Week 11: Keeping the book modern

To take an alternative approach to this week’s blog question, I thought, “wouldn’t it be nice to go back in time and say, for once, ‘You were right.’”

Although history has been full of naysayers of the future of the book (just take a look at next week’s readings, or my fellow Futurama bloggers’ posts), and those who detest “change,” we shouldn’t forget that there are those who worked hard in their time to reinvent the book (or in this case “the novel”), to break traditional boundaries, and to demonstrate that the form and content of “the book” is fluctuating.

In this case, I am speaking of the literary modernists. Specifically those writers who observed a changing society and felt that the novel ought to reflect those changes in its essential structure. Instead of holding on to the ideals of what constitute the traditional novel or book, authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce attempted to shape their works in a way that reflected the changes they saw in society, and even in “human consciousness,” in the modernist period.

I have always loved this statement by Woolf (2009) which highlights her view on literature, and “the book's”, ability to represent her lived experience:

“A shift in the scale – the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our attitude--those scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty--and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole and comprehended.” (p. 59-60)

While Woolf’s works retained the form of the codex, the way she structured and organized the content of her text varied greatly from her predecessors (The Waves is my absolute favourite of Woolf’s texts, in case you’re interested in taking a look for yourself). Similar statements can be made of Joyce’s modernist works, especially Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. In a book history class last year, I studied Joyce’s interest in the shape of the book. Specifically, I looked at his preoccupation with form and his attempts to manipulate and push the boundaries of the printed book. In fact, Joyce’s work in this area has been seen as a precursor to hypertext narratives (Groden, 2004). Indeed, scholarship has made a direct connection between modernist literature’s innovations in form and the capabilities of the digital text (Pressman, 2014). For the modernists, then, at least Joyce and Woolf, whose work I have looked at in some depth, the book was not just a stack of sewn and bound gatherings, but a vessel for expression and creativity, that was open to interpretation and reinvention as the need was identified.

What we have learned over the semester is that the book is in a state of flux. There is no “one” definition for what constitutes a book, and there is no one distinct format. Going back to Drucker’s (2009) “Modeling Functionality: From Codex to E-Book,” we should think about what a book does and not “what a book is” (p. 170).  For Joyce and Woolf, the book was meant to capture something of society, and in Woolf’s words “give it back […] whole and comprehended.” If part of what the book should do –or what the novel should do– is provide a view into our contemporary world, and give us tools to understand and critique it, then change is inevitable.

So, why the modernists? To say, "you had the idea," your work was meaningful, the sentiments you expressed, and the experiments you took, are still of great value today.  

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This doodle on Woolf's most famous portrait spoke to me for this post.
It offers its own unique juxtaposition of media, time periods and expectations.
Retrieved from: http://booklips.pl/galeria/doodle-na-fotografiach-znanych-pisarzy/

As a related aside, I think I would also like to tell Woolf specifically that the future of reading and writing holds so much more for women. I would tell her that, while she had the privileged position of being in control of her writing, publishing, and printing, the future of the book makes it much easier for a woman’s voice to be heard in print (or more accurately, in text). That is, of course, an over simplification. This being the case, I would then suggest maybe we continue the conversation over lunch, because, heck, if I have Woolf’s attention, I might as well monopolize on it while I can.

References

Drucker, J. (2009) Modeling functionality: From codex to e-book." In SpecLab: Digital aesthetics and projects in speculative computing, 165-175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Groden, M. (2004). James Joyce’s Ulysses on the page and on the screen. In The Future of the page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, 159-176. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Pressman, J. (2014). Digital modernism: Making it new in new media. New York: Oxford University Press.

Woolf, V. (2009). How it strikes a contemporary. In Thoughts on peace in an air raid, 53-65. London: Penguin.