Visual Text and Media Divergence

This article was downloaded by: [University Library Utrecht] On: 28 March 2013, At: 16:00 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK European Journal of English Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/neje20 Visual Text and Media Divergence Kiene Brillenburg Wurth , Sara Rosa Espi & Inge van de Ven Version of record first published: 25 Mar 2013. To cite this article: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth , Sara Rosa Espi & Inge van de Ven (2013): Visual Text and Media Divergence, European Journal of English Studies, 17:1, 92-108 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2013.757014 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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How has the literary evolved as a verbal-visual art in the digital age, pronouncedly ‘bookish’ in spite or because of its overall digital mode of production? The authors focus on works illustrative of three genres – Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Only Revolutions (2006a), Louise Paillé’s artbook Livres-livres (1993–2004), and ET Russian’s personal zine Ring of Fire #3 (1999) – showing how the digital does not erase but produces ‘analogue’ or paper-based writing anew. How does the digital provide new meanings, and modes for such writing to pronounce itself? With respect to the works discussed, the authors argue that such ‘analogue’ writing is presented as an embodied writing: a writing addressed towards the body, but also presenting itself as a visceral, bodily act. They approach this embodied writing as an instance of media divergence: a dynamic of contrastive, material differences between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ media in the present. Keywords analogue; digital; embodied writing; media divergence; visual text Introduction Since the late 1980s, scholars have claimed that the future of Western literature is electronic: innovations in literature were thought be framed by the electronic technology of hypertext, replacing paper and books as bearers of the literary. Thus, Robert Coover announced the death of the book in the early 1990s, in his defence of hyperfiction as the literary genre of the future: a verbal-visual constellation that was to make for new kinds of writing and reading (1992). Such claims regarding the end of the book have been part of a growing tendency in media studies to consider the digital as the point of integration of all media. In line with this tendency, Henry Jenkins has identified media convergence as the key dynamic of the present: users are participating in different media that meet and merge with, and remediate each other so that a new integral media platform has come into effect (2006b: 3). Today however, claims for an electronic-literary future fuelled by new media theories and Amazon’s marketing figures stand in need of being corrected – in spite, if not because, of the possibility of a bookless future. Indeed, already in the early 1990s European Journal of English Studies, 2013 Vol. 17, No. 1, 92–108, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2013.757014 Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE Stuart Moulthrop deflated the ‘long dream for a new culture’ that hypertext had projected in the 1980s: this dream, in which hypertext was positioned as an agent of change in the era of late capitalism, was ‘pure delusion’ (1994: 300, 310). Not even did ‘hypertext represent the end of books’. It marked a transition, not a ‘terminus’ (317). It may therefore come as no surprise that since the 1990s, authors have precisely gone back to books and paper. They have reinvented the literary as a hybrid genre that hovers between the verbal and visual, and foregrounds its paper-based, ‘analogue’ materiality. Among these are celebrated writers such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Anne Carson, and Graham Rawle, who tease out the peculiarity of books in contrast to screens, and try to open up the bounds of paper and the book to create a mixed medium. But there are also many amateur authors (of personal zines and chapbooks) who play with the visual materiality of writing and the paper page in their handcrafted work. This article explores current reinventions of the paper page and the book as bearers of visual text, and then investigates if these reinventions point to a more complex dynamic of media-interaction in the present than Jenkins’s model of interchangeability suggests. This is a dynamic of divergence; of material diversity rather than digital expansion and unification alone. How has the literary evolved as a verbalvisual art in the digital age, pronouncedly ‘bookish’ in spite of its overall digital mode of production? We focus on works illustrative of three literary genres – Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Only Revolutions (2006a), Louise Paillé’s artbook Livres-livres (1993–2004), and ET Russian’s zine Ring of Fire #3 (1999) –, showing how the digital does not erase but produces ‘analogue writing’ anew. How does the digital provide new meanings, and modes for such writing to pronounce itself: how does the former bring forth the latter? Media divergence In Jenkins’s theory, our so-called digital age is defined by convergence. Different media have become functionally interchangeable: their uses