Esthetics in Literature, A Multimedia Story - Lily Knox (3491528)

ESTHETICS IN LITERATURE A MULTIMEDIA STORY 1
Comparative Literature
Bachelor Thesis
Utrecht University
year 2013
Esthetics in Literature
A Multimedia Story
Lily Anna Knox
3491528
tutored by Bram Ieven
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................3
CHAPTER
I. IMAGES AND FOREGROUNDING......................................................................5
1. The Differences Between Image and Text.......................................................6
2. The Intersection of Resemblance and Meaning...............................................7
3. Typography: The Visual Unit...........................................................................9
4. The Writing Process: a Natural Foregrounding of Text.................................16
II. FILM AND REMEDIATION................................................................................19
1. Remediation: Definition.................................................................................19
2. Remediating the Moving Image.....................................................................20
3. Remediation in Context..................................................................................21
III. INTERNET AND HYPERTEXT..........................................................................23
1. The Digitization Fear/Inspiration...................................................................23
2. Hypertext........................................................................................................25
CONCLUSION..................................................................................................................................28
BIBLIOGRAPHY...............................................................................................................................29
In the last twenty years or so, books have been published that overtly challenge the classic
appearance of literature. They are not ordinary novels full of the same small letters page after page,
but instead are confronting the reader with their particular lay-out. This is happening in a time
where some are worried about the uprising of digitization, and fear for the replacement and
disappearance of the book as a material object. This claim about the death of the book is not the
first, and this essay will show that there need not be a clash between media. Digitization is not a
threat for the book, it is an inspiration.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (2007) tells us he story of Eric Sanderson, a British
man who has lost his memory. He is confronted with letters from Eric Sanderson the first, the man
he was before the memory loss. The letters contain clues and advices from his former self about
conceptual fish, the death of his girlfriend Clio Aames and the Un-Space Exploration Committee,
that lead to an adventurous exploration of his anterior life. The reader discovers that Eric is under
constant threat of the Ludovician, a conceptual shark that feeds his memories. After an attack by
this being, Eric Sanderson decides to search for Dr. Trey Fidorous, who is part of the Un-Space
Commitee. On the way he is contacted by Mr. Nobody, actually part of Mycroft Ward, who is an
internet based intelligence that engulfs other people and personalities in order to grow. He also
meets Scout, another member of the USEC and together they manage to find Fidorous. The three of
them build a conceptual boat to hunt down the Ludovician and destroy the dangerous database that
is Mycroft Ward. Fidorous dies in the process. Eric and Scout stay to live on a conceptual island,
and stop existing in the real world.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000) is a book with several story lines. One is a
narrative by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles Tatoo parlor employee. He and his friend Lude go and
look at the apartment of the recently deceased Zampan, an old blind man who lived in Lude's
building. They discover a manuscript written by Zampan that describes a documentary called The
Navidson Record, although it does not seem to exist. Truant obsessively reconstructs the
manuscript, adding his own notes in which his own story also develops: the growing delusions, the
drug use and his scarred past. Zampan's manuscript is the second narrative that the reader
encounters. It is about the Navidson family and their recent move into a new home in Virginia. The
house is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and after several changes a door appears behind
which a long corridor extends. It is the beginning of a vast maze that Will Navidson explores with
his companions and tries to record on tape, later edited into The Navidson Records.
These are two novels that exploit other media in order to enrich their own content. To do so,
they use lay-outs that differ from what we are used to in very diverse ways. The House of Leaves
uses for example footnotes referring to nonexistent texts and letters positioned in almost every
possible way are other particularities of Danielewski's book. Even the story itself is not
straightforward as the different fonts reveal to us different stories interlacing. The Raw Shark Texts
has equally an interlaced story line, but it is spread over two media: paper and the web. The reader
has to search for the missing chapters him/herself. This novel's play with letters is less extreme than
in The House of Leaves, but has the particularity of featuring a flipbook at the near end of the story
and uses typography in a very pictorial way.
These alternative lay-outs have an influence on our reading process and also on the way we
see the novel in this multimedial age. A question we can thus ask is: How do these novels
incorporate other media into their printed pages?
Taking a step back, we can see that both books incorporate images, film (moving images)
and references to the internet. Each of those media are inserted into the stories using specific
literary concepts. Images are both inserted and recreated using typography ensuring the
foregrounding of the text. The illusion of moving images and rhythmic effects are created by the
remediation of one medium (film) into another (text). Lastly, translating the impalpable internet
onto material paper through the use of text and layout makes the story hypertextual. Literary styles
have thus accompanied the proliferation of media in a way that enables literature to stay up to date
in a media abundant environment and even transgress its (so called) boundaries into becoming a
multimedial medium itself.
To answer the question of how The Raw Shark Texts and House of Leaves incorporate other
media into their printed pages this essay will analyze three media in relation to the literary concept
used to translate them: Images and Foregrounding; Film and Remediation; and Internet and
Hypertext.
I. Images and Foregrounding

One of the earliest media with which texts have been confronted are images. They have been seen
as opposite and non-exchangeable for centuries. One of the reasons for these thoughts is that text is
seen as an immaterial thing, a vehicle for ideas, forgetting the fact that it is ink on paper, a palpable
object; and it is precisely on language, the raw material out of which literature is made 1 that the
theories about foregrounding first focused.2
When foregrounding occurs, the referential, transparent, function of language is being
placed in the background, and this effect is mostly obtained by deviating from the rules of everyday
language and writing.3 The term was introduced as the English equivalent of the concept
'aktualisace', from the Prague school of Structuralism, and they both point towards literature's
ability to break automatisms and make the reader aware of the medium that is being used. 4 A more
innovative aspect that is being researched now are the readers reactions to such form.5 This
development broadened the field, linking it to the functions of literary texts more generally. 6
Readers reactions to literary form have been tested in a series of empirical studies, and these studies
are continuing to grow.7 They analysed the surprise effect of foregrounding, as well as, later on,
concepts such as Shklovsky's notion of retardation; and readers indeed slow[ed] down their
reading speed under the influence of a nexus of foregrounding devices.8 However, to achieve such
effects, foregrounding involves a certain degree of novelty. As such, their effect will eventually
wear off and will have to make room for ever more novel devices.9
Willie van Peer, Introduction to foregrounding: a state of the art Language and Literature 16: 99 (2007):99,
http://lal.sagepub.com/content/16/2/99.
G.J. van Bork et al., "Foregrounding," Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren, 2012,
http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03670.php.
G.J. van Bork et al., "Foregrounding," Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren, 2012,
http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03670.php.
1. The Differences between Image and Text

According to the German philosopher and art critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 - 1781), and
the German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser (1926 2007), texts and images have very different
properties.
In Laocoon Lessing elaborates on the differences that can be found between painting and
poetry as having their own domains and subjects. The rule that he formulates is that the sequence in
time is the domain of the poet and that the co-existence in space is the domain of the painter:
Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore
choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what
is to follow.
Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a single attribute of bodies, and must choose that one
which gives the most vivid picture of the body as exercised in this particular action.10
When we read, we can not observe everything at a glance like with a painting, because when one
reads and writes, the words follow each other. Hence, the time aspect is the most important for
texts. In order to describe the beauty in a person, for example, the poet should describe every detail
of every element of beauty consecutively and for this reason, says Lessing, the poet should stay
away from descriptions of beauty. The exquisite elements, arranged in a series, can not have the
same effect as if we see them together in an image. It goes beyond the human imagination to make
them into a harmonious picture.11
Iser agrees with the idea that the illusion of an image cannot be generated by detailed
descriptions. If a writer tries too hard to describe an image through text, the risk is that when the
reader hears all the details, as he says in his Reader-Response theory, there remains nothing more
for the reader to do. His imagination is not stimulated and the result is the inevitable boredom that
arises when everything is readily served on a platter. A literary text must therefore be made in such
a way that it stimulates the imagination of the reader as reading is only a pleasure when it is active
and creative.12
Thus could be said that according to Lessing and Iser, the unwritten, the information that is
purposefully left out, is what ultimately makes a written text interesting.
10
11
12
Gotthold Lessing, Laocoon in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 128.
Gotthold Lessing, Laocoon in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 129.
Wolfgang Iser, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1972):
280.
2. The Intersection of Resemblance and Meaning

