Post-Print Fiction

In his famous piece, “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes makes his case for the death of the author, stating that as soon as writing begins, “the author enters into his own death” (142). Instead of the author being the origin of the narrative – taking personal responsibility as the “voice” of the text; Barthes prefers to see the author as a mediator of the text, or a scriptor of the text which is “born simultaneously with the text” at the moment of the act of writing (145).

One of Barthes’ problems with the “tyrannically” self-centeredness of author as God, is the limitation imposed on the text by the author’s own limitations. I believe this is crucial because as “God-author” the writer is saddled with the heavy mantle of giving meaning, which is just a form of judgment. I believe Barthes wants to remove the author from this judgment seat in order to open up the text to multiple meanings, interpretations, and revelations. In order to do this, text cannot be seen as originating from one source and received as such – like a single hose squirting water; but instead, must be experienced as part of a whole, from the sea of story.

Harris’ We feel fine, supports this perspective. The database does not judge the text it represents, but instead sifts and ciphers it based on a formula, a formula (although it arguably originated from a man) that is passive and non-human. For me, the database represents what Barthes’ envisioned. If narrative surrounds us all the time, like a sea, than the database is only a mediator of many voices and is essentially the construct or filter, just as the author would/should/could be. It dips its net in and trolls for the stories that are already out there, bringing them to the surface of the computer screen, and allowing us to read them. As a result, multiple texts and multiple narratives, born at the moment they are brought to the surface, provide the complexity and multi-dimensional experience which is to be human.

After reading Barthes’ Death of the Author piece, a few things stuck out to me…

Much of what I say is in response to cpetrus2’s opinion on the piece.

I completely agree with the assessment my colleague makes of “We Feel Fine” and “Whale Hunt.” I think Barthes would agree that these narrative works function to liberate the reader and exhaust all possibilities existing within it. I think this is very much because neither of these new media narrative forms is presented with any strong attachments to their authorship.

In my understanding of Barthes’ text, his qualms seem to be with the authorial power existing in conventional literary narration. I wold guess he’d be pleased with the way authorship is regarded (or the degree to which it is disregarded) in some of these new media narrations.

While I tend to agree also that some of what Barthes writes borders on melodrama, I couldn’t agree more with Barthes’ assessment that “once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” (147).Particularly in how Barthes believes authorship holds the key to criticism, I think his thoughts are spot on.

As we all have experienced in one form or another — likely in many forms — the human ego is strong. I think the ego and a feeling of self-importance or fulfillment plays a huge role in the writing we create, but also in our roles as readers and critics in particular. It’s apparent in our manic pursuit of meaning and explanation in the things we read. If we can’t create the writing we admire, it becomes our obsession to figure it out. At least this has been an experience I can relate to.

I think “paying homage” to the author is more often a means for reverencing ourselves as critics than the actual writer.

“To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text…” (147). We seek to trap writing in a box to make it easier to draw definitive conclusions from it. The text, including its potential to extend innumerable strands of thought and morph many times in the mind of the reader, is contained and held in captivity by the conventions of the author.

This explains, in part, why many readers tend to cling to the “classics.” While many of the works may have been first admired for their literary prowess, the incredible amount of criticism has risen that genre to an almost equal footing. Shakespeare can’t be taught and appreciated without some understanding of popular criticism of his works.

Does this work to educate, inspire, inflate, or perhaps inhibit a reader’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s works? A worthwhile question.

It is in following this line of thinking that Barthes’ final conclusion can be best understood. “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (148).

It is only after the text is liberated from authorship that we as readers can be truly unshackled in our thinking of it.

–On a side note, I found it interesting that Barthes decided to capitalize every mention of “Author” in his text. He seems to sarcastically illustrate the undue respect we pay to the person.

 

 

If you look at the two images above you will notice one key difference – the size of the name of the author. As we had talked about in class, society is consumed with the idea of the “author” and of discovering his or her past in order to capture the meaning of the work rather than letting the work speak for itself. These two images are two prime examples of how Jonathan Harris and Dan Brown differentiate as artists. Dan Brown feeds into the idea of the “author” as his name is written equally as large if not larger than the title of the book, while in Jonathan Harris’ work, Whale Hunt, his name is written in smaller letters so that the image (the work) can be highlighted instead.

In the Death of the Author, Barthes writes that many author’s including Mallarme, distanced themselves from the notion of the “author” because like for him and assuming Harris, and

“For us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. (143)

Replacing written text with images, Harris allows for the images that he captured in Whale Hunt to ‘perform’ for themselves, rather than having himself be fully emerged in his work. It is through these images that we, as readers, are able to make sense of the whale hunt and of the situations, and living conditions that Harris and his team had to endure. We don’t need for Harris to walk us through the journey of the whale hunt – we are able to see it ourselves through these images. Similarly in We Feel Fine, Harris steps outside of the work and let’s several individual writers of different nations, ages, gender, emotions, and so on  take shape of the work. The website combined with these anonymous authors and images speak for themselves. Because Harris detaches himself from these two works, we are able to appreciate them for what they are rather than for being the works of the famous Jonathan Harris.

As writer, Julia Alvarez, mentions, the reader should not try to create a personal relationship with the author, but “with where the author has disappeared in the work.” The beauty about the distance that Harris establishes between himself and his works is that in doing so he gives us multiple options of how we want to view his works. There is no one set way of how to interpret the works and there is no one meaning to them. Barthes writes that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (147) In Whale Hunt, we can either view the images from beginning to end or vice versa, we can see them in a pinwheel, mosaic, or time line, or we can select a team member of the Whale Hunt and view his or her individual experience through their personal images. All the while, in We Feel Fine, we have the option of looking at what people write depending on their emotion, gender, geographical location, age, and so forth – the range of options are endless.

Based on my reading of The Death of the Author, I interpreted that a work is not so much based on the author as it is on the work. Barthes supports this argument by writing that “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (148). This is to say that it is the reader who unifies the work not the author. In his works, Harris gives readers the ultimate opportunity to put the pieces of his works together to create their own interpretations. Each person views these two works differently.

I agree with Barthes when he says that “the birth of a reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (148)  because as long as we continue to have the notion of the “author” we will continue to value proper names over works, and instead of trying to find meaning in the work through the text itself and appreciating the work for what it is, we will continue to try to have a relationship with the author in order to find meaning and understanding of his or her work.

            I can see, through examples such as “We Feel Fine” and “Whale Hunt,” how Barthes’s idea that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” makes some sense. In a way the author becomes nonexistent after these programs are complete, like any text, and it is left for the reader to interact with the text. Yet, I still find Barthes’s conclusions to be a little melodramatic, perhaps a little overdramatic. Yes, the author no longer has control of the text. But, Barthes says, “the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (142). Are not the databases two examples of how the author’s voice, and the author himself, are not dying through his function, rather, his functions are beginning to change and evolve? Rather than dictating what he sees or what he wants to express, he is creating narrative plots to allow the reader to express, at that given moment, a brand new narrative. Manovich says in “The Database Logic,” “the database of choices from which narrative is constructed is (the paradigm) is implicit; while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit” (231). So rather than being an author of what is explicit, cannot the author narrate the implicit and guide the consciousness of the reader to a limitless amount of new ideas?

            For instance, in We Feel Fine, I clicked the word “cheap” for both genders on rainy days in the United States. The author of the database created the algorithm or set of rules to which I could get the amount of 20 year olds who feel cheap on rainy days. Now, I am able to imagine the actual story:

            There are about 10-12 twenty year olds on a rainy night in the United States. Some lived in Oregon, fewer were in Washington. One in particular didn’t feel cheep because he was used for sexual favors. He claimed, “I feel cheap because I received a cheap shot to the face.” Another guy says he feels cheap because he got a cheap CD player. Then there was the girl who claimed her boyfriend uses her and treats her bad. The next day (really the next search) was sunny, but surprisingly even more people in their twenties were feeling cheap. One female says to herself, “I will never find a man who wants me for anything other than sex.”

            It seems the author is not dying through his work; he is handing over the baton to the reader. The story still goes on. We just have to click and be inspired. I could go on to imagine how all these cheap people meet and find a new sense of self-worth. The database creator has created paths and options, according to Manovich in the “The Database Logic,” that would “make explicit the psychological processes involved in cultural communication” particularly in the reader.

            I think this also holds true in the traditional narrative. Sure, this form of storytelling is concrete and sequential, but the world and its characters, in which the author created, are still within the readers minds. His voice is alive and well. Often times, readers take the author’s story and his voice and use it to expand the story or universe, as we discussed in class last week. So, I still find it hard to believe that “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin,” even in a figurative sense. If anything, writing should be considered the birthplace of origin and of every voice.

