The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities [1st ed.] 9783030534080, 9783030534097

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi
Introduction: The Novel as Network (Tim Lanzendörfer, Corinna Norrick-Rühl)....Pages 1-21
Introduction: Novel Forms (Tim Lanzendörfer)....Pages 23-28
The Novel’s Novelty Now (Mathias Nilges)....Pages 29-49
The Cosmopolitan Value of the Multicultural Novel (Kristian Shaw)....Pages 51-68
The Novel Network and the Work of Genre (Tim Lanzendörfer)....Pages 69-86
Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction (Christopher Pizzino)....Pages 87-110
Introduction: Novel Ideas (Tim Lanzendörfer, Corinna Norrick-Rühl)....Pages 111-117
Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Stephen Shapiro)....Pages 119-136
From Comic to Graphic and from Book to Novel: Sandman’s Invisible Authors and the Quest for Literariness (Julia Round)....Pages 137-162
Listening to the Literary: On the Novelistic Poetics of the Podcast (Patrick Gill)....Pages 163-179
The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld Narratives, Novelization, and the Contemporary Novel-Network (Tamer Thabet, Tim Lanzendörfer)....Pages 181-201
Introduction: Novel Commodities (Corinna Norrick-Rühl)....Pages 203-210
Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive (Jim Collins)....Pages 211-227
Auratic Facsimile: The Print Novel in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Julia Panko)....Pages 229-249
Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/Selling the Goods (Claire Squires)....Pages 251-270
Shakespeare Novelized: Hogarth, Symbolic Capital, and the Literary Market (Jeremy Rosen)....Pages 271-298
Reading the Small American Novel: The Aesthetic Agency of the Short Book in the Modern Literary Marketplace (Alexander Starre)....Pages 299-322
Back Matter ....Pages 323-327

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY

The Novel as Network Forms, Ideas, Commodities Edited by Tim Lanzendörfer · Corinna Norrick-Rühl

New Directions in Book History

Series Editors Shafquat Towheed Faculty of Arts Open University Milton Keynes, UK Jonathan Rose Department of History Drew University Madison, NJ, USA

As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors. Editorial Board Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14749

Tim Lanzendörfer · Corinna Norrick-Rühl Editors

The Novel as Network Forms, Ideas, Commodities

Editors Tim Lanzendörfer Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

Corinna Norrick-Rühl University of Muenster Muenster, Germany

New Directions in Book History ISBN 978-3-030-53408-0 ISBN 978-3-030-53409-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Anton (Lanzendörfer) and Anton (Rühl)

Preface and Acknowledgments

This volume is the result of an interdisciplinary conference held at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, in September 2016, but it is not a traditional conference volume. Neither when we first conceived it, nor in the course of its development, nor even in its actual happening, did we imagine the conference Novel-Seeming-Goods to pursue the idea of the novel as network, of the novel network. We believed that it would be useful to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines and perspective on the novel, in order to discuss the futures of the novel. In the unfolding of the conference, we realized the many points at which the papers presented touched, and found ourselves relieved that the twoday event did not fizzle out, with scholars of publishing practice having nothing to say to literary scholars eager to read books, and neither having any comment for scholars of television. For a while, we rested content that the conference had been a success. But we soon felt that whatever had been developed at the conference required theoretical grounding, and soon came to believe that the idea of the network—which seemed illustrative of the connections, many shared points in the papers and across the papers—would be most amenable to our purposes. This volume is the result, then, of scholarship the way we believe it should be done: building on the presentations of first-class research, amplified by the outstanding discussions our presenters provided, reflected upon and then presented in a coherent form for discussion. We rather hope that you will agree.

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are deeply indebted to, and would like to thank, the participants at this conference, both the speakers and the guests, for making it a success. We would like to acknowledge again the sponsorship of this conference by the internal research funding (Förderstufe 1) of Mainz University, by the Forschungsschwerpunkt Medienkonvergenz, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Without their generous contributions, none of this could have happened. We remain indebted to our research assistants, Scarlett Saurat and Isabell Thomas, for their tireless work in preparing the conference and supporting us throughout. We are also happy to acknowledge the administrative assistants to our respective departments, Anette Vollrath and Renate Geyer. Without their support, the conference would not have taken place, and certainly nobody would have been paid, fed, or housed. We would also like to thank the people who made this book a reality: the series editors of the New Directions in Book History series, Shafquat Towheed and Jonathan Rose, as well as our editors at Palgrave, Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe. Obviously, this book could not have been finished without the tenacity and patience of our contributors, whom we are grateful to for their grit! We also would like to thank Lukas Lieneke, who assisted with the preparation of the final manuscript, and Ellen Barth for comments and input in the final editing stages. Each of us has also incurred individual debts in the context of that conference and this volume. Tim wants to thank his wife, Anselma, and son, Anton, for doing without him in the United States for the five days the conference took him back to Germany in the middle of a lectureship at the University of California, Davis, and subsequently their patience, and that of his daughter, Marlene, in the preparation of the manuscript, quite a few years later. He would also like to acknowledge the kindness of the English Department at UC Davis in permitting his absence from the first day of classes there. Corinna would like to thank her family, especially Timo Rühl and Petra Norrick, for their unwavering support, and Anton and Charlotte for distraction from academic activities. Frankfurt, Germany Münster, Germany

Tim Lanzendörfer Corinna Norrick-Rühl

Contents

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Introduction: The Novel as Network Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl

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Introduction: Novel Forms Tim Lanzendörfer

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The Novel’s Novelty Now Mathias Nilges

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The Cosmopolitan Value of the Multicultural Novel Kristian Shaw

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The Novel Network and the Work of Genre Tim Lanzendörfer

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Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction Christopher Pizzino

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Introduction: Novel Ideas Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl

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CONTENTS

Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Stephen Shapiro From Comic to Graphic and from Book to Novel: Sandman’s Invisible Authors and the Quest for Literariness Julia Round

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Listening to the Literary: On the Novelistic Poetics of the Podcast Patrick Gill

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The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld Narratives, Novelization, and the Contemporary Novel-Network Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer

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Introduction: Novel Commodities Corinna Norrick-Rühl

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Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive Jim Collins

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Auratic Facsimile: The Print Novel in the Age of Digital Reproduction Julia Panko

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Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/Selling the Goods Claire Squires

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Shakespeare Novelized: Hogarth, Symbolic Capital, and the Literary Market Jeremy Rosen

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CONTENTS

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Reading the Small American Novel: The Aesthetic Agency of the Short Book in the Modern Literary Marketplace Alexander Starre

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Jim Collins is professor of Film and Television at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2011). He is also the author of Architecture of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (Routledge, 1995) and Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1989), editor of HighPop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (Blackwell, 2002), and co-editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Routledge, 1993). His current book project is entitled Playlist Culture. Patrick Gill is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Mainz, Germany, where he also received his Ph.D. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (WVT, 2014) and the co-editor of Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle (Routledge, 2018). He has lectured and published on English poetry, the contemporary novel, and British and American media culture. His ongoing research is into the efficacy of literary form. Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Fellow in Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Communications at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, after having been an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany, and visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, and Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of two monographs, Books of the Dead:

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Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2018) and The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic (Schöningh, 2013), as well as editor and co-editor of several collections of essays. He has finished the monograph Speculative Historism: Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel and is at work on books on literary theory and the problem of reading in contemporary fiction. He tweets at @timlanzen. Mathias Nilges is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. He is the author of Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future (Bloomsbury, 2019), as well as editor and co-editor of collections such as Literary Materialisms (Palgrave, 2013), The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Routledge, 2015), Literature and the Global Contemporary (Palgrave, 2017), and, most recently, Periodizing the Future: William Gibson, Genre, and Cultural History (U of Iowa P, 2021). His most recent monograph is How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present (Northwestern UP, 2021). Corinna Norrick-Rühl is associate professor and Chair of Book Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany, after having been associate and assistant professor of Book Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. She is the author of panther, rotfuchs & Co (Harrasowitz, 2014), Internationaler Buchmarkt (Bramann, 2019) and Book Clubs and Book Commerce (Cambridge UP, 2020). She is Director of Publications for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Publishing Research Quarterly, Quaerendo and the recently founded International Journal of Young Adult Literature. Julia Panko is Associate Professor of English at Weber State University in Utah. Previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, her research focuses on the intersections between literary forms and media formats. She is the author of Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book, forthcoming with the University of Massachusetts Press. Her work has appeared in journals including Book History, Contemporary Literature, and the James Joyce Quarterly. Christopher Pizzino is Associate Professor of Contemporary US Literature in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, USA. He has published articles on comics and contemporary literature in an

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array of venues, including PMLA, ImageTexT , Extrapolation and ELN . His book Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature appeared in 2016 from the University of Texas Press. His current book projects are entitled Living Dead Images: A Guide to the Culture Wars and Feeling Southern Cinema. Jeremy Rosen is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (Columbia UP, 2016) and several essays on the contemporary global novel and genre fiction. Julia Round is a Principal Lecturer at Bournemouth University. Her books include Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (UP of Mississippi, 2019), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (McFarland, 2014), and the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is one of the editors of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect) and the book series Encapsulations (U of Nebraska P), and co-organizer of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (www.igncc.com). She has published numerous essays on the medium and history of comics and shares her research at www.juliaround. com. Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (Penn State UP, 2008), How to Read Marx’s Capital (Pluto, 2008), co-author (with Philip Barnard) of Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-systems Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018), and co-editor of The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (U of Michigan P, 2012). More recent co-edited collections include Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature (Dartmouth College P, 2019), World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent (Palgrave, 2019), and The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford UP, 2019). His research interests include television studies, United States cultural studies, and theory. He is a member of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), which published Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015). Kristian Shaw is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, specializing in contemporary British and American literature. He released his first AHRC-funded monograph with Palgrave in 2017

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entitled Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction. He is currently writing his second monograph entitled BrexLit (Bloomsbury, 2020)— a term he coined in 2016 to describe cultural responses to Brexit—and an edited collections on the work of Hari Kunzru and Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester UP, 2021). He has recently contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction and The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction. He serves as a reader for the C21 Literature journal and sits on the executive committee of BACLS (British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies). Claire Squires is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She is the author of Marketing Books: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007) and is co-editor with Andrew Nash and Ian R. Willison of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge UP, 2019). With Beth Driscoll, she is co-founder of the Ullapoolism movement, and co-author of Publishing Bestsellers: Buzz and the Frankfurt Book Fair (CUP, 2020) and, pseudonymously, of Blaire Squiscoll’s The Frankfurt Kabuff (Kabuff Books, 2019). Alexander Starre is assistant professor of North American culture at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute in Berlin. His research interests include American cultural history, knowledge production, media theory, as well as print culture and the history of the book. He is the author of Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (U of Iowa P, 2015) and co-editor of several essay collections, among them Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice (Winter, 2018) and The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (Palgrave, 2019). Tamer Thabet is a professor of Letters in the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Federal University of the Valleys of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri (Brazil). He has a Ph.D. in literary theory and videogames from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and has taught game studies at Brock University in Canada from 2008 to 2012. Thabet is the author of the two books Video Game Narrative and Criticism: Playing the Story (Macmillan, 2015), and Game Studies All Over the Place: Videogames and Gamer Identities (EDUEL Int., 2017).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Novel as Network Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl

What is the novel? The answer to this seemingly simple question depends, of course, on whom you ask, and what perspective they are thinking from, whether they are literary critics or book historians, media scholars, publishers, or readers. To the literary critic, the novel is a particular form, less frequently a genre (cf. McKeon 2000: 15; Bode 2011: x), one which is immediately connected to modernity itself (McKeon 2000: 16), and one whose properties are almost by definition mutable. In J. A. Cuddon’s pithy and exemplary definition, the novel is “a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction” (1998: 560). Indeed, few critics today even ask the question: Lawrence Buell does not ask what the novel is in the Dream of the Great American Novel (2014) any more than Peter Boxall does when he reflects upon the Value of the Novel (2015) (two examples we cite here without prejudice, since see also, and inter alia, Bradford 2007, Head 2008, O’Donnell 2010, Dix, Jervis, Gill and Jenner 2011, Müller 2017‚ Caserio

T. Lanzendörfer (B) Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany C. Norrick-Rühl University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_1

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2009 or in more colloquial formats Garber 2011 and Lesser 2014). For literary critics, what the novel is is less important than what it does, or what its cultural value is, how it works in and on society, and so on. That it recognizably exists, and that it is recognizable as itself, is simply taken for granted. Similarly, if you are a consumer of novels—a buyer and reader of novels—then what the novel is may also appear quite clear. It is a book you buy, whether in hardcover, paperback, or as an electronic file, and it is often helpfully self-identified—“A Novel” printed below the title of the book as a paratext, which Genette has elaborated on (1987). Presented with the “immense accumulation of commodities” (Marx 1987: 1) available in every bookshop whether brick and mortar or digital, whether selling new or used wares, it is a commodity among others, sitting on the “Fiction” shelves near cookbooks, travel guides, self-help volumes, history and non-fiction, coloring books, poetry, and so on. But like the literary critic, readers may not worry too deeply about what it is. And indeed, even if we assume that publishers care about literary definitions, it may also be that for them, what the novel is is less important than what publishers can sell as a novel (precisely because buyers and readers are not much concerned with what the novel is, either). Publishers may likely focus on which novels are bestsellers, and which might be prize material. They will certainly be worried about what sales of novels mean for their bottom lines, either financially or with regard to their cultural capital, even as they make their money precisely with those celebrity memoirs which the novel shares its commercial spaces with. And lastly though not finally, if you are not a prose reader at all—if you are a TV viewer, or a someone who prefers comics, or podcasts, or who plays videogames, you may feel yourself unwilling to commit to an idea of what the novel is at all; what the novel is, to you, may simply not be very interesting, even as the various media you consume or interact with connect themselves both formally and culturally to the novel. This also goes for the scholarship which is connected to these vastly different perspectives on the novel. We have already noted that this is true for literary scholarship; it also appears to be largely true for scholarship in publishing and book studies. While John B. Thompson’s seminal study of the publishing industry, Merchants of Culture, frequently touches upon the publishing, editing, selling, and buying of novels, it is hardly interested at all in the novel as a form; nor are Jodie Archer and Matthew Jocker in their The Bestseller Code (2016). That is, they do not consider what makes the novel a novel both from the perspective of the people

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making it and from the perspective of the people buying it. The rarer studies of novel readers likewise are less interested in novel readers as readers, specifically, of novels: neither Janice Radway’s seminal Reading the Romance (1984) nor Jim Collins’s groundbreaking Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) defines the novel, focusing instead on what people do with it. It may seem counterintuitive to begin a book about the novel today with anecdotes detailing the way nobody cares about what the novel is. But, we suggest, this is actually a crucial point of departure: what the novel actually is has taken a backseat to the various ways in which it functions as a designator of form, reading practices, commodity production, and prestige among other things. This volume aims to return critical attention to the question that these re-orientations elide, the quasi-ontological question of what the novel today actually is. So what is the novel? This volume may not conclusively answer this deceptively simple question. But we will offer what we take to be a meaningful position toward it. We will discuss why and how in everyday practice, what the novel is can be left largely open: readers, publishers, authors do not have to care too deeply about what the novel is, because it is all of the things we sketch above. The novel is a literary form and a physical commodity, a means of claiming cultural prestige and a point of reference, a source of styles and a receptacle for new technologies. The novel is many things to many people; but that does not mean it is an empty signifier, or ever elusive. Rather, as we will argue with the help of our contributors, it is seen as such because people tend to focus on the novel’s relevance to their own position in a large network of connections. It is this network of connections which, we will contend, can be most meaningfully described as what the novel “is,” and which leads us to the idea of the “novel network.” In offering a theorization and a selection of practical examples of what it means to emphasize the need to read the novel as a network of relations, we hope to contribute to the theory of the novel, by thinking it anew at a moment when more than ever before the name novel has become available in an ever-increasing number of contexts. To be sure, the novel has, for a long time now, been considered a constitutively open form (beginning with Bakhtin 1981; see also Nilges in this volume), one whose very capacity to adapt to the changes and circumstances of its day have ensured its longevity over the centuries. Such arguments have, by and large, however, focused on the novel’s capacity

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to adapt, adopting genres and styles, and seeking its place as a mediator between high-cultural and popular forms. Less often, these changes have been read as material changes; or as changes of its place in the medial landscape—these, as we will go on to discuss, have usually figured as threats to the novel, not as elements which it too adapts, adopts, and influences. Yet the present moment appears as one that most fundamentally requires such a perspective, and requires us to understand these shifts in the novel’s medial presence not as a threat, but as a constitutive part of what the novel today is. The following is but a sample of the ways the novel—as traditionally conceived—seems to come under pressure: from TV increasingly touting its narrative capacity; from the comic picking up the novel’s name in the “graphic novel” (see Pizzino 2016); from shifts in publishing toward electronic, often radically open ways of putting out fictional long-form writing (see McGurl 2016)—“writing conceived without the guardrails of the book,” as Juliet Fleming says (2016: 2); from electronic reading devices and apps making the possibility of interactive gamebooks like the 1980s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books mainstream (see Hendrix 2011; Hungerford 2016: 93–118); from digital print technology opening the way for scrapbook fiction like Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013; see also Panko in this volume); and from conglomerate publishers under economic pressure doing what Thompson calls “extreme publishing,” unable to grow authors and help create carefully crafted novels but rather focused on finding this season’s multimedia-ready plot (see Thompson 2012: 223–291); to name a few. In our perspective, these aspects of contemporary cultural production are part and parcel of what the novel is today. Such a perspective opens a way for rethinking the return of largely traditional arguments about the novel’s incipient demise in the face of technological changes: “the same anxieties crop up whenever one form of communication or expression begins to feel threatened by a newer form” (Fitzpatrick 2006: 9). The British novelist Will Self claimed in the Guardian in 2014 that “The Novel is Dead,” adding with parenthetical self-awareness: “(This time it’s for real).” He has repeated this contention elsewhere, such as at literary festivals. Self’s focus on the “literary novel” (for which see also Lanzendörfer in this volume) certainly further limits his claim. “I do not mean that narrative fiction tout court is dying—the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health,” he somewhat condescendingly concedes, but his catalog of grievances—24-hour-news channels, Quality

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TV, electronic publishing, a general cultural decline in which people cannot concentrate long enough anymore to read anything but Twitter— clearly suggests a solipsism in reading the novel’s state. Focusing on the codex form, Self’s argument fails to recognize the myriad ways in which the novel remains relevant, and promises to be so in the future, if understood in the expansive way we propose to. Self’s claim that the novel is a “form of content specifically adapted” to the physical codex (2014) is certainly as historically true as it is apocalyptic in its assumed consequences: that, on the one hand, the codex form is dying (see Gomez 2008; Striphas 2009), and that, on the other, the novel will not be able to adapt to this shift as it has adapted to numerous others before. The famous malleability of the novel-form, most emphatically stressed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), does however appear fully capable of sustaining not just the generic, but also the physical changes which it is currently undergoing. As China Miéville has noted, “you don’t radically restructure how the novel’s distributed and not have an impact on its form” (2014: 43). We would go a step further, perhaps, and suggest that you don’t change how the novel is made (written and edited, printed and published, distributed, sold, bought, and consumed) without changing what the novel is. This was true in the past, as Peter Stoicheff recently and convincingly argued (2015: 83–86), and is perhaps truer today than ever before. In what follows in this introduction, we will do two interrelated things. First, we will briefly outline the multifarious interconnections which any mention of the novel today touches upon, from film to TV to comics, to questions of production, dissemination, electronic media, reading practices, and so on. We will argue that these connections are not incidental to but rather constitutive of what the novel today is. And we suggest a reading of contemporary network theory that permits us to grasp this totality of the reach of the novel. Secondly, we will transfer this conception of the network onto our reading of the novel, and offer an idea of what it means to speak about the novel network. We conclude this introduction, as is customary, by sketching the logic of the contributions and their particular content.

The Novel as Network: Connections and Theory What work does a reference like “novel” in the terms “graphic novel” or “novel in stories” do, or the naming of a text like George Packer’s

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reportage on the state of the contemporary United States, The Unwinding (2013), as “a Great American Novel in the guise of a Great Non-Fiction Epic?” (as Douglas Kennedy blurbs on the book’s cover). At the heart of this collection is the contention that these and a host of other apparently throw-away references to the novel are not so throw-away at all, but are in fact a crucial part of what the contemporary novel “is.” The reconceptualization of the comic as the “graphic novel” (see Round in this volume) is just the most overt, well-known, and by now least contentious example of this kind of reference; other instances of such connections abound. Quality TV—or “prestige TV,” as it has been recently called, heralding the first-ever New Yorker issue dedicated to television in August 2017 (see Rothman and Overbey 2017)—makes notable use of such reference. Perhaps the most universally highly acclaimed example of Quality TV, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) has been described by its producer David Simon as “a novel for TV” (quoted in Talbot 2007). Critics have agreed that it was akin to a “60 hour-long novel” (Griffin 2007) or the “contemporary equivalent of a Dickens novel” (Mittell 2015: 323); most directly, perhaps, Kyle Bishop has recently asserted that “TV serials are novels” (in Jones 2019). Netflix’s successful political drama House of Cards (2013–2018) called its individual episodes “chapters;” so does the same service’s 1980s-set nostalgia horror series Stranger Things (2016–), suggesting these shows’ interest in having themselves understood not only as longer serial narratives, but as specifically related to the older form of the novel—or, at the very least, as asking the viewer to make this connection. Such referential use of the name novel sits alongside other medial expansions of the term: from Steve Tomasula’s 2009 “new media novel” TOC, which worked exclusively online, to Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz’s The Silent History, an app-based, interactive, and geographically bound “novel” (see Hungerford 2016). All of these forms, on the one hand, clearly profit from the lasting literary-cultural renown inherent in the idea of the novel; at the same time, they appear to reinforce the claim which Will Self has voiced: that the “literary novel” had lost its role as a “cultural capstone” in the contemporary climate, superseded by a variety of forms which have taken its mantle, and have done so with an overt claim to the prestige of the older form. Nor has it gone unrecognized that the novel may seem to be a bit staid in comparison with other media (though whether that is a useful assessment remains to be seen): one recent study undertaken by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association suggested that publishers should conceptualize

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their books like successful TV shows, to create book series and to further binge-reading (Martus and Spoerhase 2018: 9). We turn to the idea of the network to both describe these connections and to draw from them the beginnings of a theory of the novel for the contemporary moment in part because, coming from different academic fields that draw on the problem of the novel—book studies and literary studies—our own practices already take into view very different perspectives on what the novel is and how it works in different contexts. This is why we would like to suggest that the term “novel” is best perceived as a node in the novel network of actors, objects, ideas, and markets. Using the term novel is less apt to designate anything particularly formal or prestigious about the comic, the TV series, or the multimedia experience than it does its connectivity as such, its readiness to be read in connection with the other tendrils which the name novel sends out. These tendrils are not limited to the quasi-formal. They include publishers packaging short story collections as novels (see Norrick-Rühl 2018); intermedial storytelling which links properties across television, film, video game, and prose fiction; and even such commodities as blank notebooks, e-reader covers, or tote bags proudly masquerading as a novel in codex form. Our understanding of what is shifting in the book industry and within book culture cannot be limited to the novel’s form and its use as a reference— which would be the traditional domain of literary studies. The question of what the novel is is bound up in the material conditions of production, distribution, reception, and reading. These are, traditionally, the cornerstones of book history and publishing studies scholarship (see Noorda and Marsden 2019), and we argue that these perspectives must be drawn upon to understand the contemporary novel network. What is more, they should be understood as necessarily interrelating with the traditional questions of literary studies. Peter Stoicheff, focusing on the materiality and production of the novel, explains that originally, the novel may have been little more than an “inexpensive product … of mechanical reproduction”: “the low production costs coupled with mass production capabilities opened a new market for attention-grabbing storytelling over artistic depth.” Or maybe, he concedes, the interconnection between the material conditions and the novel’s form were vice versa: “the wide currency of the novel, enabled by its technologized printing press assembly line, immersed more of the human imagination in the world of the book, opening the way for the explosion of novelistic experimentation and sophistication in the late nineteenth century”

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(Stoicheff 2015: 86). Either way, it is safe to say that the network of actors involved in the production, distribution, reception, and reading of book products labeled as novels is highly influential in our understanding of what the novel is and might be in the future. Claire Squires has convincingly argued that “material conditions and acts of marketing profoundly determine the production, reception and interpretation of literature” (2009: 16). More recently, Caroline Koegler has discussed the entanglement of postcolonial writers, critics, and readers through ‘brand acts’ within a ‘performative market’ (2018). In different ways, and using different conceptual metaphors, these studies complement our interest in the novel as network. Some examples for networked aspects of the production process are the “packaging” of the literary text with descriptors (sequel, prequel, novella, etc.; see Genette 1987), blurbs by other authors or citing important media outlets—or pointing toward other media versions with film stills on the cover and the indication “now a major motion picture.” Decisions regarding the materiality of the novel— whether bound in hardback, trade paperback or mass-market paperback, or all of the above, also tie into the distribution—the materiality defines the sales channels, or vice versa. Furthermore, regarding distribution understood most broadly, the network includes actors such as booksellers, librarians, and the authors themselves, reading and presenting their work on book tours and at literary festivals. And finally, when we look at the reception processes, the novel network becomes nearly impossible to reign in. Even before Web 2.0, the reception was hard to measure, encompassing everything from the feuilleton’s reviews to the nominations for literary awards. But now, within the novel network, the number of literary awards has skyrocketed. Actors determining novels’ fates can be professional readers or laypersons, reviewing books online in vlogs, blogs, or on sales websites, or discussing their reading experiences with other readers around the globe. A “new literary middlebrow is defining the future of reading” (Driscoll 2014: 201)—and, we would argue, what the novel is. Reading as a process is becoming ever more complex due to the changing forms that texts can take on. Anouk Lang warns us not to think of this as a strict “before” and “after,” but rather as a transition from analog reception processes to a mixture of analog and digital reception processes: “The resulting hybrid practices rarely present an entirely new formation but rather create a meshing of old and new technologies and established and emergent modes of interaction” (Lang 2012: 4). Either way, readers are a central node in the novel network. The internet

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and e-reading offer new forms of shared reading. The relatively new term social reading points toward “the sociality of an increasingly networked world of readers” (Lang 2012: 2). What all this points to is the way the novel is bound up—as a narrative form, as a material form, as a concept, and as a commodity—in a host of contexts, none of which by themselves exhaust what the novel “is,” and which, in academic engagement, are often separated out unduly. It is against this tendency—itself inevitably a consequence of disciplinary atomization, but also of the sheer mass of data that needs to be analyzed in each of these separate spheres of the novel’s activity—that we set this volume, collating a more holistic view of the complex state of the contemporary novel. We have adopted the term “novel network” for this new state of the novel: instead of seeing the novel as a monolithic if culturally important and efficacious form, we propose to see it as always already a set of interrelations, connections, and references. But how is the novel like a network? This is ultimately less a point about “novels”—any individual novel, any individual text sold as a novel, whether a codex, or ebook, or audiobook. These remain largely untouched by this intervention (that is, novels are still novels—we do not propose to do away with the label). It is a point about the concept of “the novel,” which we would like to suggest today cannot but be understood in the vast network of relationships and constraints within which each individual novel finds its place. It may be helpful to break this point down to a few more manageable claims. We claim that when a text such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen becomes prominent and canonized as a graphic novel, this in itself impacts “the novel”—not just the idea of the literariness of comics (cf. Hoberek 2014). We claim that when a producer such as David Simon can say of their TV series that it is a “novel for television” (Simon 2004: 28), this in itself impacts “the novel” as much as it makes a claim about the structure of The Wire. We claim, with Mark McGurl‚ that the “age of Amazon” has changed “the logic of contemporary fiction as such” (2016: 447)—or certainly the logic of the novel. We claim, importantly, that all of these issues hold at the same time, and that we must understand how each of these processes interferes with the others in the production, distribution, and reception of what we too blithely call the novel. Such a claim brings us to the question of theory and method. Most importantly, we hold that any investigation of the novel network must be interdisciplinary: it must acknowledge that for all the usefulness of

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the individual disciplines’ engagement with the novel, it will require a conversation between literary scholars investigating the consequences and meaning of the formal and generic changes it undergoes, media scholars suggesting its importance for their chosen forms of narrative, and scholars in publishing and book studies looking at the changes to the novel’s materiality and production, in order to tease out the extent and meaning of the networked relations of the novel in the contemporary. The contributors to this volume run this gamut, and each of them, in bringing their disciplinary perspective to bear, suggests already the multifarious linkages which the novel brings with it. We also propose to syncretize these perspectives by recourse to the metaphor of the “network.” The idea of the network is one with a lot of critical currency today, largely through the increasing attention paid by academics outside of science studies to the ideas of French sociologist Bruno Latour (2005). Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and its somewhat cutesy acronym, ANT, has been adopted in a variety of ways in literary studies recently, from Franco Moretti’s plotting of networks of intrafictional relationships (2011) to Rita Felski’s call to make ANT central to a literary studies less invested in critique, since it “directs our attention to the many actors with which literature is entangled and the specifics of their interaction” (2015: 189), to Caroline Levine’s call to understand networks as forms which “link people and objects” (2015: 21) and Amy Hungerford’s recent effort to employ a version of this idea to trace “the networks through which contemporary literature is made” (2016: 1). The network approach, as one recent attempt to operationalize it for cultural and literary studies has noted, offers us the opportunity to “shift in critical perspective towards an understanding of cultural practice in terms of complexity, relationality, and processuality” (Reichert et al. 2015: 12). And more concretely with an eye toward the objects that we also study below, Heike Schaefer and Alexander Starre have recently explained that they “understand media as networks of interconnected technologies, institutions, and practices that are both emerging from and contributing to sociocultural and economic processes” (2019: 18). Such recognition of the concept’s purchase in criticism should not be construed, however, as

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our adoption of everything that it stands for. Rather, we wish to recognize the suggestiveness of the concept, without necessarily purchasing it wholesale.1 If actor-network theory in Latour’s original estimation is concerned with “how the social is generated” (2005: 30), then we might here be said to be concerned with how “the novel is generated” by offering readings of potential actors and their interconnections. The network concept allows us to understand both the fluidity of the idea of the novel as well as to decenter arguments about causality in favor of arguments about influence, about the way different actors in the novel network “make others do things” (107). We adopt and adapt this conception of the personal and material interactions of human and non-human actors in which, in Latour’s initial conception, the social gets formed, to the novel with some trepidation. We do so because in the strictest sense, Latourian network theory, with its insistence on the “tracing of associations” (5) not once, but over and over, resists the theorization of a particular fixed system: a network is not made of nylon thread, words or any durable substance but is the trace left behind by some moving agent. You can hang your fish nets to dry, but you can’t hang an actor-network: it has to be traced anew by the passage of another vehicle, another circulating entity. (132)

In proposing a particular novel network, then, we must appear to unduly reify. But the obverse is, of course, also a problem: in Amy Hungerford’s phrasing, “each account of making serves as a rabbit hole into a broader network of makers, objects, and acts” (2016: 2, original emphasis). Each of the accounts of the novel network we offer below thus appears to lead us down to a wonderland of never-ending connections. In what follows, we would like to attempt to split the difference. With a nod to Latour, in our reading of the novel as novel network, the novel becomes not so much a thing but a concept, a “circulating entity” (2005: 128) which becomes the “novel” only in its relationships with actors in the novel network. “Actor-Network Theory … [is] a productive theoretical approach to understanding media, its uses and the processes 1 The network is also by no means the only viable metaphor to describe the interrelation between different agents in the process of producing literature. Jeremy Rosen suggests, for instance, the need to understand what he dubs the “ecology of neoliberal publishing” in order to “discover a series of local changes in the ways literature gets produced today” (2020).

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of mediation which constitute networks” (Spöhrer 2017: xv), but it is certainly incumbent upon us to make its application clear. Conceiving the novel as network allows us to draw attention to the multiplicity of actors which are involved in the way the novel must be understood today. It means to pay attention to the connections which exist between the various actors that participate in shaping it, without attributing to any one of them a uniquely casual position. It means to pay attention to the ways in which any particular novel comes into being comes to be what it is. If the network is “the trace left behind by some moving agent,” the impossible challenge is not to account for the making of the novel, but for the making of each and every one of the tens of thousands of novels made every year (see Childress 2018 for an exhaustive account of the making of one novel in the network). At the same time, however, it challenges us to think about the substrate in which these agents leave traces, impacted by conscious and unconscious actors who are “associated in such a way that they make others do things” (107). As Latour has it, “in order to trace an actor-network, what we have to do is to add to the many traces left by the social fluid through which the traces are rendered again present, provided something happens in it” (2005: 133). Our reason for concretizing our own medium is that the “social” fluid postulated by Latour is too broad for our more limited purposes, while we cannot do without identifying the “fluid” in which we believe the novel moves. Similarly, we follow Latour in proposing that a good account of the novel is one where “all the actors do something and don’t just sit there” (128): that is to say, one where no node in the network just passively passes the novel through itself. What we sketch out further below as the novel network is the sum of many of the parts which we, and our contributors, have managed to think of as actors in Latour’s sense— without any claim to exhaustiveness. The term “novel” here becomes a crucial nexus, a hub or a hinge in a number of otherwise discreet networks (and the echoes of Hungerford’s ever-expanding networks are palpable here): fiction publishing, whose main actors, obviously, attend to more than just the novel; literary authorship, whose actors engage with text first and foremost, but also with other authors, with their editors, critics, and readers; the media environment, including media conglomerates (and their counterparts, independent publishers, startups, and other small presses, which are at the heart of the “Contemporary Small Press Project,” initiated by Georgina Colby and Leigh Wilson and discussed in the volume The Contemporary Small Press, which is also published in

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this series), multimedia companies, multimedia publishing outputs, and of course journalists; the prize landscape, which addresses itself to an object it calls the novel, even as it tends to reify that object in peculiar ways. The multitude of actors involved in creating, disseminating, and reading the novel (in the broadest sense) can be traced with the help of Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires’s reconceptualization of Robert Darnton’s communications circuit. In their digital publishing communications circuit, they show how disruption, inter- and remediation and new formats have broken apart Darnton’s (admittedly rather simple and perhaps too straightforward) circuit, feeding into what looks like a network-based model (2013). In fact, another, earlier reworking of Darnton’s circuit by Nicolas Barker and Thomas R. Adams already hinted toward a more networked understanding of the processes and interactions in the book trade, proposing “five events in the life of a book—publishing, manufacturing, distribution, reception and survival— whose sequence constitutes a system of communication and can in turn precipitate other cycles” (Adams and Barker 1993). Conceiving of the novel as a “novel network” draws attention to the multiplicity of actors which are involved in the way the novel must be understood today, to the ways in which any particular novel comes to be, and to the reach the idea of the novel has. To understand the novel within a novel network is to decenter any one particular aspect of the novel—usually the novelas-form (Buell 2014; Schmidt 2014; Boxall 2015)—and to understand it instead as a set of relationships between actors: human actors, such as readers, authors, and editors, but also non-human actors such as publishing houses, the physical reality of the book, and indeed even ideas such as form, genre, prestige, value, and others. What unites these actors is their connection to the novel, and the novel’s connection to them. In fact, we postulate that the novel network is, in fact, a network-ofnetworks (as indeed almost anything is). Of course, “like a node in a network, no literary text exists in isolation” (Schaefer 2015: 141); yet the range of the networks of the novel can be read in different ways. In Heike Schaefer’s reading, it comes to the fore as it were formally: “the cultural significance of the novel [can be located] in the integrative function of its potentially complex structure” (140). But that may be too limiting yet. Rather more expansively, Caroline Levine has recently argued for us to pay “careful attention to the multiplicity of networks and especially to their differences” (2015: 114), and we take this injunction seriously. As this introduction will outline, and the essays that follow it will show, the

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novel network is perhaps best understood as sets of overlapping networks, which cluster around the central node of the novel as such, and perhaps just the very term, “novel.” We might conceive of these networks as essentially three states of matter for the novel: as the Novel Form, it is fluid, adopting genres, modes, and design features from other media, worked on by more general shifts in the culture; as the Novel Idea, as a point of reference for other media, it is gas-like, amorphous, and at times invisible, but, where present, frequently essential like oxygen; and finally, as the Novel Commodity, it is a solid, a bound book, use value or item of exchange, produced, distributed, and consumed not exactly but almost like any other commodity. In the interconnections between these states, it again touches on everything else: even an apparently prestige-driven reference like “graphic novel” thus causes things to be done elsewhere, to link agents across the medial divide. Such an approach, as Levine notes, is not without consequences that complicate the whole notion of appraising a subject. “We cannot ever apprehend the totality of the networks that organize us,” Levine writes (2015: 114): that is, we can only gesture toward the totality of the network-of-networks that is the novel. In that sense, we can only ever gesture toward the way the novel network’s connections exceed our sense of them. When we speak of how networks constitute what “the novel” is, we cannot refrain from appearing to reify, even as we seek to destabilize, and we cannot refrain from appearing to center what we actually hope to decenter: to us, “the novel” is as much the novelization of the video game as it is the latest Don DeLillo; what and how it is as much constituted by the choices of form which authors undertake as by the various actors that participate in the making of what would have been novellas into novels, genre fiction into literary fiction, or comics in graphic novels; and how the idea of the novel shifts our thinking about the comic as relevant as well as how the influence of comics shifts the ways in which we understand the novel.

The Essays in This Collection The setup of this collection pays heed to our injunction to read both the individual case and the network of connections. Each of the subsequent sections—Novel Forms, Novel Ideas, and Novel Commodities—is preceded by a brief critical opening laying out the stakes in these separate, but connected parts of the novel network; and within, the articles seek to draw out the ways in which their own thinking about the novel

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connects to the greater network of relations which is spun around the name of novel. The first section, Novel Forms, contains five essays which engage with the question of the contemporary novel’s form. We begin with the novel’s form as the locus classicus for discussions of what the novel is, but as the essays go on to show, even such traditional understandings of the novel’s form quickly come to be exceeded by the contemporary linkages of the novel’s network. In the first essay of the collection, Mathias Nilges turns to the question of what the constitutional quality of the novel— its “novelness,” its presentation of the new of given historical moments aesthetically—is today, how the contemporary novel traces the “waxing and waning of different conceptions of novelty,” as he has it. Nilges suggests that close attention to the way this currently works allows us to trace the novel’s departure from postmodernism and thus to identify it as a form peculiarly suited to historicize the present. Kristian Shaw follows this essay by thinking about the value of the contemporary “global” novel, and the cosmopolitan aspirations encoded in it. Shaw understands the prevalence of this form of novelistic writing as bound in a complex network of universal claims and a somewhat contradictory appeal to a specifically Anglophone market, which make it interesting to publishers but produces a danger of potential blandness as a consequence of needing to be broadly readable across boundaries. Drawing upon a wide range of Anglophone examples, from Chimamanda Adiche and Teju Cole to Zadie Smith and Gautam Malkani, Shaw argues that even in the face of challenges from other forms of cultural narrative, the novel retains what he terms “cosmopolitan value”: it continues to respond to the changes of the twenty-first century and remains a central transmitter of cultural narratives even in the fraught contexts in which it gets published. In the third essay of the section, Tim Lanzendörfer discusses the contemporary move toward genre-fictional writing in the literary novel, presenting this generic turn as standing at the tail end of a history in which narrative realism—and resistance to taking genre seriously as a mode—was determinative of the idea of the literary as such. He argues that the turn to genre fiction signals the possibility of what, with recourse to theorizations by Stephen Shapiro, he calls a realignment of class relations in fiction, one arguably ratified by the constellation of prizes won by Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Lanzendörfer suggests that we need to understand the network of influences under which the genre turn becomes visible as broader than hitherto sketched, and as more

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important. Christopher Pizzino’s essay then discusses the question of how the contemporary novel mediates comics. Reading three notable examples of the contemporary literary novel’s engagement with the comics tradition—Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—Pizzino suggests that each of these novels traces one way of dealing with comics’ persistent problem of status. What his essay reveals is that novelists with strong personal and vocational commitments to comics, such as Chabon, can still approach the medium with condescension in their role as novelists, and that the problem of status is not necessarily about intention or content, but rather about form. Contemporary U.S. fiction now possesses legitimacy as, in the Lukáscian sense, a formal property—of which it can only divest itself through radical labor of the kind Díaz’s novel exemplifies. This final essay also begins the turn to the question of what the novel’s power is as an idea, which we explore at greater length in the second section of the collection: Novel Ideas. What happens, the essays in this section ask, when other forms of fiction (or non-fiction) take explicit or implicit recourse to the novel? The novel takes on different valences as a point of reference for other cultural forms such as the “graphic novel,” for contemporary Quality TV, and indeed for media as far removed from print as the podcast, a source of both ready-made prestige as well as one location of transmedial modes of storytelling. In the first essay of the section, Stephen Shapiro suggests that recent comics have taken over the cultural place of the novel in presenting the possibility of new class and cultural alliances in what he calls intersectionality, also present in some versions of contemporary television. He suggests the importance of looking at the way comics work specifically against the work the novel has been often argued to work in previous historical moments. Likewise engaging with the comics medium, but shifting attention toward the formal and publishing problematics, Julia Round approaches the question of the novel’s influence on the aesthetics of comics and their canonization in her discussion of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Approaching the comic through the lens of Michel Foucault’s author function, Round argues that whereas the author remains the most important “authorizing” element of the literary novel, the comic’s multiplicity of “authors” suggests one way in which a simple adoption of novelistic categories fails to address the comic properly. Patrick Gill discusses the poetic debts the contemporary podcast, in both its fictional and nonfictional versions,

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appears to incur to the novel, both as simple intertext as well as a formal point of departure. Drawing upon a range of contemporary podcasts, Gill discusses a question that sits at the heart of the network idea, namely, whether the repeated references to the novel in podcast marketing and production bespeak genuine proximity or merely an instrumental search for cultural cachet. Finally, the section concludes with Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer’s essay which discusses the question of the novel’s role in the multimedial narrative universe of videogame franchises. The essay examines the novelization of video games as a dual process in which video games become increasingly “novelistic” (in Bakhtinian terms) even as they get turned into narrative fiction as traditional novels. This seems to be a dual movement which sets into relief the importance of the novel in terms of both storytelling and the production contexts in which it functions: as a cheaply produced narrative form, as a means by which storytelling may be performed in support of what is ostensibly the main narrative producer, the video game itself. In the final section of the book, Novel Commodities, our contributors trace the tendrils of the novel network as they shape the products they reach. In the first essay, Jim Collins starts out the section with a chapter which interweaves the marketing potential of e-readers’ portability within contemporary literary culture, between the book as object and the physical or digital library as an archive, drawing on Umberto Eco, Bruno Latour, and Walter Benjamin. Following on from Collins, Julia Panko also takes Walter Benjamin’s critique of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction into account, offering a close analysis of possibilities for print novels in the age of digital reproduction with Abrams’ and Dorst’s S., but also integrating observations on newer novelistic forms like podcasts. The last chapter is concerned with the day-to-day work of editors and publishers. Claire Squires analyzes the results of interviews with novel editors, helping us understand how novels are chosen for the market and reach their audience, from the author’s manuscript to the finished product. Following on from Squires, Jeremy Rosen discusses the fully commercialized production of Shakespeare novelizations by renowned literary authors. Rosen argues that the series exemplifies two of the most important results of the consolidation of the global publishing industry. On the one hand, they reflect a desire to capitalize on the availability of superstar “house” authors, which can now be commissioned to write even—ostensibly “autonomous”—literary novels. On the other,

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they highlight the way these publishers, in the quest for marketplace reliability, seek to profit both from the established appeal of the classics as well as the similarly apparent appeal of the various forms that tie themselves to these classics. In conclusion, Alexander Starre analyzes the recent trend toward shorter fiction and the ways in which publishers appear to consciously place such shorter fiction—novels of only about 120 pages or so which would appear to be difficult to commercialize, especially in expensive hard cover—as particularly valuable literary commodities. Starre suggests that the commodity of the small book aligns the dual discourses of aesthetics and economics in such a way that material shortcomings (few pages, little content) are transformed into markers of artistic merit to be appreciated by literary connoisseurs. Together, the thirteen essays collected here offer a first foray into understanding, tracing, and interpreting the connections of the novel network as it constitutes the totality of the contemporary novel. Many more tendrils appear invitingly open to explore for how their nodes shape the novel, and are in turn shaped by them.

References Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker. 1993. A New Model for the Study of the Book. In A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker, 5–43. London: British Library. Archer, Jodie, and Matthew L. Jockers. 2016. The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel. New York: Macmillan. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bode, Christoph. 2011. The Novel: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2014. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caserio, Robert L. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Childress, Clayton. 2018. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Colby, Georgina, Kaja Marzweska, and Leigh Wilson (eds.). 2020. The Contemporary Small Press. Cham: Palgrave. Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Cuddon, J. A. 1998. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin. Driscoll, Beth. 2014. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. Houndsmills: Palgrave. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2006. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Fleming, Juliet. 2016. Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garber, Marjorie. 2011. The Use and Abuse of Literature. New York: Anchor Books. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gomez, Jeff. 2008. Print Is Dead: Books in our Digital Age. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Griffin, Nick. 2007. Inside HBO’s The Wire. CreativeCOW.net. https://library. creativecow.net/articles/griffin_nick/hbo_the_wire.php. Accessed 30 March 2020. Hendrix, Jenny. 2011. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and the Digital Gamebook. The New Yorker, January 31. http://www.newyorker.com/books/ page-turner/choose-your-own-adventure-and-the-digital-gamebook. Accessed 31 March 2020. Hoberek, Andrew. 2014. Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hungerford, Amy. 2016. Making Literature Now. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jones, Valerie. 2019. TV Series May Just Be the New Books. Deseret News, October 21. https://www.deseret.com/entertainment/2019/10/21/208 97751/netflix-hulu-hbo-tv-goldfinch-lemony-snicket-handmaids-tale-gameof-thrones. Accessed 27 March 2020. Koegler, Caroline. 2018. Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Lang, Anouk. 2012. Introduction: Transforming Reading. In From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Anouk Lang, 1–21. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lesser, Wendy. 2014. Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Martus, Steffen, and Carlos Spoerhase. 2018. Gelesene Literatur in der Gegenwart. In Gelesene Literatur: Populäre Lektüre im Medienmandel, ed. Steffen Martus and Carlos Spoerhase, special issue Text+Kritik: 7–17. Marx, Karl. 1987. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In MarxEngels Collected Works 29: Marx, 1857–1861, 257–419. London: Lawrence and Wishart. McGurl, Mark. 2016. Everything and Less. Fiction in the Age of Amazon. Modern Language Quarterly 77 (3): 447–471. McKeon, Michael. 2000. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Miéville, China. 2014. The Autonovelator. In The 21st-Century Novel: Notes from the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, ed. Jonathan Bastable and Hannah McGill, 40–46. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Noorda, Rachel, and Stevie Marsden. 2019. Twenty-First Century Book Studies: The State of the Discipline. Book History 22: 370–397. Norrick-Rühl, Corinna. 2018. Short Story Collections (and Cycles) in the British Literary Marketplace. In Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle, ed. Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger, 45–67. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ray Murray, Padmini, and Claire Squires. 2013. The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit. Book 2.0 3 (1): 3–23. Reichert, Ulfried, Heike Schaefer, and Regina Schober. 2015. Introduction: Network Theory and American Studies. In Network Theory and American Studies, ed. Ulfried Reichert, Heike Schaefer, and Regina Schober, special issue Amerikastudien/American Studies 60 (1): 11–15. Rosen, Jeremy. 2020. Introduction to Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing. In Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing, ed. Jeremy Rosen, special cluster of Post45: Contemporaries. http://post45.org/2020/04/introduction-to-eco logies-of-neoliberal-publishing/. Accessed 8 April 2020. Rothman, Joshua, and Erin Overbey. 2017. How TV Became Art. The New Yorker, August 28. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/howtv-became-art. Accessed 31 March 2020. Schaefer, Heike. 2015. The Novel as “the Most Complex Artifact of Networking”: The Relevance of Network Theory for the Study of Transcultural Fiction. In Network Theory and American Studies, ed. Ulfried Reichert, Heike Schaefer, and Regina Schober, special issue Amerikastudien/American Studies 60 (1): 139–156.

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———, and Alexander Starre. 2019. The Printed Book, Contemporary Media Culture, and American Studies. In The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor, ed. Heike Schaefer and Alexander Starre, 3–28. Cham: Palgrave. Schmidt, Michael. 2014. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Simon, David. 2004. Introduction. In The Wire: Truth Be Told, ed. Rafael Alvarez, 2–34. New York: Gallery. Spöhrer, Markus. 2017. Preface. In Applying the Actor-Network Theory in Media Studies, ed. Markus Spöhrer and Beate Ochsner, xiv–xxv. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Stoicheff, Peter. 2015. Materials and Meanings. In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam, 73–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Striphas, Ted. 2009. The Late Age of Print: Every Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Squires, Claire. 2009. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Talbot, Margaret. 2007. Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind “The Wire.” The New Yorker, 22 October. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/ 22/stealing-life. Accessed 31 March 2020. Thompson, John B. 2012. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity.

CHAPTER 2

Introduction: Novel Forms Tim Lanzendörfer

The first section of this book investigates versions of what we call Novel Forms, and this may easily look like a deeply hidebound gambit. For literary studies scholars, the traditional approach to understanding the novel has been to attempt to understand it as a genre, and specifically to understand the formal and thematic features that make it distinct. Here “genre” is the name for the greater systems of moderately distinct forms of literary production from which the novel needed to be distinguished at the time of its genesis, most importantly poetry and drama (in the contemporary moment, “genre” is more usually understood as a market category). And even if the time of the novel’s genesis, and its first examples, vary between literary historians, histories of the novel combine this attention to formal and thematic differentiation with an attempt to historicize them: to explain, that is, how the arrival of the genre of the novel is related, variously, to modernity as such, or at least elements of it: early capitalism, nascent individualism, a widely shared sense of eponymous “newness” (for general histories of the early novel, see McKeon 2002; Watt 2000).

T. Lanzendörfer (B) Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_2

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The section title Novel Forms plays with this lasting sense of the novel’s newness. The section addresses itself at once to the forms of the novel in the contemporary, and the newness of those forms; to the way in which the novel form itself works, and the question what about the novel’s contemporary forms is new, and important, for the constitution of the novel as a whole. In this connection, and for the contemporary novel, the traditional distinctions against drama and poetry are of less import, of course. The chief question, as the essays we collect below contend in concert, involves the problems of generic and medial relations, of the network woven in the contemporary novel itself, between exponents of differently valued textual production, and between it and medial forms that are connected to it tenuously. The first of these problems is the problem of genre. Genre in the contemporary is a possibly more complicated term than it was earlier: today, by and large, when we speak of the novel and genre, we speak of the relationship between an ostensibly generic novel form—which insists on being properly set off, really, only against the traditional grand genres of literature—and the narrower genres of novels, the commercial genres—fantasy, romance, thriller, horror, science fiction. In such juxtapositions, the novel is usually understood to be the realist novel specifically (and, when those things were still current, forms of the experimental novel), whose pride of place in the literary canon has remained steady throughout the last century or so. The second problem is the problem of the novel’s influence on, and its susceptibility to influence from, other medial forms, the way in which it draws on, is drawn on, resists, is resisted by, and otherwise relates to these forms—in the examples below, the comic and the video game. Our contributors in the second section, Novel Ideas, focus more on the way in which the novel influences those media; here, the focus is, for practical rather than theoretical reasons, on the way the novel draws from them. What emerges from the discussion of the two problems is, we hope, a clearer idea of how the novel’s contemporary form is continuously in movement, in exchange with easily recognizable “others” as well as in constant flux within itself. This section of The Novel as Network thus, on the one hand, takes in the contemporary novel’s many different forms, and seeks to relate them to the larger systems in which the novel operates. As such, it pays careful attention to the novel’s form: the essays collected here strive to historicize the novel’s contemporary form, to trace the novel’s formal and thematic connections to other, very contemporary media, to situate it in

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the larger cosmos in which it operates both socially and medially. We want this collection to begin with this element of the novel’s network not to privilege again the idea of the novel as a particular narrative form, but rather to show how the attention to form can inevitably lead to the larger network of the novel. On the other hand, then, it also seeks to draw on more expansive versions of what form means in the first place: to suggest that the form of the novel, which is essentially a way of saying “what the novel is,” goes beyond formalist questions of textual constitution and requires us to understand the novel’s broader network. As always, we understand these issues to be fundamentally interconnected: shifts in the form of the novel, shifts in what novels do today, are necessarily related to the way it relates outside of pure literary form. Form’s reach, of course, has long been held to extend beyond the text, most notably in Marxist criticism, which argues that form is a way to read the ruling ideologies of a text’s times, whether in Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” (1977: 128–135), Fredric Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious or in later elaborations. Outside of Marxist criticism, Dorothy Hale’s suggestion that the novel’s form instantiates the social, understood by her narrowly to mean interaction between human subjects (1998: 14) is argued by her to be a bridge between Marxist and a purely formalist attention to how the literary text works. Most recently, Caroline Levine has suggested that form should be understood to be “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (2015: 3), whether literary or not, thus allowing her to understand the relationships between things that seem quite distant—say, class and narrative resolution—as sufficiently connected to warrant their (and many other forms besides) being read together. For some of these versions of relating the social, wider world to the form of the novel, historicization is key; as Fredric Jameson famously put it in the first line of The Political Unconscious: “Always historicize!” (2002: ix). Historicization is the effort to understand the novel as what Frederick Beiser calls a “product of history, i.e. the result of historical events or processes” (2016: 44), itself firmly embedded in a social totality which is inevitably shaped by history. Historicization is vital to our understanding both of the novel’s form and the novel’s social value, but it does not exhaust—at least not immediately—the work of the novel, and the work on the novel. Vilashini Cooppan notes, in an exemplary historicizing move, that in “the current moment of dystopian fiction’s resurgence … it is hard not to concede the degree to which novelistic form provides

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a shorthand not only for the individuals created by a particular social regime but also for the regimes of self and society per se” (2018: 38): here, the form of the novel—dystopia—becomes mappable onto different levels of the social, from the individual to the controlling structures to totality itself. There is no need to quibble with this argument—but there is room to expand it: to attempt to understand how the novel does this in practice, and how it does so in a network of relations with other art forms, commercial and not, that are all similarly historicizable. Especially historicizations which insist on mapping directly from social totality onto literature may be at least tempered by such a move, not so much in order to deny historicity, but in order to put a set of intermediate steps into clearer view. These steps may suggest the workings of historical forces, the push and pull of contingent operations within the cultural field—may suggest the specific ways in which the novel is embedded in the world, and the pathways by which changes registers in it. The essays which we have put into this section of this collection together seek to illuminate some of these myriad pathways, and I want to conclude this introduction by tracing one of them. When Mathias Nilges explores what he calls the “the novel’s novelty now,” he traces the very constitutive feature of the novel, its eponymous newness, as a contemporary problem that is very much in need of historicization, and thus historicized, reveals to us something about the state of the idea of novelty as such. Nilges’s essay insists on the importance of reading the form of the novel as meaningful, even as it already recognizes the tendrils the question of “newness” sends out into production and publication contexts. Kristian Shaw picks up on these production contexts in his discussion of one of the most notable forms of the contemporary novel, the multicultural novel. Shaw suggests the difficult position of multiethnic fiction between form—as a recognizable subset of novels concerned both thematically and formally, as realist novels, with what must appear to be a particularly important contemporary concern—and their marketing and publication. Here, too, “newness” plays a major role: shifting casts of authors are presented as worthy successors of one another in efforts to retain readerships initially attracted to the writing of one author for a new voice. In lieu of formal innovation as a draw, here publishers drive marketing and publication efforts on the basis of identifiable author-figures positionable as the next new thing, with scant attention to the way their actual treatment of materials, novelistic approaches, or indeed ethical outlooks on their ostensibly shared subject, multiculturalism, differs. Tim Lanzendörfer’s

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essay on genre also picks up the question of what the valence of the new is. For Lanzendörfer, the often-referenced generic turn of the contemporary novel, the increasing prevalence of fantasy, science fiction, crime fiction, and other genre fiction motifs and forms, is insufficiently understood when it is understood only in the context of a formal renewal of the novel, as an avant-garde progressiveness seeking one, but essentially any, means to renew the formal expressiveness of the literary novel. Instead, what is new in the genre turn, Lanzendörfer suggests, is that it establishes readerly alliances between groups of readers that might otherwise remain distinct: popular fiction and literary fiction consumers, especially. Lanzendörfer identifies in the prize regime that validates some of these fictions in different registers by no means coincidental recognition of the possibility of such alliances, and suggests that we may consider this a sign that far from being even moderately separate from larger societal structures of value, the prize economy is in fact bound up with the larger societal structures of its day. The chapter returns to a historicizing mode, but here with greater attention to the way many of the elements of the novel’s form and development in the contemporary may be historicized together and separately. Finally, Christopher Pizzino’s essay returns more directly to form, but does so with an important twist, tracing the reaction of the literary novel to the emergence of what is not exactly a new form— comics—but a newly forceful one. Pizzino traces the reaction to comics as a cultural force in three authors’ literary texts, understanding them as variously reacting to the idea of comics as a cultural product. Reading Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Junot Díaz, Pizzino understands them as three different responses to the formidable question of the relative value of novel and comic. While Lethem, and strikingly, also Chabon insist on retaining the greater cultural legitimacy of the novel, Pizzino sees Díaz as breaking with the structures of legitimacy, and as doing so very much through the formal means of the novel. The “new” form of the comic here emerges as “newly” on the same level as the novel—perhaps, tongue in cheek now, meaningfully claiming the title of graphic “novel.” This is one through line for this section: others no doubt exist that even the editors did not anticipate. Form is important for all of them— but form will remain important throughout this book, largely because it is as difficult to talk about the novel without talking about its form as it is to do so without talking about its relation to other media or the publishing industry. And so perhaps I should conclude by looking ahead at the next section. There, Stephen Shapiro opens our shared look

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at Novel Ideas, where the novel is a chief referent and touchstone for other medial forms, by reading a comic. Cursorily, this might seem little different from Pizzino’s work; and this fact may set out the stakes of this collection a little more clearly. Shapiro’s chapter differs from Pizzino’s in perspective, coming at the problem of comics’ relation to the novel from the angle of the comic; and it sets out how little the comic appears to require the novel, even as it appears to supersede it in its role as what he calls a dominant cultural form. There is reason, then, for our choice to place Shapiro in a different section—but more reason to point out that these sections should not be understood to have strong boundaries. In fact, the remit of the entire book is to highlight the deep interconnection between all the aspects of the novel; and if justifiable delineations can be made, the chapters collected here could also be rearranged to speak to one another differently. That is, in a nutshell, the central idea behind the novel network.

References Beiser, Frederick. 2016. Historicization and Historicism: Some Nineteenth Century Perspectives. In Historisierung: Begriff-Geschichte-Praxisfelder, ed. Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel, 42–54. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Cooppan, Vilashini. 2018. The Novel as Genre. In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson, 23–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hale, Dorothy. 1998. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2002. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Abingdon: Routledge. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McKeon, Michael. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watt, Ian. 2000. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe. London: Pimlico. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Novel’s Novelty Now Mathias Nilges

“The word Novel in all languages signifies something new,” writes Clara Reeve in 1785 (1970, 110). This suggestion, taken from Reeve’s The Progress of Romance, is one of the most frequently mobilized lines in inquiries into the status of the concepts of the new and novelty in the history of the novel, one that also traces the relationship between the novel and novelty in relation to the novel’s “rise” in the eighteenth century. I put the term rise in quotation marks here, because there lies at the heart of the well-known argument that associates the rise of the novel as such with the eighteenth-century English novel a specifically connected problem with regard to novelty: the novel was far from new during the time that we often associate with its rise. If the novel is so centrally connected to novelty, yet if this cannot simply be understood as 1 I use the term “genre” here to reflect the terminology of early criticism on the novel that seeks to articulate the rise of the novel in relation to the tradition of other literary genres. That is, critics speak of the rise of the novel as a new genre that adds to or at times even replaces aspects of the traditional literary genres (epic, drama, poetry, and so on). In the context of contemporary criticism, however, it is more common to address these matters by speaking of novelistic form.

M. Nilges (B) St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_3

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a matter of the novel’s own novelty, as the beginning of a new genre,1 without unsettling some of the historical accounts of the novel that have come to define critical consensus, then, critics like Emily Hodgson Anderson rightly argue, we must ask: “When, and how, was the novel novel?” Hodgson Anderson maintains that discussions about the novel’s rise have in recent years shifted away from attempts to pinpoint the novel’s origin and toward the question of “whether the various representatives of the genre … can be properly categorized at all.” As Hodgson Anderson suggests, one way to answer this question is not by turning toward matters of style, length, and so on in order to define a uniquely novelistic set of characteristics that would allow us to simply tell novels from not-novels. The novel defies such admittedly ham-fisted attempts at categorization and simple taxonomy, Hodgson Anderson argues. Instead, the category of the new itself, she suggests, is what allows us to understand something important about the novel. For it is the novel’s commitment to the new, conceived as an aesthetic problem and impetus, and its constitutive “sense of conscious experimentation” that “characterizes the novel form.” The new and novelty defined the novel therefore not as a matter of chronology or terminology that has a simple historical point of origin but rather as the novel’s fundamental aesthetic commitment, “not,” in other words, as Hodgson Anderson proposes, “only as a ‘new means of expression’…but as a means of expression that implicitly wants to be recognized as new” (2007: 2). On its most fundamental level, the novel’s novelty, therefore, is not a qualitative matter but rather a matter of the novel’s foundational aesthetic problem insofar as it may be understood as a genre whose very essence lies in the commitment to constant formal change in order to represent and make thinkable the new itself as a changing historical category. We can trace this proposition throughout the dominant theories of the novel of the twentieth century. For instance, regardless of the well-known and much-discussed differences between their accounts of the novel, both Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács associate the historical rise of the novel with the particular kind of aesthetic and philosophical work that the novel form is able to carry out in the context of a rapidly developing modern world, in particular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The accounts of Bakhtin and Lukács illustrate that we should be interested in the growing historical significance of the novel not because we can see the emergence of a new literary form—for the novel was not new during this time—but because the novel finds its historic calling at a moment

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when the novel form, more than established literary genres or other art forms, expresses a new historical consciousness. The quickly developing world of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a world that is defined by a new material structure and new forms of social and political life, required new ways of making sense of the relation between human existence and material reality. The novel’s rise can therefore be understood as a matter of the novel’s ability to develop these new ways of narrating and thus of imagining modern life, in its progress, as a constantly developing, a continually new present. It is on this basis that Bakhtin and Lukács explore the historical rise of the novel and its distinction from other literary genres such as epic. In spite of the different conclusions that they proceed to draw from this, the basic principle that defines the work of both Bakhtin and Lukács on the novel is the historical distinction between novel and epic that Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1982) and Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1989) borrow from Friedrich Schiller and J. W. Goethe: the epic is the genre of a completed, closed universe; the novel, on the other hand, is the genre of a new, developing modern world whose progress it aims to make thinkable. It seems, then, that we have an answer to the question of when and how the novel is novel, one that begins by suggesting that this is not in fact a matter of “when” but rather a matter of “how.” The novel is wedded to novelty not by virtue of trying to be new or by having been new at a certain moment in time but rather by way of confronting the new as an aesthetic problem, thereby allowing us to make the new thinkable at different moments in history. One could end the inquiry here, were it not for the emergence of a new problem with the novel’s novelty that is related to the question of “when.” In what follows, I shall outline some of the ways in which we may understand the novel’s changed relation to novelty in recent years, a time when we see the problem of the novel’s novelty returning in force. The renewed commitment on part of young novelists such as Rachel Kushner to the project of historicizing the new and its generic history is but one of many striking examples of this. The particular strength and the critical as well as the aesthetic force of Kushner’s much celebrated debut novel The Flame Throwers (2013) may in this sense be located in its desire to trace the historical development of the new and of innovation, from the times of early Italian Futurism to the crumbling of modernism’s futures in the 1970s. The novel thus traces the waxing and waning of different conceptions of novelty and of futures in order to set up a meditation of the crisis of these terms in

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our time. We can see similar projects in the work of a range of young authors in recent years, including Ben Lerner, as well as in the work of novelists who mobilize genre fiction in order to engage with questions of temporality and history such as Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Nathaniel Rich, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead. In fact, we may understand some of the recent developments in novelistic form as a matter of the novel’s aim to confront the problem of novelty as a historically specific aesthetic problem, one that is directly wedded to the particular crises of temporality of our time, the rise of “the contemporary” as a contested temporal and historical category, and indeed to our understanding of the time and history of the novel after postmodernism. What I wish to foreground in this essay, then, is the suggestion that attention to the changing status of the category of the new in the novel may not only allow us to draw conclusions about the novel’s status today but also about the novel’s recent historical development, therefore affording us one way of understanding literary history after the end of the postmodern, in a time, that is, when both the novel and criticism struggle to determine what happens to novelty after the end of the “post-.” The latter point no doubt requires elaboration. If the novel’s novelty is not a matter of simple historical emergence but rather of the novel’s historically specific aesthetic project, then what happens to the novel’s work—and indeed to its social and political function—when the sense of time that occasions the novel’s rise experiences a moment of crisis? The novel used to be constitutively bound up with novelty, with the aesthetic mediation of a changing present. However, not only the novel’s novelty but indeed the new itself appears to have a harder time today than it did in previous moments in history. “The worst thing about the present, if you’re an artist, is that it never stands still long enough,” writes Laura Miller in a 2017 article in Slate. “Once, perhaps,” Miller continues to reflect on the status of the present in our time, It lingered, back in the days when everyone communicated by letter and Jane Austen heroines entertained houseguests for seven weeks at a time. But now we live in a world where occupations that once seemed reliably perennial, like clerking in a retail store, are suddenly teetering on the brink of extinction. For novelists, whose work typically takes at least a year (and often much longer) to produce, delivering an up-to-date depiction of contemporary life must be a maddeningly elusive goal. In the time it takes to write a novel that perfectly nails some new technologized form of

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connecting, the rest of us will most likely have left off using it and moved on to something new. (2017)

The problem with our present, Miller reasons, is that it moves so quickly that the novel no longer seems capable of novelty. The novel, Miller argues, seems to be confronted with the infamous problem of the vanishing present that has been the subject of much philosophical discourse: as soon as we try to pinpoint the present, it is already past. As a result, Miller argues, we see the novel abandoning the attempt to represent the present, opting instead for an engagement with the future by turning toward science fiction. Even more recently, Brianna Rennix, in an article in Current Affairs, suggests not only that novels are no longer very good at being novel but in fact that the novel’s continued obsession with novelty has ruined the genre (see 2017). Rennix’s critique aims to be a historical assessment of the status of the novel, yet it is driven by a clearly discernible sense of temporal and periodizing confusion. Shuttling back and forth between criticizing “modern publishing” and “the postmodern novel,” deploying the latter term to describe any novel of the last 60 years or so that shows some interest in stylistic experimentation, Rennix’s argument is ultimately less invested in a rigorous account of the literary historical development of the novel than in executing the popular literary criticism version of the well-known “unpopular opinion…” meme: Rennix does not like the same contemporary novels that other critics like, and she particularly dislikes when novels try to be “novel” in spite of the fact that she is able to show that some attempts at being novel rely upon stylistic moves that have a long history—and thus are not novel at all. In much the same way that Miller simplifies the novel’s actual relation to the category of the new and to the present,2 Rennix severs style from its historical context in which even firmly established stylistic moves can create new effects or be deployed in the service of a historically specific reflection on the changing status of the new and the historical developments of the present. And 2 Of course, this is also true for Rennix’s foreshortened account of science fiction, which is well-known to be more than a matter of imagining simple futures, since the genre has an important, enabling relationship to the present. One may point here to Ursula K. LeGuin’s famous suggestion in Left Hand of Darkness (1969) that good science fiction is never predictive but rather descriptive or to Samuel R. Delany’s suggestion in The JewelHinged Jaw (1977) that science fiction that does not reflect on the present and that becomes a version of bad adventure fiction is, as he puts it, “our true anti-literature.”

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while these problems profoundly limit the actual critical purchase of their essays, Miller and Rennix do point toward current problems with regard to the novel’s historical status and its relation to novelty and the new that we must take seriously. If we examine the novel’s changing relation to novelty and its attempts to grapple with the problem of novelty in relation to the temporal crises of our moment (beginning in the mid1980s), it becomes apparent that we cannot with Rennix assume that the term “postmodern” allows us to identify novels of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the contemporary novel. Put differently: by tracing the novel’s struggle with novelty conceived as an aesthetic problem in recent years we are able to also trace the novel’s departure from postmodernism. To be sure, other contributors to this volume are much more qualified than I am to discuss a crucial aspect of the development I wish to illuminate here that I must point out however briefly before proceeding with my own analysis, an aspect that my fellow contributors will no doubt address: novelty also confronts the novel as a central demand of the literary marketplace. And, of course, this is far from a new problem for the novel. Literature and indeed all art encounter the problem of novelty as a matter of production, distribution, and with regard to market demands more widely conceived. However, from the very beginning of the novel’s rise as understood in this essay, the novel engaged also with this notion of novelty inasmuch as its rise was directly bound up with the rise of capitalism. And, of course, innovation and novelty are structural requirements of capitalism that from its beginning take on not only a structural but also a sociocultural and ideological dimension. It is, therefore, also from this perspective that we can observe the novel’s formal development as a matter of the mediation of the dialectical relation of material and market forces on the one hand and cultural, ideological, and ultimately aesthetic form on the other. The question of how historically specific notions of novelty give form to the novel is, therefore, also always a question of the novel’s constitutive ability to narrativize its own material standing in the history of the capitalist market and its pursuit of novelty and innovation.

The Exhaustion of Novelty Already in the 1990s the novel itself begins to diagnose those problems that characterize contemporary fears about the status of the novel that we find in popular dialogue and essays such as those of Miller and Rennix. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast (1995) centrally revolves around

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the struggles of the novel’s protagonist, Jim, with the apparent exhaustion of the New and the formal impasse this crisis appears to produce: you have to do something new, but there’s nothing new left to do. Serious trouble that. Jim solves this problem by writing postmodern poems that he hopes to make post-postmodern by scrambling them with some random program. The problem with this solution is that postmodern poetry already reads as if the lines have been scrambled by a random program, so the effects of Jim’s ultraradical experimentation are difficult to notice. (1997: 67–68)

Serious trouble indeed, for Jim clearly senses the exhaustion of postmodernism yet remains unable to imagine its aftermath. But what also becomes clear is that Jim understands that there is something in our conception of postmodernism itself that hinders our ability to conceive of both its aftermath and the new proper. Novels such as Robinson’s therefore understand the problematic status of the new as a problem of the relation between style and history as well as a problem of literary history, of our attempt to historicize the novel, the contemporary, and the new itself. Moreover, the problem that Jim identifies also appears to trouble some of the still most dominant models of literary history. “The way we feel today, in full postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson writes in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is that “we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same.” Yet, Jameson also insists that: “now everything is new; but by the same token, the very category of the new loses its meaning and becomes itself something of a modernist survival” (Jameson 1991: 310). How, then, do we explain this strange simultaneity of success and exhaustion, of death and global success, futurity and apocalypse? And how does this seeming confusion give form to the novel, which recognizes this problem as a matter of tension between form and history? How, then, may we understand the troubled relation between the novel and novelty, which also appears to be bound up with the troubled status of the new in our established periodizing models of postmodernism? Novels such as Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001) and Jonathan Dee’s The Locals (2017), which examine the tension between capitalist advancement and social regression, between structural innovation and sociocultural backlash that gives way retrospection, deliver a meditation on the relation between novelty and nostalgia that is altogether particular to our moment and

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that cannot simply be conflated with well-known and often temporally overly capacious notions of the postmodern nostalgia mode. Such novels raise questions such as: what is the status of the new in our moment, how does it relate to the heritage of postmodern thought, and, ultimately, how many such questions allow us to understand the status of the novel now? In recent years, literary criticism has struggled to make sense of the “now,” with regard to both its object of study and its own fundamental disciplinary skills and methods. Attempts to develop a clear sense of the mission of literary studies in the twenty-first century find their necessary counterpart in a variety of attempts to determine what precisely literature is now.3 In the context of these debates about the Now, the logic of periodization inevitably emerges as critics try to determine whether or not our Now ought to be distinguished from postmodernism, and as a consequence concepts such as the new or novelty raise the same question that is resurrected in regard to postmodernism: what exactly is the concepts’ referent? Furthermore, while, as Andrew Hoberek argues, “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become critical commonplace” (2007: 233), there exists no fully developed theory of what precisely distinguishes contemporary literature from postmodern literature. And while critics such as Rachel Adams have proposed new periodizing markers such as “American literary globalism” that are designed to distinguish between postmodernism and the contemporary (2007: 249), the fact that postmodernity as postmodernism’s dialectical counterpart is generally associated with terms such as late capitalism, post-industrialism or globalization ultimately means that speaking of literary “globalism” does not exactly communicate the substantive periodic distinction Adams and other critics rightly consider necessary. What is more, despite the fact that the discussion of literature after postmodernism is currently particularly vibrant and has sparked a variety of periodizing terms in recent years (among which post-postmodernism is the most notorious), it is surely telling that the debate surrounding post-postmodernism and postmodernism’s purported exhaustion has been carried out for over 20 years now. Critics generally agree that the New, the emergent, or more accurately, a radical transformation in the socioeconomic structure (which 3 For representative examples of these debates, see the special issue of PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010) dedicated to the topic “Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century” and New Literary History 37 and 38 (2007) dedicated to the topic “What Is Literature Now?”

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is, depending on the theorist, described as the transition into “latecapitalism,” “postindustrial capitalism,” “media society,” “consumer society,” and so on4 ), lies at the heart of postmodernism, since postmodernism is seen as the aesthetic mediation of the historical, material transition into postmodernity. Critics also tend to agree that it is the very category of the New that defines the postmodern in contradistinction to the modern. But, as we shall see, postmodernism cannot be understood as the culture that corresponds to the moment at which modernism’s defining situation of uneven development disappears, and postmodernism does not in fact describe a situation in which everything is new. Were it so, we would surely have to come to Jameson’s conclusion that the New is an utterly inconsequential category for literary form in postmodernism. Yet, if we compare literary production of the 1960s and 1970s, the time of emerging post-Fordism, to literary production since the 1990s, we cannot help but notice substantial formal, generic, and narratological differences. As a number of critics have recently noted, we are currently witnessing what is being described as a renaissance of realism, of U.S. naturalism, and of a series of traditional literary forms such as the encyclopedic novel, sentimentalism, the pastoral and the confessional, which depart radically from postmodernism formal experimentation (evident, for example, in metafiction or surfiction, avant-pop sampling, and literary montage and collage).5 Additionally, playful, experimental visions of what postmodernity might look like in the future have now given way to representations of postmodernity as the dominant, repressive social logic of our present. In other words, the temporal component of the relation between postmodernism and postmodernity operates in dialectical connection with literary form that traces the shift from emergent to dominant postmodernity. The anti-Oedipalism of novels such as Donald Barthelme’s 1975 novel The Dead Father, for example, mediates the New of emergent postmodernity. A story of the journey of a group of young people 4 For the most prominent examples, see Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; or Harvey, David. 1992. The Condition of Postmodernity. London and New York: Wiley. 5 The, in my mind, most rigorously executed account of this development, in particular with regard to the consequences of the return to realism for our understanding of both recent literary history and the history of postmodernism is Madhu Dubey’s 2011 essay Post-Postmodern Realism? Twentieth-Century Literature 57 (3–4) (Fall/Winter): 364– 371.

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toward the burial site of the Dead Father who is not yet entirely dead, the novel directly conjures up the waning of Fordist modernity and the exciting possibilities opened up by this prospect. Reduced to a tragically comic figure, Barthelme’s gigantic father (one leg consisting of a Fordist factory), struggles with the gradual loss of all those elements of traditional life that he fathered. Yet, his death opens up the possibility for future liberation (albeit in characteristically disavowed form as futurity without a distinct future) and is the cause of great exhilaration among the group of young people as well as one of the central mechanisms that drives the plot of the postmodern novel. Similarly, the periodic breakdown of language and narration in the novel is at every point bound up with its anti-Oedipal project that attaches linguistic and narrative conventions to basal forms of paternalistic thought. The sole aim that drives the novel’s plot is the journey toward the Dead Father’s final death, a journey that is periodically disrupted by the insertion of passages such as the “Manual For Sons,” in opposition to which the anti-teleological futurity of the novel defines itself. “Did you ever want to paint or draw or etch? Yourself?” asks Julie, one of the novel’s protagonists, to which the Dead Father replies: “it was not necessary,… because I am the Father. All lines my lines. All figure and all ground mine, out of my head. All colors mine. You take my meaning” (Barthelme 2004: 18–19). The novel’s form and content thus fuse at the intersection of the lines of temporality and paternalism, at the moment at which future possibility concretizes itself in the act of wresting meaning and representation from its paternalistic pastness. Memorably, the novel’s introductory passage closes with a formulation of the temporal unevenness of postmodernism, out of which its novelistic form emerges as a sense of historical potentiality: “We want the Dead Father to be dead. We sit with tears in our eyes wanting the Dead Father to be dead—meanwhile doing amazing things with our hands ” (5; original italics). Opposed to this formulation of excited futurity and jouissance brought about by the end of Fordist modernity and the beginning of postmodernity stand novels such as Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), the story of a billionaire asset manager stuck in downtown traffic on his way across town to get a haircut. The extreme stasis of DeLillo’s realism stands in direct opposition to Barthelme’s experimental movement toward the New and mediates on the level of form and content the lack of movement of the omnipresent Now and thus the distinct crisis of futurity that arises at the moment of transition from emergent postmodernity into actually existing, dominant postmodernity. “Time is a thing that grows

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scarcer every day,” a character observes, later adding that, “we used to know the past and not the future. This is changing” (DeLillo 2003: 69 and 86). Dominant postmodernity generates formal and epistemological structures connected to the absorption of the new into the Now, of the gradual disappearance of futurity and the spread of omnipresent contemporaneity. The periodic turn of authors such as William Gibson and Robinson away from science fiction and toward realism, in particular during the 2000s, can be counted among a wide variety of examples of this development (see also Lanzendörfer in this volume). The seeming collapse of the new into the now is therefore about more than another example of the paradox of avant-gardism, which must point toward the future but never reach its goal in order to avoid its own exhaustion, that critics like Raymond Federman already in the mid-1990s trace in postmodernism’s demise—at the same time as Robinson’s Jim, therefore. “Postmodern fiction experimented with death, or rather with its own death,” Federman writes, adding: “It won” (Federman 1993: 107). For Federman, the death of postmodernism is a direct, inevitable result of its constitutive contradictions: “postmodernism was an exercise in discontinuity, rupture, break, mutation, transformation, therefore doomed from the beginning” (110). Consequently, Federman concludes, “now that the entire world, the entire universe for that matter has become Postmodern,” authors can “stand back and watch, with some degree of amusement” the consequences of postmodernism’s victory (107–108). Yet, while the death of postmodernism (which Federman tellingly understands not as a matter of disappearance but of becoming the new historical dominant, of a transition from new to now) is a matter of humoristic observation for Federman, authors themselves understand that the historical transformation that calls into questions previous versions of novelty creates a crisis not only for our understanding of literary history but for the novel itself—and we can therefore evaluate recent formal changes in the novel in relation to the changed status of novelty.

Periodizing Novelty In A Singular Modernity Jameson describes Jean François Lyotard’s “great embarrassment” as arising from the dependence of Lyotard’s description of postmodernism upon “what essentially remain modernist categories of the new,” prompting Jameson to conclude that “like Deleuze, Lyotard was himself in many ways a quintessential modernist,

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passionately committed to the eruption of the genuinely, the radically, and, dare one even say, the authentically new” (2002: 4–5). Yet, at the same time Jameson remains insistent on this previous characterization of postmodernism, suggesting that “where modernity was a set of questions and answers that characterized a situation of incomplete or partial modernization, postmodernity is what obtains under a far more complete modernization” (2002: 12). Once again, the new, for Jameson a distinctly modernist category, marks Lyotard as a modernist at the same time that it constitutes for Jameson the advent of postmodernism as soon as the new has become dominant (and therefore is no longer radically new as in modernity, but becomes the benign new of postmodernism). To be sure, Jameson is entirely correct when he locates the continued presence of modernist conceptions of the New in postmodern thought. Yet, instead of trying to determine who should be embarrassed and why, what may be more useful for our purposes is the suggestion that we may require a differentiation between two kinds of “new-ness.” Such a distinction can form the basis of a more complicated understanding of the relationship between postmodernism and postmodernity that in turn allows us to depart from increasingly confusing description of literary historical periods by measuring the degree of successful modernization (which, as Jameson himself suggests, carries with it the problem of being confronted with concepts such as “alternate” or “alternative” modernities) and instead develop a more specific periodizing model. Postmodernism, put simply, is the representation of a moment when the new is still new. By contrast, the problem of the novel after postmodernism is that we appear to live in a moment when the new has become our new historical dominant. We can therefore describe the postmodern project in retrospect as based upon a central misrecognition of the connection between postmodernism and postmodernity—and this misrecognition also persists in critical engagements with postmodernism and contemporary culture. Postmodernism’s cultural and philosophical investment in the decentered subject, representative of the project of overcoming modernity’s repressively centralized structures as a whole, depended on the formulation of future possibility made possible by an incipient, radical socioeconomic transformation. The new that impels postmodernism’s liberatory impulse, however, is in fact nothing other than the socioeconomic structure we refer to as postmodernity. Once this structure has reached actual dominance, literary form changes drastically,

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indicating that postmodernism must be understood as the cultural representation of emergent postmodernity, and that postmodernism, precisely due to the formal connection between postmodernist thought, culture, and a shift in the material structure, was in fact instrumental in facilitating the necessary transition from one capitalist structure to another. The disappearance of jouissance and optimistic hope for the future in cultural and theoretical production marks the end of postmodernism as a liberatory project at the point at which it reveals itself as the sociopolitical logic of full postmodernity. At the moment at which postmodernity reaches dominance and reveals the degree to which postmodern categories such as decentralization, pluralism, difference, and diversity are assigned a functional role in the context of full postmodernity (postFordist or neoliberal capitalism), the postmodern project exhausts itself. I would like to suggest, therefore, that postmodernism and postmodernity should not be understood as contemporaneous but instead as temporally disjunctive terms. Moreover, the temporal disjunction between the two terms should be understood as one of postmodernism’s formative features. Dominant postmodernity means the death of postmodernism. And it is for this reason, therefore, that we must take the novel’s recent return to matters of time and novelty as an occasion to once again talk about the novel and its changed status and significance in our time. Overly capacious notions of postmodernism, stretching from the 1960s into the present, overwrite the novel’s important immanent formal development and hide the fact that the novel’s recent history is marked by striking and profoundly important formal changes. For it is, for instance, in the novel’s formal mediation of the problem of novelty in our time that we can trace the novel’s desire to formulate accounts of its own status, importance, and possibility in our time. Furthermore, such an analysis of the novel also affords us a retrospective view of postmodernism that not only creates the basis for a more precise periodizing project, but it also allows us to better understand the historical place and the function of postmodernism itself. From this standpoint, the term postmodernism can be understood as designating a period of intense social and cultural creation that is dialectically connected to a radical transition in the mode of production: the waning of Fordist modernity and the beginning transition into a form of capitalism that is frequently described as post-Fordism or neoliberalism, but that is, crucially for our purposes, what has long been broadly identified as postmodernity. Postmodernism’s engagement with death and endings is therefore directly wedded to its enjoyment and futurity. This

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historical link between the crisis of Fordism and postmodernism’s movement toward the new is expressed in Federman’s account of the rise of postmodernism: “in this funerary climate, surrounded by such negative conditions, confronting all these apocalyptic predictions that the fiction writer, in the mid-sixties, considered his task and began writing the new novel” (1993: 114). The death of paternalism, as encountered above in Barthelme’s novel, is one of the trademark aspects of the postmodern novel. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), for instance, the death of paternalist modernity determines the novels’ relation to death and endings but also, just as importantly, to their sense of futurity, difference, and change. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions begins with an introductory sentence that is emblematic of some of what we have come to understand as postmodernism’s key characteristics: “this is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast” (Vonnegut 1999: 7). But the dying of old white men and the end of their world is no cause for great sadness in the novel. Instead, the novel is defined by a longing for the apocalypse. The novel humorously though not without a sense of political consequence reflects back upon the mistakes that gave shape to the dying prompting Kilgore Trout to suggest that, “humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet” (18). Barthelme’s The Dead Father echoes this need for a departure from the old and the benefits of the death of old men. While the Dead Father still clings to the hope that his journey will lead him to the mythical possibility of revival, to the group of young people who carry the body of the Dead Father as well as to the reader it is clear from the beginning of the novel that this will not and in fact must not occur. A section of the novel entitled “A Manual for Sons” leaves no doubt that it is imperative to fight the temptation to find a new father: Do you really want to find this father? What if, when you find him, he speaks to you in the same tone he used before he lost himself? Will he again place nails in your mother, in her elbows and back of her knee? Remember the javelin. Have you any reason to believe that it will not, once again, flash through the seven-o’clock-in-the-evening air? What we are attempting to determine is simple: Under which conditions do you wish to live?… Ignore that empty chair at the head of the table. Give thanks. (Barthelme 2004: 138)

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In postmodernism, that is, the range of ends is connected to the end of Fordist modernity and paternalism, an end that may not (or should not) signal a fully formed future but that betokens joyful potentiality. And it is in this sense, as a result of the tension between the rejection of modernism’s engagement with the new and postmodernism’s own momentum generated by the opening up of a different, disavowed form of the new, that we can identify a distinct sense of uneven development at the heart of postmodernism that finds expression in the excited anticipation arising from the contemplation of the future possibilities brought about by the beginning end of Fordist modernity. The contradiction between apocalypse and jouissance that marks the culture of the 1960s and 1970s indicates the uneven development between a cultural stage in its infancy and its projection of a non-defined future that still functions as postmodernism’s not yet and object-cause. To assume, therefore, that the rejection of modernism’s new is tantamount to the rejection of the new altogether is, as we shall see, a non sequitur that makes it difficult for us to understand the recent relation between the novel and novelty as well as literary historical development beyond postmodernism. Still, the suggestion that we must distinguish between postmodernism and contemporary culture based on the notion that postmodernism exhausts itself at the moment at which its new reveals itself as the now of post-Fordism may strike us as strange. After all, the end of the new is a commonly taken first step when referencing the now wellknown periodizing distinction between modernism and postmodernism. In case of the latter distinction, modernism is understood as defined by a quintessential situation of uneven development. Once this uneven development disappears, postmodernism (and by extension postmodernity) begins. It is important to emphasize, then, that the suggestion that postmodernism contains its own version of uneven development and an engagement with the new is not indicative of either a logical contradiction in regards to existing periodizing models nor of a contestation of these models. Rather, the suggestion that postmodernism, too, is characterized by an engagement with the new is meant to indicate the need to historicize varying forms of the new itself. The end of modernism’s engagement with the new and innovation, that is, does not mark the wholesale structural and epistemological exhaustion of the new. Instead, it marks the transition into a different configuration of time and temporality that logically and structurally generates a corresponding form of the new.

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In Decline of the New, one of the earliest works of criticism that interrogates the exhaustion of modernism and speculatively advances the idea of a potential postmodernism, Irving Howe foregrounds modernism’s characteristic, immanently contradictory relation to the new and time that indicates that the new’s function in the current periodizing distinction does not stand in contradiction to but in fact arises in part necessarily from the logic of modernism itself. Howe writes: in its multiplicity and brilliant confusion, its commitment to an aesthetic of endless renewal—in its composition of the “tradition of the new,” a paradox envisaging the limit of limitlessness —modernism is endlessly open to portraiture and analysis. For just as some of its greatest works strain toward a form freed from beginning or end, so modernism strains toward a life without fixity or conclusion. (Howe 1963: 30; original italics)

Yet, what marks on the one hand modernism’s trademark engagement with the new and resistance to fixity and closure, Howe realizes, becomes not only modernism’s internal logico-temporal tragedy once confronted with its own end, but it also creates a level of contradiction for critics’ attempts to periodize modernism. And, thus, a few pages later, Howe’s considerations of modernism’s time and relation to the new necessarily acquire a moving sense of self-reflexivity. “How, come to think of it,” Howe wonders, “do great cultural movements reach their end? It is a problem our literary historians have not sufficiently examined, perhaps because they find beginnings more glamorous, and a problem that is now especially difficult because there has never been, I think, a cultural period in Western history quite like the one we call modern?” It is in the latter suggestion, the beginning moments of a historical shift that troubles our temporal and periodizing imaginary along with the temporal thought upon which modernist aesthetics rest, that Howe locates the crux of the matter. “Signs of a denouement begin to appear,” Howe notes, adding: “how enviable death must be to those who no longer have reason to live yet are unable to make themselves die!” Modernism, according to Howe, produces a particular problem once its enabling temporal thought runs into its inevitable point of historical exhaustion, namely the problem of lacking the epistemological framework for understanding the historical and temporal conditions of its own waning. “Modernism will not come to an end,” Howe consequently reasons. And while history will pass it by, modernism’s “war chants will be repeated through the decades,”

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Howe suspects, “for what seems to await it is a more painful and certainly less dignified conclusion than that of earlier cultural movements: what awaits it is publicity and sensation, the kind of savage parody which may indeed be the only fate worse than death” (33). Here, Howe not only strikingly forecasts what later will widely be understood to be central aspects of postmodernism but also the logical foundations that allow us to trace the emergence and exhaustion of postmodernism and the distinct form of temporality that gives shape to culture after postmodernism while simultaneously making it difficult to conceive of postmodernism’s aftermath. In postmodernism, we see in many ways an inversion of modernism’s relationship to the new. That is, postmodernism is characterized by both the immanent rejection of modernism’s attachment to perpetual renewal and innovation and its constitutive attachment to large-scale changes in its structural, philosophical, social and political context. Postmodernism is dialectically connected to emergent postmodernity, and while one is not hard-pressed to find formal likenesses between modernism and postmodernism—say, the collage technique, stream of consciousness narration, the rejection of linearity or standard mechanisms of plot (if not plot altogether)—historicizing these formal strategies allows us to generate a sense of periodizing distinctions and indicates that they take on a decidedly different function in the context of emergent postmodernity, a moment that witnesses the structural undoing of modernity. It is in this context that we can understand the work of writers such as Barthelme and Vonnegut not simply as exemplary of standard accounts of postmodernism as modernism’s apocalyptic undoing but more accurately as defined by the simultaneity of apocalypse and forward dawning, situating the formal experimentation of postmodernism in joyful relation of the possibilities opened up by the waning of Fordist modernity. And it is in this sense, as a result of the tension between the rejection of modernism’s engagement with the new and postmodernism’s own momentum generated by the opening up of a different, disavowed form of the new, that we can identify a distinct sense of uneven development at the heart of postmodernism that finds expression in the excited anticipation arising from the contemplation of the future possibilities brought about by the beginning end of Fordist modernity. In the contemporary moment, then, we witness a new, a different stage of the novel’s engagement with novelty. Novels such as DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and its companion work of sorts, Point Omega (2007; see

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also Starre in this volume), offer meditations on the moment at which progress and the new become virtually unimaginable in the context of our present, a time defined by the speed and virtuality of finance capital. What re-emerges in this context is a novel that is attentive to one of its formative projects, namely imagining time in its progress by addressing itself to the present. In Theory of the Novel (2017), Guido Mazzoni reminds us of the centrality of the account of the novel with which this essay began. “The English word novel,” Mazzoni writes, appeared “for the first time in the fifteenth century” and “originally meant ‘something new’, ‘a novelty’.” However, already in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Mazzoni argues, the noun “novel” came to be more closely associated with “the Italian genre of the novella” (2017: 61). Very quickly, therefore, the simple association of novel with novelty was replaced by a focus on matters of genre, and it is on the level of the latter, Mazzoni shows, that the most substantive accounts of the novel have been developed, accounts that do not seek to mark beginnings or that try to reduce the novel to a set of stable definitions and characteristics. The more rewarding path is to understand the novel’s relation to novelty as a generic problem for the novel. That is, Mazzoni writes, as in famous early accounts of the novel like that of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel that finds its way into the work of later critics such as Bakhtin,6 the novel can be understood as not only a genre that is under continuous change but as the genre that turns the problem of continuous change into its most fundamental aesthetic problem and commitment (65). “Although the genre did not proclaim its originality” in the eighteenth century, Mazzoni reminds us consequently, it “introduced new and revolutionary ways of telling stories” (137). The novel can be understood as the genre of the new, that is, insofar as it attempts to develop new ways of representing and thinking constant change and novelty in relation to the specific conditions of a given historical moment. This is, then, an account of the novel that we find not only in Schlegel and Bakhtin but also in the early work of Lukács, particularly in The Theory of the Novel. “The novel,” according

6 Bakhtin leans heavily on Schlegel’s various “fragments” that discuss the novel in

general and the novel’s relation to the epic in particular, which were published in Athenaeum, the literary magazine that Schlegel and August Wilhelm co-founded in 1798. The magazine went defunct shortly after 1800, and its fragments are today available in library collections or via digitizing services, including Google Books: https://books.goo gle.ca/books?id=sCA9AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

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to Lukács, “in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in the process of becoming” (1989: 72–73). It is not the novel that is new when it replaces the epic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Lukács argues, nor do innovations to novelistic form on their own allow us to trace the foundational link between the novel and novelty. Rather, it is the dialectic of form and content of the new that defines the novel, which is to say that the history of the novel is the history of the development of form that represent and that make thinkable the new that defines historical progress of the modern itself in ways that are as numerous as the novel’s own generic and formal facets. It seems fitting to conclude this essay by returning to John Barth’s brief essay “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979) in which he forwards a passionate defense of literature in the novel in the aftermath of his famous account of postmodernism as “the literature of exhaustion” (Barth 1984). After much debate about postmodernism, it seems, Barth returns in this essay to a suggestion that has more recently been once again forcefully articulated by Timothy Bewes: postmodernism, above all else, is an attempt to stage the possibility of literature (Bewes 2007). Given recent literary criticism’s affinity with nowness and its frenzied attempt to formulate a definition of a future literary criticism in a moment when critical discourse is once again preoccupied with the crisis, uncertain future, and even exhaustion of both our discipline and our object of study, there is, it seems to me, much to be gained from reminding ourselves of the way in which Barth considers the “ideal postmodernist writer.” This author, Barth writes “has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back” (1984: 203). We may be well advised to think of the relationship of the ideal contemporary author to the history of both postmodernism and the new in much the same way. At a moment when the novel struggles with the crisis of novelty, with the absence of the new in the aftermath of postmodernism’s standardization in the present, and with transition of the postmodern new to the contemporary now, it is important to foreground those novels that in recent years have re-energized one of the novel’s core projects. After all, what art form may be better suited for the task of launching an inquiry into the current crisis of the new than the one whose rise is directly bound up with the category of novelty and its historical development? And while critics like Rennix lament the novel’s persistent attempt to engage with novelty and reads this as a sign of the novel’s crisis today and of its inability to speak to our moment, any inquiry

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into the true substance of the novel’s historical relation to novelty will ultimately highlight the novel’s crucial importance in our time. Far from consolidating the crisis or even the purported end of the new, the novel after postmodernism is in part characterized by its formal engagement with the crisis of the new that it understands as an always dual intervention: reflecting on the possibility of the new in the contemporary novel is always also a matter of reflecting on the novel’s own possibility in or time. With Barth, then, we can describe the work of the novel today as a matter of the re-deployment of one of its formative aspects: the attempt to trace the valences of the new in the present of a new material reality. It is out of this dimension, as Barth reminds us, out of literature’s ability to “take us beyond the possibilities of reality” (1984: 165), that the possibility of literature, its futurity and its future truly emerges. And no literary genre is as deeply wedded to the project of historicizing the times of the present as the novel. The timeliness of the novel in the present is therefore a matter of the novel’s own complex tradition of tracing the new in the now, a tradition that assumes a crucial function and that is endowed with new critical potential in the context of the crisis of the new in our time.

References Adams, Rachel. 2007. The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism. Twentieth Century Literature 53 (3) (Fall): 248–272. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1982. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist and ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barth, John. 1984. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam. Barthelme, Donald. 2004. The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bewes, Timothy. 2007. Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster’s Cinematographic Fiction. Twentieth Century Literature 53 (3) (Fall): 273–297. Delany, Samuel R. 1977. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press. DeLillo, Don. 2003. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. Dubey, Madhu. 2011. Post-Postmodern Realism? Twentieth Century Literature 57 (3/4) (Fall/Winter): 364–371. Federman, Raymond. 1993. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Harvey, David. 1992. The Condition of Postmodernity. London and New York: Wiley. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. Introduction: After Postmodernism. Twentieth Century Literature 53 (3) (Fall): 233–247. Hodgson Anderson, Emily. 2007. Novelty in Novels: A Look at What’s New in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Studies in the Novel 39 (1) (Spring): 1–16. Howe, Irving. 1963. Decline of the New. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. A Singular Modernity. London and New York: Verso. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1969. Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Publishing Corporation. Lukács, Georg. 1989. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mazzoni, Guido. 2017. Theory of the Novel, trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reeve, Clara. 1970. The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countries, and Manners. New York: Garland. Miller, Laura. 2017. Dark Futures. The Slate Book Review, May 25. https:// slate.com/culture/2017/05/literary-fiction-is-borrowing-the-tools-of-the-sci ence-fiction-genre.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Rennix, Brianna. 2017. How Novelty Ruined the Novel. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/how-novelty-ruined-the-novel. Accessed 31 March 2020. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 1995. The Gold Coast. New York: Doherty. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1999. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dial Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Cosmopolitan Value of the Multicultural Novel Kristian Shaw

This article investigates the difficult position of the ‘multicultural’ novel in the twenty-first century. Bound in a complex network of universal claims and cross-cultural influences the multicultural novel appeals to a specifically Anglophone market and is highly attractive to publishers. As Caroline Levine recently argued in relation to form and context in literature, attention must be paid “to the multiplicity of networks and especially to their differences” (2015: 114). The multicultural novel as a commodity is intrinsically linked to this perception of difference and its unique place in the “novel-network.” Marketing strategies, however, often ensure these texts are in danger of furthering a potential cultural blandness as a consequence of needing to be broadly readable across boundaries. It will be argued that the novel’s form, and also the apparent proliferation of multicultural fiction, is impossible to divorce from fundamentally profit-driven decisions made by publishers—largely by repeating what they have deduced are proven formulas, not always successfully. This idea of the multicultural novel as a commodity reinforces the notion that

K. Shaw (B) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_4

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the novel form in general is affected by a complex network of human and non-human actors (such as publishing houses). As Philip Tew acknowledges, to “read texts by identifying ideological markers of ethnicity is in effect to prejudge such texts through the perspective of a particular set of sociocultural elements which may well obscure many other cultural and aesthetic issues” (2015: 252). Drawing upon a wide range of Anglophone examples, from Gautam Malkini and Monica Ali to Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith, it will be suggested that the marketing of multicultural fiction continues to involve a sense of marginalization that limits the perception and reading of certain novels. The chapter also emphasizes the special role which the novel has in a broader cultural discourse on globality: a role which is also intimately related to its special status for publishers. On the one hand, in the face of challenges from other mediums, the novel retains a “cosmopolitan value”: it continues to respond to the changes of the twenty-first century and remains a central transmitter of cultural narratives. As Martha Nussbaum argues, “narratives, especially novels… speak to the reader as a human being, not simply as a member of some local culture; and works of literature frequently cross cultural boundaries far more easily than works of religion and philosophy” (1990: 391). The limitless subjectivities inherent in the novel form foster cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, exposing individuals to “the extraordinary diversity of human responses to our world and the myriad points of intersection of those various responses” (Appiah 2005: 258), and allowing for the development of “cosmopolitan reading practices” (Appiah 2001: 203). On the other hand, in the fraught contexts in which certain works are published, it is evident that multicultural novels often connect beyond their locality only by a soft humanism, rather than by a concrete and pragmatic politics. The “marketing multiculturalism” debate emerged at the turn of the millennium, following the critical and commercial success of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Just over a decade on from the infamous “Rushdie Affair”—concerning the acrimonious release of The Satanic Verses (1986)—the millennium witnessed a changing attitude to both the promotion and reception of multicultural texts. Culturally diverse authors became a desirable commodity for the global literary marketplace with publishers making intensive and concentrated efforts to introduce new voices to the field. As the article will demonstrate, however, in the subsequent process of promotion and consumption the thematic content of these authors’ texts became distorted in order to replicate

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the mainstream appeal of specific success stories via reusable marketing strategies. The label of “multicultural fiction” itself continues to be problematic. Multiculturalism implies a level of homogeneity at the level of the group, resisting the cultural agency of individual actors to assume more cosmopolitan forms of identification and belonging. Given the marketing formulas employed for non-white authors, the term “multicultural” fiction therefore proves to be a rather apt appellation in exposing the practice of cultural leveling. The term is traditionally employed by publishers to refer to texts written by individuals from non-white backgrounds (as opposed to fiction that deals with the finer complexities of transnational engagement), leading to generalization and the positioning of heterogeneous works as comparable to one another. The significance of the multicultural novel to contemporary British fiction in particular is undeniable, with Guardian journalist John Ezard going so far as to suggest that the British novel had been “saved by ethnic minorities” (2004). As Patrick Parrinder’s seminal study, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, declares: “the novel of immigration [is] now recognised as the most vital form of English fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (2006: 380). The Granta list, which identifies and celebrates the work of the twenty most auspicious British novelists under 40, is reflective of the progressive cultural diversity of the British literary scene. Whereas past lists have been dominated by old-school white postmodernists such as Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Will Self, and Graham Swift, the 2013 list contained authors of Chinese, Nigerian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Ghanaian descent, among others. It also illustrated the complexity and indeterminate nature of Britishness: Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) was born in China and educated in Beijing; Nadifa Mohamed, author of Black Mamba Boy (2010) hails from Somalia but now resides in London; and Pakistani-author Kamila Shamsie, author of Salt and Saffron (2000), was still waiting for British citizenship while on the list and now enjoys dual nationality. Granta, by including authors who were either born in Britain, moved there at a young age or who self-defined as a specific ethnicity, indicated what had been apparent for many years—that British identity is not fixed or rooted, nor is the nation a homogenous space, but rather a site of complex cultural exchange and syncretism reflective of the post-millennial globalized environment. An examination of globalizing processes is central to any discussion of twenty-first century fiction in general. The development of widespread

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cultural heterogeneity is especially evident in North American fiction, in works by NoViolet Bulawayo, Cristina Henriquez and Imbolo Mbue, for example, with thematic concerns that exceed regional or national space, sensitive to the intensification of cross-cultural engagement and its revitalization of the novel form. As Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosalo emphasize, “the nation-states of the West have become homes to a host of diverse and sometimes incommensurable cultures” (2008: 23). In the wake of such unprecedented sociocultural change, or what Arjun Appadurai would term shifting “ethnoscapes,” publishers employ differentiated marketing strategies to target specific groups and promote the identity of ethnic minority authors to appeal to the widest public readership (as well as capitalizing on the potential for future growth) (Appadurai 1990: 297). The early 2000s intensified a late-twentieth century concentration on national identity in light of multicultural debates, with the publishing market witnessing a surge in interest for multicultural novels as lucrative goods. Simon Prosser, editor of works by Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, concedes that “to a degree British publishing has been diverse… but it isn’t anything as diverse as the society we live in” (in Sethi 2005). The renewed attention towards ethnic minority authors often echoes the criticism directed at responses to postcolonial fiction: a privileged and passing flirtation with ethnic “otherness” or difference that fails to engage with the thematic concerns of a particular text. Graham Huggan’s seminal text The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) was an early attempt at posing some of these cultural concerns, interrogating the influence of publishing and marketing practices on literary texts and production. Huggan details how “marketing the margins” became a central marketing strategy with regards to multicultural fiction from the late 1970s onwards. By emphasizing the “exotic appeal” of “publicly endorsed ‘multicultural’ products” (2002: 116), publishers market literary texts as being reflective of changing demographics or sociocultural developments, yet fail to address the specificities of their subject matter or the identities of global subjects: “one of the effects of this sponsored multiculturalism is a levelling out of different histories, and an aestheticized celebration of diversity that disguises the lack of sociohistorical change.” More importantly, the process “assimilate[s] ‘marginal’ cultural products, rejuvenating, but also protecting the beleaguered mainstream culture” (2002: 117). Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau’s edited collection, Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market (2014), continues Huggan’s work on postcolonial literary production,

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advancing the debate into the twenty-first century by examining the legacy of demands and expectations placed on Indian writers within the marketplace. Lau suggests elsewhere that a narrow reception of contemporary Indian writing in English results in “re-orientalism,” observing that: “who is speaking (which in part depends on where they happen to be located) matters more than what is spoken, and consequently, what is eventually heard and made accessible to large audiences” (2011: 26). Lau’s remarks reflect a wider reception facing authors of postcolonial or multicultural texts: the notion that their fiction is semi-autobiographical or almost journalistic in nature, betraying an emphasis on identity and culture without a corresponding focus on structure or form. The agency of the author is thereby subsumed by an association with the cultural or national contexts inherent in their works, forcing an intervention with the notion of authenticity and preventing a detachment from the politics of cultural production and consumption. Appiah, writing in 1991, suggested that postcolonial novelists were complicit in their own marginalization, forming a “comprador intelligentsia”: “a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” (348).1 Pankaj Mishra, drawing on Appiah’s comments, argues that the prospect of commercial success leads Asian and African writers to “embody the bland consensus of transnational elites,” producing works that contain an “internationally identifiable and translatable literariness, not to mention cuddly-bear politics,” and ultimately “denuded of the differences and antagonisms that define a genuinely pluralist culture.” As a result, “the homogenizing and depoliticizing effects of the ‘global novel’ can also be exaggerated, to the point where every writer of non-western origin seems to be vending a consumable—rather than a challenging—cultural otherness” (Mishra 2013). As literature moves beyond the postcolonial condition, the extent to which authors are complicit in the distortion of their works within the global literary marketplace is questionable and will be explored further below. However, it is evident that the contemporary multicultural novel, as a commodifiable “good” within the novel-network, suffers a related form of “market colonization” to that which Sarah Brouillette 1 Appiah’s view is echoed by the narrator of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) who recognizes and resists the perception that he should serve as a “janissary” of Western neoliberalism (or capitalist American society more specifically).

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argues affected “the cultural production of postcolonial literature” before it (2007: 24). As the following examination of several best-selling and internationally acclaimed twenty-first century novels will demonstrate, an intensification of the processes of globalization have only served to intensify and reinforce, rather than remedy and ameliorate, such marketing strategies.

Literary Aesthetics With the much-hyped publication of White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith was celebrated as the poster girl for contemporary British fiction; her novel was reflective of a celebratory and almost harmonious form of multicultural engagement at the turn of the millennium. According to Sam Wallace, Zadie Smith is “the perfect package for a literary marketing exercise”—describing her as the ideal face for a culturally diverse twentyfirst century society (2000: 69). Aesthetics clearly influences the positioning of the author on the literary market, assigning individuals to restrictive categories. Dominic Head details how publishers immediately drew attention to Smith’s youth and black British identity in order to generate interest for the novel: With the seriousness of the author established, it seems that the publisher could attend to other areas of her marketability… Smith now has an Asian look, and this demonstrates an indeterminate ethnicity. For the author of a book that purports to speak authoritatively to a wide range of ethnic experience—including Caribbean British and Asian British experience—the ability to adopt different guises suggests a substantive hybridized identity that goes beyond the more cynical marketing objectives. (2003: 106)

Smith was reportedly granted a £250,000 advance from her publishers Hamish Hamilton for her first two novels; the first of which, White Teeth, went on to sell well over a million copies, enjoyed widespread media and marketing coverage, and won a host of literary awards in the process.2 Her work, according to Prosser, detailed the “ordinary Englishness” not

2 The Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Betty Trask award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Whitbread Book Award.

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usually associated with multicultural fiction: “I think of her as an incredibly British writer—and the Britishness that she embodies, both as a writer and as a person, is a very real form of Britishness, which is multifaith, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural” (Edemariam 2005). And yet, Smith has always resisted the moniker of multiculturalism as either a marker of cultural identity or a means of marketing her fiction, bemoaning that nonwhite authors are often subject to homogenization: “I was expected to be some expert on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism is a genre of fiction or something, whereas it’s just a fact of life… I think I have brown people in my book, and so does Salman [Rushdie], and so does Hanif Kureishi. So it’s a genre” (Hattenstone 2000, my italics). An added emphasis is placed on multicultural fiction to ensure texts can be compared to other works, especially concerning non-white authors. As a result, writers and their works suffer from a branding problem—emergent talents are pigeonholed and it is assumed their thematic concerns and characters come from the same imaginative space. According to Smith, her fictional characters: don’t struggle to find an identity because they’re mixed race, they struggle because they are… the product of a twentieth century that invented and patented this piece of claptrap called “finding an identity”, and it drives everybody nuts, mixed race or no. The search for an identity is one of the most wholesale phony ideas we’ve ever been sold. (Smith 2000)

By association, multicultural texts are stripped of their cultural agency and categorized as writing “from the margins.” The process of multicultural marketing concerns an extensive focus on the background, identity, and, most importantly, “authenticity” of the author in relation to their works. Authenticity is thus a struggle predominantly facing ethnic minority writers. White, middle-class authors are afforded a level of imagination and thematic freedom that fails to be extended to black British or British Asian authors who are expected to tackle ethno-political and sociocultural issues of diversity, racial tension, or belonging as well as a positioning of narrative events within a wider transnational or even global context. As Smith comments, “a white male writer is never asked to be a spokesman for anything; he has complete artistic freedom” (in Hattenstone 2000). The most immediate problem is that multicultural marketing merely reinforces cultural diversity as a deviation from an alleged “norm,” limits

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the novel’s market, and ultimately contributes to a process of marginalization—the very effect the marketing of the novel attempts to avoid. These authors become commodified in the process and assimilated into a vague and homogenized ‘multicultural’ brand that fails to acknowledge the cultural specificities and ethnic differences of each particular author. Although novelist Hari Kunzru suggests that White Teeth “did something new among books about minority experience about being already here,” Smith was in fact developing the thematic concerns of earlier black British and British Asian authors such as Hanif Kureishi (Edemariam 2005). Indeed, the opening sentence of The Buddha of Suburbia is built upon this very premise: “My name is Karim Amir and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost,” expressing an early ambivalence towards the supposed inclusivity of multicultural British life (Kureishi 2000: 3). By contextualizing White Teeth’s reception, the novel can be better understood as a (ironic) reflection of political and media discourse in this period. Claire Squires identifies how the novel presents “a largely optimistic view of multiculturalism, but not without satirizing the attitudes that would inform her reception” (2007: 180). However, the marketing and promotion of White Teeth, involving an intensive emphasis on Smith’s own identity, would influence and shape the reception of subsequent multicultural fictions in the post-millennium. Prosser, the editor who masterminded the release of White Teeth, immediately positioned Kunzru in relation to Smith: “he has a similar kind of potential… the same confidence and maturity. His themes are cultural identity and race” (in McCrum 2002). Kunzru himself accepted this inevitable comparison, ironically stating that he is “doomed to be the new Zadie Smith… I’m under 35, brown-skinned and able to write a sentence” (in O’Regan 2002). The Impressionist continues postcolonialism’s fascination with the haunting and lingering legacy of imperial practice, considering its impact on subsequent race relations in the contemporary moment. The central character, Pran, an adolescent Kashmiri male, is reflective of the mutable nature of identity construction, but simultaneously suffers at the hands of oppressive national structures and institutions who maintain an outdated focus on ethnicity alone. Although The Impressionist is historically grounded in nineteenth-century India, the narrative alludes to several critical issues surrounding ethnicity and cultural identity relevant to post-millennial debate. Kunzru questions the monolithic nature of social institutions in apportioning assumed

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affiliations onto individuals and ensuring the continuation of ethnic categorization. Despite Kunzru’s own Kashmiri heritage, the majority of his subsequent works have avoided an engagement with ethnic heritage. In the wake of Lionel Shriver’s controversial comments on “cultural appropriation,” Kunzru defended the potential for writers to escape assumed forms of identification: “Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not ‘own’ (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author… trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelist’s work” (Kunzru 2016). In purposely moving beyond a backward-looking mediation on twentieth-century cultural debates in his subsequent works, Transmission (2004) and Gods Without Men (2011), Kunzru is engaging with new forms of identification (including the role of digital technology in complicating cultural categorization) more reflective of the contemporary globalized condition. The commercialized promotion of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) has attracted much critical attention—not least for the continued focus on the author’s own ethnicity and background in the marketing of the novel. The novel set in Hounslow in West London, with the central character, Jas, code-switching between cockney, BAAVE, and Hindi, before being revealed as a white youth in a plot twist, exposing the emergent processes of cultural acculturation and their effect on British identity. Londonstani was widely hyped as the next “great multicultural novel” in the development stages for its apparent subtle exploration of race relations and the social complexities of Britain’s Asian communities in the capital. The novel secured Malkani a $675,000 advance, eclipsing the advance granted to White Teeth (with which it was already being compared) and securing the guidance of Zadie Smith’s editor, Ann Godoff (see Morrison 2006). However, following Londonstani’s first release by Fourth Estate, and subsequent commercial flop (selling only fifteen thousand copies), publishers Harper Perennial developed a digital campaign for the novel. James Graham notes that the new cover design was “resplendent in new-rave, day-glo green,” and presented “a recognisably iconic ‘London’ skyline” with “‘edgy’” photos of Hounslow”—a misguided image-making process designed to attract the attention of a younger urban audience reflective of the British Asian subcultures populating the novel (Graham 2008). The digital campaign was also a non-starter and merely demonstrated a fatal misunderstanding of the novel’s readership. Londonstani

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also received a poor critical reception predominantly for its stereotypical and inaccurate depiction of British Asian youth. Although Donald Morrison praised the novel for its “imaginative mix of English, Punjabi, Urdu, profanity, gangsta rap and mobile-phone texting,” the urban vernacular and street slang failed to ring true with most critics and reviewers, and attention was drawn to Malkani’s Oxbridge education and occupation as a journalist for the Financial Times (Morrison 2006). Suhayl Saadi, author of critically acclaimed novel Psychoraag (2004), went further in his criticism, arguing that the fault lay with Malkani himself: “There is a serious lack of depth. Empathy is created for South Asians only if they speak with a British accent. First-generation South Asian immigrants are not accorded the same linguistic breath, back-story or vision as British Asians or whites” (2006). Saadi claimed that the literary production of Malkani’s text is a mutually reinforcing process, with the author himself at fault for following the same convergent path as the publisher and being complicit in the cultural framing of his fiction. Saadi argues that an emphasis on cultural and ethnic stereotypes to depict and typecast Asian subjects is partly responsible for the faulty reasoning behind the marketing campaign: “the book is full of restaurants and (arranged) marriages—the easy drippings of South Asian culture, the types of paradigm through which white elites perceive the ‘other’” (Saadi 2006). In this sense, the novel is reflective of the wider problem facing British Asian fiction in its marketing, production, and reception, namely that “the state of ‘Asian-ness’ is irredeemably primitive, destructive and existentially separate from the redemptive state of ‘White-ness,’ creating ‘a shabby, 21st-century, Orientalism’ which ‘tells upper-middle-class white elites what they want to hear.’ It reinforces the structures of power in the world of information to which the novel as an art-form belongs” (Saadi 2006). In Malkani’s defense, the novel is written with an awareness of the Western world’s perception and presentation of minority cultures: “the characters in Londonstani are basically defined by their differing levels of inauthenticity—that’s kind of the point, it’s about performance and pretense—so the whole authenticity test that the media kept applying to me becomes even more ridiculously meaningless” (in Graham 2008). The construction of the protagonist Jas, who masquerades as a British Asian, highlights the dialogic performativity of identity, allowing the cultural marker of ethnicity to be a floating signifier and providing a wider critique on the positioning of ethnic minority authors or their characters as

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“authentic” voices of their community. As James Clifford argues, “cultural difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness… Everywhere individuals and groups improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and languages” (1988: 14, my italics). With this in mind, the digital rebranding and “urban” aesthetic reconstruction of Londonstani merely points towards the widespread criticism of a superficial “cosmopolitan” culture—the Western production and consumption of images and stereotypes to lend a shallow (and inauthentic) cultural authenticity to a literary text. Monica Ali had faced similar criticism for her inaccurate depiction of the Bangladeshi community, as well as her perceived lack of knowledge concerning London given her own upbringing in Bolton. Her debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), despite acknowledging the sense of dislocation and political marginalization experienced by transnational migrants inherited from Rushdie, charts the fate of Bangladeshi teenager Nazneen, as she attempts to assimilate and situate herself within the tense and fractious urban spaces of 1980s London. The marketability of the novel was inherent in its title: Brick Lane is a renowned street in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, home to a strong Bangladeshi community. Germaine Greer attacked Ali for her use of “pre-existing stereotypes,” ensuring the characters in her novel had “the force of a defining caricature” (Greer 2006). As Michael Perfect notes, the argument that Brick Lane “actively courts such ‘burdensome’ representation cannot be in doubt. One need only consider the novel’s title to see that it finds the prospect of representing, or perhaps even ‘unveiling’, a particular community rather attractive” (2008: 110). That being said, Ali clearly demonstrates an awareness of the stereotypical attitudes and practices associated with the British Asian community, and the means by which they can be exploited. Chanu, Nazneen’s husband, points to the proliferation of Hindu statues outside Brick Lane restaurants as an empty gesture of religious “authenticity” that merely exposes how the wider Asian community manipulates cultural stereotypes via aesthetic commodification: “‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest God of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity,’ said Chanu” (Ali 2003: 373). What separates contemporary Asian fiction from that of previous generations is this sense of progressive situatedness in place of a late-twentieth-century rootlessness. Like Kunzru, Ali was declared “the new Zadie Smith” with her two-book deal confirmed after the publisher had only read a couple of her chapters (Lane 2003). It is perhaps inevitable that Ali would also

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be pigeonholed in this manner given that their early fiction concerns the same geographical focus on the capital footnote—yet such a reading neglects how both novels are concerned with the problematic notion of “roots” and the relevance of cultural heritage. The production, promotion, and marketing of Malkani and Ali’s texts are not unique in this respect. In the years following Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) a range of Asian authors struggled with the “burden of representation”—both with regards to the creation and marketing of their works. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and Sunjeev Sahota’s Ours are the Streets (2011) faced similar, if not as problematic, branding issues. Nor is the issue endemic to British literary texts. The marketing and reception of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) reveal the same concerns inherent in North American publishing, involving the positioning of Lahiri’s work as a specific form of American “immigrant fiction.” As Anis Shivani identifies: “American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange” (Shivani 2006: 2). Lahiri, born in London but educated and residing in the US, is the daughter of Bengali emigrants, and her work often addresses the “glocalizing” nature of post-millennial Western culture. However, despite the plain and realist nature of her writing, her fiction is often considered to be sensual or exotic and suffers from the lingering notions of Orientalism associated with female minority writers. Julia Leyda concludes that questionable marketing strategies relating to Lahiri and others “makes it difficult or impossible for western reading audiences to embrace an Indian American writer’s book on its own terms” as “exoticizing stereotypes… hover like a cloud” over the production and reception of these texts (2011). In an interview with Leyda, Lahiri expresses a frustration that North American versions of her texts: “often resort to a stock image of India—a deity, or spices, or an elephant, or a woman in a sari. It’s tiresome and unimaginative.” The inaccurate representation of Lahiri’s fiction is not limited to aesthetic branding or paratextual features; several reviewers mistakenly describe her characters as Indian, despite being second or third-generation Indian-Americans, or even fail to appreciate Lahiri’s own cultural background: “I spend half the time in interviews trying to explain to people that I’m not from India.” However, she acknowledges such positioning and categorization is inevitable given the transnational nature

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of her work, conceding: “I have no control. I can only control the words I write” (in Leyda 2011). Further examples can be found by considering the categorization of Nigerian-Belgian author Chika Unigwe or Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Unigwe’s debut novel The Phoenix (originally published as De Feniks in 2005) and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) demonstrate the intricate linguistic transfers involved in border crossing and the employment of Igbo terms to indicate hybrid cultural backgrounds. As Elleke Boehmer and Sarah De Mul observe, their texts “circulate in an anglophone global book market, where they are shelved under black, African, Nigerian, or African diasporic writing,” without a corresponding attempt to market the texts by locating them within the national literatures of other cultures encountered in the narratives (Boehmer and De Mul 2012: 2). Nigerian-American author Teju Cole experienced a comparable reception. Cole’s debut novel Open City (2012) demonstrates a breadth of various cultural traditions and their influences on Cole, and yet academic criticism and marketing strategies have attempted to limit Cole’s perspective from the narrow purview of West African diasporic writing.

The Value of the Novel In the years following White Teeth’s publication, Smith bemoaned the contemporary literary marketplace and the failure of the novel to accurately represent the world or indicate the value of the novel form as a unique “good.” The atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7 exposed the hollow optimism apparent in her early work as literary critics and cultural commentators looked to fiction to provide answers for a fragile and anxious British society. Accordingly, Smith’s fourth novel, NW (2012), purposefully assumes a critical stance that attends to the tensions and dissonances of London, deviating away from White Teeth’s concentration on Britain’s passing “century of strangers, brown, yellow and white… the great immigrant experiment” (Smith 2000: 326). Although these thematic concerns naturally invite debates surrounding multicultural politics and cultural legacies, NW is Smith’s attempt to shift the focus to twenty-first century life, directly engaging with the socioeconomic inequalities and crosscultural interdependencies that define the contemporary moment. Smith ensures the local and the global operate in dynamic interplay, acknowledging shifting notions of belonging and national identity, as well as the complex links between cultural identities and consumer culture,

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thus limiting ethnic marginalization. The protagonist, Natalie de Angelis, resists the temptation to appropriate the values and ties of her childhood, renegotiating potential social and cultural allegiances and affiliations, and constructing an identity that is at odds with the multicultural politics practiced by publishers in marketing Smith’s fiction. In doing so, NW demonstrates how the novel form itself is central to cosmopolitan forms of empathy and dialog and the means by which the novel can serve as an agent of cultural change: “the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here… Narrative itself is the performance of that very procedure” (Smith 2003). As Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, questions: “why should the colour of the writer matter? In 20 years people won’t think twice about it. … Stories are universal” (in Sethi 2005). While Denny’s remarks may be considered naïve in addressing the complexity of ethno-political contexts, Kwame Anthony Appiah perceives the novel form especially to contain a progressive function, serving “as a testing ground for… cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on dialogue among differences” (2001: 207); the novel itself being “a message in a bottle from some other position” (223). The novel form, then, possesses a unique capacity: contributing to the transmission of cultural narratives, ensuring and supporting the active and evolving process of ethical relationality, and thereby operating against homogenizing effects of Eurocentrism or Western homogeneity more widely. In a post-millennial environment of progressive global interdependence, the fate of the “multicultural” novel will be intimately affected by the political parameters of cultural production and the impetus of publishers to alter entrenched marketing strategies. As this chapter has suggested, the “multicultural” novel continues to suffer de-historicization through its incorporation into the Anglophone literary market and the processes of consumption and production in general. The value of such works as commodifiable “goods” lies in their potential for cross-cultural dissemination and global distribution. The challenge facing authors and their works, however, is to prevent fictions of globalization experiencing the same fate as postcolonial literature, resisting the continuation of marketing practices that sustain established exceptions in dissemination, circulation, and readership. What is required is a renegotiation of social and ethnic identities and an interrogation of the author’s own complicity in existing practices. In Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995), David Hollinger advanced the emergence of a postethnic perspective favoring “voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a

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determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (3). While the etymology of the term is suggestive of a movement beyond ethnicity or a rejection of ethnicity as a category, the term postethnic instead “disputes the confinements of the very category” while simultaneously demonstrating “an awareness of the expectations that so-called ethnic writing faces” (Stein 2004: 112). In resisting assumed expectations, multicultural authors become active agents in the construction of post-millennial national identities, attentive to the cultural and ethnic specificities of their own identities and the thematic concerns set forth in their works. Smith in particular is forwarding an alternative, ethical vision of British society that resists attempts to circumscribe or limit the mis-marketing, production, and reception of her literary texts. Peter Boxall emphasizes that cultural and ethical values have always been integral to the novel’s enduring form and its value as an object for future cultural negotiation: “If we are living at a disjunct time when we are required to rethink our understanding of value, when we have to adapt our critical languages and institutions to newly emerging global realities, then the novel might help us to achieve this” (2015: 15–16). Despite the marketization of literary forms, especially in regard to the marginalization and exoticization of multicultural fiction (in which authors may be implicated and complicit), “it is the novel we need, more than ever, to help us understand such communities and to live within them” (144). The value of the novel, then, lies in its capacity to respond directly to our shared global communities, in a time when social, ethno-political and technological change is profoundly altering the cultural landscape. The Anglophone novel, as a cultural capstone within the global literary marketplace and novel-network, must possess the ability to adapt to recent transformations in cultural production and accurately reflect the diversity of twenty-first century society.

References Ali, Monica. 2003. Brick Lane. New York: Scribner. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295–310. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? Critical Inquiry 17 (2) (Winter): 336–357.

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2001. Cosmopolitan Reading. In Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, 197–227. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boehmer, Elleke, and Sarah De Mul. 2012. Introduction: Postcolonialism and the Low Countries. In The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism and Multiculturalism, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Sarah De Mul, 1–22. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edemariam, Aida. 2005. Learning Curve. The Guardian, September 3. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/03/fiction.zadiesmith. Accessed 31 March 2020. Ezard, John. 2004. UK Novel Saved by Ethnic Minorities. The Guardian, May 31. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/may/31/highereducat ion.artsandhumanities. Accessed 31 March 2020. Graham, James. 2008. ‘This in’t Good Will Hunting’: Londonstani and the Market for London’s Multicultural Fictions. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6 (2). http://www.literarylondon. org/london-journal/september2008/graham.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Greer, Germaine. 2006. Reality Bites. The Guardian, July 24. https://www.the guardian.com/film/2006/jul/24/culture.books. Accessed 31 March 2020. Hamid, Moshin. 2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Hamish Hamilton. Hattenstone, Simon. 2000. White Knuckle Ride. The Guardian, December 11. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/11/fiction.whitbread bookawards2000. Accessed 31 March 2020. Head, Dominic. 2003. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium. In Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, 106–119. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: BasicBooks. Huggan, Graham. 2002. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo. 2008. Tracking Global Flows. In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 3–46. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Kunzru, Hari. 2016. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Novelists Have Their Say on Cultural Appropriation. The Guardian, October 1. https://www.thegua rdian.com/books/2016/oct/01/novelists-cultural-appropriation-literaturelionel-shriver. Accessed 31 March 2020. Kureishi, Hanif. 2000. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Lane, Harriet. 2003. Ali’s in Wonderland. The Guardian, June 1. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2003/jun/01/fiction.features1. Accessed 31 March 2020. Lau, Lisa. 2011. Re-Orientalism in Contemporary Indian Writing. In ReOrientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within, ed. Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes, 15–39. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leyda, Julia. 2011. An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri. Contemporary Women’s Writing 5 (1): 66–83. McCrum, Robert. 2002, The Literary Lottery. The Guardian, March 11. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/17/fiction.grahamswift. Accessed 31 March 2020. Mishra, Pankaj. 2013. Beyond the Global Novel. Financial Times, September 27. https://www.ft.com/content/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc000144feab7de?mhq5j=e3. Accessed 31 March 2020. Morrison, Donald. 2006. Pump Up the Street Cred. Time, May 7. http://con tent.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191817,00.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. O’Regan, Nadine. 2002. Seeking Self Amid the Feeding Frenzy. Sunday Business Post Online, April 14. http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2002/04/14/sto ry317716.asp. Link no longer accessible online. Parrinder, Patrick. 2006. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perfect, Michael. 2008. The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43 (3): 109–120. Saadi, Suhayl. 2006. Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani: A Taste of Gangsta Sikh. Independent, April 21. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ books/reviews/londonstani-by-gautam-malkani-6103175.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Sethi, Anita. 2005. The Curse of Being Labelled the ‘New Zadie’. The Guardian, November 14. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/14/pressa ndpublishing.bookscomment. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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Shivani, Anis. 2006. Indo-Anglian Fiction: The New Orientalism. Race & Class 47 (4): 1–25. Smith, Zadie. 2000. White Teeth. London: Penguin. ———. 2003. Love, Actually. The Guardian, November 1. https://www.the guardian.com/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith. Accessed 31 March 2020. ———. n.d. ‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith’, Reading Guides: On Beauty. https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_ number/344/zadie-smith. Accessed 31 March 2020. Squires, Claire. 2007. Marketing Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stein, Mark. 2004. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Tew, Philip. 2015. After the First Decade: Revisiting the Work of Zadie Smith. In Postmodern Literature and Race, ed. Len Platt and Sara Upstone, 247–263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, Sam. 2000. Cutting Her Teeth. The Age, February 6.

CHAPTER 5

The Novel Network and the Work of Genre Tim Lanzendörfer

Genre and the Contemporary Novel In July 2017, Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Britain’s most prestigious award for the genre. In as much as a book wins this award annually, that alone might not be notable. But just the day before, the novel had also been long-listed for the—mainstream literary—Man Booker Award; and the previous year, had in fact won both the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and been nominated for Oprah Winfrey’s prestigious (and sales-increasing) book club (Cowdrey 2017; Lujan 2016). While there had been winners of sets of these awards and recognitions before (though fewer than one might think), Whitehead’s win marks the first, and so far only, time when the most prestigious U.S. awards in mainstream fiction, and a genre fiction award, went to the same novel. Not quite as notably, perhaps, Whitehead failed to win the Man Booker in 2017, but the prize went to a similarly fantastical novel, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Where Whitehead’s novel followed its protagonist Cora’s escape from slavery to freedom by means of a network of actual underground railway tunnels and through counterfactual historical constellations in the

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American South, Saunders’s narrated the complicated afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie, who died to Lincoln’s great grief at age twelve in 1862, as well as the spirits he meets in that afterlife. Both of these cases, then, feature novels winning mainstream fiction awards even though they “are,” as it were, genre-fictional novels, or at any rate heavily overwritten by genre-fictional motifs. I want to begin with what amounts to a largely anecdotal point—since 2017, the success of genre fiction has not been repeated in the Pulitzer or National Book Award, although Margaret Atwood’s arguably dystopian novel The Testaments co-won the Man Booker Award in 20191 —because it allows me to ask the question that will engage the rest of this essay: what is the contemporary role of genre in the novel? This is in many ways a presumptuous question to ask, given that it will involve what amounts essentially to an imposition of several beliefs: first, that it is important, and indeed possible, to distinguish between “novels” and “the novel,” where—of course—even a mass-market paperback potboiler, a Dan Brown or Clive Cussler or Nelson DeMille or Barbara Cartland book is “a” novel, but not part of what I am after when I speak of “the” novel. Second, that there is something interesting going on the contemporary that is different, if not in all literary history, then at least from what has been going on in the last couple of decades or so, and that this interesting thing has to do with the contemporary novel’s relation to genre. The simplest reply to this second belief amounts to its dismissal: the novel has always been omnivorous of genres, “plasticity itself” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase (1980: 39). If not always, then at least since postmodernism and its voracious pastiches—at any rate, there is nothing interesting going on in the turn to genre that we appear to have been diagnosing for the past couple of years. “Literary fiction,” says Jeremy Rosen, “has always worked with existing genres, because all texts use genres” (2018). I think that an argument can be made that such a reply shortchanges what is happening in the current moment, that something more is happening in the contemporary that shifts, if slightly and in fits and starts,

1 In 2019, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf , a sprawling fantasy epic, was

short-listed for the National Book Award, though he did not win it. All the way back in 2007, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize; that same year, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a heavily literary novel with considerable genre elements, won several science-fiction awards, but did not repeat Chabon’s 2001 win of a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

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the idea of what “the novel” is. In what follows, I will do a number of interrelated things. First, I will endeavor to sketch an idea of the novel that emphasizes the distinction I have drawn above between all kinds of novels and the novel proper, a distinctly more high-cultural, but generically restricted mode. Departing from this postulation of such a specific subset of all things novel, I will in a second step argue the importance of the contemporary turn to genre within the novel’s contemporary network—an argument that suggests, essentially, both the increasing coherence of the idea of “the novel” as well as its extra-literary influences. Finally, I will seek to draw the connections between these primarily formal and thematic moves and the larger socio-literary space, suggesting the ways in which the various ways in which the genre turn has been read so far need to read together, as constitutive of one significant contemporary element of the novel’s network, and potentially part of a larger cultural moment of class realignment.

Realism and the Spirit of the Novel I want to begin by suggesting something possibly contentious, namely that there is a difference between novels and the novel: that is to say, there is a difference between the things we recognize as novels by their form, commodity contexts, and other clues (not least the paratextual marker “a novel” frequently found on covers), and the things that we recognize as one of the subset of novels aptly called the novel. The first set, obviously, is utterly encompassing; the second, by contrast, is marked by its cultural cachet as limited in scope. When anxieties about the novel’s place in the system of cultural production crop up, as they periodically do, these are not concerned with the first version, which amount to mere storydelivery systems, we might say: “the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy” of Will Self’s (2014) jeremiad are, even in Self’s estimation, “in rude good health” (see also “Introduction” in this volume). Anxiety about the death of the novel is always anxiety about the death of the “literary,” “high-cultural,” “serious” novel. That kind of novel is itself, of course, ill-defined to say the least, an open category with fluid borders whose policing is left to an assortment of players in the cultural field, from publishers to prize committees to literary scholars.2 2 Attempts are frequently made, of course, to set a list of possible characteristics. Günter Leypoldt, for example, suggests that the “literary” novel is defined by “stylistic or formal

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“Literary” as a category is, in the way we conceive of it today and for the contemporary novel, a modernist idea, one which developed in the exchange between a specific type of writing and a specific set of literary-critical responses. Modernist writing claimed for itself a distance from the market, while at the same time its tendency towards formal and stylistic innovativeness, and most explicitly its radical challenge to simple reading, gave lasting rise to literary studies as such, what John Barth has famously called a “priestly industry of explicators, annotators, allusionchasers, to mediate between the text and the reader” (1984: 201). It was this professional system that developed the canon of literary works now recognizable as “literary history;” not because they were the first (in fact, earlier professionals in literary studies were, by and large, literary historians rather than literary critics [see North 2018]), but because their view of what to do with literary works and what to favor in literary works came to shape the line of works which retroactively became “literary” and produced a vague genealogy of literary works. What unites much of this line (though not necessarily all of it) is an investment in versions of realism. For some values of that term, that certainly is odd: after all, if nothing else, in most periodizations of literary history, modernism as a paradigm follows on from realism, and disavowed much of what the Realist impulse stood for. But realism, writ small, nonetheless remained a vital impulse for literary writing, not just in offering up relatable— realistic—subjects and settings, but even in techniques aiming to best capture the “reality” of a given situation (as Erich Auerbach noted in his discussion of stream-of-consciousness in Woolf and Joyce [2003: 535– 543]). Modernist high literary fiction was realist in this sense, and neatly slotted into a long tradition of novel-writing that was heavily bound up with realism in the first place. As Ian Watt notes in his seminal The Rise of the Novel, the first novels were heavily inflected by philosophical realism in producing a formal turn to an “authenticity of … narratives”

innovations that expand a novel’s aesthetic possibilities, a ‘privileged’ imagination or intellectual distinction resulting in ‘world-disclosing’ new visions, or an expressive representativeness that captures a cultural or historical moment or the way a culture thinks and feels about itself” (2018). These categories are, of course, more or less open themselves to definition, and in fact, are non-exclusive of non-“literary” novel forms, except when the determination is made beforehand. Thus, a Jonathan Franzen novel, which may very well fail to be any of the things Leypoldt sets out, will probably still be literary by dint of Franzen’s pre-existing prestige as a writer, while a G. R. R. Martin novel, despite successfully fulfilling all the criteria listed (incidentally: by whose determination?) will not.

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(2000: 29), a trueness to life which has pretty much ever since been the emphasis of realist writing—and the literary novel, identifiable at least in part precisely by this capacity.3 If some about this changed in the transition to a post-modernist and even into postmodern times, the essential delineation between genre fiction’s investment is often non-realist forms (science-fiction and fantasy, most importantly) and literary fiction held. If postmodernism’s adoption of the styles of genre fiction was in keeping with its general tendency towards the transgression of traditional boundaries (Hutcheon 1988: 9), it was also a parodic mimicking rather than a true adoption of genre fiction—even if, granted, much postmodern fiction transgressed also against the boundaries of narrative realism—and so did not amount to the wholesale adoption of genre-fictional narrative modes. It’s not such a surprise, then, that throughout the postwar era, Mark McGurl identifies a “dominant position of realism” in the writing programs that have shaped the literary field (2009: 95), segueing neatly into the most recent debates, which have identified a turn to what has been dubbed “neorealism” (Rebein 2001) or “post-postmodern realism” (Dubey 2011), highlighting the way in which realist fiction has returned to the fore of critical thinking.4 Little of this is more than a recognition that the novel is deeply marked by its relation to realism, even when, as in postmodernity, it frequently abandons it for effect. In Michael Sayeau’s words, “‘realism’ exerts a sort of gravitational pull over the novel,” a pull which, like all good gravitational relationships, goes both ways: “the” novel is pulled towards realism even as narrative realism pulls a text towards being “the” novel, especially when it doesn’t fit into other, also quasi-realist genres, such as crime fiction or the romance. “Having some sort of relation to realism seems to be an inevitable part

3 All this becomes a bit more complicated—though not insurmountably so—when we

consider the two other big genres of genre fiction, crime fiction and the romance, which are, after all, realistic in their ontologies: they do not present the fantastic or impossible. We might note in passing the importance in this context of the idea of “magical realism” and the way in which authors in its tradition (especially, perhaps, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Marquéz; see Joshi 2018: 227) were able to ascent the pinnacles of literary fame and recognition. Alejo Carpentier’s insistence that magical realism captured a particular postcolonial Latin American reality lays claim to a tradition of realism in the novel that is also a claim to literariness (see Carpentier 1995). 4 Dubey’s essay in fact rejects the project which post-postmodern realism, according to its practitioners and supporters, appears to embody, but recognizes the validity of the claim that there is such a thing.

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of what it means to write a novel” (2018: 91). This may, indeed, even be saying too little (though it bears noting in relation to postmodernism): after all, even the most fantastical novel imaginable has “some sort” of relation to realism; but it emphasizes the way in which what the novel is to most critics is distinct from all things novel. It is certainly less anecdotal to stress how prevalent realism is in the upper reaches of the cultural hierarchies of the novel: against the examples I began with, prize-winners over the past two decades have been heavily leaning towards realist fiction. Similarly canonizing, neither Michael Schmidt (2014) nor Thomas Pavel (2013), in their respective efforts to trace the life of the novel give more than short shrift to anything not literary (Pavel briefly highlights the enormous vitality of “popular literature” in the postwar period over two pages [291–292]), and for Peter Boxall, in his outstanding The Value of the Novel, the valued novel clearly is the literary novel, and most especially the realist novel. “The” novel, then, we might say, is implicitly realist: certainly not all of the most esteemed novels are realistic fiction, and certainly not all realist novels are esteemed, but there is more than just coincidental overlap between the categories of literary fiction and realism—one which is set into even starker relief, as Priya Joshi points out, when we recognize that the narrative of the rise of novels as a medium is largely owing not to the prestige literary forms canonized by literary studies, but by a global “sustained rejection of realism” (2018: 226) from its very earliest days. Some novels, as it were, are more equal than others. The paratextual annotation “a novel” becomes a marker of genre (only!) where genre fiction is argued to be absent: that is to say, “a novel” is a (negative) genre-marker on the jacket of Jonathan Franzen’s, Don DeLillo’s, and Toni Morrison’s novels, simply marking non-genericity; and in turn it is merely a formal assertion—“this is not a short story collection”—on the cover of Neal Stephenson, Dan Brown, or Clive Cussler’s. Part of the point here must be, I think, that the distinction which Jeremy Rosen has drawn between “genre” and “genre fiction” is only partially operative. Rosen is certainly correct to suggest that there is a difference between the formal operations of genre and the declarative positioning of a text in a genre—its placement within genre fiction, where the former is essentially value-free, and the latter an establishment of relative prestige (cf. Rosen 2018: n. 25). But if realism is, in any meaningful way, the standard mode of the literary novel, we can see how any operation that shifts a novel’s place in the literary field also seeks to shift its position in the system of genres: it seeks

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to claim, as it were, that the markers of genre that the novel exhibits do not, in fact, make it a genre novel. It is this that gets broken, even if only anecdotally, by The Underground Railroad’s winning prizes which mark it simultaneously as recognizably literary and recognizably generic.5 The crucial point of the past decade, then, is that today, unlike in postmodernism, genre fiction’s motifs, modes, but also its often straightforward, no-nonsense style are taken seriously for themselves, as ways of talking about the contemporary that go beyond realism, and are becoming a part of what is understood to be literary fiction.

Genre, Genre Fiction, and the Novel’s Formal Network For the purposes of this chapter, I am not interested very much in what the preexistent disposition of the literary novel towards realism and the recent upswing in genre-fictional inclusiveness signifies in aesthetic terms. Rather, what I am after here is, in keeping with this collection’s belief that what constitutes the contemporary novel is a network of relationships, rather than any particular formal quality, a suggestion of what new paths and connections we may trace in the turn to genre. My chief assertion here is that while Jeremy Rosen is right to point out that contemporary “novelists’ incorporation of popular genres into literary fiction does not dismantle cultural hierarchies” (2018), it does shift what we understand “the” novel is, and it does so in a way that opens the novel to a wider range of influences—or, at the very least, openly opens the novel to those influences, permitting us to understand them in turn in a different relation to the novel than hitherto. Most importantly, I would argue, this involves the relationship between “the” novel and its immediate other, the genre-fictional novel, and I contend that what we are seeing is a greater coherence of the category “novel,” a depolarization between its literary and generic poles. The question of the importance of genre fiction’s presence in literary fiction has been answered variously in the last number of years, and engaged both literary critics writing for public consumption and academic critics seeking to establish the phenomenon’s meaning. Lev Grossman, 5 I expand on this argument, and the arguments sketched below, about The Underground Railroad in my forthcoming Speculative Historism: Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel.

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then Time’s book critic, dubbed it a “revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles” in 2012; I suggested in 2016 that genre’s use could function as a “cultural-diagnostic tool” (2012: 8); Andrew Hoberek has argued that the genre turn holds the promise of “a fiction capable of broadcasting visions of life not as it is, but as it might be” (2017: 73). Against this, some recent academic criticism has been more cautious. Jeremy Rosen has suggested that “the adoption of the genres of genre fiction by literary writers does not entail the abandonment of traditional literary values, or a leveling of cultural hierarchies” (2018), and Günter Leypoldt has suggested, more anti-radically, that to say that The Buried Giant has been influenced by genre fiction is thus only true in the abstract sense in which fire-breathing dragons used to be creatures of the genre ghetto that have now entered the sphere of major literary awards. Contra to Grossman’s “revolution from below,” the standards that define whether and how, and indeed which kind of fire-breathing dragons (emaciated, anti-climactic, desensationalized, in Ishiguro’s case) can inform prizewinning fiction with an aesthetic sense of grit, trickle down from high-cultural institutions in which the genre territories (Grossman’s “supermarket aisles”) have little say. (2018)

Leypoldt would understand the formal adoption of genre elements in contemporary fiction as an avant-garde move, an attempt to “revitalize conventional literary practice,” one which remains a one-way street, and changes nothing about “the socio-aesthetic atmospheres of stigmatized readerships” (2018) that still adheres to genre fiction as such. I want to offer something like a median position between these various arguments here for now (for now!), which stays closely alongside Rosen’s point that the “blending of elements from popular genres with recognizably literary traits positions their novels in an enviable cultural middle ground, making literary fiction look more like entertainment for popular audiences, while simultaneously maintaining the distinctiveness of the literary field from the broader terrain of popular culture, and appealing to institutions that confer literary prestige” (2018). One of the ways in which the idea of the network is helpful, I think, is in highlighting the dubiousness of unidirectional influences. As Rosen suggests, there are already at least two addressees for the genre turn: audiences of genre fiction, invited into literary fiction by its adoption of entertainment, and audience of literary fiction, who are not asked to accept wholesale abandonment of

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literary prestige. But beyond the idea of the literary field, and of readerly practices, the idea of the novel’s network permits us to read the linkage between genre fiction and literary fiction as an agential connection between nodes, in which either can’t help but act on the other. In simpler terms: when you take seriously the capacity of genre fiction to speak to the concerns of literary fiction, you make genre fiction more serious. As Priya Joshi has it, “the insurgent, sometimes subversive popular forms characterized as genre fiction have been sidelined by the economy of prestige as well as by the prevailing metrics of scholarly analysis” (2018: 233). In some ways, this is an enforcement of boundaries that is also gendered, where an initial cohort of genre-turn writers (Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, among others) has become somewhat accepted by critics while a cohort of women writers has struggled (see Hoberek 2017: 70–71); in other ways, this is simply a sidelining of most genre authors tout court. But they have not been sidelined by readers—they never have been sidelined by readers. What has happened has been the establishment of a specific cultural hierarchy that understands—today, at least, in the specific cultural constellation we have, and which is different in this regard from high postmodernism—realism again as the most prestigious form of literary fictional engagement; and it is this understanding, and with it the specific hierarchy we currently have, that gets destabilized not by the turn to genre as such, but by successful adoption of the same text in a variety of value-making contexts: this is what happened to Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The point of departing from this example is to stress that it shows the way the genre turn can be—perhaps is—reciprocal, making available the same novel as genre fiction to the prestige systems of genre fiction and of literary fiction. My wager here is that no adoption of genrefictional elements can fail to lower the threshold that keeps apart genre fiction and literary fiction—certainly not when that adoption is made seriously. Instead, what happens in the contemporary novel network is that overt connections become traceable and retraceable, connections whose impact—while never certain—potentially reshapes the idea of what “the” novel is in the first place. What gets established, then, is an increasing congruence between categories, a shifting of the Venn diagram of the reach of “the” and “a” novel towards greater overlap.