converge or overlap, so that an integrative multimedia system has been brought into effect. In this system, media such as television, telephones and the computer, or books and screens, once distinct technologies serving different ends, merge into one conglomerate in which the dominant technology is digital. We text on our phones, read or watch movies on our iPads. As no one can entirely predict these relations (convergence culture is, for Jenkins, a culture out of control), convergence is not so much an end-point as constantly evolving: a process, always becoming, in the hands of various users. Jenkins has argued that media convergence at once implies media divergence precisely because media functions are interchangeable in convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006a). For him, convergence implies divergence because the uses of media flow across multiple platforms (as we see with phoning and texting). Convergence may show us how media merge, Jenkins argues, but divergence shows us how their uses are being redistributed. Is this all that media divergence can imply? In Jenkins’s notion divergence is ‘more of the same’ in a pattern of dispersal with different media performing similar 93 Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 94 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES functions. Yet ‘more of the same’ discards an important dimension of divergence as a concept and of media relations in the present, new and old; deviation and difference. In the field of psychology, divergence is a term that has long been used to denote a mode of thinking that is ‘plural’. It is not a thinking geared towards a specific solution to a problem, as convergent thinking is, but to thinking through multiple possible solutions by regarding a problem from different perspectives (McCrea, 1987: 1258). Divergence here means to wander off, think alternative modes of thought – to deviate, to stray. Thus, divergence is akin to free association. It runs counter to the integrating modes of convergent thinking. Divergence generates ideas, not answers. It is a multiple thinking. In this paper we rethink media divergence in terms of this multiplicity. We argue that current modes of paper-based literature call for a different approach to media divergence that takes into account contrastive, material differences between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ media. Such an approach shies away from the kind of apocalyptic speculation that anticipates the death of paper and the book by screen. Instead, we show, different genres of paper-based literature are now reinventing themselves as embodied writing: a writing addressed towards the body, but also presenting itself as a visceral, bodily act. Elaborating on Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the digital and analogical, we will approach such an embodied writing as ‘analogue writing’: a writing of and pertaining to the body and to matter interrupting the bounds of mere ‘good’ form (Deleuze, 2005: 73–5). Reading hands-on: Only Revolutions as a chiasmic space We will now consider Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006a) (Figure 1).1 The author has stated that he wanted to write a ‘book that cannot exist online’ (Rich, 2006a: para. 19), to investigate what it is that books do, that digital media cannot do. This makes Only Revolutions, analogically designed (first drawn with pencil on paper) but technologically reproduced, a particularly interesting case for media divergence.2 Only Revolutions is a hybrid novel: rather than ‘merely’ illustrative, materiality and visual design are here fully integrated as a structural dimension of the narrative. Word and image ‘breed to produce a new creature’ (Sadokierski, 2010: 3), neither purely textual, nor purely visual. Danielewski brings about an uncommon coordination between the tactile and the visual. This coordination brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s parallel between the storyteller and the craftsman. To emphasise the harmonious connections that exist between soul, eye, and hand, Benjamin asserted that ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprint [Spur] of the potter clings to the clay vessel’ (1999b: 91). We will demonstrate how reading Only Revolutions works as a visual and tactile performance. The eye functions as a central semantic and formal trope in the novel, as suggested by the gold-and-green iris adorning the covers of the hardback edition and the use of colour-coding to signify the colours of the characters’ eyes. Moreover, the reader’s eyes and hands are actively implicated in the novel’s meaning-making. As we will argue, Only Revolutions redirects the reader’s body as an integral part of the functioning of the text, in a way that could solely be achieved by the medium of the book. Moreover, such an embodied text imbues the novel with an affect of the Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE Figure 1. Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions, page H1 (2006). 