Archival Fictions

Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature

Paul Benzon

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781625345998, 9781625345981
• eBook ISBN: 9781613768754
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media technology, contemporary and avant-garde writers have offered more nuanced considerations.

Taking up works from Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Don DeLillo, and Hari Kunzru, Archival Fictions considers how these writers have constructed a speculative history of media technology through formal experimentation. Although media technologies have determined the extent of what can be written, recorded, and remembered in the immediate aftermath of print's hegemony, Paul Benzon argues that literary form provides a vital means for critical engagement with the larger contours of media history. Drawing on approaches from media poetics, film studies, and the digital humanities, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how authors who engage technology through form continue to imagine new roles for print literature across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

For Sarah, who has always been there

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

On the Undeath of the Book

Chapter One

Lost in Transcription

Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error

Chapter Two

Unheard Frequencies

Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts and the Analog Aesthetics of the Turntable

Chapter Three

Archive, Film, Novel

Mediated Writing and Media History in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog

Chapter Four

Digital Materiality on Paper

Literary Form and Network Circulation in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Chapter Five

Page Shredding

Digital Textuality and Paper Cinema

Conclusion

Valeria Luiselli’s Undocumentary Novel

Notes

Index

Preface

Like many literary scholars, I can chart my personal and intellectual growth through the books I encountered at various stages of life: the first “grown-up” literature I discovered in my parents’ living room bookshelves in grade school; the contemporary novels I wandered across in bookstore aisles as a young adult, which mirrored my world back to me in ways I could not have imagined without them; the theoretical texts I discovered in college, which opened up lines of thinking and reading that seemed at once both impossible and necessary. This project builds on all of those texts and moments, yet its true origin point lies in an earlier, less canonical text, Thomas Rockwell’s 1973 middle-grade comedy novel How to Eat Fried Worms.

How to Eat Fried Worms tells the story of Billy Forrester, who bets his friend and rival Alan fifty dollars that he can eat fifteen worms in fifteen days. Once the bet is set in place at the outset of the novel, the characters proceed through a linear narrative of gross-out meals, family dramas, and petty conflicts typical of the genre. Nearly all of its chapters, some only a page or two in length, cover a single scene, often focusing on Billy’s eating his daily worm, with many of the chapters titled as such: “The First Worm,” “The Second Worm,” and so on. After making my way through the early sections of the novel, I remember becoming uneasy with its middle stretch, not only for the way the tension escalated between Billy and the duplicitous, conniving Alan, but also—and far more so—for the way the novel’s paratextual apparatus (although at age eight or nine I hardly knew to call it that) registered that tension. Chapter 23 was titled “Admirals Naumo and Kusaka on the Bridge of the Akaiga, December 6, 1941,” and subsequent chapters followed the suit of this strangely weighty, Orientalist parallel between the Pacific theater of World War II and elementary school rivalry: Chapter 25 was “Pearl Harbor,” and Chapter 26 was “Guadalcanal.”

Chapter 29, in which Billy and Alan finally come to blows, was marked in the book’s table of contents by what looked to my untrained eyes like a blotch of black and white, an inkblot, a printer’s error of some sort on the cheap, pulpy paper of the school library paperback. I briefly considered finding another copy to compare it against—in hopes of finding the “real, actual” title of this pivotal chapter in the narrative—but page ninety-three of the novel, where this title appeared in situ, was larger, more detailed, and clearer in its implications. While I didn’t at the time know all of the historical particulars the previous chapter titles invoked, I knew that this one was an image of a mushroom cloud, the atomic bomb detonating over Hiroshima. How was I supposed to read this? The metaphor of explosive conflict was clear enough, if overburdened with geopolitical and racial insensitivity. But how was I supposed to read the image itself amid words—how did it resonate against those words, not only thematically but visually, spatially, materially, textually? What did it mean for a chapter title, a paratextual element that I implicitly understood to be a transparently explanatory label, to swerve so diametrically from conventional protocols of narrative, of typography, of textuality, of codex form? While I didn’t have anything like the vocabulary to fully articulate these questions at the time, they took hold in my mind as the first seed of the reckoning with textual experimentation that I pursue in this book.