When looking at the historical background of the relations between image and text, their
dichotomous definitions as described by Iser and Lessing, have not always been as relevant. In his
seminal work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud (1960), comics theorist, uses the example of
hieroglyphs to demonstrate that at that time, pictures and words were together at the intersection of
resemblance and meaning13 In the early 1800s, the two had drifted apart to being completely
opposite: art being [] obsessed with resemblance, light [, ] color, all things visible, [] while
writing was focused on the intangible representations of senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy,
and so on.14 However, as McCloud says and as we will see in this thesis, text and image are now
becoming more and more synonymous.15
The Raw Shark Texts and House of leaves both have the particularity of inserting concrete
elements in their narratives.16 In The Raw Shark Texts the reader can find letters (pages 10, 54, 63 to
83), a postcard (page 429), a newspaper scrap (page 428), images of a shark (page 157, 337 to 375),
ink blots (page 325, 421), a map (page 300) and much more. In House of Leaves the reader
encounters pictures (page 549 to 552, 569 to 572, 582, 583, 658 to 662), letters (page 554, 587 to
643), an obituary (page 585), poems (page 558 to 565, 574 to 580), etc. These elements are
presented as artefacts as they are incorporated as is in the text, and not mediated through narration. 17
Most of the artefacts are text based (letters, news paper, obituary, poems) whereas others are images
(pictures, post card, map). In between these two forms, Hall presents us with images made out of
words, such as the ink blots and the shark.
13
14
15
16
17
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 145. quoted in J.
Polk, Not Just Fun with Typography: Remediation of the Digital in Contemporary Print Fiction. (Master thesis,
Texas State University, 2009), 4.
J. Polk, Not Just Fun with Typography: Remediation of the Digital in Contemporary Print Fiction. (Master thesis,
Texas State University, 2009), 37-38.
fi
gure 1
The shark called Ludovician (fig. 1), who is a main character in Hall's narrative, is made of text:
both literally (on the page) and conceptually (within the narrative).18 This particular form of
representation, both textual and pictorial, can be assimilated on two different levels.
18
Jessica Pressman, The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review
(2008): 469-471, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/45000862/THE-AESTHETIC-OF-BOOKISHNESS-IN-TWENTYFIRST-CENTURY-LITERATURE
One is to merely view it as a typographic representation of the creature and view it much as one would a more
traditional image, while the other allows one to actually see the image on the aforementioned level while
reading the text of which the fish is composited and derive additional meaning from its content. As the beings
become more complex, the text with which Hall uses to assemble their likenesses is more complex as well and
can provide an additional experience for the reader that is not necessary for understanding the overall
narrative.19
The content of such a representation is inseparable from its formal presentation. 20 The typographic
images provide the reader with a wealth of information simultaneously in a manner not possible
with conventional text.21 [T]he two perspectives of transparency and physicality of the text [are
merged ...] into one by presenting a text whose very shape, color, and layout influences the way in
which the content is understood.22 On a broader level, when comparing what is happening with the
image of the shark and the book itself, Hall points out the fact that the book too exists as a physical
object and as a conceptual narrative.23
In contemporary fiction, as Bolter estimates, we can observe a readjustment of the ratio
between text and image in various forms of print. 24 The use of graphic elements seems to increase
and thus, these have to be analysed. He claims that uniting the textual with the pictorial creates a
visual unit that depends on but also attempts to surpass the typography of the printed page.25
3. Typography: the Visual Unit
One of the problems of analysing typography in literary novels is that its semiotic potential is
mostly disregarded in favour of the meaning of the words only. 26 Nina Nrgaard, professor of
applied linguistics, attempts to create a methodology to systematically analyse typography,
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
(2008): 468, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/45000862/THE-AESTHETIC-OF-BOOKISHNESS-IN-TWENTYFIRST-CENTURY-LITERATURE
Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 48.
quoted in J. Polk, Not Just Fun with Typography: Remediation of the Digital in Contemporary Print Fiction.
(Master thesis, Texas State University, 2009), 7.
Nina Nrgaard, The Semiotics of Typography in Literary Texts: A Multimodal Approach, Orbis Litterarum 64:2
(2009):141.
combining different theories in her piece The Semiotics of Typography in Literary Texts: A
Multimodal Approach. Printed text should firstly be viewed as multimodal, as only then can the
interplay of different semiotic modes27 be analysed. To explore the meaning-potential of the
visual aspect of printed verbal language in literature28 one could choose to reach in the descriptive
apparatus provided by the field of typography. However, design, anatomy, history and legibility will
not be treated in this essay.
One of Nrgaard's suggestions, based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse
(2001), is that typography can act like a metaphor, a form accordingly named the typographical
metaphor.
[It] is based on a principle of similarity. While metaphor proper as exemplified by, for instance, My love is a
rose transfers meaning from one domain, rose, to another, my love, with the implications that my love
has some of the same qualities as those of a rose, typographical metaphor is based on a principle of similarity
between the visual form of the signifier (the letterforms) and the signified.29
We gain meaning through our physical experience of the visual unit created by typography. 30 31
This relationship between typography and the meaning of the words presented can be either
iconic or indexical. In the first, the link is made through resemblance or imitation. In the second, it
is a causal or physical relation that binds them, like the indexical relationship between smoke and
fire or footprint and foot.32 When indexicality happens in book form, this means that the link created
will point at book-bound media, such as paper and ink. Thus, in novels, foregrounding and
indexicality are inextricable. This being said, whenever there are typographical quirks involved, a
foregrounding effect is created.
Foregrounding through typographical metaphors happens on many occasions in House of
Leaves and The Raw Shark Texts. To start, they both contain many facsimile reproductions33 of
letters (fig. 2). This is a fairly simple example of indexical meaning where the look of the writing
[, its lay-out,] invokes the material origin of its own coming into being.34
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
(2009):142.
(2009):142.
(2009):146.
(2009):146.
(2009):147.
(2009):147.
(2009):148.
(2009):148.
figure 2
A more peculiar version of indexicality can be found in Danielewski's novel. Pages 119 to 142 all
posses a square, outlined with grey and with text in their centre.
figure 3
For each uneven page, there is an even page which copies the exact same words in its square, but
the characters are mirrored (fig. 3). When flipping through the pages the reader will get the
impression that he/she is looking through the paper, at the back of the words. While the medium
paper is negated this way, the indexical relation to ink is emphasised. The inkblot on page 421 of
The Raw Shark Texts is also indexical as the dark shape refers to the actual ink being used to make
the visual. It is furthermore an example of iconicity as it is meant to look like an inkblot, a spill, an
explosion, when it is in fact a well thought through image. However, Danielewski shows us that
iconicity and indexicality can work against each other. Page 309 (fig. 4) features one word: white.
This time it is the meaning of the word that creates an indexical link with the medium used, the
blank page. However, while foregrounding the medium, it destroys any possible iconic relationship
as the page is no longer white but marked with black characters.
figure 4
On many occasions when iconicity is at play,