95 Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 96 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES ‘auratic’ in Walter Benjamin’s terms (1999c), that is to say a unique, physical materiality connecting past and present, author and reader. Early novel such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) reflected a concern with the effect of reading on the sentiments and their physical manifestations in tears and blushing. By the twentieth century, however, literature had come to be more associated with the mind and reflection. In this modern context, the novel and the body form an unlikely alliance. Thus, Michel de Certeau has stated that the reading body necessarily withdraws from the text before encountering it through the mobility of the eye. The eye does not see in reading-for-signification; the sensual is filtered out. Due to this ‘autonomy of the eye’ with which we ‘scan’ for meaning, our bodies are only loosely bound to the space of the text (1984: 176). Reading habits of flipping and scanning, that have conditioned readers for so long, emancipate their bodies from the text. The boundary between reader and text remains firmly in place, so that while reading, we can forget ourselves as corporeal beings, and are ‘free to convert the text . . . and to ‘‘run it’’ the way one runs traffic lights’ (176). As we will demonstrate, Only Revolutions challenges these automatised reading habits in several ways. The novel tells the story of its two protagonists, Hailey and Sam, through juxtaposed stream-of-consciousness monologues. After falling in love at first sight, these perpetual 16-year-olds embark upon a road trip through time and space, across the US and its history. Their monologues are narrated from opposite ends of the book, so the reader has to decide at which end to begin.3 The ending of Sam’s story implies the beginning of Hailey’s (in 1963), whose ending (in 2063) implies a return to the beginning of Sam’s (in 1863). This gives the narrative time sequence the form of a Möbius strip, a story loop with an impossible twist: both versions end with the death of the other character. The final pages prompt us to start over at the other end, so the reading, like the Möbius strip, has no logical ending. Thus Only Revolutions enacts the distinctive circular structure of the modern road narrative, where ‘[t]ime spent means ground covered’ (Ganser, Pühringer and Rheindorf, 2006: 3), but where, in the end, one often finds oneself back at the beginning. This elliptical quality, conventionally working at the story level of the road novel, here comprises the entire material composition of the text: the reading is structured by the sensory space in which the text is inscribed. The material structure of the text is crucial for the narrative’s capacity to work this way. The novel is comprised of exactly 360 pages. Pages 180–1 form an axis of symmetry: everything that happens is mirrored on the other side (Figure 2). The book’s structure revolves around this ‘eye’ in its middle, the core of the narrative. For each page, there are three counterpoints with corresponding lines: for instance Hailey’s first page (H1) is counterpointed with the symmetric page in her own narrative (H360), the same page in Sam’s narrative (S1), and the symmetric page in Sam’s narrative (S360, printed upside down on the same page). This makes the book into a chiasmic space, a space constituted by mirrors and parallels.4 The chiasm, as Jean-François Lyotard explains: introduces in the course of the text a depth that is not of pure signification, but that conceals and signals a kind of excess of meaning. The figure of the chiasm gives to this meaning – situated on the side of explicit signification, and which Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE Figure 2. Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions, pages 180–1 (2006). exceeds it – the form of the mirror, and therefore inspires a feeling of reflection, the same set of elements repeated, but reversed. (Lyotard, 2010: 70–1) Lyotard writes of the chiasm as a rhetorical figure of the ab-ba variety, and thus of a depth as an excess of meaning. Here, however, the chiasmic space is literal, its depth material. The road novel’s element of flight and movement begets a whole new dimension. Resulting from the structure of the chiasm, the visual space of Only Revolutions is a three-dimensional space. Following Sam and Hailey, the reader navigates through the book and across its pages, experiencing every little bend and turn in the road, which is the text. We navigate the text haptically. In Only Revolutions, each story half is narrated in portions of eight pages, as a consequence of which one has to turn the book over to read the other narrator’s half. This is where the body is brought into the reading, as the reader has to handle the book like a steering wheel turning the stories together. The physical enactment of the narrative puts the integrity of the boundaries between paper and skin at risk. The page of the medieval manuscript has been described as a carnal object, because it had the skin of animals as its material bearer (Dagenais, 2004: 37). For different reasons, this technologically enhanced, mass-produced book could be described in a similar vein. The design, with its interweaving and mutating plot lines, gives the body of the text the properties of a living organism. Evolving and expanding, it invites the reader, her hands and her eyes, to become a part of it. A road novel that must be steered, 97 Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 98 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES manually navigated and thus performed