Many years ago, a sadistic literature professor of mine
suggested James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a
book I might want to read over the summer. He based this judgment
on the fact that I hadn’t been altogether repelled — as the rest
of the class had — by Samuel Beckett’s experimental novel
Watt. He saw potential in me, and I knew
it, so I went out and bought FW determined
not to let him down.
To say that I was in over my head is an understatement. I
should’ve put on a snorkel before I read the first sentence. I’d
never felt more stupid… and more taken. In the end, I couldn’t
get past page thirty. But even after I’d thrown in the towel, I
couldn’t put the book behind me. Years later, I sat down with an
annotated edition and made it through to the end. I still didn’t
understand a lot of it — many of the annotations needed
annotations. But it was one of the great literary joys of my
life.
Cut to the present: When I first came up with the idea for
my new novel Sloth, I wanted to write a
kind of friendlier, slapshtickier
Finnegans Wake — a book that would be
funny page by page but would carry a subtext in which a different
and more complicated story unfolded. The whole would make sense
if you happened to be fluent in Dostoevsky, Dickens, Sophocles,
Dante, Yeats, Nabokov, Philip Roth, Nathaniel West,
Hamlet and The Merchant of
Venice… as well as Aquinas, Descartes,
Martin Buber, Henny Youngman, Mr. Ed and Dr. Seuss. Otherwise, it
would just be a strange (but, I hoped, funny) book.
Predictably, Sloth was a nightmare
for my agent to sell. Before it was picked up by Greenpoint
Press, a six-year-old, not-for-profit press, it was rejected at
least twenty-five times. Several editors at commercial houses
expressed interest, only to be overruled by colleagues and
executive editors. The argument against it was always that the
target audience was too narrow to be profitable — undoubtedly
true … if you only take into account the print version.
Perhaps, though, Sloth was a more
natural fit as an e-book all along. The idea is strange — and
certain to unnerve devotees of the printed-page like Lisa
Fabrizio. The old paradigm of the electronic edition of a book as
a mere reproduction of the print version remains dominant for the
time being. But the e-book format has the potential to be much
more than a reproduction. How would a book like mine tap that
potential?
With optional on-screen annotations.
Sloth consists of journal entries by
a nameless narrator in which he recounts his quest to win the
heart of a TV exercise girl. But midway through, the journal is
interrupted by his best friend Zezel — who breaks into the
narrator’s apartment, reads the journal on his computer, and
inserts a risqué counter-narrative that lampoons and deconstructs
the original. If you turn to page 109 of the print edition of the
book, you find Zezel’s first interruption:
“We’re going to die,” she said. “The comet Kohoutek, the
planets, even the phases of the moon are unequivocal in this
regard.” Thus, we joined. She with the intensity of doom, and I
because I am me, and because I like to relate to women in a
full and open manner. The warm tides of the Sargasso engulfed
me, those dying generations lost amid the mackerel-crowded C.
Ever it was: Her expression distracted, her hair gyred by the
wind, her face framed against the constellations, she was fixed
upon me, fixed beyond me. She was fixed, and then at last she
broke. Her very ponderousness heaped out of my hands. She
panted. She moaned. She cooed and bayed: Her mind moved upon
silence.
Now suppose you encountered the same passage in an
electronic edition, and you scrolled through it with a cursor,
rather than merely scanning it with your eyes. The following
annotations might pop up:
Kohoutek: dubbed the “comet of the
century” before its appearance in 1973, and believed by some to
herald the end of the world, it proved a dud, even for
astronomers.
Phases of the moon: poem by
W. B. Yeats in which he lays out the cyclical nature of
history, with each cycle containing in it the seeds of the next
— thus, a world with no end.
Sargasso: Sea in the North
Atlantic often represented in literature and popular culture as
a place of irresolvable mystery, here associated obscenely with
a woman’s sexuality.
Those dying generations… mackerel-crowded
C: See “Sailing to Byzantium” by Yeats,
in which he considers the possibility of human immortality
through art.