it is not only an icon referring to an exterior object,
it is also a link to the content, the words with which
the icon is made up of. Hall does this in a very literal
way when depicting two fish on page 95 (fig. 5). The
visuals are made out of
figure 5
the words faceplate,
spine, joint, scale, eye, fin and ridge,

each of them placed on the spot where they belong to
create a fish. The words are thus supporting the
visual. When speaking about (what may be
interpreted as) evolution and cells on page 16 (fig. 6),
the words Australopithecus and Homo habilis are
shown in a fragmented form, visualising the idea that
man has evolved from dust debris. In House of
figure 6
Leaves we can find a corridor and a ladder, both

created by a typographical visual unit. The corridor is
simple rectangle of text (fig. 7), which gets smaller on

every following page. The black ink of the words
represent the darkness of the corridor and from 443 to
458 the reader follows main character Navidson's
crawl through the narrowing corridor. The ladder
visual works in much the same way. It is spread out
over two pages (440 and 441) (fig. 8) that need to be
turned a quarter for the text to stand upright. The
reader then starts at the bottom of the double page and
reads the short blocks of two lines, working his way
upwards, while Navidson is pulling himself up a
ladder. The blocks of texts form the steps for them to
climb.
figure 7
Typographic metaphors, iconic or indexical, are a foregrounding of paper and ink, but what
has not yet been mentioned are the choices in typography. Times New Roman, the font used for
Zampan's narrative, is one of the most widely used fonts, but Johnny's story in Courier New is
already more special. Nrgaard describes an interesting background of the Courier typeface. It is an
archetypal typewriter font35 that was
suitable for dataprocessing in computers and telex machines. It was therefore much used in the infancy of the
computer and is still commonly used by computer programmers. Even though the technical side of computing
which involves the use of Courier is thus typically hidden to the common user, Courier is nevertheless a
typeface that many people associate with computers for the reasons just mentioned.36
In the context of House of Leaves, the Courier font reinforces the idea of a different text by means
of contrast and of that of a data text37 through indexicality.
35
36
37
(2009):157.
(2009):157.
(2009):157.
4. The Writing Process: a Natural Foregrounding of Text