The media theory I encountered during and after graduate school some two decades later is another. Reading the work of scholars—many of whom appear in this book—who were thinking through the materialities of media formats, from the phonograph to the hard drive, revealed to me the outline of a material poetics in those formats that resonated with how I had by then begun to see literary form. But that poetics was nowhere to be found in critical writing on contemporary literature in relation to media technology. Scholars in this domain largely treated technology at the level of culture—of what it meant in a generalized sense within the imagined world of a given novel or poem—without attention to how it worked or how the text itself might work in relation or response to it. What might a closer, more syncretic attention to those workings reveal—about literary form, about media format, about the relation between the two? Where might we find a media poetics of and in literary experimentation?

Archival Fictions seeks to explore these questions. Bringing the domains of literary form and media theory into contact, I aim to understand what is at stake in moments where literature engages with media technology not in discursive or narrative terms but rather in formal ones, and to suggest how we might read those moments in ways that are sensitive to both literary form and media format. Turning to a series of formally innovative print literary texts from roughly the last fifty years, I focus on instances of experimentation and rupture, where mimesis breaks down and literature as conventionally understood fails and refuses to transparently represent its technological others. My intent in focusing on these moments is not to emphasize literature’s shortcomings or limitations in comparison with other media but rather precisely the opposite—to locate a point of departure from conventional critical conceptions of the literary that allows us to turn to type, paratextuality, layout, blank space, and other elements that lie outside of language, narrative, and discourse.

These moments become productively redoubled and overdetermined when the question of literary representation comes to bear on other media forms: when text on the print page not only has to describe or narrate celluloid, vinyl, or silicon but also somehow figure the materiality of those forms through ruptures in its own materiality. The codex book is perhaps the most stable media format in human history—so much so, in fact, that we often see it as transparent to the point of invisibility. Thinking about the materiality of literary form through media theory, we might see that form anew, as being entangled with other technologies in ways that are both more microscopic and more capacious than we might first imagine. In this sense, Archival Fictions picks up on a tradition of print formal experimentation that dates back at least to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 innovation with typography and layout in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, tracing how the contours of that tradition transform within the context of the contemporary media landscape. Looking for ways in which moments of formal experimentation might help us to map that landscape in new ways, I aim to imagine literary textuality itself as its own kind of media format, one that is capable of tracing other technologies across history in ways that are as intimate as they are uneven.

Acknowledgments

This project has been a long time in the making, unmaking, and remaking; I’m grateful to everyone who has been with me along the way and played a role in its development, and mine.

While How to Eat Fried Worms might have produced the first sparks of Archival Fictions, I took a massive leap into reading the way I do in this book in middle and high school Latin class at Trinity School. Allen Schroeter, Charles Fornara III, Maureen Rayhill, Doug Tobin, and Donald Connor taught me about graphic word order, chiasmus, and synchysis; tracing my pen back and forth across Latin words, I began to see language as material—as having shape and weight, taking up space on the surface of the page. Even though the content of this project is millennia away from the lines of Catullus and Virgil, the methods are, in many ways, nowhere near as distant. My time at Williams College laid further foundations for my work in this project and beyond: I learned how to close read from Bob Bell, how to think the contemporary and the paracanonical from Nico Israel, how to conceptualize the poetics of technology from Tom Murtaugh, and how to read the popular for the political from Kristin Carter-Sanborn.

The first true inklings of what would become this book appeared during my time at Rutgers University, thanks to the support of a group of dedicated, generous teachers, each of whom championed my work in different ways. Richard Dienst was there from day one: with a few comments on my work in his seminar on Deleuze and cinema, he set the course for much of my thinking since about media, form, and format, and always believed—even when I did not—that attending to the preposterous in a text or a problem could uncover what was exciting about it. Brent Hayes Edwards somehow managed to simultaneously meet me where I was in my thinking and be miles ahead, and modeled an approach to treating texts capaciously, generously, and sensitively that I still aspire to. John McClure respected my interests when they seemed eccentric, and challenged me to rein in my thinking when it seemed—and was—outlandish. Marianne DeKoven opened the door for me by encouraging me to write my first-ever seminar paper on graffiti and to submit it to a conference on text and image, and will hopefully be pleased to see that this book turns to Bob Dylan in its closing pages. Cornelius Collins, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Megan Ward, and honorary Rutgers student Sean Grattan kept me as smiling and sane as possible, whether in the seminar room, at Au Bon Pain, on Listserv back channels, or on NJ Transit.

At Temple University, Eli Goldblatt, Keith Gumery, Rachael Groner, and Christine Palumbo-DeSimone welcomed me as part of a community of thinkers and teachers, and I’m grateful for their support, for the collegiality of everyone in the Temple Writing Program, and for the thinking and learning I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication