Visual Text and Media Divergence

Abstract

This article explores current reinventions of the paper page and the book-object as bearers of visual text in the digital age. How has the literary evolved as a verbal-visual art in the digital age, pronouncedly ‘bookish’ in spite or because of its overall digital mode of production? The authors focus on works illustrative of three genres – Mark Z. Danielewski's novel Only Revolutions (2006a), Louise Paillé's artbook Livres-livres (1993–2004), and ET Russian's personal zine Ring of Fire #3 (1999) – showing how the digital does not erase but produces ‘analogue’ or paper-based writing anew. How does the digital provide new meanings, and modes for such writing to pronounce itself? With respect to the works discussed, the authors argue that such ‘analogue’ writing is presented as an embodied writing: a writing addressed towards the body, but also presenting itself as a visceral, bodily act. They approach this embodied writing as an instance of media divergence: a dynamic of contrastive, material differences between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ media in the present.

Keywords:

• analogue
• digital
• embodied writing
• media divergence
• visual text

Notes

The author's first novel, House of Leaves (2000) is already called a ‘cult classic’. For an in-depth analysis of this novel's relation to digital media environments, see Brian W. Chanen's article in EJES 11.2 (2007). For a similar analysis of Only Revolutions, see Hayles (2011). With the success of House of Leaves, the genre started to notably develop and receive popular esteem – see, among many others, Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts (2007).

See the ‘Book Trailer’ of the novel (Danielewski, 2006b).

References to the text will henceforth start with ‘H’ or ‘S’ followed by a page number, to indicate the narrator of the particular citation.

At one point, for instance, the protagonists are being chased by a ‘creep’ (depicted in purple, signifying time) who tries to catch them with a lasso, and threateningly predicts: ‘You can't leave me’ (H87)/‘You can't quit me’ (S87). And indeed, when the reader (with Sam and Hailey) arrives at the pages on the other end of the chiasmic space of the book, he is waiting there: ‘You can never quit me’ (H274)/‘You can never leave me’ (S274).