I think that the two websites We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt, are both interesting to look at how we define the author of a work, especially after reading The Death of the Author.  Like Roland Barthe suggests, we confine the author to be the person who produced the work.  However, can we really attribute the title of author to Jonathan Harris because he designed We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt?  I think that the interactive quality of these websites between the site and the user does not make that the case.  Instead of there being the death of the author, I think there are multiple people who encompass that role.  With these websites, the user, like the reader, can also be seen as an author alongside Johnathan Harris.

In The Whale Hunt, we can certainly say that Harris provides us with all the photographs from his trip.  But instead of providing the user with one linear storyline, he manipulates the site, allowing the user to manipulate the story.  The user can decide to view the photos through a mosaic, pinwheel, or time line form.  By providing different navigations, Harris gives the user options which allow each person to view the site differently.  No one will see the photos the same way.  This in turn allows the users to make up their own stories.  Harris goes a step further by providing constraints as well.  This allows users to see photos with only Ron or Cat for example.  They restrict their view of the story by certain concepts, context, or cadence which will provide all the users with different stories.  Because of this, I think that the users can also be seen as the authors of the story.  I think this emphasizes Barthe words when he states that the text comes together “not in its origin,” from the author, “but in its destination” from the reader.

We Feel Fine adds another potential “author” to the site.  There is Jonathan Harris who has created the website, and the user of the site.  Constraints have been applied here as well; users can view only certain feelings, different types of weather, or gender.  But the website also includes quotes that people have written on the web.  They should be included as author as well.

After re-visitng We Feel Fine under the context of Foucault’s What Is An Author?, I began to see many different definitions of an “author.” Foucault argues that the definition of an author stems from the author’s “functioning of certain discourses within an society.” (Foucault, 108) He then questions “how can one use the author function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals,” which immediately made me think of We Feel Fine (Foucault, 110). The four criteria for an author that Foucault quotes from Saint Jerome are what seems to discredit Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine project as one of a story with an author. We Feel Fine seems to break against all four of Jerome’s criteria. Foucault concludes from Jerome’s four criteria that an author is “defined as a constant level of value…as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence…is conceived as a stylistic unity…is seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events.”(Foucault, 111) But because of the consistent manner in which We Feel Fine goes against Foucault’s definitions, one might conclude that it is this nonconformity that defines the author of We Feel Fine.

None of the blog authors of We Feel Fine share common ideals or opinions (not on purpose, anyway). In fact, the blog authors contradict each other all the time. But all the blog authors’ works are being gathered for a common reason: they all feel. This also speaks to the third criterion, in that each blog author has their own, distinct style. It is these distinct styles that lets the reader know that these blog authors are individual people with their own set of feelings, instead of an emotion-spouting, standardized computer. Finally, We Feel Fine’s blog authors are not single historical figures, but many figures existing in many different periods of time standing at many different crossroads simultaneously. They are all unified because they are standing at these crossroads, and writing about them.

I haven’t forgotten the first criterion. In fact, its probably the most important in defining We Feel Fine’s author. Foucault describes an author as “a constant level of value.”(Foucault, 111) Although there are many different blog authors who contribute to We Feel Fine, one is not valued more than another, because it is their being there together that gives the project its value. True, one blogger may seem more intelligent than another, based on the content and/or style of their post, but each blog resonates differently within each reader, based on the reader’s own context, perspective or experience. It is from everyone’s differences, readers and writers alike, that We Feel Fine draws its strength and poignancy. Its not They Feel Fine, its We Feel Fine.

In the “mission” section of We Feel Fine, Harris states that “We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone.”(Harris, Kamvar) I interpret Harris’ “everyone” to mean all the people who’s blog posts contribute to the We Feel Fine database, Harris and Kamvar as creators of the database, and the people who explore and interpret We Feel Fine (the readers). Without any of these people, We Feel Fine cannot exist. We Feel Fine is a project that celebrates the individuality of the human race, and it is this individuality that defines its many, many authors.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” We’ve all heard it. We’ve all scoffed at its banality. Though when paralleled with Jonathan Harris’s work, it becomes his mantra. Two years ago, when I was first exposed to his work in Professor Sample’s recitation, I was naïve to this idea of transformative textuality. Pictures as a story held as much relevance to me as a two-year-old’s coloring book. However, Harris’s work colors outside the lines, transcending the boundaries of reading and celebrating the idea of experiencing. Writers like Peter Rabinowitz would not necessarily agree with that, though. Rabinowitz’s “Before Reading” stresses the hierarchy between reader and author, a hierarchy that does not afford the reader with much freedom for their own interpretation,

“…treat the reader’s attempt to read as the author intended, not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/interpretive community that is, the acceptance of the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constituted way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers” (22).