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The Genre Turn, the Literary Marketplace, and the Culture of Realignment If this is a meaningful version of the contemporary novel’s network, perhaps the final step we need to think about here is twofold: to think about both the why now and the meaning of the genre turn. I will aim to give one possible answer to this, drawing on recent work done by Stephen Shapiro, which suggests that we may be witnessing something like a process of class realignment here (see also Shapiro in this volume). This will be, admittedly, a fairly radical interpretation of that turn, and can only ever be a tentative offer. Shapiro’s argument is made in the context of television, more precisely prestige television, show of a return to highly generic narrative forms—urban crime procedurals, espionage thrillers, fantasy and science-fiction alternative worlds, swords-and-sandals historical costume drama, sentimentalized romance, and gothic sensation— that excavates and renews what had not that long ago been consigned as obsolete and lacking any audience appeal, especially for the more economically secure and (ostensibly) culturally “sophisticated” consumer base required for subscription television. (2016: 177)

Shapiro suggests that the best way to understand this phenomenon in prestige television is to read it as “laboratory for remaking the relations between classes within the cross-over of a broadly bourgeois audience and popular narrative forms, content, and medium” (178). Shapiro understands some of the specifics of his argument to be medially restricted to television because of the specifics of television production, what he calls the “televisual intellect:” “the combined apparatus of writers, actors, producers, and distributors construct a new mode of thinking-seeing as a response to a social transformation in which it is itself embedded” (180). I want to understand Shapiro’s implicit limitation as unnecessary here, and indeed much of this should sound familiar: not merely the question of genre adoption and the understanding of genre as for a less sophisticated audience, but also the description of the apparatus of production, or if you will, the network involved in the production of the TV show. If individual novels, as usually stand-alone cultural products, cannot respond to cultural shifts, and especially to readerly reactions, in the way seasonal TV shows can, I take it that the sum of novels can: that the network

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of the contemporary novel functions—or can be interpreted—in much the same way as Shapiro takes contemporary prestige television to work. What Shapiro takes to be the final horizon of prestige television’s contemporary work is “cultivating a new cross-class alliance between the ideal middle-class collective viewers and the classes that they typically imagine as subordinate to and different from their privileged lifeworld,” a realignment of allegiances that shows up as the “search [for] narrative forms wherein the middle-class viewer, experiencing a collective class decline, can imagine, accommodate, and practice a new class alliance” (178). One key difference between TV and the novel is that what on TV may not be a form of “narrative experimentation and formal innovation”—the adoption of genre fiction’s tropes and modes of storytelling—“otherwise considered the requirements for periodizing and consecrating cultural shifts” (177) clearly are so for the novel; but this difference should only encourage us to see the usefulness of Shapiro’s line of thought. Shapiro’s argument allows us to identify a particular cultural logic at work in the past thirty years or so of literary history. Neorealism, in its various guises and as a cultural formation, may here be best understood, as Lee Konstantinou suggests by way of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, as echoing the imitation of authority undertaken by postmodernism. Konstantinou argues that postmodern novels were essentially “imitating the exercise of authority” in an effort to retain the literary authority otherwise lost to “new social movements, new media, and market segmentation” and proposes that this was a viable strategy at a time when “middle-class readership [was] growing in number” (2017: 121). What literary authority means in this context is the authority—the social power—of literature, more than any form of power as it exists in the narrower confines of the literary field (say, in the prize economy, or in academia). What Fitzpatrick argues postmodernism reacts against is a perceived decline in the cultural centrality of literature (2006: 22) and its capacity to make authoritative pronouncements on culture. For Konstantinou, one element of neorealism is to react to this decline by adopting its own commerciality—to adopt the production of “pleasure and connection” (2017: 15, quoting Jonathan Franzen) as the author’s main job in the wake of total commodification. For Günter Leypoldt, meanwhile, it is the second form of neorealist fiction described by Konstantinou, the affective neorealism that reads closer to non-fiction autobiography (Karl-Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, to name just two practitioners), that has become invested with authority, “with a public space of authority that shapes the

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rhythms of literary innovation and defines ‘the state of the novel today’” (2017: 64). In either case, however, neorealism is a new version of the attempt of consolidating literary authority. As a means of understanding my description of the contemporary novel, it may take on added force. The turn to neorealism, in Konstantinou’s analysis, was already propelled by a sociocultural realignment, in which the (re-)adoption of particular narrative techniques was instrumental in capturing an audience which might otherwise have been lost to the novel. Thus the wide-ranging, deep-reaching, sweeping realism of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, John Lanchester, Richard Powers, and so many others becomes readable as both a pandering to audiences and the literary establishment, and thus in many ways little different from the diagnosis Rosen has offered for the inclusion of genre fiction into literary fiction, as well as a recognition of the way social structures—networks—act directly on the production of the novel. Meanwhile, the turn to genre fiction functions superficially similarly—as Leypoldt’s argument about the avant-garde suggests—but because it does not draw on a tradition of literariness the way the neorealist return to realism does, because it draws on a different set of cultural positions, specifically because it picks up the reading of “stigmatized” readerships, it destabilizes the sources of authority. What is set into relief through this recognition is nothing so much, I think, as the question of what audiences are mobilized, respectively, by the turns from postmodern experimental fiction to neorealist storytelling. Postmodern experimentalism drew authority from its resistance to the middlebrow; the contemporary realist novel draws authority, by contrast, from wholesale acceptance of the middlebrow. This is not, of course, a declension narrative, which would find its endpoint now with the inclusion of the conventionally “low-brow” genre of fantasy—this is not an argument about value at all. Rather, it is an argument about the mobilization of different audiences through different (not better or worse) aesthetics. Let me return for this to The Underground Railroad again: one of things which may be striking to readers is the way in which stylistically, a good case can be made that Whitehead’s novel is far from literary, at least for given versions of “literary” going beyond the mere question of realism. It is stylistically unchallenging, insists on closure and on smoothing out narrative difficulty. Many examples could be provided for this, but perhaps the most egregious is the way in which the novel discloses the fate of the protagonist’s mother, Mabel. Mabel’s disappearance haunts not just Cora, the protagonist—who spends much of her time

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wondering why her mother left her to her fate on the plantation, instead of trying to buy her from freedom in the north—but also Ridgeway, the slave-catcher who is after Cora for the entire novel, and for whom Mabel remains the only failure in his slave-catching record. For 300 pages or so, the mystery of Mabel’s motivations and whereabouts thus drives the characters, until the novel, in the penultimate chapter, shows us her fate in a point-of-view chapter. Mabel, it turns out, died a day out from the Randall plantation of a snake bite in the swamp. There is obvious room here for disagreement on the artistry of this narrative move—which may suggest how the entire edifice of the “literary” is built on swampy ground—but the point I want to raise here is that the narrative’s insistent removal of narrative uncertainty removes difficulties of access no matter their motivation. This is, of course, in some ways a good in and of itself— in as much as accessibility is good for wide circulation—but it is also a point to be raised when difficulty is, in many ways, a marker of literariness, especially in neorealism of the Knausgaard and Heti kind (see Moi 2017 for one version of this). What the genre turn produces is not, then, authority, an attempt at securing some long-lost cultural dominance for literary writing. Instead, it produces an offer of finding shared ground between genre fiction and literary fiction, one which parallels endeavors, as Shapiro has argued, to rethink the relationships between classes. It is also, as in the case of The Underground Railroad, a recognition that authority is, perhaps, more social than frequently suggested, difficult to impose from above. To suggest that there is something like a class realignment taking place is to assert that there is a class-based readership difference between genre fiction and literary fiction.6 The first major point here must be while genre fiction can be read by anyone, even by you and me, readers and producers of literary and cultural criticism, who may as Günter Leypoldt has it, “appreciate [it] as ‘fulfilling’ in moments of leisure-oriented consumption” (2018), the obverse is far less likely to be true. Sales figures alone bespeak the limited appeal of literary fiction, and it is hardly for nothing that the turnstiles and counters at places such as airport book stores and

6 Leypoldt (2016) offers one example, although he doesn’t flag it as such, when he describes the difficulty participants in Oprah Winfrey’s book club had in understanding Toni Morrison’s genuinely really complex novel Paradise. I offer a much more extensive argument on this point in Speculative Historism: Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel, forthcoming.

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supermarkets are stocked with Clive Cussler and James Patterson, rather than (at least by and large) Ben Lerner or Howard Jacobson. In this sense, any commitment to genre fiction as a serious practice is also a commitment to a readership which is otherwise excluded from literary fiction’s reach. In simpler terms, to write in the registers of genre fiction “as” a “literary” writer, the publication of such a novel as The Underground Railroad, and most especially its wide recognition, all point to the possibility not just of revitalizing tired literary fiction through new formal means, but also of understanding this as producing texts of wider appeal, appeal less forcefully constrained by high-low dichotomies. The second might be that while, generally speaking, all reading is likely to be more middle-class than all TV watching (Navy CSI being “more popular” than even Dan Brown), this does not seem to preclude the larger argument that new alliances are being forged—even if they should turn out to be between upper and lower middle class. There is no hiding the fact that this claim is, in some ways, quite radical. Rather than understanding the contemporary turn to genre as one possible version of reestablishing literary authority, I understand it as part of a broader cultural movement towards inclusive forms of representation capable of producing cross-class audiences. These two versions of the contemporary genre turn are not mutually exclusive, of course, so that in some ways my version of it is simply another turn of the interpretative knob; but an important one, I think. I want to suggest again the importance of noting what Whitehead’s achievement in winning a slew of culturally if not incommensurate, then at least never before attained prizes, signals. Perhaps “literary prize-winners owe their cultural relevance to literary field-specific currencies of strong value that emerge not from society at large, but from market-sheltered cultural institutions” (Leypoldt 2018, original italics). But even if we were to agree with the gist of that argument (and I don’t think it is by any means clear that we should), the categorical oppositions in this field may not be sufficiently exhausted by that between market-oriented and market-sheltered. Even market-sheltered institutions may not be immune to social movements that do not directly express themselves in sales, to strong values that are exactly not literary-field specific. To an extent, I think, the 2019 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handtke is a recognition of the broader force of the #metoo movement, beyond the Nobel Committee’s own extensive failure in that regard. Similarly, the dual award of the Man Booker Prize that same year to both Bernardine

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Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel to her speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), whose TV adaptation also was a touchstone of #metoo, is unlikely to have been solely owed to issues specific to the literary field. Instead, it may be best understood as a dual move recognizing the cultural impact of The Handmaid’s Tale and of the genre turn as such. It is both a turn away from identifying the genre turn chiefly with male authors, as Andrew Hoberek has suggested it has been, and another example of the deeper social embeddedness of the prize economy. The force of both of these events then is to set the logic of prizes in a far more reciprocal push and pull with the social developments in which the books these prizes honor are inevitably bound up. This is the logic which sees in the recognition awarded Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad nothing so much as a registration of the success of its formal interpolation of an intermediate position between genre writing and genre readers, and the consecrating authorities and their readerships of “literary” fiction. Whether or not Whitehead’s novel set out, in form, style, and already-present literary cachet, to forge cross-class readerly alliance is beside the point here: the argument must simply be that it has.

Conclusion I departed from the claim that whenever we speak of the novel—and this “we” is a class-specific we as well as a professional “we,” a “we” that is not only limited by the entire belief that it is worthwhile speaking of the novel in the first place, but also the specific disciplinary upbringings we bring to this question and the leisure to ask it, as well as the general classstanding we, as professors of literature, are likely (though increasingly less so) to have—we speak of the particular subset of all novels that is already imbued with the nimbus of the literary. I suggested, following on from that, that this version of what the novel is is firmly tied up with a preference for realism that explains the challenge of the genre turn; and I ended on two related, but differently-radical suggestions, the first being that it is within the logic of the novel network idea necessary to think that any adoption of genre into the literary novel must impinge, act on the genre novel as well, must draw firmer connections between these two forms and link them and their various own networks more firmly together; the second being that these links are readable as more than just value-free agential relations, but may, in fact, reflect a large sociopolitical turn to

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shared narrative consumption and production across class stratifications. At this point, it may bear asking even more expansively what this means, especially against the backdrop of the oft-cited (even within this book!) anxieties about the novel’s future. Again, I am less interested in whether or not the genre turn is here to stay as an aesthetic means of revivifying the novel—whether it will remain the means of choice to bring new life to the literary. That remains, I think, the wrong question. Rather, what I am interested in here is the question of the place of the novel within the social at large. There are two ways this may develop further, I think. The first is that “the” novel will remain locked in high-cultural status, that it will persist in being an ever-narrowing category of “charismatic” fiction, increasingly exclusive—drawing less and less on genre as the decades wear on, finding instead new means of revitalizing itself as an explicitly high-cultural form. In this version of the novel’s future, the consecrating authorities produce it as a set of texts that does not have mass appeal, does not seek to be available widely, does not breach boundaries of class taste—in fact, rather more explicitly so than before, having once turned away from genre’s broader appeal. Call this the gated community future of the novel: bounded off firmly against the badlands around it, and for all that no more certain of its authority than before. This version of the novel becomes increasingly sterile: whatever it speaks of, the segment of readers it speaks to will (given the contemporary decline of the middle class) dwindle. The second is a version where “the” novel becomes a broader public category, inclusive of not just the modes, forms, and themes of genre fiction, but also of its audiences. This would amount to the recognition that the boundaries of the literary are more expansive than they have been: that whatever the literary is necessarily includes at least some of genre fiction. This would not, again, amount to an abrogation of value and prestige systems tout court: rather, it would suggest that a wider prestige category, a more inclusive prestige category, is a necessary reorientation for the novel as a consumer as well as a cultural good. Call this the open neighborhood future of the novel. Either of these versions appears as an eminently possible future—there may be others. But what remains no matter what the territory of the novel will be in the future will be the way the nodes of the novel network have been altered by the genre turn. Having once drawn on genre, the spread of what can be counted literary writing has expanded: it will inevitably include genre writing, even if future versions of the novel should for their

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own moment discount it. And, conversely, it will open genre writing to the same kind of attention as literary writing, as no longer categorically bounded off from what constitutes “the” novel. This is the minimal work of the genre turn in the contemporary novel’s network, but it is, already, immense.

References Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1980. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist and ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barth, John. 1984. The Literature of Replenishment. In The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction, 193–206. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carpentier, Alejo. 1995. On the Marvelous Real in America. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 75–88. Durham: Duke University Press. Cowdrey, Katherine. 2017. Whitehead Scoops Arthur C Clarke Award. The Bookseller, July 28. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/colson-whiteheadwins-arthur-c-clarke-award-science-fiction-603606. Accessed 31 March 2020. Dubey, Madhu. 2011. Post-Postmodern Realism? Twentieth Century Literature 57 (3–4, Fall/Winter): 364–371. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2006. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Grossman, Lev. 2012. Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology. Time, May 23. https://entertainment. time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/. Accessed 30 March 2020. Hoberek, Andrew. 2017. Literary Genre Fiction. In American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith, 61–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge. Joshi, Priya. 2018. The Novel as Commodity. In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson, 219–237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstantinou, Lee. 2017. Neorealist Fiction. In American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith, 109–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Leypoldt, Günter. 2016. Degrees of Public Relevance: Walter Scott and Toni Morrison. Modern Language Quarterly 77 (3): 369–393. ———. 2017. Knausgaard in America: Literary Prestige and Charismatic Trust. Critical Quarterly 59 (3, October): 55–69. ———. 2018. Social Dimensions of the Turn to Genre: Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Post45 Peer-Reviewed, March 31. http://post45.org/2018/03/social-dimensions-of-the-turn-togenre-junot-diazs-oscar-wao-and-kazuo-ishiguros-the-buried-giant/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Lujan, Adam. 2016. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad Selected. EW.com, August 2. https://ew.com/article/ 2016/08/02/oprah-winfrey-book-club-underground-railroad/. Accessed 31 March 2020. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moi, Toril. 2017. Describing My Struggle. The Point, December 30. https://the pointmag.com/criticism/describing-my-struggle-knausgaard/. Accessed 31 March 2020. North, Joseph. 2017. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pavel, Thomas G. 2013. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rebein, Robert. 2001. Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Rosen, Jeremy. 2018. Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction. Post45 Peer-Reviewed, August 7. http://post45.org/2018/08/literary-fiction-andthe-genres-of-genre-fiction/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Sayeau, Michael. 2018. Realism and the Novel. In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson, 91–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, Michael. 2014. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Self, Will. 2014. The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real). The Guardian, May 2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/ will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction. Accessed 31 March 2020. Shapiro, Stephen. 2016. Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis of Class Alliances in Contemporary Subscription Television Drama. In Class Divisions in Serial Television, eds. Sieglinde Lemke and Wiebke Schniedermann, 177–203. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Watt, Ian. 2000. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe. London: Pimlico.

CHAPTER 6

Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction Christopher Pizzino

Introduction: Flushing Comics in DeLillo’s Underworld The contemporary US novel’s relationship to comics might be summarized by a single scene from Don DeLillo’s Underworld. In a short, vivid passage, Matt Shay recalls his brother Nick sitting on the toilet and reading comics to Matt and other kids, sometime in the first decade of the postwar era. The children, aged four or five, are unable to read the words of the comics for themselves, and Nick brings print narrative to his pre-literate audience with memorable vocal style: “he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women.” Of course, we are meant to ask what role visual images play in Nick’s reading. DeLillo indicates that the children not only cannot read, but also do not see the pages of the comic books. Instead, Nick describes and performs their images and sound effects—using, for instance, “an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars cornering tightly in the night” (1997: 210). As Nick decodes and translates pictorial elements for his listeners,

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the comics’ visual images—and their spatial relations to each other and to the words on the page—simply vanish. A print novelist who undertakes to describe or write about comics is perforce in the ekphrastic role of Nick Shay, accounting for a pictorial medium in words.1 Such accounting is never free from questions of power; as Peter Wagner observes: “Ekphrasis … has a Janus face … it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it” (1996: 13). In this scene from Underworld, as in three case studies I will discuss at greater length, ekphrasis is troubled not only by the general paradox Wagner articulates—formed, as W. J. T. Mitchell teaches us, by the longstanding opposition of word to image in Western thought—but also by assumptions about the worthlessness of comics relative to print literature, and in particular to the novel.2 In his brief narrative of comics ekphrasis, DeLillo seems notably ambivalent regarding comics as a visual medium. Nick’s way of reading assigns pictures an incidental, at best an embellishing, role in reading as such. This would seem to confirm a model of developmental literacy, now enshrined in more than half a century’s worth of educational scholarship, in which comics are allowed a limited, stepping-stone role in childhood so that they can give way to robust adult literacy (needed to read, for instance, a novel like Underworld).3 However—here the ambivalence emerges—this neat, developmentally oriented conversion of visual/spatial into oral/verbal is disrupted by a messier act of elimination. DeLillo reminds us that Nick performs comics while defecating, “pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature” (1997: 210). The pun on the venerable term “funnies” is notable here, as is the repeated, but strangely flat, use of onomatopoeia. On the comics page the “splat” and “plop” would be sound effects—elements of comics that

1 Contemporary fiction does, of course, make routine use of pictorial illustration in various minor roles, including cover images. This decorative and/or epigraphic use does not, I would argue, displace the centrality of the print text. 2 For Mitchell’s thoughts on power relations in ekphrasis, see “Ekphrasis and the Other.” For a broader sense of Mitchell’s approach to word-image relations, see “The Politics of Genre.” 3 On the subject of comics as stepping-stone to print literacy, see Pizzino (2016): 27–29, 200–201, notes 10 and 11.

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exist, Scott McCloud indicates, at the boundary of words and pictures— but in the confines of DeLillo’s novel they are decisively aligned with print, to rather graceless effect.4 A potentially impactful “splat” is turned into a clumsy, three-syllable participial adverb, and the force of the “plop” is diminished by its linking to the conditional “would.” Likewise, DeLillo’s phrasing lacks the rough poetry of crime comics dialogue, making it difficult to judge how much is gained, and lost—for the kids who listen to Nick, or for DeLillo’s readers—in a purely (perhaps merely?) verbal rendering of the comics medium. This scene resonates with Underworld’s ambivalence regarding all categories of the pictorial, especially given the complex relations DeLillo establishes between visual images and waste. As an adult, Nick Shay works in waste management, and on one occasion he observes to himself: “all waste aspires to the condition of shit” (302). By this light, Matt Shay’s recollection of Nick’s way of reading comic books might allow us to substitute “comics” for “waste,” especially since Nick apparently chooses the most infamously trashy comics genres of the late 1940s and early 1950s: superhero, crime, and horror stories. “Who else,” Matt recalls, “would read the comics to them, acting out those vibrant dramas of crime fiends and bounding heroes?” (210–211). Yet DeLillo is concerned to revaluate, in some cases to venerate, the postwar era’s literal, visual, and metaphorical waste. Further, as a number of critics have noted, the vast project of sorting, recycling, and re-using this era’s trash is a central metaphor for the novel’s sprawling exploration of the postwar era, and particularly the Cold War; DeLillo explores the destruction, fragmentation, and terror of this era while, perhaps, also suggesting its recoverability.5 Thus, this scene of comics reading participates in DeLillo’s larger project of iconologic waste management; it is one of many instances in which Underworld seeks to reclaim and/or recycle visual images—marked as transient and disposable—in what is presumed to be the more enduring form of the novel.

4 McCloud’s thoughts on the sound effect can be found in Understanding Comics ’s famous pictorial vocabulary diagram, where examples of sound effects are deliberately positioned between pictorial and verbal groupings; see (1993): 58. 5 On Underworld’s engagement with postwar US history, particularly on waste as central topic and metaphor, see Helyer (1999), Osteen (2000, chapter 8), Wallace (2001), Gass (2002), Gleason (2002), McGowan (2005), Noon (2007), Boxall (2008), McDonald (2008), Schaub (2011), and Isaacson (2012).

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In the context of Underworld as a whole, however, the scene of Nick reading comics also indicates that of all visual media, comics allow the novelist the most latitude; that is, they confer the least ekphrastic responsibility. In contrast to DeLillo’s extended descriptions of myriad examples of visual art, including film, graffiti, large-scale outdoor installations, and others, the recollected moment of Nick reading comics on the crapper is quite brief, a throwaway rendering of a subtractive reading of a trashy medium. The comic book is at the novelist’s disposal in several senses at once, a medium fit for an amusing, nostalgic interlude but not, in any sense, the peer of Underworld itself. The novel alone does the ekphrastic and curatorial work of recycling, and when the waste being recycled is comics, the ekphrasis apparently can be (to put it crudely) shitty and still be adequate to the task. Yet, as indicated earlier, DeLillo still marks the loss of a certain raw energy contained in the comics image, and thus the scene remains ambivalent concerning its ekphrastic procedures. The three case studies I will examine all give comics more topical significance than Underworld does, and all attempt what Anthony Lioi, in the phrase I have borrowed for my title, calls nerd ecology. In his 2016 book of the same name—subtitled Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture—Lioi offers a total revaluation of the category of the nerd, and of popular or mass-cultural media and narratives through which nerds define and express themselves. Countering a long line of critics and theorists who “approach popular culture with a hermeneutics of suspicion, an a priori distrust of its substance,” Lioi asserts that nerd ecology—his term for “the response of nerds to the biopolitical forces that constituted them”—is nothing less than a project for making better worlds (3, 8). In the stereotyped and despised figure of the nerd, we have “the reader who takes popular culture unironically as a way of thinking about modernity, social justice, and the nature of the good life” (2). Lioi argues that this way of relating to popular culture is tied to a larger struggle for environmental and social justice, not least because it involves undoing interlinked stereotypes about nerds and their culture: that they are developmentally substandard, unfit for robust mental work; that they are disposable waste, unfit for respectful cultural treatment; and that they are affectless and robotic, unfit to be considered fully human (42–52). Obviously these stereotypes apply strongly to comics; indeed, anti-comics discourse in the US offers a paradigmatic case study in hostility toward mass-cultural phenomena. Even in the current era of the graphic novel (so called), the

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medium is shadowed by a sense of its supposed intellectual immaturity, patent disposability, and mechanical soullessness.6 Thus, to consider how contemporary novels approach comics, we must examine the ways that novelists’ interactions with comics, as a node in the network of which contemporary fiction is a part, are affected by cultural perceptions of comics as a lesser medium. As the case of Underworld suggests, novelists’ attempts to contain comics, as content, in novelistic form can be unsettled and ambivalent. The three central case studies I examine are the most highly acclaimed, and certainly among the most complex, such attempts of the past twenty years: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Authored by nerds whose debt to comics narratives is immense, all were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize (Kavalier & Clay and Oscar Wao won). Yet they were made with the knowledge that while serious fiction writing about nerd culture is permissible (and, given the richness of the network connecting novels and comics, inevitable), it is not self-evidently justifiable. Thus, each of these three works confronts the longstanding inequity governing the links between comics and literature—and particularly between comics and the literary novel—quite self-consciously, and each struggles, with whatever degree of success or failure, to reconcile the role of comics nerd with that of novelist. In my chosen case studies, the novelist’s ability to solve the problem of cultural hierarchy has little to do with an author’s personal attachments or intentions. Chabon and Lethem accept comics as self-evidently valid and have in fact written comics themselves. Yet their attempts to represent comics as such, to articulate their relations as novelists to the comics they write about, and to avoid disposing of the medium (as, however ambivalently, DeLillo does), are overtaken by some degree—more severe for Chabon—of bad faith. Both authors ultimately are unable to address, in novelistic form, the complex problem of cultural relation they necessarily confront. Díaz, however, sees what is at stake in the cultural inequity that governs the novel/comics relation, and phrases this inequity clearly in his work—and this despite the fact that comics are not one of its central topics. Thus, Díaz indicates the possibility of a network that is differently

6 On the current status of comics in US culture, see Pizzino (2016) chapter 1.

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disposed toward comics, more open to genuine mutuality, than the novel has typically been thus far.

Making Comics Secondary: Ekphrasis in Kavalier and Clay I confess my analysis of these case studies has surprised me, not least as regards Chabon. Of the three authors, Chabon has the most obvious personal and creative allegiances to comics. Kavalier & Clay, a novel about the careers of two fictional comics creators working during the tumultuous years (for comics, and for the world) leading up to and following the Second World War, has itself become the basis for comics production. As of 2004, the Escapist, the fictional comics superhero created by Chabon’s protagonists, illustrator Joe Kavalier and writer Sam Clay, has become an actual character on the comics page (written by Chabon and others, illustrated by various comics creators, and published by Dark Horse [2004–2005]).7 Chabon’s novel, highly respected in its native realm of contemporary US print fiction, is thus part of a cycle of intermedial production—a cycle that, according to Chabon, began with his own reading of comics as a child (Buzbee 2000). Thus, Kavalier & Clay might seem to herald a newly democratic state of intermediality, in which Chabon the young comics reader and Chabon the adult comics creator are linked through the novel—and thus, in which the novel and the comic book are linked as well, greeting one another as equals. Further, as Hillary Chute argues, Kavalier & Clay presents comics as formally innovative, culturally prescient, and capable of bridging the gap between high and low cultures, thus aligning the medium with Chabon’s postmodern sensibilities (2008: 282–292). If we examine how Chabon handles comics ekphrastically, however, we see a more hierarchical regulation of comics’ place in culture and in the novel itself. Kavalier & Clay officially posits that it could not exist without the comics-based exploits of the Escapist and the other characters and stories invented by Joe, Sam, and some of their friends and contemporaries. Yet as we read the text, it becomes clear—and not just because 7 A further development is the comics miniseries The Escapists created by Brian K. Vaughan and various illustrators and first published by Dark Horse in 2006. This metafictional story concerns a revival of the original Escapist comics by an aspiring group of creators in the present day.

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we know Escapist comics did not exist until after the fact—that the novel, like the previously discussed passage in Underworld, has a tendency to dispose of the medium to which it supposedly owes so much. Even in the passages where he describes the content of the comics he is imagining, Chabon has a curious way of subsuming that content in novelistic form; the latter repeatedly takes up an authoritative position. Take for instance a long passage in which the Escapist’s origin story is spelled out. Writing in the present tense, Chabon articulates a dramatic scene in which a young magician’s assistant, Tom Mayflower, witnesses the murder of his master, Mysterioso. As he dies, Mysterioso tells Tom an elaborate backstory concerning his involvement with a society of escape artists dedicated to fighting an evil organization called the Iron Chain. Tom, together with the magician’s other assistants (all of whom, like Tom, were freed from some form of bondage by Mysterioso), will now join the fight, becoming the Escapist. This long passage owes more to drama and to cinema than it does to comics, but it is most deeply invested in ekphrastic techniques native to print fiction itself. Chabon makes frequent use of incidental details—what we might call, after Barthes, insignificant notations—that mark his writing as particularly novelistic in its description, including details that, by their very nature, would be difficult to render in pictures.8 Describing Tom Mayflower at one point, Chabon writes: “He wears, we see now, a leather apron filled with tools. There is a pencil stuck behind his ear and a chalk string in his pocket” (2000: 124). How “we” can “see” this last detail is not explained. As the Escapist’s origin story ends and Chabon returns to the main narrative, it is revealed that the passage we have just read is not an ekphrastic rendering of Escapist comics per se, but a novelistic summary of the words and thoughts of Joe and Sam as they converse, over a period of hours, to imagine the Escapist’s origin. As in the comics reading scene in Underworld, the novelist enacts, by dramatizing, the rendering of images—or in this case, potential images—into words. And while Chabon’s rendering is far more specific than DeLillo’s regarding content, its grounding in novelistic practices of description is even more assured in its disposal of the very comics that, supposedly, Joe and Sam are inventing. The novel itself not only describes, but also formally constitutes, the origin and existence of Escapist comics in such a way as to mark the

8 See Barthes, “The Reality Effect.”

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latter as derivative. Notably, this subordination of comic to novel seems to affect “The Passing of the Key,” a twenty-page rendering of the origin scene that serves as the opening story of the first issue of Dark Horse’s The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist comics. Scripted by Chabon, illustrated by Eric Wight and colored by Michelle Madsen, the story is verbally stilted and visually unimaginative; the effect is that of an inadequate visual summary of Chabon’s rich prose. In the context of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s manner of telling us the Escapist’s origin is justified by the fact that Joe and Sam are at the very start of their careers in comics creation. Chabon hints that each is still developing his relation to a new medium and is more comfortable using the language of other media to describe the story they plan to tell together. But if, at the beginning, the story of the Escapist is rendered as something as yet undrawn, unvisualized in comics form, Chabon thereafter tends to summarize Escapist comics, and the other titles and characters he invents, in such a way as to make readers feel nothing is lost by not having seen them. Indeed, there is an odd double sense that readers do not need to lay eyes on them, so effectively are they described, and that they have seen them already because they are so much like other comics of the era in which they were made—comics that are themselves, we are meant to understand, easily summarized in print. With seeming effortlessness, Chabon combines adroit allusion with concise and witty verbal summary, lightening his ekphrastic burden so much as to make its visual referents inconsequential. Take as a single instance, among many possible examples, this description of one of the stories that appear in the opening issue of Amazing Midget Radio Comics, the fictional title in which the Escapist makes his debut: In addition to the Escapist and Black Hat, their book now boasted the opening adventure, inked and lettered by Marty Gold, in the career of a third hero, Jerry Glovsky’s Snowman, essentially the Green Hornet in a blue-and-white union suit, complete with a Korean houseboy, a gun that fired “freezing gas,” and a roadster that Sammy’s text described as “ice-blue like the Snowman’s evil-detecting eyes.” Jerry had managed to rein in his bigfoot style, letting it emerge usefully in the rendering of Fan, the bucktoothed but hard-fighting houseboy, and of the Snowman’s slavering, claw-fingered, bemonocled adversary, the dreaded Obsidian Hand. (Chabon 2000: 149)

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By making clear how deep Marty Gold’s debt to the Green Hornet is, Chabon shifts a considerable descriptive obligation while also compactly summarizing the narrative, cultural, and ethnic stereotypes out of which the Green Hornet is made. Likewise, in a few deft strokes, he denotes the difference between a more realistic and a more cartoonish “bigfoot” visual style in such a way as to implicate the latter in the most notably, and offensively, stereotypical elements of the Snowman comic. The effect of such a passage is to allay rather than to stimulate the reader’s visual curiosity; actual Green Hornet comics and Marty Gold’s fictional borrowing of them feel somehow both optional to the reading experience and always-already-seen. This dismissal, at the level of novelistic form, of what is clearly treated as valuable at the level of content, resonates with Chabon’s valorization of ordinary, everyday lives and struggles, more commonly the purview of literary realism than of superhero comics. During the strongest era of Joe and Sam’s work on Escapist Adventures and related titles, during the early days of US involvement in the war, Chabon notes that the emphasis is laid … not only on the superpowered characters … but also, most radically for the comic books at the time, on the ordinary people around them, whose own exploits, by the time hostilities with Germany were formally engaged in the early months of 1942, had advanced so far into the foreground of each story that such emphasis itself, on the everyday heroics of the “powerless,” may be seen to constitute, at least in hindsight, a kind of secret, and hence probably ineffectual, propaganda. (2000: 568)

Here, Chabon simultaneously champions quotidian realism, claiming it as a way to celebrate heroic struggle in the real world (a way that is, by implication, more powerful than the metaphors that superheroic adventures provide), and absolves realism, and by extension himself, of any propagandistic agenda in making this claim. And this complex ideological transaction is achieved precisely by a close critical evaluation of Joe and Sam’s comics as striving (with partial success) for the very quotidian realism that—in his focus on everyday creative, psychological, and moral struggle—Chabon himself achieves in Kavalier & Clay. Time and again, the credit Chabon seems to grant to the efforts of comics creators ultimately accrues to the novel itself, both as the artistic platform from which

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Joe and Sam’s artistic efforts can best be surveyed and as the hegemonic genre with the adjudicatory power to decide the value of their efforts.9

Making Comics Juvenile: Failed Superheroics in The Fortress of Solitude In contrast to Chabon, Jonathan Lethem is not so certain that the novel should presume to be the vantage point from which all media can be evaluated. Moreover, Lethem is often keenly attentive to the irreducible specificity of various cultural forms. The Fortress of Solitude’s central plot concerns the friendship of Mingus Rude and Dylan Ebdus, two boys growing up in Brooklyn between the 1970s and 1980s, and some events in their later lives extending into the 1990s. In this plot and in his frequent explorations of related characters, Lethem attempts not only to write a history of the social, political, and racial dynamics of this time span, but also to chart the trajectories of a number of different media, from popular music to superhero comics. Lethem situates his two key fictional artists—Mingus’s father, singer Barrett Rude Jr., and Dylan’s father, experimental filmmaker Abraham Ebdus—quite carefully in particular contexts, and obviously treats the work of cultural history and cultural criticism with seriousness. Indeed, Lethem’s historical rigor extends far enough to suspect its own limits. Describing various songs, graffiti, and artworks at length and in respectful detail, Lethem avoids the confident ekphrastic summaries Chabon frequently offers and emphasizes the labor required for ekphrastic description, implicitly refusing the idea that the novel can easily sum up all other genres or media. This refusal has nothing to do with an easy cultural relativism. Far from seeing all cultural forms as equivalent, Lethem insists not only on their specificity but also on their interconnectedness in a broader network, thus casting doubt on the novelist’s, or anyone’s, authority to encompass them all or to render final judgments of them. Take, for instance, Lethem’s portrayal of the career of Abraham, who divides his artistic efforts between experimental film and commercial illustration, specifically the covers of pulp science fiction paperbacks. Abraham views the latter, painted only for money, as utterly contemptible; looking at his first

9 For a more positive reading of Chabon’s novelistic assimilation of comics form, see Singer (2008): 282–287.

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published cover, he sees only “a third-rate surrealist landscape or moonscape or mindscape of brightly colored yet somehow ominous biomorphic forms, indebted to Miró, indebted to Tanguy, indebted to Ernst, indebted even to Peter Max, and repaying none of those debts in the least” (2003: 96). The inclusion of Max, shorthand for the most watered-down and lifeless pop art, underscores how Abraham associates lack of artistic integrity with lack of distinction, of lineage, and of aesthetic purity. By contrast, his own hand-painted experimental film, largely unseen by anyone as he works on it for decades, concentrates all these qualities. However, there is at least some relation between the covers and the film, if only, at first, a relationship of displacement. At the start of his pulp illustration career, Abraham thinks: By expelling onto jacket designs his corruptest impulses—the need to entertain or distract with his paints, the urge to do anything with his paints apart from seeing through them to the absolute truth—he’d further purify his film. The published paperback art, he saw now … would be a Day-Glo zombie standing in for his painting career, a corpse that walked. Meanwhile, thriving in seclusion … would be the austere perfection of the unpublished, unseen film. (97)

Yet as the illustration career unfolds, even the high-modernist priorities of “austere perfection” gradually enter circulation by way of Abraham’s popularity among fans of the paperback covers. In a key scene late in the novel, Abraham attends a panel at a science fiction convention, where he admits his covers at least provided readers with “a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950,” and later proceeds to show a segment of his film and to discuss it with an engaged audience (343). While having little respect for fans of his commercial work, Abraham finally admits that the conventions he occasionally attends constitute “a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go … Perhaps for me the stakes are too high, so I accept [science fiction convention] invitations instead” (344). Though Abraham asserts his right to create a pure high-modernist art separate from any “bohemian demimonde,” he admits what Lethem obviously believes: aesthetic energies circulate among different sectors of culture, even those most seemingly opposed, indebting them to one another and making it impossible to

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judge among them with certainty. Again, however, this attitude is not relativistic. Even as he implicitly criticizes purist high-cultural leanings as too narrow, Lethem’s novel clearly values the discrimination of which Abraham is capable; without such capability, Lethem’s own project of accounting for decades’ worth of US culture would be impossible.10 But if there is a realm of culture Lethem eventually judges with certainty, it is superhero comics, which, in The Fortress of Solitude, come to be aligned with developmental failure and with lack of capacity for careful discrimination. This alignment does not emerge early in the plot, when Dylan and Mingus are avid readers of Marvel’s highly interconnected superhero storylines. Describing their reading experience, Lethem stresses that these storylines are rich, dense, and difficult to parse. The Marvel superhero universe, as it is now experienced across multiple media, began in a series of comics titles that appeared over the course of the 1960s. Narrative relations among these titles were rapidly and increasingly interconnected as character arcs and larger plot elements sprawled from one title to another. By the time Dylan begins to dig into this universe in the 1970s, it is, he feels, already so complex as to defy easy comprehension: The overlapping storylines were a field of expertise … all fine print and ritual. Dylan was really horrified to learn he’d let so much time slip past, so much essential cultural history. Forget what you thought you knew. The Silver Surfer, for example, was a situation you couldn’t really understand

10 Unlike Abraham, Lethem attempts quite a public accounting, and tries to document

fault lines in culture where social and political tensions manifest strongly. Arguably, the novel’s most central topic is the relationship of popular music to racial division. This topic is manifested in the struggles of Dylan, one of the few white boys in his mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood, to understand his connection to the culture around him and to find a place in it while he is living there—not least in his friendship to Mingus, a black boy—and an adequate relation to it after he departs. Lethem constructs Dylan, lead protagonist and occasional first person narrator, as someone who struggles to maintain a complex stance toward the realities of race while, at the same time, feeling a strong desire to relate to cultural concepts of blackness. As an adult, Dylan becomes a music journalist, and one of his central projects is to write a liner note for an anthology of Barrett Rude Jr.’s music. In the note, the text of which Lethem presents in its own chapter, and in the debate Dylan has with his employer about it, Lethem is careful to show not only the sensitivity and respect Dylan brings to this project but also the possessiveness and critical overreach that mar his efforts. The liner note is, in miniature, an image of Lethem’s struggle both to adjudicate complex racial and cultural realities and to be critical of the potential hubris of such adjudication.

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if you came into it too late. Mingus only shook his head. You didn’t want to try to explain something so tragic and mystical. (64)

While some adult readers of The Fortress of Solitude may be tempted to laugh at a child’s sense of the Silver Surfer’s story as “essential cultural history,” Lethem is not, at first glance, contemptuous. Whether adult novel readers who avoid comics would feel the same, The Fortress of Solitude suggests that the world of superhero comics reading is its own lively “bohemian demimonde.” In this passage, Lethem grants the reading world of Dylan and Mingus a measure of validity without presuming he can finally decide its worth or encompass its achievement in the form of the novel. However, as its plot unfolds, The Fortress of Solitude casts increasing doubt on the worth of superhero comics, and it does so by a curious exchange of energies that initially challenges traditional novelistic values only to uphold them in the end. The object enabling this exchange is a magical ring given to Dylan by Aaron X. Doily, a black man in the neighborhood who, despite alcoholism and failing health, has been using it to fly. Dylan keeps the ring secret at first and is able to tap the ring’s power to some degree, but then shares it with Mingus, who is able to fly more effectively. As a shared secret between the two boys, the ring promises at least some degree of transformation—if not of the dynamics of their neighborhood (Dylan and Mingus’s attempt at local superheroics are limited in scope), then at least of the relationship between the two of them. The ring, and its association with superheroes, becomes an image of intimately shared potential—emotional, cultural, and sexual—that opens new possibilities for both boys’ identities and futures. During their first sexual encounter, Dylan thinks to himself: “The world was unnamed, you wore disguises, were Inhumans. Mingus’s room was another Negative Zone … detached from [the neighborhood] and whirling away to another place” (205); it is after this encounter that Dylan shares the secret of the ring with Mingus. This moment in the novel seems to support Ramzi Fawaz’s claim that postwar superhero comics and their associated thematics demonstrated “the capacity of popular fantasy to recast current social and political realities in radically new ways” (113). For Mingus and Dylan, the potential new identities and alternate futures promised by such recasting do not emerge; more predictable historical realities of race and class steer the fates of both characters. Dylan attends a magnet school, leaves New York City, eventually completes

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a college education, and becomes a writer while Mingus is trapped in a dead-end public school and is eventually imprisoned. Regarding the novel’s view of superhero comics, what is striking about the characters’ fates is the way they reframe the meaning of the ring, which comes to represent lost opportunity, broken faith, and individual possessiveness. Mingus uses the ring to acquire drugs for a time, and Dylan then pays Mingus in order to take it for himself when he leaves for college. In later years it grants Dylan the power not of flight but of invisibility, as if diminished in power. Later still, when Dylan uses it to enter the prison where his friend is held in an attempt to free him, Mingus refuses the ring. Immediately after, it accidentally kills another character also confined in the prison, Robert Woolfolk, who does not understand that the ring can no longer enable flight and falls to his death trying to escape. Without untangling all the meanings of its trajectory, we can see that the ring, the image of superheroic potential in the novel’s world, appears as a transformative promise to the characters in their youth and then becomes, in time, less powerful, then perhaps socially unproductive (after college, Dylan’s solo attempts to use his invisibility to fight crime are taken as racist vigilantism), and ultimately destructive (killing Robert). It is not clear whether this trajectory can be blamed wholly on the notion of superheroics; perhaps it is not the ring itself but its users who are to blame for its failure. Yet given that Dylan and Mingus are both dedicated Marvel readers in their youth, this potential line of interpretation is inseparable from a more familiar and stereotypical image of the superhero comic as— to return to Lioi’s analysis of anti-nerd discourse—intellectually stunted, culturally trashy, and numbingly mechanical. The exact degree to which anti-comics discourse overtakes Lethem’s novel is, I believe, impossible to decide. The very presence of the ring in the text as a clearly non-realist element suggests that Lethem cannot easily dispense with the promise of superheroic potential. Nevertheless, his tale of two young comics readers becomes, over the course of the novel, a paradigmatic story about distinguishing between childhood fantasy and adult reality—that is, history. Not only does the novel finally insist that the images of better worlds, and of a better self, promised by superhero comics cannot be translated into reality, but also this lack becomes strongly identified with Dylan’s own immaturity, short-sightedness, and denial. In short, the novel eventually associates the main characters’, and especially Dylan’s, weaknesses of character and limitations of consciousness with an attachment to comic book superhero mythology. And thus,

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while Lethem does not initially claim to judge the status of media in relation to one another, and pursues a broad-minded vision of culture that allows for each “bohemian demimonde” to have its own worth, he finally judges comics in terms of their insufficiency in the face of history—a standard not applied, however, to Barrett Rude Jr.’s music or to Abraham’s experimental film.11

Making Comics Matter: Nerd Reading in Oscar Wao Critiques of wish-fulfilling fantasy are often the novelist’s stock in trade when addressing narratives based in the long tradition of adventureromance. Indeed, such critiques are foundational to the novel as a genre, both in some of its earliest examples, such as Don Quijote, and in its steady progress toward legitimation in specific cultural histories, such as the English novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Against this broad background, Lethem’s eventual judgment of comics as immature fantasy and Chabon’s valorization of everyday realism over superhero comics are familiar and predictable. Junot Díaz, by contrast, has a much different, more radical relation to the cultures of what he calls “the Nerd Age” (2007: 22). Not only does he affirm non-realist modes of writing— such attempts are common enough in postwar literature—but also he works to establish more genuinely equitable relations between his own writing and a vast array of nerd cultural production, including comics.12 It is easy to conceive of Díaz’s relation to nerd culture only in terms of quantity; certainly no other major contemporary US novel is so saturated

11 Like Marc Singer, I believe The Fortress of Solitude ultimately marks the metaphorics of superhero comics as naïve and weak in the face of adult realities (2008): 274–275. However, Singer argues that the novel leaves open the possibility of other ways of exploring comics: “Lethem’s association of comic books with the earnestness that precedes irony and figuration also implies that comics can operate through modes of representation other than his own exhausted metaphors” (278). I am more pessimistic as to whether Lethem sees further potential in comics’ naïveté—particularly because Lethem applies such a different standard of judgment to comics than he does to other art forms and media. 12 On the subject of Díaz’s use of narratives from nerd culture, see also Bautista (2010), Miller (2011), and Gonzalez (2015) chapter 2. Miller lays a special emphasis on the place of science fiction in Oscar Wao, a claim I find persuasive as regards the novel’s content. As regards Díaz’s formal intentions, however, I find the role of comics, regardless of genre, to be even more important.

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with references to science fiction and fantasy in multiple media, including print fiction, film, comics, and role-playing games. A focus on their sheer number, however, misses a crucial qualitative difference: Díaz treats nerd culture not simply as a natural topic for the nerd novelist, but as valid for thinking about history as such. The history Oscar Wao addresses most directly is that of the Dominican Republic, specifically the effects of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo on multiple generations of Dominicans in the Americas. Early in the novel, the narrator, Yunior, describes Trujillo— whose regime was characterized by extraordinary levels of surveillance, brutality, and oppression—as “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (2). Even in this single allusory list—three characters from fantasy novels and one comics character—Díaz enacts a multi-sided intercultural exchange, implying a broad network of interconnected cultural forms that is too complex to be analyzed in full here. For the moment, it is enough to note that the three incalculably powerful villains created by J. R. R. Tolkien (Sauron), Lloyd Alexander (Arawn), and Jack Kirby (Darkseid), along with T. H. White’s King Arthur, whom Yunior uses as a contrast, are all taken seriously and without irony as valid images for understanding Trujillo’s dictatorship. Trujillo himself, Yunior insists, beggars any fictional comparison—ultimately because the history of the Americas itself is “so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful” that no writing, including Díaz’s own, can capture it. Thus, the fact that no string of allusions fully characterizes the Trujillato does not devalue any of the particular allusions Yunior makes. Indeed, the more such allusions appear in quantity, the more they underscore their qualitative worth as useful, though not perfect, measures for understanding historical reality. The reader who is unversed in some, or most, of the novel’s myriad mass-cultural allusions may resist the novel’s implicit urging to discover their meaning. More to the point: Díaz’s insistence that nerd culture is a useful way to think about history may strike some readers as nonsense. As a product of the Nerd Age himself, Díaz certainly knows this, which may be the reason he builds a conflicted relationship to nerd culture into the character and voice of his main narrator, Yunior. Oscar Wao focuses on three generations of the de Leóns, a Dominican family Yunior knows, and on the way their tragic fates intertwine with the Trujillato and its aftermath. The titular protagonist, hyper-nerd Oscar de León, is Yunior’s longtime acquaintance and sometime college roommate. As

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Yunior records his interactions with Oscar, his internal conflict over his own nerdery becomes glaringly obvious, and in ways that clearly implicate any reader who looks down on nerd culture. For instance, when he tells the story of their initial meeting in college, Yunior describes Oscar as “Still obsessed with his fanboy madness. Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In fucking Elvish! (Please don’t ask me how I knew this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De León, you gotta be kidding, Elvish? Actually, he coughed, it’s Sindarin” (171–172). The line “Speak, friend and enter” is taken from a well-known scene in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring involving translation of a fictional language spoken by elves. While Oscar is compelled to specify which of Tolkein’s invented Elvish languages he is using, Yunior begs the reader not to judge him for being able to understand the reference at all. Thus, even as Yunior sees Oscar’s investment in such details as laughable, readers are invited to note his shame at knowing enough to laugh—and thus, are confronted with any shame they may feel and getting the reference, or any contempt they may feel toward Oscar themselves. Asserting the value of nerd culture, Díaz self-reflexively asks what is at stake in any moment where cultural translation risks misunderstanding, shame, and rejection (note that the line from Tolkien directly raises questions of friendship, welcome, and alliance). Thus, as he asserts the direct value of Tolkien, Díaz prompts readers to reflect on their own relationship to cultural difference, and on the hierarchy that limits the status of nerd culture. As in many of the novel’s complex transactions involving intercultural exchange, personal shame, and cultural identity, this brief passage suggests that the fate of nerd culture is strongly tied to larger historical injustices, not least of the force of patriarchal culture in the Americas. The Trujillato is, for Díaz, not only a key example of oppressive dictatorship, but an exemplar of patriarchal oppression—oppression that, he suggests, continues to affect the values of Dominican immigrants living in the US. The contempt Yunior feels for Oscar and his internalized shame over his own deep investment in nerd culture are, Díaz insists, part of his identity as a Dominican male committed to physical strength, athletic achievement, sexual prowess, and aversion to any emotional weakness or ambiguity of sexuality or gender orientation. Among several oft-used slurs in the novel is the epithet maricon, which can refer to male homosexuality, to nonstandard “effeminate” masculinity or some other lack of “proper” gender differentiation, to emotional vulnerability, indeed to any fissuring

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of monolithic heterosexual masculine identity. Upon hearing Oscar specify that his Elvish motto is actually Sindarin, one of Oscar and Yunior’s Dominican male acquaintances’ remarks, “Actually … it’s gay-hay-hay,” explicitly linking contempt for nerd culture—and rejection of the offer of friendly entrance into that culture—to the patriarchal policing of masculine identity that, Díaz insists, was essential to the Trujillato and is still present both in Dominican culture and in US culture more generally (172). This linkage of anti-nerd attitudes to observable injustice redounds upon the reader as well; Díaz insists that there is nothing historically innocent about contempt for nerd ways of comprehending history, or of being in the world. Díaz’s most striking move, however, is to implicate the role of the novelist in this critique of oppressive power in the Americas, and by this implication further to strengthen investment in nerd culture. Yunior remarks: “[Salman] Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (97). With shocking directness, Díaz asserts writing—given the reference to Rushdie, perhaps especially of novelistic writing—as a potential form of domination, an idea he has also expressed elsewhere. In an interview conducted shortly after the publication of Oscar Wao, speaking of the influence of the Trujillato on his attitude toward writing, Díaz remarks: “I’m more suspicious of my craft than I should be. Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship—it’s all one person speaking … multi-voiced polyphony is an illusion; behind it all is a colossal single voice.” In the same interview he expresses suspicion of the silence surrounding the topic of dictatorship in much American fiction: “On the dictator’s hold, the basis of our experience in the Americas, you detect a studied silence. But in the genres, in comic books, it’s all expressed. It doesn’t get discussed on a rational, coherent level but in the underworld of our imagination” (in Jaggi 2008). Given his suspicion of the literary writer’s aims, the adjectives “rational” and “coherent” should not be taken too positively here. Díaz openly values “the underworld of our imagination,” that is, the realm of what he calls “the genres” (science fiction, fantasy and other “low” or masscultural forms) and comic books, which addresses questions of power in ways less available to the “colossal single voice” of the literary writer. And thus, we should pay keen attention to Díaz’s attempt at cross-media, “multi-voiced polyphony” through deep engagement with

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comics. In stark contrast to Chabon, Díaz attempts very little ekphrastic accounting of comics; instead, he points the reader to a medium that exists elsewhere, not on the page of the novel. (Indeed, despite the spectacular heteroglossia of the novel, its visual description is notably spare.) One of the novel’s two epigraphs, a line from The Fantastic Four—“Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... to Galactus??”—is credited both to the writer, Stan Lee, and to the illustrator, Jack Kirby; also listed is the exact issue in which this quote appears, including the year and month of its original publication. Díaz marks the epigraph not as a free-floating line of verbal discourse he can incorporate as if print is its natural form, but rather as a specific word-image combination existing in a particular place on a particular page in a particular number of a serial comic book. Informed readers will know that Galactus is a gigantic alien being who consumes entire worlds, and will grasp the meaning of the line in relation to Jack Kirby’s visual characterization of the speaker. However, as Christopher Gonzalez points out, while “a reader unfamiliar with Galactus will miss the significance of this epigraph entirely,” it is nevertheless the case that “Díaz is prompting the reader to refer to this particular issue of the Fantastic Four precisely because it informs the rest of the novel” (79). Here, the incipient network that must be presupposed in order for the novel to engage with comics is made into a relationship that is not rhetorically contained—and thus limited—within the form of the novel; rather, the network is presumed as an external reality that structures novel reading and comics reading alike. The epigraph establishes pictorial matter from comics as key to understanding the figure of the alldevouring dictator—and Díaz references this pictorial matter without any ekphrasis, emphasizing his, and the reader’s, dependence on word-image, multi-textual connection. As Gonzalez points out, it is perhaps in the nature of such dependence that readers lacking the necessary background may be unaware of how significant Díaz’s debts to comics are. Rather than focus on other references to superhero comics, particularly to various characters drawn by Kirby and to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, I will briefly point to the comics of the Hernandez Brothers, whose long-running Love and Rockets and related series have been a profound influence on Díaz.13 His creative affiliation with them was publicly cemented by a

13 On Díaz’s engagement with Watchmen, see Hoberek (2014).

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deluxe edition of Díaz’s 2013 short story collection This Is How You Lose Her featuring illustrations from Jaime Hernandez. Most crucial for Oscar Wao, however, is Jaime’s brother Gilbert, who created Luba, arguably the central figure of Gilbert’s long-running Palomar stories. Luba is the template for Oscar’s mother, Belicia Cabral, aka Beli. As previously noted, Díaz avoids ekphrastic summary of the comics he references, and only once mentions Luba by name, in a seemingly offhand manner typical of Yunior’s interest in female beauty (Beli’s breasts are compared, in size, to Luba’s [92]). Yet if we read the Palomar stories in depth, it becomes clear not only that many features of Beli’s life resemble Luba’s, but also that Gilbert’s pictorial characterization of Luba is a profound influence on Díaz’s print characterization of Beli. It is in the nature of such influence, as expressed by Díaz, that it could not be established in full, here in this text, without reference to numerous panels in which Luba appears, at various ages from infancy to middle age, in comics published over multiple decades.14 In these panels, her physical actions, facial expressions, specifics of posture, and myriad other pieces of visual data are even more important to the comics reader’s sense of the character than the words Luba speaks. And it is precisely these pictorial elements that express the lineaments of character we read clearly in Beli: her naïve hopes, deep fears, intense sufferings, generous loves, cruel prejudices, and fierce ambitions. Díaz himself has provided more than ample evidence of Luba’s influence on Beli in interviews.15 Here, I claim simply that there are significant aspects and dimensions of Beli’s character that are not merely presaged by Gilbert’s stories about Luba, but are actually to be found in their pictorial images. While Chabon lightens his own ekphrastic burden by persuading his readers that the novel can adequately stand in for the images it references, Díaz, by refusing such summary ekphrasis, achieves the opposite effect: a debt to comics so deep it cannot be fully expressed in words.

14 The Palomar stories, together with other comics by Gilbert and the comics of Jaime and Mario Hernandez, are most readily available in the Love and Rockets Library collected volumes by Fantagraphics; publication is ongoing. 15 Díaz’s testimony concerning the influence of Luba on Beli is most fully documented by Glaser (2013).

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Conclusion: Hegemony Versus Mutuality To read Poison River and then to re-read Oscar Wao is thus to discover quite a different relation than that between Kavalier & Clay and Escapist comics, real or imagined. Beli can, in a sense, be read as a commentary on Luba, but Díaz makes sure she cannot be read as an effective summary. At most, the two characters now seem mutually expressive of one another, making it impossible to judge the novel superior and equally impossible to ignore its indebtedness to the comics of Gilbert Hernandez. Thus Díaz succeeds in breaking with the “colossal single voice” he sees as the great danger of the novel, and in realizing something of the ideal he expresses when he notes, in the same interview, that “the saving grace, the sign there’s no dictatorship, is the ultimate polyphony of the bookshelf” (in Jaggi 2008). For Díaz—in ways that are not the case in Kavalier & Clay or The Fortress of Solitude—the bookshelf in question at last includes comics at the same level, as it were, as the novel itself. In the case of Chabon or Lethem, the novel addresses comics from what turns out to be a stable position of legitimacy that regulates the status of “low” culture; comics, as content, are admitted into the network of the novel’s form. Díaz, by contrast, refuses the seemingly benign—but, he suggests, actually damaging—hegemony that marginalizes comics. He devises a different network, in which the reading of some aspects of Oscar Wao actually depends on readers’ having seen comics images not disposed of by ekphrasis in the novel itself. Thus, Díaz does more than allow a new kind of dialogue between comics and the novel; he boldly challenges the formal legitimacy of the novel as a genre. In Human Rights Inc., his 2007 study of the Bildungsroman as a global contemporary form, Joseph Slaughter persuasively argues that the novel now functions kind of cultural legislation that adjudicates conflicting claims for status and recognition (see also Nilges and Shaw in this volume). If Slaughter is correct, then the novel has changed a great deal from its earliest days, when, as Lukács argued in Theory of the Novel, an uncertain search—for meaning and legitimacy—was not merely the content of the novel, but also its form (1971, 60). Díaz restores this seeking aspect of the novel at the level of form; Oscar Wao seeks its legitimacy through a new exchange of cultural energies in a non-hegemonic, and thus more genuinely interdependent, network. For Díaz, such exchange is part of an attempt to create a culture for the Americas that can share experiences—including

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experiences of injustice and oppression—across multiple lines of difference. The potential effect of this kind of nerd ecology on the novel is not yet known. At present, the critic tracking the network of links between novels and comics must simply insist that there is a radical difference between allowing comics to be a legitimate topic for the novel, as Lethem and Chabon do, and acknowledging comics as the novel’s distinct formal equal, as Díaz does.

References Barthes, Roland. 1969. The Reality Effect. In The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard and ed. François Wahl, 141–148. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bautista, Daniel. 2010. Comic Book Realism: Form and Genre in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 (1): 41–53. Boxall, Peter. 2008. “There’s No Lack of Void”: Waste and Abundance in Beckett and DeLillo. SubStance 116/37 (2): 56–70. Buzbee, Lewis. 2000. Michael Chabon: Comics Came First. New York Times, September 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/books/interviewmichael-chabon-comics-came-first.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Chabon, Michael. 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Picador. Chabon, Michael (writer), Eric Wight (illustrator), and Michelle Madsen (colorist). 2004. The Passing of the Key. In The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist 1, 5–24. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse. Chute, Hillary. 2008. Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 54 (2): 268–301. DeLillo, Don. 1997. Underworld. New York: Scribner. Díaz, Junot. 2007. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead. Fawaz, Ramzi. 2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press. Gass, Joanne. 2002. In the Nick of Time: DeLillo’s Nick Shay, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, and the Myth of the American Adam. In UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, ed. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin, 114–129. Newark: Delaware University Press. Glaser, Jennifer. 2013. Picturing the Transnational in Palomar: Gilbert Hernandez and the Comics of the Borderlands. ImageTexT Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 7 (1, Summer). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v7_ 1/glaser/. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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Gleason, Paul. 2002. Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, and the Redemption of America’s Atomic Waste Land. In UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, eds. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin, 130–143. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Gonzalez, Christopher. 2015. Reading Junot Díaz. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Helyer, Ruth. 1999. “Refuse Heaped Many Stories High”: DeLillo, Dirt, and Disorder. Modern Fiction Studies 45 (4, Winter): 987–1006. Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez. 2007-present. The Love and Rockets Library. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Hoberek, Andrew. 2014. Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Isaacson, Johanna. 2012. Postmodern Wastelands: Underworld and the Productive Failures of Periodization. Criticism 54 (1, Winter): 29–58. Jaggi, Maya. 2008. Junot Díaz: A Truly All-American Writer. Independent, February 29. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/fea tures/junot-diaz-a-truly-all-american-writer-789382.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Kirby, Jack (illustrator) and Stan Lee (writer). 1961–1971. The Fantastic Four issues 1–102, 108. New York: Marvel. Lethem, Jonathan. 2003. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage. Lioi, Anthony. 2016. Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins. McDonald, Brian J. 2008. “Nothing You Can Believe Is Not Coming True”: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the End of the Cold War Gothic. Gothic Studies 10 (4): 94–109. McGowan, Todd. 2005. The Obsolescence of Mystery and the Accumulation of Waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Critique 46 (2): 123–145. Miller, T. S. 2011. Preternatural Narrative and the Lens of Genre Fiction in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Science Fiction Studies 38 (1, March): 92–114. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1984. The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon. Representations 6 (Spring): 98–115. ———. 1994. Ekphrasis and the Other. In Picture Theory, 151–181. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, Alan (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator). 1986–1987. Watchmen issues 1–12. New York: DC.

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Noon, David. 2007. The Triumph of Death: National Security and Imperial Erasures in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Canadian Review of American Studies 37 (1, Spring): 83–110. Osteen, Mark. 2000. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Schaub, Thomas Hill. 2011. Underworld, Memory, and the Recycling of Cold War Narrative. In Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster, 69–82. New York: Continuum. Singer, Marc. 2008. Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel. Critique 49 (3): 273–289. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Vaughan, Brian K. (writer), Steve Rolston, Jason Shawn Alexander, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto (illustrators). 2006. The Escapists. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Wagner, Peter. 1996. Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality— the State(s) of the Art(s). In Icons Texts—Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner, 1–40. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wallace, Molly. 2001. “Venerated Emblems”: DeLillo’s Underworld and the History-Commodity. Critique 42 (4): 367–383.

CHAPTER 7

Introduction: Novel Ideas Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl

Why is a novel like a video game—or a video game like a novel? With apologies to Lewis Carroll, versions of this riddle drive the essays in this section. Novel Ideas plays off the two possible parsings of the title phrase: the belief that there is an “idea” of the novel that is referenced in other media, and the realization that these media are themselves often “newly” novelistic, that the novel network we suggest the best names the contemporary novel’s nature is precisely that: contemporary. Some of the media discussed here, notably perhaps in Patrick Gill’s reading of the novelistic qualities of the podcast, are firmly twenty-first century, even if they trace their antecedents in earlier media forms (here, the radio drama or audio book). Some are older—e.g., comics—but have only recently received sustained academic attention or turned to formats that are manifestly echoes of the novel (here, the graphic novel). What they all share is that they have in recognizable ways come to be part of a larger network of cultural production that takes recourse to the novel in some way, shape,

T. Lanzendörfer (B) Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany C. Norrick-Rühl University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_7

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or fashion—differently drawing on the novel in matters of cultural cachet or form, or indeed understanding the need to supersede the novel as form and cultural good, suggesting the way the idea of “the novel” might need to extend in the future. This section, then, explores relationships between media, loosely following the “principle of intermediation” delineated by Striphas (2009: 15–16). The section looks at connections and concatenations between the “novel proper” and the “novel others,” which frequently turn out not to be strongly “other” at all. The main suggestion of this section—and in some ways, of the book as a whole—is that these systems of reference and relation are a crucial part of what “the novel” is today. “The novel” is not just a concrete textual form and formation, in this conception, but also a cross-medially available form of discourse, a way of making fiction; and in turn, the concrete textual form of the novel is impinged on by other ways of making fiction. When we suggested, in the book’s introduction, that it is difficult to conceive of the novel’s appearance in other media contexts to be a one-way street, one of the ways that might easily have sprung to mind is the fruitful relationship between the comic and the novel, already addressed by Christopher Pizzino in the previous section. This is also perhaps the most overt case of how the novel functions as an “idea,” in the now over forty-year-old coinage of the “graphic novel.” Initially used by veteran comics writer Will Eisner for his “book-length comic book” (Weiner 2012: 17) A Contract with God (1978, though conceived earlier), the term soon gained mileage. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey suggest that for “readers, reviewers, publishers, and booksellers,” the term is “useful shorthand for either adult readership comic books or single volume comics the qualities (content or artwork) of which distinguish them as exceptional when compared to regularly serialized titles or more generic material (superheroes, sci-fi, or fantasy)” (2015: 3). The work of the idea of “novel” in graphic novel, then, is already complicated, suggesting at once a formal-generic distance to the traditionally genre-heavy comic book (cf. also Lanzendörfer in this volume) as well as toward the long-form, but also one of relative “quality,” which is to say a claim of relative value.1 It is explicitly shorthand, a way in which 1 It is obviously impossible to fully and reliably untangle the two terms and their respective work, but for heuristic purposes, we think it may be permissible to suggest that “graphic” substitutes for “comic” not just because “comic novel” is semantically unclear, but also because “graphic” permits access to self-consciously adult audiences;

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the various issues that are implicit in the term “novel” may be hinted at without needing to perform the impossible task of spelling them out—it also recognizes that these issues are essentially inseparable, and that to take one aspect—say, long-form narrative—is also to take many others— such as prestige, address toward an adult and quality readership, and so on. Baetens and Frey spend the rest of their introduction setting the graphic novel off against the comic on the levels of form, content, publication format, and production aspects (8)—that graphic novels need no setting off against novels goes without saying. But as both Stephen Shapiro and Julia Round will argue below, that is a bit too simple: the graphic novel requires an understanding of the novel and its cultural functions as much as it requires the comic; and as Christopher Pizzino shows in his chapter (and as Baetens and Frey briefly allude to; 2015: 191–197), visions and versions of the graphic novel—of the comic—shape key contemporary novels. And today’s successful comics and/or graphic novels are not stand-alone products in any case. In “A Look Inside the 21st-Century Comics Shop,” Publishers Weekly offered insights into 2019 comic and graphic novel sales, giving a mostly optimistic outlook for the industry which predated the corona fallout caused in the entire book industry, and also felt by the comics distributors and stores (O’Leary 2020a). One bookseller noted that his top three sellers (The Watchmen, which “absolutely ran away with the whole kit and caboodle” and “outsold the next bestseller by a factor of three,” as well as Umbrella Academy and Infinity Gauntlet ) all were firmly rooted within the larger media network: “Everything in the top three had a media tie-in.” (O’Leary 2020b) The comic is only the most obvious source of novel ideas and adopter of the idea of the novel. Referential relationships abound: as one example, we might cite a case that may seem to amount to fairly little initially. In a number of episodes of the horror podcast Tanis, including the version of episode 1 available for download in the spring of 2020, Tanis ’s narrator-protagonist Nic Silver opens with a cross-advertisement for Pacific Northwest Stories’ horror podcast Rabbits. Silver approvingly notes that “one Itunes listener described Rabbits as Ready Player One while “novel” encodes the formal claim to comparative length and general, if possibly only comparative, quality. It should also be noted that Eisner’s A Contract with God was, in fact, a collection of stories.

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meets Serial meets the television show Lost ” (0:00–0:20). Silver’s advertisement simultaneously draws on three cultural reference points: Serial, the podcast that “started” the podcast phenomenon, a nonfiction show; Lost, the hit ABC mystery series (2004–2010); and Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s 2012 science fiction novel. But only two of these references are understood by the anonymous commentator, and Silver, as being in no need of identification: Serial, the podcast, and the novel, Ready Player One. We suggest that there is something to this: that there is a clearer proximity of podcast and novel than podcast and TV show, and a clearer idea that such a proximity calls upon similar readers/listeners. The advertisement suggests what cultural proximity podcast and novel have—a cultural proximity also highlighted in the ease with which the well-received mystery podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012–) has spun off three novels. The podcast appears in these not just as a theme and source, though: it also shows up as a source of formal choices initially made for the aural medium of the podcast. Tanis is an interesting case in other ways. Throughout, even though different characters appear in it, and Silver represents these appearances as audio-recordings of actual encounters, the podcast relies heavily on narration, even at moments where the podcast is explicit about the way it is ostensibly a record of recordings. Thus, in the season 3 episode “An Artifact, an Adorcist, and an Asylum,” Nic ends up reporting that he found himself earlier running through woods, and twice mentions his voice recorder is on during this run. Yet the podcast makes no use of these “recordings,” instead relying on Nic’s postfactual narration. In its refusal to produce more overtly radio-play like moments, Tanis exhibits novelistic qualities: it becomes recognizably more novel-like than otherwise it would have been. Tanis does not just draw on readers familiar with (genre) novels: it draws them in by being formally “novelistic.” The “novelistic” is a Bakhtinian category (see also Thabet and Lanzendörfer in this volume) that asks us to think of the novel less as formally specific— of a certain length, or theme, or, in the most extreme parsing, even medial type—than as a way of engaging the world in art, a way that stresses openness and dialogism. As Patrick Gill emphasizes below, the contemporary podcast is not necessarily “like” a novel—but all the same, it cannot deny the novel’s influence, or the essential “novelness” of much of the content produced as podcasts. Interestingly, over the past decade, podcasts have also been used increasingly by publishers to source new voices for debut novels (see Daehl 2007). And conversely, perhaps, the

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audio market is experiencing a boom, with “sales of digital audio … buoy[ing] the publishing industry” and the “audio market continu[ing] to blossom” (Maughan 2020). This interconnectedness, finally, is also what Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer ask us to take away from looking at the final medium this collection groups as recipient and provider of novel ideas, the video game. At first glance, they acknowledge, the video game may appear as distant as anything to the novel, given that among its many distinguishing features—digitality, ludicness, and frequent storylessness—few appear to be shared with the novel. But, as they also point out, there is a growing tendency, often propelled by commercial reasons, for bringing novel and video game into closer proximity. Numbers show, in fact, that the commercial success of the game novel is often “longer-lived” than that of movie tie-ins (Maas 2003). Below, Thabet and Lanzendörfer read video games and video game novels through the idea of “novelization,” which they understand as being the process both of turning a video game story into a novel and of turning out video games which increasingly possess the Bakhtinian spirit of the novel, of “novelness.” The video game, as Thabet and Lanzendörfer acknowledge, is not the novel: but in both directions, video game and novel share more points of reference, and influence each other more profoundly, than might initially be thought. What emerges from these essays, we realize, is a more heterogeneous view of the relation between novel and other media than the previous section arrived at for the novel form. In some instances, it might be suggested that we unduly privilege the novel form as the chief point of reference in all this. But that is not our intention. To stress the novel as a point of reference for the podcast, say, is not to devalue or up-value the podcast—it is not meant to say either that the podcast could not be without the novel, or that we should think more highly of it because it so often relates to the novel. It is simply to suggest that the novel relates to the podcast, and the podcast to the novel, and that each form influences the other—or, as Stephen Shapiro argues here, that attention to the respective cultural valences of related arts allows us to say something more meaningful about them than would be the case if we understood them only in relation to their own histories; the cultural political work of Shapiro’s text, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, largely emerges in Shapiro’s telling from its supersession of the novel, rather than the comic. We are aware that this section does not—and cannot—do justice to all of the tendrils that the novel network has in other arts. But we want

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to close this introduction on something that we think is a vital corrective to the idea of the novel as the key hub in contemporary culture, namely, the way novels serve subsidiary ends, as means of adding to the various story-worlds created by other media and as cheaply producible, easily sold franchise commodities. Spinning off a Welcome to Night Vale novel, after all, does not mainly serve artistic ends (though these delineations are obviously difficult) but commercial ones, banking on readers who have listened to the podcast. What emerges, we contend, is a process of commodification of the idea of the novel within the novel network, and beyond. This is most manifest in the novelizations of games discussed by Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer in this section’s final chapter, which also serves as a bridge toward the next, and final, section: Novel Commodities. The Halo and BioShock novels the essay discusses exist because they are cheap, because they can help retain attentive consumers while the more complex, expensive, and commercially valuable video games undergo their complex production process, and they are firmly kept under control by vast franchise organizations for whom they are only a bit different from toys and sweatshirts. And yet, as Thabet and Lanzendörfer also point out, they are that bit different: they remain, in all their commodification, means of advancing a larger story, and are often the only viable means of providing a narrative that may or may not be crucial for the meaning of the games which they support. Similar conditions apply across the board, as we would insist: the graphic novel is also explicitly a commodity, as Baetens and Frey’s reference to booksellers and publishers indicates. It is not a “comic book freed from commercial constrictions” (Tabachnick 2017: 1); but it may be a comic book bound up more firmly than the actual comic book in a novel-like system of commercial conditions (see Round in this section for one analysis of the marketing of graphic novels). Attention to the commodity nature of the novels produced with a link to other media may also suggest something important about the novel as a whole. The video game novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, which Thabet and Lanzendörfer engage below, may not sound like it has much in common with a Margaret Atwood or Howard Jacobson novel. But precisely here the link with the next section, Novel Commodities, must be stressed. There, Jeremy Rosen outlines the heavy commercial stakes of Hogarth Press’s Shakespeare novelizations, penned, to order, by many of contemporary fiction’s hardest hitting names. In another context, perhaps, we might be inclined to suggest that the hack work which produces Halo:

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The Fall of Reach is little different from the hack work which produces Shylock is My Name. Or, better put: perhaps the novel network can provide the context in which we find that to read these two examples similarly as hack work is an important interpretative gesture, one which highlights at once the commodity nature of all novel-production and the concomitant possibility that either of these texts can, or cannot, stand on its own independent of its crassly commercial genesis: that may be its own novel idea.

References Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2015. Introduction: The Graphic Novel, a Special Type of Comics. In The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, ed. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daehl, Rachel. 2007. Turning Podcasters into Authors. Publishers Weekly, August 31. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20070903/3527-turningpodcasters-into-authors.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Maas, John-Michael. 2003. Publishers Get Game. Publishers Weekly, February 12. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20030210/28178-publis hers-get-game.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Maughan, Shannon. 2020. Spring 2020 Announcements: Audio Books. Publishers Weekly, January 31. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/bytopic/industry-news/audio-books/article/82291-spring-2020-announcem ents-audio-books.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. O’Leary, Shannon. 2020a. Comics vs. Coronavirus: Following Up with Comics Retailers. Publishers Weekly, April 1. https://www.publishersweekly.com/ pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/82867-comics-vs-coronavirusfollowup-with-comics-retailers.html. Accessed 1 April 2020. ———. 2020b. A Look Inside the 21st-Century Comics Shop. Publishers Weekly, March 20. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/ind ustry-news/comics/article/82741-a-look-inside-the-21st-century-comicsshop.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Striphas, Ted. 2009. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Tabachnick, Stephen. 2017. Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, ed. Stephen Tabachnick, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiner, Stephen. 2012. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: NBM.

CHAPTER 8

Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Stephen Shapiro

During the long duration of liberalism, no other cultural form became as dominant in its medium as the long-form fiction called “the novel.” The novel neatly captured and modulated tensions within liberalism, not least involving the entire spectrum of civil society’s separate sphere divisions, such as that between the public and the private, the self and the nation, and the normal and the outsider. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957) boldly created a fable about the linear advent of the long-fictional form that was taken as commonsensical mainly because there was a truth embedded within its mythology: the novel-form had become so dominant throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that it has become difficult to perceive the myriad of other literary forms that co-existed with the novel, but which were either easily marginalized or, more likely, entirely forgotten. But

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what has been rewarded by and risen within liberalism, suffers when neoliberalism alters many of liberalism’s frameworks. The prestige of certain cultural forms in the nineteenth century, like the sculpture that Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) highlighted, declined when they were decreasingly able to respond to the rising conditions of industrial capitalism and the advent of a mass-reproduced market for cultural goods. A similar declension exists now with the novel, as conventionally understood and consecrated. Even as recently as The Wire, other media still sought to mantle themselves within the prestige of the novel-form by comparison. Today the situation has almost entirely reversed. This move is partially seen with the so-called “genre turn” wherein otherwise prestige authors, like Colson Whitehead, take up forms, like the zombie apocalypse he describes in Zone One, that would have otherwise been disdained as not even worth the name of “middle-brow.” My claim is not that skilled or interesting novels are no longer produced today or will be in the future. The starting point for this essay, however, is that the novel-form is losing its dominance in favor of other forms, much like sculpture had previously, and that the new novel will have to catch up and adapt to neoliberalism’s social conditions that are often better registered and constituted in other narrative forms, such as television and comics (here called graphic narrative, rather than graphic novel, in order to underscore its functionality precisely because of its notnovelness). The novel is not going away any time soon, but to grasp the directions that it may need to develop toward in order to survive within neoliberalism, we need to look momentarily elsewhere. One task for cultural studies today, however, is to find terms that better capture the transformations within decades of life under neoliberalism, especially those more recent ones that have catapulted other narrative forms over the novel. If we understand the neoliberal regime of accumulation and mode of social regulation as a “long revolution,” in Raymond Williams’s sense of a social and cultural alteration that occurs in multiple spheres and in ways often not immediately perceptible as a single date (1961), then how might we gauge differences within this time, such as those between exemplary postmodern ones from the 1970s and 1980s and more recent ones? To better differentiate the striations within neoliberalism’s long-ish duration, I want to propose a new term with regards to our cultural registration of historical change: speculative nostalgia.