Gyred by the wind: The gyre
was the funnel shape invoked by Yeats to symbolize history’s
cycles.
Her mind moved upon
silence: See “Long Legged Fly” by Yeats
which contains the refrain “Like a long-legged fly upon a
stream / His mind moves upon silence.”
Again, you wouldn’t have to
read the pop-up annotations — which, remember, are
prompted by cursor movements. You might decide to ignore the
cursor and read the e-book as you would a standard paperback. But
Sloth is a novel about wordplay and
allusion as much as character and plot, a winking tour of the
traditional canon of dead white males as well a satire of
postmodern notions such as the death of the author, the
de-centered self and the destabilized text. (Yeats, for example,
was a practitioner of “automatic writing” in which the text
doesn’t derive from the author’s conscious mind; in the case of
Sloth, it may be that Zezel’s interruptions
are only manifestations of the narrator’s subconscious. Yet the
narrator courts the exercise girl by pretending to be Zezel… who
writes newspaper columns under the pen name “Mark Goldblatt.”) An
electronic version of the book — currently in production — that
also served, in effect, as an annotated edition would make
Sloth more enjoyable, or at least more
accessible, to readers who don’t happen to be literature
professors, graduate students or writers themselves. The
electronic edition, in short, opens up the book’s target audience
from classics junkies to anyone with a fondness for cheap laughs
and a passing acquaintance with the Norton
Anthology.
Cursor-prompted annotations are one of many changes on the
e-book horizon — and perhaps the least dramatic. These changes
will necessarily alter the entire calculus that goes into a
book’s creation. Consider: We now live in a world in which, for
the first time, there are two distinct ways to read: 1) with your
eyes alone, and 2) with a cursor. The two ways to read point to
two very different reading experiences… and that difference will
affect not only how books are acquired and published but also how
they are imagined and executed.
The experiential possibilities of an
e-book are not limited to the words on the screen. With
inevitable hardware advances, there will eventually be suspense
novels, for example, with creepy background music and momentary
visual effects. As the heroine steps inside the seemingly
deserted house, a bass line will pulse through your headset. As
you scroll across the words, “She heard a sudden rustling of wind
through the tattered curtains,” you’ll hear a rustling. Then, as
your pulse quickens, when the villain leaps out from behind the
curtains, an animated graphic will emerge from behind the words
on the screen to menace you for a split second, then
recede.
As unsettling as such innovations may seem, they needn’t
encroach on the experience of traditional readers — not even
those seduced by the siren song of a Nook, Kindle or iPad. The
option of sight reading, of scanning down the page line by line,
without using the cursor, will always remain. But the range of
new possibilities is sure to impact how writers write; many will
write with an e-book specifically in mind. They will become
orchestrators as well as wordsmiths — deciding, in the case of
Sloth, what to annotate, but, in the
future, deciding what to score, what to illustrate and what to
animate. The results will be hybrids… not unlike the way today’s
graphic novels are hybrids of traditional novels and comic
books.
The existence of such hybrid forms will, in turn,
drastically affect what gets published. Acquisition editors will
have to factor into their decisions not only familiar literary
criteria — the words on the page — but also, in the case of
e-books, the totality of the experience created by the writer. As
a result, commercial publishing houses will have to hire effects
editors as well as text editors. It will be a brave new world for
book marketers as well. How many potential book buyers have been
siphoned off by movies, television and the Internet over the last
half century? Marketing departments will perhaps reclaim a
portion of those lost audiences with an enhanced sensory
experience.
The power of books has always been their intimacy, the
exquisite closeness of a story playing itself out inside your
head. But the price of that intimacy is cultural literacy and
heightened concentration — a price fewer and fewer people have
been willing or able to pay. That is the reality. But with pop-up
annotations, sounds and sights, the price drops
precipitously.
More people will become book lovers. They’ll just love
their books in different ways than book lovers did before.