makes the reader an integral element of the functioning of the text. The reader needs to handle the novel to weave a story out of it, to experience the unfolding of the narrative. A mutual linking between the reading and the textual body is put to work, a continuum running from typography and the page to the reader’s hands, eyes and brain. This foregrounding of the body ties in with the narrative level, on which Hailey’s and Sam’s autodiegetic accounts present their immediate embodied experiences in the present tense with neither analepses nor prolepses. Everything happens ‘here’ and ‘now’. Aptly, the epigraph of Only Revolutions reads ‘You were there’, hinting at a unique presence at this place called ‘there’. The presence of whom? Besides pointing to the way that Sam and Hailey are bound together in each singular moment the book is opened, this epigraph implies the involvement of the reader who traverses the text, and whose physical work keeps the journey going. What is more, the author ‘was there’ too, as evidenced by the traces of Danielewski’s hand. All are brought together, contained, in the three-dimensional space of the book, the undividable ‘here and now’ of its material presence. Sam and Hailey at times seem to be themselves curiously aware of this materiality as something standing between them. When their voices become one for a moment, exactly one page before the axis of the chiasmic space, they feel ‘something wide which feels close./Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly/across US. Between US. Where we’re/closest, where we touch, where we’re one./Somehow continuing on separately’ (179). Sam and Hayley could here very well be feeling the book that contains them and comprises their world. What lies between them at this point is literally one page: a space to be traversed. That this is the closest the two are ever going to get gives a materialist spin to an otherwise classic love story. Only Revolutions is a novel that circles around the eye and the act of being looked at. Benjamin wrote of the aura that ‘[t]he person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in return. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest [belehnen] it with the capability of returning the gaze’ (1999a: 178–88). Giving the book an eye, making it into an organism, invests it in this case with the capacity to return the gaze. Moreover, the book’s capacity of returning our touch is brought to our attention. We once again notice how the book object answers to our touch with its texture, and meets our gaze with its visual appearance. In foregrounding the book as a tactile-visual, three-dimensional space to be travelled, Only Revolutions (like contemporary novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes [2010]) allows the book form to resurface as a sensuous presence in the digital age. In this age, when most of us are used to handling screens, Only Revolutions has us touch and traverse paper again. However, from a perspective of media divergence – and despite (if not because of) Danielewski’s claim about writing novels that cannot exist online – this foregrounding of the book as an embodied presence by no means reiterates naı̈ve claims about a binary opposition between the digital and analogue, screen and paper. Rather, Only Revolutions gives us insight in the peculiar dynamic that instates the digital and analogue in relation to each other. We can see how the digital brings forth the book as a sensuous presence, not because Only Revolutions is evidently digitally produced, but precisely because the dominance of the digital produces a space for the paperbased novel to pronounce itself as such in the first place. Because we have become used to screens, the paper page has the opportunity to position itself as auratic. In the next section, we again consider this digital–analogue dynamic in relation to the interplay ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE between the verbal and visual in current literary writing. This time, instead of considering the hand that reads, we analyse the hand that writes: the practice of handwriting as an ‘analogue’ activity in the digital age. Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 Palimpsests in a digital age: handwriting as overwriting As we have seen, Only Revolutions explores different possibilities and positions of reading as a verbal-visual act. Indeed, to borrow a term of Craig Dworkin, this is an exploration of neglected perspectives: the reader is made aware of this neglect through the very awkward positions her body is forced into while engaging with the text (Dworkin, 2003: 38). As it frames these awkward positions, Only Revolutions reshapes the materiality of the novel, and rethinks the physicality of reading by composing a text that stages a visual performance of its own narrative. In this way, it approaches book art. From the hybrid novel to book art it is but a small step. Like the hybrid novel, book art foregrounds the book, paper, and the paper page as visual, material objects. However, unlike the hybrid novel, book art is not necessarily an art for reading. Indeed, book art is concerned with ‘not-reading’: book art aspires towards something different that is no longer just a book (Drucker, 2004; Stewart, 2011). This aspiration becomes ambiguous in the work of the Canadian book artist Louise