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Speculative nostalgia looks to exhume past traumatic events as a way of contemplating a process of constituting a new intersectional left, a social collection of multiple interests that is enabled through narrative recollection in new media and forms of communication. The plots of speculative nostalgia often seek to entangle their characters within actual historical events, excavate and recall the experience-system (or structure of feeling) of that moment’s historical transformation, as well as to study the relation and response of individuals to transformation to enable a process for speculating on not only how history happens, but how contemporary viewers might both recognize the presence of an ongoing historical change in their own time and contemplate how to act within this dynamic transformation. Speculative nostalgia differs from works that we discuss under the term critical nostalgia. Critical nostalgia covers the critique of backwardlooking effects and memories in order to dismantle patterns that often construct collective, usually nationalist, imaginaries which function to sanitize or disguise the presence of structural inequalities. Yet while the work of critical nostalgia seeks to disempower these fantasias, it can also be seen as complementary to, or even further, neoliberalism’s degradation of Fordist-era liberalism. Speculative nostalgia shares critical nostalgia’s interrogation of the past, but it does so to contemplate and help constitute a future progressive alternative. Sharing a forward-looking motivation with speculative fiction (“science fiction” and “fantasy”), speculative nostalgia mixes the past with an idea about an alternative lifeworld as its authors use media in new ways to build a new social formation or counter-hegemony. Hence, speculative nostalgia’s forms often blur the neat separation between gritty documentary realism and the forms of magical or wondrous reverie. In so doing, they also challenge the theoretical models built to justify these separations, which include judgments about the relative cultural efficacy of comics and novels in the contemporary. The use of speculative nostalgia for the purposes of creating a new intersectional left culture through non-novelistic media can be seen with Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017). Ferris’s MFTiM is a graphic narrative about Karen Reyes, a young Latinx lesbian, and her coming of age and sexual self-declaration in late 1960s Chicago. Ferris’s work is noteworthy for how it conveys this desire for an intersectional community both thematically and formally through a coming together of what Denning calls a cultural politics and aesthetic ideology (Denning

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1996). One chief way to perceive the distance between Ferris’s work and an earlier postmodernism is to consider their difference in recording historical time. Writing in a postlapsarian mode in 1984, Fredric Jameson argued that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally … producing fresh waves of ever more novelseeming goods (from clothing to airplanes).” Since “aesthetic innovation and experimentation” had “an increasingly essential structural function” in the capitalist economy, Jameson proposed that cultural style was now constitutive, rather than merely reflective, of the dominant mode of production (1984: 56). Consequently, any understanding of how the period’s consumer style operated, its “cultural logic,” would provide the key to comprehending what Jameson then called “multinational capitalism” as “the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world” (56, 57). Although Jameson did not explicitly say so, the phrase “novelseeming” suggested that the literary form of the “novel” would also be the particular cultural commodity against which all others should be compared. Furthermore, if the novel-form was the exemplary deployment of the commodity-form within contemporary capitalism, then the interpretive modes developed for its analysis, especially those involving the hermeneutics of suspicion, were, likewise positioned as the most effective means of understandings the latest phase of capitalism. While Marx may not have needed Freud or Nietzsche to understand the nineteenthcentury factory, Jameson implied that we might in order to critique the late twentieth-century’s showroom of goods. From the perspective of nearly forty years later, much of Jameson’s commentary can be seen as an early, but incomplete, effort to come to grips with the cultural effects of neoliberalism, in its insurgent phase between the 1970s and the mid-1990s (Kennedy and Shapiro 2019; Deckard and Shapiro 2019). From our own moment’s vantage point, much of Jameson’s cultural commentary can now be more sharply seen as belonging to the cultural work of neoliberalism’s unwinding of the social certainties and mode of regulation built up through post-war (military) Keynesian macro-economics and the Fordist-era’s organization of social economies of scale involving the deployment of relatively homogeneous (or, at least, bell-curved) mass identities and national imaginaries. If postmodernism enacted the dissolution of a binarized field of cultural

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production and evaluation, such as with the collapse of high-low cultural distinctions, then these derangements can be seen as an overall effect of neoliberalism’s degradation of Fordist cognitive mapping to enable the erosion of class securities that the laboring-class had won through decades of confrontations and compromises. Later, when this loosening of social certainties began to be turned against the middle class, then the thrill was gone for the consumption of postmodernism and its critical cognate, poststructuralism. A new phase of neoliberalism began to emerge after the financial crash of 2008/2011 (Shapiro 2019). This further development, however, changed many of the claims that Jameson had made for his own time, such as with the contrast between forms of historical consciousness. For Jameson, a key feature of postmodernism’s ensemble was the loss of “historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality” (1984: 58). This deficiency was exemplified by a seemingly “random cannibalization of all styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusions” (65–66) that Jameson saw exemplified by the increased use of pastiche, especially with the new “so-called nostalgia film (or what the French call la mode retro)” (66). These films enabled a crisis of historicity by using a “pastness” projected through “glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness,’” that helped “lay siege either to our own present and immediate past, or to a more distant memory that escapes individual existential memory” (67). This temporal jumble had the effect of putting together the end of any notion of a progressive history eventually bending toward social justice. The dilution of an utopian, sequential history eventually created what Mark Fisher would later call “capitalist realism,” the condition of finding it easier to imagine the end of the world rather than capitalism’s overturning (2009). The “inverted millenarianism” that Jameson saw as beginning to proliferate in the 1980s became, according to Fisher, a new dominant mode of passive-aggressive ressentiment by the early years of the 2000s. For Jameson, pastiche nostalgia was often constructed by the addition of imaginative elements, but not in ways that might impact either historical movement (in other words, nothing changed!) or our awareness about how to generate it in the future. Beyond the emphasis on costume and set design, what Jameson called glossiness, pastiche nostalgia was typified by narratives of fictional characters who would have encounters with famous historical individuals, as with Jameson’s discussion of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975). The fictional characters had a Zelig or

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Forest Gump parentheticality as they were presented simply as a marginal voyeur to “great” figures of transformation. The effect was arguably to encourage the reader or viewer into an attitude of passivity, the notion that while one might be in the proximity of historical transformation, this did not mean that it was possible to influence change itself. One watched but never enacted social change. On the other hand, these tales often seeded neoliberal ideology as they highlighted the glamor of heroic, selfcontained, and famous individuals in contrast to what was presented as the dull, bureaucratic smear of the Fordist everyday and its loss of human uniqueness. A (Kondratieff) long-wave later, in the third spiral of neoliberalism, the contemporary use of nostalgia differs from Jameson’s account in, at least, four ways. First, the focus has shifted away from the noteworthy individual to the transformative historical event or moment. This expansion of focus seeks to draw our attention to historical process in ways nearly opposite in intent that that of the amnesia of 1980s historicism. Second, the look back is to a moment that is tragic and traumatic, rather than celebratory or wondrous. Third, the mournful past is raised not only to acknowledge and give testimony to its wrongs, but also to reconfigure present-day society into a more forward-looking and politically mobilized collective. Contra Fisher, nostalgia operates today as a medium to better comprehend and enact the dynamics of historical transformation, rather than lose faith in its existence. Finally, neither the novel-form, not the critical approaches developed to canonize the novel’s preeminence is foregrounded and consecrated. These changes from Jameson’s model of pastiche nostalgia are significant enough to merit a new category name: speculative nostalgia. In prestige television, there has been a noteworthy surge of these historically situated shows. Examples include series like Mad Men (2007– 2015, AMC), noted for the episode dedicated to the Kennedy assassination; Masters of Sex (2013–2016, Showtime) about sexual misery in 1950s mid-Western America; The Americans (2013–2018, FX) and Deutschland 83/86/89 (2015–, Sundance, Amazon) about Reagan-era Cold War betrayals and espionage; Vinyl (2016, HBO) about the collapse of rock-and-roll in the 1970s; Swingtown (2008, CBS) about heterosexual awakening in 1976 just before the onset of the AIDS epidemic; Pose (2018–, FX) and The Deuce (2017–2019, HBO) about NYC in the midst of the AIDS crisis; and Good Girls Revolt (2015, Amazon) and Pan Am (2011, ABC) about workplace struggles for equality by women. Other

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period pieces include Manhattan (2014–2015, WGN) about the Atomic Bomb project and Underground (2016–2017, WGN) about nineteenthcentury abolitionists. Sometimes these series work through counterfactual histories, such as Watchman (2019, HBO), which recites the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Speculative nostalgia’s mood works much in the way that the character Don Draper expressed it in Mad Men (2007–2015, AMC), the prestige television show about 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives. Against the idea that advertising must satisfy the itch for aspirational consumers to participate in an ongoing modernity of the “new,” Draper explained that he had been taught that there is a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate … but potent. Teddy told me in Greek “nostalgia” literally means, “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device [the Kodak slide carousal] isn’t a spaceship [to the new]. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again … It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again … to a place where we know we are loved. (Weiner and Veith 2008)

The new speculative nostalgia differs from the prior nostalgia mode as its mixture of time, going backwards and forwards, brings the present consumer into contact with a knowable, public past moment to create a form of combined and uneven development (Shapiro and Barnard 2017) that mixes past events and affect with present awareness, and intertwines its fictional characters with a historical event or moment, more than a signposted individual. While famous people still appear in the narratives, they are less and less the dominant feature of the tale. These narratives often create this catachresis by mixing a documentary news account or newsreels, mixing period costume with contemporary dialogue, or even using steampunk-like mixtures of historical and contemporary dress. Other instances involve the placement of contemporary attitudes or multi-ethnic casting into past conditions. The purpose of this temporal collision is not, as was earlier, to void history through random juxtapositions, or to collapse high-low distinctions, but to create an experiential pedagogy by situating the present as continuing to be shaped by the past. This historical catachresis seeks to highlight the individual’s construction and consciousness as a result of social history,

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rather than a flitting and accidental encounter with exceptional historical figures. Furthermore, they often seek to exhume “an old wound” of traumatic social history. This gesture follows Christina Sharpe’s notion of being In the Wake (2016). Sharpe’s study uses the keyword “wake” in three, intertwining senses: the social and cultural pull of Atlantic slavery, metaphorized as the Middle Passage’s slave-ship’s wake, which leaves a cross-generational depression on descendants; a funeral wake’s testimonial commemoration of the dead; and a resulting political awakening, of becoming “woke.” Here the narration of speculative nostalgia dissents from Mark Fisher’s claim that apocalyptic or pessimistic tales are the absence of critical thought or social praxis. Instead of reinstating Frankfurt School dismissals of culture’s agency, the new speculative nostalgia uses its backward glances to help establish a new composition of social interests for responding to the crisis today. The collision of contemporary interests (costume, music, dialogue) and past events is not to surrender to an ironic, giddy pastiche, but a more determined effort to facilitate the production of a new social consensus. The greater project of speculative nostalgia tales is to enable the construction of an “intersectional left.” This usage of intersectionality differs from its original provenance and formulations by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and the Combahee River Collective (2000 [1977]), which examine the multiple kinds of discrimination or structural inequality (such as racism and classism or misogyny/homophobia) that an individual may simultaneously face or feel. Instead, the newer usage of intersectionality shifts the unit of analysis from the unit of the individual to that of the social collective, a social movement formed by an elective affinity among different groups each with their own particular kinds of exclusions. Michael Denning provided an illustrative blueprint for this new sense of intersectionality as the alliance of interests with his argument that the 1930s Cultural Front was created by disparate groups (secondgeneration immigrants, Black Americans, WASP elite artists, European exiles) that each had their own unique grievances. But through a convergence, these groups began to see each other’s concerns and traumatic histories as their own, a process that Denning calls a “cultural politics, the politics of allegiances and affiliations.” This sharing of concerns was not operated through cultural appropriation, but mutual acceptance, as they created a set of “aesthetic ideologies, the politics of form” (1996: xix) by forging a new set of terms that not only indicated the presence

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of this set of affiliations and allegiances, but also sought to bypass its internal differences by crafting symbolic forms that were a commonwealth because they did not initially emerge from any particular group. Denning suggests this constellation of cultural politics and symbolic creation recurs throughout American history, and I have previously suggested that the current moment shares these features as well (Shapiro 2017). In this sense, the intersectional left is little more than a contemporary term for a Cultural Front. Hence, Occupy’s slogan of the “99%” has the same function as did “the people” for 1930s artists. My Favorite Thing is Monsters typifies this new Cultural Front production through its intersectional graphic narrative. In his influential 1993 study, Understanding Comic: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud used a formalist approach to establish prestige for the graphic narratives that implicitly sought to rescue the medium from accusations of being a degraded form of capitalist-shaped mass media and culture industry. He defined comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (9) in order to deploy a Marshall McLuhanesque distinction between comics and cinema that sought to differentiate and devalue motion pictures from comics based on an assumed consumer response to the medium. McCloud defined the art of comics by its construction of visual meaning through static, single images bound by rectilinear frames and separated by the “gutter,” the “space between the panels” (62). McCloud claimed that the separation of framed images by empty, “dead” space forces the viewer to “mentally construct a continuous, unified reality,” or “closure.” “If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is the grammar … [so that] in a very real sense comics is closure” (67). Because this closure is “aided and abetted by a silent accomplice … the reader” (68), McCloud contends that it requires the viewer of comics to make a constant labor of interpretation in ways that make comics a superior medium to film, where “closure take place continuously—twenty-four frames per second” (65). For McCloud, because the smooth movement of motion pictures makes the viewer believe that they are witnessing an unified image, rather than a sequence of images, film’s “continuous motion” does not require that its consumer be active in providing narrative closure or interpretation. McCloud’s celebration of comics reinstates Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between “hot” and “cold” media (1964). Hot media are rich in saturated forms that are deeply immersive, creating an effect similar

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to what Nietzsche called Dionysian art, as it does not require a cognitively active consumer who is straining or exerting themselves to make meaning (Nietzsche 1988). Cool media are data-poor, sparse, an arte povera, whose minimalism requires the viewer to fill in the gaps and provide what McCloud calls closure. Much as Brecht wanted a smoker’s theater, where a viewer (Apollonian, in Nietzsche’s terms) would not become enraptured by the plot’s Aristotelian effect, but would stand at a distance as a critical analyst of contending forces, McLuhan presented cool media as requiring more analytical labor. McCloud, consequently, presents the normative comic book reader as a heroic completer of unfinished projects, one who forms and completes narrative meaning as they suture images together from among the splintered frames. This reader should certainly not be disparaged as juvenile, one unable to develop intellectually toward the textual literacy required by the novel. It is at the level of form that Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters (Volume 1, 2018) confronts McCloud’s search for prestige. Ferris refuses McCloud’s canonizing definition of comics as it largely avoids the box and gutter form. MFTiM is over-sized and is composed of images that are drawn over and across the blue lines of a replicated unpaginated, middleschool notebook. While MFTiM does include framed illustrations, these are often “drafty,” crudely drawn, and uncolored. On the other hand, Ferris’s most detailed and lushly pages spill over the page’s entire surface and sometimes over both verso and recto as a whole. Such unboxing illustration is not unique or new to Ferris, but what makes her work noteworthy is that she uses image spill to stage, at the level of form, three critical interventions. First, Ferris refuses to participate in any prestige rankings of media, as she declines to seek glory for comics in conflict with other visual, sonic, or textual forms. Ferris’s work can be seen as suggesting that McCloud is desiring prestige in ways that seek approval from anti-populist, bourgeois authority, especially as his argument rests on unexamined assumptions of whiteness and cis-male heteronormativity as it treats comics overwhelmingly through the form of “super-hero” ones that are conventionally read by and marketed to young adult men. Much as feminist theory argued that construing women as “absence” was a patriarchal gesture that only granted presence to the phallic, Ferris’s drawing seems to function as suggesting that the gutter operates as a metonym for a hard phallic composition that erases the presence of women. Furthermore, the idea that absence provides closure in order to maintain the integrity of the

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box, operates as a theorizing that justifies the closeting, the cloistration, of same-sex sexual desires in favor of an integral normativity. Removing the gutter operates to destabilize the gender and sexuality divisions on which this normativity depends. In turn, if the gutter’s closure defines comics, then its pristine whiteness places that color as more important than the others, which are now structured as subordinate to the power of white segregation. Ferris’s work, consequently, exemplifies the more recent female and queer-oriented work that is less willing to hunger for acceptance by prior guidelines if that adherence to convention means reinforcing the ideal of the heterosexual young male’s virile subjectivity in opposition to women and non-heterosexuals and abandoning the commitment to progressive intersectionality. Ferris’s comfort with media promiscuity as a means of expressing gender and sexual difference exists from the start. The book begins with a fantasia wherein Karen’s orgasmic cries from her successful masturbation, despite her attempts to mask it by playing the Troggs Wild Thing loudly on her record player, have reached the outside streets. The drawing of her alliterative howl eurythmically spills over two pages, and is presented as a werewolf-like cry that is heard by an offended crowd. This public then forms a lynching mob depicted like the villagers’ storming of the castle in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. “Let’s smoke that freak” and “kill the monster” say the members of what Reyes calls the “M.O.B.=Mean, Ordinary, & Boring,” who wish to remove monsters, those who are different from socially policed normality, but are unwilling to hide their difference. Hence, Karen thinks that the word monster is etymologically derived from visibility, to demonstrate, to make something visible to the public gaze. Here Ferris draws on a visual and textual history of cinematic gothic and horror as a slantwise syntax to convey the presence of queer sexual desire. For most of the book, Karen presents and is depicted by wearing a combination of noir movie detective overcoat and a Lon Chaney-esque wolfman visage. While Karen draws herself as a lycanthrope both as a protective disguise and performative display of non-femme development, the howl is also Ferris’ acknowledgment of a queer artistic lineage, even if its members are separated by time and space, as it echoes Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This communalizing gesture is reinforced as Ferris’s drawing uses diagonal and bending cross-hatching to provide shade and texture for her human figuration. Ferris’s disinclination to predominately use the conventional box and gutter comic book format can be read as a refusal to “closet” her characters with the box, and allow the invisibility of the

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gutter to become the structuring device that grants definitional authority to comics. MFTiM ’s second intervention involves the motif that runs through Karen’s narration which has her belief that she can look into visual media as a protective sanctuary and refuge from her travails. Just after Karen has argued that social monstrosity is produced by dominant values, she describes a green patch in her mixed-race mother’s iris. Imagining it as a bucolic, verdant island in the sea of grey, Karen draws herself as resting on this spot of spatialized sight. Karen’s search for this immersive utopia is conveyed most remarkably and frequently by her trips to the Chicago Art Institute. Her artist brother Deze, who is often routinely subject to petty outbursts of public racism, takes her there to “see some friends.” These are the canonical canvasses of Western European high art who are introduced to her “like they were rich uncles of ours that I’d never met.” While Deze uses the paintings to explain various formal techniques and structures of visualization to her, Karen responds in ways that go far beyond the visual as she imagines them enveloping her whole body, like a (maternal) embrace. She routinely imagines herself entering the two-dimensional surface to be within its compositional space wherein she imagines the canvass’s figures speak to her in ways that seem to help her unravel the secrets and silences of her own family’s history. At one point, Karen even falls backward to the gallery’s floor to avoid being grabbed by the canvas. This queer Stendhal-effect is not a response to overwhelming aesthetic beauty, but one resulting from her reception of art as a viable resource to handle her frequent witnessing of public racial prejudice and the whispers surrounding her family’s private tragedy, including her mother’s incipient death from cancer. In contrast to McLuhan and McCloud, Karen uses immersion as a cognitive tool, not a mode of passivity or amnesia. Such a defense of visual immersion of fine art might seem merely to reinstate art scholar Michael Fried’s celebration of visual absorption in his study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French painting and culture (Fried 1988). Fried contrasted absorption to what he called theatricality, which he felt involved a meta-reflexiveness that he associated with minimalism and pop art as styles that Fried found suspiciously camp and implicitly not heterosexual enough to be canonized. However, Ferris makes two crucial correctives that reject both sides of these male critics’ binaries. First, Karen makes no distinction between

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the richly covered sensational comics books (or the black and white Bhorror films) and the fine art in the museum. She refuses to position herself as alienated by or excluded from cultural achievements, even those carrying the institutional prestige historically accorded to the white, maledominated canons. Unlike the regularities of McCloud, McLuhan, and Fried, Karen sees any form of culture as an enabling cultural resource and allowing for how companionship can transcend, or, more accurately, entirely ignore high-low distinctions as a metonym for any other kind of separation. Second, Ferris’s other deviation is that she moves slantwise as she uses theatricalized immersion as her speculative mode that looks to go beyond the loneliness of the individual condition to create the community of an intersectional coalition. Dan Hassler-Forest (2019) has championed MFTiM as an instance of intersectional art, but he does so with reference to a lineage within the graphic narrative, mainly Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and he looks to the older definition of intersectionality as a single subject’s experiences of multiple vectors of difference. That is true but does not fully capture the larger project afoot. Ferris’s references are broader than those only belonging to graphic narratives. MFTiM embeds itself within multiple visual, sonic, and textual lineages and that Karen’s use of intersectionality functions not as simple as an individual have several identifying features, but also as a unifying formation of multiple individual experiences. This complex social unit appears when Karen enthusiastically shares the museum’s cultural resources with her other newfound companions: Franklin, a trans-Black American whose facial scars and height recall the movie monster (which she often draws him as looking like), and Sandy, an imaginary friend. When Missy, a wealthier, sleep-over female friend (and possibly first crush), distances herself from the lower-class Karen, after the girl’s mother replaces “Missy’s monster magazines” with “hair and beauty mags,” and “her board games,” like “Haunted House” got replaced with “the Mystery Dating Game,” then Sandy suddenly appears and introduces herself to Karen. Sandy is supposed to be a recently urbanized child of a displaced Kentucky coal-mining family. She is presented as ghoulishly white and emaciated like a hungry vampire. This crew of monsters—a werewolf, a vampire, and a Frankenstein-monster—is used to illustrate a group including a mixed-race Latinx, an “Anglo-Saxon” white, and a Black American. Yet when these different figures go to the museum, each experiences a similar immersion and self-transformation within the

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paintings that enables their own particular desires—Franklin’s for crossdressing, Sandy’s for luxury food. Here Karen shares the high cultural resource with other “monsters” in order to teach them how they might also use the resource, but also so that she can strengthen her affinity with the others by watching them consume, perform, and satisfy their own deeply embodied corporeal desires as they campily theatricalize their own reception of the depicted costumes and setting. Because the museum’s iconography of high European art is initially unknown and foreign to each of the three, the canvasses can function as a resource equally available to them. The individual consumption creates the foundation for sharing that establishes a context for an even deeper and more significant affiliation among the excluded. Karen learns about Franklin’s sexuality in the museum by watching his responses to the paintings, and then, having learned to see his reactions, she learns even more by watching how his anguish at the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination is amplified by an ensuing street humiliation by a Black heterosexual man who homophobically denies Franklin’s inclusion within a larger grieving Black community. In this way, the image’s immersive quality does not primarily stage Karen’s, Franklin’s, and Sandy’s ethnic or sexual differences from one another, but their analogous experiences of, responses to, and use of cultural objects that can be employed to acknowledge moments of social trauma that can, in turn, be the intersectional glue that binds together these different groups. The notion that one individual’s suffering can function as more than merely an object of empathy, but can also stand as a scaffold for mutually enabling development through coalitional alliances is carried out most clearly through the MFTiM ’s other large section, involving Karen’s search for an answer to the riddle of the mysterious death of her Jewish upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverman. Anka is a Berlin-born Holocaust camp survivor whose death has been labeled by the police as a suicide, but Karen decides to investigate as an instance of foul play. As she pursues the case, by talking to Anka’s mourning Jewish, jazz drummer husband, she listens to cassette recordings of a biographical interview between Anka and an unnamed male questioner about Anka’s childhood. Anka’s tale differs from Karen’s in terms of national origin, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, medium of transmission, and historical times. But unlike Karen’s drawings, which often involve a young adult’s misperception of what adults are trying to express to her, Anka’s testimony functions like the museum’s paintings in that

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Karen seems to use it to recognize herself within them. For both the story of young Anka and young Karen have remarkable similarities: both lose their mothers to illness; both mothers lose their hair as a pathetic fallacy for an incipient larger-scale social catastrophe; both suddenly lose a young female friend and are aided by morally ambiguous older men; and both use High Art (in Anka’s case, Greek mythology and opera) to ameliorate their own crisis conditions. While Karen has no direct links to Jewish identity, and does not entirely understand the dangers of life under the Nazis, she finds Anka’s tale to be a narrative mirror to cast a gaze on her own life. For this reason, Ferris uses an image for the cover of MFTiM that depicts a gothicized image of Anka, whose irises contain a reflection of Karen as a werewolf, much as Karen also saw herself protected within her biological mother’s eyes. Here gothic becomes the shared symbolic language that can overcome differences so that Anka’s Holocaust memoirs act as a Cultural Front-like syntax for Karen’s own social awareness about the communalizing ethics of shared trauma. This core claim appears when Anka speaks about the prostitutes in Weimar Germany, who were among the few who provided a modicum of welcome and comfort to the men disfigured in the First World War: Of course, when the History books tell of the groups murdered by the Nazis, they never list the prostitutes, because I’m sure the mention of their deaths is considered a stain on the other victims. The attitude is that the lives of the prostitutes are worthless. I think it’s self-hate. Our world hates anyone who would accept us and our bodies, and our secret desires without reservation. But that is what the ladies taught me … to welcome disdained things.

To welcome disdained things, that is to say, to welcome all those who have been allowed to be socially dead, may well stand as MFTiM ’s grand motif. This embrace is extended outward by Ferris’s third intervention in response to McCloud’s work. For while McCloud allowed the comics reader to self-isolate, Ferris nudges us, the reader, regardless of our initial identities, into Karen’s community of care. Brecht broke the fourth wall by liberating the actor and allowing them to directly address the critical audience. Ferris does something in reverse as she encourages the reader to immerse themselves in Ferris’s lush illustrations and in doing so join the graphic narrative’s heterogeneous Salon des Refusés.

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This spirit is conveyed to us with her brother Deze’s pectoral tattoos of Zapata and Diego Rivera. This pairing of political liberation and art is exemplified by Rivera’s murals, often painted on Mexican public buildings. Rivera’s images are unashamedly Marxist in their iconography, but also in the form. The mural’s mode of production rejects the possibility of bourgeois private property ownership as the image is affixed alfresco to a wall that cannot easily be transported or privatized within a collector’s or a museum’s space. The murals’ mode of consumption rejects the privatization of visual experience as their scale forces the viewer to leave the private halo of intimate proximity to a canvass and step far enough back, into an idealized crowd, to gain perspective on the whole. The mural-form forces its consumer into a collectivizing experience of being physically within a mass crowd and public space rather than the privatized one of the museum. Ferris’s oversized book similarly locates itself within the Rivera lineage and its effects. Like Rivera’s images of the Mexican people, MFTiM links disparate disdained groups together in two places where the images cover recto and verso. One is in Anka’s narrative as MFTiM depicts the German men who were damaged by the First World War. The other, in Karen’s time, occurs when her brother takes her on the uptown 36 Broadway Bus. On the multi-racial public transport, Deze rhetorically asks Karen what she “thought all the people in uptown had in common.” He answers that “they’ve all had a ride on the ‘Royal Shaft Express.’” These riders from Appalachian mining communities, Black, Latinx, and Native American groups all share the trauma of being abjected as “monstrous” and left as socially dead by the US State. Just as with Anka’s Berlin, these are groups that have become only too easy to no longer see and too easy to sacrifice. Just as Karen shares with Franklin and Sandy her newfound wonders of the image, Ferris forces the reader to do likewise through her chosen form. Ferris’s oversize pages lay claim to the high art world as MFTiM ’s dimensions, heft from the stiff paper stock, and price make it like that of a coffee-table book belonging to the bourgeois arts lifeworld. Yet its volume and mass also force its reader to be “out” of the comforts of middle-class (sexual) normativity and privilege, since MFTiM cannot be covertly transported by rolling it up or hiding it within another book’s page. Consequently, it becomes more difficult for the reader to hide their consumption (and identification with) of MFTiM from the public gaze.

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Hence, Ferris not only embeds us within MFTiM ’s progressive intersectionality but turns us, as readers, into the next link in the extending chain of its ideals. The politics of MFTiM ’s speculative nostalgia are not postlapsarian, but prefigurations of a better tomorrow. Perhaps this turn may be what finally calls time on neoliberalism’s damage.

References Brecht, Bertold. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang. Combahee River Collective. 2000 [1977]. The Combahee River Collective Statement. In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. ed. Barbara Smith, 264–274. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 139 (1): 139–167. Deckard, Sharae, and Stephen Shapiro. 2019. World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An Introduction. In World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, ed. Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, 1–48. London: Palgrave. Denning, Michael. 1996. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Doctorow, E.L. 1975. Ragtime. New York: Random House. Ferris, Emil. 2017. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants, UK: Zero Books. Fried, Michael. 1988. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2019. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: The Socially Engaged Graphic Novel as a Platform for Intersectional Feminism. In The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1860. The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review 146 (I, July–August): 53–92. Kennedy, Liam, and Stephen Shapiro. 2019. Introduction. In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 1–21. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow.

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McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Shapiro, Stephen. 2017. The Culture of Realignment: Enlightened and ‘I can’t breathe’. In Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture: Axes of Influence, ed. Doug Haynes and Tara Stubbs, 144–161. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Shapiro, Stephen. 2019. Foucault, Neoliberalism, Algorithmic Governmentality, and the Loss of Liberal Culture. In Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, 43–72. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Shapiro, Stephen, and Philip Barnard. 2017. Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Watts, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Matthew, and Robin Veith. 2008. The Wheel. Mad Men. S01E13. 27 May. AMC. Whitehead, Colson. 2011. Zone One. New York: Doubleday. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.

CHAPTER 9

From Comic to Graphic and from Book to Novel: Sandman’s Invisible Authors and the Quest for Literariness Julia Round

The comic book is dead—long live the graphic novel! These words might make a fitting epitaph for the British-American comics industry’s development during the twentieth century. During this time the discourse around comics publishing and the books themselves have undergone a series of aesthetic, commercial, conceptual, and cultural changes (Round 2010a). This chapter will explore the move toward bookishness and literariness (both of which, as previous chapters have argued, are connected deeply to the novel-network) in contemporary British-American comics, using DC Vertigo’s Sandman series as a case study. It argues that this comic enacts the particular status struggles of a collaborative medium against the “graphic novel” brand. It concludes by mapping its findings back onto the processes and changes at work in the novel’s own quest for literariness, and reflecting on what this means for definitions of cultural worth, the performativity of the author function, and our understanding

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of artistic creation and ownership. Novel, graphic novel, and authorship are linked here to quarrels about literariness and symbolic value that feature as two key nodes in the novel-network: affecting the novel-form, the novel-commodity, and the novel-as-reference-point. The words we use to speak of many comics today instantly reveal the shift in perception that has taken place. Although weekly and monthly serialized titles still exist, comics stores and mainstream bookstores now also offer an array of collected editions under the umbrella term “graphic novel.” This product diversification affects the graphic-novel-form and the symbolic value of the graphic-novel-as-commodity. We have moved from comic book to graphic novel—that is, from comic to graphic, and from book to novel—with all that connotes. While “book” is a material object, without a description of content (and could refer to a textbook, a manual, or even a blank notebook), a novel is something different: an aspiration, an escape, a new and unique experience (“novel”). Whereas the “comic” is light-hearted entertainment, the “graphic” is explicit and visual. The graphic-novel-as-reference-point now carries the weight of these expectations, echoed in the numerous news articles reporting that comics have now “grown up” (Pizzino 2016). The graphic-novel-form has also reflected back onto the aesthetic of both monthly comic books and collected series. Digital art, glossy pages, and elaborate covers now feature on the majority of titles. This makes the comic book commodity feel like a more permanent and literary product. Ironically, it sits alongside an increase in digital distribution. Some scholars have predicted that we were entering a new wave of distribution in which the comic book transcends its commodity status and may be better understood as sequential art storytelling across multiple platforms (Palmer 2010). Although others claim that digital publishing has not impacted significantly on print sales (DiChristopher 2016), media reports from Europe show a decrease in sales of monthly titles (in Sweden: a drop from 83 periodical series titles in 1989, to 60 periodical series in 1999, to 31 titles in 2019) (Dellert 2020) due to both digitization and the sale of graphic novel collections (Strömberg in Dellert 2020). This all demonstrates that the comic-as-commodity has undergone significant aesthetic and form-based changes that bring it closer to the novel-network. Today in the comics industry, single-issue sales must compete with trade paperbacks, which collect complete mini-series or separate story arcs of a maxi-series into a single bound volume. The trade paperback aesthetic is somewhere between a book and a comic: with the

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dimensions of an American comic book, but typically printed on higher quality paper, with a semi-rigid cover and spine, and totaling around two hundred pages (six or eight single issues). These collections are commonly known as graphic novels, borrowing the label’s cultural cachet (even though this term technically refers to a singular novel-length comic) and similarly borrowing their format from another media output, the DVD, often including “bonus features” such as artist’s sketches, variant covers, or the writer’s script. The novel-form of the trade paperback market has also, according to some creators and critics, “actually changed the way the comics are written” (Titan artist/editor Steve White, in Round 2005). Rather than simply beginning a run on an unending series, creators now write “for the trade paperback,” typically devising story arcs that fall into six or eight issue blocks. The format has also changed the way that comics are sold, as the move to the direct market that created comics shops in the 1970s (see Palmer 2010, 2016) has been followed by a move into mainstream bookstores and online distribution sites, many of which now contain a “graphic novel” section. Literary publishers are also taking note: imprints such as Jonathan Cape (Penguin Random House) and smaller independent companies such as Myriad Editions now publish graphic novels that are primarily focused around “serious” fields such as graphic medicine, memoir, and literary adaptation. In addition to these material and commercial shifts, more mainstream comics also continue to seek literary inspiration for their content. As far back as 1941 researchers and psychiatrists were reading superheroes as modern folklore (Bender and Lourie 1941), noting particular similarities with fairy tale, with magic replaced by pseudo-science. Umberto Eco’s landmark essay “The Myth of Superman” (1972) claimed critical validity for the superhero genre on the grounds of Superman’s mythological weight: comparing the text’s temporal paradoxes, oneiric atmosphere, and archetypal character qualities to the myths of Ancient Greece. This interpretative ideology continues in much of the scholarship around superhero comics today (e.g., Reynolds 1992; Brooker 2001; Morrison 2011). Popular new comics genres such as autobiographix and graphic medicine also reference established literary forms such as the bildungsroman. Mainstream publishers DC and Marvel continue their shared universes, but

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increasingly create (and then abandon) side imprints.1 New comics now exist against an awareness of an established storytelling tradition and a canonical body of work. As a consequence, knowing and revisionist treatments are common, for example approaching the superhero with an ironic or self-aware tone (The Boys, The Authority, Planetary), or combining the figure with theology (The Wicked + The Divine, Supergod). Other comics series specifically address or adapt the literary canon (Sandman, The Unwritten, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Rewriting formed the basis of the DC Vertigo imprint, and Dony (2014) applies Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence to argue that Vertigo’s self-conscious reworkings are part of a process of canon formation designed to negotiate mainstream/alternative categorizations. Comics scholarship has also shaped this pathway toward narrative rather than artistic criticism. Today’s comics scholars are more often found within cultural or literary studies departments than art schools (Beaty 2007), bringing traditions of textual analysis to bear on the medium. Further, the majority of models that analyze comics from a visual perspective draw on linguistics and semiotics rather than art history or stylistics. The citation systems preferred by many academic publishers and institutions also make comics hard to manage, as the writer’s name comes first and others are easily absorbed into “et al.” Writers or auteur writerartists also dominate in academic citation indexes and published “best of” lists (Beaty and Woo 2016). These types of reading lists from public and academic sources (see for example Barnett 2014; Gravett 2011) and public-facing institutions and roles also help shape a canon. For example the post of UK Comics Laureate was inaugurated in 2014 by the Lakes International Comic Art Festival with academic and corporate support, as “an ambassadorial and educational role for the comic genre … to raise awareness of the impact comics can have in terms of increasing literacy and creativity” (Lakes International Comic Art Festival). These stated aims privilege the literary over the artistic (which is subsumed within “creativity”)2 ; despite this, to date the role has been held by two artists 1 These are often themed around genre (DC Helix, DC Vertigo, Marvel Noir, Marvel Razorline), audience/age (DC Minx, Marvel Max) or act as explicit sites of fictional worldbuilding outside the publisher’s main storyline continuity (DC All-Star, DC Earth One, DC Elseworlds, Ultimate Marvel, Marvel Knights). 2 This may have also led to the erroneous (or perhaps classical) use of “genre” in this mission statement (in today’s theoretical terms, comics are a medium).

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(Dave Gibbons [2015–2017] and Charlie Adlard [2017–2019]) and one writer-artist (Hannah Berry 2019–2021). These aesthetic, commercial, and conceptual changes have led to a cultural shift in the perception of comics that is explored by Beaty and Woo in their provocatively titled The Greatest Comic Book of All Time (2016). Despite its title, the book does not offer an answer. Rather, it explores the factors that have led to the same “canonized” comics being cited again and again. These include dominant texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991), or the work of writers such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman in what is primarily a visual medium. Beaty and Woo note the adoption of “a naïve version of auteur theory” (2016: 46, original italics) by comics fans to create a pantheon of star writers and artists, with a subsequent drift toward the author as critical discourse around comics privileges the “novel” over the “graphic.” As they point out “today, media discourse (including that of comics critics) routinely treats collaboratively authored comics art as if it sprang fully formed from the heads of its writers—artists are lucky to be mentioned, let along discussed or interviewed as an integral part of the creative process. This is a significant reorientation of the field from the past” (54). Considering production rather than reception, Isabelle Licari-Guillaume (2017) and Christophe Dony (2014) have also argued that comics publishers have used the symbolic value associated with authorship as a self-legitimising strategy. Many of these debates are apparent in the creation, marketing, and critical reception of Sandman, which after its launch in 1989 would become the flagship title for DC’s Vertigo imprint, founded in 1993. Sandman ran for seventy-five original issues (plus one special) and spawned numerous spin-off series from various creators, culminating in the release of Sandman: Overture (2013) nearly twenty-five years after the series first began. Scripted by Neil Gaiman and drawn by a range of high-profile artists, Sandman initially rewrote a golden-age superhero into an immortal deity, although it went far beyond this. It is described by Gaiman as “a machine for telling stories” (2016: 292) that weaves together mythology, literary history, and interpersonal drama: becoming an epic tale of the rise and fall of a god and the impact on the worlds around him. Sandman’s epic tone, departure from mainstream superheroics, and extensive use of intertextual references and literary citations made it intensely popular (Savlov 1999) and have allowed it to claim its place as a canonized “graphic novel.”

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These elements also foreground the series’ storytelling over its artistry. Neil Gaiman’s authorship and authority dominate the creation and construction of Sandman through tightly controlled scripting practices, extensive narrative asides, and paratextual materials that stress his ownership. Licari-Guillaume (2017) uses auteur theory to examine the authorial performance of Gaiman and the other Vertigo writers, focusing on their use of paratexts (interviews, letter columns, blogs) and authorial avatars. She argues that such acts both assert and destabilize writerly authority as the comics often foreground a competing focus on the importance of the act of reading. This chapter instead addresses the novelnetwork by applying Michel Foucault’s more detailed critical concept of the author function to the material product and creative content of Sandman, with an emphasis on its visual elements. Sandman’s artistic contributions are frequently assimilated and ignored in its paratexts: as Clay Smith points out, Gaiman’s celebrants often “illustrate their claims about Gaiman’s author(ity) [or authorship] by including panels from his graphic novels (most often from the Sandman series). In doing so, these critics deny the existence of the authors/others (e.g., inkers, colorists, editors) involved in the production of those panels” (2008). But simultaneously the existence of these “others” and the varied artistic style of Sandman destabilizes clear-cut authorship and undermines the notion of a singular author function. This chapter will argue that Sandman thus articulates comics’ ongoing struggle against the graphic novel brand, which can inform understanding of the way collaborative processes are often hidden in the novel-network.

Sandman, the Novel-Form, and Literariness Adopted as flagship title for the Vertigo imprint, Sandman’s literariness was precisely the reference point that DC wanted to promote their new line of comics. Gaiman followed in the footsteps and style of highprofile comics writer Alan Moore: bringing a literary voice and a British accent to the fantastic multiverse he created. This was enhanced by the novel-commodity of the Vertigo imprint, which had a significant aesthetic distance from DC’s other titles. No DC bullet logo appeared on the covers of the monthly releases and Sandman’s covers in particular were conceptual and often surreal. Sandman did not feature its lead character on the cover (a rarity) and Dave McKean’s abstract art often dominated over the title’s logo, which on Sandman: Overture #5 is “almost

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blown off the cover” (McKean in Gaiman et al. 2015). Later collected editions of Sandman also emphasize literary status through their material qualities. For example the Absolute Sandman editions (released 2006) are oversized, hardback books with high quality paper, bonus features and enhanced art and the Sandman Omnibus editions (2013) come in two volumes of over a thousand pages each, with leather-like covers in black and red. These graphic-novel-commodities have the feel of ancient literary tomes, bound in rich and sumptuous materials. The aesthetic is continued in the collected Sandman: Overture (2015), originally released in hardback with a lavishly colored dustcover. Sandman’s structure and paratexts also encourage a literary reading. The collected trade paperbacks often include short epilogues and prologues, prompting Maaheen Ahmed to claim that “[t]he difference between these issues and the chapters in a novel is small” (2016: 69). Sandman also blurred the lines in its accolades: along with a number of industry awards (including four Eisner awards) it controversially won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for #19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (awarded to Neil Gaiman and artist Charles Vess), the first (and only) time this has been awarded to a comic (as the rules were subsequently changed to prevent this). Similarly, the vast majority of Sandman scholarship to date has honed in on the series’ literary qualities, such as Gaiman’s use of allusion, metaphor, and overwriting. Entire issues of academic journals and many edited collections have now focused on his work. For example, Stephen Rauch and Peter S. Rawlik Jr and many others have analyzed Sandman with respect to Joseph Campbell’s hero archetype, and many authors and scholars have drawn attention to the parallels between Gaiman and his protagonist (Barker, Gaiman, Katsiadas, Smith). The marketing of Sandman also embraced and prioritized the trade paperback format and the notion of the literary author. The first Sandman collection to be released was in fact the second story arc, The Dolls’ House (#9-#16), introduced by bonus issue #8 “The Sound of her Wings.” Despite being a wrap-up of the first story arc (Preludes and Nocturnes ), “The Sound of her Wings” was given this privileged position as a personal and idiosyncratic piece of writing. Whereas the first seven issues of Sandman draw variously on different storytelling styles, echoing “classic English horror, 1970s horror comics, gritty urban British horror, 1940s John W. Campbell, and the darker side of the standard DC Comics heroes and villains” (Scott), Sandman #8 follows a Romantic authorship

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model and is described by Gaiman in authorly terms, as “the first one where I don’t sound like anyone else … I’d found my voice” (Gaiman in Schnelbach 2015). Another relevant aspect of Sandman’s marketing was its commercial status as the flagship title for DC’s new Vertigo imprint. Vertigo’s launch contributed to establishing a literary comics tradition by using rewritten titles (such as Sandman itself, originally the identity of a defunct goldenage superhero, Wesley Dodds) and actively seeking out British creators. DC Vertigo editor Karen Berger describes this change as “totally writerled” (Round 2008, cited by Baetens and Frey 2014: 88), as most of the new talent it brought into the industry were writers. Vertigo followed an ethos that had been established by British writer Alan Moore’s work on both sides of the pond: remodeling and remaking the superhero genre in series such as V for Vendetta, Miracleman/Marvelman, Swamp Thing, and Watchmen.3 The revisionist and literary tone of Vertigo’s new publications and their use of the trade paperback format contributed heavily to the mainstream cultural revaluation of comics as graphic novels, and critics such as Candace West have argued that Sandman in particular was instrumental here due to the attention the series received from mainstream media such as Rolling Stone magazine.

Sandman and Romantic Comics Authorship Sandman and the other Vertigo titles are considered emblematic of the “British Invasion”—a term often used to evaluate the changes that took place in the American comics industry in the 1980s. It is strongly associated with literacy and Romantic authorship: Licari-Guillaume (2018) argues that by using the writer-as-author trope these scriptwriters invaded comics using symbolic rather than economic power. Chris Murray (2010: 44) quips that the “Brit Invasion was also a Lit Invasion” and Steve White also claims the UK writers were able to take that “step away from spandex” by providing critical distance and bringing in “classical, Shakespearean and mythological themes” (Round 2005). These conceptual changes are apparent in Sandman’s rewriting of its eponymous character (also known as Dream or Morpheus) into a deity, and Gaiman also rewrites other earlier DC Comics characters such as Destiny into 3 It should be noted that Moore’s movement into the American industry followed that of artists such as Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons.

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his Endless pantheon, reframed in metaphysical and literary terms: “The Endless are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The Endless are repeating motifs.” (#48) Literary authors and historical persons also appear as minor characters, alongside numerous figures from literature, religion, folklore, and other comics.4 Nick Katsiadas thus describes Sandman as “a series that invokes English Romanticism … [and] bring[s] to the fore the series’ relationship with the European literary canon,” suggesting that Gaiman’s revision of the Sandman character and these intertextual references allow us to read both Gaiman and Dream as Romantic authors (2015: 61). Clay Smith also argues that we can read Gaiman as his titular protagonist—but with more negative consequences. Smith stresses the dominance of Gaiman’s author function and the way it is rearticulated and emphasized in interviews with his collaborators and artists. For example, colorist Daniel Vozzo says “[i]f he [Gaiman] doesn’t agree with or like something, he’ll let you know it, which is fine. And then you change it because he is the man” (McCabe 2004: 190). Smith also draws attention to the use of Gaiman’s name as owner and validator of anthologies such as The Sandman: Book of Dreams, arguing that “his author(ity) manifests itself throughout the entire work in implicit and explicit ways.” Gaiman’s own comments on the nature of storytelling also strongly evoke the image of the Romantic author, for example his claim that Sandman allowed him to “[find] his voice.” Further, he is not the only comics writer to claim this sort of authorship. Speaking of his practice, Warren Ellis comments: “I lock myself in this room and I don’t come out until the damn thing’s written … That to me is what being a writer is” (in Salisbury 1999: 68).5 Like Alan Moore, both writers have “an unmistakable voice” (Murray 2010: 36). This is emphasized in their comics work through detailed and directive scripting practices that present them as in control, extensive narration, and protagonists who can be read as author surrogates (Ellis’s Spider Jerusalem; Grant Morrison’s King Mob; Gaiman’s Sandman) (Licari-Guillaume 2017). Karen Berger stresses the impact of Moore’s comics work on the Vertigo ethos and its emergent 4 An indicative selection might include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, Julius Caesar, Joshua A. Norton, Emperor, Marco Polo, Odin, Thor, Loki, Bast, Anubis, Azazel, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Cain, Abel, Eve, Titania, Oberon, Puck, Batman, Element Girl, and the Martian Manhunter. 5 Ellis is part of the “British Invasion” and has also produced three novels.

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stable of writers, saying that Moore “changed the perception of writers in comics…. he brought a respectability … he really showed that you could do comics that were, you know, literary, but modern and popular, but could really stand next to a great work of fiction, of prose fiction.” (Round 2008, cited by Baetens and Frey 2014: 88) However, Moore has claimed that Vertigo simply commodified his pessimistic emotional state (cited in Ross 2001), and scholars have similarly argued that its writers presented their Romantic authorship as part of their “brand” (LicariGuillaume 2017). Here the perceived values of the novel-commodity are in counterpoint to those of the novel-as-reference-point.

Sandman and the Author Function So what does it mean to be an author? Foucault’s discussion of the meanings attached to this label can be broken down into four parts, as follows: a consistent style; a consistent ideology/doctrine; an existing historical figure, i.e., a real person; and a consistent standard of writing. Gaiman fits all of these criteria. His style is consistent across all the media he works in: strongly narrated and generally overwriting mythology or fairy tale or literature within the setting of a new fantasy world. For example his novel Stardust (1999) opens with the poem “Song” by John Donne, before proceeding to its first chapter (entitled “In Which We Learn of the Village of Wall, and the Curious Thing That Occurs There Every Nine Years”). In editions such as the first paperback, (Headline 1999) both the page design and Gaiman’s phrasing mobilize historical and fairy tale tropes. The chapter title is surrounded by a traditionallooking drawn frontispiece, and the first sentence (“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire”) begins with an illuminated letter “T.” These tropes are also woven into its phrasing and suggestive capitalization. However, the typography also offers an ironic detachment (we are reminded perhaps of A.A. Milne’s “Significant Capitals” that allow the author to intrude into the tale) that is echoed in the second paragraph. This reflexively evaluates the clichéd nature of this start (“while that is, as beginnings go, not entirely novel”) while still maintaining that the story will offer something different and unusual (as suggested by the “Curious Thing” of the chapter title).

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Gaiman’s comics writing often takes a similar form, as in this extract from Sandman: Once upon a time, there was a place that wasn’t a place. It had many names: Avernus, Gehenna, Tartarus, Hades, Abaddon, Sheol… It was an inferno of pain and flame and ice, where every nightmare had come true long since. We’ll call it Hell. (Sandman #27)

As above, Gaiman steeps his setting in the weight of tradition, this time by including a number of historical and linguistic translations of the word for “Hell.” The same ironic sense of awareness is also present, as the narrator casually addresses the reader (“We’ll call it Hell”): inserting himself in the tale and being both friendly and instructive. Reflecting on his writing, Gaiman specifically marks this tone as not just literary, but authorly, inspired by his childhood reading of authors such as CS Lewis, who: was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the way he used parentheses—the auctorial asides that were both wise and chatty… (Gaiman 2016: 40)

An intelligent yet friendly tone also underpins Gaiman’s characteristic themes, such as the humanization of Gods. Sandman’s seven Endless are a family who bicker and fight, and ironically the most human of them all is Death, with her boundless enthusiasm for humanity. Gaiman’s most recent work Norse Mythology (2017) also casts an antiquated pantheon in human terms, and in his first novel American Gods (2001) the ancient deities of multiple worlds are found languishing in modern-day America, eking out livings as taxi drivers and con-men. This idea is prefigured in Sandman, as the character Ishtar says: I know how gods begin, Roger…. We are worshipped and loved, and take power to ourselves. And then one day there’s no one left to worship us. And in the end, each little god and goddess takes its last journey back into dreams … (Sandman #45)

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A notion of gods as symbolic, fluid concepts also appears across Gaiman’s work. In Sandman he notes “[w]e are expanding—assimilating other pantheons, later gods, new altars and icons. Marilyn Monroe is ours now, as are King Kong and Lady Liberty” (#26). In American Gods, we meet the God of Media (incarnated as various icons including Lucy Ricardo and Marilyn Monroe) and Technical Boy (personification of the Internet). As these comparisons show, Gaiman’s ideology frequently reappears in shared themes across his work: employing and extolling the power of fantasy while offering his own personal take as a “wise and chatty” guide. He thus exists as a clearly recognizable figure both inside and outside his texts (alongside celebrity wife Amanda Palmer) as he promotes his work via his blog, social media, and public appearances. The standard or quality of his work also remains consistently erudite: whether children’s literature or non-fiction, his writing is clearly literary with frequent reference to established fairy tale and myth.

Sandman, the Novel-Commodity, and Authorial Control In Gaiman’s case, the visibility of his author function is not just a marketing tool, but also structures the way that his comics are produced— for example when it comes to idiosyncrasies of style and the extra investment of money and time that these require. The level of control that Gaiman is allowed might only be possible in a medium such as comics. Although this is a collaborative medium, critics have bestowed literary status upon it and often apply theoretical and creative models taken from other disciplines such as film and literature, privileging the idea of the auteur and author. Gaiman’s role thus both exploits and problematizes the author function. His authorial privileges built up as Sandman’s popularity increased, tying into the economic and material aspects of the novel-as-commodity. This can be seen in the development of an increasingly elaborate and intertextual aesthetic to match the tone of Gaiman’s prose, and claims that link the success of the story to the book-like format of the collected edition, drawing on Romantic notions of reading. Smith (2008) asserts that Gaiman’s constant use of citations, quotations, and references to other authors “demonstrate[s] his command of authors/others—specifically by incorporating them into the body of his work and (re)authoring them.” However, I argue elsewhere (Round 2014: 158) that Gaiman’s overwriting of characters goes further than this:

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it is an act of gothic absorption that also foregrounds the artificial nature of the author function and concepts of literary ownership. Even his choice of Shakespeare supports this, as the playwright was a master adaptor of others’ work with only three original plays to his name. Another good example is Gaiman’s reuse of characters such as Cain and Abel (originally hosts of the House of Mystery and House of Secrets anthologies, then featured in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, and finally incorporated into Sandman). This chain of reuse problematizes notions of singular creation and intellectual ownership and exemplifies Foucault’s interrogation of the author function as a restrictive category that represents just one way of classifying texts. Sandman’s visual elements support this problematization. Critics such as Smith, Beaty, and Woo all draw attention to the way in which comics criticism frequently overlooks the artist, but Sandman’s art has also played a significant part in its canonization. This is most notable in the series covers, which were all designed by Dave McKean, and in its lettering by Todd Klein. Gene Kannenberg aligns these elements with Gaiman’s author function as identifying markers when he describes them as “the few graphic constants in the books … Between the styles of McKean’s photomontage and Klein’s letters, readers could tell that a particular issue was a Sandman issue even without seeing the title or Gaiman’s name” (179). Dave McKean is an artist whose conceptual and surrealist art is instantly recognizable and has received many awards. Although his techniques are greatly varied, in Sandman his art is used as an identifying marker in a rather explicit way, just as the author function operates. In the initial series his artwork evolves and separates out the different story arcs, again framing Sandman as a series of books, and more recently his covers provide legitimation for Sandman spin-offs such as The Dreaming and Sandman: Overture. His covers use multiple different methods: early arcs are photographs of found objects and collage in box frames, whereas those of later arcs such as A Game of You are better described as “photographic experiments” (McKean 1997: 90), But throughout this process the mixed media element remains strong, for example pen and ink sketches or photos scanned into Photoshop files, made into prints, to which mixed media elements have been added, creating dramatically varied collages. Designer and letterer Todd Klein has won multiple industry awards for his work, for example receiving the Eisner award for Best Letterer

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every year between 1993 and 1995 and between 1997 and 2008 alongside multiple Harvey awards. For Sandman, Klein devised a unique font for each of the seven Endless characters, as well as many other supporting characters. This process built on his previous work with McKean and Gaiman on Black Orchid, where colored speech balloons distinguished the title character. Gene Kannenberg draws attention to the “marked” qualities of comics fonts, which carry potential beyond simply “graceful legibility” (2001: 168), of which this is a good example, as Klein’s creation of a pantheon of fonts echoes the content of the Sandman series and provides additional characterization. However, although this is a visual attribute of the book, it is based on Gaiman’s authorial control. Klein has described how this aesthetic evolved around the time of the fourth collection, Season of Mists, where Gaiman “was bringing in all these different gods and characters from other mythologies and wanted each of them to have a different style” (in McCabe 2004: 194). In particular he emphasizes the increased labor attached to this (“I would say ‘Well, that’s fine, but how often are we going to see this character, because it’s going to take me a lot of time and I don’t want to spend an extra hour per page’ … Of course, two issues later the character would be back … [Laughs] So at times, it was kind of a problem, but we got through it all and it worked out well.”) Diversity thereby became a defining trait of Sandman’s art within the two constants of its graphic design: McKean’s covers and Todd Klein’s lettering. However, alongside this constancy exists a collective of nearly 50 artists, colorists, pencillers, and inkers who brought their own style to individual story arcs or single issues. These artists were deliberately selected for their very different characteristics. For example Marc Hempel, artist for The Kindly Ones, has an art deco, angular style. Again, Gaiman comments that his selection of Hempel for this arc was quite deliberate: “I wanted a sense of form. I wanted a sense of everything reducing to light and shadow, of everything reducing to simple shape” (in McCabe 2004: 6). Danny Vozzo’s flat and bold colors on the same arc emphasize this. By contrast, Michael Zulli’s colored pencils for The Wake have no inked lines and create an ethereal look for this story arc. Each artistic team was “chosen for specific stories as the content or theme of a story dictated (e.g., the ‘cartoony’ artist Mike Allred for the light-hearted tale of ‘Prez, the Teenage President,’ the fantasy artist Charles Vess for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest )” (Kannenberg 2001: 179).

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Many of the artists also play with a vast variety of influences and techniques that often take them beyond their own era. For example, Steve Olson describes “A Tale of Two Cities” (#51) as having a “nervous, dreamlike quality” and “Hob’s Leviathan” as having a style “fitting for the era” (2005: 77). Smith also notes that Kelley Jones adopts previous artistic styles (for example, those characterizing 19th c. Japanese woodcuts and Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings) as well as drawing on the work of Audrey Beardsley and Paul Gustave Doré in his work on the Season of Mists arc (Smith 2008). With multiple names attached the author function becomes, quite paradoxically, both foregrounded and undermined. Its constancy is replaced by a more varied standard and reception, for example as seen in reactions to the covers to A Game of You, which were “generally disliked” (McKean 1997: 90), and the response to the art of The Kindly Ones, which was criticized as “artificial” and “distancing” (perhaps because the monthly publishing schedule allowed readers time to forget). However Gaiman claims that “[w]ith The Kindly Ones story collected in a book, you’re in there and it may be distancing for the first couple of pages but as it goes on, you are in that world” (in McCabe 2004: 6, original italics). The collected, more book-like format is cited as essential to the artwork’s success (and vice versa). Romantic notions of readership (as complete immersion, and access to a new world) are tied to the collected format and used to legitimize it. However, the graphic-novel-form, although privileging the writer, has also contributed to the visibility of the artist’s contribution by including scripts, sketches, and notes. In the annotated script included in the Dream Country trade paperback, Gaiman’s panel descriptions are interpreted a number of ways by artist Kelley Jones, who makes many alterations to Gaiman’s directions. The contradictions and paradoxes of the author function and notions of authorial control are thus exposed by the processes of comics creation.

Sandman: Overture, Legacy, and Rearticulating the Novel This brings us to Sandman: Overture. Released nearly a quarter of a century after the original series, this six-issue mini-series paradoxically had to both prove itself and maintain links with the original run. It does this by mobilizing many of the novel-form and novel-commodity attributes

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that characterized the original Sandman, privileging book-like connotations in its aesthetic, structure, title, and content. It thus also enacts many of the competing processes that can be found in the original Sandman, despite having a consistent creative team (script by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III, color by Dave Stewart, and lettering by Todd Klein). These artists’ holistic and organic processes extend and develop Sandman’s mixed media approach and sustain diversity. Although each has a consistent role they continue to foreground and problematize the author function in the same manner as the multiple artists who worked on the original Sandman. It is immediately obvious that the aesthetics of Overture seek to elevate it to literary status. The collected edition comes in a hardcover format with detachable dust cover, and has glossy pages throughout. Its paratextual material also relies on elevating language that claims literary status. Sandman: Zero was rejected as a potential title in favor of Overture, connoting elitism, opera, and so forth. The additional materials in the deluxe collected edition are similarly entitled “Accompaniments: Composing and Performing The Sandman Overture,” again reinforcing the metaphor. The opening comics content is also framed as weighty and literary, for example the double-page spread of Destiny reading his book (#1), where the image of the book takes up approximately two-thirds of the double-page spread, and eight paragraphs of narration on the left hand side overlay Destiny’s body. Here the literary dominates in both word and image. J. H. Williams III is an experimental artist, from his co-owned series Chase in the 1990s to later work on Starman and Promethea and Batwoman. His varied and ambitious style is used in Sandman: Overture to connote high culture and reinforce the literary weight of the series. Its eclecticism also connects with the artistic multiplicity of the original run. The number of covers released for the mini-series further emphasizes this notion—issue #1 had nine different covers and each of the rest had around six or seven, most drawn or recolored by Williams with one for each issue by McKean. The pages of Overture contain a wide range of different styles and techniques. These include dizzying double-page spreads that play with the use of perspective as befits the cosmic level of this story and which blend multiple visual styles from the series itself (see for example the double splash page in #6). Background and character become inseparable, for example the opening of #4 where Dream meets Father Time. Echoing

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the inspirations of previous Sandman artists, J. H. Williams based the look of this scene on the early work of Peter Max, relying on bright block colors and psychedelic patterning to create a “fluid” and “colorful” scene “that defied comics to a degree, or at least the notion of panel-by-panel comics storytelling.” Williams also points out that this style allows for the unobtrusive inclusion of symbolism—another trope of literature and high art rather than comics (Williams in Gaiman et al. 2015). Examples on this page might include the autumnal leaves, or the withered tree—all markers of the passing of time. Dave Stewart’s comments when asked about his favorite color are similarly multiple: responding “[t]hey’re all my babies. How can I choose?” But he continues that he privileges color combos over original colors, saying “[c]ertain rusty red, yellow green, and mustard yellow hues in combination make me pretty happy” (Stewart in Gaiman et al. 2015). Again multiplicity is emphasized—Stewart cannot choose one color, just as Sandman’s art cannot be singular. Overture plays with the conventions of the comics medium and unifies form and content, for example by matching borders and layout to the theme of the page. In Chapter 5, Night’s realm is not just appropriately colored in pinks, blues, purples, and blacks, but the layout of the page as a whole reinforces the flowing, seductive air (see for example the second double page spread of #5). Panels blossom from a sexually resonant central shape, and their curves echo the lines of Night’s body, for example encompassed by her arm in the bottom right quadrant. Roads and pathways also provide borders as in the top right. The whole is both organic and surreal, as the flat pink colors used for borders and the character herself offer no sense of realism. Overture also disrupts and multiplies our expectations through manipulating the material object and the reading experience, for example by requiring a change of reading direction. This forces the reader to interact with the book physically by turning it in their hands to continue reading— a dizzying experience but one that simultaneously reminds us of the object we are holding (and of course severely disadvantages those nonbibliophilic readers who might have bought a digital copy). Other features of the comic also foreground its material object, such as the mighty gateway pages (which open to create a four-page spread) that appear at the beginning and end of the mini-series. These bring haptic issues to bear on the reading experience (Hague 2014) as we literally expand the space of the page—just as Dream himself has been expanded.

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Foregrounded these elaborate art styles and haptic elements extends the varied art and physical repackaging strategies that were used in the first run of Sandman. One of the most striking examples of this is from letterer Todd Klein, who produced over fifty different character and caption styles for Overture, using non-standard lettering for each of the Sandman pantheon, whose typeface and speech balloon tails are all different. This is a continuation of the technique Klein used in the original Sandman, where Dream’s speech always appeared in white font on a black background.6 Back then this was achieved manually: the dialogue was hand-lettered, printed in negative, cut out by hand, and then pasted over the artwork. For Overture Klein could do this digitally, which also allowed him to merge the text and art still further by using translucent lettering and transparent balloons where it suited the story, for example when Dream speaks to Night on the pages mentioned above. His speech thus seems less certain than usual, and the flowering shape of the panel borders is preserved. The merging of text and image is also apparent in the title pages to each chapter, which incorporate these labels into the artwork. Again, these use a range of different styles and media to suit the mood, for example the City of the Stars (#4)—“a city made of light,” in which no black is used. These contrasting chapter styles extend out to the rest of comic and many pages or double pages bring together a range of contrasting styles and techniques. As Andy Khouri points out: “There’s some stuff that’s hand-painted, some stuff done in washes, some stuff that’s only pencil that’s been colored [by Dave Stewart].” The legacy of Sandman is clear in dramatic shifts between styles. For example in a double-page spread from #4 the artwork shifts from a flat perspective and bold colorway, with no discernable use of background or paneling, to more subtly colored hues as we re-enter the “world” of the comic, combined with an overuse of geometric panel borders. False panel borders and background abstract shapes are used to lead the eye onto the second page. Different characters speak in individual fonts and speech balloon styles. This mobility also informs the gatefold page from #1 where we can also see the contrasting depiction of the different Sandmen, some of which specifically echo the original series (such as the full moon head, a homage to the cover of Sandman #39), although the majority are utterly 6 The creation of a distinct font for each character was pioneered by letterer Gaspar Saladino in Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum (DC Comics, 1989).

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new. Perspective is also used to emphasize this (for example via the twodimensional characters at center-left and top right) and scale is also used (the hands of a giant Sandman are shown on the right hand side). Visibility and color also play a role, for example via the translucency of the black ghost-like shape to the center right and the bursts of flame which break up the many shades of blue used on this page. The opulent and varied aesthetic and the gatefold device scream quality and innovation. Critics hailed Overture as “stunning,” “amazing,” and “well written,” (Bailey) and “ludicrously pretty” (Rivera). But there was also criticism: as reviewer Dan Nadel argued that the elaborate art “stifles actual engagement” and that Gaiman’s level of control “works against his premise.” Here Nadel echoes Smith’s comments on the original series by finding both Gaiman’s authority and the elaborate art problematic.

Comics-Seeming Novels? With this in mind, I’d like to end by reframing some of these observations in terms of some recent work that has been done on comics and legitimation and extending my conclusions to the wider cultural search for legitimation apparent in fiction and the changing nodes of the novelnetwork. Jean-Paul Gabilliet (2010 [2005]) and Paul Lopes (2009) have done significant work on the historical legitimation of comics, which has been continued by later critics such as Andrew Hoberek (2014) and Christopher Pizzino (2016). Gabilliet’s cultural history looks at the structuring social and economic relationships that have defined the development of comics publishing. He considers both internal and external types of consecration and how these contribute to the visibility, recognition, and cultural legitimacy of comics. In summarizing, he points out that while the graphic novel format has shifted comics toward the field of adult culture, the inertia of the monthly market has simultaneously trapped the medium as part of adolescent culture. The paradoxical nature of these findings is particularly interesting in the context of Charles Hatfield’s (2005) work on the narrative tensions that appear on the comics page (which might contrast word/image or surface/sequence to reinforce particular themes or meanings), or Benoit Peeters’ (2007) work which uses a series of binary divisions to break down its workings, or even my own research (Round 2014) that identifies similar internal contradictions shared between comics and the Gothic.

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David Ball’s work on Chris Ware’s comics also notes a tension that he names “comics against themselves”—the tendency to bring in highminded literary themes while simultaneously undoing them (2010: 106). I interpret this as the type of process we see in other media, such as the television show South Park, or in texts of the “mash up” literary genre such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). In these texts, canonical beliefs and books are simultaneously acknowledged and undermined (see Lanzendörfer 2018). They enact the contradictory impulse that seems present in ideology and literature today, reflecting a lack of faith in metanarratives as part of the postmodern condition (Lyotard 1984[1979]). Szép also notes the particular tendency of comics to be self-referential, arguing that these texts are, first and foremost, about being comics, and should be defined as a rhetorical mode. Most recently, Christopher Pizzino (2016) develops this body of criticism by using the notion of legitimation as a tool to read the comics page. He defines and argues for a process called “autoclasm” (or “selfbreaking”)—a split energy that articulates comics’ status problems in comics-specific terms on the page. Essentially Pizzino argues that the “coming of age” bildungsroman narrative continually applied to comics in the mainstream media is a fiction. The fact that this same “news” is still being reported year after year is indicative of what remains as an ongoing struggle for legitimation (since such articles have been published for 30 years now as “new news,” and show no signs of stopping). This is also apparent in comics paratexts and other scholarship. Sandifer and Eklund point out that “[t]he desire for legitimacy has pushed comics scholarship into a contradictory position, in which literary merit is valued, and Gaiman valued for his literary qualities, but the ‘low’ cultural tradition of popular comics and comic art is devalued” (2008). Andrew Hoberek (2014) demonstrates that many existing critical approaches to Watchmen as literature do not stop to question the concept, and instead his own work uses Watchmen as a lens to examine what we mean by literature and the consequences of including graphic narrative within this. Beaty and Woo suggest that comics critics and scholars often engage in doublethink by positioning a “great” comic as the exception to the rule (as Karen Berger does in discussing Alan Moore), or by using the language of cinema or prose to analyze it (2016: 32). Hoberek also draws attention to this paradox: pointing out that claims for comics as literature must interrogate the concept itself and ask how the non-verbal elements of comics complicate existing definitions.

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Pizzino argues that the “signs of these struggles can be read on the comics page” (2016: 2), which demonstrate a split energy that articulates comics’ status problems. He offers four case studies, that include reading The Dark Knight Returns (1986) through the language of the comics code (and particularly the notorious accusations of Fredric Wertham which are re-voiced through its psychiatrist figure), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as articulating the disruptive pleasure that comics offer. Using this model, I’d suggest that Sandman’s incorporation of literary references can be read as an example of Pizzino’s autoclasm. It thus performs the literary or intertextual play of high-low culture, representing comics’ ongoing struggles with the graphic novel label. Fitting Pizzino’s model, this is done via a method that is typically “of comics”— Gaiman uses retroactive continuity,7 but pushed to the nth degree. As well as prior comics and characters, he overwrites other literary texts and global historical events (such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the sleeping sickness that did indeed appear between 1915 and 1926), explaining them away as a consequence of the events of his narrative. In addition, his combination of diverse mythologies and literatures demonstrates the same type of cross-fertilization that the mainstream comics universes have created (where multiple characters inhabit the same universe). Finally, the dramatically varied art produced by his collaborators also enacts the multiplicity of comics art more generally, where pencillers, inkers, colorists, and letterers collaborate on a single text. This is even sustained within the work of singular artists such as McKean, Klein, or Williams through their use of collage and mixed methods. When considered alongside Gaiman’s prose literature, Sandman’s reputation also exposes the subjective and fluid qualities of literariness: “Even Gaiman, hailed as the most literary of comic book writers, is in prose merely a writer of popular genre fiction” (Beaty and Woo 2016: 64). In the framing and reframing of Gaiman’s work across media we can therefore perhaps also see the genre novel’s own quest for respectability emerging, for example in his introduction to his novel American Gods (2005 edition). This notes that the book won “a number of awards including the Nebula and Hugo awards (for, primarily, SF), the Bram

7 A practice commonly found in comics: overwriting past events to create a coherent and singular history for a character.

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Stoker award (for horror), the Locus award (for fantasy)”: pairing paratextual markers of literary worth with pop culture genres (for such genre awards, see also Lanzendörfer in this volume). In Sandman the treatment of word and image demonstrates the particular status struggle of a collaborative medium against singular authorship and the graphic novel label. Through its performance of this autoclasm, perhaps the (graphic-)novel-seeming-comic-book can also illuminate understanding of the author function in the novel, where similar collective processes (the work of editors, agents, readers, reviewers, and so forth) are occluded by the single name on the cover. As boundaries between high and low culture blur, and social media and new technologies increasingly reframe reading as a dialogic process and create new possibilities for co-creation, the case study of Sandman exposes the limitations of the author function and auteurship in a collaborative medium and a postmodern world.

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Bender, Lauretta, and Reginald S. Lourie. 1941. The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11: 540–550. Brooker, Will. 2001. Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon. London: Continuum. Carey, Mike, and Peter Gross. 2009–2015. The Unwritten. New York: DC Vertigo. Dellert, Matteis. 2020. The Expert: “The Comic Book Will Slowly Disappear”. SVT, January 14. https://www.svt.se/kultur/serietidningen-kommer-saktaatt-forsvinna?cmpid=del%3Afb%3A20200114%3Aserietidningen-kommersakta-att-forsvinna%3Anyh%3Alp&fbclid=IwAR2xWMH_G4sGZFgxqW23 JFjb4b3WhA5RG_zqKCsDIQPRcQOarbb6h_W78J4. Accessed 31 March 2020. DiChristopher, Tom. 2016. Comic Books Buck Trend as Print and Digital Sales Flourish. CNBC.com, June 5. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/05/comicbooks-buck-trend-as-print-and-digital-sales-flourish.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Dony, Christophe. 2014. The Rewriting Ethos of the Vertigo Imprint: Critical Perspectives on Memory-Making and Canon Formation in the American Comics Field. Comicalités. http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/ 1918. Accessed 29 May 2020. Eco, Umberto. 1972. The Myth of Superman. Review of The Amazing Adventures of Superman, trans. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics 2 (1) (Spring): 14–22. Ellis, Warren, and Bryan Hitch. 1999–2010. The Authority. New York: Wildstorm. ———, and Garrie Gastonny. 2009–2010. Supergod. Rantoul, IL: Avatar. ———, and John Cassaday. 1998–2009. Planetary. New York: Wildstorm. Ennis, Garth, and Darick Robertson. The Boys. 2006–2012. New York: Wildstorm/Dynamite Entertainment. Foucault, Michel. 1969. What Is an Author? Generation-online.org. http://www. generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm. Accessed 31 March 2020. ———. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2010. Of Mice and Men: The Cultural History of the American Comic Book, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gaiman, Neil. 1989. Afterword. In Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics. ———. 1999. Stardust. London: Headline Feature. ———. 2005. American Gods. London: Headline Review. Available online at http://m.litread.in/read/91773/95817-96935?page=173. Accessed 22 May 2017. Link no longer accessible.

