A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy

11. The Future of Literature:Complex Surfaces of Electronic Texts and Print Books

180 c h a p t e r 1 1 The Future of Literature: Complex Surfaces of Electronic Texts and Print Books N. Katherine Hayles Nothing is riskier than prediction; when the future arrives, we can be sure only that it will be different than we thought. Nevertheless, I will risk a prognostication : Digital literature will be a significant component of the twenty- first-century canon. Less a gamble than it may appear, this prediction slyly relies on the fact that almost all contemporary literature is already digital. Except for a handful of books produced by fine letterpresses, print literature consists of digital files through most of its existence. So essential is digitality to contemporary processes of composition, storage, and production that print should properly be considered a particular form of text for digital files rather than a medium separate from digital instantiation. The digital leaves its mark on print in new capabilities for innovative typography, new aesthetics for book design, and, in the near future, new modes of marketing. Some bookstores and copy shops, for example, are investing in computerized xerography I am grateful to Nicholas Gessler for information on letterpress machines, for help with analysis of Apollonaire’s visual poems, and for photographing Apollonaire’s Calligrammes. I am also grateful to Special Collections of the University of California, Los Angeles, Young Research Library for permission to examine and photograph Apollonaire’s 1918 edition of Calligrammes. N. Katherine Hayles 181 machines that produce books on the spot from digital files, including cover design, content, and binding.1 Also available are electronic book-like devices that can be taken to a bookstore, where the electronic files comprising the text can be purchased, downloaded, and read at leisure on the device. As these examples suggest, print and electronic textuality deeply interpenetrate one another. Although print texts and electronic literature—that is, literature that is “digital born,” created and meant to be performed in digital media—differ significantly in their functionalities, they are best considered as two components of a complex and dynamic media ecology. Like biological ecotomes, they engage in a wide variety of relationships, including competition, cooperation, mimicry, symbiosis, and parasitism. These dynamic interrelations can be observed in the complex surfaces emerging in contemporary digital and print literature. As John Cayley remarks, “The surface of writing is and always has been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpenetrated membrane, a fractal coast- or borderline, a chaotic and complex structure with depth and history.”2 Although complex surfaces are scarcely new, as Cayley reminds us, the surfaces created in the new millennium have a historical specificity that comes from their engagement with digitality. This engagement is enacted in multiple senses: technologically in the production of textual surfaces, phenomenologically in new kinds of reading experiences possible in digital environments, conceptually in the strategies employed by print and electronic literature as they interact with each other’s affordances and traditions, and thematically in the represented worlds that experimental literature in print and digital media perform. In discussing the surfaces of contemporary writing, Noah WardripFruin comments that “there is [always] something behind the surface.” He continues, “Behind poetry, fiction, and drama on paper surfaces there are processes of writing, editing, paper and ink production, page design, printing and binding, distribution and marketing, buying and borrowing.”3 Wardrip-Fruin’s main interest lies in “works that might be regarded as especially inseparable from some of their processes,” that is, digital literature .4 My focus here will be not exclusively on print or digital literature but rather on their interactions through complex surfaces that bear the marks of digitality. In the case of digital literature, computations continuously produce and reproduce the surface, as Wardrip-Fruin notes; in the case of print, computations produced the surface as durable inscriptions on paper. In both cases, the ontology of computation marks the surfaces of the texts discussed here, leading to complex interactions that bring into question the importance we might otherwise attach to the boundary separating digital and print literature.5 182 The Future of Literature Complex Topologies of Immersive Electronic Literature Good realistic fiction is often called “immersive,” but the works discussed below are literally so, in the sense that they are performed in a threedimensional CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). Usually employed for scientific and mathematical visualizations, a CAVE costs well over a million dollars for a top-end apparatus (and...