In his famous piece The Death of the Author, French literary critic Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980)
says that writing stands outside of all functions, and is only an amplification of the symbol itself. It
creates a disconnection.38 It is not the author who speaks in a text, but the language itself. Writing is,
by means of a conditional impersonality, reaching the point where only language acts, and not the
"I".39 It is a neutral space in which the subject disappears, where all identity is lost, and this happens
first to the person who is in the process of writing. 40 This is why Barthes says that writing is the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. 41 The author enters his own death as writing
begins.42
On the same topic, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002), German philosopher, sees writing
as a self-alienation. Writing implies an alienation of the self while reading a text is, according to
him, the highest grade of understanding.43 A text is independent of any writer or author and of any
receiver or reader.44 What is recorded in writing has detached itself from its origin and its author,
and is free to develop new relationships. The text starts leading its own life. 45 This autonomy of the
written text can be seen as a first step to the foregrounding of the words that compose it.
In a certain way, writer Mark Z. Danielewski plays with this idea of lost voices and
independent texts. On the second page of the black, white and grey second edition of his book (fig.
9) one can see the following:
38
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author Athenaeum Library of Philosophy, (1997) http://evansexperientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm.
39
40
41
42
43
Hans-Georg Gadamer, extracts from Truth and Method, (Edition Unknown), 847.
44
45
figure 9
Where Barthes says that a writer loses his voice in the act of writing, detaching himself of the story
that is written, Danielewski already negates his own presence by placing the name of one of the
characters of the book itself in the spot where his own name is required, thus visually breaching his
involvement with the book. This is also the case for the introduction and notes as they are equally
accredited to a character of the narrative. By gaining this role, according to Barthes theory, the
fictional characters Zampan and Johnny are also losing their voices and becoming detached from
their own stories. To confuse the reader even more, he/she is following two parallel narratives
throughout the book: Zampan's and Johnny's. By creating interlacing story-lines and giving the
role of author to a fictional character, Danielewski is contributing to the autonomy of the text.
Going back to Gadamer, we could say that House of Leaves is independent of any writer, as this part
is filled by a character of the story itself, and also independent of any receiver, as the interlacing
story-lines make it possible to image that each author-character is able to read the other's narrative.
Even though image and text are very different, Hall and Danielewski show us that the textual and
pictorial can be united literally and conceptually. Seeing typography as a visual unit make us consider the subtle differences between iconic and indexical typographical metaphors, and the weight
of font choices. The foregrounding that occurs in all these cases is only preceded by the foregrounding that has already occurred during the writing process.
II. Film and Remediation