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———. 2016. The View from the Cheap Seats. London: Headline. ———. 2017. Norse Mythology. London: Bloomsbury. ———, et al. 1989–1996. Sandman. New York: DC Comics/DC Vertigo. ———, and Kelley Jones, et al. 1991. Script for Calliope. Dream Country. New York: DC Comics. ———, J.H. Williams III, and Dave Stewart. 2015. The Sandman: Overture— The Deluxe Edition. New York: DC Vertigo. Gillen, Kieron, and Jamie McKelvie. 2014–present. The Wicked + The Divine. Portland, OR: Image Comics. Grahame-Smith, Seth. 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Gravett, Paul. 2011. 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die. London: Cassell Illustrated. Hague, Ian. 2014. Comics and the Senses. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hoberek, Andrew. 2014. Considering Watchmen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kannenberg Jr, Gene. 2001. Graphic Text, Graphic Context: Interpreting Custom Fonts and Hands in Contemporary Comics. In Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton, 165–192. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Katsiadas, Nick. 2015. Mytho-auto-bio: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the Romantics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Studies in Comics 6 (1): 61–84. Khouri, Andy. 2013. Artist JH Williams Talks ‘Sandman: Overture’. Comics Alliance, October 31. http://comicsalliance.com/sandman-overturejh-williams-artist-interview-neil-gaiman-vertigo/?trackback=tsmclip. Accessed 12 August 2016. Lakes International Comic Art Festival. n.d. UK Comics Laureate. Lakes International Comic Art Festival. https://www.comicartfestival.com/project/ukcomics-laureate. Accessed 31 March 2020. Lanzendörfer, Tim. 2018. Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Licari-Guillaume, Isabelle. 2017. Ambiguous Authorities: Vertigo and the Auteur Figure. Authorship 6 (2). http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/aj.v6i2.7700. Accessed 29 May 2020. ———. 2018. Transatlantic Exchanges and Cultural Constructs: Vertigo Comics and the British Invasion. International Journal of Comic Art 20 (1): 189– 203. Lopes, Paul. 2009. Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCabe, Joseph. 2004. Hanging Out with the Dream King. Seattle: Fantagraphics. McKean, Dave. 1997. Dust Covers: The Collected Sandman Covers 1989–1997 . London: Titan Books. ———. 2014. Dream States: The Collected Dreaming Covers. New York: DC Vertigo. Miller, Frank, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley. 1986. The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics. Morrison, Grant. 2011. Supergods. London: Jonathan Cape. ———, and Dave McKean. 2004. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, 15th Anniversary Edition. New York: DC Comics. Murray, Chris. 2010. Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics. In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons, 31–45. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Nadel, Dan. 2013. Review. The Sandman: Overture 1. The Comics Journal. http://www.tcj.com/reviews/the-sandman-overture-1/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Olson, Steven P. 2005. Neil Gaiman. New York: Rosen Publishing. Palmer, David. 2010. The Evolution of the American Comic Book Industry: Are We Entering the Third Wave? Advances in Business Research 1 (1): 232–239. ———. 2016. The Tail That Wags the Dog: The Impact of Distribution. In Cultures of Comics Work, ed. Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, 235–249. London: Palgrave. Peeters, Benoît. 2007. Four Conceptions of the Page, trans. Jesse Cohn. ImageTexT 3 (3). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rauch, Stephen. 2003. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press. Rawlik, Peter S. 2007. The King Forsakes His Throne: Campbellian Hero Icons in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman’. In The Neil Gaiman Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press. Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rivera, Joshua. 2014. Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III on Morpheus’ Father in ‘Sandman’ #4. Entertainment Weekly, December 16. http://ew.com/art icle/2014/12/16/neil-gaiman-and-j-h-williams-iii-talk-morpheus-father-andthis-weeks-sandman-overture/. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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Ross, Jonathan. 2001. Conversation with Alan Moore. The Idler 28. http:// www.idler.co.uk/html.interviews/rossmoore.htm. Accessed 18 April 2004. Round, Julia. 2005. Personal interview with Steve White, Titan Comics. By telephone, Monday 25 April 2005. ———. 2008. Personal interview with Karen Berger, DC Comics. In person at Bristol Comicon, Sunday 11 May 2008. ———. 2010a. ‘Is This a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s. In The Rise of the American Comics Artist, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons, 14–30. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ———. 2010b. Transforming Shakespeare? Neil Gaiman and The Sandman. In Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works, ed. Phyllis Frus and Christy A. Williams, 95–110. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ———. 2014. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Salisbury, Mark. 1999. Writers on Comics Scriptwriting. London: Titan Books. Sandifer, Philip, and Tof Eklund. 2008. Editor’s Introduction. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4 (1). http://english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/ v4_1/introduction.shtml. Accessed 31 March 2020. Savlov, Marc. 1999. A Sort of Legend. Austin Chronicle, September 10. https:// www.austinchronicle.com/books/1999-09-10/73755/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Schnelbach, Leah. 2015. What Neil Gaiman and Junot Díaz Talk About When They Talk About Sandman: Overture. Tor.com, November 10. http://www. tor.com/2015/11/10/neil-gaiman-junot-diaz-talk-about-sandman-overturecomics-death-and-diversity/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Scott, Rebecca. n.d. Review. The Green Man Review. http://thegreenmanreview. com/gmr/book/book_gaiman_sandmanomni1.html. Accessed 22 May 2017. Link no longer accessible. Smith, Clay. 2008. Get Gaiman? PolyMorpheus Perversity in Works by and About Neil Gaiman. ImageTexT 4 (1). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imaget ext/archives/v4_1/smith/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin. Szép, Esther. 2014. Metacomics—A Poetics of Self-Reflection in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Pádár and Koska’s ‘Lifetime Story’. Studies in Comics 5 (1): 77–95. West, Candace E. 2013. The Sandman. In Icons of the American Comic Book. From Captain America to Wonder Woman, ed. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, 645–651. Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford: Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 10

Listening to the Literary: On the Novelistic Poetics of the Podcast Patrick Gill

As late as 1796, by which time it was well on the way to becoming an established genre, the novel still drew critics to comment on its inherent dangers, judging its immersiveness as its greatest societal threat. As one commentator noted in The Sylph: “I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread: and the mistress of a family losing hours over a novel in the parlour, while her maids, in emulation of the example, were similarly employed in the kitchen” (qtd. in Taylor 1943: 53). That said, the novel has also been credited with providing “actual practice in empathy” (Morson 2013: 207–208): “one experiences feelings and perspectives that one either knew about only by hearsay or never even suspected” (207). A similar spectrum of claims has been made as regards the properties of the podcast, demonstratively separating the listener from their surroundings (see M. Collins 2016) at the same time as “enabl[ing] connectivity for diverse publics” by providing a “bridging medium” (Swiatek 2018: 173). In investigating what might be termed

P. Gill (B) Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_10

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the “novelistic” properties of the podcast, the present chapter obviously has to avail itself of a certain amount of generalization on both sides of the equation, determining in very broad strokes what is typical of both novel and podcast when both forms have brought forth so many individual specimens as to ensure that for every claim made here, multiple exceptions can and will always be found. In the following, I will take a closer look at four characteristics conventionally associated with the novel and see how they are paralleled by the form of the podcast. What forms the basis of this essay is a concern not so much with ideas of the novel and the podcast as represented by individual examples but with what Caroline Levine calls “affordances”: I borrow the concept of affordance from design theory. Affordance is a term used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs. Glass affords transparency and brittleness. Steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability. Cotton affords fluffiness, but also breathable cloth when it is spun into yarn and thread. Specific designs, which organize these materials, then lay claim to their own range of affordances. A fork affords stabbing and scooping. A doorknob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing, and pulling. Designed things may also have unexpected affordances generated by imaginative users: we may hang signs or clothes on a doorknob, for example, or use a fork to pry open a lid, and so expand the intended affordances of an object. (2015: 6)

In discussing “the potential uses or actions latent in” the podcast medium, the present chapter makes no claim that the affordances discussed here form hard and fast rules governing the existence of all or even the majority of podcasts. It merely discusses the signifying potential, the specific propensities of the podcast inherent in the form and exploited to varying degrees, finding some parallels with the genre of the novel on the one hand, but also addressing the question of how, why, and by whom such comparisons are frequently instigated on the other. One distinguishing feature the novel might be said to have is its penchant for the fictional, so the podcasts referenced here might be assumed to be limited to audio drama and audio fiction. However, it is particularly podcasts dealing with non-fictional matter that evoke (or invoke) comparisons with the novel, and there is a great deal of mutual influence between fictional and non-fictional podcasts where their form, their poetics, their storytelling strategies are concerned. Discussing the

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impact of “stylised audio documentary” Serial, for instance, Hancock and McMurtry argue that “despite being explicitly built around notions of truth and reality,” the 2014 favorite “represents the most influential force upon podcast fiction since Old Time Radio drama” (2018: 81–82; original emphasis). Furthermore, while we do see fictionality as a distinguishing feature of the novel, that was by no means always the case. Early novels frequently attempted to convey to their readers the impression that they reported on factual events.1 So even though the fictional nature of novelistic storytelling seems a given on the surface, things have not always been as clear-cut and over the course of its history the novel has had a tendency to incorporate the non-fictional. In a way, the novel has always been a hybrid genre, combining between its covers the affordances of a multitude of forms, both fictional and non-fictional: Monstrous hybridity … is nothing other than the novel’s … form: the “cutn-mix” sampling of whatever material falls to hand, the inventive synthesis of old with new, fact with fiction, social with imaginative, political with personal. Both chimera and chameleon, the novel is defined by the ongoing nature of its hybridity. (Cooppan 2018: 27, original emphases)

In order to incorporate these mixed discourses, the novel, like the podcast, relies on its generous dimensions.

“Podcasts Are Designed to Take up Time” (Scope) Freed from the necessity of producing texts readable in a single sitting or having to be recited in social settings, and supported by the spread of printing technology and cheaper paper production, the novel came into being when prose narratives incorporating all manner of other writings extended to unmatched proportions. This “cannibal genre that heteroglossically digests the world” has the capacity, through its sheer dimensions, to expose readers to an extraordinary length of engagement with its text, to present them with unmatched detail and complexity as well as involving them in gradual processes told over time. In addition, given these extraordinary dimensions, it is the most omnivorous of all the

1 In a similar vein, the clearly fictional mystery podcast Tanis frequently infuses its storyworld with real-world events and its makers have steadfastly refused to acknowledge to its listeners its fictional status.

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genres: “Such is the magnitude of the novel that it even swallows other genres” (Coopan 2018: 29; see also Lanzendörfer in this volume). Discussing “online radio” in the Guardian in 2004, Hammersley saw similar forces at work on the fate of the podcast: file compression and increasing transmission rates meant that while video streaming was still some way off, audio formats could find their way onto listeners’ portable devices with relative ease. Additionally, no longer bound by broadcasters’ schedules, “aspiring radio journalists” were unrestricted by “a shortage of airtime.” The effect this had on early podcasts such as The Daily Source Code was a lack of editorial discipline—a free-flowing, conversational discursiveness heedless of any need to make maximum use of time, since neither the time allotted to a single episode nor the number of episodes produced in total was strictly speaking limited. While many a chatty podcast remains a staple of podcasting culture, even simple conversational shows are edited to increase their density to some extent. Elsewhere‚ podcasters have developed uses for the medium’s potential scope beyond the merely discursive. When Mead posits that “podcasts are designed to take up time, rather than to be checked, scanned, and rushed through” (2018: 51), she makes the point that they do not behave the way we would expect digital media to behave, that there is something old-fashioned about the leisurely way they go about their business of making use of their scope. The type of use they make of their overall volume, i.e., the sum of the shows produced under a common title, very much depends on whether they follow a serialized pattern of a continuous multi-episode arc, or whether they proceed by accumulating instalments each of which is complete in its own right but the totality of which still adds up to more than the sum of its parts. In the latter case, take the 100-part BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, written and presented by Neil McGregor. While each of the 100 15-minute episodes engages with a discrete subject, attentive listeners will discern patterns developing over time with explicit and implicit references back to previous episodes a common feature. Conversely, a serialized fiction podcast such as Tanis can engage listeners over the course of four twelve-episode seasons, continually building on, distracting from, and adding to the mysteries outlined in its first episodes. It is not just in the potential length of their episodes and overall story arcs however, that podcasts can be seen as akin to novels. Another point already hinted at is their willingness to incorporate other media.

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A brief consideration of a factual podcast ought to elucidate this. More Perfect is spun off from WNYC’s Radiolab and concerns itself with the history of the US Supreme Court. As a factual podcast investigating questions of law, More Perfect avails itself of all the typical raw material of an audio documentary: every episode patches together historical audio recordings from court sessions, previously recorded interviews with witnesses and protagonists, recent interviews with witnesses and protagonists looking back on events, excerpts from on-stage discussion panels, and brief conversational exchanges between expert and non-expert presenters (one standing in for the audience and asking questions, the other providing insight and linking the various other segments). All of this is helped along not just by title music, but by use of sound effects and music to underline atmosphere and even individual characters in the course of a story. This level of inclusion of disparate sources and materials is par for the course in both fiction and nonfiction podcasts and thus no longer remarkable among podcast listeners. Beyond it, though, there is a whole other level of generic omnivorousness, when in the second season of More Perfect, a season engaging with the 27 Amendments to the US Constitution, each episode incorporates a specially composed song by a well-known recording artist on one of the Amendments. That said, there are structurally even more significant ways of incorporating other forms than the simple inclusion of music. For instance, some fiction podcasts actually appear in the guise of other media, as when different seasons of Within the Wires are presented either as a relaxation tape or a museum audio guide. What the generous dimensions of podcast episodes and seasons as well as their tendency to incorporate various other forms are in aid of is one of storytelling’s most fundamental tasks, that of world-building. From big structural incorporation of fictional or factual sources and documents to miniscule allusions to a reality extending beyond the story itself, podcasts use every trick in the book to provide listeners with a sense of reality and texture of the world they present. In doing so they combine the amount of material they can directly communicate thanks to the scope of their episodes and story arcs with a sense of hyperdiegesis: “In fiction, hyperdiegetic universes provide a sense of breadth and depth in the text’s setting, a sense that any one story being told is only the tip of the iceberg in a larger universe” (Hancock and McMurtry 2018: 87). In all, these aspects allow listeners to immerse themselves in the worlds presented to them. While immersiveness is nothing unusual in any

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medium, the podcast’s “commitment to a slow build, and to a sensual atmosphere” (Mead 2018: 51) makes it more like the novel than like a film, say, or a computer game, where engagement has to be achieved near-instantaneously. For the podcast to bring the “aesthetic immediacy and world-making potential of sound” (M. Collins 2016) to bear on the listener demands the listener’s active collaboration, a willingness to engage with the medium.

“An Hour or so of Devoted Listenership” (Focus) The most fundamental parallel between the novel and the podcast may be the fact that they are both single-channel high-focus media addressing a captive audience of one. Where the novel employs the medium of text, the podcast has to rely on sound (and sound only) to tell stories and convey atmosphere and meaning. The idea of the podcast as a primary medium may not be in line with the judgment of early commentators. After all, they tended to extoll the virtues of the podcast as a medium that can be consumed while doing other things and decidedly not demanding the listener’s full attention. But recent developments in podcasting—from the continued rise of fiction podcasts to the evolution of densely structured documentary strands—have changed the perception of the form: “In podcasting, programmes are no longer constrained by programme schedules and listeners are more able to put aside time to give intricate content more of their attention” (Berry 2018: 23). One of the points of the contention regarding the isolating nature of the podcast made above actually points to one of the main affordances of the podcast medium: its propensity to engage a captive audience of one. Like the novel, the literary form that outgrew the social aspect of song contests, poetry recitals, and storytelling situations, the podcast is consumed individually (as anyone who has ever had to listen to podcasts in a classroom situation will know, with students awkwardly trying to find something to stare at while listening as a group).2 But before looking 2 On the growing trend of collective podcast listening, see Hancock and McMurtry (2018: 90). The present chapter contends that this is still an exception to the podcast’s traditional “lone listener” paradigm. For a discussion of similar trends that may run counter to what are conventionally thought of as the affordances of the novel, see J. Collins (2010: 80–114).

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at the individual reception situation, let’s consider other aspects of the highly individualized engagement the podcast affords: Podcasts are deliberately and actively sought out by their listeners. As opposed to radio’s “unstoppable linear flow of programming” (Berry 2016: 10), the podcast experience requires “a series of choices” (Berry 2018: 12) on the part of listeners. A podcast can be downloaded by an individual at any point and it can be navigated by individual listeners much like a novel: many podcasts are explicitly divided into segments that can be directly jumped to, shorter passages can be skipped or listened to again, and listening can be interrupted at will by the individual listener.3 The situation of the listener means that the medium of the podcast can command the full attention of its captive audience. Obviously outwardly, some of the above could also be said of radio, but while radio is also a medium based solely on the transmission of sound, it is almost universally seen as “an inattentive medium, one that understands that listeners multitask” (Berry 2018: 13), leading Hancock and McMurtry to speak of its “long-held secondary status” (2018: 85). But it is not just the physical parameters of the reception situation that separate radio and podcast: it can be argued that there is a fundamental difference in the audiences they address. After all, while discussions of podcasts mention “intimacy” and a “one-to-one relationship with the speaker(s)” (K. Collins 2018: 228), radio has traditionally envisaged a collective audience rather than the individual listener, a programmatic aspect of radio encapsulated in the motto on the BBC’s coat of arms: Nation Shall Speak Peace unto Nation.4 In stark contrast to that, podcasts by and large go out of their way to cultivate a relationship with individual listeners, to make listeners feel that it is specific individuals who are being addressed rather than constituent parts of a local community, nation, or other collective. For many podcasts, this is a matter of sheer necessity. When The Economist (2018) writes that “Edmund Burke described patronage as ‘the tribute that opulence pays to genius.’ Today it is the spare change millennials pay podcasters” (“Patronage – Patreon, Kickstarter and the new patrons of the arts”), it

3 These are all things that are nowadays technically possible with film as well, but as the classroom situation above illustrates, where students would not feel awkward if they had a screen to stare at, film still tends to be considered a collectively consumed medium. 4 See also the etymology of the word broadcast.

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points to the importance of engendering a feeling of personal responsibility, of stakeholdership, even, in individual listeners. Dependent on a variety of subscription, support and crowdfunding models as well as sales of merchandise and tickets to live events, podcasters cannot afford to make listeners feel part of a crowd in which others can take up the slack: every listener needs to be made to feel involved, engaged, and partly responsible for the podcast’s wellbeing. This economic need for listener engagement is stylistically paralleled by stances not dissimilar to Jane Eyre’s constant address of the reader: from most podcast advertising addressing listeners as individuals (not uncommon in advertising on the whole, but done with surprising consistency in podcasts); to BBC statistics podcast More or Less calling individual listeners who have contacted the show with questions or comments “loyal listener”; to narrative ploys creating a form of direct address from narrator to listener in both documentary and fiction podcasts. Whether it is in true-crime podcasts such as Serial or in mysterious fictional worlds as those portrayed in Rabbits, for instance, a multitude of narrative ploys is used by podcasts to make the reader feel either a witness or an active part of the unfolding story. Providing for “an hour or so of devoted listenership” (Hancock and McMurtry 2018: 85) is no one-way street or simple equation: the listener has to be actively engaged, their devotion earned. This is sometimes achieved by novel means of interactive media, but more often than not by novelistic means in the form of narrative strategies, distribution of knowledge, and direct address. What this highly focused and ostensibly personal engagement with a podcast opens listeners up to is another one of the principal affordances it shares with the novel: that of its affective power.

“You’ll Feel Something, and the Feeling Is Audible” (Affect) The immersiveness of the worlds created by podcasts and the dedication of the listener in both quantitative terms (time spent) and qualitative terms (focus given) to their favorite podcasts serve to further another of their primary affordances: their affective potential. The reception situation has already been addressed above, but it bears repeating that in the case of podcasts, “the state of intimacy remains a constant characteristic given, in part, the physical aspects of audio, enhanced further by the use of earbuds or headphones and the feeling of a one-to-one relationship with

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the speaker(s)” (K. Collins 2018: 228). This peculiar form of transmitting meaning through sound waves causing vibrations within the human body is the most fundamental aspect making podcasts “a peculiarly intimate medium” (Mead 2018: 51). To this can be added the fact that, as is the case in novels, their world-making facilities are primarily verbal, thus relying on the listener’s imagination to conjure fictional or factual worlds. Small wonder, then, that the audio entertainment company mentioned in the heading above along with other podcast-related companies such as headphone makers Bose with their motto “Get closer,” tend to base their advertising campaigns on notions of affect and proximity. But the affective dimensions of podcasts are not restricted to their means of delivery. The direct transmission into the listener’s ear may enhance the affective impact of the message, but the message itself is often crafted in line with the affordances of the medium to reverberate with the listener’s emotions. For one thing, what was simply considered “a new boom in amateur radio” (Hammersley 2004) in its early days, has gradually developed into the home of elaborate soundscapes and sonic collages, painstakingly assembled and exquisitely edited for emotional effect. Whether it is to impress upon the listener the panicked response of an allergy sufferer to an unexpected allergic reaction in WNYC’s factual series Radiolab or to fill in the background of an episode of fictional mystery podcast Tanis, evocative sound effects are everywhere and go far beyond the simple mimesis of what might be thought of as realistic or naturalistic sounds accompanying traditional radio drama. In fact, so dominant is the idea of atmosphere in many podcasts, that it is hardly surprising that many of the most successful shows produced in this medium belong to genres or sub-genres specifically associated with the triggering of an emotional response in the intended audience. Even something as quotidian as the celebrity interview becomes a vicariously lived experience of a heartfelt, confessional nature when presented in its most successful podcast iterations such as Oprah’s Supersoul Conversations or Marc Maron’s WTF . But where instead of only frank conversation and canny editing the entire arsenal of sound editing can be brought to bear on a given genre, the affective dimension is even stronger, as is the case in mystery and horror podcasts such as Tanis, Night Vale, or Within the Wires, which are as much determined by mood as by plot. True-crime documentaries manipulate listeners’ emotions in following and in turn dismissing clues, believing and in turn disbelieving witnesses, all the while also deeply reliant on sound editing. But there is one more aspect of

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podcasts that is even more important than the physical effect of audio storytelling on the body and the use of sound effects to encourage an emotional reaction, and it is once more something the podcast has in common with the novel.

“I’m Not Even a Crime Reporter” (Narration) Frequently considered the first novel in English, Robinson Crusoe is a firstperson narrative consisting of a variety of different texts, viz. Crusoe’s diary, his retrospective insights into the arc of his own story, and—most crucially of all—the vivid recollection of what it was like finding himself in fear for his life on a desert island. While the diary provides documentary evidence of Crusoe’s sojourn on the island, the retrospective account provides the aged Robinson with an opportunity to make sense of his adventures, to neatly embed them in a pattern familiar from spiritual autobiography. What the third and most substantial portion has to offer is interiority. What makes Robinson Crusoe recognizably novelistic is the extent to which it involves the reader not just in its principal character’s emotions but in his decision-making process. That process itself is consistently championed by the novel over its outcomes, as is attested by the many instances in which Crusoe contemplates a problem quite extensively without in the final analysis reaching any conclusion or taking any action. Time and again the process of arriving at a decision is more important than the action taken based on that decision. As a form entirely reliant on audio output, podcasts might be expected to go out of their way to make that output as varied as possible, relying on a cast of many different voices, on dialog, on polyphony to tell their stories, as was often the case in radio plays in what is referred to as the old-time radio era or the golden age of radio. But instead of relying on an extensive cast, of showing, not telling, podcasts tend to rely quite heavily on a single narrator figure, and one of the reasons that they do so is that it affords them the opportunity to present their listeners with a novel-like interiority, a narrative in which the process of arriving at conclusions is as important as those conclusions themselves. As Mead elaborates in reference to Serial and Sarah Koenig, the journalist and narrator of that podcast: “The point of ‘Serial’ … was not so much to solve the mystery as to reveal the process of attempting to solve the mystery …. [T]he show’s real innovation lay in capturing Koenig’s psychological process—her inward struggle about what to believe.” This “presence of

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a musing narrator” gives listeners someone to identify with within the world presented to them (2018: 50). That identification with a central narrator might be important in a form of theoretically boundless duration among the principal virtues of which can be listed its affective potential should not be surprising. But what are the characteristics typical of a podcast narrator that make them easy to identify with? First of all, following Koenig’s example in Serial, for twists and turns to occur in the story, the narrator’s perception of a given situation cannot be instantaneously right. There are no emotional ups and downs if the distribution of knowledge is not handled very carefully and if listeners are not manipulated into drawing the wrong conclusion occasionally. So the typical narrator figure in a podcast—be it fictional or documentary—is what Mead calls “a more personal, even fallible narrator” (2018: 54). Typically, they will have been drawn into the story reluctantly, and they will approach whatever mystery or quandary awaits them with the unsuspecting innocence of an amateur. When in episode one of the first season of Serial, Koenig remarks that “I’m not a detective or a private investigator. I’m not even a crime reporter,” it is to impress upon the listener the fact that they, too, could embark on an ostensible fact-finding mission such as the one presented over the course of the ensuing episodes. To this fish-out-of-water element is often added another layer of relatability when it comes to podcast narrators. As Michael Collins points out with reference to the horror and mystery podcasts The Black Tapes, Ars Paradoxica, Tanis, Alice Isn’t Dead, and The Message: “In each of the[se] cases … the narrator is either a journalist, an intern, or a person who either by profession or personal circumstances has been placed in a position of uncertainty or threat.” And while he admits that “the choice of narrator also reflects dominant generic traditions in sci-fi, horror and gothic literature (one need only think of Poe’s use of the semi-professional narrator in many of his tales, Brontë’s use of the governess in Jane Eyre etc.),” he goes on to elaborate how the choice of narrators put into positions of precarity resonates with the audience of the above-mentioned podcasts, “overworked, yet unremunerated, Millennials” (2016). Even without following up on Collins’s claims of the specificity of these narrators, what is clear is that they are marginal figures facing complex problems and having to deal with these without being institutionally equipped to do so. Regardless of the identification of specific listener demographics, podcasts share the novel’s concern, either through

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perspective or focalization, with the conveyance of the facts through a particular character, making listeners vicariously share in their experiences. With this focus on character—and on a single character doubling as narrator at that—podcasts (like Robinson Crusoe) inevitably champion process and experience over fact and result, as is attested to by Letzler in his comments on Serial, whose appeal, as he claims “rests in the narrative construction, not the events of the murder” (2017: 40).5 In its emphasis on affect, its world-building properties, its quantitative and qualitative levels of engagement as well as its heavy reliance on narrator figures, the podcast does show a number of affinities with the novel. Besides these individual points, perhaps the strongest claim for such an affinity can be made based on the combination of all of these factors in one cultural artefact. And with more and more narrative podcasts produced and audiobooks on the rise (see Rubery 2016: 251),6 it is not difficult to argue that listening may have a significant role to play in the future of reading the novel.

“Disconnected from the Past to Help Make Sense of the Current” (Branding) For all that, it could be argued that drawing comparisons between novel and podcast is of limited use as, referring to comparisons between literature and television, Mittell does when he states that “such cross-media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities” of a given “storytelling form” (18). Interestingly, the general opinion of the relative futility of “cross-media comparisons” is shared by academics writing about podcasts. After all, among that group of people, acceptance of the podcast as a form in its own right without constant reference to other media is a necessary prerequisite to a meaningful discussion of the medium. Specifically, the cross-media comparison critics like Berry want to move away from is not that between podcast and novel but the somewhat more stringent one of the podcast’s relation to radio: 5 This particular aspect of the podcasting’s aesthetic and its application to factual programs rather than fictional ones can be seen as the origin of many an ethical debate in the context of shows such as Serial and S-Town. 6 Perhaps even more telling than the mere sales figures for audiobooks is the fact that Rubery labels them “one of the only types of reading to have grown in popularity” (2016: 1).

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Rather than considering podcasts as a reinvention or rejuvenation … of radio, we can instead reflect upon it as a process of innovation …. [P]odcasting should also be disconnected from the past to help make sense of the current. In this framework, then, podcasting ought to be reviewed as a medium in its own right, rather than an extension, or a reconfiguration of other media. (2018: 16)

The radio-podcast comparison is one argued over by academics but rarely foregrounded by makers of podcasts. Where radio would offer the most obvious points of comparison, podcast makers seem keen to cast about for other, objectively less straightforward comparisons instead. The opening monolog of Serial, for instance, is recognizably constructed to echo the opening paragraph in a hardboiled thriller with its tentative gestures in the direction of the case at hand, its focus on the role and perspective of the investigator and that investigator’s rhetorical questions addressed at the listener. But it is not just in style that Serial beckons toward the novelistic. A few minutes into the first episode, it describes its subject matter in the following way: I read a few newspaper clips about the case, looked up a few trial records. And on paper, the case was like a Shakespearean mashup: young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families, secret assignations, jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched, the villain not a Moor exactly, but a Muslim all the same,7 and a final act of murderous revenge. And the main stage? A regular old high school across the street from a 7-Eleven. (Koenig 2014)

Despite these literary allusions that start out from the precisely identifiable point of the hardboiled thriller to rapidly transition into a much more general idea of the literary by invoking Shakespeare, Serial ’s title engendered associations with television series, something the show’s sister program, S-Town, went out of its way to avoid by openly referring to its seven episodes as chapters and fashioning its story “into a shapely, selfconsciously literary form … framed by a controlling metaphor.” Endowed with “the density of literary writing” and seen with “a novelist’s eye” (Mead 2018: 56), S-Town faced little resistance when it tried to convince the media and its audience that it ought to be seen in terms of the literary. 7 Strictly speaking, this is a misreading on Koenig’s part, as Othello is famously Christian (see 2.3.342ff.).

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All of which asks us to consider why it is that makers of podcasts like to evoke and invoke literature in this way instead of referring back to the history and aesthetics of radio. It would be foolhardy to assume that a univocal answer can be found to this, but there are elements that suggest themselves for consideration. One of these elements is the simple fact that, as the above discussion has shown, a real affinity between podcast and novel can be established by those interested in establishing it. It is no coincidence that discussing the world of fictional podcasts, a Canadian podcast producer would come to the conclusion that “writing is the single most overlooked element” (qtd. in Berry 2018: 28). But alongside the relatively vague positive identification of the podcast with ideas of the novelistic, there is also a very specific negative idea regarding the podcast’s relation to other media. Not only is radio actively discouraged as a frame of reference by podcast researchers—it is barely even a viable frame of reference for makers of podcasts, as “both the public and broadcasters tend to neglect audio heritage” (Verma 2016: 40). Given the shared origins, techniques, and sometimes even studios and personnel between radio and podcasts, it seems peculiar that the latter would not expend more energy on referencing the former. Instead, when it comes to matters of the long-standing traditions of radio in both Britain and the United States, there seems to be a willful ignorance on the part of podcast makers: Many admired practitioners of the audio arts today suffer from an amnesia about the origins and histories of their own techniques and sensibilities …. The ‘New Masters’ of audio seem uninterested in the ‘Old’ ones; it is as if no one had thought to tell radio stories before This American Life. (Verma 2016: 40)

Avoiding any association with a medium that is perhaps unfairly seen as impersonal, inflexible, and unengrossing is an obvious aim of those producing and disseminating podcasts. It is something they as makers cannot identify with, nor is it something they see as an easy sales pitch when it comes to their listeners. And those listeners—or imaginary constructs of an ideal listener—make up the third element of the podcast’s penchant for being associated with the novelistic. Given the variety of podcasts available, it is of course impossible to hypothesize what a “typical” listener might look like. After all, it is unlikely that The Meatcast would share much of its audience with Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack!.

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What is possible, however, is an abstraction of what type of listener might be most valuable to a given podcast. So when WNYC Studios defines its ideal audience as “intellectually curious and highly engaged listeners across digital, mobile and broadcast platforms” (qtd. in Berry 2018: 23), advertisers would interpret those points as educated, committed, and tech-savvy younger listeners. What would constitute an advertiser’s ideal audience happens to coincide with a demographic unlikely to be charmed by radio’s strengths of addressing a wider public, while either “playing in the background” (Mead 2018: 51) or “necessitat[ing] appointment listening” (K. Collins 2018: 228). Habitual consumers of on-demand services, those listeners were seen as most desirable by advertisers naturally gravitate toward a medium more responsive to individual tastes and needs, a medium offering choice in terms of the tremendous spectrum of shows available as well as in terms of when to consume them. Like readers of novels, podcast listeners like to feel that they are discovering something not necessarily available to everyone, that their decision to listen to a podcast is something personal and that they are following their instincts or a friend’s recommendation rather than a program scheduler’s decision of what is available at any given time. Any consideration of the affordances of the podcast and the use that has been made of the medium in its first decade and a half will lead to the conclusion that its success story is based on capacities in many ways paralleled by the novel: its immersiveness and scope, its affective power, its willingness to rely on the viewpoint of a single individual while creating and presenting entire narrative worlds. These are aspects that podcasts foreground in the interest of forging a strong bond with their listeners. Despite Mittell’s general verdict that “cross-media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities” of a given medium (2015: 18), seeing the podcast through a novelistic lens can be quite illuminating, and it can help to further distinguish it from other forms it might be seen to share similarities with, such as radio. Given the many overlaps detectable between novel and podcast, and similar points to be made with regard to other media such as film or digital gaming, a discussion could be had about the privileged status the novel enjoys in our culture when it comes to ideas of narrative representation. In how far will the novel still embody all that we think of as novelistic in the third decade of the twenty-first century? But the discussion about the essentially novelistic aside, what is perhaps even more telling is how the novel has been used as an explicit or implicit point of reference by podcast

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makers, critics, and audiences alike. Instead of looking back on a proud tradition of radio storytelling, some podcasters give their shows the veneer of the novelistic (see also Panko in this volume). While this may well be an expression of how they see themselves and their role, it can also be read as a more cynical ploy to address audiences reluctant to consume media that feel impersonal to them, that do not afford them individual choice and agency. In that regard, the novel represents a more participatory narrative experience than either radio or network television. At the same time, the very idea of the novel comes with a tremendous cultural cachet making it a kind of shorthand for a valuable way of media consumption, something that is more than mere entertainment and somehow worthy. Compared to the consumption of other media, the podcast-novel comparison seems to imply, “losing hours over a novel in the parlour” (qtd. in Taylor 1943: 53) is no longer seen as a waste of time. On the contrary, after a history spanning more than three centuries, the novel has become the epitome of a cultural good: something for other forms to aspire to and emulate, possibly in actual artistic practice, but definitely in terms of projected image.

References Berry, Richard. 2018. “Just Because You Play a Guitar and Are from Nashville Doesn’t Mean You Are a Country Singer”: The Emergence of Medium Identities in Podcasting. In Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, ed. Richard Berry, Neil Fox, and Dario Llinares, 15–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Podcasting: Considering the Evolution of the Medium and Its Association with the Word ‘Radio’. The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 14 (1): 7–22. Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Collins, Kathleen. 2018. Comedian Hosts and the Demotic Turn. In Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, ed. Richard Berry, Neil Fox, and Dario Llinares, 227–250. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Michael J. 2016. Pod People: Brave New Worlds of Digital Audio Drama. Alluvium: 21st Century Writing, 21st Century Approaches 5 (4). https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2016/10/30/pod-people-bravenew-worlds-of-digital-audio-drama/. Cooppan, Vilashini. 2018. The Novel as Genre. In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson, 23–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hammersley, Ben. 2004. Audible Revolution. The Guardian, February 12. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.digita lmedia. Accessed 31 March 2020. Hancock, Danielle, and Leslie McMurtry. 2018. “I Know What a Podcast Is:” Post-Serial Fiction and Podcast Media Identity. In Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, ed. Richard Berry, Neil Fox, and Dario Llinares, 81–105. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Koenig, Sarah. 2014. The Alibi. Serial. https://serialpodcast.org/season-one. Accessed 31 March 2020. Letzler, David. 2017. Narrative Levels, Theory of Mind, and Sociopathy in TrueCrime Narrative or, How Is Serial Different from Your Average Dateline Episode? In The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age, ed. E. McCracken, 39–53. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mead, Rebecca. 2018. Binge Listening: How Podcasts Became a Seductive—And Sometimes Slippery—New Mode of Storytelling. The New Yorker, November 19. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/how-podcastsbecame-a-seductive-and-sometimes-slippery-mode-of-storytelling. Accessed 31 March 2020. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Morson, Gary Saul. 2013. Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. Rubery, Matthew. 2016. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. s.a. 2018. Patronage—Patreon, Kickstarter and the New Patrons of the Arts. The Economist, December 18. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/ 2018/12/18/patreon-kickstarter-and-the-new-patrons-of-the-arts. Accessed 31 March 2020. Swiatek, Lukasz. 2018. The Podcast as an Intimate Bridging Medium. In Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, ed. Richard Berry, Neil Fox, and Dario Llinares, 173–187. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, John Tinnon. 1943. Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830. New York: King’s Crown. Verma, Neil. 2016. Radio’s “Oblong Blur:” On the Corwinesque in the Critical Ear. In Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship, ed. Jacob Smith and Neil Verma, 37–52. Oakland: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 11

The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld Narratives, Novelization, and the Contemporary Novel-Network Tamer Thabet and Tim Lanzendörfer

Introduction: Reading Video Games, Playing Novels In 2001, Microsoft released its Xbox home video game console, then perhaps the most powerful on the market. Included in its release was a first-person shooter called Halo: Combat Evolved. The Halo series would go on to become one of the most successful series of video games ever, selling around 70 million copies over nearly a dozen iterations.1 More interesting for the purposes of this chapter, however, is the fact that a month before Halo: Combat Evolved was released, Del Rey published a novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach, written by Eric C. Nylund for Microsoft’s 1 Figures are from https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Halo.

T. Thabet The Federal University of the Valleys of Jequitinhonha, Mucuri, Brazil T. Lanzendörfer (B) Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_11

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Franchise Development Group (FDG). The Fall of Reach tells the otherwise unavailable back story to the game’s protagonist, the Master Chief, and sets the stage for the game’s narrative; but it also highlights a number of issues at the nexus between video games and novels. Halo: The Fall of Reach, “was assigned to Eric Nylund,” a “content writer in [Microsoft Games Studios] and accomplished writer.” Nylund was given a seven-week deadline to produce the novel, which he wrote in close cooperation with the game designers. Perhaps more than mere cooperation: Microsoft’s FDG kept close tabs on Nylund’s progress, and “reviewed Nylund’s work to ensure that it was true to the vision of the game’s designers and the story guide;” so much so that, “late in the book’s development,” the “content specialist” for the FDG intervened literally. When the game designers added a “fundamental new technology” to the game, he “found appropriate scenes [in the novel] and wrote a line foreshadowing this ‘experimental technology’—just enough to ensure continuity between the book and the game” (Longdale 2008). Halo: The Fall of Reach is our starting point in this discussion of the way video games and novels are interlinked in the contemporary novel’s network for a number of reasons. First, the novel in question is unabashedly a merchandising project, one which is impossible to divorce from the desire to sell more copies of both the console and game of whose franchise it is part. When the same article that outlines The Fall of Reach’s genesis notes that subsequent novels would be “due in April, a third in fiscal year 2004,” we should read the bookkeeping language to indicate quite clearly the position of these texts in a larger frame of commercial logics. In this sense, The Fall of Reach may appear little different from the various other kinds of Halo merchandise that ultimately fill Microsoft’s coffers: bobble-heads and Monopoly editions, toy guns, and figurines. But there is a clear recognition on part of the FDG that this is not, in fact, true. “Publishing novels,” as the business-development manager for the franchise group also notes, “offered a way for us to develop the game universe.” The novel, then, takes a special place in relation to the video game that depends on its narrativity, its capacity to do meaningful story work that is, apparently, otherwise difficult to do. It is specifically this question that drives our essay. Halo: The Fall of Reach offers us a way to approach a set of concerns which we take to be crucial for the relationship between video game and novel—but also for the novel itself more concretely—that bear discussing. First, it highlights the embeddedness of the novel in larger systems of cultural production. The Fall of Reach, after

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all, is affirmatively not a stand-alone text. Not only does it owe its genesis to Microsoft’s desire to spur interest in its upcoming product and is a text written entirely to order. It also serves the purpose of an extended advertisement, in other words, without having the form of advertisement, as a commodity first and foremost. But secondly, it is also a “literary” text, not least because of its status as a commodity: “the novel had to be high quality. We want people to see the MGS and Xbox logos and know that the product is good” (Longdale 2008). Its status as a literary text sets into relief the differences between video game and novel narrative, but also their necessary links and overlaps. The novel itself has a complex relationship to the video game text: while no player of the game affirmatively needs to know the protagonist’s back story, those who desire it can only glean it from the novel, and a case may be made that the story in Halo: Combat Evolved plays differently for those who have read it; conversely, readers who do not play Halo will miss out on the very story for which the novel provides merely background. And intriguingly, all this does not exhaust the complex relationship between novel and video game: after the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, Microsoft in fact ordered a novelization (penned by William C. Dietz and entitled Halo: The Flood) of the game: a novelistic retelling of the video game’s narrative. Halo opens this essay because it is such an obvious place to start with when talking about the question of the video game’s relationship to the novel, and vice versa, a question which is both material in the widest sense—driven by commercial concerns, a mere adjunct here to the actual product to be sold—and aesthetic. The novel raises the question of the reach and role of “story-worlds” (Ryan and Thon 2012: 2) in the contemporary literary marketplace, but also questions of narrative, such as the process of novelization and the differences between video game and novel narratives, of medial adaptation and of the novel’s peculiar role as a medium of broad popular reach. Following on from this, there are three key issues which we will discuss in this chapter. The first is a discussion of how video game and novel narratives relate theoretically and formally. To say that video games are narratives may sound unintuitive to some, but we will go further and suggest that it pays to understand (some of them) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “novelness” as surprisingly closely related to the novel. The second issue is to think through how, in the concrete examples we have chosen for this chapter, video game and novel narratives coexist not formally, but as nodes in the networks of their storyworlds, and how,

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within those frames, they produce meaning. Together, these two issues already, we think, signal the novel’s reach as a popular-cultural commodity and its importance as a means of transporting story. The third and final issue, which we will seek to interrelate constantly in our discussion, is the question of how these narrative issues relate to the production of both novel and video game. In sharing story worlds, in sharing franchises, video game novels are perhaps more overtly goods than even the most generic romance; but, as we will argue further on, this should merely place in a starker light the way in which all novels are essentially and inescapably goods. The video game is a deeply contemporary node in the novel-network, one which would have been unthinkable even thirty years ago, and its theorization as part of the novel’s contemporary network will, we hope, lead us to understand more clearly how what the novel is best conceived today.

Video Game Novelization and the Novelness of Video Games We want to begin by addressing the idea of “novelization,” which will guide much of our engagement below. Narrowly and formally, a novelization is “a novel written on the basis of a screenplay,” as Jan Baetens quotes. As he critically notes, this makes it a non-intermedial form, one which merely transposes different forms of writing (2005: 46). This purely formal version of novelization does not grasp, however, the difficult cultural landscape which it has always faced. As several critics have noted (Mahlknecht 2012; Parys 2009), novelization has been a mainstay of cinema from its earliest days and has survived largely through its market logic. Novelizations, as Johannes Mahlknecht argues, are largely considered to be no more than “film ads;” a “marketing technology,” in words he takes from Teresa de Lauretis: they serve the sole purpose of increasing the sale of another product. “What could be a hierarchically equal companion piece to the film, a text, becomes a subordinate adjunct, a paratext” (2012: 160). Novelization thus understood, that is, is never accorded the status of even its own, often deeply popular sources. This is important to us because reception usually colors all the other discourses related to novelization. This does not only apply to the popular discourses surrounding franchises, which take novelizations to be largely derivative, but academic works too are primarily focused on the status and legitimacy of novelization. It is often devalued by critics and scholars because

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of the commercialism associated with it, the very reason it exists in the first place. As Kate Newell puts it, “novelizations are generally perceived as uninspired, profit-motivated ancillary products written by hacks with little concern for the craft of writing.” (2017: 32). For Jan Baetens, for example, textual novelization as a conversion of the film is a derivative product to be assessed in relation to the original movie (2005: 50). The word “product” in the definition is key to understanding video game novelization as well, because, as we have already seen, it almost never happens outside a franchise. We are not much concerned with the question of the legitimacy of novelization and fully willing to embrace its position in life as a product: in fact, we would argue, it is precisely this condition that lets us use novelization to more fully appreciate the way the contemporary novel-network functions, and the sheer embeddedness of all novels in production contexts that at the same time none of them are easily reducible to. But more expansively, we would like to understand the act of “novelization” as a more encompassing process than the (“mere”) adaptation of a story from one medium into another. Rather, we would like “novelization” to be understood hearing its Bakhtinian echoes; it is both reciprocal—the “novelization” of the video game entailing its writing and production in such a way that the narrative it presents can be meaningfully described as “novelistic”—as well as open to the story-world’s various interventions: in this parsing, we would understand the Halo series of novels as meaningfully “novelizations” of the Halo franchise even when they are not novelizations of any of the actual games. As Baetens notes, “novelization can also, in an intermingling of different forms and genres, present itself in the form of a continuation” (2005: 48), and, we would add, a prefiguration or paralleling. That is to say, we understand novelization to be the act of writing novels that tie into a story-world also worked on by video games (a practice, if you will) as well as the influence of the novel on those games (a spirit, perhaps?). Doing so allows us to think novelization as a process that does not merely produce (inferior, or at least derivative) “adjunct” novel-products, but rather forms a crucial part of intermedial storyworlds; a necessary reminder of the reach of the novel in a production universe in which it is frequently taken to be subsidiary. Adaptation studies offers one way of understanding this part of the process of novelization (see also Thabet 2015: 9). Elsewhere, one of us has argued the value of this body of theory for studying game narratives, but here, we want to use it to think about video game novelization. Two

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key terms here are Brian McFarlane’s distinction between “transfer” and “adaptation” proper (1996: 13). The first denotes aspects and mechanisms that let themselves be easily replicated across systems—dialogue, for instance, and indeed description—while adaptation means the aspects and mechanisms that resist transfer and need intervention by adaptors— crucially, interiority. As Linda Hutcheon points out, “what video games … cannot easily adapt is what novels can portray so well: the ‘res cogitans,’ the space of the mind” (2005: 14); at the same time, novels have their own problems with elements of video game narrative, especially the ludic elements. But video games themselves are, in a meaningful way, adaptations. In order to create any video game, whether a triple-A title game, indie, or a game design school student project, the game must begin with a written script that preliminarily describes the fictional environment, characters, possible plotlines, and events (a story proposal).2 After this stage there is a story treatment phase, during which the story is polished in the script. The third step is to create the Game Design Document (GDD), which is the technical document that outlines all production phases in high detail. The GDD is written and edited occasionally by the development teams, which is a game industry standard production map.3 Game stories, like films, begin on pages in order to get developed into a story told by players in a virtual computerized world; they begin as written narratives, if short ones, in order to become ludic ones. It pays here to first outline the differences between video game narrative and novel narrative, if briefly. Perhaps the first thing to note— especially for the benefit of scholars not engaged with video games—is the very presence of narrative in video games. As Sebastian Domsch notes, narrative “is an almost ubiquitous and very visible presence” (2013: 31;

2 AAA-type games are titles published on the back of large development budgets by

big-name publishers in the field. Microsoft’s Halo, 2K Games’s BioShock, but also such games as Bethesda’s Fallout series, Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, or Electronic Arts’s various sports titles function as the equivalent of major blockbuster movies: they have not just a long and costly production process, where major games may easily reach into triple-digit millions of dollars, but also come with the advertising power needed to make them viable—as well as with the franchising that permits publishers to draw in additional revenue. Indie games are video games developed by small companies independent of money or resources from big production companies, with correspondingly smaller budgets. 3 For more detail on basic game design and production principles and practices, see Bob Bates’s Game Design (2004).

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see also Jenkins 2004) in video games, not merely in the way most things can be narrativized even when they are not themselves narratives, but very much in the way narratological theory understands the concept of narrative. As one of us has argued elsewhere, video games are performed, narrative genres: that is to say, they draw their narrativity from the performance of the player; play “consists of a number of actions that fulfill the function of narration in a nonverbal manner, meaning that the player’s actions have an essential impact on how the story is told as the game narrative requires the player’s action for discourse creation” (Thabet 2015: 42). In this, video games are clearly different from novels—so much should be obvious—but it is here, too, that the novelization of a video game departs most fundamentally from the novelization of a film. Both film and novel are, in Sebastian Domsch’s terms, “passive” media, which have a “single option for right usage,” while video games afford users more interactivity (even if it is so simple a choice as when to hit a button to jump). In a video game, the fictional narrative of a novel might turn into nontextual, and even nonverbal, storytelling as the player assumes the role of a narrating/perceiving4 protagonist acting in the digital world—as the example of Bioshock, based on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), will show below. The adaptation of a video game into a novel, then, removes its chief feature: performance and interactivity. Linda Hutcheon, echoing Marie-Laure Ryan, suggests that video games are chiefly “problem-solving challenges” (2005: 13). We should keep this in mind if for no other reason than to understand the very complementarity that this lays in, in which the novel and the video game do fundamentally different things that nonetheless share fundamental similarities. Video game narrative is the story as it is told every time the game is played, which depends on the same fundamentals we learn from structural narratology and film narratology. But the video game narrative is crucially a player’s story, a personal one he or she tells by projecting their own discourse into the game world, which is also the story-world where players can virtually live stories and assume roles in their telling. Every time the player enters the story there is a different narrative instance depending

4 “Perceiving” is the same as “focalizer” in Gérard Genette’s structural narratology. In more recent sources on literary theory, the term “perceiving agent” replaced “focalizer” to answer the “who sees” question because “focalizer” implies seeing only, which is just one of many senses, while perceiving may include more senses. For more details, see Herman and Vervaeck (2005: 77).

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on the player’s choices. In the video game narrative, the player simultaneously assumes three different yet interdependent roles: that of the protagonist he or she impersonates, that of the narrator who unfolds the plot by her or his actions in the fictional world, and that of the focalizer with the function of perceiving. In other words, the player is central to both the telling and the reception. The player in many games qualifies as a co-narrator along with the game system that depicts the story-world while the player tells a story by actions that qualify as a narrative discourse (see Thabet 2015). The movement from video game to novel thus involves, in part, an act of confiscation of the player’s narrational ability and choices, in an apparently insurmountable difference of modes of engagement.5 As we will contend further on, however, there is more than meets the eye in the relationship between novel and video game. Some of this may be illustrated with reference to a different transmedia story-world, that of the first-person shooter BioShock, and one of the novels within this world, the game novelization BioShock: Rapture (2012), written by John Shirley. Rapture is, on the one hand, like Halo: The Fall of Reach, a prequel to a video game, written in preparation of the release of the second game in the series, BioShock 2. But complicatedly, BioShock’s game world has been read as an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Rand’s book is set in a dystopian United States at the time of economic collapse. The novel tells the story of the leader of a railroad company struggling against government control of the economy, culminating in the seclusion of most of the country’s business leaders against an increasingly authoritarian central government that is, finally, brought to collapse by the novel’s Randian stand-in, John Galt. BioShock’s story-world picks up the central theme of the book, Rand’s objectivism and its pursuit, but with a much-amplified science fictional imagination, befitting the fifty years or so that have passed since Rand’s novel’s publication. In the game, an underwater city called Rapture is built to be the last haven from totalitarianism. The game begins with the player stranded in the city after its fall to discover that it was the player’s own father, Andrew Ryan, a business magnate who became famous for rejecting government, religion, and economical regulation, who had built the town. The art-deco style city was built to be a laissez-faire state,

5 Cf., though, Roland Barthes’s arguments on the playfulness of literary texts in The Pleasure of the Text (1975).

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and has thrived for years as a refuge for scientific, artistic, and commercial freedom, much as in Rand’s novel, Galt’s hideaway of Galt Gulch had. If we understand Bioshock as itself an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, we may say the three stories share a single story-world of sorts; but even if we don’t, clearly Shirley’s novel and the video game do. But they do more than that: they share formal features, adapted to their respective media apparatus. In the video game, the story is partially told by its player, but also through audio diaries scattered throughout the game world which give much of the history of Rapture. Audio diaries voice the thoughts of characters and contain pieces of the backstory, which helps the player progressively understand the narrative they are supposed to play—and begin to open, especially, the two possible narrative endings to the story. In Shirley’s book, print versions of these diaries appear instead, offering Shirley the opportunity for multiple first-person perspectives while, at the same time, echoing the narrative design of the video game. Between the familiar and the adapted, Shirley’s novel, then focuses on the traditional strengths of the novel: interiority and narrative command, greater freedom to describe emotional states and a far greater narrative sophistication. Some of this is caught well in producer Ken Levine’s rapturous discovery while “peek[ing] in [his] nose” into the process of Shirley’s writing Rapture: “Oh! I can just write about Tenenbaum [one of the central characters in BioShock, and the narrator of its endings]! I can just say what she’s saying! And she can talk! And the audience may not go off, and, like, shoot her in the head while she’s saying it!” (Nutt 2009). This is the written novel, and it favors the author. In the game’s story, visuals, ludic elements, and limits of story-telling devices force the player to tell the story as his or her own personal experience. This is a story with much more narrative limitation, favoring the player, not the writer. Gameplay represents a series of acts by the player: moving, effectuating, and interacting, choosing the sequence, and deciding on the character’s presentation—up and including the disruption of the “intended” narrative itself, the shooting of the deliverer of key dialogue. All of these acts together represent a discourse produced by the player. It is not only decision-making that qualifies a player to be a discourse producing narrator; also, by controlling the inworld game camera, the time, and the sequence, the player is able to organize, arrange, select, and give efficient, sufficient, and relevant information. First, the player projects his or her narrative voice through the voice marker that Jahn (2017) calls to “subjective expression:” actions

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that “indicate the narrator’s education, his/her beliefs, convictions, interests, values, political and ideological orientation, attitude towards people, events, and things.” BioShock, ultimately, offers up two conclusions to its narrative, depending on player’s choice: either as the happy father to five adopted daughters, saved from the system of Rapture, or as an accomplice to the narrative’s chief antagonist, and themselves caught up in the amorality of objectivist thought. Bioshock and BioShock Rapture permit us more than just insight into the narrative differences between such works of adaptation. They also suggest the depth to which contemporary games—“even” first-person shooters—go to produce narrative meaning. This is what we want to grasp by the second conceptualization of novelization. One of the ways in which BioShock is like, say, Super Mario Bros. is that its story is, like Mario’s, still incidental to the ludic elements of the game—in other words, the story is not absolutely required to shoot things, or jump on them. But unlike Mario, it is clearly necessary for the game as a whole—its attempt to tell the story of Rapture is what makes it successful (compare the amount of unexplained narrative occurring in Mario), or, at the very least, its careful combination of engaging problem-solving (including both puzzles and shooting elements) and narrative world-building are equally key to the game’s success. And we would like to propose, if with some trepidation, that this development—easily seen, incidentally, over a wide range of contemporary video games, including such commercial and critical successes as Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption series, the Fallout franchise, and many others—may be well caught by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “novelness.” “Novelness” is a complicated enough concept, tied strongly to the most vital of Bakhtin’s categories, heteroglossia, polyphony, and dialogical reason. For Bakhtin, novelization means becoming “more free and flexible,” the inclusion of “extraliterary heteroglossia”; novelized genres “become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (1981: 7). “Novelness” names, as Bruhn and Lundquist have it, the “spirit of the novel, signifying all the possible potentials of the novel” (2001: 42). Lundquist and Bruhn also offer an important expansion, noting that, as long as we insist on the primacy of the polyvalence and polyphony of the novel as the core of the

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novel’s novelness, “modern poetry is to a large degree extremely novelistic” (48). It is in the spirit of this expansion and extension that we would like to claim the usefulness of the idea of novelness for the video game as well. Between the different narrative voices of the “given” narrative and player agency, the interior construction of narrative the player performs and the given presentation of narrative progression as the video game lays them out, not only can we detect a surface polyphony, but we may also parse much of what happens in the video game as dialogical, as resistant to the “normal subject-object dichotomy, directed towards a perhaps never attainable subject-subject relationship” (44). The utopian impulse of the novel as Bakhtin sees it becomes more readily visible, perhaps, in the open dialogue between the player and the played narrative—at least where the video game’s form permits such openness. And perhaps most seriously, this would also suggest that some of the cultural function of the novel exists today, at least also, in the video game. Novelization, in this parsing, is a cultural development that bespeaks the capabilities of the video game in the contemporary. “The novelization of other genres,” Bakhtin notes, and again here we should note the way Bakhtin’s use of “genre” encompasses virtually all writing, which video game writing easily should be part of, “does not imply their subjection to an alien generic canon; on the contrary, novelization implies their liberation from all that serves as a brake on their unique development” (1981: 39). It would also signal, if thought to conclusion, a sense of periodization, and of shifts in the value systems that we have long had. As Bruhn and Lundquist note, Bakhtin holds that novelness emerges “in periods of destability and the destruction of prevailing value-hierarchies” (2001: 45): here, we may say, the growing tendency in the video game to be novelistic is also a marker of shifting systems of value and, by extension, of the state of society (see also Shapiro in this volume, and Lanzendörfer in this volume). None of this is to speak in absolutes, to claim that all video games are, in any sense, novelistic, or that Halo signals the imminent collapse of the societal status quo. Rather, it is to suggest that some video games are, in fact, novelistic, and that this may suggest ways of bridging mediareception gaps; and also, paradoxically, that the quality which lends itself to franchising in video games may best be dubbed such video games’ novelness. It is a quality distinct from genre (there are novelizations of the real-time strategy game Starcraft, for example), but not detached from it (in as much as, as we’ve argued, some wholly narrativized games may not lend themselves to the extension of narrative that novelization usually

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provides). But at the same time and conversely, it is the novelness of the video game that also permits it to become part or center of a story-world that includes, also, actual novels—it is, as it were, the pre-existing proximity of a video game to the novel, its use of forms of engagement that are like the novel’s, that disposes those games to expansion into novel-form. We might invoke again, here, somewhat facetiously, the fact that there is no Super Mario Bros. novel to suggest that novelistic story-telling is itself a good, a commodity-feature, for video games, enabling the attachment of further story-telling in different, and cheaper, media. Yet beyond identifying the essential novelness of video games, we would also suggest the importance of this to the novel itself, which again sees its own specificity diminish when it is read against a medium sharing in its story-telling cachet. The novel’s continued existence as a cultural touchstone, as this collection seeks to suggest, exists today chiefly in its relation to other media, of which the video game emerges as a central example. On the level of form, then, we propose to understand the relationship between novel and video game to be crucially close: one in which mediaspecific forms of narrative nonetheless share fundamental similarities that ask us to take seriously the possibility that the existence of storyworlds is not owed only to the economic logics of franchises, but also to the way in which the video game adopts the modes of novelistic discourse. But of course nothing exists today outside the realm of commodification, as we have just hinted; and the importance of the market for the video game novel may at once exceed that of the novel while, at the same time, permitting us to understand more clearly the ways in which the novel is always, already, of the market.

The Video Game Novel’s Market: Product, Art, Commodity, Community As John Shirley notes in a 2012 interview, writing Bioshock: Rapture was a deeply cooperative effort, and Shirley himself, in the best sense, a hack: Tor Books simply asked me to do the Bioshock novel and I really had enjoyed playing the games, Bioshock 1 and 2, so I was happy to do it. They wanted to do a prequel/origin sort of story, the conceiving and creation of Rapture, and the background of the characters Andrew Ryan, Bill McDonagh (who becomes the main protagonist), Frank Fontaine, Eleanor Lamb…so I had to grow Rapture from a seed, in a way, dramatize

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its creation—and its source in Ryan’s psychology—and then follow it up to just a bit before the point where the player of Bioshock 1 starts the game. (Dyar 2012, original elisions and italics)

“Story conferences” and editorial sign-offs, up to an including the choice of focal character and last-minute rewrites because of publishing decisions made elsewhere, in this case the impending publication of Bioshock 2, whose narrative, it was felt, needed to be incorporated into the novel (Wigham 2011). All of this already suggests the incessantly networked nature of the video game novel, which must—at least to the extent any franchise novel must—be consistent with the worlds into which it is written, and which pre-exist it. In part, of course, the editorial compromises between Shirley and the game’s publisher 2K Games simply appear as a version of the editorial hand any publisher would offer most novelists (see Childress 2017: 88–106 for one example), bringing together a vision that is both authorial and saleable, on the one hand, but that at the same time remains, as the 2011 interviewer has it, “authentic” to the story as it already exists (Wigham 2011). There is, then, little of what we might call “authorial freedom,” of the kind often imagined to adhere to creative writing (see also Rosen in this volume). The game company has commissioned the novel and expects it to fulfill its larger function, a standard practice given that the new product is directly related to a video game that is hoped to generate a fortune in sales. Even though both video games and novels can also be understood as art forms, their production is a multibillion-dollar industry. In the same way that a Hollywood production studio would maximize profits by drawing on a blockbuster film by means of selling film-related products (books, mugs, T-shirts, and figurines), so video game companies seek to profit off of both straightforward merchandize as on story-world related art-commodities (such as, for example, the Pokémon TV series and films). Shirley himself outlines the chief limits and affordances of the video game novel: “I tried to make sure I contradicted nothing in the games, while adding a great deal more to them, dramatically” (Dyar 2012). The video game novel is, as a novel, a piece of art, but it is also a product created to be sold, a means to expand the fictional universe of the video game and to sustain thereby the loyalty of its fans. One of the key questions to be engaged here, then, is the status of the various objects created. A figurine of, say, Wolverine—or, for that matter, a Big Daddy figurine, modeled on the BioShock figure— sold in a store is not only a product, but also a piece of (commercial)

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art created by an artist: drawn, sculpted, and colored before it is mass produced. It is what Nicholas Brown has dubbed an “art-commodity,” an object which still holds on to properties of art even as, in the first place and more importantly, it is a saleable good (2019: 20)—much like video game novels, and indeed the video games themselves. And, perhaps more to the point, while the there is an apparent duality between the ideas of literature and the novel on the one hand, and of the game and product on the other, it pays to consider both, unless otherwise established, as precisely the same kind of art-commodity. Halo is one of the most commercially successful video game series in history, and one which exemplifies well the problems we encounter in attempts to understand the relationship between novel and video game. Some of this problem stems from the very thing that Halo “is.” Instead of being a single story, Halo is essentially a story-world with what game writers and producers call a “canon” of events, backstory, characters, and so on, which delimits the story premises acceptable by the series’ managers and followers. As the series’ own wiki (halopedia.org, established in 2004, currently comprising over 10,000 articles) summarizes the essential background of Halo, “the Halo universe is the sprawling fictional universe in which all Halo media takes place.” Storyworlds of this sort are ubiquitous in science-fiction franchises (Star Wars and Star Trek being the obvious examples) because they are capable of giving stories an ongoing life: continuity and growth. Creating and maintaining a story universe allows not only the growth of the official narrative by the game makers, but it also allows fan art to be cultivated in other media, as, for example, the Halo Universe YouTube Channel featuring short Halo fan-made films; the open-world narratives common in these franchises permit, indeed ask for, consumer engagement, and they do so in part because such consumer engagement both denotes and fosters customer interest between official instalments of the main media product. There is, consequently, overlap between the production systems which make these franchises. Eric Nylund, for example, the writer of Fall of Reach, is also a video game writer for the Halo series, and the author of two other novels set in the Halo universe: Halo: First Strike, and Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, as well as a short story in Halo: Evolutions and the graphic novel Halo Wars: Genesis. Matt Forbeck, author of the novelization Halo: New Blood, wrote for Halo role playing games; and Fractures is a collection of short stories by various authors, including Frank O’Connor, the franchise development director at 343 Industries (the Halo game developer), Kevin Grace, the

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franchise manager, Lindsay Morgan Lockhart, a former narrative designer, Joseph Staten, director of cinematics at 343 Industries, and other game writers such as John Jackson Miller and Brian Reed, James Swallow and game designer Troy Denning. All of these texts, which insist upon—and are insisted upon—maintaining the setting, themes, and characters, of the Halo universe, are examples of media that are loyal to a story universe even as they provide a vital service to it, while drawing on the synergies offered by a story universe, established writers in the story-world, and an existing fan base to cater to. Fractures is also a good example of the specific product that the novel is, even if it is a collection of stories: it is described by its authors as an anthology of tales that are at the very heart of the Halo universe; but these tales are, in different ways, “unplayable.” Not only do they not exist in game form, they would also frequently have a hard time being adapted to that form. One of the stories is without any traditionally ludic element, and rather treats the protagonist’s personal issues. There are two narratives reflecting on the backstory of the story-world, with the characters including enemy characters. One of the thirteen stories is entirely a song; an actual ballad. There are three stories about characters from the game other than the protagonist: Two soldiers in a rescue mission who discover a betrayal, a mystery story of survival in a remote corner in space, and another survival adventure of soldiers stranded in a faroff world. The collection includes three stories that may be considered marginal to the Halo universe and concern philosophical ideas about artificial intelligence. Perhaps surprisingly, the question of quality, which we already had a glimpse at in the introductory section, is key to conceivably answer how do the commodity purposes of the Halo novels and their narratives intersect. The Halo game company puts game-related products next to the game itself on the shelves, knowing that these products are optional to a gamer buying the game—an optionality which the liminal quality of the stories told in the novels already suggests. It is a given, however, that the story in the game is not optional since players will get a limited range of narrative options specifically because gameplay is the focus of the product. Meanwhile, buying a novel is as optional as buying a Halo mug: this is when the literary quality becomes a factor. The word “quality” here should be understood within the context of a commodity that was not created for prestigious literary awards. The publishers of both of the novels we have discussed at length, Del Rey and Tor Books, are reputable science-fiction imprints of large

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publishing houses (Penguin Random House and Holtzbrinck Macmillan, respectively), whose publishing credentials reflect the level of institutional prestige expected to be at a commensurate level to the video games themselves. Quality means, in part, to provide fans with story aspects not attainable through gameplay at a level that appears to be the same as the game play’s.6 These side-stories, background stories, or alternative stories must be exciting, intriguing, and well-written; in other words, they must be dollar-worthy—in the words we already quoted above, “the novel had to be high quality. We want people to see the MGS and Xbox logos and know that the product is good.” This, again, may seem to be no different from the way a mug must be “good,” but obviously the novel’s quality is of a different, largely non-material order: it must be a good story. As the examples we just offered show, this quality is vastly more malleable than the mug’s: it can be present in short story collections with radically different subjectivities from the game as well as novels that treat of material that goes way beyond the narrative of the game proper. Quality here signifies both stylistic aspects (franchise novels must be “good reads,” whatever their subject) as well as felicity to the story-world, the former dimension expressing very well the reach of the possibility of “art” in this context. Franchise novels, video game novels are in this regard like (because they are) genre novels: within the constraints under which they are written, they can work toward their own voices and their own subjects. But the limitations of the franchise intrude more forcefully still upon the video game novel than one the regular genre novel, seeing as how beyond the requirements of genre, such novels must also adhere to the logic of the storyworlds of which they are a part. There is, then, as John Shirley makes clear, a push-and-pull factor at work in the video game novel: one which ties novel-writers and video game makers together in a shared network of concerns, including authorial ambition for the work of the novel, game companies’ worries for the integrity and immediate commodity usefulness of the finished novel, the affordances of the novel genre in furthering narratives otherwise situated firmly in a game, and consumer-fans’ desire to read more about the storyworlds they are interested in. Fulfilling all of the demands placed on it at 6 To present complex story events, perhaps heavy with emotional or psychological aspects, game makers frequently rely on the more cinematic concept of cutscenes, short video clips shown between gameplay stages, and operating narratively like movies, including dialogue, voice-over narration, and audiovisual information.

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once (if successful), the video game novel must therefore appear as an especially illuminating product of the contemporary novel-network.

Conclusion: Game Novels, Novel Games Video games are not novels, if that still bears pointing out. And yet, as we have tried to argue above, in the contemporary situation it bears showing the ways in which they are linked, not just through their shared production of storyworlds, but also more fundamentally, in the way they (may) aim to engage readers and players. To be sure: some of this fundamental similarity is shared beyond video games and novels, in the way storytelling in TV shows, films, comics, and so on has become, or has always been in part, novelistic; but in the case of video games, we would like to emphasize the nexus between the novelization of video games understood as their increasing novelness and the novelization of video games as their expansion of story space into written fiction. These dual moves condition one another, and they play heavily into what we understand either medium to be—though, in fairness, more strongly so in the case of the novel’s impact on the video game than vice versa. Players expect story, and indeed, they expect the kind of complicated, dense, deep, and long-form narrative that the novel excels at. If they are not novels, their novelistic qualities cannot be denied either; and if not all video games are novelistic, character- and story-driven, the tendency toward long-form story-telling may still be said to be increasing. We have focused here, because we are interested in the dual movement from and to video games, on first-person shooters; but the movement toward story-telling in video games has other interesting examples. Puzzle-adventure games have long told stories (LucasArt’s 1992 adventure Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, for instance, has often been understood as the best successor to the film trilogy, even in the wake of the 2008 fourth film); some adventures have recently gone the way of almost entirely supplanting puzzles with story, such as the 2017 indie game What Remains of Edith Finch. And even real-time strategy games have done so: Rimworld, the 2018 colony-building simulation, markets itself—and indeed plays, at least in parts—as a “story generator” (as the game’s website has it) whose main purpose it is to produce ever-new and original versions of the basic story of colony survival. The game’s various “storytellers” do not as much narrate the game as direct the game’s narrative, picking up some of the agency of a normal author and directing the player toward new occasions

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for their problem-solving—even as the game’s characters, the “pawns,” come with their own characters and make their own decisions and enter into their own relationships outside the player’s agency. It’s not surprising, as we have suggested above, that these already story-driven games are not usually the target of to-novel novelizations, something that appears reserved for games in which story is a necessary part of the game play—increasingly so, as we have suggested—but not the main aspect. There is little point in novelizing, say, a game such as Kentucky Road Zero that is already largely driven by story, and where the de-ludification of the written novel is not compensated for by greater story-depth. Video game novelizations by and large serve two purposes: they expand the story-world, and retain good will for the franchise. In this way, video game novelizations highlight the way in which the novel’s specific affordances intermesh with the commercialization of story. As both the examples of Halo and of BioShock show, the production of a novel in the context of a video game franchise is hardly distinct from the production of any other item of merchandize, tightly coordinated to coincide with video game releases, aimed at an audience of fans, geared toward publicity and profit both. But at the same time, the novel is a different product: unlike a baseball cap, a plastic figurine, or a toy gun, it transports story. In the cases of Halo and BioShock both, this did not just mean that coordination between the writers of the games and the writers of the novels needed to be close and extensive, so that the storyworlds of both games could remain coherent. It also meant that the development of the story-world itself, in both of these cases the development of the entire backstory of the video games in question, took place not within the game, but rather in novels. In both cases, it was the specific affordances of the novel-form, especially in comparison to the video game, that drove the decision to publish them. They were quick to make (and quick to change, too) and cheap, especially in comparison to the game. If they also needed to be “good,” as we have seen, we may be within our rights to imagine that such ascriptions of quality were of a different order to the video game in proportion to the investments made for them. BioShock and Halo also stand out, however, because of the specific affordances of the first-person shooter, which simultaneously stands at some odds with the exploration of a complex and multi-layered story and appears to demand it. This goes beyond finding that much of the narrative of, say, The Fall of Reach would make for a particularly boring video game, or at the very least a particularly boring first-person shooter. The point

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here is, rather, that the gameplay of even the most prestigious AAA game may easily turn out to be monotonous and clichéd—which is not to say “boring” or “bad.” But in order to keep engaged with what amounts to a repetitive gameplay mechanic—shoot enemies, solves puzzles—stories become important; the novelness of the video game, in this sense, in part is the ability of the player to participate in the story as an agent, similarly vicarious to the participation of the reader in the novel’s story. It is certainly possible to overstate the claims for the relationship between novel and video game. We hope to have been suitably limited in our claims for the relationship we see, and it is important to emphasize the deeply commercial nature of the interaction between the two forms, where the instrumentalization of the novel-form appears far more important to the video game industry than the video game is to the novel and its readers. But at the same time, in few cases other than the video game novel does the networked character of novel production come out as starkly, and appear to showcase so readily the specific affordances of the novel as a means of narrative story-telling. And similarly, in few media other than the video game are the possibilities of reading the novelistic so apparent. As we have argued, the potential of picking apart this relationship to further our understanding of the twenty-first-century novelnetwork is vast, and we have only scratched the surface. Even on that surface, however, the conversation between the contemporary video game and the novel is vital to our understanding of how the contemporary novel works, and what its affordances—and the affordances of the video game—are.

References Baetens, Jan. 2005. Novelization, a Contaminated Genre? Critical Inquiry 32 (1) (Autumn): 43–60. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Carly Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, trans. Lionel Duisit. New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 6 (2) (Winter): 237–272. Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Bruhn, Jørgen, and Jan Lundquist. 2001. Introduction: The Novelness of Bakhtin? In The Novelness of Bakhtin, ed. Jørgen Bruhn and Jan Lundquist, 11–50. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Childress, Clayton. 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Domsch, Sebastian. 2013. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games. Berlin: DeGruyter. Dyar, Amanda. 2012. Exclusive Interview: John Shirley Talks Resident Evil: Retribution—The Official Movie Novelization, Borderlands: The Fallen and BioShock: Rapture. BioGamerGirl.com, September. http://www.biogam ergirl.com/2012/09/exclusive-interview-john-shirley-talks.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2005. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2005. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Jahn, Manfred. 2017. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative. English Department, University of Cologne. http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn. htm. Accessed 13 March 2020. Jenkins, Henry. 2004. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Longdale, Holly. 2008. Game Worlds in Written Words. MGS Franchise Development Group Expands Game Universe. Xbox.com. Retrieved from Archive.li, August 8, 2018. https://www.halopedia.org/User:Subtank/Arc hive. Accessed 31 March 2020. Mahlknecht, Johannes. 2012. The Hollywood Novelization: Film as Literature or Literature as Film Promotion? Poetics Today 33 (2): 137–168. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newell, Kate. 2017. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nutt, Christian. 2009. Ken Levine on Studio Culture: From Looking Glass to 2K Boston. Gamasutra.com, July 17. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/fea ture/132471/ken_levine_on_studio_culture_from_.php?page=2. Accessed 31 March 2020. Nylund, Eric. 2011. Halo: The Fall of Reach. New York: Tor Books. Parys, Thomas Van. 2009. The Commercial Novelization: Research, History, Differentiation. Literature-Film Quarterly 37: 305–317. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon. 2012. Storyworlds Across Media: An Introduction. In Storyworlds Across Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and JanNoël Thon, 1–24. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Shirley, John. 2012. BioShock: Rapture. New York: Tor Books.

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Thabet, Tamer. 2015. Video Game Narrative and Criticism: Playing the Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wigham, Chris. 2011. Bioshock: Rapture—Interview with the author, John Shirley. Consoleob.com, July 26. http://www.consoleob.com/features/bio shock-rapture-interview-with-the-author-john-shirley/. Accessed 31 March 2020.

