At a time in which digital technology is substantially changing the ways we read, write, and know, there have been increasing debates about the status and functions of traditional (print ) media. These debates have entered media and literary studies, as the focus of this collection makes evident, but they are also negotiated in and through the media themselves. A growing number of print novels self-reflexively addresses questions as to the validity, “quality,” and mode of communication, more or less remorsefully exploring the ways in which they still “count” in a world that increasingly subscribes to the paradigm of quantitatively “readable” knowledge.
In my chapter I will compare two recent novels that negotiate the function of the book in the information age. At first glance, Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a piece of mystery genre-fiction, and Joshua Cohen’s complex and large-scope Book of Numbers, written, as the New York Times Book Review remarked, in a style comparable to Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, could not differ more in their mode of discussing the state of the book in an online world. Yet, in many ways, they deal with similar issues that pertain to the topic of this publication—if from rather different ends of the spectrum. Most obviously, both begin with an explicit reference to what Jessica Pressman has described as the discourse of the end of the book,1 while retaining a traditional layout and form, without overly celebrating what she calls “the aesthetics of bookishness” on a material level. Thus it is predominantly on a thematic level that these novels reflect an increased “longing for the literary experience” in the digital age,2 as opposed to the more experimental examples of book fetishization discussed in this volume.3
The opening pages of Mr. Penumbra introduce one of the main dilemmas regarding the practice of reading in the information age: We are continuously faced with increasing amounts of information while simultaneously experiencing a decreasing ability to manage such information in a qualitative way. “In contemporary digital environments,” Katherine Hayles maintains in How We Think, “the information explosion of the Web has again made an exponentially greater number of texts available, dwarfing the previous amount of print materials by several orders of magnitude.”4 The rising availability of information, Hayles concludes, makes necessary what she calls “hyperreading,” a practice which, as Hayles’s choice of word suggests, implies a shift toward a more spatial and literally superficial reading experience, as it “enables a reader quickly to construct landscapes …, it shows ranges of possibilities … and it easily juxtaposes many different texts and passages.”5
This shift in reading practice is described by the novel’s protagonist, art school graduate Clay Jannon, as follows:
This passage illustrates the sense of disorientation felt by the Web 2.0 generation during the recent economic crisis in which many startup companies in the creative media industry faced bankruptcy—just like Clay’s busted employer NewBagel, a company set up by two ex-Googlers trying to sell algorithm-based and software-designed bagels. Clay’s retrospect description of his reading habits is symptomatic of navigating the internet. Reading is depicted as an endless and mind-boggling process rather than as a meaningful activity, indicated by the colloquial use of the conditional past. Moreover, verbs like “scanning,” “get(ting) distracted,” and “follow(ing) a link,” hint at a decentralized, contingent, and mechanical form of processing information rather than what has traditionally been conceived of as immersive reading.My name is Clay Jannon and those were the days when I rarely touched paper.I’d sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I’d get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I’d add it to my reading list. Then I’d follow another link to a book review. I’d add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book—third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I’d retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.6
Hayles’s concept of “hyperreading” is just one of various new forms of reading discussed as a result of massive shifts in informational scale. As the authors of the Digital Humanities handbook propose, the sheer masses of digitized information available to us requires us to “design and employ new tools to thoughtfully and meaningfully sift through, analyze, visualize, map, and evaluate the deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has unleashed.”7 As opposed to more traditional ways of hermeneutical interpretation, terms like “text-mining tools, machine reading, and various kinds of algorithmic analyses” have entered the vocabulary of our knowledge cultures. Above all, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading,”8 a method of navigating large amounts of data through pattern revelation, has spurred on academic debates on new forms of reading. These have challenged more traditional conceptions of concentrated, linear, or deep reading, leading critics such as David Mikics to advocate for the pleasure of “slow reading.”9 Yet, for the amount of information Clay is confronted with, close reading is not an option. “Because information is being produced on a scale that far exceeds the faculties of human comprehension,” the Digital Humanities handbook claims, “it has become impossible to read, comprehend, and analyze the digital cultural record without the assistance of digital tools and methods.”10 The process of reading in this context has more and more become what Hayles calls “human-assisted computer reading,”11 a posthumanist decentering of reading practices which challenges traditional notions of reading as exclusively restricted to the autonomous, rational self. Rather, knowledge becomes more and more identified as an entity that needs to be managed and processed with the help of (digital) technology.
Accordingly, Clay perceives information as a commodity, as he moves around content like items in a shopping cart, stored away for later and reassembled into a personalized reading list. The coincidental stumbling from text bit to text bit appears to be both the result and the cause of the protagonist’s unemployment: he can afford to roam around the internet for hours because he is unemployed and he is unemployed because he gets distracted from his job search by the endless links and pop-ups windows: the autopoietic function of the internet’s disorientation leaves the individual no other choice than to break out of this cycle completely, to go for a real walk and stumble upon a paper job ad in front of a book shop—of all places.
Joshua Cohen’s The Book of Numbers similarly deals with a broke and aimless young writer, who decries the digitization of reading, more passionately perhaps, in a direct address to the reader. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off,” the novel announces smugly, “I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.”12 And talk it does. Over 580 pages, printed and bound in a nostalgic deckle-edged format, the novel (or at least the only version available to date, the hardcover version of it) tells the story of Joshua Cohen, who, in postmodern emphasis on the importance of narrative in the construction of the self, is modeled after the author of the novel and who is commissioned to ghostwrite the memoir of a dying software mogul also named Joshua Cohen. As he records his alter ego’s life story, the protagonist gradually becomes involved and treacherously entangled in a complex cybercrime plot full of revelations, leaks, and data security breaches that recall recent Wikileaks and National Security Agency (NSA) data scandals. However, Book of Numbers can hardly be called a crime novel—or if it is, the main suspect or villain is not a human being, not even a systemic flaw but instead, the ancient and ultimately unsolvable quest and question of how to know and how to represent ourselves as human beings.
The initial quote should therefore not be read as a cynical or nostalgic remark on the loss of materiality in the context of a digital knowledge culture, or at least not exclusively: “Paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth, the thread from threadstuff or—what are bindings made of? Hair and plant fibers, glue from boiled horsehooves?”13 What reads like a narrative of loss is subsequently qualified:
This is not (only) a lamentation of media degeneracy, nor is it an idealization of the hardcover book with its assumedly “pure,” “natural,” and therefore more “human” materials before the book’s supposed downward slope that starts with the paperback. Rather, this passage is an ironic critique of such a material book fetish. The alliteration “paper of pulp” combined with the description (the clumsy description “thread from threadstuff”) as well as the list of bizarre natural materials undercuts the sincerity of the subj...The paperback was compromise enough. And that’s what I’ve become: paper spine, paper limbs, brain of cheapo crumpled paper, the final type that publishers used before surrendering to the touch displays, that bad thin four-times-deinked recycled crap, 100% acidfree postconsumer waste.14