Narrative Materiality and The Contemporary Book

Abstract

Narrative Materiality and The Contemporary Book David Wylot (bio) 1. HAPPY READING In 2019, the publishing house Penguin Books ran an advertising campaign across the UK for its imprint Penguin Classics entitled "Happy Reading." The campaign comprised of photographs of individually owned books from the Penguin Classics range that have been handled, used, and thoroughly read. One campaign poster, for instance, displayed a copy of CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S Jane Eyre (1847) complete with bent cover, annotation labels, and the marks of a book worn with use.1 More than just a celebration of their stories and worlds, the campaign sought to vividly display (and sell) readers' physical encounters with the printed book. As its promotional material stated, each book photographed "tells a story of its own, through its cracked spine, dog-eared pages, scribbled margins or its missing cover."2 The story contained by the book is only half of the book's story. Penguin's attention to readers' tactile handling of the book is clearly attentive to what Leah Price terms "the manual dimension of reading," and in this respect, the campaign is strikingly contemporary.3 "Happy Reading," after [End Page 71] all, notably appears at a time when the sociology, media history, and literary study of the book and of reading have captured the attention of the academy. This coincidence need not be limited to criticism either. Twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction, as many remark, has increasingly turned to a thematic and formal emphasis on the materiality of its printed inscription in response to a changing digital media landscape.4 An archive of this material might include the textual experimentation of Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves (2000), Ali Smith's printing of two versions of How to Be Both (2014), Chris Ware's book-in-a-box graphic novel Building Stories (2012), or Nicola Barker's typographic play in H(A)PPY (2017), but also less explicitly experimental texts that explore the permutations of their bookish form, such as James Smythe's No Harm Can Come to a Good Man (2014), discussed shortly. As Jessica Pressman suggests, these literary engagements with the "bookishness" of the codex book "describe an aesthetic practice and cultural phenomenon that figures the book as artifact rather than as just a medium for information transmission and, in so doing, presents the book as a fetish for our digital age."5 In this scholarship's expansion, however, less has been made of the impact of the book on readers' comprehension of narrative. In cases where it has been, the textual archive has remained largely pre-twentieth century; likewise, media-conscious narrative theory has often turned to nonprint media due to verbal narrative structure's dominance in narratology.6 Yet the rise of "bookish" books, coupled with renewed focus on the material dimension of reading, clearly invites reconsideration of narrative comprehension attentive to this form. This essay therefore asks two related questions. First, what kinds of narrative dynamics should we look to when incorporating the printed book into a consideration of narrative? And second, what can bookish form make perceptible of twenty-first-century digital culture amid the proliferation of new forms of reading, writing, and consuming narrative? I consider both by way of an analysis of James Smythe's British science fiction novel No Harm Can Come to a Good Man.7 Despite lacking the experimental aesthetics normally associated with "bookish" books, No Harm thematically reckons [End Page 72] with the bounded nature of its printed form to offer vivid reflection on the book's narrative temporalities. The novel follows the story of Laurence Walker, a U.S. senator running for nomination in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, whose political campaign runs aground once a ubiquitous data service called ClearVista, italicized throughout, predicts that he has 0% chance of success. ClearVista, which offers users forecasts of the likelihood of seemingly any event in a digitally quantified world, provides the novel's speculative vision for the methods of capture, "datafication," and statistical forecasting that underpin the technological and ideological regime of "big data" in the twenty-first century.8 It is a technology that, as Laurence is told, "finds out everything about...