CHAPTER 12

Introduction: Novel Commodities Corinna Norrick-Rühl

As our general introduction has outlined, and the essays in the first two sections Novel Forms and Novel Ideas have shown, the novel network is in itself part of further overlapping networks, clustering around the central node of the novel as such, or, perhaps, the term “novel.” As the two first sections have emphasized, actors and institutions in the novel network are concerned with the aesthetics of the novel form as well as the production, distribution, and reception of formats that reference and derive from, or morph (back) into novels. From the vantage point of book history, much of this may not be surprising. Books, and more specifically novels, have shown to be “a highly adaptable commodity that prospered in the booming market conditions of mass production as early as the time of Charles Dickens” (Hemmungs Wirtén 2009: 395). The novel as a node in the network was historically a “product of an emerging literary marketplace,” but also quickly became a forger of further networks, “a facilitator of imagining both nations and national economies as communities” (Koegler 2018: 59). The previous section, Novel Ideas, already hinted at the network tendrils that are concerned with the marketability and commodification of

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novels and other related media. The twentieth century saw the transition from individual publishing enterprises into multimedia conglomerates, a process which was and is far too complex to reiterate here (see, inter alia, Hemmungs Wirtén 2009; McCleery 2015; Steiner 2018; Striphas 2009; Thompson 2012). Through the conglomeratization of the industry, in the terminology of this collection, publishing imprints and houses have become nodes in the multimedia network, which sprawls beyond and encompasses the contemporary novel network. The textbook Converging Media visualized this, in a sense, when the authors tried to offer a timeline of conglomeratization in a fold-out flap, covering the years from 1983 to 2006. The individual lines representing media companies intersect and cross dead-end into one another, giving the impression of a complex subway network map (Pavlik and McIntosh 2011). This third and final section, then, Novel Commodities, circles around the complexities of the transition from novelistic text to a product on virtual or physical bookshelves. How does a novel manuscript turn into something that Publishers Weekly calls a “hot commodity” only “shortly after hitting the desks of New York editors” (Deahl 2020)? This section will place a magnifying glass on nodes of the novel network such as the editorial process and publishing imprint marketing strategies. It will also offer insight into the reception of printed or digital books in the contemporary moment, suspended between the pragmatism and convenience of digital reading practices and the nostalgia and haptic experience of physical reading practices. As Heike Schaefer and Alexander Starre remind us, “in the wake of the digitization of literary culture and the publishing industry, the book as a commercial product has undergone a fundamental differentiation: while the printed book is a physical commodity, the ebook qualifies as a type of digital service” (2019: 18). Certainly, what has emerged in the first decades of the twenty-first century is a marketplace in which convictions about the product that the novel is have vanished, and beliefs about its uses have, too. Priya Joshi convincingly argues that “the novel is several kinds of commodities.” It is, she emphasizes, “purveyed in a dizzying array of outlets and platforms” (2018: 219). Obviously, in its five chapters, this section can only highlight a limited number of areas in the novel’s sprawling network of commodity relations. Areas of the novel network which we are not able to cover here include, for instance, the debates about the “reading brain,” ignited by Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid in 2007, and rekindled (pun intended) by her follow-up book Reader, Come Home in 2018. Recent research has

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also underscored the potential of literature to build communities. For instance, book clubs—on screen, online, or offline—play an important role in literary culture. As James Atlas argued in the New York Times, the boom of book groups is rooted in a search for community, “in the end book groups are about community…. We spend our days at airports or commuting to work; our children come and go; our friends climb up and down the social ladder; we change jobs and move house. No one knows their neighbor. But a lot of us are reading The Goldfinch” (2014). Furthermore, literary events—readings, festivals, book launches—have grown exponentially over the past years, and have been studied, inter alia, by Millicent Weber (2018) as well as in a special issue of Mémoires du Livres/Studies in Book Culture edited by Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires (2020a). The central issue that is interwoven into all the contributions here is that all novels are not created equal. In our network metaphor, some novels are connected more firmly to central actors and institutions in the marketplace, and thus, their success is often predetermined by and through their level of networkedness. In this way, publishing, as André Schiffrin once said, “is truly a microcosm of the different societies in which it exists and a mirror of the way in which modern capitalism has evolved” (2010: 1). More recently than Schiffrin, Gabriel M. Schivone described the dangers of corporatization and conglomerate structures as a form of “corporate censorship” (2019). The role that independent and/or small publishers play in a market increasingly shaped by corporate structures cannot be overstated, and is the subject of widespread and important research (see inter alia Ramdarshan Bold 2015, Noorda 2019 as well as Colby et al. 2020). The big publishing conglomerates—“The Big Five”—dominate the bestseller lists, define the average readers’ experience of the marketplace through their impressive marketing budgets, and have clear-cut profit margins they need to meet. Names such as Oprah Winfrey or other celebrity voices are involved in bringing certain novels front and center (on “big books,” see Thompson 2012: 188–222) by creating and perpetuating book buzz (see Steiner 2018: 128, and Driscoll and Squires 2020b). While these mechanisms are at play in the novel network at all times, they are usually invisible to the majority of book-buyers. Readers were outraged in early 2020 about the controversial novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (published by Flatiron Books, an imprint of

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Macmillan). The controversy circled around the lack of authorial authenticity (which has been widely discussed under the hashtag #ownvoices) in an industry struggling with a diversity deficit and the insensitive marketing strategies. But readers were also shocked by the blatant hypercommodification of the book, which “opened a window into the ways a few select books are brought to the public’s attention at a time when many authors have to hire their own publicists or arrange their own book readings and events” (Hernandez 2020; see also Alter 2020). Readers seemingly felt patronized when they realized that the book “was poised to be a blockbuster long before copies arrived in bookstores” (Hernandez 2020). In the contributions, we see how central marketing is to the “supply chain” of literature, navigating its way through the novel network, from author to reader. In Chapter 13, by looking more closely at Kindle marketing strategies, Jim Collins thinks through the significance of contemporary portable e-libraries, and the locativity of e-literary culture(s) and recent novelistic outputs such as Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra (2018). Julia Panko follows with an in-depth analysis of the role and possibilities of print in the age of digital reproduction, choosing as her case study the highly anticipated and acclaimed novel S., co-created by high-profile TV and film producer J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. “Publishers want celebrity stardust, and, let’s face it, most writers don’t have that” (Mechling 2018): S. brought celebrity stardust to the bookstore, but also underscored themes of book-as-object fetishism that have blossomed in the age of Instagram (see e.g., Schneider 2018). In Chapter 15, Claire Squires discusses the role of the editor in the novel network. Fiction editors play an important role in the curation process of acquiring and selecting texts for publication. The editors work together with the authors to improve the text, and engage with the production and marketing departments of the publishing house to ensure that the novel is made visible to the consumers. However, the editors often remain anonymous (see Schneider 2005: 11–35), and their decision-making processes, such as the so-called “comp titles” they use when decided whether to acquire a manuscript, have only recently been scrutinized more widely (see McGrath 2019). In “Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/Selling the Goods,” Squires analyzes editorial instincts and the impact of the editor on marketing literature, and we see how central marketing is to reader’s exposure to contemporary fiction. Squires draws parallels to prize culture, where marketing and curation are also negotiated behind

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closed doors (for context, see Marsden and Squires 2019). These practices within prize culture have recently come under more scrutiny, not only amid the controversies surrounding the Nobel Prize and the heated debates about the double Booker Prize announcement, with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood’s highly anticipated (and already bestselling) The Testaments sharing the prestigious award, with Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport swept aside (for interesting insights on the necessary marketing budgets and strains brought about by prize culture, see Jordison 2019). Marketing and curation are also central processes in Jeremy Rosen’s analysis of the Hogarth Shakespeare project, initiated by Penguin Random House in 2012, for which popular authors re-write Shakespeare plays as short novels for a wide audience. In an interesting twist of celebrification and commodification, Penguin Random House also created another sub-imprint using the Hogarth brand with celebrity Sarah Jessica Parker, whose celebrity imprint “SJP for Hogarth” launched in 2016 (see Norrick-Rühl 2019: 93): more of the “celebrity stardust” mentioned above, and, in sum, Novel Commodities at their most highly commodified. Finally, in Chapter 17, Alexander Starre also asks how marketing can influence the reader response and experience. He connects issues of book size and format to questions of prestige, attention, and value. In so doing, Starre brings us (and this collection) full circle, back to Novel Forms, in a more material reading of the first section’s title. We hope that the five contributions in this section can contribute to a deeper understanding of the novel network in all its contradictions and complexities. “Books may connote and sometimes even provide for leisureliness, erudition, and a modicum of distance from the exigencies of daily life. That said, one mustn’t lose sight of the fact that they’ve long been tied to people’s immediate economic realities” (Striphas 2009: 7) At this time of writing, as we finalize this manuscript and sketch out the sprawling novel network in relation to Novel Commodities, the global book industry and its actors and institutions are threatened in an unprecedented way by the COVID-19 pandemic. Bookstores around the globe are shuttered, reduced to book warehouses empty of customers; book fairs, large and small, and book events, near and far, are cancelled for the foreseeable future; the livelihoods of authors, agents, translators, booksellers, book designers, publishers, editors, etc., are at stake. Amazon has officially de-prioritized books, a move which will “hurt independent publishers in particular, whose reliance upon the e-tailer to sell their books

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is often begrudging but has nonetheless become inevitable” (Milliot and Maher 2020). At the same time, however, readers in self-isolation are, perhaps, following the instructions to #stayathomereadabook and maybe supporting their local book infrastructure through GoFundMe or by ordering from local bookstores. It is conceivable that they are finding much-needed literary comfort, solace, and distraction in novels. We are not in a place to know how the novel network will change due to this historic moment. Emily Temple, on LitHub, mused that “the fate of the novel is tied to our own: that is, it all depends on what happens to us, and we have no idea what is going to happen to us” (2020). We can only hope that the complex connections we have sketched out here, which define and shape the contemporary novel network, are strong enough to weather this storm.

References Alter, Rebecca. 2020. Why Is Everyone Arguing About American Dirt? Vulture, updated February 7. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/americandirt-book-controversy-explained.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Atlas, James. 2014. Really? You’re Not in a Book Club? New York Times, March 21. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/reallyyoure-not-in-a-book-club.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Colby, Georgina, Marczewska, Kaja, and Leigh Wilson (eds.). 2020. The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible. Cham: Palgrave. Deahl, Rachel. 2020. Former Knopf Assistant Sells Publishing Novel in Seven Figure Deal. Publishers Weekly, February 21. https://www.publishersweekly. com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/82464-former-knopfassistant-sells-publishing-novel-in-seven-figure-deal.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Driscoll, Beth, and Claire Squires (eds.). 2020a. Book Commerce, Book Carnival. Special issue, Mémoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture 11 (2) (Printemps/Spring). ———. 2020b. Publishing Bestsellers: Buzz and the Frankfurt Book Fair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva. 2009. The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers. In Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 395–405. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hernandez, Daniel. 2020. ‘American Dirt’ Was Supposed to be a Publishing Triumph. What Went Wrong? Los Angeles Times, January 26. https:// www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-01-26/american-dirt-pub lishing-latino-representation. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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Jordison, Sam. 2019. What Happened? Sam Jordison on the Best and Worst of the Booker Prize Experience. Times Literary Supplement, October 25. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/what-happened-boo ker-prize-ellmann/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Joshi, Priya. 2018. The Novel as a Commodity. In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson, 219–237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koegler, Caroline. 2018. Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Marsden, Stevie, and Claire Squires. 2019. The First Rule of Judging Club…: Inside the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4 (2) (December): 10. McCleery, Alistair. 2015. The Book in the Long Twentieth Century. In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam, 162– 180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGrath, Lauren. 2019. Comping White. Los Angeles Review of Books, January 21. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/comping-white/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Mechling, Laura. 2018. Sarah Jessica Parker Is the Latest Celebrity to Start Her Own Book Imprint. Time, June 14. https://time.com/5311981/sjp-celebr ity-book-editors/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Milliot, Jim, and John Maher. 2020. Publishers Weekly, March 17. https:// www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/art icle/82713-amazon-deprioritizes-book-sales-amid-coronavirus-crisis.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Noorda, Rachel. 2019. The Discourse and Value of Being an Independent Publisher. In Les discours de l’éditeur/The Publisher’s Discourse, ed. Anthony Glinoer and Julien Lefort-Favreau. Special issue, Mémoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture 10 (2) (Printemps/Spring). Norrick-Rühl, Corinna. 2019. Internationaler Buchmarkt. Frankfurt: Bramann. Pavlik, John V., and Shawn McIntosh. 2011. Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. 2015. Standing in the Shadow of Giants. Publishing in the Midlands and North of England. Logos 26 (4): 37–50. Schäfer, Heike, and Alexander Starre. 2019. The Printed Book, Contemporary Media Culture, and American Studies. In The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. Medium, Object, Metaphor, ed. Heike Schäfer and Alexander Starre, 3–28. Cham: Palgrave. Schiffrin, André. 2010. Words & Money. London and New York: Verso. Schivone, Gabriel M. 2019. Corporate Censorship Is a Serious, and Mostly Invisible, Threat to Publishing. Electric Lit, January 17. https://electriclite rature.com/corporate-censorship-is-a-serious-and-mostly-invisible-threat-topublishing/. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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Schneider, Ute. 2005. Der unsichtbare Zweite. Die Berufsgeschichte des Lektors im literarischen Verlag. Bielefeld: Transcript. ———. 2018. Bücher zeigen und Leseatmosphären inszenieren – vom Habitus enthusiastischer Leserinnen und Leser. In Gelesene Literatur. Sonderband Text + Kritik, ed. Carlos Spoerhase and Steffen Martus, 111–120. Munich: Edition text + kritik. Steiner, Ann. 2018. A. The Global Book: Micropublishing, Conglomerate Production, and Digital Market Structures. Publishing Research Quarterly 34 (1) (March): 118–132. Striphas, Ted. 2009. The Late Age of Print. Every Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Temple, Emily. 2020. What Will Happen to the Novel After This? On the Inevitable Post-Pandemic Genre. LitHub, April 7. https://lithub.com/whatwill-happen-to-the-novel-after-this/. Accessed 8 April 2020. Thompson, John B. 2012. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity. Weber, Millicent. 2018. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolf, Maryanne. 2007. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper. ———. 2018. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: Harper.

CHAPTER 13

Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive Jim Collins

Literary novels have been circulated as a specialized form of cultural goods for over a century and the benefits of reading those novels as a cultural good has had a history that is almost as long. Literary reading has played a central role within a Liberal Arts education, and it acquired the star status within the popular literary culture that emerged in the nineteen-nineties in the form of book clubs and adaptation mania, at which point reading literary novels was bestowed with an ever broader range of positive effects, from refined self-help therapy to lessons in cultural empathy. But the notion that reading literary fiction is a cultural good that has a variety of transformative powers has never been celebrated more exuberantly than during the coronavirus pandemic. That we should be reading voraciously is taken as given. What we should be reading has generated relentless list-making, which changes both the nature and the location of reading pleasure. In his essay, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton argues that if we

J. Collins (B) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_13

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hope to gain a more subtle understanding of the ideals and assumptions about reading in the past, “we could study contemporary depictions of reading in fiction, autobiographies, polemical writings, letters, paintings and prints in order to uncover some basic notions of what people thought took place when they read” (1986: 16). The goal of this article is to identify the goods of contemporary reading by focusing on the new mise-en-scène used to depict reading on websites and in recent literary bestsellers. I will concentrate specifically on the intercutting between the two interdependent spaces of reading pleasure: one in which readers are lost between the pages of the book as a material or virtual object, and another imagined space in which readers find themselves in an infinite libraries, which are infinitely personalizable as they are curated. The degree to which online book selling and book reading have been impacted by the pandemic has become the subject of widespread speculation. The very title of a recent article in the Los Angeles Times exemplifies how profound the impact on publishing is imagined to be (“How the Coronavirus Will Change Book Publishing, Now and Forever”). It comes as no surprise that online sales have surged (estimates range from 250– 400%) or that sales of ebooks and audiobooks have also spiked since the advent of the virus. While speculation about the future of book publishing is vitally important, in this article I want to focus on the degree to which not the publishing industry but reading cultures had already become dependent on networks which connected readers to books, and readers to readers, books to other forms of media. The tidal wave of advice about reading and frenetic listing did not suddenly emerge as a result of the coronavirus. Instead, the pandemic has intensified and accelerated a process that has been underway for the past decade in digital literary culture in terms of delivery systems, notions of expertise, and how to curate reading experiences which have become entirely interdependent with the act of reading a book. Simone Murray’s watershed book, The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (2018) is particularly important in this regard because it outlines a far more expansive conception of what digital reading now involves. For far too long the popular discourse on e-reading revolved endlessly around the same banal question which boiled everything down to the gestalt of the reading—do you prefer to hold an ebook or “real book” in your hands as you read? The obsession with the material form of the book has obscured the expansive changes in the acts of reading which depend increasingly on a series of networks, linking readers with those aspects

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of digital reading culture which they use to maximize reading pleasures, regardless of whether their format of choice is produced from wood pulp (print book), contains black and white pigments floating in tiny capsules (ebook), or consists only of soundwaves (audio book). Tracing the distinctive characteristics of this expansive mise-en-scène of reading pleasure depends on identifying the ways in which the use values of literary reading have been reimagined within a new media ecology that began to take shape in the 1990s. The formation of popular literary culture that I investigated in Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) depended on fundamental changes in the processing, display, and circulation of literary experiences beyond the bounds of the printed book and beyond the realm of professionalized readers which led to profound changes in literary production. The advent of passionate readers, as opposed to close readers, who could take their literary pleasures in a variety of different media, marked a new phase in the history of reading cultures. Just as fundamental was the transformation of reading from what had for centuries traditionally been conceived of as a solitary act into one in which the solitary and social reading pleasures became seamlessly interconnected. Much of that media ecology is still solidly in place: literary bestsellers and high-concept adaptation films and television series are still alive and well, book clubs (actual and media, e.g., television-based) continue to proliferate, and Amazon grows ever more expansive, particularly with its acquisition of Goodreads in 2013. Since the advent of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, our inboxes have been bombarded by advice about which titles will help readers endure the crisis by becoming fully immersed in fictional universes. I want to begin by considering how we can theorize about those circumstances of immersion because they form the basis of an “architecture of participation,” to recast Tim O’Reilly’s term, that not only engages readers but relocates the forms and sites of reading pleasure. That readers can become immersed in a good book is widely acknowledged to be one of the great benefits of reading. But how do readers become immersed in another far more expansive space beyond the contours of a book: the realm of limitless archives of books, endless talk about those books, where readers cruise through digital arcades bombarded by advice about what to read and just as importantly how to turn their personal libraries into an exuberant form of self-expression? Between the book and the digital archive, locativity becomes a key

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dynamic—how do readers find what Walter Benjamin refers to as a “circumscribed area” (1969a: 60) within the age of not just technological reproducibility but omnipresent technological recommendation? While I receive recommendations and lists in my inbox on a daily basis from Amazon, Buzzfeed, Barnes&Noble, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and the New York Times I want to begin with the email messages I have received from Penguin Random House during the month of April 2020. The titles of these messages reveal the full gamut of lists made according to different evaluative criteria which bear the traces of an older cultural hierarchy which is now dropped on its side as it were, making popular and literary reading co-equal options in pursuit of connectivity. “Escapist Fantasy and Sci-Fi Books to Read Now” “Escape into a Great Book” “Staff Picks: Books We’re Reading at Home” “Reese Witherspoon’s April Book Club Pick” “Prize-Winning Reads to Keep You Company” (Booker Prize-Winning Books: “How Many have You Read?”) #BooksConnectUs

In each case, the promise of the goods of reading is the basis of the connection, and the list becomes imagined common ground where expertise can be offered and appreciated. As such, the list is a collection of titles but also, implicitly, a set of recommendations about the ways in which the navigation of the endless list itself has its own set of pleasures which intensifies the increasingly fluid relationship between the contours of book and the archive in which the joys of reading become inseparable from the delights of curation.

The Bliss of the List and Digital Reading Technologies I think the best way to take the measure of the arc between the novel in the hands of the individual reader and the infinite digital archive is to combine theoretical paradigms that address different aspects of the fluidity of that relationship. Framing that arc in terms of actornetwork theory, for example, allows us to identify the interdependency of consumerist, technological, and “human” factors. In his seminal essay,

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“Technology is Society made Durable,” Bruno Latour uses the development of the George Eastman’s box camera from prototype invention to popular phenomenon to explain the advantages of actor-network theory, emphasizing how human and non-human elements can both function as actors in the complicated interplay between technological and social factors, resulted in a “socio-technical network” (1990: 129). The only way to avoid what he calls the “twin pitfalls of sociologism and technologism” is to recognize that “we are never faced with objects or social relations, we are faced with chains which are associations of human and non-humans” (110). The network of connectivities that shape the architecture of participation of contemporary reading are exactly those kinds of chains, and a global pandemic provides an especially rich opportunity to how to explore how socio-technical networks can incorporate the monstrously unexpected. But using those chains in order to trace the complicated mise-en-scene of contemporary reading culture ultimately depends on how we explain the ways in which the curation of an infinite range of titles has become so essential to that socio-technical network that the joys of reading, and the joys of the strolling through in the infinite archive, encountering and making lists, are made to seem seamlessly interdependent. Refining how human and non-human factors actually coalesce in regard to the goods generated by those chains requires a more sophisticated understanding of personal investment in both the material and psychological senses of that term, particularly when those chains can be fine-tuned into expressions of personal identity. In short, we need to have a more subtle understanding of the factors that shape list-making. The work of Umberto Eco is particularly useful in this regard, specifically his book, The Infinity of Lists (2009). Eco was invited by the Louvre in 2009 to serve as guest curator on any subject he chose, and he proposed lists. The catalog for the main exhibition was entitled, Mille e tre, and the literary and pictorial lists he discusses are unified by their attempt to convey a sense of what he refers to as “etcetera” (2009: 9)—the enumeration of things within the text that gestures toward an immensity or infinity beyond the frame. For my purposes, his most intriguing essay in the catalog is, “The Exchanges Between Practical and Poetic Lists.” There he argues The voraciousness of the list often prompts us to interpret practical lists as if they were poetic lists—and in effect, what distinguishes a poetic list

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from a practical one is only the intention with which we contemplate it… Mario Praz, a lover of old books, observed in a text for catalogue 15 of the 1931 Libreria della Fiera Letteraria how bibliophiles read antiquarian bookstore catalogues with the same pleasure as others read thrillers. “You can be sure that no reading has ever granted such swift moving action as that of an interesting catalogue.” (374)

Eco’s point about how book lovers can be intoxicated by a catalog can be used very productively to account for how contemporary readers are encouraged to enjoy pleasures of playlisting the infinity catalog. No list has ever been more voracious than Amazon.com and, in both the long and short run, it all becomes a matter of how you read the list. The master catalog appears infinite but the individual poetic list in which catalog is mastered and transformed into an articulation of the self as private and as satisfying as the act of reading itself. Eco’s distinction between different types of lists, and different ways of reading them, is then useful for understanding the mise-en-scene of contemporary reading because it can help us situate reading pleasure in the arc between strolling through the infinity catalog and being lost between the covers of an individual book. The unique spatiality of that arc, and how locativity became an imperative within it, can be accounted for by incorporating the work of Walter Benjamin, specifically by juxtaposing two of his best-known essays which are rarely if ever combined. In “The Flâneur” section in his book on Baudelaire (2006), Benjamin situates the term flânerie in reference to number of Baudelaire’s antecedents and contemporaries and, in the process, he reflects on the architecture of the arcades, and the emergence of images of the city as vast incomprehensible labyrinth or forest. One of the points he pursues most intensely in this mix is the new fluidity between exterior and interior space that was developed by the midnineteenth century, specifically the notion that the streets could become a kind of interieur. The introduction of the gaslight technology gave rise to a newly ambulatory urban subject—this new public lighting, combined with other social factors, generated a complicated sense of social identity in which the flâneur was both within, and without, simultaneously. According to Baudelaire, for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of

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movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world. (1964: 9)

Benjamin’s own self-location project is the basis for his central argument in “Unpacking My Library.” In this essay, however, the spatial and evaluative coordinates of that project are defined according to a very different sense of interiority since here the interieur is an intimate space which he shares with no one else. He uses his books to wall off that private “circumscribed space.” He details his book collecting but those books acquire value only when they are inserted within a library that he takes with him wherever he travels, at which point collecting provides a locative function for Benjamin. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin contends that the work of art is emancipated from the realm of the magical (1969b). Yet in “Unpacking My Library,” the incorporation of a book within his personal library is described as a magical process of valuation that reverses that emancipation. “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them… for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia” (1969a: 60, my emphases). Books do not, in and of themselves, have aura—aura here is matter of projection as the books cross the threshold of his personal library. Benjamin recounts how he reads catalogs of rare books but his library is a perfect example of how the master catalog is turned into a kind of poetic list in which books are so invested with value that they become constitutive of self: “So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, which is only fitting” (67). So what is the point of juxtaposing flânerie and personal libraries since they seem to exemplify two very different ways of thinking about space and locativity? On the face of it, they seem antithetical rather than comparable since the former is all about the pleasures of strolling through space, and the latter is defined in terms of the pleasures of circumscribing a space for one’s books which function as the building blocks of identity formation. The point of the juxtaposition is that the pleasures of reading in a digital reading culture are a matter of navigating the landscape of endless

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recommendations as we stroll through the digital arcade as well as domiciling books within digital built environment of the individual device. The advertising campaigns that Amazon has developed for its Kindle e-readers fold the two into the same technology, encouraging readers to get blissfully lost as they assemble their personal libraries, which they then take with them, wherever they go, online or off. According to their advertising campaigns, Amazon e-readers are designed for passionate readers who, like Benjamin, are defined by their libraries. Only in this case, the library is infinitely mobile since it is located in digital devices which redefine the relationship between interieur and exterieur. The e-reader is a library ready to be endlessly packed and unpacked. This library is made out of digital pages which are facsimiles of old-fashioned paper but no traditional printed book ever had an archive function; the arc between the digital arcade and the personal library is included within the device. This is a library you hold in your hand, not just one title, a point visualized neatly in a Kindle Paperwhite advertisement which insisted, with an image of a endless library made out of digital pages, that it is a “book that keeps getting better because it is thousands of books”. The e-reader as a library offered by Amazon functions as the contemporary digital version of Benjamin’s library because it operates as a digitally built environment with its own architecture of infinite personalization. What I find interesting about this emphasis on the library is that it parallels so neatly to the original promotion for the Apple iPod in 2001 when consumers were told by Steve Jobs that it “lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go” (quoted in “Happy 15th Birthday to the iPod.”). Jobs insisted that the storage capacity made the iPod a game-changer in the history of portable music players not only because of storage function but also because it allowed users to cherry-pick the contents, thereby providing, to return to Eco, a technology for transforming infinity catalogs into poetical playlists. Storage capability became seductive when it could be hyper-individuated. Paraphrasing Jobs through Benjamin, the sanctuary built out of songs was now portable. A Kindle advertisement used in the Chinese market provided the miseen-scene for this new space of reading which is inseparable from the library. We see a shot of a young girl struggling with a stack of books in public library and are told by the voice-over that “the Library you always wanted to take with you can now be carried in your hands” (Leo Burnett 2017, 0:08–0:14). Once upon a time being immersed between

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the covers of a book may have required seclusion but no longer, a point made vividly by another cut between the reading spaces in this ad: “The good times you spent immersed in reading under a tree can now be enjoyed anywhere” (0:19–0:25). In the ad, Amazon uncouples immersion from seclusion and, in the process, reconfigures the relationship between the library and the flâneur, as well as the relationship between exterieur and interieur. Reading on the Kindle appears to be an intensely solitary activity since the readers depicted are always the only people reading in the coffee shops, train stations, and airports featured in these ads and their solitary state promises intimate pleasure, given the rapturous looks on faces of the readers. Apparently, any public space can be transformed into private pleasure zones, if you have the right device. To return to Benjamin’s Baudelaire, and paraphrase him within the realm of the online literary culture, the ability to collapse the relationship between exterieur and interieur is available to anyone with a digital device. They can experience the immense joy of setting up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world. The multi-functionality of the Kindle ereader as screen, archive, and portal to the internet, allows readers to take not just a book but their libraries with them wherever they go in the most public of spaces. The relationship between the arcade and private reading room is fundamentally reconfigured in the process because the magic circle of the digital library becomes infinitely mobile, and thereby travels along with you as you stroll through both real and digital landscapes. Those libraries, combined with the itineraries of those travels, form the built environment of digital reading culture. The locativity function is both curatorial and navigational, enabling readers find their books, and themselves, within their reading cultures.

Curating Your Traveling Library in the Contemporary Novel Re-envisioning the relationship between the book and the library, as well as the private and public dimensions of reading, has become omnipresent in online reading cultures, visible in e-reader advertisements but also in critically acclaimed novels which create another kind of mise-en-scène for what we think takes place when we read. I have elsewhere argued that the construction of the archive is a foundational aspect of the narrative

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universes in a number of recent, critically esteemed literary bestsellers such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (Winner of the National Book Award 2018), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year of 2019), Tommy Orange’s There, There (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2019), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (a fixture on Ten Best lists, 2019). In each case, reading and writing are inseparable from the assemblage and curation. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to compare two very different literary novels in order to demonstrate how the goods of literary reading now depend on being lost in a book and strolling through the archive of one’s creation—Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter (2016; which became a STARZ channel television series by the same name in 2018–2019 produced and written by Danler) and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra (winner of the 2019 Pen Faulkner Award). Both feature female characters committed to a project of identity formation in which they try to forge a sense of self in a new location. Both are self-consciously serious fiction, complete with literary references and a hyper-awareness of the language they use to construct their self-image. Despite those similarities, they come to drastically different conclusions about the goods that literary fiction can deliver as they engage in relocation projects that recalibrate the relationship between the library and the self, and reflect on what can be gained from that exercise. The first three sentences of Sweetbitter announce the stakes of the novel and the terms by which Tess, the narrator, measures her maturation: “You will develop a palate. A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language obsessed” (3). The “you” in question is the reader but also Tess, whose story will account for how she has acquired that sensibility. I say sensibility because the palate in question includes a number of associated pleasures that are densely interconnected. As an apprentice server at the legendary Union Square Café in New York, she learns a great many lessons in food and wine connoisseurship which are recounted at length, and it almost goes without saying that she also acquires a far more sophisticated appreciation of sex, particularly in terms how to avoid toxic lovers. But that palate also includes the appreciation of a host of artistic pleasures that form the required cultural literacy that is an essential component of her apprenticeship within this taste community.

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You knew which shows were at which galleries, and it was a given that you attended the museums regularly. When asked whether you had seen Manet’s execution paintings (and you were going to be asked by someone taking a late lunch after MOMA), you were either on your way and had already seen them in Paris. You had opinions about opera. If you didn’t, you politely implied that it was too bourgeois. (83)

But that palate in the process of developing also depends on words. Danler acknowledges that her main reference point in writing her novel is Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and she inserts poems throughout the novel, many composed of the random voices that collide in the restaurant and the narrator’s head. During a dinner party, characters talk about Emily Dickinson’s poems and Stravinsky’s ballets while another flips through a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957). The direct correlation between character and reading material becomes most explicit when Tess analyzes the private libraries of other two main characters, Simone (the older, seemingly wiser mentor figure who works at the restaurant and lends her books crucial to her education) and Jake, the bad-boy bartender. But unlike Simone, who had everything—sections of poetry, religion, psychology, gastronomy, editions of all of the capital L literature, and a column of art books that cost more than a year of my rent, Jake had mystery novels and philosophy. That’s it. Pulpy, sooty, paperbacks and leather-bound editions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Aquinas. Mutilated copies of Kierkegaard in their own stack. (290)

Reading the libraries of others within these private, domestic spaces is crucially important for Tess because it allows her to draw inferences about who they are, a premise that takes as a given that we are built out of books—the private library assumed to be purely constitutive of self. Benjamin would no doubt approve. Early in the novel, Simone tells the narrator, “your self-awareness is lacking, without an ability to see yourself, you can’t protect yourself. … Don’t isolate your senses—you’re interacting with an environment” (76). Tess eventually acquires that self-awareness through a process of cultural mapping in which she tries to situate herself as a stranger in New York. Not so coincidentally, one of the elements of wine connoisseurship that Tess is determined to understand is terroir—how, in short, is flavor of

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wine localized by the soil and microclimate it grows in? Her narrative becomes an exercise in how to understand her own terroir and develop a meaningful sense of locativity. In the pursuit of that goal, her library and her flânerie become completely interdependent elements in that selflocation project. This interdependency is foregrounded in one of the pivotal scenes in the novel. As she strolls through the city, accumulating the books she needs for the realization of her project, she realizes, I learned that there was an invisible ravine running up the city, as deep as the Grand Canyon, narrower at the top. You could be walking in tandem with a stranger on the sidewalk and not realize that she or she was not the same cliff-side as you. On one side, there were the people who lived there, and on the other side, terminally distanced, were the people who had made homes there. (136)

The texts that function as her cultural GPS aren’t the Zagat Restaurant Guide or the Lonely Planet Guide to New York but Emily Dickinson’s poems, The World Atlas of Wine and stacks of art books. According to Danler’s novel, it is obviously necessary for a young, culturally savvy gastronome in New York to have an extensive knowledge of art history and “literature with a capital L,” but the reverse is also just as true. Any would-be young literary type worthy of the name has to have a palate that includes an expansive expertise in food culture, not just books, which tells us something about the use-value Sweetbitter claims for itself and the palate that “you” the reader has to acquire in order to have achieved any demonstrable degree of cultural connoisseurship. The goods that the novel delivers are not just crucial advice about the benefits of gastronomic and material culture but lessons in locativity. Danler situates her novel squarely at the intersection of material and aesthetic culture, bestowing the creation and consumption of material pleasure with a high degree of artistry, while turning the literary pleasures into a web of practical, useful knowledge needed for navigating the city in ways that make it a place where she is always able to feel herself everywhere at home, at the center of the world. According to the Pen Faulkner judges’ statement, “Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s ‘Call Me Zebra’ is a library within a library, a Borgesesque labyrinth of references from all cultures and all walks of life. In today’s visual Netflix world, Ms. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel performs at the highest of levels in accomplishing only what the written novel can

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show us” (quoted in Merry 2019). While Sweetbitter could be located at the edge of Netflix culture since it became a television series, Call Me Zebra imagines a library in which there is only the pleasure of literature (and sex, on occasion). One of the first things that the narrator Zebra (born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini) tells the reader is that she is from a long line of self-taught philosophers, poets, and painters. Thanks to her father, a multi-lingual translator, “I was armed with literature” (3). As a family, they could hardly be more convinced about the benefits of literary reading. Her father’s “FIRST COMMANDMENT” is “ill-fated child, trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is this decaying world. Seek refuge in it. It is through its missives alone that you will survive your death, preserve your inner freedom.” Zebra says she born in an “Oasis of books. I learned to crawl, walk, read, write, shit, and eat in that library” (8). But her father tells her that they must think of themselves as guardians of literature safeguarding the voices, who, “knew how to retreat into literature in order to survive history’s bloodshed and thus be in a position to share the truth with the world” (2019: 8). His knowledge of literature is handed down to her in the form of the transcriptions he writes and the lists he makes for her, he taught me about literature, culling paragraphs from books written by our ingenious forbears, The Great Writers of the Past: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mawal¯an¯a (alias Rumi) Omar Khayyám, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dante Alighieri, Marie-Henri Beyle (alias Stendhal), Teresa of Ávila, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, S¯adegh Hed¯ayat, Frederick Douglass, Francesco Petrarca, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Benjamin, Sei Sh¯onagon. The list went on and on; it included religious thinkers, philosopher-poets, mystics, secularists, agnostics, atheists. Literature, as my father would say, is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. (11)

Out of these lists, Zebra fashions what Eco might call her own poetical list: “I built the constellation of literary networks that I had come to refer to collectively as the Matrix of Literature” (50). The narrator’s need to share those titles with the reader makes Call Me Zebra, in many ways, a relentless series of lists and recommendations about the value of literary reading. In a 2018 interview with GRANTA, Van Vliet Oloomis was asked to share, “five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.” Number 2 on that list is “Lists: I am fascinated by literary lists.” Why are these lists invested with such power?

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What shapes Zebra’s lists, in part, is her desire to retrace the steps of her family’s journey from Iran through the Mediterranean to the U.S., and that journey becomes the narrative through-line on which those lists and recommendations are hung. I thought: If Ulysses can set off on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Don Quixote on a Grand Tour of Literature, and Dante the Pilgrim on a Grand Tour of Human Nature, then it stands to reason that I, Zebra, can do all three at once. Done and dusted. I was going to use the papers I had secured through the inky sweat of my father—my American passport —to embark on a GRAND TOUR OF EXILE. (48, original capitalization)

That journey becomes an extended locativity project, which is geographic, but also profoundly textual since it is inseparable from her father’s lists that she uses to navigate through that region, believing quite fervently that, “literature is the only true form of cartography in the world” (101). Her project becomes an exercise in border-crossing: “Like the clear-eyed Edward Said you are a specular border intellectual. It was my father’s muffled voice coming from deep inside my void” (178, original italics). She continues the invocation of Said later in the novel specifically in reference to transcription, “And why, you might ask, why should we, the Pilgrims of the Void, focus on the literature of exiles? Because exiled poets objectify and lend dignity to a condition designed to deny dignity,” I said, citing Said. “By transcribing the literature of such writers, we will be restoring dignity not only to literature but also ourselves; Not to mention the fact that we will be retroactively restoring dignity to those great writers of the past. An act of posthumous salvation…” (235)

As such, transcription redefines the edges of the individual book, gesturing toward other books and, by extension, the primacy of the archive in determining the value of reading. The mise-en-scene of this particular way of imaging what people think takes place when they read has to be a tracking shot, especially since Zebra builds her own Mobile Art Gallery, a museum on wheels filled with books from her matrix and family heirlooms to take with her wherever she goes. She refers to this miniature museum which functions as her own circumscribed area as a “portable library,” to which she must attach wheels so

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I could easily transport The Mobile Art Gallery. There would be no place out of reach. Its message was meant for everyone; it didn’t matter how remote a village a person lived in. They deserved to know the truth, and the Mobile Art Gallery was capable of delivering that truth anytime, anywhere. My notebook, filed to the brim, was not enough. (174)

That the personal library—not just a mere book—needs to go with you wherever you go because it is an intimate, but robust form of selfexpression and, therefore, has its use value sounds remarkably like an ad for the Kindle Oasis, another sanctuary that allows for easy transportation of your own Matrix of Literature. But it also sounds like Benjamin’s library. In his essay, he goes into detail about how he has taken his books with him whenever he has traveled throughout his life because they are after all, the building stones of his identity. The resemblance between Zebra’s portable library and Benjamin’s library is not an interpretive leap on my part because Zebra invokes him first in the list given to her by her father (quoted above), and then repeatedly throughout the novel, ultimately coming to the conclusion that she wants to become Benjamin. She quotes “Unpacking My Library” explicitly, I opened Benjamin’s Illuminations and quickly made my way to “Unpacking my Library.” It seemed appropriate. I ate Only in extinction is the collector comprehended. I was ready to devour the next sentence, to eat Benjamin quoting Hegel, to consume an infinitely receding sequence of quotes. My goal kept evolving. I envisioned building an epic book of light and dark passions from the sentences I ingested. (163, original italics)

Zebra also characterizes her own journey in Benjaminian terms: “I am a flâneur of Death, walking through the city, examining the palimpsest of time” (107). Ultimately, Van der Vliet Oloomi makes it abundantly clear why in this particular mise-en-scene of reading the figure has to be in motion, pulling a library behind her. If the self, the history of exile, and the Matrix of Literature are all individual palimpsests which she braids together throughout the novel, then the library is the only possible means of personal expression because no one book or one transcription can encompass what must be expressed in aggregate. Consequently, she comes to see her project as a continuation of Benjamin’s work:

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But how was I going to push Benjamin’s thought further? How was I going to borrow his thinking to do what I intended: to hurl my void— that palimpsest of literature and my multiple stratified selves—at life in order to simultaneously expose its infinite multiplicity and its fundamental nothingness. Surely Benjamin had gone far enough for his time. But years had passed since his life and death, decades. (208)

To return to Darnton’s conviction that we can uncover a great deal about what people think takes place when they read by studying depictions of reading across a range of different sources, an analysis of mise-en-scène of contemporary reading allows us to get a better sense of the goods on offer. The appeal of list-making, the fascination with taking your library with you wherever you go, the recalibration of the private and public spaces of reading, the persistence of celebrating immersion as the basis for reading pleasure but relocating that immersion in the arc between the book and the archive, all point to a fundamental the redefinition of what reading means as an act of self-definition in the twenty-first century.

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life. In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, 1–35. London: Phaidon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969a. Unpacking My Library. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 59–68. New York: Schocken. ———. 1969b. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken. ———. 2006. Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire. In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 46–133. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Danler, Stephanie. 2016. Sweetbitter. New York: Vintage. Darnton, Robert. 1986. First Steps Toward a History of Reading. Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1): 5–30. Eco, Umberto. 2009. The Infinity of Lists. New York: Rizzoli. Halliday, Lisa. 2018. Asymmetry. New York: Simon & Schuster. “Happy 15th Birthday to the iPod.” Medium, 24 October. https://medium. com/@samworldpeace/happy-15th-birthday-to-the-ipod-f133a3872d79. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. Latour, Bruno. 1990. Technology Is Society Made Durable. The Sociological Review 38 (1) (May): 103–131.

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Leo Burnett (China). 2017. Amazon Kindle’s 2017 TV Commerical in China, May 27. Video, 0:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KIkj9X26tM. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. Luiselli, Valeria. 2019. Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Merry, Stephanie. 2019. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s ‘Call Me Zebra’ wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The Washington Post, 29 April. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/azareen-van-der-vliet-olo omis-call-me-zebra-wins-penfaulkner-award-for-fiction/2019/04/29/c03 cc98e-6857-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. Murray, Simone. 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Nawotka, ed. 2020. How the Coronavirus Will Change Book Publishing, Now and Forever. Los Angeles Times, 20 March. https://www.latimes.com/ent ertainment-arts/books/story/2020-03-25/how-the-coronavirus-will-changebook-publishing-now-and-forever. Accessed 31 March 2020. Nunez, Sigrid. 2019. The Friend: A Novel. New York: Riverhead Books. O’Hara, Frank. 1957. Meditations in an Emergency. New York: Grove Press. Orange, Tommy. 2018. There, There. New York: Vintage Press. Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. 2018. Five Things Right Now. GRANTA, 1 February. https://granta.com/five-things-right-now-oloomi/. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. ———. 2019. Call Me Zebra. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Vuong, Ocean. 2019. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. New York: Penguin Press.

CHAPTER 14

Auratic Facsimile: The Print Novel in the Age of Digital Reproduction Julia Panko

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” According to the artist Kajsa Dahlberg, this is one of the most underlined sentences in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own amongst the copies in Sweden’s public libraries. To create her 2006 work “A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries” (“Ett Eget Rum / Tusen Bibliotek”), Dahlberg borrowed every annotated copy of Woolf’s book that she could find from more than a hundred libraries throughout Sweden. Page by page, she manually copied each marginal comment and underlining onto a master copy, compiling all of the annotations into a single version.1 Dahlberg’s facsimile edition—an artist’s book of one thousand copies—is a testament to the persistent desire of readers to mark their books. Woolf’s 1 As Mats Dahlström notes, Dahlberg’s task was “made much easier by the fact that all Swedish editions at the time were imprints based on one and the same typeset composition from 1958” (2011: 118).

J. Panko (B) Weber State University, Ogden, UT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_14

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quote characterizes authorship as a communal undertaking; Dahlberg’s work shows reading, and textual reception, to be similarly collective acts. Ease of annotation is one reason many readers continue to prefer print texts to digital ones (see Liu 2008: 117–138). Readers today consume text in historically unprecedented amounts. Yet much of this reading takes place online, typically via webpages that lack native annotation capabilities. E-readers like the Amazon Kindle, on the other hand, facilitate certain modes of annotation: Kindle users can add virtual bookmarks or quickly drag their fingers across the page to highlight selected text, and they can also view popular highlights, tagged with the number of readers who marked those passages. Like the palimpsest text Dahlberg created out of the individual print copies in the Swedish library system, the Kindle amalgamates the notes its readers take, offering a glimpse into a virtual reading community. Dahlberg’s work, then, stands at the boundary between the annotation practices of print and digital media, as it blurs the lines between original and facsimile texts and individual and collective readers. It is with an eye to these unstable boundaries, and their relevance for the idea of the novel network, that this paper examines S., the 2013 novel conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by author Doug Dorst. Abrams’ aim with S. was to “celebrat[e] the book as an object,” creating “a distinctly analog object” in “a digital age” (Hill 2013). Key to this distinctiveness is the way readers mark books. S. appears to be an aging, midcentury library book—the novel Ship of Theseus by the fictional author V. M. Straka—whose pages have been covered by the annotations of two readers. As Jen Heyward (an undergraduate English major) and Eric Husch (a graduate student) read through Ship of Theseus, they write to one another in the margins. They also leave various pieces of ephemera between the book’s pages, including letters, postcards, and photographs. S. becomes a bibliographic romance between Jen and Eric, but it is also an illustration of a longstanding cultural romance with books. S.’s draw is its material verisimilitude. This verisimilitude is the product of a whole network of design, publication, and distribution platforms. I will discuss this network in more detail below; here, I note that these recent digital technologies are inextricable from the creation of this very bookish novel, this novel that centers both the aesthetics and the reading habits of the print codex. In its seeming to be a real found object, S. simulates how print books are individualized over the course of their reading. What we might, following Walter Benjamin, call “aura” appears to inhere

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in books as a result (1968b). S., I will argue, epitomizes aspects of book culture that remain compelling to contemporary audiences: a nostalgic, bookish aesthetic; the ability to connect readers to authors and to one another; and, especially, the perception that print books are a particularly auratic medium. I will also argue, however, that the many paradoxes of S., not the least of which is its use of digital reproduction to simulate the aura of printed books, offer a theoretically useful challenge to the print/digital binary through which so much discourse about the future of the book— and the future of the novel—is constructed. Finally, I will suggest that S.’s use of a variety of media to heighten the illusion of its seeming real brings the history of the novel—a form that has, from its beginning, appropriated the formal conventions of nonfictional genres—into the contemporary moment, suggesting the reach of the contemporary novel network. This history also serves as a model for how emerging literary genres written for new media (like podcasts; see Gill in this volume) might similarly obscure their ontological status as fictional narratives by manipulating readers’ expectations about the facticity of media.

Aesthetics and Aura: Connecting with Print Books S.’s bookishness permeates its narratives. One of S.’s core themes is the malleability and uncertainty of identity, and the intertwined narratives that comprise the novel explore this theme through the tropes of books and writing. In the Ship of Theseus narrative, the amnesiac protagonist known only as “S.” is kidnapped by sailors and pressed into an assassination plot. He never regains his memories of his former life; instead, he forges his character through his actions. This narrative arc is intercut with scenes of S.’s frenzied, trance-like writing and an episode where he finds a book emblazoned with the letter “S,” both of which grant him insight into the interplay between fate and free will through which identity is shaped. In the margins, Jen and Eric analyze Ship of Theseus, as they collaborate to solve the mysteries of the novel’s authorship: who was V. M. Straka? Did one person write the books credited to him, or were they the work of a collective? What was his relationship with his translator, F. X. Caldeira? Finally, Jen and Eric confess their troubled pasts to one another, as they read Ship of Theseus and link events in their own lives to details in Straka’s novel. In the process, they realize that telling their stories has codified certain ideas about themselves. At every narrative level in S., tensions

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between individuality and relationships, and between the reality of events versus the way events are remembered and recounted, are worked out through the writing and reading of books. Critical and popular discussions of S. frequently focus less on this narrative content, however, than on the novelty of its design.2 By S.’s fourth week on the New York Times bestseller list, the description made almost no mention of plot: “In a project conceived by the writer and director J. J. Abrams, the facsimile of a novel published in 1949 encodes a mystery” (“Best Sellers”). S. is one of a number of contemporary novels that experiment with the visual and material affordances of books, embracing an “aesthetic of bookishness,” to use Jessica Pressman’s term. Within this broader trend, however, S. is unusual in its comprehensive simulation of an individualized, well-read book. Much of the attraction of S. is its seeming-singularity. In nearly every detail, S. appears to be a midcentury library book, personalized by its readers. On the textured cloth cover, “Ship of Theseus” and “V.M. Straka” are embossed in a periodappropriate typeface. The book bears a library collections stamp and call number sticker, and its pages are artificially yellowed. The marginal notes appear to be actual handwriting, written in pencil and ink (an illusion convincing enough that one of my students tried to erase a pencil note, thinking it her own). Additionally, the novel is extra-illustrated with nearly two dozen pieces of ephemera—from postcards and handwritten letters to a college newspaper and a map drawn on a napkin—each seeming to be an original artifact.3 S. paradoxically makes a claim to novelty through its reproduction of a well-established, indeed old-fashioned, bookish aesthetic.

2 The relative lack of attention to S.’s plot stems at least in part from frustration with the lack of narrative resolution. As Alexander Starre describes, “despite its commercial success, the novel garnered mixed reviews that faulted the authors for erecting an overcomplex narrative apparatus without adequate closure.” Starre’s critique is that S. “invites both ‘forensic’ and ‘aesthetic’ modes of reading, yet it eventually fails to meaningfully connect and balance these two poles of signification” (“Media Theory”). 3 H. J. Jackson defines “extra-illustrated” as “a catch-all classification for books with foreign elements ranging from a single additional plate presented as a frontispiece to the dozens or hundreds of miscellaneous bits and pieces that readers have been known to drop into their books” (2001: 185–186).

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S.’s design matters because it speaks to readers’ tendency to regard print books as more auratic than digital media.4 S. functions as what we might call an “auratic facsimile”: a simulation of the way print books accrue aura, through the simulation of a unique copy of a print book.5 “Facsimile” derives from the Latin for “to make” and “like”; it denotes an exact copy, especially of textual material. A facsimile is always seeming, always a simulation. The idea that a facsimile might be auratic—or that aura could be copied or simulated—is antithetical to Benjamin’s seminal definition in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Aura, he writes, is acquired through a work’s “presence in time and space,” which “includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years” (1968b: 220). For Benjamin, these qualities cannot exist in mechanically reproducible art, because “making many reproductions … substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (221). With print books, there is no original “unique existence” per se. “From a photograph negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense” (224). So too for copies of books, whether printed from type or digital files. Yet the pull of S. is precisely its claim that books can have aura. The seed from which S. sprung, according to Abrams, was his finding a novel left in an airport with a note that it should be shared and read: “It reminded me of being in college, and seeing the notes that people would leave in the margins of the books they’d checked out of the library” (in Rothman 2013). The books that Abrams describes are mass-produced copies, yet he was moved by the ways they had been personalized by their 4 According to a number of recent studies, the print book remains the platform of choice for most readers. The Pew Research Center reports that sixty-five percent of Americans read a print book in 2016, compared to only twenty-eight percent who read an ebook (Perrin 2016). In a survey of several hundred university students in Germany, the United States, Japan, and Slovakia, ninety-two percent reported that they preferred to read “serious” material in print (Robb 2015). The reasons underlying this preference are multiple, and they include pragmatic considerations such as how different platforms affect attention and comprehension. Yet studies of reading preferences frequently elicit statements that describe affective connections to books: “We have a strong emotional attachment to the physical book, as demonstrated by the qualitative comments made by participants [in one survey of young readers], such as ‘I like the smell’ and ‘I want full bookshelves’” (Brady 2013). 5 Sara Tanderup uses the phrase “manufactured aura” to describe S. She argues that this aura results from the ways works like S. engage in “‘media nostalgia,’ celebrating the book as an old object and as a medium of memory” (2016: 47).

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readers. S. re-enacts this uniqueness of the novel-in-use, demonstrating how copies of books may become, in their relationship with readers, singular and significant (even as this dynamic is ironically undercut by the fact that the apparently unique marks of wear and use in every copy of S.— annotations, smudges, yellowed pages—are themselves mass-produced effects). Readers form attachments to books, imbuing them with meaning and value, in part because their interactions with the physical forms of books focalize their intellectual and emotional responses to the books’ authors. Milton wrote that books “preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them” (1848: 55). Annotations left in books are frequently a record of a reader’s imagined relationship with the author: we “[cherish] the illusion of intimacy,” writes H. J. Jackson in her comprehensive study of marginalia (2001: 84). The oneway communication of marginalia is none the less meaningful for its lack of reciprocity. As John Durham Peters describes, “expressive acts occurring over distances and without immediate assurance of reply may be … daring acts of dignity. That I cannot engage in dialogue with Plato or the Beatles does not demean the contact I have with them. Such contact may be hermeneutic and aesthetic rather than personal or mutual” (1999: 152).6 The conversations readers engage in with authors through annotations may be one-sided, but the practice of writing thoughts in response to text in a book creates a forum for engaging with an other. In S., marginal notes go further, engendering reciprocal conversations between readers and writers. Ship of Theseus is doubly annotated: in addition to Jen’s and Eric’s notes, the text’s translator, Filomela Caldeira, frames the novel with her introduction and footnotes. Jen and Eric annotate Caldeira’s notes as well as the main text; Eric later flies to Brazil to find her and speak with her in person. Caldeira, too, attempts to use annotation to communicate with an author: fearful for Straka’s safety, she hides coded messages in her footnotes, including the final communiqué “I have loved you from the beginning and I will love you to the end.”7 Although Caldeira never meets Straka in person, the fact that, within Ship of Theseus, S. meets a woman on a volcanic island who shows him a book 6 Peters is writing specifically of communication with the dead, but his larger point that “dialogic ideology” tends to overlook the significance of more hermeneutic modes of communication applies well to imagined communing with authors through books. 7 The Fourth, “Re: Eotvos Wheel Code.”

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bearing the “S” insignia suggests that Straka, too, was hoping to communicate with Caldeira via the novel (which is a roman-à-clef about Straka’s literary circle).8 The take-away point is not that scribbling notes in a book are likely to lead to direct communication with its author, but rather that marginal engagements with authors are real interactions. S. also dramatizes the intense connections readers can form with each other via a shared book. Jackson observes that readers have often used books to construct intimate relationships: “Lovers will seize on whatever means of communication are available to them, and books with marginalia often turn out to be a record of affection” (72). Abrams, too, cited the “optimistic, romantic idea that you could leave a book with a message for someone” as one that compelled him to create S. (in Rothman 2013). In S., the romance between Jen and Eric develops through their marginalia. To turn the pages of S. is to feel as though you have stumbled across an intensely personal archive. In one marginal exchange, Eric and Jen debate whether they should still use the book to communicate. Eric writes that it is “not very practical, I know … But I still love that we’re doing it. Love hearing you in the margins. [Ship of Theseus ] was my favorite book, it was the central text for my dissertation, and now it’s also this scrapbook of us” (293). As S. imagines how two readers might fall in love through a shared book, it shows how books themselves become significant objects through such exchanges. When S., and print books generally, seem auratic, it is because of such personalization. Even for Benjamin, copies—including facsimiles— could become meaningful through their interactions with people.9 In “Unpacking My Library,” he writes that “not only books but copies of books have their fates,” and that “the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with” its collector (61, emphasis added; see also Collins in this volume). Benjamin is concerned with ownership and collection, rather than reading practices: “[a]n inveterate collector of books” is marked “by his failure to read these books” because this failure refuses books’ “functional utilitarian value” (1968a: 62, 60). Jen and Eric, as 8 A caldera is a volcano crater. That “the Lady” is a novelistic avatar for Caldeira is supported by the description of the island where S. meets her as having a volcano’s “deep, irregular crater” (278) and by Eric’s observation that Straka’s depiction of her “is a lot like how Filomela looked when [Eric] met her” (285). 9 Benjamin lists “handwriting facsimiles” among his examples of the “booklike creations” to which “some people become attached” (1968a: 66).

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attentive, voracious readers, are the antithesis of Benjamin’s paradigmatic collector.10 Despite these differences, and despite the fact that Benjamin does not use the word “aura” in “Unpacking My Library,” his pronouncement that “the chance, [and] the fate, that suffuse the past … are conspicuously present” in a collector’s books (60) complicates his argument in “The Work of Art” that mechanically reproduced works lack the unique material history necessary for aura. Each book that experiences a significant encounter, whether with collector or reader, begins to acquire this history.11 Aura, then, is a forensic quality, a product of material history. But it, and the qualities for which it typically stands as shorthand—authenticity, presence, emotional significance—are also the product of feeling and seeming. S. is not what it purports to be; nonetheless, it feels authentic. Whether or not there is anything essentially authentic or auratic about personalized books, readers frequently voice their perception that this is the case. By the end of S., Jen and Eric conclude that authentic identity is not an unalterable given; it is created through perceptions of and narratives about the self. S.’s design reiterates this argument by simulating and mass-producing an apparently authentic, singular book. On the one hand, as we have seen, the notion of auratic facsimile runs counter to traditional accounts of aura as created through the presence of an original, even S., as an auratic facsimile, demonstrates how a mass-produced book might become transformed into a unique original. On the other hand, the fact that facsimile entails likeness and seeming highlights the phenomenological dimensions of aura. Both underpin the meaningful connections readers feel to their books.

10 S. strikes a more Benjaminian note in the plot point that Eric has stolen the copy of Ship of Theseus from the library, “the borrowing of a book with its attendant nonreturning” being, for Benjamin, “the customary mod[e] of acquisition … most appropriate to a collector” (1968a: 62). 11 This contradiction is perhaps one reason why, although Benjamin cites print as a “particularly important case” illustrative of the larger stakes of mechanically reproduced art, his discussion of aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” focuses on the visual and plastic arts (1968b: 219).

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Contemporary Novels: Beyond the Print/Digital Divide S. is a novel of paradoxes. It is a mass-produced simulation of a singular, individualized book. Its novelty as a marketable commodity results from its lack of newness (its apparent age, and the histories of bookish aesthetics and reading practices it invokes). This section examines an additional paradox: while S.’s narrative and design valorize print books, digital media have been crucial to its production and dissemination. S. reveals the complexity of media categories like “book,” “print,” and “digital,” and it complicates an easy distinction between the former and the latter. In the case of books, “print” is often conflated with “codex.” S.’s multi-modality serves as a reminder that print books encompass multiple media. Customarily, a book contains paper, print, and perhaps photography, bound into a codex. Readers may and frequently do contribute handwritten text, or leave bookmarks, photographs, or other objects between the pages. As a print novel, S. is more than a book: it is also a decorative slipcase and a collection of inserts. These are not trivial distinctions. The plot continues across the ephemera, particularly as Jen’s and Eric’s memories and histories require more space to elaborate on than the medial limit of the margin can provide. The slipcase’s function is less narrative than paratextual: it is the only part of S. that provides full bibliographical information, including the novel’s actual authorship. “Print” is similarly complex. Print has often been characterized as less authentic than handwriting because it is mechanically mass-produced. Yet print originated out of the desire for a reproducible facsimile of handwriting: the earliest European printed books’ blackletter typefaces mimicked calligraphy. Walter Crane, for instance, describes the Mainz Psalter as “an instance of the printer aiming at directly imitating and supplanting by his craft the art of the calligrapher and illuminator” (2014: 52). Many of the earliest incunabula, including the Gutenberg Bible, were also hand-rubricated and hand-illuminated, becoming individuated in the process. S. nods to this history through its titular initial, which is rendered as a Gothic “S” on the slipcase. S. also complicates the divide between print and digital media. Critical discussions of S. frequently note the contrasts it draws between print and

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digital media.12 Even the iBook edition of S. insists on the print/digital divide: “please know,” write Abrams and Dorst in the preface, that “the experience of looking at digital reproductions of these items is decidedly different from that of reading and holding the physical book of S.” Certainly this is true in terms of the affective registers of the print book this chapter has so far outlined; it is also true that electronic editions structure readers’ interaction with texts in markedly different ways.13 Yet an exclusive focus on the literary text in its final, output mode misses the ways in which even very bookish texts are deeply imbricated in digital production networks. As N. Katherine Hayles writes, “literature in the twenty-first century is computational. Almost all print books are digital files before they become books; this is the form in which they are composed, edited, composited, and sent to the computerized machines that produce them as books” (2012: 101). S.’s production tested digital technology’s ability to replicate bookish aesthetics. Making a digital facsimile of an annotated print book was a difficult task: Dorst has stated, “I tried pretty much every piece of wordprocessing software that I could find, and none of them were particularly well-suited to what we were doing. And what I ended up going with was … a track-changes function to do the margin notes.” The program “would crash several times a day” trying to implement the notes’ intricate formatting (in Stover 2014). The notes were written by hand by two employees of Melcher Media (who worked on the book’s design), scanned, adjusted in Photoshop, uploaded into InDesign, and adjusted further (Berman 2013). This print novel—itself a mini media ecology— required a suite of software programs to produce. The final “output form,” as Hayles describes it, is significant: print books do have qualities and affordances that differentiate them from other media in the ways they are read and used, as I have discussed (2012: 101). But an acknowledgement of the mutual embeddedness of print and digital media in contemporary media culture—and, especially, in the contemporary novel—offers a necessary complication to an uncritical lionizing of print. As the initial rise of the novel occurred alongside the rise of the new

12 Tanderup, for example, notes S.’s “resistance towards the new media” and reads the novel as a “reflection[n] of ‘media nostalgia’” (2016: 53, 47). 13 On these differences, as well as differences between the Kindle and iBooks editions of S., see Rowberry (2017: 296–298).

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printing technologies that made possible the mass-dissemination of longform narrative, today’s visually experimental novels are predicated on the capabilities of the digital composition and production technologies that are integral parts of the novel’s network. To speak of “the digital” in relation to S. is to speak of a number of elements. In addition to the platforms used to compose, design, and print the novel, and the e-book editions, online platforms were used to market the novel and extend its narratives. Two months before S. was published in October 2013, Abrams released a video teaser on YouTube. A second trailer was released a month later, revealing that the new project would be a novel. A few days ahead of S.’s release, Canongate (the novel’s British publisher) launched online radio broadcasts about Straka and Ship of Theseus, written in-universe. In 2014, Dorst tweeted that “Straka’s original ending for Ship of Theseus may have been found,” linking to a document on a tumblr account registered to “jenheyward” (“ICYMI”). A number of websites and social media accounts, also written in-universe, purport to be by or about characters from S.: Twitter accounts for Jen and Eric, a website with photographs and other evidence from events in Straka’s life, a YouTube video of an audiotaped confession related to the authorship of Straka’s novels, and others. In addition to this presumably official content (judging by the sites being launched before or very shortly after the novel’s publication date), a number of fan sites discuss and analyze the novel. These examples illustrate two points. First, “digital,” like “print,” is a category that entails a wide range of elements (composition platforms, reading formats, different social media, etc.), and each of these has its own affordances and user expectations. All of these, like all of the print elements, are part of S.’s novel network. Second, S.’s digital elements are consonant rather than dissonant with the print content: both categories are multimedia, and both work to further the narrative, build the backstory, enhance S.’s verisimilitude, or encourage reader interactivity. The print novel contains clues and codes that readers may solve along with Jen and Eric, and clues also proliferate across the transmedia elements. S.’s transmedia components show how similarly print and digital media (in all their variety) may function, particularly in a literary context. Nor, in the case of S., can the print book be said to constitute the “main,” or even conceptually prior, portion of the novel: many of the elements that now exist as digital ephemera were written by Dorst before he had decided which would be included in the print book versus posted online (Stover

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2014). S. bridges the print/digital divide conceptually and materially. As an artifact, it embodies the techniques of digital reproduction, and, as a novel, it encompasses both print and digital elements. S. itself emerges as a network, an assemblage of narrative nodes, linked by multiple possible reading pathways and distributed across analog and digital platforms.

Seeming Real: Media Ontology and Narrative Ontology S., then, exemplifies how novels can both represent and contribute to the complexity of print books’ cultural status and position within the contemporary media ecology. The perception that books retain a special role due to their tendency to accrue aura persists all the more as digital texts gain an increasing prominence in daily life. At the same time, books are increasingly dependent on digital platforms for their composition, reproduction, and ongoing reader engagement. This argument holds more or less true irrespective of genre. One can annotate and extra-illustrate informational texts as well as literary ones, for example. Yet there is another aspect of S.’s “seeming”—and its being a mass-produced facsimile of an apparently singular object—that is specific to the literary and deeply tied to the novel. S.’s purposeful confusion of whether it is real or only seemingly so locates it both within the tradition of the novel and among recent nonprint literary experiments that explore how media platforms may shape a narrative’s perceived fictionality. Readers’ suspension of disbelief in the narratives of S. is effected through media. Readers can enjoy the illusion that Jen and Eric are real people who have left their real handwriting in the book because S. is filled with handwriting, even if it is not Jen and Eric’s, and even if these marks are images—facsimiles—rather than the original inscriptions.14 Readers can believe, too, in the existence of Straka and Caldeira because Ship of Theseus exists as an object before them, and because there is documentary “evidence” of their existence: an obituary clipped from a newspaper, a photograph, etc. This elaborate material fiction functions because of the expectation that a book will be what it purports to be. As Adrian Johns writes:

14 The original notes were handwritten by two women, adding, at the media level, a queer undercurrent to S.’s otherwise rather formulaically heteronormative love stories.

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Pick up a modern book. … There are certain features about it of which you can be reasonably confident. Its professed author does indeed exist and did indeed write it. … It is produced with its author’s consent, and it is indeed the edition it claims to be. If the dust jacket announces that it is the product of a given organization … then this too may be believed. (1998: 1)

S. violates almost all of these expectations. It uses readers’ assumptions about the ontological status of books to further their immersion in the narrative world. So too with S.’s online elements. As Henry Jenkins notes, transmedia “may add a greater sense of realism to the fiction as a whole” (2007). S.’s destabilization of the line between fiction and reality owes much to the history of the novel, a genre that developed out of experimentation with nonfictional discourses, such as those of journalism and travelog. Realism is a frequent enough novelistic mode to have become one of the genre’s most common definitional features. Early novels, however, were not simply realist, but rather asserted that they were real. Titles often included a truth-claim (e.g., A History of Tom Jones; Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady). According to Lennard J. Davis, early novel readers’ “uncertainty as to the factual or fictional reality of the work … was one of the major components in the phenomenology of reading during the early eighteenth century” (1983: 24). S. also picks up on the “found manuscript” trope common in the Gothic tradition.15 Thus The Castle of Otranto begins with a preface explaining that the text was “found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England” and “printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529” (Walpole 2003: 59). One imagines that Walpole would have delighted at the thought of printing his text in this style. Of course, most readers encounter S. with the foreknowledge that it is fictional: they know it is an Abrams project, they find it in the bookstore’s fiction section, they read the overview on the slipcase, etc. In these cases, to believe in S. as “real” is to take the pleasure of temporarily, and knowingly, entertaining the notion that the fiction really happened, rather than actually mistaking the novel’s ontological status. When I have shown S. to friends, however, they have often been unsure which elements were artificial. Was this really an old novel? Were the annotations mine? It would not 15 On S. as Gothic, including its use of this trope, see Southward (2015).

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be unreasonable to imagine that a reader might pick up a second-hand copy of S., minus the slipcase, and at least temporarily assume that the annotations and ephemera were real. That Internet searches for “Straka” or “Ship of Theseus” (Abrams’ and Dorst’s names only appear on the slipcase) would return in-universe online content would compound this confusion. S.’s real-life reader is often given pause to wonder whether Jen and Eric have definitely stumbled onto a literacy conspiracy, or whether they have become paranoid. The line between real and imagined is unclear. So too with S. itself. When Stephen Colbert interviewed J. J. Abrams on The Colbert Report, Colbert jokingly wondered whether Dorst, like Straka, Jen, and Eric, was a fictional creation (“11/21/13”). Colbert was kidding, but several students raised this question in earnest the first time I taught the novel. That an influential film producer might hire an actor to pose as an author, and build an online presence for him, did not seem outside the realm of possibility, given how fully S.’s print and digital components challenge the reader’s ability to distinguish who authored what. Once again, the history of the novel offers an instructive point of comparison. Many early readers of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela understood themselves to be reading a nonfictional memoir: as a result of the novel’s realism, authorial framing (Richardson claimed to be relating a story he had once overheard), and adjacency to nonfictional discourses, “many [readers] did consider Pamela to be a true story, and one went so far as to write to the putative editor demanding, ‘Let us have Pamela as Pamela wrote it’” (Davis 1983: 179). S. adds the insight that readers’ ability to differentiate fiction from reality is also produced by the media channels they use to receive information. S.’s troubling of the truth status of its narratives is thus a highly novelistic move. It is also, however, a very contemporary one, of a kind with a number of recent narrative experiments with new media. Writers have used social media and podcasts to much the same effect as S. uses the print book. The LA Flood Project, for instance, used Twitter (along with other Internet platforms) to compose an improvised networked narrative (or “netprov,” to use Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig’s term). In May and October of 2011, more than sixty participants, many working from their real professional or personal Twitter accounts, produced a real-time, collectively authored narrative about a fictional flooding disaster in Los Angeles. Circulating amidst Twitter streams largely made up of nonfictional content like news items or personal musings, and originating from

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established accounts, The LA Flood Project tweets produced a cognitive frisson for accidental readers who might have casually come across a few tweets without realizing that the catastrophic events being reported were not occurring. Fictional podcasts have arguably been even more effective in using media to seem real. Within this emerging and undertheorized genre, there exist a number of recent fictional podcasts that purport to tell true stories. The Black Tapes, The Message, Limetown, Tanis, and others narrate extraordinary and even supernatural events—all while employing the conventions of nonfictional podcasts like Serial or public radio shows like This American Life. The Black Tapes (hereafter TBT ) is closest to S. in its effect. As the fictional podcast producer Alex Reagan (voiced by Lori Henry) profiles the investigations of Dr. Richard Strand (voiced by Christian Sloan), a skeptic and paranormal investigator, she begins to doubt her own perceptions of reality. She is increasingly unsure whether the stories she is investigating are really happening, or whether the “evidence” for them is the product of apophenia, anxiety, or her increasing insomnia. Alex begins the first episode by describing the pleasure of ghost stories: “Full disclosure: I love ghost stories. Even if you don’t really believe in ghosts, it’s fun to suspend disbelief. You dim the lights, set the mood, and tell the scariest story you can think of. And it’s fun because we know it’s probably not real. Ghosts don’t actually exist. Do they?” (“A Tale of Two Tapes, Part I”).16 The pleasure of such tales is not only independent of their factuality; it is dependent on the uncertainty of their fictionality. The need for a definitive answer to the question of whether the supernatural exists quickly becomes pressing, however: in the third episode, Alex listens to, and broadcasts, a supposedly demonic audio recording that reportedly 16 That TBT ’s inaugural episode plays on the title of a novel by Dickens—probably the nineteenth century’s best-known author of serialized fiction—is evidence of the extent to which podcasts, still an emerging form, frequently gesture to other narrative (and media) genres in order to establish themselves. Novels are not the only reference point for TBT . Other episode titles evoke movies and popular songs (e.g., “Sleepless in Seattle” [episode 201] and “Welcome to the Machine” [episode 210]), and Alex frequently defines podcasts along the lines of “Radio. For the Internet” (“Cabin Fever”). TBT ’s sister show Tanis advertises itself as “television for your ears” (a tagline that became more than an analogy with the July 2017 announcement that Tanis was being developed for television [Stanhope 2017]). TBT is closer to the radio drama than the novel in its structure. Yet the novel remains an important cultural touchstone, as indicated by the fact that the only advertisement in the first episode was for an Audible recording of Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

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kills everyone who hears it within one year. Encountering this audio threat through TBT ’s audio medium is immediately uncanny. Listeners, too, will hear “the unsound” when Alex plays it on the podcast; the broadcast is prefaced with her warning that “if you listen to the sound, you’re listening at your own risk. …[I]f you’re afraid or superstitious, please skip ahead ten seconds” (“The Unsound”). That TBT is able to use its medium to produce an extreme, and uncanny, degree of verisimilitude is evident in the hesitation listeners have expressed to listen to the unsound (e.g., “I can’t listen to it… It freaks me out and while it is fiction it’s a little to [sic] creepy for me” [Bobeany 2016]17 ). The subject of the narrative, and its medium, become one and the same. Like the book Ship of Theseus in S., TBT ’s unsound is not simply described; it is produced. Listeners physically experience it.18 Alex’s uncertainty about whether supernatural creatures exist is mirrored and reproduced by the podcast’s use of media and genre expectations to muddy its own fictionality. TBT picks up on the conventions of Serial, the popular podcast co-produced by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder. Alex, like Serial ’s narrator Koenig, is a likable, intrepid journalist who intercuts interviews with her own musings. TBT ’s theme music and sound style are also reminiscent of Koenig’s production.19 Listeners will play or download TBT through the same platforms (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.) they would use to listen to nonfictional podcasts, and Alex occasionally references the user’s real-life listening experience (e.g., “You might want to put on headphones for this” [“The Unsound”]). An additional layer framing TBT as nonfictional is the manner in which the podcast’s producers Paul Bae and Terry Miles have, to date, kept the content and discussion they generate about the podcast in-universe.20 The program’s website describes it as “a serialized docudrama” (a term typically reserved for programs that reenact real events, rather than wholly fictional narratives) “hosted by Alex Reagan” (“About the Show”). On 17 TBT ’s producers archly acknowledged fan reactions by selling “I survived the unsound” t-shirts a year after the episode aired. 18 The Message similarly plays with the effect of weaponizing sound in an audio narrative: its fictional host broadcasts an extraterrestrial, and fatal, sonic virus. 19 The tagline on TBT ’s Facebook page is “It’s Serial meets the X-Files.” Koenig’s stylistic influence is also apparent in the female narrators of Limetown and The Message. 20 At the time of this writing, TBT ’s final season has not yet aired. It is conceivable that Bae and Miles may break their in-universe stance after the show has concluded.

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social media and in interviews, Bae and Miles discuss the podcast as if it were real, for instance explaining the long hiatus between the first and second seasons as resulting from Alex’s exhaustion (“Hi Reddit!”). With TBT , as with S., narrative and media collude in creating the illusion that the story is real. Little wonder that the TBT Reddit discussion forum frequently sees posts asking “is this real?” and “is it fiction?”21 As with early novels and print books, or The LA Flood Project and Twitter, TBT capitalizes on the relative newness of digital podcasts as a medium. Thus the literary traditions of old and new media converge in the seemingrealness of S. In all of these examples, historical and contemporary, writers take into account users’ expectations about media, and they marshal these expectations to manipulate the readers’ encounters with the literary works.

Conclusion: Media Theory, the Novel, and the Book In “Marginalia,” Billy Collins describes the pleasurable impetus to write in a book: We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. (2011: 34–38)

Works like Collins’ poem, Dahlberg’s “A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries,” and S. examine and celebrate the ways readers mark their books. As such works remind us, the meaningful connections readers continue to have with and through books are produced in part through the ways they annotate and personalize them. Readers, too, belong to the novel network. 21 Rose057, “Is this real?” and Superdudeo, “The black tapes podcast.” Additionally, TBT ’s narrative incorporates the histories of obscure but real artifacts (such as the Codex Gigas and Seikilos epitaph); curious listeners who search for these references will learn that they are not fictional, adding further ambiguity to the narrative’s fictionality. Although Internet searches will return results explaining that the podcast is fictional, the in-universe official website and producer interviews will likely sustain such uncertainty for a longer period of time than would be the case for readers of S. (especially given Abrams’ profile).

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Categories like “print,” “book,” and “digital” remain useful so long as we take seriously S.’s caution that they tend to interpenetrate and that the borders among them are not absolute. Recent work in media theory has demonstrated how productive it can be to press against these categories: consider Jonathan Sterne’s work on the format in the history of sound, or Lisa Gitelman’s argument that “print culture” is not a unified field.22 Novels can also do the work of theorizing media. S. offers a model for how we might take seriously the particularity of different media without reifying these differences. S. reaffirms the print book through the embrace rather than the exclusion of other media. When we ask what role the print novel continues to play in an age of digital media and digital reproduction, one answer is its ability to reflect on and reenact reading practices. S. forms a narrative about books through the book itself, via its “medial mise-en-abyme”: as Abrams and Dorst write in the iBooks preface, Jen’s and Eric’s world “is a world of found items, clues, pieces of ephemera, and the intimacy of handwriting on paper. The physical edition of S. offers its readers all of this in precisely the way that the characters offer it to each other.”23 As an auratic facsimile, S. models the ways that readers imbue their books with meaning. It also demonstrates how novels might serve as examples for writers’ continued engagement with new media, creating new literary genres that challenge expectations about media and explore the stakes of fiction and narrative immersion.