Paillé, who practises writing in books as a technique to change the relations between word and image, and create almost illegible visual patterns. Paillé’s art is of special interest with respect to media divergence as it strays from the mainstream electronic highway, following an old paper path and using the waning art of handwriting. Paillé is a book artist and art theorist who has been overwriting second-hand books since the 1990s in a series of artists’ books collectively called LivreLivre (1993–2004). In the digital sphere, overwriting has become a commonplace activity. We do it all the time on our computers as we delete and write again, or use the OVR function to cover our tracks. Paillé’s work, on the other hand, is all about leaving traces in visibly layered texts. This is how her work diverges from the dominant, digital medium: by appropriating its very flexibility and transforming it into something singular and irreversible. More precisely, overwriting here displays itself as a process of superimposition, one word placed over another, and then freezes that process in a visual pattern. Overwriting by hand on paper, Paillé becomes like a medieval scribe: ‘I transcribe, transcribe, transcribe still more, I work an alchemic process that transforms writing into a pictorial gesture. In a second-hand book, I transcribe, by hand, word for word, the entire text of one or more books’ (Paillé, n.d.: para. 1). She fills the unused spaces of the paper pages, overwriting ‘horizontally, vertically, obliquely’ – until the page is transformed into a cartography (in its etymological sense of writing on a sheet of paper): a mapping of writing tracks. As readers, we are dealing with these tracks, rather than words, that direct us beyond writing as a sequential mode. Livre-livre: double book, echo book, repetition book, book within a book – yet also ‘just a book’ as the covers of these books will not reveal the palimpsests, the artful layering of writing and print, within. Palimpsests, in medieval times, were created when old vellums were scraped off and a new text was inscribed on top of it. Still the old text remained present, shining through the surface text (which eventually, 99 Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 100 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S of course, made the palimpsest a popular figure of speech for the work of memory). This ghosting through of the past in the present, the old in the new text, is a feature of all of the works included in Livre-livre. Yet such spectrality becomes especially meaningful to our argument in Paillé’s Livre-livre: L’Œuvre au noir I, a bookwork about bodies and embodiment. L’Œuvre au noir I is a transcription of Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel L’oeuvre au noir (1968) in an old, illustrated book of medicine (Figure 3). L’oeuvre au noir is about a sixteenth-century alchemist, Zeno Ligre, who is a physician to the poor in Flanders under Spanish rule. The title refers to nigredo, an alchemist formula pertaining to the dissolution of substance. Paillé’s book of medicine, in its turn, shows us different kinds of bodies (male, female, ill, pregnant) as objects of a scientific gaze. This reproduction of what, in all probability, was an early modern medical textbook anticipates Paillé’s intervention in the sequential line of writing. It has text blocks floating around the bodies it features, in quadrangles and in circles, printed vertically, horizontally and erratically, one could say, in a non-linear fashion. This book already deterritorialises the paper page, but it is a deterritorialisation that is also highly stylised and conventional in early modern printing (Vandendorpe, 2009: 34). Like the medieval copyists, Paillé in Livre-livre uses the material that can be scraped off – ink. Interestingly, ink here also tells us something about the fluidity of handwriting that will be important to our approach to Paillé’s work. Handwriting, according to Vilém Flusser, is a matter of ‘onscription’ (Aufschrift), in contrast to inscription. As a mode ‘onscription’, flowing and rapid handwriting, has been used as unofficial writing since the Pharaohs: Inscriptions are laborious, slow, and therefore considered writings. They are monuments (monere, ‘to consider’). Notes are writings thrown in passing onto surfaces . . . They are documents . . . Inscriptions are monumental; notations are documentary. (Flusser, 2011: 18) ‘Onscription’ has always been the mode of the copyists – as it is for Paillé today. In L’Œuvre au noir I it is as if the continuous line of documentary writing had come up against a plane of resistance and diverged into multiple patterns. Paillé’s text is legible here and there, but never continuously: the combination of the dense, multidirectional handwriting and the print obstructs any easy linear reading. Indeed, just as one tries to read closely, holding the text close to one’s eyes to make out the individual words, something extraordinary happens: the text, still recognisable as a written text from an arm’s length, transforms and blurs into a dense, visual pattern that resists focus. Something comparable to the Kantian experience of the mathematical sublime is happening here: we look, but we cannot achieve an overview. Instead we are lost in a grid with patterns so thick that we cannot direct or