Playing It by the Book

Abstract

AMONG THE MANY EMBATTLED CONSTRUCTS IN OUR CULTURE, the book has been particularly beset in recent years. Assailed from all sides by other forms of expression-television, film, electronic media, and so forth, the book competes more and more unequally in the cultural marketplace. A stroll through any bookstore will confirm that the traditional notion of the book as a vehicle for literature has been challenged from within as well, for even in good bookstores the shelf space accorded to fiction, poetry, drama, and essay has shrunk dramatically in the last two decades. After swatting aside calendars, greeting cards, and personalized agenda books, one finds that new kinds of books-books on video, books on audiotapehave prospered, and are displayed prominently. Non-literary genres abound: cookbooks, diet books, and exercise books of dazzling variety tell us how to nourish and sculpt our bodies. Moral guidance from Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, and Pope John Paul II is easily found, but should you wish to consult Dostoyevsky, you have to hunt. The imposition of taxes on publishers' inventories has occasioned a stark reduction in the half-life of books: they must be consumed now or go out of print. We are told that reading and writing skills are in decline, that readerly attention spans are dwindling vertiginously (Barth 2); yet-perhaps symptomatically-we don't know whether to read that phenomenon as cause or effect. Among the many manifestations of the book's embattlement, I am especially intrigued by the way writers of literature frame that issue and attempt to come to terms with it in their own work. One can undoubtedly identify in any book a discourse, more or less muted, that engages the status of the book itself. Recently however, many writers, responding to the crisis of the book, have amplified that discourse critically and staged it at the center of their work, questioning the theoretical foundations of the construct and proposing new practical models of the book. I would like to discuss three figures in contemporary French literature who seem to me exemplary in this regard. Edmond Jabbs and Jean Echenoz focus on the notion of the book's dimensions, each in his own distinctive fashion, and from different ends of the book's spectrum of possibility. Marcel B~nabou,