Marginalia and Aphoristica

A recent article in the New York Times about the current state of books/electronic books notes that not only is the book not dead, the whole question of the future of the book is wearying. Frank Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book states, “Frankly, I can’t stand the question”.

We are going to think too hard about fiction here, and maybe in some future post, think hard about non-fiction/technical books, because I believe they are fundamentally different. Frank may be being frank with this. But it may also be wearying perhaps because we have not thought hard enough about what a book actually is.

Within the realm of storytelling, a work of fiction is simply a story told to an individual listener. There is no “community”, no “social network of readers”, simply a story teller (or narrator) and a story recipient (listener/audience at first, individual reader eventually). A book is nothing more than the physical manifestation of that storytelling and is in fact a shortened, abbreviated form of ingesting the story being told.

The voice that comes from the author of the work of storytelling may take many forms and the story itself is crafted to be heard – consumed – ingested – apprehended by the hearing/reading audience. In this way the story is the work and its individual apprehension by the consumer – ingestor – reader completes the cycle of telling/apprehension. Seen this way, it is true that the audio book, a relatively recent technical addition, is in fact a more pure form of delivering a story, albeit an older form of the work of fiction or storytelling.

The placement of the narration on any physical object — paper, computer, tablet reader, audio CD/DVD – is simply a convenience for the delivery and consumption of the narration, and that delivery mechanism is mostly irrelevant to its apperception by the recipient of the story. All of the features of storytelling embodied within a “book” may be present in any one of other forms of delivery.

A case can be made, perhaps, that various forms of delivery may be superior/offer particular advantages over other forms. A book itself can be heavy, unwieldy, cheap, flimsy, falling apart, missing pages. An e-reader may have text too small (or large), be poorly visible, hard to navigate, confusing in its attempts to “represent” itself as a “book” (note the trend to try to map page numbers into e-reader pages). An audio-book may have an incompetent reader, poor production qualities, and be presented with a story text that is difficult to render by voice.

But each of these drawbacks is simply an instance of failure, failure of the physical manifestation to step up to the demands of the storytelling, and each presupposes technical underpinnings which may themselves stand in the way of reception.

Another complication is that the physical manifestation itself may be altered/changed to “help along” the reception – consider the epistolary novel, the “marble” page in Tristram Shandy, pages numbers running in reverse in Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor, verbal handling of literary artifacts (such as footnotes) when producing an audio book.

So each manifestation a “book” may have bears at least potentially with it some possible tampering of the narration itself which constitutes the work. Authors may play with/against the representational form, and here we may ultimately see differences betwixt and among the various forms. But ultimately the form is largely irrelevant to the work itself, except where the author uses the physical instantiation as a partial object of discourse. This is something we have yet to see exploited authorially in the new media, and we may be at the beginnings of something different, but that is yet to come.

This is not to say that there are not economic considerations at play – there are, and they are substantial – but they are not very germane to the overall experience and aesthetic (or not) interplay between storyteller and apprehender.

This interplay – who’s story is it, the teller or apprehender? – may be the source of a future post, but as for the book/story/narration itself, it is in no danger of having no future until narration comes to a standstill at the end of time.