As discussed in the previous chapter, The Raw Shark Texts and House of Leaves are two novels that
incorporate visual elements to draw attention to - and blend - the two ways in which the reader can
look at the narrative; the first being the transparent ideal in which a reader is immersed in a
fictional world and scarcely aware of the page as a material object; and a readers focus on a page
as a material object in which innovative typography and/or images encourage one to focus on the
pages physical properties.46 The book thus becomes a multi-layered, multi-medial format. 47
48
When, for example, visual media appear inside a narrative, this incorporation is called remediation.
1. Remediation : definition
Remediation is, according to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, the "ongoing process in which
supposedly 'new' media obtain cultural significance by rewriting or refreshing other, 'older' media.
Media are never completely 'new', but always an adaptation of existing media or media
techniques"(my translation).49 Bolter goes even further and suggests that remediation is when a
newer medium replaces an older one, borrowing the characteristics of the older medium and
remodelling its cultural space.50 Polk points out that no medium today seems to do its cultural work
in isolation from other media, any more than its works are in isolation from other social and
economic forces.51 Put simply, remediation involves the representation of one medium into another,
which is an important characteristic of the new media of today.52
Researches are done to investigate to what extent new media affect older media, but equally
important is to see how older media remodel themselves to compete with the newer ones. In novels
this is evident in, for example, the use of images and different typographies, which can be seen as
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
Kiene Brillenburg Wuth and Ann Rigney, Het Leven van Teksten: Een Inleiding tot de Literatuurwetenschap
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 414.
attempt to compete with the internet. 53 Although it is not systematically true, artists try, not only to
represent something, but also try to force the viewer to look through the medium and accept the
representation [...] as the actual thing.54 Bolter and Grusin point out that, throughout history,
painting, photography, and computer systems all are attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or
denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation.55
2. Remediating the moving image
The particularity of Hall's book is that it is able to remediate the moving image. The fifty pages at
the end of the story, each with a new representation of the Ludovician shark, work like a flip book:
when the reader turns the pages quickly, the succession of images generates the idea of movement.
This is an example of a way in which authors propose movement in print. The idea of a flipbook is
not new, but in this perspective it is an effective way to remediate film in literature. 56 The novel
becomes graphic and cinematographic, visual and tactile. The book changes into a medium that
requires action, a place where things live, a physical object that the reader must manipulate. The last
page of the flipbook shows not the shark attacking Eric Sanderson, but the reader him/herself. 57 It is
an intervening medium that connects the character and the reader.
As seen in the previous chapter, the conceptual and literal representation of the Ludovician
make it an element that is being heavily foregrounded. This same element is also the remediation of
a moving image. As such we can say that there is here a case of foregrounding of remediation.58
Besides movement as a cinematographic element, rhythm and pace also form important
elements in the remediation of film. Whether it is slow or fast, a link between the reading rhythm of
the reader and the narrative rhythm of the story arises. Time delay is a literary effect that can
determine the tension in a narrative.59 This effect is visualized by Hall: from page 373 to page 381
the same unfinished sentence is repeated eight times: "Fingers clamped my wrist and forearm and
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
(Master thesis, Texas State University, 2009), 12-13.
Katherine Hayles. Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves. American Literature 74.4 (2002): 797,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/al/summary/v074/74.4hayles.html.
dragged me back up towards the surface with a". At the beginning these sentences overlap with the
end of the flipbook and finally the phrase appears three times at the bottom of a blank page, printed
lighter and lighter every time. The narrative rhythm is delayed in a visual rather than in a literary
way. The repetition of the phrase can for instance represent the shock which the protagonist
experiences, and the fading of the words can mimic fainting after the attack of the shark. A parallel
can be drawn with film techniques which uses slower moving images to achieve the same effect.
The remediation of the medium film is thus repeatedly achieved in a visual way.
In the same manner, the tenth chapter of House of Leaves also mimics film making
techniques in a rhythmical and visual way.
For example, when a rope holding a gurney begins stretching as the staircase suddenly expands, the text itself
also stretches, taking three pages to inscribe the word 'snaps' (294-296). Other passages see the text on the page
decreasing as Navidson crawls into tighter and tighter passages, as if the text were being squeezed along with
his body. Danielewski has pointed out a that such passages can be seen as a subtle correspondence between
reading speed and the emotional pacing of the narrative.60
The analogy with the rhythm of a film lies with the speed with which the eyes of the reader move
across the page. The time spent decoding and reading one page defines a certain pace within the
narrative that is read.61 Blank space around the texts and specific use of typography work as a
slowing factor.62 The reading pace slows down and a sort of slow-motion effect is created, similar to
what can be seen in films, often used to build up tension in the viewer. Danielewski's text shows us
a way in which film is remediated, working simultaneously on both the transparent and physical
level with the combination doing more than either could alone.63
3. Remediation in context
Remediation within a novel creates firstly an emphasis on its own materiality. For example, the
flipbook requires a tactile manipulation to perform the animation. It is a physical form of the Reader
Response Theory: the literary text lies in between the reader and the written text. It needs to be
realized. To do so the reader is obliged to touch the physical book in a different way. 64 The
remediation is here foregrounded, and the reader who is confronted with this is equally confronted
60
61
62
63
64
with him/herself: the bodies that read as well as those that are read.65
Secondly, remediation reaffirms the relation between the book and the richly diverse
medial ecology in which we are all immersed 66 such as books, films and the web. A book
participates in this ecology and could not possibly isolate itself from it. In these cases the opposite
happens: they celebrate different media through the incorporation that is remediation. 67 The printed
page is exploited to show off its multi-medial properties 68 and becomes a manifestation of how data
mutates.69
The two books that are the case study here borrow characteristics from other media such as film
and through this process renew the old medium that is the book. New elements such as flipbooks
and reading/viewing pace emerge from it to achieve a new kind of immediacy inside the novel. The
relation towards the book changes as these elements have to be realized by the reader through manipulation. This mutation supports the multimediality of the book and the phenomenon of data
mutation.
65
66
67
68
69
III. Internet and Hypertext
The play with different media, as is the case with remediation, has accelerated and expanded since
the rise of new digital technologies, with the computer at its head. The omnivorous appetite70 of
the computer, has pushed other media into more and more remediation. 71 Take for example a
newspaper, now featuring links on its front page, referring to stories to be read on later pages, as a
website would do.72 The digital has provided the literary world with new inspiration, a way to
reinvent itself through remediation, but also a different kind of ready behaviour.
1. The digital fear/inspiration
In 1999, Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011), literary scholar and media theorist, described his views on
new technologies versus the paper medium. According to him
[t]echnologies [...] not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their
own description impossible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are
disappearing into black holes and boxes.73
Many of these papers are old or perhaps even forgotten, but in the founding age of technological media the
terror of their novelty was so overwhelming that literature registered it more acutely than in today's alleged
media pluralism.74
As said by Hayles, the original threat caused by digital technologies (if they even ever were a
threat) has transformed into an inspiration for twenty-first-century literature.75
76
Some of these
works employ what she calls an aesthetic of bookishness presenting a reflection on the book
through experimentation with the media-specific properties of print illuminated by the light of the
digital.77
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, no date), xxxix.
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, no date), xl.
(2008): 466, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/45000862/THE-AESTHETIC-OF-BOOKISHNESS-IN-TWENTY-
Like the computer, House of Leaves and The Raw Shark Texts try to eat all the other
media.78 This frenetic remediation leads to a drastic transformation in the text's physical body and
narrative corpus. They become a new kind of literature, a hybrid discourse that as yet has no
name.79
The processing of digital technologies and web reading behaviour into a book format is a
way to renew the status of the novel and to show that it is an innovative medium. 80 It is even a
multi-medial medium.81 Today there are many more options in the print process of books, making it
possible to merge literature and technology. (See examples discussed in part I and II.) The reader
gets a plethora of information in a way that is not possible with conventional text. This coincides
with the assertion of George Landow that the use of extralinguistic text is a way for an author to
profile the novel itself as hypertext literature.82
The threat of digital technologies is also connected to new ways of data storage and data
mutation. Novels are
a conceptual and literary manifestation of the ways in which data mutate across spaces, platforms, and
interfaces. [...] What is at stake is indeed [] an ideology of strict division between content and presentation
the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases. [] The belief in disembodied information
[that ...] lives invisibly and spreads virally, but also that material bodies (of people, books, et cetera) will be
emptied of content and thus of relevance.83
These fears are represented in Hall's book by the Ludovician shark, which is at the same time a
symbol for another modern epidemic: Alzheimers disease. 84 This fear of memory loss is not only
medical but can also be interpreted from a digital angle. Data loss from storage machines is another
important fear which is a resulting by-product of the digitalization of information. This is embodied
in The Raw Shark Texts by the Microft Ward, a character who has extracted his identity from his
material substratehis bodyand circulates as a form of disembodied data. 85 He is an example of
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
FIRST-CENTURY-LITERATURE
body-less information that is able to spread virally.86 These disembodied data are something that, in
Hall's story, can only be defeated with pen and paper.87
I used to know so many things . . . all I have are splinters. Remains of things I was quick enough to write
down and preserve.
Paper is shown as a preserving and protecting medium: there is also a shelter made of books a
maze of books and corridors [] quiet like some huge silent brain. 88 The Raw Shark Texts thus
shows how novels use 'bookishness' as a way to rival with the digital world and erase the claims
about the death of the book.89 They are a response to their contemporary, digital moment by
showing how literature retains a central role in our emergent technoculture as a space for aesthetic
expression and cultural critique.90 The novel is by definition already a medium that strives to
incorporate the contemporary elements in new ways. The Raw Shark Texts and House of Leaves
have updated their book-bound aesthetic to the contemporary, digital moment and environment.91
2. Hypertext
The definition of hypertextuality, as summarized by Wurth et al, states that it is
a new kind of text that is made possible thanks to digitization and where the reader can use electronic links,
which connect both verbal and non-verbal information units to each other, and which in turn offer further
possibilities to click-on. The readers thus determine how often they click through and in which order they do
it.92 (my translation)
In the book The Raw Shark Texts this is also possible because for each chapter there is, or will be,
an un-chapter available on the Internet. The reader can extend the story himself. This is also true for
86
87
88
89
90
91
92