disentangle our view – there is a flickering that will not stop. Thus, depending on the colour and thickness of the ink, the overwritten pages change, in the act of looking, into a different ‘substance’: from the verbal, or verbal-visual, to the purely visual. Reading Paillé’s writing tracks, the idea of nigredo becomes affectively present to us. L’Œuvre au noir I revolves around a turn from a distanced to an embodied mode of looking: a mode of looking that is dispersed, dizzying, painful almost, and optically Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE 101 Figure 3. Louise Paillé, Livre-livre: L’Œuvre au noir I (2004). disorienting. It is a turn we also see in the work of Cy Twombly, or Simon Hantaı̈, artists who have likewise explored the margins and un-thought possibilities of writing as a freely or barely signifying, visual mode (Barthes, 1985: 160–1). With this visual turn, so to speak, Paillé may be demediating (to use Garrett Stewart’s term) writing Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 102 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S and the book as a body of literature and knowledge: ‘the process by which a transmissible text or image is blocked by the obtruded fact of its own neutralized medium’, by which, in this case, the book and the page become display objects or, at best, objects of visual experience (Stewart, 2010: 413). L’Œuvre au noir I offers the visual impression of a literary transcription and thus, arguably, performs a tribute to handwriting: a monument, precisely, an imprint of an old medium that is no longer current. That is to say, does the illegibility of the handwriting, and the context of its appearance in a digital age, here render the fluid monumental, a hieroglyph for the future, still to be deciphered? Not entirely. With all these words spread out across the pages, Livre-livre (containing lire-lire) is not simply a project that mummifies the book, or handwriting. It does not seal off the function of the book as a body of reading that can be touched, engaged with, and leafed through. Instead, we propose that this work is the visible record of a reading – of Paillé’s reading of L’oeuvre au noir, but also of what reading may amount to as a paper-based event. On the one hand, this would be an event that continues to be interpretive in the minimally legible surface of the handwritten words interfering with the print. Yet, we have seen, as our eyes move closer to the page, L’Œuvre au noir I also leads us through language onto a dense plane where reading becomes a matter of pattern recognition, repetitive patterns of circles, squares, or minimal forms, hazy and opaque at once that take us to the limits of looking. This would be the plane of the figural, in Lyotard’s terminology, the plane of a disruptive visuality that is irreducible to – what Paillé derisively calls – ‘good form’ (2004: 20). L’Œuvre au noir I foregrounds its bookish, layered materiality in this pure visuality that comes to the fore in a mere perspectival switch, a visuality bound to ink and the paper page, as it is the thickness and rhythm of the ink that allows the switch to take place. If reading turns into a verbal-visual event here, it becomes figural precisely as ‘close’ reading: an act of pattern recognition. Media divergence and zine writing: textual artefacts If handwriting and visual writing are features of book art, and provide divergent modes of mediation in the digital age, they are also central to a mode of self-published writing that has long anticipated the networked narratives of the digital age: personal zines. Zines are non-professionally produced personal manuscripts. They come in all shapes and sizes, and range from print runs of one to several thousand. The paths of distribution for these paper micro-narratives intersect with and diverge from the electronic highway, as they are distributed both from online sites and from zine fairs, in alternative bookshops, at concerts and through the postal service. In the digital age, the community of zine writers and readers is dynamic, as is evident from the number of zines being produced, traded and distributed. While zine-writers will often also have an online blog, they claim that there are stories which cannot be expressed in the slick pre-designed templates of that medium, that there is something about paper itself and the way that it can be torn, folded, burnt and wrinkled, cut, pasted and collaged that gives life to self-expression as a verbal-visual expression. Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE 103 In interpreting the meaning of a zine, it becomes essential to look beyond content alone to account also for the zine as a ‘text-object’ that ‘explore[s] the intersection of narrative and materiality’ (Poletti, 2008: 87). In the previous sections, we have explored media divergence in relation to hybrid novels and artists’ books, revealing innovative practices of reading, visual writing, and overwriting. Our investigation of zines as literary artefacts (Piepmeier, 2009: 93) continues exploring the potential of analogue text as an explicitly embodied textuality. Here we will show how the meaning of the text becomes tightly interwoven with the material object itself, as a medium with distinct visual strategies such as cutting and pasting, and a creative use of blank space. We will base our