Isn’t reading supposed to be treated as an escape from everyday social conventions? A utopia that is not demarcated and monitored by the author’s spatial dimensions? Harris seems to think so, treating the audience of his The Whale Hunt as viewers and not as readers. By viewing his work, the audience can invest more time in the emotional significance of the hunt, connecting more with the ethos of the whale hunting community. He toys with a system of aesthetics that have a subjective authority and a three-dimensional form. Harris’s Hunt allows the viewer to create their own lexicon of emotion by allowing them to arrange the journey in their own particular way,

“Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience” (from Harris’s The Whale Hunt statement).

With this freedom of navigation, the viewer does not have the pressure of forcing an advancing chronology on the images. If he or she wants to go backwards, that can happen. If the viewers want to spin the images, they can do that. In most books where the reader is given a passive role in the development of the piece, Harris’s viewer is given an active role, or, the active role in progressing the story. Similar to the ergodic texture of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the viewer has to make a decision where the plot begins and ends. The malleable relation of images allows the viewer an expansive potential for identification (even if they have never experienced a whale hunt). Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author notes that, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). Harris does not seem to be fazed by the finality of this hunt, as the experience will be treated like a domino effect, scattering itself to new eyes and minds all over cyberspace. The tendency for continuity will be its greatest asset. The future of the piece is not premeditated by the limitations of the author’s text. These various forms could very well reveal testimonies that Harris may not have even intended. In order for The Whale Hunt to speak for itself, Harris removes himself and the lets the kaleidoscope of moments and experiences interact with the viewers.

Harris trusts that his viewers are capable of their own representations. He hands The Whale Hunt to them without so much as a “Here you go” and leaves to continue working on his next project.

            I agree with what David says about how If on a Winter’s night a traveler “is an extended satire, poking fun at books, poking fun at both readers and writers, deliberately playing on tropes and complexities and insights, the ideas of structure and form, throwing in themes that mean multiple things at once, and recursions that continue on forever, in counters to counters to counters that purposely throw the reader this way and that.” For example, Last week the class was talking about how the second person perspective could be made into third person if we just refer to the main character as “you.”

            Later in the novel, however, the meta-narrator seems to step completely out of all levels or frames of narration to confront us; he, says “It is time for this book in second person to address itself no longer to a general male you…but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the third person necessary for the novel to be a novel” (141). Calvino, once again, seems to know how the readers, male or female, might respond to the “you” character. He knows that a logical way to classify this character would be to just name him “you.” And yet, this idea kind of troubled me because of the way Calvino would still use “you” in the subject-verb agreement of the sentence.

            For example, even after the declaration on page 141, the author still uses the subject “you” as if it is in the second person: “You are having tea, sitting with her” (153). If “you” was really in the third person singular, the verb would be “is.” Later in chapter seven, the author seems to confront what I am thinking and writes, “You are in bed together, you two Readers. So the moment has come to address you in the second person plural, a very serious operation, because it is tantamount to considering the two of you a single subject” (154). I thought to myself, Of course! In second person plural, Calvino could still grammatically use “are” instead of “is” like he does earlier in the story.

            And now, even if “you” really is its own character, it is not a grammatical error because when “you” is brought up, so are you, the reader. So, Calvino uses or creates a hybrid second/third person perspective and, of course, the author cleverly and humorously establishes this new rule at the point when two characters are having intercourse turning the moment into yet another threesome in the novel. And, I think it’s very funny how the narrator calls this “a serious operation.”

Well I’ve finally finished this book, and frankly it is difficult to sort out what best to say on the subject.  I will attempt to organize my thoughts on the following assumption, as in analyzing this kind of book we must make certain assumptions that others may or may not also have:  I believe the book attempts to achieve the ultimate kind of metanarration, one in which meaning is wholly ambiguous, and interpretation is left entirely up to the reader.

This may seem like a somewhat vague and shallow analysis, so allow me to clarify: the book is a joke, and it makes me laugh.  It seems to me that the story is an extended satire, poking fun at books, poking fun at both readers and writers, deliberately playing on tropes and complexities and insights, the ideas of structure and form, throwing in themes that mean multiple things at once, and recursions that continue on forever, in counters to counters to counters that purposely throw the reader this way and that.

I interpret the final library scene as being sort of wistful, with readers attempting to hearken back, through the murkiness of thought and memory and description, to their original state of reading, what initially drove them to read, and what ultimately was irreversibly changed by that simple act of reading.

This book will make some readers angry, and it will leave most everyone confused (or pretending not to be).  Some readers will try to analyze it to death in the hopes of finding a singular cogent meaning, which they probably will find, as the book provides a multitude of meanings, including this interpretation here, which may or may not have been intended – I suppose we’ll never know, as Calvino is Italian and also dead.

What remains is this book that plays on the idea of books, and of reading and writing, and of the conventions applied to all of them, the malleability of stories, and the arbitrariness of plot construction.  Note the general meaningless of the many endings proposed for Flannery’s story of the two writers – it does not seem to matter how the story ends.

The first part of the book leads the reader to believe that the issue at stake is to solve the problem of finding the end of the stories we have started reading. But half way into the book we realize that with so many stories unfinished, it would take more than one book to develop a reasonable ending to all of them together or separate.

The second part of “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” the true story takes shape. This is the story of an ordinary reader who gets sucked into a fictitious conspiracy theory about writing and reading. He finds himself solving the mystery surrounding the counterfeiting acts of a malicious translator who besides forging the works of renowned authors also doesn’t finish the works.

At some point I was able to see that the story was about the character of the male reader and the adventures he underwent of the malfunctioning of his readings. Each unfinished story was just a step in the direction of his journey to find out about the translator and his acts, his motives and his inability to counterfeit or deceive the reader.

I couldn’t help recalling the character from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor who finds himself uncovering the mysteries and conspiracies of the Illuminati. Here, the conspiracy is not so much about knowledge and power but very much about what is considered one source of knowledge and power: reading and writing. If the source is counterfeited what is left? Everything turns a counterfeited chaos. The whole chapter 9 illustrates this state of chaos.

Despite recognizing the new direction the story was taking, I felt through the book, the nagging need to know what would finally happen with those unfinished stories. Even though I had said in my previous posting that it didn’t matter whether a story has an end or not, and although the book questions it too “‘Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end?’” (259) Why did the author choose to tell the story in a way that didn’t allow me to let go of those unfinished stories?

It was about an awakening of the reader, a shake to our abandonment to a passive role as readers.

“You might as well stick to this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters…You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invisible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (but are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)” (210)

This role of the reader and the importance given to the “ideal reader” (189), emphasize that the reader validates or disfranchises the author/writer.

 

Seferina

The further I delved into If on a winter’s night a traveller, the more confusion and utter nonsense I was forced to make sense of. The more I tried to make connections between the characters, settings and plot lines of each individual story, the more they became disconnected. Even the somewhat familiar and linear story of the two Readers seemed to go off on tangents. The only thing that seemed to draw them all together is the idea of literature itself. The idea that literature is the common meeting place between the completely opposite and distant worlds of readers and writers. In chapter eight, Silas Flannery struggles with the incompatible relationship between himself (a writer) and his reader (Ludmilla). He notes that their incompatibility stems from the opposite nature of their duties as reader and writer, respectively: “reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing.”(176) He also notes that, “Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing,” which implies that the reader has more power in the reader-writer relationship (176). This is a possible result of the fact that in the act of reading, a reader transforms what she is reading “into what in her is most personal and imcommunicable” while “whatever [he] writes bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity.”(170)

Nothing seems further apart than the characters of Ludmilla and Mr. Okeda, or Silas Flannery and the Professor who is haunted by ringing telephones, or even ourselves, external readers from the author, Italo Calvino. But what Calvino tries to show us is that all of these things find a common ground in the actual pages of a novel. The shared experience of the story itself, regardless of the role one takes in the process, (reader, narrator, writer, character) is what brings all of these elements together. And in that shared space, as Corrina puts it, “nobody can be sure what is true and what is false.”(212)