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007), 271.
House of Leaves, as there are more than two entwined stories that the reader can choose to follow or
ignore. As the narratives are literally intertwined (one figuring as the main text, the other as
prominent footnotes), the reader has to make this choice on nearly every page as he is constantly
confronted to both.
The use of hypertext emphasises the fact that a text is part of a network of other texts and
that these are related to each other.93 Barthes goes one step further and sees a text as primarily
consisting of references to different cultures that are related to each other through dialogue, parody,
challenge, etc. Inside Danielewski's story, the idea of a network is shown through visual references.
This is done with the aid of different fonts, shades and formats. The different narratives are
identified by their fonts, the word 'house' is emphasized throughout the book by its grey shade, and
all the passages about the Minotaur are overstriked. These fragments of texts scattered throughout
the novel form four united groups as they reference each other by means of their visual similarities.
Apart from this visual aspect they are also linked in their content.94 They are paper hypertexts.
Christopher Keep argues that hypertext does not lay the attention on the text itself but on the
mechanism that has enabled the existence of the text, that is to say the overall cultural and
technological skills needed to read the document, or to perform it. 95 Reading becomes a free
improvisation.96 This change in reading behaviour extends to a reconfiguration the relations
writer/reader/text/narrative, as claimed by Landow. Hypertext blurs the boundaries between writer
and reader as the reader participates more actively in the text by choosing what to read. 97 Iser
already claimed that the product of this creative activity is called the "virtual dimension" of the text.
This virtual dimension is not the text itself and not the imagination of the reader. 98 He argues that
the convergence between reader and text is what realizes the literary work. This convergence can
never be precisely pinpointed and must always remain virtual. It cannot be identified with the
reality of the text or the individual disposition of the reader. 99 The novel thus is an open textual
space where no one thing is given sole authority. 100 Although Barthes disagrees and argues that the
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
Christopher Keep, Hypertext Theory and Criticism, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism,
http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/view.cgi?eid=144&query=christopher%20keep.
Christopher Keep, Hypertext Theory and Criticism, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism,
http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/view.cgi?eid=144&query=christopher%20keep.
283.
279.
reader is the place where the unity of a text arises. As a text consists of references to different
cultural expressions, there is according to him only one place where this multiplicity comes together
and this place is the reader.101 The reader is simply the person who can collect together in one space
all the elements that compose a text. The unity of the text lies thus not in its origin but in its
destination.102
All in all, digitalization, despite the threat some might think it is, has made of the book an even
more innovative and hybrid medium than it already was. The network of media and works in which
the novel finds itself can now be represented in an additional way: hypertext. It represents
digitalization, networks and also the fact that it is the reading process that gives the text its unity
and its inherently dynamic character.103 Through the reading process, any text is written here and
now.104
101
102
103
104