analysis on the zine Ring of Fire #3. Written by Seattle-based zine writer ET Russian under the pseudonym Hellery Homosex in 1999, Ring of Fire #3 describes her experiences of having both legs amputated below the knee in a train accident at age 18. Russian’s zine is compiled as an A5 book, reproduced on a photocopy machine in black and white with a bright purple cover. Its pages are densely packed with her own handwritten commentary, graphic stories, and collage. She intersperses personal accounts of her experiences with images of prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and crutches culled from medical textbooks, and articles relating to disability. These texts are fragmented by being cut up, layered, interrupted with handwritten commentary and encircled with dark frames for emphasis. The visual design of RF thus announces its creative strategy: to juxtapose medical with personal discourses about disabled bodies, and to intervene in the discourses about disability. While cut-and-paste is a very common tool in digital word-processing, the distinctive way it is used in paper media is that it leaves a visual record behind, just as overwriting in L’Œuvre au noir I is put on display as a process of superimposition. Such cut-and-paste trails are instances of an ‘autographic’ strategy, where the zine writer uses different visual interventions to advance, interrupt or complicate the verbal narrative (Poletti, 2008: 85). Image, narrative, and materiality here creatively intersect. Reading RF as an autographical work involves interpreting the visual design and layout of the text as well as its content. For example, in a double-page excerpt from one entry in the zine entitled ‘Courage’, Russian leaves conspicuous gaps between texts (Figure 4). The heading has been pasted in, an assemblage of individual magazine letters to form the word ‘courage’. Nine blocks of handwritten text have been pasted over the two pages, accompanied by a medical drawing of a prosthetic limb, an advert for a ‘hard cap’ to use while doing sport, and an excerpt from the classified section of a newspaper with the title ‘Women Seeking Women’. The entry describes Russian’s feelings at being called ‘brave’ by strangers when she is walking with her prostheses, in contrast to the condescending treatment she receives when using a wheelchair. The narrative in the text blocks gets increasingly angry and upset, and the strength of emotion is communicated vividly through the use of handwriting as well as capital letters and different letter sizes. The content of the entry is arresting, as she writes of a very personal experience in vivid language. However, it is the visual arrangement of the text which makes it such a complex and nuanced communication. Between each block of text and the images is a section of inky black. These spaces break up the cohesiveness of the narrative, and could be read as a symbol of censorship in one Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 104 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S Figure 4. ET Russian, Ring of Fire #3, double-page spread (1999). sense, or perhaps more accurately as an excess of language. The black page brings us to the limits of what can be said or written and imagined – an instance of the figure in Lyotard’s sense of the term. The excerpts pasted in by Russian challenge different aspects of the kind of medical discourse that insists on what Robert McRuer describes as ‘compulsory ablebodiedness’ (2006: 2). McRuer suggests that in an age of neoliberal ‘flexible’ capital, bodies are expected to be flexible as well (16). This might suggest a freedom in bodily expression, or a model that could accommodate many different kinds of bodily identities, but McRuer argues that this apparent postmodern flexibility is misleading. It does not mean that the body can behave or manifest itself in myriad ways, but rather that it must respond quickly and flexibly to lots of crisis-type circumstances, for example to losing a job or being forced to migrate. The body must be able to transform and change shape to adopt the appearance of wholeness in each new circumstance. In these instances, disabled, queer bodies are quite the antithesis of flexible bodies. They are not willing or able to adapt, and therefore not able to fit in with the dominant regime. Russian’s pasted insertions succinctly critique normative able-bodiedness. While her text relays her anger at being patronised, the drawing of a prosthesis alludes to a medical textbook, and to the biomedical discourse which Michel Foucault has shown to be so effective at authoritatively creating marginalised subject positions (1973: xviii–xix). Her inclusion of an advert for sports equipment for people with prostheses Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 ANALOGUE LITERARY WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE 105 is a reference to the commercialisation of disability, and also more subtly alludes to the creation of what Russian describes as ‘supercrips’, where the media will highlight the example of a talented disabled athlete and describe their achievement as an overcoming of a personal weakness while ignoring the social and political contexts that make it impossible for so many disabled people to access basic health care, never mind the resources necessary to participate in the