References Abrams, J.J., and Doug Dorst. 2013. Preface. In S, iBooks ed. New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Co. ———. 2013. S. New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Co. Bae, Paul, and Terry Miles. 2015–2017. The Black Tapes. TheBlackTapesPodcast. com. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. ———. 2016. Hi Reddit! We’re Paul Bae (u/MrCantDo) and Terry Miles (u/PNWSTM). Our podcast about interesting professions somehow morphed into something else called The Black Tapes Podcast. And we don’t regret it […] yet! This is an AMA so go for it! Reddit,

22 See Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format Toward a Media History of Documents.

and Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge:

23 On medial mise-en-abyme, see Alexander Starre’s Metamedia.

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April 7. https://www.reddit.com/r/PNWS/comments/4dtwm2/hi_reddit_ were_paul_bae_umrcantdo_and_terry_miles/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Benjamin, Walter. 1968a. Unpacking My Library (1931). In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 59–67. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1968b. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217–251. New York: Schocken Books. Berman, Aaron. 2013. The Most Complex Project of 2013? PaperSpecs, 10 December. https://www.paperspecs.com/caught-our-eye/s-by-jjabrams-com plex-project/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Best Sellers—Hardcover Fiction. 2013. The New York Times, December 9. Bobeany (username). 2016. Re: Can’t/Won’t Listen to the Unsound. Reddit, October 27. https://www.reddit.com/r/PNWS/comments/59pzll/ cantwont_listen_to_the_unsound/. Accessed 31 Mar 2020. Brady, Matthew. 2013. Why Do Young Readers Prefer Print to ebooks? The Guardian, December 4. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/ 2013/dec/04/ebooks-amazon. Accessed 31 March 2020. Colbert News Hub. 2013. Episode no. 10028, Guest: J. J. Abrams. Comedy Central, November 21. https://www.colbertnewshub.com/2013/11/22/ november-21-2013-j-j-abrams/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Collins, Billy. 2011. Marginalia. In Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, 94–96. New York: Random House. Crane, Walter. 2014. Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahlström, Mats. 2011. A Book of One’s Own: Examples of Library Book Marginalia. In The History of Reading, Volume 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics, ed. Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed, 115–132. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Lennard J. 1983. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dorst, Doug (@dougdorst). 2014. ICYMI: Straka’s Original Ending for Ship of Theseus May Have Been Found. Twitter, July 9. https://twitter.com/dou gdorst/status/486745159036448768. Accessed 31 March 2020. Dorst, Doug. 2014. Interview by Kaite Stover. YouTube, uploaded by The Kansas City Public Library, May 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZGVPR 2Do0k. Accessed 31 March 2020. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision. In Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace, ed.

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Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, and Jessica Pressman, 100–126. New York: Fordham University Press. Hill, Logan. 2013. A Long Time Ago, in a Universe More Analog. New York Times, October 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/books/j-j-abr ams-and-doug-dorst-collaborate-on-a-book-s.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Jackson, H.J. 2001. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Transmedia Storytelling 101. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 21. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_ 101.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Marino, Mark C., et al. 2011. The LA Flood Project. http://laflood.citychaos. com. Accessed 31 March 2020. Milton, John. 1848. Areopagitica. In The Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. J. A. St. John. London: Henry G. Bohn. Liu, Ziming. 2008. Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age. Westport, CT and London: Libraries Unlimited. Marino, Mark C., and Rob Wittig. 2012. Netprov: Elements of an Emerging Form. Dichtung Digital 42. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/en/journal/akt uelle-nummer/?postID=577. Accessed 31 March 2020. Perrin, Andrew. 2016. Book Reading 2016. Pew Research Center, September 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Pressman, Jessica. 2009. The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature. Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4) (Fall): 465–482. Robb, Alice. 2015. 92 Percent of College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to E-readers. The New Republic, January 14. https://newrepublic.com/ article/120765/naomi-barons-words-onscreen-fate-reading-digital-world. Accessed 31 March 2020. Rothman, Joshua. 2013. The Story of “S”: Talking with J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The New Yorker, November 23. https://www.newyorker.com/books/ page-turner/the-story-of-s-talking-with-j-j-abrams-and-doug-dorst. Accessed 31 March 2020. Rose057 (username). 2016. Is This Real? Reddit, June 30. https://www.reddit. com/r/PNWS/comments/4qo1d7/is_this_real/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Rowberry, Simon Peter. 2017. Ebookness. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23 (3): 289–305. Southward, Daniel. 2015. Defeat Is Good for Art: The Metamodern Impulse in Gothic Metafiction. Studies in Gothic Fiction 4: 30–41.

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Stanhope, Kate. 2017. ‘Mind MGMT,’ ‘Flutter’ Adaptations in the Works at UCP as Dark Horse Re-ups Pact. The Hollywood Reporter, July 17. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mind-mgmt-flutter-adapta tions-works-at-ucp-as-dark-horse-ups-pact-1021851. Accessed 31 March 2020. Starre, Alexander. Media Theory as Book Theory: From the Technologies of Writing to the Materialities of Reading. Unpublished manuscript. Starre, Alexander. 2015. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Superdudeo (username). 2015. The Black Tapes Podcast—Is it Fiction? Reddit, September 21. https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/3lu 50r/the_black_tapes_podcast_is_it_fiction/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Tanderup, Sara. 2016. Nostalgic Experiments: Memory in Anne Carson’s Nox and Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’ S. Image & Narrative 17 (3): 46–56. TheBlackTapesPodcast. n.d. About the show. http://theblacktapespodcast.com/ new-page-1-1-1. Accessed 31 March 2020. The Fourth (username). 2013. Re: Eotvos Wheel Code. Comment on Eotvos Wheel Code on SFiles22, November 13. http://sfiles22.blogspot.com/2013/ 11/eotvos-wheel-code.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Walpole, Horace. 2003. The Castle of Otranto. In The Castle of Otranto and the Mysterious Mother, ed. Frederick S. Frank. Ontario: Broadview.

CHAPTER 15

Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/ Selling the Goods Claire Squires

The gatekeeping orientation, evaluative processes, and decision-making role of the commissioning editor are central to traditional publishing practices. How-to guides and publishing studies textbooks articulate the centrality of editors and their intermediary role between author and reader (e.g., Smith and Ramdarshan Bold 2018; Clark and Phillips 2019), and such jobs are recognized, and prized, by would-be entrants into the industry (e.g., Baverstock et al. 2008). Yet there are still few scholarly accounts which go beyond descriptions of organizational processes, or get under the skin of the industry’s own capacity for mythmaking, particularly with regard to the publishing of novels. In her series of interviews with editors, Greenberg comments that editing “happens behind the scenes,” is “not talked about very often” and that her interviews are “an attempt to fill some of the gaps and silences” (2015: 1). This chapter seeks to address further these knowledge gaps and silences in understandings of the publisher’s editor and their decision-making

C. Squires (B) University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK © The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_15

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processes, situated within the networked industry and its market environment. It does so by positing a conceptual framework indicated in the chapter title: “sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods.” This framework incorporates the affective, and often bodily processes of reading novels (“sensing”), alongside the matching of taste to communicative processes and an envisioning of the material book-as-product (“seeing”), culminating in the commercial impetus of books-as-goods (“selling”). In so doing, it seeks to “zoom in” to the particularities of cultural judgment, in Stewart’s phrase, thereby enabling an understanding of “the dynamics of the evaluative moment” which is attendant to individual subjectivities, network-based thinking, and sociologically grounded decisions (2013: 120, 127). In the development of this framework, the chapter draws substantially on primary data, in the form of a series of nineteen semi-structured interviews with commissioning editors for UK-based publishing houses. The process of editing, and those who carry it out, is a crucial aspect of the network of value creation in the publishing of novels. The houses ranged from conglomerates to mid-sized companies to small and micro businesses, with the interviewed editors commissioning novels across a range of sectors, including literary fiction, crime, and children’s books.1 Through the interviews and the framework generated to examine them, the chapter provides an account of the often sensory and passional ways in which editors recount their experiences of commissioning, both as a lived, felt experience but also as part of a professional discourse and an economic practice. These findings thus respond to Henningsgaard’s call for interviews with industry professionals to address their “reading” and “narrated experiences” (2019). As such, the chapter also investigates the novel (as the primary focus of the commissioning practices discussed in the interviews) as an aesthetic and commercial good with values derived from a variety of taste and value regimes, stemming from professional networks, and which are constructed by various hierarchies (including the structural and systemic), alongside their own intrinsic, crafted, and aesthetic qualities. Additionally, in the chapter’s exploration of the sensory ways in which editors narrate their experiences of commissioning, both as 1 My acknowledgments are due to Rachel Noorda for transcription, funded by the University of Stirling Division of Literature & Languages. Ethics approval for the interviews was granted by the University of Stirling General University Ethics Panel. The interviewees are anonymized.

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a lived, felt experience, but also as part of a professional discourse, it also considers the potential elision of the labor and (demographic) positioning of cultural intermediaries in such a narrative, and also how such narratives interact with conceptualizations of “objective” qualities of text, and of authorial “genius.” Such narratives have self-mythologizing as well as mystifying tendencies which are explored later in the chapter, and which interrelate with the seeming need to occlude or render invisible aspects of professionalized reading and evaluation practices. Much of the understanding underpinning this chapter derives from but extends beyond existing accounts of commissioning, decision-making, and editorial choices in the book publishing industry (e.g., Thompson 2012; Stewart 2018). It also draws on accounts of taste-making and value construction both of literature in the marketplace, but also from broader cultural sociological spheres (e.g., Radway 1997, Fuller and Rehberg Sedo 2013; Leypoldt 2017; Stewart 2014; Banks 2017). Additionally, it can usefully be read in parallel to—as it builds upon and beyond—my own article “Taste and/or Big Data?: Post-Digital Editorial Selection” (2017b), which utilizes the same dataset of interviews.2 This chapter continues that analysis of the “dynamics of the evaluative moment” in the publishing industry through its investigation of pre-publication, professionalized reading. This chapter, then, is structured into three parts, reflecting the framework of “sensing the novel, seeing the book, selling the goods.” Each section draws on primary data from the interview set described above, which are interpreted throughout the chapter via broader analyses of the aesthetic, sensual, and commercial nature of cultural properties.

Sensing the Novel My interviews began by asking editors whether they identified with a prevailing industry discourse about reading for acquisition, which centers on gut instinct (Squires 2017b). My interviewees did identify with, and frequently use, this discourse, as I explored in my previous article: “it’s

2 Within the frame of publishing’s operations in a post-digital age, “Taste and/or Big Data?” (Squires 2017b) articulates how publishing nonetheless remains a largely traditional process, in which the individual editor’s taste, judgment, and gut instinct combines with company behavior and market environment, rather than via an incorporation of the big data of algorithmic processes.

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more a kind of emotional feeling, or something in the pit of your stomach … it’s all quite an unconscious thing to be honest … instinctive, yes, no, yeah, or feeling that something is right”; “You almost learn to trust how your body is reacting to something because those books that you got super excited about are then going to be a hit, and then you think, ‘I’ve got that feeling again.’” The responses detailed are augmented by others from across my interview sample, in which are expressed additional sensory explanations for the moment of reading. One of these is that the encounter between editor and book ideally makes the heart “rac[e]” or “fires me up totally.” For another editor, a book has potential to make her “literally feel kind of electrified … absolutely utterly … cattle-prodded by the book” (although this was made in references to a book that the interviewee should perhaps not buy, indicating a degree of textual coercion). Experienced editors “learn to trust how your body is reacting to something,” and tell themselves, as one editor from an independent company put it, “I’ve got that feeling again.”3 Such sensations, described repeatedly in physical, visceral terms, were also articulated in terms of “love” or “passion,” in which the individual editor’s emotions as well as physical feelings were stirred while reading. A conglomerate-based editor explained that “we only buy books really that we love,” and that while reading as an editor “you want to … fall in love with it.” This editor reflected on her commissioning decisions, describing them using language similar to love at first sight: “I think the more you go on, the more you realise that all the books I’ve bought, are the books I’ve loved pretty much from the first page, or the first chapter, there’s something about it…” (It is notable that in a 70-minute interview, this particular interviewee used the term “love” or “loved” thirty-three times.) An editor at a mid-sized company described the importance of an affective relationship to her potential purchases: I read as a reader first and foremost, and I think my taste is aligned with other readers out there, but I personally would feel it very difficult to take on a book that I didn’t feel very passionate about, because you’ve got to live with it for 12 months, the publishing schedules are quite long, 12-18 months; you’ve got to read it, re-read it, re-read it again at least six times.

3 The learned aspects of using instincts and gut feelings are investigated further in Squires (2017b).

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Such construction of feelings toward the novels which editors have under consideration is also crucial to the ongoing process of commissioning and publishing, as the next section on “Seeing the Book” examines. However, some editors were keen to assert that their (initial) feelings toward a book were not driven by any sense of the market, or its potential and eventual readers. “It’s the book itself,” as another conglomerate editor put it, referring to their sense of the text’s intrinsic, aesthetic qualities. My interviewees, then, sought to assert the primacy of the text under consideration in front of them, and alongside the sensory effects of these texts, they were also keen to emphasize the affective space of their initial reading. Such emphases referred to their own private reading habits, and how those habits and their sensory and emotive reactions to texts then informed their professionalized reading practices. These accounts are productive in the examination of the “narrated experience” of reading by editors argued for by Henningsgaard (2019). These narratives are, I would argue, part of publishing’s normative discourse about the “dynamics of the evaluative moment.” This discourse is also an example of the self-mythologizing tendency of these accounts, in which the cultural object—in this case, the novel which is to become the book and eventually the goods—affects the reader bodily, insisting on their attention, and creating a pattern which will, ideally, then be imprinted onto future reading moments, in the company, in the trade, and for future readers. In these accounts, the novel achieves its own valency and capacity to affect readers, rendering these attributes central to the decision-making moment, rather than any external, sociologically informed attributes. Despite their insistence on their reading as readers first and foremost, however, all my interviewees were nonetheless able to articulate and occasionally understand as problematic their sociodemographic positioning. In a period in which the whiteness, London-centric and middle-class nature of UK publishing is increasingly evidenced and interrogated in industry and scholarly accounts, my interviewees demonstrated some understanding of the potential effects of their identities on their commissioning practice and their (often privileged pathways) to the attainment of the status of commissioning editor, particularly when I explicitly questioned them about politics, identity, and ideology and publishing’s “diversity deficit” (see Saha 2016; Squires 2017a; Brook et al. 2018; Ramdarshan Bold 2019). That said, the editors even then frequently restated the primacy of the text and their affective encounters with it.

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If texts are understood, as argued by Banks, as one of a range of “cultural objects”—“complex entities that have aesthetic properties and effects that might be regarded as objective—as well as subjectively apprehended and socially made” (2017b: 35–6)—these editors’ narrated experiences of their encounters with such objects can be read as prioritizing the objective qualities of the text, as well as the subjectivity of their reading experiences, albeit with an awareness of their particularized subject positionings, their organizational contexts, and market environment. My interviewees’ remarks about texts’ objective qualities also occasionally referred to their potential lack of literary merit, with one experienced independent editor reflecting humorously on her early career reading through unsolicited, non-agented submissions:

[Interviewee:] When I first did work experience twenty years ago, my job was to go through the slush pile.4 I could not believe it. I was like, “Oh my God, they’re trusting this with me. Wow, this is crazy.” And then about six manuscripts in, I was like, “Oh, I get it now.” [CS:] It’s not that hard? [Interviewee:] It really isn’t. Yeah. A cat could do this.

While the image of a feline acquisitions editor comedically undermines the human agency of editorial selection, such exaggeration nonetheless reasserts the qualities of the literary text undergoing editorial consideration. This interviewee states that such qualities—or at least the failure to maintain minimum objective standards—are readily discernible, even to a new entrant to the publishing industry. Such an intentional overstatement of the ease of separating good from bad submissions might find a computational parallel in the claims of Archer and Jockers in The Bestseller Code (2016), to the effect that bestsellers can be identified by (complex and yet non-human) computer modeling. Rowberry (2019) argues that “Archer and Jockers’ approach removes the agency of readers” (240) and, moreover, that “big data in publishing cannot rest on the laurels of analyzing sales figures, but must instead triangulate various data points to understand what is read and 4 The publisher’s “slush pile” is comprised of unagented manuscripts submitted to publishers; frequently also referred to as “unsolicited.”

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how. A formula built upon both content and context allows insight into the reading process” (240–1). My previous examination of these claims (2017b) led to an emphasis on the situated practices of professionalized reading by acquisitions editors, an approach that this chapter furthers. Indeed, several editors expressed to me how their reading instincts— and their sense of market—developed as their career progressed, a process of melding instinct, taste, logic, and learning (see Squires 2017b). This process was articulated as, moreover, a negotiation, a process of “constantly navigating” between instinct and “your reality of what’s possible [in the marketplace],” as one conglomerate editor phrased it. Another conglomerate editor talked about working out her taste on the job, alongside her knowledge of the requirements of the publisher’s list into which she was acquiring books. The conglomerate editor who referred to her constant navigation between instinct and the possibilities of the market also discussed a move from a love-at-first-sight sensation to one invested in the qualities and power of the book itself, or rather two particular books which she deemed her most successful, as an editor: “in both cases I knew within a page that this was going to be amazing. And there was just something about those books that had a charisma about them and a compulsion, if you like.” The “charisma” of a book might, for this particular editor, be understood as the affective pull of her first reading, aligning her sensations with publishing’s discourse of sensory and passional relationships to texts which are not yet books. They also relate to a theorization of how a book might be received in both cultural and economic terms through what Leypoldt has termed “charismatic trust” (following Shils’ adaptation of Weberian terminology into that of “charismatic value”) (2017, 58). “Literary products,” argues Leypoldt, “involve cultural frameworks that make them multi-dimensional and incommensurable, so that choosing between them poses a degree of uncertainty,” making cultural consumers “invariably enter what Karpik calls a ‘judgment-market’ embedded within social networks” (57). The particular “social networks” in the case of professionalized readers are also, in this case, business networks which are generative of the “judgment-market.” As Leypoldt continues, in order to “choose and appreciate fiction in today’s extensive field of cultural production,” we “fall back on complex evaluation regimes to which we extend a degree of trust.” These might include “public and private networks of expertise, including various kinds of rankings, brandings, or product identities”—the “bookshop around

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the corner, our favourite critic at the Guardian, Oprah Winfrey, the Booker Prize committee, or our most reliable aunt” (57, 58). These latter are forms of “calculative trust,” “if we know our desire relatively well” (57). But when that desire is not so statable or even quantifiable, Leypoldt argues that a “more complex kind of trust”—“charismatic trust”—comes into play, a trust by which certain “products can embody ‘something larger’ in our culture,” a quality that has something of the “sacral” in it (58, 59). If a book becomes “attached to the literary field’s charismatic space,” that space has the potential to “turn … it into an object of strong value” (65) bringing to it the status of “hypergoods” (59) or, alternately, “meta-goods,” which are “borne partly from their own objective qualities and partly from our subjective engagements with them” (Banks 2017: 33). For the editor who referred to the “charisma” of her career-defining acquisitions, the primary recognition of that attribute came from the “page,” a seemingly textual recognition and a subjective “compulsion” that nonetheless swiftly turned into a marketable proposition, which is quickly shared with colleagues: the automatic thing you do then is get everyone else reading it, because you know … that’s its selling point. The selling point is that it will be a total word-of-mouth book and for everyone who reads it, they will press it onto someone else. So all you’re doing is … what the market will do. And you want, with what that kind of book … is as many people reading it as possible, even if it’s just the first few pages … that’s what helps you buy it, because if twenty other people running around the company going, ‘Oh my god this book’s amazing. Oh my god have you heard about it?’… And you’re going, there’s something about this book it’s almost inevitable. That’s very rare.

Such a rapid transition might seem to fall into the definition of “calculative trust:” a quantifiable number of people have read and been affected by the book; a pre-emptive, even Baudrillardian precessional simulacrum (1994) of “just doing what the market will do” through its creation of networked word-of-mouth and—it is to be supposed—an inevitable marketplace success. And yet the explanation for why these particular books, rather than others, remains under-explained as to how the aesthetic attributes of what is presented on the page might align with a “charismatic space,” which is as much external and “conceptual” as aesthetic.

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Leypoldt’s argues that “since literature as a medium tends to fall somewhere between relatively somatic and relatively conceptual forms, we need to look at each individual case,” meaning that for any individual text a perception based on the sensory effects produced is created alongside intellectual understandings of it and the “charismatic pull” of wider, “conceptual frames” which the text might embody (2017: 67, 66). The articulation of this interviewee’s charismatic texts is, in fact, very circular: “everyone else reading it … that’s its selling point. The selling point is that it will be a total word-of-mouth book and for everyone who reads it, they will press it onto someone else. So all you’re doing is … what the market will do.” The networked, charismatic space, then, is one that wants to read, voraciously and hungrily, and share, and read, and share. Such a charismatic space is one into which the book, if it meets the editor’s taste and market judgment, the company positioning and market environment, might find its marketplace success, its physical form, and its communicative functions, as the next section explores further.

Seeing the Book So what happens when the editor considers the continuation of the passional affair with a novel they’ve read? A conglomerate editor explains: “a lot of it essentially comes down to, do I just love this book? Am I really excited by it? Is this something, which to me, I feel like I can talk about endlessly for a year, or two years, because publishing is such a long process.” This short excerpt demonstrates a rapid transition from an immediate sense of love to one that can sustain a long-term relationship. The “long process” of publishing—in which the period from acquisition to publishing an initial edition can easily be up to a year—requires seemingly “endless” talk about the book, and a concomitant commitment and energy. The editor’s comment translates what might seem an overly intense expression of desire for a book (“Would you jump off a bridge for this book?,” as one editor said a previous manager had expressed it) to one in which passion engineers marketplace success. Numerous interviewees talked about having sufficient passion to get their titles through acquisitions meetings—“you have to get the passion going”—with the need for passion to translate into a company process. As another conglomerate editor stated, as an editor, “you drive the entire publication.” One editor at a mid-sized company explained she needed to get thirty people

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(effectively the whole company) to work with her on a book. The requirements for such work were made evident by one interviewee: “You need to have a sort of lightness and energy to want to acquire things and see, to have that hope. Because most publishing fails and so most things fail, so you have to have a sort of endless spring of optimism within you.” The “hope” required in taking a book to an acquisitions meeting in a midsized to larger company can become exhausting, as the “endless spring of optimism” can get “sort of bashed out of you.” These are expressions of emotional labor and its alienating tendencies more productively read through subsequent theorizations of Hochschild’s concept (1983), which rather than dichotomize notions of “surface” and “deep acting,” see the incorporation of the seemingly authentic, private self (i.e., reading as readers) drawn upon in the emotional, sometimes alienating, often wearying, labor of the commodified, public self (e.g., Brook 2009, and in particular relation to creative labor Grindstaff 2008; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008). My interviews with editors revealed a normative narrative by industry professionals of the requirement for such forms of labor in the commissioning process. The same editor who mentioned “optimism” getting “bashed out of you” also discussed a phase in her career where her commissioning rate at the high-prestige, mid-sized company that she then worked for was diminished, describing how she (“you”) “can also have a sense that your good taste is somehow confirmed by the fact that you turn lots of stuff down.” In her introduction to her book of interviews with editors, Greenberg writes: “In the popular imagination, the editor is a passive creature, busy telling people ‘No’” (2015: 4). And as I previously argued, this “popular imagination … casts the editor as the ‘gatekeeper,’, with ‘selection’ at the heart of that process” (2017b: 27). Publishing’s gatekeeping function thus has a complex and dynamic relationship with publishing’s commercial functions, in which the exhaustion of emotional labor leads to a (temporarily) alienating turn from positive decisions and fulfilling desires to publish, to one in which negative decisions seem to align with regimes of taste. Another editor, who also discussed her selection in terms of “love,” linked it to a professionalized exploitation of her authentic sensibilities: “the books that I publish are genuinely books that I love and would read in my spare time, so there is a definite crossover there … I am encouraged, as are my colleagues … to buy books that I really love, like something that is prized and important.” This editor demonstrates how her passion for

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her books is a valued commodity within her company. This “feeling for books,” in Janice Radway’s (1997) formulation, sees emotional attachment to books and an ideological belief in their importance, meeting marketplace behavior. It is also useful to read such statements of the “passion for reading” through understandings of cultural workers, as Fuller and Rehberg Sedo do in Reading Beyond the Book (accompanied as they are by a frequent “narrative of fatigue, overwork, and overtime labor”; 2013: 164, 190). Gatekeeping is thus posited as a function that aligns a sense of taste with a weariness derived from emotional labor. This function then simultaneously constructs that taste somewhat cynically in its assertion of aesthetic values, and repeatedly excludes sociodemographics, as described earlier. My interviewees went on to describe the challenge of conveying their passion for a particular text, and taking a book forwards via their company processes. Much of this work is done with an understanding, and a sense of “fit,” between the individual’s own taste, and that of the company’s requirements and market demands (Squires 2017b: 30–31). Across the interviewees, a range of workplace cultures was depicted. One conglomerate editor described heads of department as being “expected to respond in terms of their job roles (e.g. sales director, marketing director), addressing, for example, whether it might sell through supermarket chains, or how the market for particular genres was moving” (32). This decision-making makes use of the knowledge and networks of the industry professionals; “calculative trust,” in other words. Another interviewee, based at a large but not conglomerate company, described their editorial meeting as “half book club, half commercial assessment,” where various attributes of the text were discussed at the meeting. Another editor, however, talked about her mid-sized company having “a real reading culture,” whereas, she stated, “in a more commercial place, most people will read very little, people worry about the comparisons, and where it sits in the market.” The same editor talked about needing to get colleagues to “buy into the vision” of the book, which could be a commercial decision based on experiential attributes in order “to sell the book as a reading experience,” and steering colleagues to “seeing, feeling that they can see the opportunity, because they can sometimes not like it, but appreciate how it could work.” Such decisionmaking hovers between “calculative” and “charismatic trust,” between intellectual understandings and the text’s “charismatic pull,” discussed in

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the previous section. This configuration of decision-making can intensify the challenge of emotional labor, as the editor seeks to align his or her feelings, taste, and market judgment to company positioning and market environment. This process of encouraging colleagues to “buy into the vision” is a “seeing” of the book which can take material and communicative forms as well as perceiving its experiential affects. The editor who talked about her charismatic career texts also spoke of their shareability: a “word-of-mouth” chain of communication from company to external environment, modeling “what the market will do.” This pattern is one I analyzed with regard to Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), where the idea of “word-of-mouth” was then used as the marketing message for the book (2007: 107– 115). Similarly, one conglomerate editor mentioned her preparation for the acquisitions meeting, thinking about the “marketing pitch,” and “how would you recommend it”—not just to her colleagues, but for her colleagues to do so through their business networks and the book supply chain. This is an envisaging of the book and its marketplace journey: “where you would sell it, what you compare it to, interesting things about the author, has it sold internationally, what can we do in terms of marketing, publicity.” Another editor explained this explicitly as articulating “my vision” for the book; “how I see it … How will I publish it?” This “vision” is also a material one, particularly in terms of the book’s cover (one of the industry’s key modes of flagging genre and marketplace expectation [see Genette 1997; Squires 2007; Matthews and Moody 2007]). The book becomes, at this point, “a more solid object in your mind.” For editors, commercial understanding also means a very quick apprehension of the novel as good, of the materiality of the text under consideration under marketable, commodifiable form. Editors sometimes “see” the book, or rather envision it, and use that vision to articulate where the book will sit on the bookshop shelf, and what kind of messages will be conveyed paratextually to the reader. One conglomerate editor talked about this commercial turn from passion to paratext in the commissioning process: first and foremost it is always, I just love this book, but … often I’m thinking about jackets as well … the more you do of briefing jackets with the designers, the more … you’re thinking when you’re reading, I would do this, for this kind of book, and I think the ones where I can’t work out

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what to put on the cover, are the ones that quite often say to me…you don’t quite know what kind of book this is.

Similarly, the editor who talked about her “vision” of the book elaborated upon this process of envisioning the materiality of the book, derived from her initial reading experience, and communicated to her company and colleagues, with a communicable “vision for how you would like it to market:” I need to have a sense of what I think it should look like … lots of people feed into it, but unless the editor has got a really clear picture of what they want it to be, it can become a very long and drawn-out process … the best you can hope for is that it will start to come to you as you’re reading. This sort of image will work as the cover, that’s the sort of copy you want. And you start to assemble all the bits of the beast quite quickly. And hopefully you’ll lead, you’ll sort of take everyone with you. If you’re clear about what you want it to be.

The immanence of the “solid object” is—as well as in material paratexts such as the cover, and marketing messages such as its genre placement— related to the editorial process, and the submitted text’s transition into a finished book. For several editors, the book presented to them was one for which they saw “potential,” rather than a completed, already fixed, text. The editorial process and a capacity to contribute to a novel’s development into a successful book (be it commercially or aesthetically), was key to many editors’ decisions as they articulated them in interview, as was an author’s readiness to engage in an editorial process. Editors appreciate their role as textual intermediaries and assert it behind the scenes as a crucial part of their role, but in public, as one conglomerate editor put it, “by your nature as an editor, you want your writers to be the one at the front, and you want to always talk about how brilliant our writers are.” Such a tendency effaces the work of the cultural intermediary in public discussions of editing, making the process of structural editing as occluded as the process of evaluation can be mystified. This tendency fits with remarks made by literary agent Carole Blake in interview with Susan Greenberg, in terms of why it might be expedient to keep the editing process invisible: “The author has to be the central person in the whole business. If the publishing business inserts itself into the imagination of the reader, that would make for a less satisfying read” (2015: 123).

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This tendency therefore makes of editorial decision-making a “black box” similar to that discussed by Moeran (2012) with regard to cultural awards judgment, and unpacked in Marsden and my account of literary prize judging (2019). However, the editor who discussed the wish for their “writers to be the one at the front” simultaneously perceived there to be a danger in this tendency, in which the occlusion of the editor—and more generally, the publisher’s—role undermines the value publishing brings to books in the age of self-publishing, a value that could be expressed as the professionalized transition of novels to books and then goods. Feeling “protective” of their authors, that they “might not deliver the most perfect thing first off,” can at the same time deny the work of the publisher, when “we also somehow need to explain what we’re doing for our author.” It is also part of Greenberg’s scholarly desire to render the act of editing visible (2015, 2018). Indeed for one small press publisher in my interview sample, perceiving and enacting editorial work on a text was frequently a central part of the attraction of a submitted text, one which fits into the broader narrative of this section of “seeing the book”: all of our books have gone through three to four drafts and quite close editorial interaction … that’s partially because when we see something that we think, “This could be magic” … I love that. It’s like you’ve got a crumpled shirt and an ironing board and you keep ironing and keep ironing and it’s lovely to kind of see it taking shape, that process.

The “taking shape” of the book is thus a material metaphor, a set of marketing activities and, eventually, an act of material production which all leads to “selling the goods,” as the final section of this chapter outlines.

Selling the Goods Commissioning editors, then, translate their affective, bodily (“sensing”) responses to novels, alongside their market knowledge and capacity for envisioning and editing books (“seeing”) into the commercial practice of “selling” the goods. This latter impetus toward the book as commercial property is often depicted as the central tension of publishing in the creative economy, with aesthetic goods positioned as the “culture and commerce” of publishing (Coser et al. 1982). This is another normative account of the industry, one which is frequently repeated in scholarly

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accounts. But this chapter makes a different argument, seeing the process of sensing-seeing-selling articulated here as a networked praxis in which aesthetic objects, individual professionalized readers, publishing processes, company formations, material embodiments, and market environments come together. The communicative process detailed earlier, in which commissioning editors decide upon which texts to take to acquisitions meetings, is enmeshed in the language of markets, buying and selling. As detailed above, this is the process of getting colleagues to “buy into the vision,” and “sell[ing] the book [to them] as a reading experience.” The process of acquisition—the publishing company “buying” the book from the author or via the author’s agent—then transitions into one of selling to onwards markets: booksellers and readers, but also potentially through rights sales into translation and other publishing territories. Such decisions are frequently couched in terms of what readers might make of the book, both in textual and material forms, as the “reading experience,” the physical book, and the potential commodity. These decisions require editors and their colleagues to assess the commercial possibilities of a text as well as its eventual appeal to readers. One interviewee, a conglomerate editor, talked about her liking for selling books, an explicitly “commercial sensibility” as she phrased it. Another editor, in a mid-sized company, described “the talent of the editor” as residing in “marrying up a book they can bring value to, that they can buy cheaply, and their company can publish well.” One of the micropublishers in my sample articulated her commissioning decisions around a form of trusting economic exchange, belying normative narratives around the perceived differences of small publishers (further explored in Squires 2020). For this interviewee, the idea of the commerciality of a book resided in its appeal (or lack thereof) to potential readers. While operating with a strongly articulated sense of “mission” and personal taste, this editor talked about how a subscription model makes the relationship with consumers very direct: [We’re] catering for a number of people, and not everyone is interested in dark, twisted, female monologues…[her favored genre]. The subscription model works on trust. The reader trusts [us] to make an informed choice, to make a similar choice, they’re giving away their money up front, and you have to earn that trust.

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Even if her company might not be considered at the commercial end of the marketplace, the editor nonetheless talked about the economic transaction of selling the goods (or in this particular sense, subscribing to the company’s list) and its interrelationship to her own affective and tastemaking processes. It is through this process of the melding of sensing, seeing, and selling that the editors carry out their work. There still remains an unknowability to this process even, seemingly, within the company itself. One conglomerate editor described this hardto-access conversion process: people … say, do you sit at your desk and read all day, and I’m like, no—I do that all in my spare time, but then people … say, but how do you know if a book is good or not, and how do you know when you’re bidding for a book how much … I remember … one of our finance team … saying, but I don’t understand how when … you say this is going to be a big book … how you know that’s different … It’s quite hard trying to explain … it just feels like something that’s got that appeal … I suppose it is all that … knowledge that you’ve got but to somebody who’s sitting there just being asked to put all the figures together, it probably does seem quite strange that last week I … said, we think we want to offer 20 grand for this, and then I’m saying, I think this is a book that will go for 200 grand.

The editor discussed her commercial sensibility as both a learned experience (“knowledge”), but also as a feeling. This fusion of learned and sensual experience parallels my previous findings, in which gut reactions develop over years as learned skills rather than pure instinct (Squires 2017b). But after this description of the fusion of the passional and the professional, the same editor who went onto explain that there is a tendency of editors to occlude these processes, not because they think they are “special,” or that “only we can tell,” but because of the wish for editors to “talk about how brilliant our writers are,” and, concomitantly, not to expose some of the intermediary activity undertaken in the editorial process (the “ironing” and “taking shape” discussed in “Seeing the Book”). The explicit linkage by this editor of an economic understanding of the book under consideration with a need—or at least wish—to hide intermediary processes and bolster a sense of “author genius” discussed earlier creates a degree of “mystique” around industry processes, as another conglomerate editor put it, which in itself is held to contribute to the process of selling the book. This particular editor’s explanation that her reading takes place “in my spare time” hints at another way in which

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the process of “sensing the novel” and various other occluded intermediary processes are constructed and (under-)valued. Another conglomerate editor perceived there to be “a sort of self-mythologising about the industry about using those words about gut and instinct when actually we’re talking about amortising risk.” In conclusion, then, this chapter’s conceptualizations of sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods, work toward a deeper understanding of the gatekeeping orientation, evaluative processes, and decision-making role of the commissioning editor. It also flags up some challenges in the discourse and demographic positionings of editors, and the larger cultural-economic environments of the industry in which they operate. Constructing business decisions as affective and individualized responses occludes both the economic and cultural work undertaken by the publishing industry, as well as the networked nature of the novel. Publishers have an important role in the creation of literary value, but acknowledging that role—at least in the context of the current UK market—can be problematic. Instead publishers perform discursive negotiations that mystify and mythologize business processes, tend toward eliding their own professionalism and skillsets, and evade difficult conversations around (the lack of) diversity and inclusivity in the publishing workforce. A retreat into a language of affect, or “sensing,” thus sidesteps conversations about “the goods” (and publishing’s seeming cultural/commercial divide), but also retreats from interrogating cultural taste formation, its ideological operations and identity work. Such interrogations are necessary and important, particularly in an industry which has evident challenges in terms of its homogenous staffing base and the ensuing implications for cultural production and access. These interrogations are also, I would argue, imperative in order to get beyond the mythologizing tendencies of normative industry discourse, the frequent occlusions of labor, of positioning, and of processes. To understand these tendencies and occlusions should then enable a return to the discussion of the status of the cultural objects themselves, in ways which take on board their nature as aesthetic objects with formal attributes, genre allegiances, and literary histories, and in which the “value of cultural objects” is apprehended “in excess of that ascribed to them either as social facts or as commodities” (Banks 2017: 31). This will also enable an understanding of the operations of charismatic trust (Leypoldt 2017) and “a more nuanced, qualified and holistic approach that considers historical

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context, subjective appreciation and objective quality” (Banks 2017: 33). Although this chapter has only begun the job of accomplishing such an approach for the publishing industry, I would suggest that the formulation of sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods—a zooming in on the “dynamics of the evaluative moment” (Stewart 2013) in other words—is a productive way to begin that work. The process of sensing-seeing-selling, and its bringing together of the scrutiny of the aesthetic values of novels, the emotional labor of individual readers who assess them professionally, adjoined to the publishing processes, company formations, material embodiments, and market environments, might thus enable a fuller understanding of the networked praxis of literary evaluation.

References Archer, Jodie, and Matthew L. Jockers. 2016. The Bestseller Code. London: Allen Lane. Banks, Mark. 2017. Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Originally published 1981. Baverstock, Alison, Susannah Bowen, and Steve Carey. 2008. How to Get a Job in Publishing: A Really Practical Guide to Careers in Books and Magazines. London: A&C Black. Brook, Orian, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor. 2018. Panic!: Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries. http://createlondon.org/wp-con tent/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Cre ative-Industries1.pdf. Accessed 31 March 2020. Brook, Paul. 2009. The Alienated Heart: Hochschild’s ‘Emotional Labour’ Thesis and the Anticapitalist Politics of Alienation. Capital & Class 33 (2) (July): 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/030981680909800101. Clark, Giles, and Angus Phillips. 2019. Inside Book Publishing, 6th ed. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell. 1982. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. New York: Basic Books. Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; first published in France in 1987.

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Greenberg, Susan L. (ed.). 2015. Talk About Editing. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 2018. A Poetics of Editing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grindstaff, Laura. 2008. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henningsgaard, Per. 2019. Not Your Average Reader: Interviewing Literary Agents, Editors, and Publishers. Participations 16 (1) (May): 31. Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. 2008. Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7–8) (December): 97–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097798. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: California University Press. Leypoldt, Günter. 2017. Knausgaard in America: Literary Prestige and Charismatic Trust. Critical Quarterly 59 (3) (October): 55–69. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/criq.12357. Marsden, Stevie, and Claire Squires. 2019. The First Rule of Judging Club…: Inside the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4 (2) (December): 10. https://doi.org/10.20897/jcasc/6354. Matthews, Nicole, and Nickianne Moody (eds.). 2007. Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moeran, Brian. 2012. How to Award a Prize: An Ethnography of a Juried Ceramic Art Exhibition in Japan. Presented at The 7th Conference of the European Research Network Sociology of the Arts, Vienna, Austria. http:// openarchive.cbs.dk/handle/10398/8510. Accessed 31 March 2020. Radway, Janice A. 1997. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press. Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. 2019. Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom. London: Palgrave. Rowberry, Simon Peter. 2019. The Limits of Big Data for Analyzing Reading. Participations 16 (1) (May): 21. Saha, Anamik. 2016. The Rationalizing/Racializing Logic of Capital in Cultural Production. Media Industries Journal 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.3998/mij. 15031809.0003.101. Smith, Kelvin, and Melanie Ramdarshan Bold. 2018. The Publishing Business: A Guide to Starting Out and Getting On. London: Bloomsbury. Squires, Claire. 2007. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017a. Publishing’s Diversity Deficit. CAMEo Cuts 2, June 30. https://le.ac.uk/~/media/uol/docs/research-institutes/cameo/cameocuts/cameo-cuts-2-v1.pdf?la=en. Accessed 31 March 2020.

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———. 2017b. Taste and/or Big Data?: Post-Digital Editorial Selection. Critical Quarterly 59 (3) (October): 24–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12361. ———. 2020. The Passion and Pragmatism of the Small Publisher. In The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible, ed. Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska, and Leigh Wilson. Cham: Palgrave. Stewart, Simon. 2013. A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, Simon. 2018. Making Evaluative Judgements and Sometimes Making Money: Independent Publishing in the 21st Century. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 3 (2) (December): 10. https://doi.org/10. 20897/jcasc/3991. Thompson, John B. 2012. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.

CHAPTER 16

Shakespeare Novelized: Hogarth, Symbolic Capital, and the Literary Market Jeremy Rosen

In October 2015, in honor of the quadricentennial of William Shakespeare’s death, Penguin Random House launched its “Hogarth Shakespeare” series. For the series, the world’s largest trade publisher has commissioned an all-star roster of contemporary authors to rewrite the Shakespeare play of their choice as a novel.1 Hogarth Shakespeare thus joins a thriving trade in explicitly intertextual contemporary fiction. Lately, it seems you can’t flip through the 1 At the time of the writing of this essay, the series consists of: The Gap of Time (2015),

Jeanette Winterson’s version of The Winter’s Tale; Shylock Is My Name (2016), Howard Jacobson’s reimagining of The Merchant of Venice; Vinegar Girl (2016), Anne Tyler’s transposition of Taming of the Shrew into a Washington, DC suburb; Hag-Seed (2016), Margaret Atwood’s scrambling of The Tempest; and New Boy (2017), Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, set in the sixth grade of a DC elementary school. Hogarth promises further output from additional writers it has contracted, including a Hamlet by Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, a Macbeth by Norwegian crime novelist and international publishing superstar Jo Nesbo, and a King Lear by Edward St. Aubyn.

J. Rosen (B) University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_16

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Sunday book review, click around the literary corners the web, or browse the displays at your local bookstore without tripping over some stylishly packaged retelling, adaptation, spinoff, or sequel of a canonical literary text. One could adduce a great many examples: the boom in travesties like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009); a host of fantastic reworkings like Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) or Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), in which an American literature professor attempts to find the island of pure blackness that Edgar Allen Poe describes in his The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838); and the thriving genre I have dubbed “minor character elaboration,” in which contemporary authors convert formerly minor characters into protagonists, as in works from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) (Rosen). But perhaps the most similar recent venture is HarperCollins’ “Austen Project,” which the publisher launched with Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility in 2013, and followed up with Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey (2014), Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma (2014), and Curtis Sittenfeld Eligible (2016). In such publisher-driven series, we see clearly that the global conglomerates that dominate today’s publishing industry have found sequels and spinoffs of canonical texts to be attractive ventures. This essay seeks to explain why that is the case. It demonstrates that looking closely at series like HarperCollins’ Austen Project and Penguin Random House’s Hogarth Shakespeare helps illuminate several dynamics of today’s literary marketplace and genre system. The Hogarth Shakespeare and the wider boom in explicit, intertextual reworkings of canonical literary texts I have just outlined speak to phenomena in the contemporary novel only. If one were to tackle the larger field of intertextual production, one would of course have to address such diverse media as film, television, and theatrical adaptations, poetic allusion, and video game design. But a focus on these novelizations of Shakespearean drama can be particularly useful in bringing to the fore tensions in contemporary cultural production, because of the unique situation of the literary novel as a genre that has, since the early twentieth century, occupied an uneasy borderland between the realms of art and commerce.2 The writer who novelizes a Shakespearean tragedy enters into 2 For influential accounts of the novel’s uneasy straddling of art and commerce, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James and The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, where he seeks to

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a transhistorical dialogue between writers, and thus makes a bid to acquire at least some of the literary prestige of his or her illustrious predecessor. But the writer who novelizes Shakespeare, when commissioned to do so by a mega-publisher—by contrast to the theatre director who mounts a new production, for example—also makes his or her new book available to a large-scale audience; in the case of an international publishing conglomerate like Penguin Random House, that audience is the global marketplace for books. Intertextual novels like the Hogarth series thus offer a valuable opportunity to study the friction points in the literary novel, where claims to artistic seriousness rub up against the circulation of global capital. In the first half of this essay, I argue that these publisher-driven ventures reveal the ways in which today’s large-scale publishers spur intertextual genres, novelizations, and explicit rewritings and spinoffs, as a means of reducing risk and targeting audiences. Any established genre serves publishers as a technology that helps minimize the uniqueness and hence unpredictable sales of any given book (Radway 1991: 29–32). Revisions of canonical texts stand as a genre that is particularly attractive in the contemporary milieu because, in addition, it allows publishers to leverage the existing prestige of canonical authors and texts, of esteemed contemporary writers, and of renowned publishing houses—once independent and now the subsidiary imprints of large corporations—in pursuit of a “literary” readership. As these publishers trade on prestigious literary names that become brands in the contemporary marketplace (“the latest from Hogarth Shakespeare”; “the new novel by Booker-Prize-winner Howard Jacobson”), we see a blurring of the line between the literary and the commercial realm of genre fiction that has occurred in the wake of the publishing industry’s consolidation. Today, literary critics and writers of genre fiction often assert that “literary fiction” is also a genre—though they are often less apt to specify what the characteristics of that genre are (see, for example, Grossman 2012; cf. also Lanzendörfer in this volume). In looking closely at a series like Hogarth Shakespeare, we discover several internal and external features that constitute at least one strand of contemporary literary fiction. Literary fiction is a genre constituted in part by

complicate Pascale Casanova’s account of “a globalized literary space increasingly dominated by multinational media corporations who sell ‘products based on tested aesthetic formulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership,’” by adducing James English’s insights into literary prize culture, which “suggest[] the widespread persistence of an ideal of disinterested aesthetic value even now, in our hyper-capitalist age” (McGurl 2009: 328).

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extratextual features, such as the context of its production, marketing, and reception; it is fiction written by well-regarded, often prize-winning contemporary authors, published by prestige, literary imprints, reviewed in literary venues like The New York Times, and often appealing to a bibliophilic audience. If this definition looks tautological—literary fiction is fiction marketed and received as literary—it is important to note how this differs from earlier conceptions of literary art; it is not writing that is autonomous from the market and regulated only by the internal logic of the work itself or by the creative impulses of the artist; like genre fiction it is fiction produced and circulated through particular modes and sites of production, distribution, and consumption. These Hogarth novels also manifest their literariness through their use of intertextual genres. By alluding to and explicitly rewriting some of the most canonical works of the western literary tradition, these novels seek to strategically annex the symbolic capital, or prestige, of their precursors, appending themselves to that tradition and appealing to the taste of bibliophilic readers (see Bourdieu 1993: 138). In the second half of the essay, I look more closely at several novels in the Hogarth series, in particular Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, to show how these texts register anxieties about the role and distinctiveness of the literary in contemporary culture—anxieties that are brought to the fore by the authors’ participation in a publisher-driven intertextual series. The twin specters of unoriginality (because the authors are both rewriting Shakespearean plays and utilizing increasingly common genres of intertextual revision) and commercialism haunt these novels. In writing for “projects”—perhaps they could as easily be called “product lines”— conceived of and initiated by a massive global publishing conglomerate, the authors who participate in this series demonstrate varying degrees of discomfort with a mode of literary production that seems a far cry from the modernist ideal of autonomous production (see Goldstone 2013; Stinson 2017). In the Hogarth series, we discover an existential conflict in the heart of the contemporary literary novel: a desire to preserve the distinctive aura of the literary, battling with an inescapable recognition that the literary field is neither autonomous nor clearly distinguishable from the broader marketplace of cultural goods.

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Symbolic Capital and the Rage for Reboots Recruiting Shakespeare rewriters from the ample list of Penguin Random House authors, Hogarth Shakespeare joins today’s vogue for literary reboots. These authors do retain substantial creative independence in this arrangement, choosing, for the most part, which plays they will rewrite and how they will do so. Granted the first choice from the Bard’s corpus, Winterson made a decidedly weird pick in The Winter’s Tale. The people at Hogarth seemed uneager to continue leaving such consequential matters to the notoriously idiosyncratic taste of creative types. Hogarth reportedly refused Jacobson’s first several choices, and would not yield until the Jewish novelist agreed to adapt The Merchant of Venice, for the series’ second installment, which became Shylock Is My Name (see Alter 2015). While it is difficult to discern the degree to which editors and agents have urged their novelists in a particular direction, the resulting novels demonstrate wide variations in form and attitudes toward their predecessor texts. But my concern in this essay is less to examine the varied results Hogarth writers have produced with their assignment, and still less to lament that this arrangement is coercive or strangles the creative freedom of writers. I take it as axiomatic that autonomy is always only relative, that even the most commercial of artists retain some degree of autonomy (they can always quit), that even the most avantgarde producers are neither free of influence from social determinants nor able to escape awareness of their anticipated audience, including an intuitive understanding that other avant-garde producers will, paradoxically, expect the unexpected—that, within certain circles, it is conventional to flout convention. Here, I follow the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, who reminds us that “the liberty of writers and artists … is purely formal; it constitutes no more than the condition of their submission to the laws of the market of symbolic goods, that is, to a form of demand which necessarily lags behind the supply of the commodity (in this case, the work of art). They are reminded of this demand through sales figures and other forms of pressure, explicit or diffuse, exercised by publishers, theatre managers, art dealers” (Bourdieu 1993: 114). Rather than chide writers for any perceived capitulation to such pressure—in Bourdieu’s conception and my own, such pressures are inescapable, even if strenuously disavowed—this essay seeks to explain why we are seeing such series in the first place, why publishers are launching them, investing sizable resources

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in author advances and marketing, and to demonstrate what these series reveal about the contemporary marketplace for literary novels. The principal facet of this marketplace made visible by series like Hogarth Shakespeare is the way today’s mega-publishers rely on the name recognition and prestige of canonical and established contemporary authors to stand out in an increasingly overcrowded cultural field. It seems unlikely that Penguin Random House or the editors at Hogarth were actually motivated to launch the series as a way “to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death” (Kingsley-Smith 2017: 281), rather than as a chance to capitalize on that anniversary as a marketing opportunity. Does Shakespeare, long past the day when he could appreciate it, need further homage or celebration? And why celebrate the anniversary of his death? It also seems unlikely that Penguin Random House is responding to, rather than attempting to stimulate, audience demand. Are readers petitioning the publisher, clamoring for further revisions of Shakespeare? The series instead seeks to stand out in an overwhelmingly saturated literary market, enticing readers by combining the big names of contemporary fiction with the biggest literary name of all. Bourdieu writes that citations often function as “strategies of affiliation, of annexation” that help producers stake out positions within the cultural field (1993: 138). The Hogarth series’ structural debt to and explicit invocation of Shakespeare help these contemporary authors annex some of his symbolic capital, as the former hitch their new books to the established star. John B. Thompson lucidly explains Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital as “the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions” (Thompson 2005: 32). Hogarth Shakespeare conjoins several signifiers that are heavily laden with such prestige, in hopes of attracting readers to the series. Being able to draw from a huge, varied, and prestigious list of literary and popular authors is clearly one of the production-side advantages of conglomerates like Penguin Random House. And surely there is an economic incentive for writers, and at least tacit pressure from editors and agents to say “yes.” But even if some authors balk at the opportunity, perhaps preferring their own ideas to those of an editor, there are many other writers in the stable eager for the chance. Further, the marketing apparatus of Penguin Random and its ability to get big-name authors to sign onto the project has assured the series will be noticed. These factors have resulted in near-automatic press coverage, as the Hogarth Series was

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noted widely in publications like The Guardian several years before its titles began to appear (Guardian 2013). The books’ paratexts make visible the publisher’s efforts to call attention to the prestige of both the contemporary rewriters, and their most illustrious predecessor. The front of the dust jacket of the U.S. hardcover of Vinegar Girl (2016), for example, touts “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Anne Tyler,” and the back cover makes clear that the novel is “William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew retold as Vinegar Girl.” Each book in the Hogarth series, as well as the imprint’s online promotional content, also contains a page that describes and promotes the series by making reference to Shakespeare’s immortal status, citing Ben Jonson’s “He was not of an age, but for all time.” Further, the page implicitly authorizes the Hogarth project by citing the long precedent of interpreting and rewriting Shakespeare: “For more than four hundred years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, and loved throughout the world. They have been reinterpreted for each new generation, whether as teen films, musicals, science-fiction flicks, Japanese warrior tales, or literary transformations … In 2012, Hogarth was launched in London and New York to continue the tradition” (in Winterson 2016). The page appended to these novels thus enacts a two-pronged strategy that recurs throughout authors’ and reviewers’ comments about the series, and which preemptively authorizes such works against potential charges of commercialism and unoriginality: invoking the classic’s perpetual power to inspire, and citing the long-standing precedent for literary and artistic borrowing. With such authorizing mechanisms, Hogarth and its authors reframe a commercial venture as a matter of immaterial, literary motives—of a transhistorical conversation between writers and a tradition of intertextual borrowing, a tradition into which Hogarth seamlessly inserts itself. Winterson for example insists repeatedly on her personal connection to The Winter’s Tale. She writes that this story featuring a foundling has been for her, an orphan and adoptee, a “talismanic text that [she has] carried around, and that carr[ies] her around … for many years” (Crown 2015). Instead of presenting herself as an author assenting to an offer from her editors to novelize a Shakespearean drama, Winterson here figures herself as the plaything of the play, captivated by and captive of the bizarre romance. (This despite the fact that nothing in The Winter’s Tale touches on Perdita’s experience growing up as an orphan, since the girl herself remains oblivious of the fact that she is one, until the scenes in which she is joyfully reunited with her father and then her miraculously

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reanimated mother.) In addition to citing personal connections and the perennial power of the classic to inspire readers, writers and critics have tended to present such contemporary rewritings as merely a continuation of a timeless tradition of literary and artistic appropriation, and to neglect or repress the specific, local factors. Shakespeare himself is of course the go-to example for the precedent authors and critics consistently invoke. Alexandra Alter, writing about the Hogarth series for the New York Times, refers to the Bard as “a notorious mooch who borrowed liberally from other people’s plots.” She goes on to quote eminent Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who echoes that the playwright was “a great recycler of stories, and there’s no reason why his stories shouldn’t be recycled.” It’s true, of course, that Shakespeare’s age did not idealize originality, and moreover that the history of art and literature is a history of intertextual borrowing—that all art is cobbled together out of earlier art. But these authorizing strategies ignore the real impetus and engine driving this more recent phenomenon of the contemporary boom in novels that rewrite canonical texts: the commercial imperative of Penguin Random House and similar publishers, who want to capitalize on the fusion of contemporary and historic prestige. These appeals to personal significance and tradition, that is, obscure the plain fact that there is nothing brash, in fact, nothing more reliable in the contemporary literary marketplace, than rewriting a classic, as well as what is novel about this phenomenon, which has far less to do with the lasting power of the classics to inspire dialogue, and far more to do with transformations in the publishing industry, an industry which today seeks marketplace reliability above all other criteria. It may be true, in other words, that Winterson has always loved and couldn’t wait for the chance to retell the madcap The Winter’s Tale, the story of a king who abruptly and with no evidence becomes certain his wife is sleeping with his best friend, and thus plots to kill the friend and casts out his blameless wife and unborn child. Winterson aptly describes the play as “Othello on speed” (Winterson 2015). And it is certainly also the case that the history of art and literature is the history of writers and artists riffing on prior stories and motifs. But is one author’s love for one the weirder works in the Bard’s repertoire, or the great tradition of literary appropriation, the primary reason I now have The Gap of Time on my nightstand? Or is it because Hogarth, the newly resurrected imprint of Penguin Random House, commissioned Winterson to write it? Penguin Random’s resuscitation of Hogarth Press encapsulates how today’s large-scale publishers rely on prestigious literary signifiers to

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market their wares, as well as the differences between today’s literary marketplace and that of the high modernist moment—some of the structural changes wrought in the Anglophone literary field over the last century. “Hogarth,” crucially, doesn’t sound like a large-scale producer, as Penguin Random adds to the mixture of Shakespeare and prize-winning contemporary authors, connotations of the wry satire of English engraver William Hogarth, and the illustrious history behind Hogarth Press. As the page describing the series mentions, “the Hogarth Press was founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 with a mission to publish the best new writing of the age” (Winterson 2016). Whether or not this is an accurate account of the mission of the Woolfs’ press, it is clear that this account reveals the self-conception of the Hogarth series, how it wants to be understood as part of this illustrious tradition. The Woolfs seem to have conceived of the press as a form of manual therapy for Virginia, to provide her with an “occupation … which, say in the afternoons would take Virginia’s mind completely off her work.” Soon Hogarth Press became the coterie publisher for the Bloomsbury group, sheltering Woolf and other modernists from censorship and, crucially, from editorial and market pressures. Leonard wrote that Hogarth was dedicated to printing books that “the commercial publisher could not or would not publish,” particularly small volumes that were unlikely to make any money (Southworth 2010: 4). The press went on to release work by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, and of course Virginia, allowing these writers unprecedented latitude to experiment with language, subject matter, and material form. Becoming, writer, editor, and publisher of her own work, Woolf wrote that she was “the only woman in England free to write what I like” (quoted in McTaggart 2010: 64). But while Hogarth’s storied name carries this history of literary prestige and relative authorial autonomy embedded within it, the press has long ceased to be an independent entity. Leonard sold it to Chatto and Windus in 1946. Random House, owned by the German media giant Bertelsmann, acquired Chatto in 1987. And, of course, Bertelsmann merged the operations of Random House with those of Penguin, a subsidiary of the British educational publishing corporation Pearson, to form the world’s largest trade publisher, Penguin Random House, in July of 2013. Penguin Random promptly revived the Hogarth imprint as “a new home for a new generation of literary talent” (“About”). Hogarth thus demonstrates the way the umbrella structure of corporate publishing—multinational media conglomerates own mega-publishers,

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which are subdivided into specialized imprints, which were formerly independent houses—preserves prestigious imprints as subsidiaries that cater to niche audiences, and retains storied names in publishing to plaster on the spines of books. The very word “imprint” captures perfectly the symbolic authentication operating here; Penguin Random embosses the antique-scripted “Hogarth” onto its hardcovers, making it seem as if the Woolfs themselves gave the series their stamp of approval.3 According to Penguin Random’s website, Hogarth is one of its “nearly 250 editorially and creatively independent publishing imprints” (“Our Story”). But such assertions of creative independence, with their implication of pure artistic intention, are tough to square with its other online content—“Bertelsmann Achieves Highest Revenues and Operating Result in Seven Years” (“Bertelsmann Achieves”)—and the fact that the publisher came up with the idea, and commissioned the above-cited dream team of authors, which it calls “a major international publishing initiative across the Penguin Random House Group” (“Gap of Time”). Even if the Woolfs’ press could never achieve a form of pure autonomy, and if even it represented an anomalous moment in its relative freedom from market pressures, it is clear that Hogarth’s mode of production has shifted dramatically over this period, from a press dedicated to producing work that commercial publishers wouldn’t touch‚ because it looked unlikely to make any money, to a wing of a massive global conglomerate that commissions “initiatives” with clear commercial ambitions that are carried out by established, big-name authors. In other words, what’s novel about Hogarth Shakespeare is neither the retelling of a familiar story nor the fact that its novels are produced for the marketplace and are thus also commodities, whatever their claims to disinterested, purely artistic motive. It’s not new that commercial publishers are commissioning books; this has been done in genre fiction and nonfiction, for a long time. No, what is new is that giant multinational corporations are doing the commissioning, and that so-called “literary fiction” is being produced in this manner. Could the evolution of Hogarth encapsulate the development of English language publishing of literary fiction over the long twentieth century, from 1917 to 2017?

3 For the lasting recognition of illustrious publishers’ names, even as they have become imprints of conglomerates, see Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, especially 91.

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Though Hogarth and its authors typically appeal to the press’s illustrious history, the timeless appeal of Shakespeare, and the long tradition of literary borrowing to obscure the series’ commercial character, Anne Tyler expressed some unusual candor about the nature of the project, betraying an ambivalence that, as we will see, remains latent in other novels in the series. In an interview, Tyler talked about Vinegar Girl, her novelization of Taming of the Shrew, and how writing it was a new kind of venture for her—new in its nakedly commercial attributes. “It was enormous fun to write. It’s just a meringue!” Tyler enthused. “I had to sign a contract before I’d written it, and they specify how many words it should be as a minimum. I actually did activate my computer’s word counter to make sure I had enough, and I … just barely had enough—a few more ‘very verys’ in there” (Charles 2016). Comparing her book to a tasty, airy morsel, and joking about padding the word count, like so many undergraduates, to fulfill the terms of her contract, Tyler undermines the pretense that Hogarth’s literary ambition is more than a marketing ploy, and in refreshing fashion lays bare the commodity status of her book. The same article takes pains to mention that Tyler doesn’t normally do interviews, book tours, or promotions. She posits that such activities are “very bad for my writing.” In Tyler’s comment we see how the modernist ideal of autonomy persists as a contemporary literary ethos: good writing is done when the artist is indifferent to the business of books. Ron Charles, interviewing Tyler, notes that she “made a rare exception for this … interview only because her editor insisted she explain the odd circumstances of Vinegar Girl.” Fulfilling a work-order for words and urged by an editor to go against her long-standing avoidance of media promotion and publicly account for her decision to write the novel, Tyler offers a decidedly anxious, ambivalent explanation. She claims to hate Shakespeare, notes, like the father of a promiscuous teenager, “You wouldn’t want to get a reputation for doing this,” and calls into question the entire premise of the Hogarth series. “When they first mentioned the possibility … I actually laughed, because here’s someone with terrible plots … but wonderful words, and then someone comes along and says ‘Why don’t you take his terrible plot and add your inferior words to it?’ I mean really, does it make any sense?” (2016). Tyler calls attention to what many literary scholars and Shakespeare buffs would immediately recognize: that to transpose Shakespeare’s storylines into contemporary settings, or to translate his words into modernized English, is to retain

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the often implausible plots but eliminate the most virtuosic, and specifically literary character of Shakespeare’s work: his masterful use of poetic language. As a strategy for producing a compelling, plausible story or a beautiful display of language, the Hogarth Shakespeare may not make sense. But from the point of view of literary imprints of conglomerate publishers, who want to both sell books and accumulate prestige, nothing makes more sense. Hogarth Shakespeare thus epitomizes the logic of the literary field, and why today’s publishers spur “house-generated” intertextual novels, deploying the symbolic capital or prestige of the canon, to accumulate both economic and symbolic capital. One thing that makes contemporary literary fiction literary is its ability to demonstrate a familiarity with the canon, and thus to resonate with a liberal-arts-educated segment of the market that possesses both cultural capital and disposable income. We see this leveraging of prestige across the literary landscape, frequently in house-generated intertextual series and other trendy genres. Take for example the “Myths” series launched by Canongate Press in 2005 that included Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), which retells the Odyssey from the points of view of Penelope and the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus, and Winterson’s Weight (2005), a retelling of the Atlas myth. It’s interesting that Atwood and Winterson joined both of these series, and one wonders if they fear the kind of “reputation” among their peers that Tyler references. Canongate did not openly market the “Myths” series as novels commissioned by the publisher, but in an Author’s Note to The Penelopiad, Atwood thanks the editor Jaime Byng for “jumping out from behind a gorse bush and talk[ing her] into it” (2005: 198). Winterson likewise mentions that “if the call had not come perhaps [she] would never ha[ve] written the story” (xiii–xiv). These notes suggest the different mode of production that constitutes a housegenerated series, a mode in which the author is convinced to take on a project she may not otherwise have begun. Canongate is an independent publisher based in Edinburgh, and for the series it partnered with forty independents around the world, like Grove/Atlantic in the U.S., promoting “The Myths” as “THE major literary event of 2005,” and as “the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication ever undertaken” (“Myths”). Such projects represent strategic efforts for small publishers to compete with the conglomerates, compensating for a deficit of economic resources by cooperating and by amassing symbolic capital. But the conglomerates are clearly leading

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the charge. As with Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013), which retells Pride and Prejudice from the servants’ points of view, Random House put out P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, under its prestigious Knopf imprint, in 2011. Reviewing the novel, Charles McGrath in the New York Times Book Review called James “the most talented [crime fiction writer] ever,” and, apparently oblivious of the larger phenomenon I’ve been discussing, claimed that it’s hard to imagine any other crime writer, Agatha Christie included, “having the nerve to attempt an Austen sequel, let alone the ability to pull it off” (McGrath 2011). In a stark example of what Thompson, in his indispensable work Merchants of Culture, calls contemporary publishing’s “me too” impulse (2010: 10), HarperCollins promptly launched its “Austen Project,” commissioning a team of authors with a decidedly commercial slant, beginning with Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility in 2013. HarperCollins, whose parent company is of course Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, imitated Random House’s P. D. James venture in hopes of capitalizing on the devoted Austen fandom out there—adoring Janeites that Harper hopes will be willing to buy fresh takes on their old favorites. What the Austen Project, Canongate’s Myths, Hogarth Shakespeare, and other such series have in common is an effort by today’s publishers to deploy rewritings of classics as a strategy for targeting established reading publics, and for capitalizing on and reinvesting in “the big names”: the recognizable symbolic signifiers that are canonical texts and authors. The recent boom in historical fictions about famous writers and their wives similarly demonstrates the way such names circulate as brand names in the literary market. Paula McLain’s bestselling The Paris Wife (2011) and Erika Robuck’s Hemingway’s Girl (2012) revolve around the tortured love life of Ernest Hemingway. Robuck followed the latter with Call Me Zelda in 2013, the same year as Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and R. Clifton Spargo’s Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Whether in house-generated rewritings, historical fictions, or the rage for travesties that appeared in the wake of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we see how canonical authors and texts function as literary celebrities, bookish brands that are known quantities, as opposed to the unique demands of a work that has no connection with established literary or historical figures. The conglomerates’ insistence on perennial growth has spawned a strict imperative to discover—or commission—books that will be profitable immediately. Memoirs by publishing executives like André Schiffrin

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and Jason Epstein describe the erosion of a cottage industry that was dedicated to printing culturally valuable books (Epstein 2001: 105; Schiffrin 2000: 75). Houses used to subsidize titles that were unlikely to be profitable in the short run with their more commercial output. In today’s milieu, genre formulae and reliance on proven brand names, contemporary or classic, serve publishers as indispensable technologies for minimizing risk and targeting readerships. The proliferation of rewritings of classics parallels Hollywood’s addiction to remakes, franchises, and genre films, following a similar market logic but with important differences. From a production-side standpoint, the uniqueness of any new work of literature or film poses the problems of how to market it, and of its inherent marketplace risk. Genre fiction, which follows a proven formula and appeals to a preexisting audience, helps combat the uniqueness, and hence unpredictable sales, of any new book. Rewritings and spinoffs combine the formulaic quality and identifiable, target audiences of genre fiction with the prestige of canonical literature to generate works with a premise that is pithily expressed on a book jacket, and which carry the familiarity of the great names into the marketplace. Again witness: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in which the title alone encapsulates the premise, precursor, and punchline. So while art has always been made of other art, derivative works become even more attractive to producers in a media landscape dominated by multinational corporations, who demand perpetual revenue growth and are highly risk averse.

