print fiction

Over the last two decades, many recent forms of electronic literature have revealed a strong aptitude for hypertextuality and hypermediality. Meanwhile, we have assisted to the progressive emergence of innovative examples of print fiction that may be defined as «writing machines»,1 because they strive to incorporate the aesthetics and the symbolic forms of the electronic media. These kinds of narrative are often characterised by an "autopoietic" potentiality, since they often tend to include a multiplicity of media sources while preserving the autonomy of their literary function. As Joseph Tabbi observes: «Defining the literary as a self-organizing composition, or poiesis, is not to close off the literary field; instead, by creating new distinctions such a definition can actually facilitate literary interactions with the media environment».2 At the same time, some examples of print and electronic 'writing machines' are also characterized by an «exopoietic function». As the philosopher John Nolt points out (in the disciplinary context of the environmental ethics): «In exopoiesis, an organism functions not for its own benefit, but rather for the benefit of something related to it, to which it is therefore of instrumental value».3 Applying this concept to the literary field, the aim of this article is to analyse the structures and the fruition of four recent novels, in order to understand how the electronic environment promotes a complex relationship between exopoiesis and literariness. William Gibson's novels "Pattern Recognition" (2003) and "Spook Country" (2007) became the core of the projects of some online communities: users begun to build online databases by annotating the various narrative segments, in order to link them to other online searchable resources. These images, videos, and texts are indirectly related to the literary plot, being at the same time independent from it. Similarly, "Flight Paths" (2007) is an electronic «networked novel» that was developed by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph alongside a related hypermedial database containing images, videos, newspaper articles and other texts, which may be continuously updated by the readers. Finally, the verse novel "Only Revolutions" (2006) was written by Mark Z. Danielewski with the help of a well established group of readers involved in his online forum, in order to discuss the various aspects of the novel and to suggest possible connections to other material. In all these cases, the reading of the literary work seems to be perceived as not sufficient in itself and it requires the support of a parallel electronic environment, such as a database or a forum. Moreover, the authors purposefully prearranged the structural and poetic nature of their works to promote an exopoietic non-autonomy of the literary text, the fragments of the latter being exploited in order to become part of non-literary fluxes of online information. These works are not only «distributed narratives»,4 which spread themselves across different media platforms and authorial voices, but they are also novels whose reading engenders a problematization of many of the most relevant aspects that usually define the literariness of a text, like its «open» nature and the the logic of «possible worlds» that were discussed by Umberto Eco and other scholars in the fields of semiotics and narratology.5 The exopoietic function of literary works in electronic environments may be a proper field of analysis to understand how it is possible to conceive literature as a process that runs along with other information strategies.1 See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Cambridge (MA) - London: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 112. 2 Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, Minneapolis - London: University of Minnesota Press, c2002, p. 8. 3 John Nolt, "The Move from Is to Good in Environmental Ethics," in «Philosophy Publications and Other Works» Vol. 31, 2009, pp. 135-154; p. 149. Web. 29-07-2011. . 4 See Jill Walker, “Distributed Narratives. Telling Stories Across Networks,” Presented at AoIR 5.0, Brighton, September 21, 2004 by Dr. Jill Walker, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. Web. 12-10-2010. . 5 See: Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan, 1984, p. 18; The Open Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 3-24; On Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 pp. 14-15; Cesare Segre, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Since the digital revolution of the 1990’s, the ‘end’ of literature has been often proclaimed from both a utopian and apocalyptic perspective. While the former has imagined a release of the literary from the constraints of paper and print, in the animation of letters and words, the latter has lamented the end of reading and writing as ‘we’ know it. However, as clear as the opposition between the hopeful visions of theorists such as George Landow and the nostalgic lament of critics like Steven Birkerts may be, their respective stances are easily disclosed as two sides of the same coin: both the positive and negative presentations of the end of literature build on the subtext that literature ‘is’ something; an inside (a space, or a practice) that is either creatively challenged or threatened from the outside – as if it were a backward country or a country under threat, to be opened up and developed or protected respectively. This paper challenges such a distinction between inside and outside by reading ‘literature’ as an interface of other media technologies. As I have shown elsewhere, literature – a practice so diverse that it resists a logic of identity – may have always functioned as such an interface: not a place of itself, within itself, with its own durable, static essence, but rather a point of intersection where different media and media technologies converge, and where new media technologies are imagined, projected, or (p)remediated. In this view, literature is not a precedent to but the constant effect of intermedial encounters: what scholars have perceived to be its ‘inside’, its essence, is in my view always already contaminated by its ‘outside’ – the difference between the two is artificial and should rather be seen in terms of interaction. In this view, electronic literature does not simply come ‘after’ print- and paper-based writing but is in certain crucial ways always already part of it (as scholars like Noah Wardrip-Fruin have already pointed out with respect to the cut-up & fold-in techniques of Gysin and Burroughs, or the practices of concrete poetry). Likewise, the incorporated practices of electronic literature have, in a typical feedback loop, in turn impacted recent paper-based writing. Thus, Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen have already pointed to the remediation of digital procedures in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). In this paper, I will analyse the feedback loop between recent paper-based writing and media technologies by taking Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) as my starting point and showing how it functions as a meeting point and processor of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. Typically, like House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts is an assembly text, assembling different cultural texts (from Orpheus to Jaws and the postmodern canon) and modes of presentation. Not simply through its intertextual links, but through its performative foregrounding of its own intermedial activity, The Raw Shark Texts becomes an endless text – a text without borders, of infinite medial as well as cultural regress, that reaches into the experimental potential of the electronic to question the conditions of possibility of ‘literature’. Centrally, this concerns a play with the idea of simultaneity. The questions that I pose on the basis of this analysis centre on the issue of media knowledge, and more specifically the ways in which an ‘old’ medium like literature (old in so far as it refers to paper-based writing) projects knowledge of other media (be they digital, filmic, or auditive). By knowledge I here mean: media technologies and techniques, modes of presentation, modes of production and modes of perception (seeing, hearing, reading) as instated or at least instigated by the introduction of ‘new’ media technologies. What do we learn about these other media while reading literature? I am thus concerned with a particular form of information technology in The Raw Shark Texts. Interestingly, in The Raw Shark Texts as well as House of Leaves and other experimental fictions the intermedial impetus is not exclusively digital: they rather point back to film and the cinematic practices of montage. Through this cinematic connection, these novels perform a modernist heritage in a supposedly post-postmodern universe.