Paralympics. Finally, Russian’s inclusion of the heading of a section of classified adverts titled ‘Women Seeking Women’ alludes to her sexuality, and addresses the way in which ‘People with disabilities are told in a thousand ways that their sexuality is unseemly, when its existence is not denied altogether’ (McRuer, 2006: 9). This dense assemblage of fragments allows Russian to give voice to multiple aspects of her experience, and to show the limits to which bodily experiences can be expressed verbally. The inflexible ‘analogue’ paper materiality of the zine carries the traces of the author within its pages, and documents retractions, crossings-out and layering of thoughts in cut-and-paste collage. The specific mode of production here embodies the ideals that its author writes about: hand-made, disobedient to massproduced ideas of normative perfection, unruly and difficult to classify. All these layers of meaning in the zine – visual, verbal and material – combine to create a textual artefact through which complex and marginalised bodily experiences can be expressed. Conclusion During the last decade, embodied writing has become more and more significant to the field of paper-based literatures. Thus, the hybrid novel Only Revolutions inserts the reader’s body as an integral part of the functioning of the text, in a way that could only be achieved by the medium of the book. Embodied writing engenders an explicitly ‘manual’, interactive reading. This text has an eye that can return our gaze and touch, as if it were a responsive organism. Conversely, L’Œuvre au noir I shows how handwriting has persisted in present-day book art as the palpable trace of an author-scribe and how, indeed, such an embodied writing opens the way towards a visuality that solicits a physically engaged mode of looking – dizzying, optically disorienting. Reading, we have seen, here becomes at once a verbal and a visual event, as the written text transforms into a cartography of writing tracks (horizontal, vertical, straight, oblique) that leads us into the domain of the figural. Finally, paper zines have always employed a verbal-visual textuality to pronounce their specific materiality. Cut-and-paste, singular (or at least apparently so), and hand-made, they form textual artefacts that can communicate bodily experiences which may be impossible to express in words alone. To that extent, zines are autographic. Hybrid fiction, book art, and paper zines show us how paper-based writing evolves in a digital age; or, more precisely, how such writing evolves in a productive contrast to digital writing. Thus, we have seen, Danielewski wants to write books that cannot exist online, yet attain a distinctively bookish auracity in their material contrast to the new, dominant electronic materiality. Their bookish materiality exists by virtue of the digital. Likewise, Paillé’s project of painstaking manual labour becomes especially meaningful in a digital age, in which handwriting increasingly becomes a 106 E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F E N G L I S H S T U D I E S Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 16:00 28 March 2013 medium in itself; a monumental, rather than documentary, mode. Her work, like that of a number of other book artists, possibly signals the return of a manuscript culture in a time when books are said by some to come to an end. This return is also apparent in zine cultures where the free exchange and intercourse of handmade, and often handwritten, texts poses an alternative to commercial writing and reading. The paper materiality of zines can only become an alternative materiality in its apparent disparity to the dominant digital screen. Therefore, the authenticity that the texts here discussed (if perhaps despite themselves) display may ultimately be of an ironic nature: they radiate an authenticity that is ‘distanced’ or mediated by an outdated technology. Notes 1 2 3 4 The author’s first novel, House of Leaves (2000) is already called a ‘cult classic’. For an in-depth analysis of this novel’s relation to digital media environments, see Brian W. Chanen’s article in EJES 11.2 (2007). For a similar analysis of Only Revolutions, see Hayles (2011). With the success of House of Leaves, the genre started to notably develop and receive popular esteem – see, among many others, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007). See the ‘Book Trailer’ of the novel (Danielewski, 2006b). 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Paris: Gallimard. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and project leader of the externally funded research project Back to the Book. Address: Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, the Netherlands. E-mail: c.a.w.brillenburgwurth@uu.nl Sara Rosa Espi is a PhD student specialising in personal zines in the research project Back to the Book with the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University. Address: Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, the Netherlands. E-mail: S.R.Espi@uu.nl Inge van de Ven is a PhD student specialising in the contemporary novel in the research project Back to the Book with the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University. Address: Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, the Netherlands. E-mail: I.C.A.vandeVen@uu.nl View publication stats