Flannery also complains in chapter eight about how he is incapable of writing without injecting part of himself into the story. He cannot help but include his own perspective in some aspect, regardless of how minute, of the story he writes. He wants, instead, to write as if he “were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes…the tellable that nobody tells.”(171) He despises analytical readers like Lotaria because “she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.”(185) What he is searching for is this common ground between writer and reader; where readers read something he doesn’t know but only because they expect to read something they didn’t know (185). What does this have to do with the novel as a whole? Well for one thing, the novel would be considered successful in the eyes of Flannery, but more importantly, Flannery’s struggles as a writer are not common. Calvino is merely using Flannery’s abstract complaints as a way of showing the reader how much distance there really is between writers and readers, and that it is, again, only in the shared space of the story that writers and readers can meet as equals.

As I read this book I’m repeatedly struck by how self conscious the narrative is of its medium. The identification of the main characters as “Readers” is an obvious example of this, but I’m much more interested in how the act of reading is integral to the narrative. It often serves as a means to drive the plot. Each of the titled chapters have been read within the narrative, either by the protagonist or out loud by another. I was quick to notice these instances, but with chapter six I started to notice the use of reading as vehicle  for exposition in the larger narrative. For example, the protagonist and the reader learn of Marana’s “Exploits” by literally reading his letters addressed to Cavedagna.

Another thing that intrigued me was the character of the narrator. After Outside the Town of Malbork it seemed to me that the narrator is the character in the stories that the protagonist and Ludmila are reading. I base this primarily in the passages in these stories where Calvino draws attention to the fact what we and the protagonist are reading are in fact written fictional works. In the chapter  If on a winter night a traveler for instance the narrator/protagonist spends several paragraphs critiquing the author’s intent in his writing style, seemingly breaking the fourth wall to do so. This happens again in Outside the Town of Malbork and  Without Fear of Wind or Vertigo, though in these examples such occurrences are far more subtle and sporadic. In the latter for example, the narrator describes how “Several paragraphs ensue…” following his separation from Irina and his visiting Valerian.

For me these themes help shape the novel, which up until where I have read, is intently focused on the writing, reading, and the novelization. Even though the various “novels” are told from the 1st person perspective (that of single character? his voice seems to linger in the numbered chapters following the conclusion of each “novel”, there is still a great variety in the stylistics and subject matter of each novel. Furthermore the settings in the greater narrative are all tied to an involvement in literature; a bookstore, a university literature department, a book publisher, etc.

Like Lauren and Adam, I was fascinated with Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up Method” and the implications it has for writing and art writ large. In fact, I just read the article and realized I had to post my thoughts right away.

The introduction immediately brought my mind back to that passage on page 128 of If on a winter’s night, when the reader is “subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer.” Clearly, there’s something about this image that makes me uncomfortable, similar to the feeling that must have been aroused in the surrealist riot of the 1920s, when Tristan Tzara proposed to write a poem entirely by pulling random words out of a hat. Like Adam, I thought back to the times I’ve looked at the paintings of Jackson Pollock and famous collage art and questioned–not whether or not it was art–but what it implied about art in general.

What’s becoming apparent to me is the importance of the author to the reader. When we read, we read assuming that the work in front of us is of another person’s mind. How much more we assume is variable depending on the work and what we know about the author. For example, if I read a book authored by William Faulkner, my favorite author, I am of course assuming it was penned by his hand. If I found out that The Sound and the Fury was actually written by someone else and was credited to Faulkner by mistake, the entire work would change. This goes on to remind me of the Shakespeare authorship debates–a very real, historical incident of the kind of situations Calvino discusses in his novel. What does it mean if Shakespeare didn’t write these plays? How does it change the way we study them? Are they still important plays, once they become non-Shakespearian?

Further, when we “read” a piece of visual art that is actually a collage of other artists’ works, we can immediately see that it is a collage, and we’ll keep this in mind as we draw further conclusions from the work. When we listen to a remix or mash-up on the radio, we can hear right away that it is the work of a DJ. We give the DJ proper credit, but also can acknowledge that the art he is creating is a re-structuring of previous art. However, in a published poem or piece of literature, it can be less obvious that the language has been “cut-up.” Unless the author specifically states this, as Burroughs does at the end of his piece (“…here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged”) we tend to assume when we read books that the words are completely original, extracted only from the author’s mind.

