s idea play in other creative pursuits? Consider how this might work in motion pictures, that most popular art form in the world: What would movies look like if a character’s dialogue was periodically punctuated on the screen with the flash of an asterisk to indicate some part of the character’s inner life or musings of the moment (the meaning of which would escape you until the end of the movie, when you find the asterisks refer you to ... another movie altogether)?
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The act of reading books — not e-books but the real, bound, acid-free, paper-cut-inducing thing — is an implicit entrance into a contract of perception. In the hands of a skillful writer of fiction or nonfiction, it’s understood that the medium through which we experience that perception is, or seemingly should be, a thing unto itself, and not dependent on another medium to deepen (or establish) our understanding of what should be on the page in front of us.
Daggers and other typographical surrogates for elaboration off the page don’t work, can’t work in the context of the book as its own freestanding universe, a place with its own cosmology and rules, rules of no rules, its boundaries set only by the writer’s imagination and the willingness of the reader to suspend the relentlessness of his or her reality to embrace the expression of that imagination.
If readers can’t willingly make that concession to the book as its own self-sufficient realm — one less immediate and insistent than the online world they’ve briefly escaped from — what’s the point of reading it that way?
Timothy Schaffert, a lecturer in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, clearly grasped this in a reader’s comment on McDonald’s essay:
“[I]f I've put my book aside to dial-up the Internet, I've left the author's consciousness and entered the collective one. The pull of electronic communication and instant insight is often with us, teasing us away from the refined and purposeful containment of print technology. … Sure, a book's physicality is indeed ‘fixed in time, in space,’ but the act of reading is fixed only by the limitations of the reader's imagination.”
Reading passages of the print version of Monson’s daggered book immediately puts you in reference to something other than the book itself — a potentially self-defeating exercise that undercuts the rationale for reading the book in the first place. When it appears, however infrequently, you’re taken out of Monson’s narrative flow; the book’s intrinsic potential for revelation is thwarted by a forced reliance on something else, found somewhere else, to fully achieve that revelation.
Ironically, what McDonald describes as the future of the book may really a vision of the death of the book as an analog instrument.
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With the device of daggers, Monson has effectively created an alternative to an experience that doesn’t need an alternative. For this print reader, anyway, those daggers aren’t so much indications of new ideas or “synapses firing” as they are manifestations of a typographical Godot, a character that, like its namesake in Samuel Beckett’s legendary play, never shows up.
Monson gets credit for adventurously exploring the boundaries of the gray area between the analog of print and the digital of everything we informationally consume today; “Vanishing Point” is a principled attempt to offer a compelling idea of how books and the online experience could intersect in the future.
But that which works well in the online world is sometimes irreconcilably at odds with its analog counterpart. The world of real live books may be better for that.
Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.
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