280.
As we have just seen, The Raw Shark Texts and House of Leaves incorporate other media into their
printed pages using literary concepts. Images lead to foregrounding, film is remediated, and the
internet is responsible for hypertexts.
The textual and pictorial have been united literally and conceptually by both authors creating
a new visual unit by means of typography. The text and its content are thus foregrounded, detached
from an author and even more autonomous. The old medium, the book, has mutated, embracing a
new kind of immediacy inside the novel with the help of interactive elements. The novels are
multimedial and play with data mutation. By using digitalization, the books became even more
innovative and hybrid. They represent different networks (of cultural works and the web) using
paper-based hypertexts. These emphasise the reading process that gives the text its unity and its
inherently dynamic character, and also changes the relation between a text, its writer and its
recipient.
The changes that have occurred in the novel each time a newer medium appeared is natural
and nearly unavoidable. No cultural medium exists in a void, and, as such, they all influence each
other and become hybrids. This is why we can expect all media to continue changing their form
with each new (media related) discovery, and look forward to what fresh ways to read will arise
next. This is also the reason why one does not need to worry about the disappearance of the book,
one of the oldest media. Digitalization is, in the end, more an inspiration than a threat.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. in Athenaeum Library of Philosophy, translated by Richard Howars from
Image, music, text (1977), http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm, (accessed November 7,
2011).
Brillenburg Wuth, Kiene, and Ann Rigney. Het Leven van Teksten: Een Inleiding tot de Literatuurwetenschap.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Bath: The Bath Press, 2000.
Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. http://www.dbnl.org/.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. (Edition Unknown).
Grusin, Richard and Jay David Bolter. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000, 11-23.
quoted in Polk 2009, 6-13.
Hall, Steven. The Raw Shark Texts. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007.
Hayles, Katherine. Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves. American Literature 74.4 (2002): 779-806,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/al/summary/v074/74.4hayles.html (accessed December 19, 2011).
Iser, Wolfgang. The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach. New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1972):
279-299.
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, The. http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/index.html.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, (no date).
Lessing, Gotthold. Laocoon. in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Aaron
Meskin, 12330. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, 145. quoted in Polk
2009, 4-20.
Nrgaard, Nina. The Semiotics of Typography in Literary Texts: A Multimodal Approach. Orbis Litterarum 64:2
(2009):141160.
Peer, Willie van. Introduction to foregrounding: a state of the art. Language and Literature 16: 99 (2007): 99-104,
http://lal.sagepub.com/content/16/2/99 (accessed on March 24, 2013).
Polk, J. Not Just Fun with Typography: Remediation of the Digital in Contemporary Print Fiction. Master thesis,
Texas State University, 2009.
Pressman, Jessica. The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First Century Literature. Michigan Quarterly Review
(2008): 465-482, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/45000862/THE-AESTHETIC-OF-BOOKISHNESS-IN-TWENTYFIRST-CENTURY-LITERATURE (accessed October 21, 2010).

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ESTHETICS IN LITERATURE A MULTIMEDIA STORY 1

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I. Images and Foregrounding

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1. The Differences between Image and Text

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2. The Intersection of Resemblance and Meaning

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On many occasions when iconicity is at play,

the words faceplate,

spine, joint, scale, eye, fin and ridge,

Leaves we can find a corridor and a ladder, both

simple rectangle of text (fig. 7), which gets smaller on

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4. The Writing Process: a Natural Foregrounding of Text

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II. Film and Remediation

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III. Internet and Hypertext

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(2008): 475, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/45000862/THE-AESTHETIC-OF-BOOKISHNESS-IN-TWENTYFIRST-CENTURY-LITERATURE

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Texas State University, 2009), 9.

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