This leads us to some of the issues Calvino deals with in his novel, and the question of authorship that we are trying to address for our class. For example, what does it mean if a text doesn’t have an “author”–if that author is a computer? How would this influence the way that we read the text? What does it mean when a text has the wrong author? I can speak for myself and say that if I found out that my favorite novel was actually the product of an inanimate machine, my understanding of it would dramatically change. When we read a piece of great literature, or a great poem, (as subjective as the idea of ‘great’ can be) we assume that it is a stroke of genius coming from an insightful person. We read hoping to catch a glipse of that ‘genius’ so that we can experience it and somehow make it a part of us. I think that a certain level of credit must be given to artists who “cut up” and rearrange previous works to create their own…after all, there’s always the argument that no artwork is truly ‘original,’ that it is always a call and response to a previously generated work. When anyone writes, they are recycling conventions they internalized from previous readings, no matter how broadly these conventions may be. In this way, maybe we all are cutting up and rearranging other people’s words. But in this broad sense, the idea of “cut-up” writing becomes less interesting.

I feel like I am digressing. I suppose I am just fascinated with this idea of to what extent can artwork be considered ‘original,’ versus artificial, and how this affects the way we read it. There is definitely a certain point where it becomes artificial, but where do we draw that line? Is it arbitrary, based purely on personal preference, or can we all agree that a computer-generated novel isn’t art? But what if you genuinely enjoy reading it? What a crisis. I will note that in my methods class for my English education minor, we’ve been encouraged to have students create “cut-up” poetry, whether by rearranging those magnetic words (you know the ones), composing a collage of words cut out of magazines/books/newspapers, or by having them rearrange actual poems we’ve already read in the class (for example, one assignment was to rearrange MLK’s “I have a dream” speech). Interesting that Burroughs’s technique has already won merit in the unfortunately conservative territory of the English Literature and composition classroom.

As an aside…in a somewhat eerie coincidence, a daily blogfeed that I subscribe to just emailed me the following links on automated writing, and the perceived threat of the ebook to writers and publishers. As more and more of what we read is published–and written–digitally, these questions seem to become more and more relevant.

And for the record, I was very, very tempted to write my blog post entirely as a “cut up” of all the other blog posts that have been posted, just to make a point…but I didn’t think Prof. Sample would have been very amused.

             Upon reading the last half of the novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a variety of things intrigued me, from parallels to transfers of characters.
            
              First of all, I felt that the second half of the novel was much easier to get into, therefore enjoying it substantially more than the first half. However, I felt that reading the first half, especially the beginning, and truly grasping a feel for the writing style was essential to reading the second half of the novel. I almost saw the midway point as a new beginning for a few reasons.
             
                At the beginning of reading the second half of the book, I saw a recurring theme of the bookstore, where the narrator is telling “you” about what “you” like to read, and the importance of that. In the seventh chapter, the narrator is in Ludwilla’s home, and looking at her bookshelf, surveying her books, and making assumptions and conclusions about her based on them. “Let’s have a look at the books… books read and rarely reread, or books you have not or will not read but have still retained” (145-146), is a parallel to the first chapter where the narrator talks about “Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success…” (5). I saw this as important to the novel because it shifted to Ludwilla’s character, at least as I perceived it, giving insight on her character and not just “you.”
               
                  However, it seemed to me to have a transfer of character, as far as the term “you” was concerned. In the beginning, “you” appeared to be the guy that is pursuing the manuscript interest with Ludmilla. But starting in chapter 7, where the books are belonging to Ludmilla, stacked on her shelves, the narrator seems to be addressing her as “you,” by making claims to her character based on her selection of books, and using the pronoun to represent Ludmilla, rather than focusing on the man.
              
                   After this change in character, the narrator seemed to shy away from the use of “you,” giving proper names like “Reader” and “Other Reader” to define and name the man and Ludwilla’s characters. I thought this switch in what felt to be the 2nd person writing to the 3rd person as far as “Reader” and “Other Reader” were now concerned spiced up the introductory chapter to the story, In a Network of Lines that Intersect, throwing my prior interpretation of the novel off guard, ultimately making it more interesting to read.  It was definitely one of the oddest and most challenging books I’ve ever read, but it helped to open my mind to different types of writing and voice styles.