Literary Anxieties and Commercial Production In the remainder of this essay, I show how the Hogarth novels, in particular Winterson’s Gap of Time, subtly express and seek to imaginatively assuage the kind of ambivalences that Tyler made explicit about these works’ commercial character, derivative premise, and, more broadly, the role of literature in a media-saturated contemporary milieu. Winterson’s Gap of Time continually embeds reflections on derivative art, which function as veiled considerations of the novel’s own status as a Shakespeare retelling, on the position of the artist who is dependent on corporate interests, and on the anxious position of literature in today’s mediascape. The novel begins, as the others do not, with a six-page synopsis of its precursor—making clear that it is not improbably aimed at lovers of the original Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s oddest offerings. Winterson or her editors at Penguin Random House recognized that readers may

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not be familiar with the play. This very fact, that Winterson is rewriting a Shakespeare play with which readers are neither required nor expected to be well-acquainted supports my claim that the impetus behind series like Hogarth Shakespeare is less about contemporary authors’ desire to engage in creative dialogue with classic works of literature than about the publisher’s desire to trade on the continued luminosity of the name “Shakespeare,” and the lesser lights of contemporary prize-winning novelists. Within The Gap of Time, Winterson transforms Leontes into Leo, a hedge fund manager, and Polixenes into Xeno, a video game designer, and Winterson brings the latent homoerotic relationship between Leontes and Polixenes to the surface. The novel ends with an abrupt shift into the author’s own first-person musing on why the play has always been meaningful to her. But what is particularly interesting is how the novel expresses a preoccupation with issues of artistic originality and the distinction between simple commodities and works of art—in other words, how Winterson’s novel reflects on its own conditions of production. Winterson’s Perdita, who grows up with her adopted father Shep in a New Orleans-esque New Bohemia, sings cover songs in a Motown band called “The Separations,” with three Chinese triplets, also foundlings, named Molly, Polly, and Holly. These Disney-like characters also stand as reiterations or copies of one another. At Shep’s birthday party, The Separations break into “a cover of an old Bette Midler cover, of an old Tom Waits song. The banjo came in with Perdita’s voice like a faroff story” (154–155). Winterson likes to refer to her novel as a “cover version”; in the Hogarth text, the synopsis of the novel is prefaced by a title page reading, “The Original,” while the text of Winterson’s novel proper is labeled “The Cover Version.” One might argue that a musical cover version is more similar to a new theatrical production of a Shakespeare play, in which the “words and music” are the largely the same but to varying degrees reinterpreted by a new director and performers, than to a novelistic transposition of a Shakespearean storyline into a contemporary setting that jettisons all of the original language. But it is clear that Winterson uses The Separations’ performances to reference the long tradition of musical remakes and thus implicitly authorizes her remake of The Winter’s Tale by appeal to precedent. In likening Perdita’s rendition of Midler’s rendition of the Waits song to a “far-off story,” Winterson invokes not only the far-off story of The Winter’s Tale but the charm of the adaptation, what Linda Hutcheon calls the twinned pleasures of “repetition with variation,” the “comfort of ritual with the

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piquancy of surprise” (Hutcheon 2006: 4). In the novel’s final section, which Winterson narrates in her own person, she explains her reasons for writing the novel in terms that she echoes in the interview cited above: “I wrote this cover version because the play has been a private text for me for more than thirty years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can’t live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something” (2016: 267). Winterson adds another mechanism here for authorizing her appropriation. In addition to annexing her novel to the long history of musical remakes, here she effectively claims the right to appropriate The Winter’s Tale because it was already hers. It is part of her private world; she has lived inside the play. What is crucial to understand here is that there is no fundamental reason why Winterson or other Hogarth authors should need to justify or authorize their appropriation, given the long history of artistic and literary borrowing, the extensive tradition of revisions of Shakespeare in particular, postmodernism’s efforts at debunking claims to originality and individual authorship, and the important legal fact that Shakespeare’s texts are in the public domain. But these authors repeatedly do feel compelled to offer just such justifications. Just as Tyler took the unusual step, for her, of granting an interview, Atwood penned a companion piece in The Guardian, explaining her rationale for rewriting The Tempest as Hag-Seed. The fact that these authors do feel compelled to offer such explanations, appealing to precedent and to personal connections with strange plays, demonstrates how romantic notions of originality and individual authorship still hold sway in the contemporary literary moment, producing an anxiety of appropriation and commercialism in novelists who would sign onto a project like Hogarth’s. In the essayistic final pages of The Gap of Time, Winterson reflects on the theme of forgiveness as it manifests in Shakespeare’s late plays. In doing so, she offers a peculiar interpretation that extends her efforts to authorize her rewriting. Discussing The Tempest, Winterson writes: “Shakespeare walks away from the play, as we do, leaving it to the kids to get it right next time. As Ezra Pound said, ‘Make it new’” (2016: 269). Winterson here understands Prospero’s desire to see his daughter in a love match, as well as unite his dukedom with Alonso’s, by marrying Miranda to Ferdinand, as an expression of Shakespeare’s desire to abandon his art and leave it in the hands of subsequent generations to “get it right.” While nothing in The Tempest suggests that Miranda and Ferdinand will take up

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Prospero’s magic art, Winterson’s clear aim in combining this interpretation with the abrupt transition to Pound’s dictum for modernism is to claim that both Shakespeare and Pound envisioned later generations taking over extant artworks, remaking them, and even improving upon them. Winterson thus legitimates her own act of literary remaking by claiming that it has the sanction of two of the most canonical figures in the western literary tradition. And, of course, the indirect stamp of Virginia Woolf’s approval remains on the spine of the book. In addition to expressing and imaginatively resolving anxieties surrounding her appropriation of Shakespeare’s play, Winterson’s novel also wrestles with anxiety about its commercial character and her role in executing a work commissioned by a multinational publishing conglomerate. The Gap of Time stages a series of confrontations between characters expressing romantic notions of individual artistic creation—embodied, appropriately, by Perdita, the pastoral Shep, and an artist character named Roni Horn—and a demystified view of art as a luxury good—in the character of Leo, the hedge fund manager. Shep has encouraged his adopted daughter Perdita to read Walden, and instills in her the value of living simply. Perdita takes away from Thoreau a belief in autonomy and authenticity, which Winterson seems later to undermine: “you can opt out of the system. You can live in your own way” (167). Along similar lines, Shep chides Leo, for whom “money and power [are] the most important things” (247). Winterson cannily plays Shep, Perdita’s bucolic, adopted dad against the worldly greed of her birth father. In the final scenes of the novel, Leo “plans to demolish” a historic theatre in London’s Chalk Farm and “rebuild the site with two twenty-storey towers for what the architects called ‘purposeful contemporary living’” (213). In creating this scenario, Winterson addresses neoliberal conditions, in which the days of public funding for the arts and social programs have given way to private investment and socially conscious entrepreneurship, which Leo calls “Responsible capitalism” (228). In repentance for driving his wife away in a jealous rage, Leo has turned his business into a hedge fund with a conscience. The fund manager summarizes these conditions in genial fashion: “The site is fantastic and there’s no public money anymore for places like this. You can’t subsidise everything forever—nice as that would be. Private money has to fill the gap. I’m building a small theatre space and some public housing—because I like to think I am socially aware” (239). Leo enlists the help of Horn, the artist for his project. “Included in the plan was a purposeful purpose-built 250-seat theatre with funding

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guaranteed for ten years. And there was a block of purposefully affordable homes facing the mainline railway into Euston Station. The purposefully affordable homes were purposefully low-rise, screened from the prestige part of the development behind a wall of water designed by the artist Roni Horn. The wall of water’s purposeful purpose was to protect the luxury apartments from railway noise” (213). All the repetition of “purposeful purpose” in this passage heavy-handedly stresses the distance between Leo’s instrumental project and the “purposiveness without a purpose” that is Kant’s ideal of disinterested artistic production (Kant 179). In Leo’s real estate development, both artworks and homes serve purposes, and the artwork is subsumed by the needs of the construction project. Atwood’s Hag-Seed offers a similar account of the superiority of disinterested artistic motive, albeit one that is ironically deflated at the same time. Felix, Atwood’s Prospero character, is a theatre director who has been exiled from his job as the head of a rural Canadian Shakespeare festival and takes refuge by teaching prison inmates to perform the Bard’s plays on the “island” of a maximum security correctional facility. Transposing the rivalry of Italian dukedoms and principalities to the politicking and maneuvering that surrounds summer theatre, Atwood suggests that the contemporary art world is as driven by personal ambition and lust for power as the political one. When Felix emerges from his hermitlike retreat to begin mentoring prison inmates, he apostrophizes his dead daughter Miranda, telling her, “I’m not doing it for the money.” He imagines Miranda before him nodding in agreement, “because she knows that to be true: noble people don’t do things for the money, they simply have money, and that’s what allows them to be noble. They don’t really have to think about it much; they spout benevolent acts the way trees spout leaves” (61). Atwood suggests that economic comfort underwrites noble, disinterested motives; noble motives are the prerogative of those who can afford them. But just as the audience knows that Prospero is motivated by revenge to launch his tempest, readers learn that Felix is not animated by the benevolent desire to help educate and rehabilitate prisoners, but by a less-than-noble compulsion to answer personal grievances and settle old scores. Atwood, like Winterson, suggests that disinterestedness is a noble motive, but that artists frequently act out of personal interest even when this interest is not purely economic. In The Gap of Time, Winterson stages a confrontation between the artist Horn and her corporate sponsor and patron Leo, in a manner that subtly alludes to the mode of production of the Hogarth series:

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the corporate-commissioned work of art. The hedge fund manager enlists art in the service of his real estate scheme, adding a theatre and affordable housing to cloak his development in social consciousness, and he contracts Horn to produce an artwork that screens rich residents from their poorer neighbors and the industrial sounds of the railway station. Horn rails against her artistic creation being put to this use. “You told me my wall of water was for the community. You have turned it into water-boarding against the poor … I was paid. I wasn’t bought” (241). Though Winterson seems not to have been able to resist the pun, Leo intends to use Horn’s wall of water as a visual and sonic barrier, not a torture device. Leo replies that while he has not bought the artist, he has indeed bought the wall she made. (The dispute Winterson stages suggest that the notion of artists “prostituting” themselves relies on a conflation of the selling of their wares with the selling of their selves; embedded in the metaphor of the sell-out artist as prostitute is the claim that the work of art is a part of the artist.) Leo’s response emphasizes that artists are indeed sellers of wares and that, more often than not, the wealthy are their buyers: “If I buy a painting from you and you don’t like where I hang it—too bad. You know why artists can afford to shout about their values? Because people like me are paying your bills” (241). As in Atwood’s account, noble values are the possession of people who can afford to have such values, people who ironically may need to sacrifice other values in order to afford the luxury of such noble-mindedness. Though Leo’s point has merit, expressing a demystified view of art’s purported autonomy as underwritten, in practice, by wealthy patrons, Winterson clearly makes him the villain here. Protestors picket his construction site. One holds up a “placard that said ARTISTS AGAINST ASSHOLES” (240). When Leo observes after being impressed by a performance of The Separations, “I could sell them”—again, suggesting the way artists imagine that a corporate interest selling their work is tantamount to selling themselves—his assistant responds, “Don’t you know the old saying ‘Don’t boil your children to make into spoons?’” (266). While readers are clearly aligned with the artists over their mercenary benefactor in these scenarios, Winterson testifies to and expresses anxiety about the state of affairs in which artists are contracted by and reliant on wealthy corporate interests, anxiety about the state of affairs under which her own novel was produced. Both Roni Horn’s response within the story and Winterson’s own response with her novel suggest that artists can lament but maybe not escape this state

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of affairs, longing for disinterested production while serving investors’ interests. As it implicitly considers its own predicament as a piece of corporatesponsored art, refracted through the distorting mirror of Leo’s confrontation with Horn, Winterson’s The Gap of Time is also forced to confront the ideology of art and literature as a separate, sacred realm of production from the world of ordinary commodities. If art serves instrumental functions like hiding signs of industrial machinery or poverty, if it serves to gild luxury developments with an air of artsiness or social responsibility, if it is produced by similar industrial mechanisms and often by the same corporations as other goods, then what happens to the supposed distinctiveness of art from the sphere of “mere” exchange? Winterson and several other texts in the Hogarth series and “Austen Project” articulate anxieties about the putative separation of art and literature from the market. A number of these novels attempt to draw parallels between classic art and literature and contemporary media, or to mark out their differences from popular trash. In Sittenfeld’s Eligible, her “Bingley” character has recently appeared on a reality show that resembles “The Bachelor.” In Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name, the “Shylock” character, Strulovich, is an art collector and benefactor, while the insipid Portia character hosts a TV series that is part cooking show, part dispute-resolution talk show, a la “Dr. Phil.” In Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, Bianca spends much of her time text-messaging with her various tutor-suitors. These novels all associate frivolous characters with TV and new media, implicitly reasserting the superiority of literature over the debased forms of contemporary popular culture. These novels, that is, seek to assuage the anxiety about their status as corporate-sponsored products by invoking the literary as the province of seriousness, over and against the trivial and ephemeral commodities of the culture industry. Winterson’s Gap of Time adopts the inverse strategy, imagining that nothing prevents the products of the culture industry from achieving the transcendent properties of the work of art. Her novel, that is, does not suggest that literature is superior to and more durable than the endless, ephemeral stream of popular cultural commodities, but insists instead that nothing prevents those commodities from achieving the status of art. This imaginary resolution of the anxiety surrounding her novel’s commodity status emerges in Winterson’s ingenious answer to The Winter’s Tale’s magical reanimation of the statue of Hermione. In Winterson’s novel, Xeno has designed a video game called “The Gap of Time,” which takes

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place in a ruined Paris, and Xeno embeds MiMi, the Hermione character, in the game, as an angel statue perched just around the corner from Silvia Beach’s famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company. (In such allusions, we see again how these rewritings appeal to a bibliophile audience, who will recognize such names, laden with over a century of literary prestige.) As with Hermione in Shakespeare’s play, MiMi has been magically transported out of a harsh reality and into the timeless paradise of beauty, the realm of art—standing guard, as it were, over Beach’s bookstore, that other guarantor of modernist literary autonomy. As Hogarth stamps Winterson’s conglomerate-commissioned book with the emblem of the Woolfs’ independent, autonomous press, so Winterson imports Beach’s bookstore, which published Ulysses to evade its censorship in the U.S. and U.K., into Xeno’s video game, to embed within it the mark of modernist autonomy. Both the game Winterson imagines Xeno has created and Xeno’s vision for gaming are beautiful, aspirational. He asks Leo “why shouldn’t games be as good as books?” (2016: 38). “Books change the way people think about the world … Why can’t a game make us understand more, see more, feel more?” (39). By embedding just such a sublime game in her novel, by turning Hermione’s sculpture into MiMi’s video game, Winterson performs an imaginative act of alchemy that transmutes the base culture industry product into the gold of transcendent art. In imagining video games that aspire to the status and functions of literature—changing the way we think, see, and feel—Winterson attempts to assuage the anxiety that her novel is just another commodity. Rather than impossibly insisting on a great divide that separates high literature from commercial culture, Winterson imaginatively elevates the video game, holding out hope that culture industry products like games and rewritings of canonical texts commissioned by publishing conglomerates might do more than use literature as their raw material, that they might themselves become the transcendent stuff of literature. A strange wobble or confusion of fictional registers in the Hogarth Shakespeare novels to date adds an additional layer of reflection on the predicament of writers commissioned to produce such works, and which reveals, more broadly, the situation of the literary novel in the contemporary literary marketplace. Most of these novels take the form of what Gerard Genette calls “transpositions”: stories which take a familiar, in this case Shakespearean, storyline, and set it in a different time and place. This mode is familiar from texts such as Joyce’s Ulysses, West Side Story,

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and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, which transpose the plots of the Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, and Emma, respectively. The characters in the Hogarth novels thus live in early twenty-first-century England or North America, and yet are structurally analogous to figures in Shakespeare plays; Leo is, in effect, a Leontes in modern London, while Felix is Prospero, exiled to work in a Canadian prison. And yet, at several moments in a number of these texts, the modern fictional characters demonstrate their familiarity with Shakespeare—even with the particular play that their lives are reenacting. So, for example, in The Gap of Time Leo’s assistant Pauline quotes from the play they are “in”: “There’s an old saying,” said Pauline. “What’s past help should be past grief.” “That’s Shakespeare,” said Tony. “The Winter’s Tale,” said Pauline (Winterson 2016: 103).

This moment seems to disrupt some of the fictional illusion or a layer of artifice of the transposition, in which the precursor plot is typically not something the characters are aware of. In Ulysses, for example, Bloom does not know that he is an ironic figure of Odysseus, wandering Dublin, trying to make it home to his wife, whose predicament in turn resembles that of Penelope. Bloom does not know he is a character in story patterned after the Odyssey. The plot borrowed from the predecessor text is a feature of the structure or discourse, not of the story, the fictional world the characters inhabit. To have Bloom recognize he is Odysseus would be similar to having him acknowledge he was taking part in an extensive scene of dialogue with Stephen. Within the story world, Bloom and Stephen are not part of a scene with extensive dialogue; they are just two men talking. Such moments as Pauline quoting from The Winter’s Tale appear as if they could be metafictional moments, in which the text acknowledges its own artifice, and yet they do little to disrupt the story. Pauline does not notice the parallels between her world and the play she knows well enough to quote from memory. She doesn’t realize, mention, or think it strange that her boss is named Leo, that he has an estranged wife named Hermione, an ex-best friend named Xeno, and an abandoned daughter called Perdita. If she did realize that she and her friends were reenacting the basic structure of The Winter’s Tale, such a realization would likely have radically destabilizing effects on the narrative. Pauline might recognize that she and the other characters were

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characters in some author’s fiction, and we would have a postmodernist breakdown of the fictional illusion, as the characters would confront their own fictionality. Or the novel could maintain its realistic world, if Pauline used her knowledge to say: “Wait, we are behaving just like character archetypes in Shakespeare! We need to learn from these characters and take control of our own destinies!” But none of this happens, and the moment passes, leaving the reader to wonder: if the characters are so familiar with The Winter’s Tale, how do they fail to recognize the similarity of their predicament with that staged within the play? Interestingly, such moments recur throughout the Hogarth series. In Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name, Strulovich meets and has extensive dialogues with Shakespeare’s Shylock, who has come to life or returned in spirit form to contemporary London, including conversations about the play The Merchant of Venice. And yet Strulovich doesn’t find it remarkable that he has a perfidious daughter named Jessica, or that he himself is acting the part of the vengeful Jew. In Hag-Seed, Atwood’s protagonist Felix is a theatre director, and consciously uses his production of the Tempest to take revenge on his own rivals. Though Felix purposefully imitates Prospero, he doesn’t think it’s strange that these men who have wronged him are named Tony and Sal, suspiciously close to Antonio and Alonso. In other words, while he intentionally patterns his actions after Prospero, Felix has not created the situation in which Tony and Sal usurp his directorship and exile him. That is, despite his extensive familiarity with the Tempest, Felix never thinks it strange that the same thing has happened to him as befell Prospero. What are we to make of such wobbles, of the moments when these characters are simultaneously aware of the Shakespearean plays they are reenacting, and unaware of the fact that they are reenacting them? Caught between freedom—the sense that they are autonomous agents, acting out their own lives according to their own decisions—and constraint—the creeping knowledge that they are cast in someone else’s plot, reenacting a preset course—these characters figure again the predicament of the Hogarth writers, who are free to rewrite Shakespeare in the way that they wish, and yet have to stick to the assignment, to rewrite the play to some extent, and are anxious about the loss of autonomy that comes with working on commissions from Hogarth, their publisher.

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Conclusion: The Hogarth Novels as Prestige Commodity Hogarth’s Shakespeare series illuminates several elements of today’s literary marketplace. We see in such series the way today’s large-scale publishing conglomerates seek to carve out space in a saturated market for cultural goods by trading on the accumulated prestige and immediate recognizability of established names—be they Austen, Shakespeare, Hogarth, or the impressive roster of contemporary prize-winning and bestselling novelists that conglomerates like Penguin Random House or HarperCollins count among their “house” writers. At the same time, as these writers execute “house-generated” projects commissioned by their publishers, we see in novels like those of Winterson, Atwood, and Jacobson, the ways these writers subtly respond to such conditions with a longing for literary and artistic autonomy, an anxious defense against charges of commercialism and unoriginality, and a desire to preserve the higher realm of art against both commerce and literature’s competition: a contemporary mediascape that is often seen as trivial or ephemeral. These dynamics reveal a great deal about the novel’s contemporary moment, in particular the state of the literary novel. The novel has been a commodity at least since Defoe, but the ideology of art resists acknowledging this fact, or at least insists that the novel is a special kind of commodity, a commodity that is produced less in pursuit of economic profit than with higher or more noble purposes associated with the self-regulating logic of the work of art. In the age of the consolidated global publishing industry, with publishers commissioning literary novels by esteemed contemporary authors, in a manner that had hitherto largely been reserved for the rapid production cycles of genre fiction, we see renewed tensions and anxieties emerge. It looks nearly impossible for a writer who is commissioned to write a novel to claim that the work itself dictates its production. Tyler’s acknowledgment that her novel is “just a meringue!” and reference to her obligation to a generate a particular word count call attention, with unusual candor, to the contractual nature of the Hogarth series and the ephemeral, commodity status of its products. There is no reason why this contractual arrangement necessarily limits the possibility that a commissioned author will produce a novel of serious merit or even genius. (Though, having read the output of the Hogarth series to date, I have to say that novels like Vinegar Girl and New Boy— Othello set in an elementary schoolyard—read as mildly entertaining but

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quite trivial, in comparison with the weighty subject matter of Taming of the Shrew and Othello.) Michelangelo had a commission from the pope for the Sistine Chapel. Shakespeare doubtless had financiers to please. The ideology of art represses the fact that heteronomy is the actual rule in the history of artistic production. But Hogarth’s series—both in its outer trappings that are laden with prestige signifiers, and in the novels’ internal efforts to champion the autonomy of the artist over corporate backers and the nobility of non-commercial motives—reveals just the kind of commodity the Anglophone literary novel is, in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The literary novel is a prestige commodity. Consumers buy such novels in the belief that what they buy will exceed use value, do more than offer “mere” entertainment, and reward them with a work of quality or greatness, however ineffable or nebulous such measures are. James English has quantified and documented the dual regimes of value that his students recognize, as they rank novels differently depending on whether they are asked which they enjoyed most, and which were the best (English 2016). In the case of newly appearing literary novels, such books can accumulate prestige as a function of what is inside them; when reviewers laud a novel or prize committees short-list it for a given prize, these institutional agents accord recognition based on their estimation of the novel’s merit, and their judgment in turn has force insofar as these agents have themselves accumulated prestige. But prestige can also be attached to these commodities via external trappings, historic signals of quality like the names Shakespeare and Hogarth, and contemporary ones like those of prize-winning authors such as Atwood, Jacobson, Tyler, or Winterson. No doubt the quality of the significant output listed under “literary fiction” on the website of a massive conglomerate like Penguin Random House will vary widely. What makes such work literary fiction is not that it all is quality, but that it is marked and marketed as such, flagged with signifiers that have acquired, through various routes, symbolic capital over time. So long as such quality markers appeal to reading publics, we should expect to see publishers continue to spur explicit retellings and spinoffs of literary classics, and to enlist their best talent in the venture. And so long as writers persist in valuing originality and autonomy, we should expect to see these writers continue to express ambivalence about their participation in such ventures.

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References “About Hogarth.” https://crownpublishing.com/archives/imprint/hogarth. Accessed 10 April 2020. Alter, Alexandra. 2015. Novelists Reimagine and Update Shakespeare’s Plays. New York Times, October 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/ books/novelists-reimagine-and-update-shakespeares-plays.html. Accessed 31 March 2020. Atwood, Margaret. 2005. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. New York: Grove. ———. 2016a. Hag-Seed. New York: Hogarth. ———. 2016b. A Perfect Storm: Margaret Atwood on Rewriting Shakespeare’s Tempest. The Guardian, September 24. “Bertelsmann Achieves Highest Revenues and Operating Results in Seven Years.” 31 March 2015. https://www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/ news/bertelsmann-achieves-highest-revenues-and-operating-result-in-sevenyears.jsp. Accessed 25 March 2020. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Market of Symbolic Goods. In The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson, 112–142. New York: Polity. Charles, Ron. 2016. Anne Tyler Loathes Shakespeare: So She Decided to Rewrite One of His Plays. Washington Post, June 21. Crown, Sarah. 2015. The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson Review—An Elegant Retelling of Shakespeare. The Guardian, October 7. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/07/gap-of-time-jeanette-winterson-rev iew-shakespeare. Accessed 25 March 2020. English, James F. 2016. Prestige, Pleasure, and the Data of Cultural Preference: “Quality Signals” in the Age of Superabundance. Western Humanities Review 70 (3). Epstein, Jason. 2001. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. New York: Norton. Flood, Alison. 2013. Shakespeare’s Canon to Be Reworked by Authors Including Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler. The Guardian, June 26. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/27/shakespeare-reworked-jeanette-win terson-anne-tyler. Accessed 12 February 2020. “The Gap of Time.” https://crownpublishing.com/archives/feature/gap-time#. WWz1YIVMGEd. Accessed 10 March 2020. Genette, Gerard. 1998. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Goldstone, Andrew. 2013. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grossman, Lev. 2012. Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology: How Science Fiction, Fantasy,

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Romance, Mysteries and All the Rest Will Take over the World. Time, May 23. http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-dis ruptive-technology/. Accessed 21 March 2020. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kingsley-Smith, Jane. 2017. Shakespeare and the Novel: “For That Which Had Been Lost Was Found, and so on.” In The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. McGrath, Charles. 2011. A Look Back, and Ahead, at Pemberley: ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’ by P.D. James Review. New York Times, December 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/books/ death-comes-to-pemberley-by-p-d-james-review.html. Accessed 21 January 2020. McGurl, Mark. 2001. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McTaggart, Ursula. 2010. “Opening the Door”: The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf’s Outsiders’ Society. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29 (1): 63–81. “The Myths,” Canongate Books. http://www.themyths.co.uk. Accessed 2 July 2019. “Our Story.” http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/about-us/our-story. Accessed 28 January 2020. Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Rosen, Jeremy. 2016. Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press. Schiffrin, André. 2000. The Business of Books. New York: Verso. Southworth, Helen. 2010. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Squires, Claire. 2007. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. New York: Palgrave. Stinson, Emmett. 2017. Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde. New York: Bloomsbury. Thompson, John B. 2005. Books in the Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity. ———. 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Malden, MA: Polity. Winterson, Jeanette. 2005. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles. New York: Canongate.

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———. 2015. Where There’s a Will: Shakespeare Remixed in ‘The Gap of Time.’ National Public Radio, October 4. https://www.npr.org/2015/10/ 04/445032367/where-theres-a-will-shakespeare-remixed-in-the-gap-of-time. Accessed 14 April 2020. ———. 2016. The Gap of Time. New York: Hogarth.

CHAPTER 17

Reading the Small American Novel: The Aesthetic Agency of the Short Book in the Modern Literary Marketplace Alexander Starre

Introduction When Willa Cather released her World War I novel One of Ours in 1922, the book’s dust jacket did not mince words: “Here, you will say, is an authentic masterpiece—a novel to rank with the finest of this or any age…. [B]ehind the personal drama there is an ever deepening sense of national drama, of national character, working itself out through individuals and their destiny” (qtd. in Porter 2008: 42). One of Ours was one of the early attempts at a fictional reckoning with the Great War from a U.S. perspective. The novel’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf, whose signature appears below the boisterous jacket blurb, did everything in his power to market it as the Great American Novel. While it did win Cather the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, One of Ours otherwise received decidedly mixed reviews: by and large, reviewers judged the first half of the book a success while finding fault with the depiction of the protagonist’s war

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experience in Europe. Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, Gilbert Seldes, and H. L. Mencken dismissed Cather’s excursion into the male-coded domain of war literature. After this head-on collision with the East Coast intelligentsia, Willa Cather did not relinquish her ambition, but she nevertheless remodeled her poetics. The year 1922 also saw the publication of her short manifesto “The Novel Demeublé” that formulated a minimalist aesthetic for modern literary narrative. Cather showcased this literary minimalism most successfully in The Professor’s House (1925), which is still a favorite on today’s college reading lists. Beyond stylistics, however, brevity and precision also figured in the crude material domain of her works as books. In Cather’s oeuvre, The Professor’s House is sandwiched between her two shortest novels, A Lost Lady (1923) and My Mortal Enemy (1926).1 While short texts like these have given rise to the diminutive denominations novella and novelette, they also complicate the balance between the two instantiations of the literary book as a commodity, that is between its simultaneous existence as a mass-produced physical object and as a hallowed, immaterial cultural artifact.2 The effort and the monetary 1 Cather herself had a sense for the economic calculations of bookmaking, as she hinted to her publisher Alfred Knopf that A Lost Lady due to its brevity might have to be published as part of a collection. Perhaps emboldened by Knopf’s willingness to publish very short texts as stand-alone books, Cather submitted the even shorter manuscript for My Mortal Enemy to Knopf in 1925. At below 20,000 words, the novel is only about half as long as A Lost Lady. The first edition, with wide margins and decorative graphic design elements clocked in at only 122 pages. My Mortal Enemy was the first book designed for Knopf by William Addison Dwiggins, a pioneering American typographer and book designer who coined the term “graphic design.” Dwiggins crafted all parts of the book— cover, type, and decorative headpieces—a practice that would in the ensuing years further solidify Knopf’s house style. Megan Benton writes, “Books published by Alfred Knopf, for example, were as admired for their striking design as for their literary merit. Knopf’s leading designer, W. A. Dwiggins, brought a deft art deco touch to the books’ covers and title pages that was undeniably modern, yet deeply humanistic in its calligraphic flair and use of old-style, serifed letterforms” (2009: 164). On Dwiggins’s work as a precursor of current book design, see Starre (2016). On the material and typographical form of Willa Cather’s books, see also Ronning (2014). 2 In approaching this tension within the commodity-form of the book, I follow Ted Striphas’s critical perspective, which mediates between the base understanding of commodities as “generic wares” and the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism (Striphas 2011: 9). This essay aligns with Striphas’s interest in scenarios in which books are “treated either as generic stuff or as hallowed objects, as well as the labor it takes to transform books from the one into the other” (9). Whenever I use the word “commodity” in connection with books, I therefore allude to this tension.

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investment necessary to produce a hardcover volume is substantial, so why would anyone consider putting out what appears like a longish short story as a separate volume? Wouldn’t it make more sense to lump such texts together with other short writings—a common practice in publishing— and market the result as a story collection? Or, alternatively, why not stick to serial publication, and later, once a work is deemed a success, license it for reprinting in anthologies? In basic commercial terms, there is indeed something slightly extravagant about buying a physical book containing text that can be read in one sitting over the course of an afternoon. Cather’s novels arrived at a peculiar point in the history of the American book trade. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the magazine market exploded in the United States, with titles like Munsey’s and McClure’s ushering in the new business model that would use large amounts of advertising in order to drive down the cover price and radically expand readership.3 With the barrage of advertising from the ever-expanding marketplace of capitalist commodities, old-line publishers found it hard to adapt their genteel, subdued advertising strategies to the new marketplace.4 Founded in 1915, Alfred Knopf’s publishing house thrived as an outlet for serious literary fiction, in part because Knopf paired his commitment to highbrow literary values with a shrewd sense of modern marketing. From early on, Knopf worked under the assumption that the external form of a literary text exuded some kind of influence over its content, adapting some of the design tenets of the arts and crafts

3 For a succinct account of the American magazine revolution and its impact on book publishing, see Ohmann (2009). 4 As Ellen Gruber Garvey points out, these shifts in the market confronted publishers with some tough questions about the product they were selling: “Discussion of how and whether to advertise books turned on an unstated question: what is a book? Is it the physical object, whether saddle-stitched pamphlet or bound in expensive leather or cloth? Or is it the text in whatever form it takes? Is it the subject matter that the text ‘contains’? Is it the literary qualities that might be addressed in a review? Is it the entertainment or education that a book supplies? Or is it the emotions and sensations felt by the reader? And where did this prestige that publishers valued reside? Would it be destroyed if the book were marketed to the wrong people?” As Garvey further holds, for the new publishers of the early twentieth century, “the physical book became secondary to its impact” (2009: 171). Of course, literary works are to this day almost exclusively thought of as immaterial goods, rather than as material objects. Nevertheless, as I would argue, the discursive overlap we find in reviews and critical writings between the big- or smallness of a codex and the respective aesthetic qualities of the literary text remains as a recalcitrant trace of the material dimension inherent in medial communication.

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movement to the mass production of books. Knopf appeared to negate the division between the two bodies of the book—between the material object and the sacred artifact. Around the edges, so to speak, these distinctions became blurry for him, with aesthetic aspects bleeding into a work’s commodity form and with the rationales of the literary market not entirely cut off from the creative process of great writers. For Pierre Bourdieu, who also tackled the question of this double nature of artistic works, the literary field reversed the economic order of other capitalist markets. In this “up-side down economic world” (Bourdieu 1993: 40), as he calls it, lack—of money, of power, and of institutional clout—could be turned into a valuable good. To somewhat redirect Bourdieu’s point, we may say that in various forms of minimalist poetics, the absence of something— “the thing not named,” as Cather called it in “The Novel Demeublé” (1922: 6)—is actually a more valuable marker of “literariness” than the presence of lengthy descriptive accounts. In its attempt to enter the novel network as a high-cultural commodity, the short novel actively promotes its physical smallness and lightness as a marker of cultural value. To today’s literary students, the short, condensed prose style that omits much detail—especially about the emotional states of characters—is firmly tied to Ernest Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. In his influential take on postwar American literary culture, Mark McGurl likewise links the “minimalist” style of much institutionally sanctioned creative writing to the seminal influence of Ernest Hemingway.5 And yet, as Glen Love has remarked, Willa Cather might have actually been the first to clearly pronounce the merits of the literary craft of omission in her essays from 1920 (“The Art of Fiction”) and 1922 (“The Novel Demeublé”).6 In “On the Art of Fiction”—the lesser known of the two 5 For McGurl, Hemingway’s prose and his public persona congealed into an “interconnected cluster of values attached to the authorship of fiction, including, most centrally, the value of craft as represented by the practice of multiple revision” (2009: 244). This value cluster, he holds, crucially informed the practice of many American postwar writers and stretches into the present. 6 In his essay, Love emphatically endorses Cather’s minimalism as proof of her larger investment in modernist art: “What might be concluded from a close study of Cather’s craft is that she is an important and an unjustly neglected figure in the development of American literary prose style, that her critical essays on writing published in the early 1920s reveal a provocative sense of the need for new directions—modernist rather than realistic or naturalistic—[and] that her central theories of style anticipate and very closely resemble Hemingway’s theory of omission, or ‘iceberg’ principle, ….” (Love 1990: 296). With the two strongest denominators for Willa Cather’s style having been “regionalism”

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short pieces—Cather held that in great, artistic writing the aim is “finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page” (Cather 1920: 7). As we can see in Cather’s description of the “reader’s consciousness,” the modernist focus on precision and economy—in Cather as in Hemingway directed against the perceived stylistic excesses of the nineteenth-century novel—imagines a specific type of reader. In essence, the emphasis on writerly “craft” that pervades the aesthetic of minimalism expects readers to imagine emotional depth and to treat every word, every sentence as if it is the outcome of a long and arduous process: “Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it” (Cather 1920: 8). In this vein, the heroic efforts of Ezra Pound in cutting down T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or of Gordon Lish in distilling Raymond Carver’s prose have become part of literary lore. The paratextual rhetoric surrounding Cather’s slim novel clearly evokes an enigmatic “slow reader” whose connoisseurship allows her to plumb the depths of such minimalist works. We are left with the paradoxical situation that the modernist embrace of economy and precision defined itself squarely against the ascendance of a mass media regime of printed abundance, while at the same time existing in perfect symbiosis with the magazine marketplace. The contemporary return to the short novel—as described in the following—is likewise entangled in a peculiar medial dialectic. On the one hand, electronic publication formats have essentially obliterated any considerations of textual length. From a publication angle, a short digital text is not much different from a long one. It is hardly surprising then, that Amazon has introduced a specific digital imprint, “Kindle Singles,” for short fiction and non-fiction titles that readers can buy as stand-alone files for little money. Yet, instead of completely migrating to the digital realm— which would make sense from a cost perspective—short print books are seeing a somewhat surprising renaissance. Questions surrounding the material existence of the literary work, which were vital to modernist

and “realism” for quite some time, readings that argued for her credentials as a modernist were long seen as eccentric. In light of numerous recent scholarly volumes and articles, the wholescale shift of repositioning Cather as a modernist is in full swing, validating Love’s claim.

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aesthetics, now return with a vengeance in the digital age.7 The rise of the “small American novel” expressively exhibits the aesthetic, evaluative, and commercial dynamics of the contemporary literary system in the United States. This chapter engages four contemporary fiction titles—Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2012), Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014)—and considers their textual, paratextual, and commercial presentation as short novels. Clocking in at little more than one hundred pages each, these books mobilize notions of sparseness, restraint, profundity, and precision, all of which are underscored by elegant typographical designs and airy page layouts.8 In their design and their narrative framing, these small books exhibit an implicit awareness of their material existence as small books. As such, these books engage their commodity status— the tension between their raw materiality and their symbolic stature, as outlined in fn. 2—to create temporal and attentive frames, nudging their readers toward a slowed-down perception and appreciation of the literary text.9 7 On the renewed relevance of modernist discussions surrounding the medial nature of literary works, see Starre (2015, esp. 58–63). My assessment accords to other recent studies, among them Pressman (2014) and Spoerhase (2016). 8 To be precise, Johnson’s novel has 116 pages, DeLillo’s 117, and Otsuka’s 129. Offill’s is a thicker volume with 177 pages, but the layout of her book features the fewest words per page. In terms of the actual text, all four books are about the same length (between 30,000 and 40,000 words). The list prices of the hardcover editions are between $18 (Johnson) and $24 (DeLillo). 9 This is as good a place as any for a brief theoretical interlude: the reader will note that in this paragraph as in other parts of the essay the printed book appears as the acting subject in individual sentences. This is more than a mere stylistic choice. As I have outlined at greater length elsewhere (2015: 28–66), literary scholarship has long neglected the medial form of texts as extrinsic to its disciplinary domain. If we wish to understand the function of the printed book in what this volume’s Introduction calls the “novel-network,” we must be willing to grant the book agency within the social process of communication. This entails a move away from those critical perspectives that seek to locate agency in one determining domain, such as the author’s intention, the economics of the publishing business, the social prestige of readers, or the artwork’s aesthetics. All of these may have agency in a specific scenario, but they do not preclude or explain the agency of the physical book as a literary artifact. To better grasp the actornetwork that connects authors, texts, and readers, the aesthetic agency of the material codex with its typographic and visual elements should not be negated outright through terms like embellishment, gimmick, or decoration. The printed book can be seen as a form in Caroline Levine’s sense (2015), i.e., an artifact whose constraints and affordances

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The selection of these titles, while admittedly subjective, is nevertheless far from arbitrary. All four novels were bestsellers in the domain of middle- to high-brow American literature. All of them also appeared high on the omnipresent year-end lists of best books selected by major publications such as the New York Times. Finally, all of them are deeply embedded into the consecration mechanisms of literary prizes: Offill’s book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Otsuka’s won this same award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award; Johnson’s was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. And while Point Omega itself didn’t win a prestigious award, its author Don DeLillo has acquired enough laurels to allow his publisher to adorn its cover with mentions of the National Book Award and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement. Beyond this, the paratexts used by each publisher to market the novel all deal either implicitly or explicitly with the novel’s brevity. Based on these case studies, I argue that the commodity of the small book incorporates the dual discourses of aesthetics and economics in such a way that material shortcomings (few pages, little content) are transformed into markers of artistic merit to be appreciated by literary connoisseurs. In their materiality as print books, these works also counteract the data maximalism of e-reading devices that store virtually unlimited streams of text. While today’s digital media ecology is a far cry from the early twentieth-century literary marketplace, the renaissance of the short form mobilizes timeworn tropes of sparseness, restraint, and precision first embraced in high modernist poetics. As an agent within the twenty-first-century novel network, the small American novel may even be more indicative of the status of fictional writing as cultural commodity in a modern marketplace than its presumably “great” counterpart. Produced by prestige publishers like Knopf and Scribner, short literary works activate cultural scripts that associate writerly craft with readerly care, thus allowing a number of agents—from authors to professional and academic critics—to stake out aesthetic positions in the larger media ecology of the present.

actively shape the social contexts it enters. Aside from Levine’s work as discussed in the Introduction, some of the most cogent methodological impulses for doing network analysis in literary studies can be found in Rita Felski’s recent writings on Bruno Latour, such as her essay “Latour and Literary Studies” (2015).

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Today’s Literary Print Culture and the Size of the Book As we have seen, the collaboration between Cather and Knopf showcases the readjustments of the American literary marketplace in the early twentieth century. Following on the heels of the mass expansion of printing in the late nineteenth century, the overlay between “literariness” and the printed book became more pronounced in Cather’s time as publishers attempted to distinguish the contents of their lists from the swelling archives of print generated by the daily press as well as the weekly and monthly newspapers. It is not hard—and admittedly not very original—to perceive an analogous dynamic at work in the current media ecology where the plenitude of digital text in whatever technological form has come to reposition “print” formats in general as relatively scarce commodities. One surprising outcome of the early decades of digital textuality is the concomitant growth of a branch of American literature that pays sustained attention to its own mediality—an aesthetic mode I have elsewhere termed metamediality.10 That novels can now engage in close medial self-inspection has less to do with the oft-proclaimed antagonism between print and screen as mechanisms of displaying content than with the co-evolution of digital design technologies and the printed codex. In essence, digital production tools have propelled the rise of a new type of literary print culture that still hasn’t quite registered in our academic routines of reading texts.11 Now beyond such explicitly metamedial novels as Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one may of course wonder if there’s any larger dynamic in the literary field that depicts

10 In Metamedia (2015), I explore a number of literary works published after 2000, all of which share an unprecedented degree of bibliographic reflexivity. Supplementing postmodernist metafiction with an artistic embrace of the book medium, novelists Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and others helped to shape a form of narrative I have proposed to call metamedial. In essence, metamedial narrative is context sensitive: its discursive content knows about its medial frame and freely communicates about this. As such, House of Leaves, the prototypical book fiction of the past decade, openly reflects on its own existence as a printed-and-bound codex. 11 See the essays in Schaefer and Starre (2019), which map out a critical reading practice for contemporary literature at the intersection of American and comparative literary studies, book studies, and media studies.

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the shifting alliance between immaterial narratives and their embodied form. Part of the answer may concern the increasingly precarious status of the book as commodity. As Ted Striphas has shown in The Late Age of Print, books have not just been one commodity among many. Indeed, these mass-produced rectangular objects were the vanguard of capitalist standardization and rationalization, at times appearing like the supreme material incarnation of capitalist production. They helped to create modern networks of production and reception, to fine-tune the capitalist division of labor, and to catalyze the electronic management of goods and services through means like the ISBN system. Benedict Anderson indeed hit the mark when he gave the name “print-capitalism” to this historical constellation. As Striphas writes, however, this type of consumer capitalism based on material commodities faces a potent challenger now in an emergent system of what he calls the “controlled consumption” of licensed digital content that turns the “consumer from subject to object of capitalist accumulation” (2011: 183). I share with Ted Striphas the sense that this is a profound shift, though where he sees this shift as mostly having implications for our everyday dealings with books, I argue that it registers on a phenomenological and aesthetic level as well. With both distribution systems in simultaneous existence, we now have the option to choose between various types of reading experiences. In this situation, the medial differences between book and e-book are thrown into sharper relief. One of these is that strictly speaking, digital texts can only be long and short, whereas printed texts can also be big or small. In a short treatise on the literary functions of the book form, Carlos Spoerhase has argued that both modernist conceptions of the book and contemporary literary studies have—if at all—conceived of the spatial form of texts as a two-dimensional plane, as embodied in the page, and not a three-dimensional space, as in the weight and heft of the codex. To remedy this limited perspective concerning the third dimension of the book, Spoerhase suggests turning to the popular trope in which great works of literature are often associated with great length, as prototypically embodied in Joyce’s Ulysses (Spoerhase 2016: 51–61). In the United States, it is “the dream of the great American novel,” as Lawrence Buell writes in his book of the same name, that has pervaded the American literary field since the mid-nineteenth century and remains very much alive in the present. From Moby-Dick to Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest, the grandeur of the great American novel always also

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depended on its size.12 American publishers frequently advertise novels that surpass the thousand-page mark as especially ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging.13 In the shadow of such printed “door stops,” very short novels have thrived as well and have sparked design strategies, marketing routines, and reception modes of their own. As a publishing phenomenon, short books appear as an emergent trend in the digital publication ecosystem.14 In the mid-1990s‚ Oxford University Press started the small-sized paperback series “Very Short Introductions,” whose list has by now grown to over 670 titles covering topics far and wide across the disciplinary spectrum. Penguin has successfully paired short pieces or excerpts from classical literature with a focus on book design to launch the series “Little Black Classics” and “Great Ideas.” While such short-book series appear as a mere novelty, publishers are still following this model, in formats such “Vintage Minis” in the UK or Reclam’s “100 Seiten” (100 pages) in Germany.15 Implicit in all of these formats is the idea of the “quick 12 This was already true for the period between the Civil War and the World War I, when the idea of the great American novel first received attention in newspapers and magazines. In his study, based on his extensive review of these highly impressionistic and dispersed debates, Buell contends that size mattered to the potential for “greatness”: “To begin with negatives, a GAN cannot be tiny. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the shortest work ever seriously proposed” (Buell 2016: 29). 13 For a suggestive media-ecological account of the changing cultural status of big books in Anglophone publishing with a specific focus on the trope of “monumentality,” see van de Ven (2019). 14 From a media historical perspective, there is a larger argument to be made that short forms of communication, while long existing in poetry and other artistic genres like the aphorism, have drastically risen in importance in the digital era. See the chapters in Gamper and Mayer (2017) for an expansive overview of the artistic and social functions of brevity from the early modern period to today. 15 Reclam ostensibly puts form before content in its strict constraint that each book in this series be exactly one hundred pages in length (which in itself has an economic advantage, as it allows for exact print production planning before authors have even submitted manuscripts). One may wonder, in the shade of this footnote, when exactly a book qualifies as short while still being a proper book. In 1950, a UNESCO conference somewhat arbitrarily—given sizing and layout varieties—held that a book was a “nonperiodical literary publication containing 49 or more pages, not counting the covers” (qtd. in Haslam 2006: 9). Given the propensity for setting standards based on Western numerical systems, this clustering around major numbers—fifty in this case—makes a certain amount of sense. Based on the book series reviewed above, shortness in books today appears to denote volumes that are at least a hundred pages long but shorter than two hundred. Reclam’s decision to hit the hundred-page mark makes intuitive sense. What

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read,” which rhymes well with the oft-heard complaint that “no one has the time to read books anymore.” Closer to the topic at hand, however, recent years have also seen a tacit reappraisal of the artistic merit of the short novel or novella.16 Since 2004, the independent American publisher Melville House has put out reprints in the series “The Art of the Novella.” Several think pieces in American magazines have made the claim that the novella is making a “return” or “comeback.”17 In 2012, the British novelist Ian McEwan contributed an essay to the New Yorker in which he claimed that “the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.” McEwan praises the formal constraints that the short novel presses on the writer, holding that “the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focussed on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with a mind to its unity. They don’t ramble or preach, they spare us their quintuple subplots and swollen midsections” (McEwan 2012). Obviously, McEwan’s appraisal of restraint and sparsity borrows from the same strand of aesthetics called up by Willa Cather in “The Novel Demeublé.” In the present, however, the minimalist aesthetics of the hundred-pager squarely collide with the maximalism of the thousand-pager. Critics have quite routinely coordinated this maximalism with the American novel in general, thus equating the American-ness of a specific piece of writing with its ambition and scope. Martin Amis argued as much in a 1982 review essay, attributing the “American predilection for Big Novels” to the complexity of twentieth-century U.S. society in its “racially mixed and mobile, 24-hour, endless, extreme, superabundantly various” form. One recent case showing the marketing dynamics and the is more, the individual novels discussed here, from Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy to the contemporary offerings by Otsuka, Offill, DeLillo, and Johnson have all been formatted with ample margins and line spacing so as to surpass this mark. 16 While there has been ample debate about the art form of the novella—especially in German literary history—the terms novelette, novella, and novel are nowadays also used to distinguish pieces of fiction by mere word count. There are no exact denominations, but derived from various online sources one can approximate that the territory of the short story ends at about 8,000 words with the novella stretching between 20,000 and 40,000 words, the intervening space made up by the novelette and anything beyond qualifying as a proper novel. 17 See Antrim (2010) and Fassler (2012).

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patterns of critical reception of such a “big” novel is Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut City on Fire (2015), both whose length (just short of 1‚000 pages) and whose extraordinary author’s advance (reportedly around two million dollars) were frequently taken up in press reviews.18 Against the consensus view that big equals important in American literature, some academic critics have come to question the fixation on outsized novels. In her provocatively titled book chapter “On Not Reading DFW,” Amy Hungerford has recently made the case that academic readers should resist the attempt of literary tastemakers to perpetuate a specific notion of authorial genius. Taking David Foster Wallace’s cult novel Infinite Jest as her main exhibit, Hungerford perceives an unholy alliance of writer, publisher, advertising staff, and literary critics at work, all of whom forcefully pushed the door-stop novel into the public arena: “The marketers knew their marks, projecting the aura of literary seriousness out toward reviewers … and daring them to man up, read a thousand pages, and prove they had something intelligent to say about it” (Hungerford 2016: 158). Hungerford develops a larger point throughout her chapter: She holds that the type of the literary genius who produces such extravagantly sprawling works is distinctly out of sync with our culture of medial abundance.

The Contemporary Small Novel---DeLillo, Offill, Otsuka While the recurring fanfare around mega-novels is bound to continue, a robust discourse around “slow reading” has arisen in the post-millenial critical landscape.19 For the reception of the American novelist Don DeLillo, this came as a timely shift. After his massive work Underworld 18 Through the novel itself, Hallberg shows that he is aware of these framings. Among his large cast of characters, we find the struggling young novelist Mercer Goodman. On the very first pages, the reader learns that Mercer had moved to New York due to “his searing ambition to write the Great American Novel” (Hallberg 2015: 5). Despite this ironic gesture, the novel’s promotional paratexts—on the publisher’s website as well as in the numerous blurbs included in the paperback edition—use the phrase “great American novel” no less than three times in a completely unironic manner. 19 For one widely discussed intervention in this debate, see David Mikics provocative book Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013). Incidentally, Mikics comments on Willa Cather in one of his short readings of major American novels, calling her spare prose style “probably the most beautiful in American letters” (2013: 212).

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(1997), Don DeLillo wrote several rather lean novels, among them The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), and Point Omega (2010), leading DeLillo experts to associate the writer’s “late phase” with a more minimalist aesthetic.20 For this brief reading of Point Omega, I use the American paperback edition, whose textual layout is the same as the original hardcover printing, but whose paratextual apparatus of review blurbs is particularly extensive, spanning three full pages in the front, as well as most of the back cover. Even a cursory reader will note the predominant tone in these snippets. Here are some samples: “It’s for readers ready to slow down and savor the words.” (USA Today); “DeLillo slows down the whole culture, all our repertoire of artifacts, words and gestures” (Greil Marcus); “Point Omega … really is the best kind of novel: the finely honed kind that sticks with you like a harrowing memory” (The San Diego Union Tribune); “DeLillo has achieved a precision and economy of language here that any writer would envy” (Washington Post ); “Written in a style that is frugal, frequently staccato, yet also displaying great flashes of spare beauty” (The Times ); “This slim, strong novel evokes the kind of patient, haiku-like quietude we long for in the post-9/11 world.” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

In numerous variations, the marketers of this book have included critical statements that link the brevity of the work with aesthetic markers of quality. With recourse to adjectives like “slow,” “patient,” and “finely honed,” these statements prime the reader with a specific attitude toward the text. The text proper then extends this outer layer of slowness into a double frame: The book starts and ends with a scene set at the MoMA installation of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s film is projected at such a slow frame rate that it takes up all of one day. The unnamed protagonist of these enveloping sections, who ends up playing a sinister role in the book, becomes fully absorbed in this spectacle of drawn-out time: “[It] was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw” (DeLillo 2010: 5). In this figure, we may perceive a fictional avatar of the ideal reader of the book,

20 For an overview of the critical literature regarding DeLillo’s late phase as well as a perceptive reading of Point Omega’s play with time and space, see Bieger (2017).

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taking her time with every single sentence and looking closely at every slight change of mood in a book that is not very tightly plotted. In the main part of the narrative, DeLillo directly references the genre of Haiku poetry—the Poundian high modernist embodiment of compression and literary craft. To his credit, the scene in question has an ironic bent to it, as the character who philosophizes about Haiku is the elderly Richard Elster, a former public relations consultant for the U.S. military who was hired to shroud the campaigns in the middle east in euphemistic language. Elster says: “Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war … I wanted a war in three lines” (29). We should note the ease with which this intradiegetic usage of the term haiku combined with the division of the book into three parts spills over into the language of reviewers and finds its way back into the paratextual snippets on the book’s cover. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka gives equally high standing to the Haiku topos. One of its two epigraphs is a haiku verse by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down—/now/I can see the moon.” The poetics of compression at work in this novel were lauded by dozens of reviewers, but they are also staged within the book itself, where Otsuka uses the acknowledgment section to list about thirty scholarly monographs that she consulted during research for the book. One reviewer accordingly describes how Otsuka “lyrically distilled” all this material into 130 small pages of narratives (Seaman 2011: 32).21 Distinctly remarkable both about Otsuka’s and about Offill’s novel, though, is their bibliographic splendor. We may recall the lavish design of Willa Cather’s miniature novel My Mortal Enemy, and see it matched by the first edition hardcovers of Otsuka’s and Offill’s novels—not incidentally also published by Knopf. It would be fairly easy—and not entirely wrong—to critique such deluxe editions as markers of distinction and as tokens underwriting the

21 The longer passage of this review reads: “Drawing on extensive research and

profoundly identifying with her characters, Otsuka crafts an intricately detailed folding screen depicting nearly five decades of change as the women painstakingly build meaningful lives, only to lose everything after Pearl Harbor. This lyrically distilled and caustically ironic story of exile, effort, and hate is entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful” (Seaman 2011: 32).

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class aesthetic of the bourgeois, as a Bourdieu-inspired reading likely would. Yet, in turning this equation around, instead of reading the aesthetic in an economic form we may also opt for a stylistic analysis of a literary commodity. On a very superficial level, these Knopf editions merely add superior production values to very short literary works. Otsuka’s novel for example carries a patterned stamp on its cover that recurs on the title pages. Looking closer, though, we see that the book designers have chosen typefaces that are otherwise uncommon in contemporary publishing: Engraver’s Oldstyle for The Buddha in the Attic and Fournier for Dept. of Speculation. Both fonts feature decorative italics that allude to handwritten script, which accords to motives of inscription appearing in each of the novels. Both texts are structured around short to medium-length paragraphs, each of which makes up a section surrounded by white space. So what do these design features do to our reading of the text? Their decorative function does not quite distract from the content of the page, but the overall setup still demands some attention and appreciation for itself. In terms of reading, these material features can be described as delaying bibliographic codes, to extend a term by Jerome McGann.22 They ever so slightly nudge the reader to read closely. Since this volume explicitly addresses the novel’s role in the marketplace, I will take the liberty to briefly invoke an economic concept that has seen some traction recently: Nudge Theory. Pioneered by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the idea of nudging people—specifically in their decisions as consumers and citizens—describes mild forms of paternalism to steer people toward supposedly benign behavior. “A nudge,” Thaler and Sunstein write, “is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid” (2008: 6). As an example, the authors cite the arrangement of food in a cafeteria: as research shows, once people see healthy food placed at eye level, they tend to gravitate more toward this kind of product instead of the junk food placed lower on the shelf. The carefully designed short books discussed here, with their insinuation 22 As explored in his seminal book The Textual Condition, McGann draws a critical distinction between the “linguistic codes” of literary works, i.e., their textual content, and the “bibliographical codes” that determine the visual and material appearance of the printed codex form.

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of slowness and their delaying bibliographic codes, want to be read in a deliberate manner, but they don’t have to be. They nudge consumers to become slow readers, but they can also be plowed through during an extended lunch break. Entering the terrain of publishing economics from the safe home turf of literary studies naturally opens the floodgates to a stream of empirical questions about the industry: What is the publishers’ interest in this scenario? Do agents, editors, and marketers really deploy the artful design and the slow reading-centered paratexts of these novels as conscious and intentional nudges within an overall economic rationale? Does it not actually hurt a publisher’s business if people spend too much time with one given novel when they could already be off purchasing the next book? While such empirical issues of intentionality evade my methodological setup, this chapter’s extended exploration of the small American novel nevertheless shows how these books in their aesthetics and their materiality make a discursive offering to audiences and institutions (such as prize committees), allowing them to frame their aesthetic judgment within the narrative of sparseness-equals-profundity. Can this framing entice more readers to spend over $20 for a mere 100 pages of text? The likely answer is yes—but anything beyond that would be conjecture.23 My account ultimately subscribes to a poetics of the material book, attempting to read literary artifacts for the affordances and the aesthetic agency embedded in and extending outward from them. In general, the marketing departments at literary publishers like Knopf and Picador simultaneously produce bigger-is-better advertising for literary doorstoppers and minimalist framings for sparse narratives. This strategy may appear incoherent, but in a diversified literary system such a doublepronged approach pragmatically caters to consumer preferences and to economies of prestige at the expense of poetological consistency.24

23 One could envision a large-scale empirical study of the production and reception contexts of small novels, for example modeled on Clayton Childress’s integrative sociology of literature (2017), which would pair profitably with the analytical approach presented here. 24 On the shifting position of self-described literary fiction in the contemporary entertainment marketplace, see Collins (2010).

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American Myths in Miniature Influenced by a network of writers, publishers, designers, and marketers, the contemporary short novel often incorporates textual, paratextual, and material nudging mechanisms to encourage specific modes of reading, as described in the previous section. Beyond these parameters, such works also debunk the notion that an American novel must be “great” to be emphatically American. Offill’s narrator, a semi-autobiographical writer struggling with her craft, at one point takes on a hack-job as a ghost writer for a book by a rich space enthusiast. “It’s a spectacularly ill-conceived project,” the unnamed protagonist writes (2014: 38). She describes how he wishes to tell the entire history of the U.S. space program and include “elaborate technical documents of his own devising”: “It’s going to be a big book,” he says, “Big!” (39). Despairing at this job and also failing to finish her second novel, the protagonist resorts to smaller forms, like “really American” fortune cookie aphorisms: “Objects create happiness. / Your cities will shine forever. / Death will not touch you.” (52) In this compressed form, the ideological core of several timeworn American myths appears laughable. Offill satirically dismisses both the hubris of the Great American Novel and the blandness of the motivational one-liner. In his novella Train Dreams, Denis Johnson undertakes a more sustained attempt to compress an American myth—the Old West and its disappearance in the age of the railroad and the automobile. From a publishing standpoint, Train Dreams is a unique case. It first appeared in the summer 2002 issue of the Paris Review. It won an O’Henry Award in 2003 and subsequently became a favorite among writers. The story was republished by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2011, bearing the denomination “A novella” on its cover. In this new material form, Train Dreams entered a different sphere of circulation and different routines of cultural valuation. For one, the book now found its way to the editorial desks of American newspapers and magazines, eliciting reviews that called the text a “small masterpiece,” “a triumph of spare writing,” and “a nearly perfect short novel”—with all of these snippets later used as promotional blurbs on the back cover of the paperback edition.25 25 In his review of Train Dreams in the New York Times, the novelist Anthony Doerr stresses the crucial role that book publication still plays in the digital age. Noting that many writers, college professors, and students who have read Johnson’s work were not aware of the short story “Train Dreams,” Doerr writes: “So it is with a heaping cup of pleasure, and a tablespoon of reluctance, that I tell you this little novella is finally its own

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Addressing the implicit “big book” bias of the critical reading public, Picador’s official blurb about Train Dreams calls the short text an “epic in miniature.” The blurb further associates the singular fate related in the novel with the grand national narrative of the “American West” and the evolution of the “American way of life.” Unlike DeLillo, Otsuka, and Offill, Johnson refrains from a disjointed patchwork style, giving his novella the most traditional narrative form of the set. Centered on the life of Robert Grainier, a railroad laborer and logger in rural Idaho in the early 1900s, the novella quite explicitly calls up myths of the American frontier and of Western settlement.26 Figurations of totality inform this novel on various levels. Like Cather’s A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy, Johnson’s novella relates a whole life story, zooming in on specific scenes while relating other time spans in just a few spare words. Readers of Train Dreams witness Robert Grainier’s life from birth to death, as filtered through a figural narrative voice focalized on the protagonist. Thus, the relative length of each episode in the book corresponds not to its chronological span, but to the weight of each memory in Grainier’s personal recollection. While the narrative style remains sparse throughout much of the action, Johnson permits himself expansive lyricism in the few moments of paramount importance in Grainier’s life. Returning from one of his railroad jobs, he finds that a wildfire has devastated the entire area surrounding his home. Looking for his wife and child—both of whom, we learn, have died in the fire—he surveys the burned landscape: All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the book, with its own cover, as easy to find as a national park. Someone has finally put up a sign: Here Is Something Worth Seeing.” In this metaphorical rendering of a signpost, the material book again works like a well-designed nudge. It physically elevates the short text to the status of a stand-alone work, thus asking readers to focus their attention instead of—as might happen in the pages of the Paris Review—straying to other texts close by. 26 This pars pro toto figuration—an individual life story representing the state of the nation—is a staple of the Great American Novel-discourse as analyzed by Buell: “It’s always seemed permissible for the GAN to center on an individual figure, like Huckleberry Finn, but with the proviso that he or she should be in some sense socially representative. Relatedly, a GAN must not limit itself to rehearsing particular lives and events but provide at least implicitly some consequential reflection on U.S. history and culture and its defining institutions—democracy, individualism, capitalism, sectionalism, immigration, expansionism, signature landscapes, demographic mix” (Buell 2016: 29).

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brilliant pastels of the light overhead, some clouds high and white catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains, and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world. (Johnson 2012: 42–43)

This sprawling sentence, explicitly marked as a high point of the narrative, is a stylistic feat cut out for the type of professionally sanctioned close reading of literary scholars, as well as for the ideal, slow reader imagined by the modernist art theory of Willa Cather. The pictorial tableau created here conjoins life and death but it also cleverly subverts the American literary topos of the disruptive modern machine that enters the pristine garden. Here, the train is the only sign of life in an otherwise devastated natural landscape. Toward the end of the narrative Johnson encapsulates the life of his protagonist in one short paragraph, recounting in sparse sentences some basic facts about Grainier: that he’d traveled far west but had never seen the ocean, that he never drank alcohol, and that he had no idea who his parents were. The paragraph also lists some of his belongings and some of the means of transportation he’d used during his lifetime (113). The paragraph exudes Hemingwayesque minimalism, especially in deadpan statements like this: “He’d had one lover—his wife, Gladys—owned one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon” (113). The narrative appears to race toward the finish line, with the section ending with a view of Grainier’s grave, dug for him by a pair of hikers who found him dead in his cabin. And yet, like an afterthought, the story returns to a moment in time recounted a few pages before, when Grainier visited the town of Bonners Ferry to buy a sled dog. That same night, Grainier went to a theater performance by a traveling troupe that included, among other sensations and oddities, a boy disguised as a wolf. In this concluding motion, the novel finally does confront the overarching problem of the scope of smallness. While the other novels discussed above have addressed this topic through formal correlatives—the haiku, the slow-motion film, the fortune cookie aphorism—Train Dreams drives at a deeper appreciation of the human capacity to experience the large within the small. In the final lines of the book, the wolf boy—essentially a side show character—stands at center stage, fixates the audience, and lets out a monumental howl:

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He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and of the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever. (Johnson 2012: 116)

This Proustian moment of a striking sense impression that stirs human memory and imagination briefly alludes to the play of opposites that novels in the Western genre have always operated on. Through it, the novel seeks closure not so much on the narrative level—after all, we already know when and how Grainier has died—as on an experiential level. The single terrifying howl unites—the passage uses the terms “gathered” and “coalesced”—the dialectical opposites of nature and culture: it signifies primal animal force as well as the disruptive power of the ship and the railroad. Johnson underwrites this dialectical play by mentioning the unity of “awful and beautiful,” alluding to romantic notions of the sublime in art. Finally the passage unifies notions of the high and the low in the arts, as the sound of “opera singing and the music of flutes” springs from the mouth of a freak show character in a cheap country circus. With an abrupt cut to black the book ends, but not without aiming for a final unity. In the wolf boy’s howl, Train Dreams articulates the human desire for synecdochic understanding, for perceiving a given thing to stand in for something larger or smaller. As such, the single howl is the “originating ideal of all such sounds ever made”; the short moment of the howl’s ringing in the air signifies the onset of “forever.” Withholding any autoreferential statements about the value of artistic economy and precision, the novel nevertheless points us to an ultimate, yet inaccessible agent that determines literary value: “the very minds” of the audience.

Conclusion: True Reading? At one point in his review of Denis Johnson’s novella, Anthony Doerr calls up Edgar Allan Poe’s famous 1842 essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s

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Twice-Told Tales. In the longer section that Doerr quotes from, Poe defends the short story form against the novel: The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. (Poe 1994: 65)

Doerr then updates Poe’s point about the “worldly interests” that force people to interrupt their reading: “Because you have to stop reading novels every now and then—to shower, to eat, to check your Twitter feed—their power weakens” (2017). Writers and commentators far and wide—especially in and around academia—have recently turned this lament of the fragmented daily life into a widespread contemporary topos. In his book on slow reading, to pick just one instance, David Mikics claims that the digital “tidal wave of bad writing” stemming from the “never-ending flood of text” makes “true reading” increasingly hard to do (2013, 8). While the sentiment behind Mikics argument is laudable, it appears that we can no longer take for granted a shared communal sense of what “true reading” is. For one, the notion that readers fully submit to the “writer’s control,” as described by Poe in the passage quoted above, could hardly be farther removed from the self-descriptions of contemporary media society with is active consumers and empowered readers. The active audiences imagined by early British Cultural Studies have recently reappeared in updated versions as co-producers of media content whose commenting, tagging, and remixing activities add value to the intellectual properties managed by media conglomerates. If this is the “new systematic cultural norm”—to use Jameson’s term (Jameson 2005, 6)—then “willing suspension of disbelief” sounds less like a humbling gesture anymore, but more like a counter-hegemonic practice. Similarly, the fetishization of book objects has new connotations in an economic culture that slowly discards material commodities. Allowing a literary artifact to nudge one to read slowly at least temporarily frees today’s

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readers from having their micro-engagements turned into a commodity marketable to advertisers. At a time when the tools and technologies of the Digital Humanities enable us to “read” ever more words, pages, and books per hour, the small novel challenges professional readers to continue pursuing the minimalism of the word and the sentence alongside the maximalism of the archive and the database.

References Amis, Martin. 1982. The Moronic Inferno. London Review of Books, April 1. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n06/martin-amis/the-moronic-inf erno. Accessed 31 March 2020. Antrim, Taylor. 2010. The Novella Is Making a Comeback. The Daily Beast, August 4. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-novella-is-making-acomeback. Accessed 31 March 2020. Benton, Megan. 2009. Unruly Servants: Machines, Modernity, and the Printed Page. In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. C.F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, 151–169. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bieger, Laura. 2017. Nach der Paranoia: Don DeLillos Spiel mit der kurzen Form. In Kurz & Knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Michael Gamper and Ruth Mayer, 309–324. Bielefeld: Transcript. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed. In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, 29–73. New York: Columbia University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2016. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Cather, Willa. 1920. On the Art of Fiction. In The Borzoi 1920; Being a Sort of Record of Five Years’ Publishing, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 7–8. New York: Knopf. ———. 1922. The Novel Demeublé. New Republic, April 12, 5–6. ———. 2013. The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout. New York: Knopf. Childress, Clayton. 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham and New York: Duke University Press. DeLillo, Don. 2010. Point Omega: A Novel. New York: Scribner. Doerr, Anthony. 2017. Private Express (review of Train Dreams ). New York Times, September 16, 23.

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Fassler, Joe. 2012. The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread. The Atlantic, April 24. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/arc hive/2012/04/the-return-of-the-novella-the-original-longread/256290/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Felski, Rita. 2015. Latour and Literary Studies. PMLA 130 (3): 737–742. Gamper, Michael, and Ruth Mayer (eds.). 2017. Kurz & Knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Bielefeld: Transcript. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. 2009. Ambivalent Advertising: Books, Prestige, and the Circulation of Publicity. In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. C.F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, 170–189. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hallberg, Garth Risk. 2015. City on Fire. New York: Knopf. Haslam, Andrew. 2006. Book Design. London: Laurence King. Hungerford, Amy. 2016. Making Literature Now. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham and New York: Duke University Press. Johnson, Denis. 2012. Train Dreams. New York: Picador. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Love, Glen A. 1990. The Professor’s House: Cather, Hemingway, and the Chastening of American Prose Style. Western American Literature 24 (4): 295–311. McEwan, Ian. 2012. Some Notes on the Novella. The New Yorker, October 29. McGann, Jerome J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mikics, David. 2013. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Offill, Jenny. 2014. Dept. of Speculation. New York: Knopf. Ohmann, Richard. 2009. Diverging Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism. In Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. C.F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, 102–115. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Otsuka, Julie. 2011. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Knopf. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1994 [1842]. Rev. of Twice-Told Tales. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. John L. Idol and Buford Jones, 60–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, David H. 2008. On the Divide: The Many Lives of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Pressman, Jessica. 2014. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Ronning, Kari A. 2014. Speaking Volumes: Embodying Cather’s Works. Studies in the Novel 45 (3) (Fall): 519–537. Schaefer, Heike, and Alexander Starre (eds.). 2019. The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor. Cham: Palgrave. Seaman, Donna. 2011. Rev. of The Buddha in the Attic. Booklist, August: 32. Spoerhase, Carlos. 2016. Linie, Fläche, Raum: Die drei Dimensionen des Buches in der Diskussion der Gegenwart und der Moderne (Valéry, Benjamin, MoholyNagy). Göttingen: Wallstein. Starre, Alexander. 2015. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ———. 2016. Organic Book Design from Dwiggins to Danielewski: The Metamedial Aesthetics of Embodied Literature in American Trade Publishing. In Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert, 74–87. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Striphas, Ted. 2011. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press. van de Ven, Inge. 2019. Big Books in Times of Big Data. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

Index

A Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 10, 11, 214, 215 Advertising, 125, 170, 171, 186, 218, 301, 310, 314 Agency, 53, 55, 57, 126, 178, 191, 197, 198, 256, 304, 314 Amazon, 9, 124, 207, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 230, 303 Analog (media and culture), 132, 306 Audio book, 9, 111, 213 Aura, 217, 230, 231, 233, 236, 240, 274, 310 Audience(s), 17, 55, 59, 62, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87, 97, 112, 133, 140, 167–169, 171, 173, 175–178, 189, 198, 207, 231, 273–276, 280, 284, 288, 291, 314, 317–319 Author/Authorship, 12, 138, 141– 146, 158, 230, 231, 237, 239, 286, 302 Award. See Prize(s) (and prize culture)

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, M., 3, 5, 30, 31, 46, 70, 183, 190, 191 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 214, 216–218, 221, 223, 225, 226, 230, 233, 235, 236 Bestsellers/bestselling books, 2, 113, 205, 212, 213, 220, 232, 256, 305 bildungsroman, 139, 156 Big data, 253, 256 Big Five, The, 205 Book. See Book culture bookishness, 137, 231, 232 booksellers, 8, 112, 113, 116, 207, 265 codex, 7, 230, 237, 304, 306, 307 e-book, 204, 233, 307 hardback, 143 paperback, 2, 70, 138, 221, 308, 315 print (and print culture), 233, 246

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Lanzendörfer and C. Norrick-Rühl (eds.), The Novel as Network, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7

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324

INDEX

publishing, 2, 4, 10, 13, 137, 151, 196, 204, 205, 212, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 264, 265, 268, 273, 280, 283, 301, 304, 308, 313 Book culture, 231 Book history, 7, 203 Bookishness/bookish, 230–232, 237, 238, 283 Booksellers/bookselling, 6, 212 Bookstore, 138, 139, 206–208, 216, 241, 272, 291 Book studies, 2, 7, 10, 306 Bookwork, 8, 231, 236, 245, 260, 300, 305, 316 Bourdieu, Pierre, 274–276, 302, 313 British studies, 319

261–263, 265–267, 272–274, 276, 279, 280, 282, 283, 287, 291, 294, 295, 319 Conglomeratization, 204 Consumers, 2, 27, 63, 84, 116, 122, 125, 127, 128, 134, 177, 194, 206, 218, 257, 265, 295, 307, 313, 314, 319 Convergence, 126 Creativity, 140 Curation, 206, 207, 214, 215, 220

D Design, 14, 59, 123, 146, 150, 186, 189, 230, 232, 233, 236–239, 272, 300, 301, 304, 306, 308, 312–314 Digital (media and culture), 61, 138, 166, 177, 212, 213, 217, 219, 230, 233, 237–240, 245, 246, 306 Diversity, 41, 52–54, 57, 65, 150, 152, 206, 255, 267

C Capitalism/capitalist, 23, 34–37, 41, 55, 62, 120, 122, 123, 127, 205, 273, 287, 301, 302, 307, 316 Celebrity, 2, 148, 171, 205–207, 283 Codex, 5, 9, 237, 245, 301, 306, 313 Collecting, 217 Comic/comics, 2, 4–6, 9, 14, 16, E 24, 27, 28, 38, 87–96, 98–102, E-book, 239 104–108, 111–113, 115, 116, Editor/editing, 2, 12, 13, 17, 27, 54, 120, 121, 127–131, 133, 58, 59, 64, 139, 142, 144, 158, 137–146, 148, 150–158, 197 171, 206, 207, 242, 251–267, Commodity/commodities/commodification, 275–277, 279, 281, 282, 284, 2, 3, 7, 9, 14, 18, 51, 52, 55, 314 61, 62, 71, 79, 116, 117, 122, E-literary culture. See Literary culture 138, 143, 148, 151, 183, 184, Embodiment/embodied, 132, 265, 192, 195, 196, 203, 204, 207, 268, 287, 307, 312 237, 261, 265, 267, 275, 280, E-reader, 7, 17, 218, 219, 230 281, 285, 290, 291, 294, 295, 300–302, 304–307, 313, 319, F 320 Facsimile, 218, 229, 230, 232, 233, Communications circuit, 13 235–238, 240, 246 Conglomerate(s), 4, 12, 62, 204, Facticity, 231 205, 252, 254, 255, 257, 259,

INDEX

325

Fair/festival, 207, 288 Form, literary. See Literary form Format, 2, 13, 111, 113, 129, 139, 143, 144, 148, 151, 152, 155, 166, 203, 207, 213, 239, 246, 303, 306, 308

Innovation, 26, 31, 34, 35, 43, 45, 47, 72, 79, 80, 122, 155, 172 Intermediality/intermedial, 7, 92, 184, 185 Intermediation, 112 Internet, 8, 148, 219, 242, 243, 245

G Games/gaming, 102, 115, 116, 131, 168, 177, 182, 183, 185–191, 193–199, 218, 291 Genette, Gérard, 2, 8, 187, 262, 291 Genre, 1, 4, 13–15, 23, 24, 27, 29–31, 33, 46, 48, 69–71, 73–78, 80–85, 88, 89, 96, 101, 104, 107, 114, 120, 139, 140, 144, 156–158, 163–166, 171, 185, 187, 190, 191, 196, 231, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 261–263, 267, 272–274, 282, 284, 308, 312, 318 Genre fiction, 14, 15, 27, 32, 69, 70, 73–77, 79–82, 84, 157, 273, 274, 280, 284, 294 Google, 46 Graphic novel, 4–6, 9, 14, 16, 90, 111–113, 116, 120, 137–139, 141, 142, 144, 155, 157, 158, 194

K Kindle. See E-reader Knopf (A.A. Knopf), 283, 299, 300–302, 305, 306, 312–314 Knowledge (and knowledge production), 61, 91, 170, 173, 222, 223, 251, 257, 261, 264, 266, 293

H Hardback/hardcover, 2, 8, 143, 152, 277, 280, 301, 304, 311, 312 HarperCollins, 272, 283, 294 Hogarth, 116, 207, 271–295 Humanism/humanist, 52

I Immediacy, 168 Independent publishers, 12, 282

L Latour, Bruno, 10–12, 17, 215, 305 Layout, 153, 304, 308, 311 Leypoldt, Günter, 71, 72, 76, 79, 81, 82, 253, 257, 258, 267 Libraries/library/librarian, 8, 17, 46, 212, 213, 217–226, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 241, 245 Literacy, 88, 128, 140, 144, 220, 242 Literary culture, 17, 204, 205, 211, 212, 219, 302 Literary form, 3, 25, 30, 37, 40, 122, 168, 175 Literary history, 32, 35, 37, 39, 70, 72, 79, 141, 267, 309 Literary market(place), 34, 52, 55, 63, 65, 183, 203, 272, 278, 279, 291, 294, 305, 306 Literary studies, 7, 10, 23, 36, 72, 74, 140, 305–307, 314 Locativity, 206, 216, 217, 219, 222, 224 M Marginalia, 234, 235, 245

326

INDEX

Marketing, 8, 17, 26, 51–54, 56–64, 116, 141, 143, 144, 148, 184, 204–207, 261–264, 274, 276, 281, 301, 308, 309, 314 Materiality, 7, 8, 10, 262, 263, 304, 305, 314 Media (and media culture), 238 Memoir, 139, 242 Memory, 121, 123, 231, 233, 237, 292, 316, 318 Metafiction/metafictional, 37, 92, 292, 306 Metamediality/metamedial, 306 Metaphor, 8, 10, 11, 89, 95, 101, 143, 152, 175, 205, 264, 289 Multimodality/multimodal, 237 N Nerd ecology, 90, 108 Network, 3, 5, 7–15, 17, 18, 24–26, 28, 51, 52, 55, 65, 69, 71, 75–78, 80, 83–85, 91, 96, 102, 105, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115–117, 137, 138, 142, 155, 178, 182–185, 196, 197, 199, 203–208, 212, 215, 223, 230, 231, 238–240, 245, 252, 257, 261, 262, 302, 304, 305, 307, 315 New media. See Media (and media culture) New York Times, The, 205, 214, 220, 232, 274, 278, 283, 305, 315 Nostalgia/nostalgic, 6, 35, 36, 90, 120, 121, 123–126, 135, 204, 231, 233, 238 Novelization, 14, 17, 115, 116, 183–185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 194, 197, 198, 272, 273, 281 Novelness/novelistic, 7, 15–17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 38, 47, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 104, 111, 114, 115,

164, 165, 170, 172, 175–178, 183, 185, 190–192, 197, 199, 204, 206, 235, 241, 242, 285 P Paper, 134, 139, 143, 165, 218, 224, 230, 237, 246 Paperback, 8, 96, 97, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146, 151, 310, 311 Paratext, 2, 142, 143, 156, 184, 262, 263, 277, 305, 310, 314 Penguin Random House/Random House, 139, 196, 207, 214, 271–273, 275, 276, 278–280, 284, 294, 295 Podcasting/podcasts, 2, 16, 17, 111, 113–116, 163–178, 231, 242–245 Postcolonialism/postcolonial studies, 8, 58 Postmodernism, 15, 32, 34–43, 45, 47, 48, 70, 73–75, 77, 79, 122, 123, 286 Print (and print culture), 306, 308 Prize(s) (and prize culture), 206, 207, 273 Publishing/publishers, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11–13, 16, 17, 27, 33, 52, 54, 62, 115, 138, 155, 182, 193, 204–206, 212, 251–253, 255, 256, 259, 260, 263–265, 267, 268, 271–274, 278–280, 283, 287, 291, 294, 301, 314, 315 R Readers, 1–3, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 27, 77, 80, 81, 84, 89, 94, 97–100, 102, 103, 105–107, 112, 114, 116, 135, 149, 151, 158, 165, 177, 183, 197, 199, 205, 206, 208, 212–214, 216, 218, 219,

INDEX

230–242, 245, 246, 255, 260, 265, 276, 284, 285, 288, 289, 303, 304, 310, 311, 314, 316, 319, 320 Reading (communities), 205, 230 Reading, 3, 5, 52, 204, 235, 237, 246, 252, 253, 255, 257, 306 Realism, 15, 37–39, 72–75, 77, 80, 83, 95, 101, 121, 123, 153, 241, 242, 303 Remediation, 13

S Sales, 2, 8, 81, 82, 113, 115, 138, 170, 174, 176, 184, 193, 212, 256, 261, 265, 273, 275, 284 Schiffrin, André, 205, 283, 284 Screens, 169, 205, 219, 289, 306, 312 Self-referential/self-reflexive, 156 Seriality/series (book, comics, TV), 6, 7, 9, 16, 92, 98, 105, 137–140, 145, 149, 193, 213, 273, 277, 290, 308 Short Story, 7, 74, 106, 194, 196, 301, 309, 315, 319 Small press(es), 12, 264 Social media, 148, 158, 239, 242, 245 Softcover. See Paperback

327

Storytelling, 7, 16, 17, 79, 80, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 153, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172, 174, 178, 187, 197 Storyworld(s), 165, 183, 185, 192, 194, 196–198 Streaming, 166 Striphas, Ted, 5, 112, 204, 207, 300, 307 T Thompson, John B., 4, 204, 253, 276, 283 Transmedia/transmedial, 16, 188, 239, 241 Twitter, 5, 239, 242, 245, 319 Typography/typographical, 146, 300, 304 V Video games, 7, 14, 17, 24, 111, 115, 116, 181–194, 196–199, 272, 285, 290, 291 W Writer. See Author Y Youtube, 194, 239