A Theory of Book Alchemy
In my application essay to the MATX program I explored my interest in the relationship between reader, story, and the changing nature of text. As I approach the mid-way point in my second year of classes this interest has only been strengthened, even as it has been expanded.
Now, as I work toward an expression of the theoretical underpinnings of my work, narratives have bloomed beyond printed works and encompass bookworks as sculptural forms, sound, image, print text, and digital text. This wider view combines several theoretical points of view, including aspects of narratology, hypertext, intertextuality, adaptation theory, materiality, and readers’ advisory.
I am exploring a range of texts as narrative objects, seeking to understand how the reader/viewer/listener engages with the work and maps connections between and among other works. I am particularly interested in what happens when a print work is adapted into other forms. As such, while I always start with the printed text in these explorations, my work includes the visual and aural as well.
I am a readers’ advisory and collection development librarian, and whatever else I become, my work will always be ground, at least in part, in that practice. I work with readers, therefore, I am focused on how texts are perceived. When I read I want to know how the story operates. As a readers’ advisor I consider this through the framework of appeal (including, but not limited to, pace, character, story line, language, setting, detail, and mood). Clearly the overlapping functions of Gérard Genette’s theories of narrative interest me, as do Roland Barthes’s considerations of deep structure – not to mention his views on the roles of readers and writers.
I approach work from a mapping perspective and this ties into my interest in hypertexts. Readers make leaps in printed stories, narrative demands it, but in electronic texts, where the gaps are tangible, the leaps become part of the physical building of the story and that fascinates me. Even more interesting, however, is that texts do not stand still nor do they stand alone. Texts are always in conversation with one another, with their readers, and with the contexts in which they were created. This line of investigation opens rich areas of study for me as I apply it to my own theory of reading maps. Reading maps visually represent the possibilities of reading across texts and illustrate how narratives and the contexts of those narratives connect in overarching ways. The theory of reading maps posits that readers experience a text as something more than a pure narrative and stresses that there are often elements inside books that readers want to expand upon and explore. In this area of my work Jacques Derrida’s contention that there is no outside text and Julia Kristeva theory of intertextuality (as well as John Fiske’s expansions of that term to include vertical and horizontal connections) are of particular interest.
As I explore these concomitant lines of inquiry, my work has also expanded to include the materiality of texts, as well as the possibilities contained within metalepsis. Clearly the texture and physicality of a work plays into a reader’s perception of the work. Not only is this one of the driving considerations behind new digital fiction, such as the work of Andy Campbell and Alan Bigelow, it has also been illustrated by such experiments as William Gibson’s Agrippa, and such markers of literary consumerism as The Keepsake for 1829. Interacting with a work is a tactile experience as much as it is a cognitive one. The pleasures of that kind of interaction inform my considerations of texts as narrative objects and support my interests in bookworks.
As to metalepsis, there is little as a reader I like better than the transgression of extratextual boundaries. My speculation here is that hypertexts, especially texts such as Patchwork Girl, enact a form of metalepsis and that reading maps do as well. Intertextuality has to, at some point, engage with these transgressions of textual planes, and that interests me as well. While I am all for the day when we read in a holodeck, creating plots to enact the way avid readers create fanfiction, I am not sure that day will come without much that we would not like to see enacted in the world. So, purely in the realm of speculation, as one interested in the ways readers navigate spaces and construct stories, I am interested in the narrative implications and readerly reactions to metalepsis.