Work in Progress

Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction

Rieke Jordan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501347733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First Century American Fiction interrogates contemporary texts that showcase forms of reading practices that feel anachronistic and laborious in times of instantaneity and short buffering times. Objects of analysis include the graphic narrative Building Stories by Chris Ware, the music album Song Reader by the indie rock artist Beck Hansen, and the computer game Kentucky Route Zero by the programming team Cardboard Computer. These texts stage their fragmentary nature and alleged "unfinishedness" as a quintessential part of both their narrative and material modus operandi. These works in and of progress feel both contemporary and retro in the 21st century. They draw upon and work against our expectations of interactive art in the digital age, incorporating and likewise rejecting digital forms and practices. This underlines the material and narrative flexibilities of the objects, for no outcome or reading experience is the same or can be replicated. It becomes apparent that the texts presuppose a reader who invests her spare time in figuring these texts out, diagnosing a contorted work-leisure dichotomy: "working these stories out" is a significant part of the reading experience for the reader–curatorial labor. This conjures up a reader, who, as the author argues, is turned into a curator and creative entity of and in these texts, for she implements and reassembles the options made available.

1

Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor

Unfinished, fragmentary, elusive, provisional. These are adjectives we know from modernism but that we can use in a new way to describe forms of fictions in the twenty-first century. Some recent contemporary pop-cultural objects are often described as open-ended and nonlinear in the sense that they do not rely on a prescribed course, but that they defy any fully predefined narrative progression established by the author. Instead the composite forms and contents prevalent in graphic narratives, television series, novels, computer games, music albums, and movies are infused and influenced by unusual materialities and narrative. They do something new with the old: what I call works in progress are genre-bending, flexible objects of American fiction that lack a clearly defined or prescribed beginning or end. They are retro and nostalgic, while simultaneously staging themselves as contemporary, new, and hip. Narrative and material give form to life in and of the digitized moment through gestures toward their past. But they also give life to form: reading these texts connotes to practices such as building, curating, collecting, rehearsing—pastimes that are now transferred onto the act(ivity) of reading. Reading as a cultural technique in and of the twenty-first century turns into a means of interacting—with material and story and form(at). Interaction with the text extends from narrative toward material openness.

The ever-changing forms that the digital moment produces are negotiated and remediated through a kaleidoscope of obsolescence and retro-chic. These retro incarnations simultaneously reject and incorporate digital forms and practices. This is why they feel analog and digital at the same time, for they borrow what they need from online interaction to be both legible and unfamiliar. At hand, we have a comics book that is a collection of tear outs, a mute music album, and a retro point-and-click video game. They ask, In what way has reading become a technologically sophisticated, individualized pastime that entails a variety of processes exceeding the turning of the page? By connecting reading as a cultural technique to inquiries toward obsolete, forgotten and obscure side notes of technological innovation, works in progress mobilize older media forms and practices, in order, we might say, to historize the present. They combine the ever new and ever changing with overhauls in taste, trends, and technology. Interacting with these texts seems both foreign and familiar, both old and new, both adequate for the digital moment and peculiarly analog and retro.

In this chapter I think of these works in progress facilitating curatorial labor. I identify four components here—a slight shift of emphasis away from reader-response theory toward the material interaction with given components, rendering the reader as curator. This identifies a peculiar joy in and openness toward being overwhelmed, eschewing narrative closure but privileging narrative and material flexibility. Inherent within these questions of material and narrative interaction are aspects in and around creativity as a dispositif in the twenty-first century. Likewise, these inquiries shed light on the hierarchies between reader and author. The authors of the respective works recede into a rhetorics of failure and self-deprecation, whereas the curator’s interaction with the objects at hand seems to legitimatize the scattered, fragmentary works left deliberately unfinished. My broader contextualization of curatorial labor will also shed light on material flexibility, from product to process. The intertwining of these different strands of inquiry—reader-response, creativity, the fragmentation of the body of work—outlines methods to read a digitized cultural landscape and a reader embedded within this matrix as consumer and curator.

This outlines new, highly aesthetized reading practices and the marketability of creativity and failure. It is to acknowledge the interactions of different strands of critical inquiry that all, in some way or another, relate contemporary subject positions toward creativity as a hallmark in the twenty-first century. Even more to the point, if fiction now is coined provisional and flexible, the means of how to understand and relate to the world are reconfigured and reassessed through the interaction with these open media and matters. This makes things of course not only so much more fun but also, at the same time, so much more precarious. What happens when this cultural practice of relating to the world is made porous and fickle and turns from one practice to several practices?

Curating “planned confusion”

The kind of provisional and fragmentary texts that I am interested in emphasize their material flexibilities alongside their narrative affordances. Acknowledging this allows for an extension of concepts regarding reception aesthetics; to initiate my inquiries toward curatorial labor, it is my intention to slightly tilt the theoretical framework from narrative to material reader interaction. Undoubtedly, fiction has always been one mode of sense-making for the reader, and particularly theories on reception aesthetics¹ postulate fiction as the glue for identities. It is tempting to see how reception aesthetics and reader-response theories go together with works in progress. Here, though, the text rather emerges through readerly interaction pertaining to narrative and material. The idea of “reception” here is rearticulated into the quite literal production and consumption of the text—in flexible, haptic terms. Notice how a shift within the terminology, from “reading” to “engaging,” “performing,” “interacting,” is helpful to see the text as a(n overwhelming) material, haptic, yet fragmentary object. Hence, the works I discuss privilege the haptic engagement with the reshuffling of the preset components at hand.

Works in progress are playful subversions of the format of the book and offer colorful commentary on digitization processes. They explore what fiction should “do” in the twenty-first century, for the medium of the book has been well under pressure to compete with different forms of (digital) entertainment (and distractions, of course). What might be a first approach to this issue is to understand that “digital” means, literally, “performed with a finger.” Works in progress set forth reading strategies that are decisively performed with hands and fingers (reception here pertains to manipulating the material), both in the way that they demand reader interaction and in the way in which they reflect upon the nature of the digital technologies that shape our contemporary moment (i.e., the practice of scrolling, zooming in, or swiping on the cellphone screen). Besides the extending of the meaning of reading and its reflection upon current poetics of readerly interaction and communication, works in progress intertwine leisure/spare time with workout.²

This allows for an emphasis on the unfinished, fragmentary nature of the objects that aim at reconceptualizing the textual transfer into a cognitive and material “working out.” In this sense, the texts replicate hobbies and pastimes that are now reconfigured as reader-response and reader involvement, or, rather, as labor.³ This evokes a cycle of production and consumption, of labor and leisure. The texts show the reader who she can be (i.e., the idea of transfer), and they also predetermine certain skill sets to tease out what she can do to achieve a satisfactory performing of the text (i.e., playing a guitar or gluing together parts). Several media theorists have coined this phenomenon “prosumption”⁴ (a portmanteau of production and consumption), or “playbor” (Diedrichsen 2010, 135). The reader is (re)cast as a prosumer or playborer (a rather cumbersome portmanteau of play and labor) who engages with texts actively—producing and consuming texts at the same time. I personally am not too sold on this term of the prosumer, but it helps fathom the multifarious roles the audience is now assigned to in their free time. It taps into this cycle of consumption and production that I diagnose as integral part of textual and material work.

Work in progress rely on and make available disorienting and overwhelming reading or viewing experiences. These experiences might even tie together readers and fans in their leisure time to solve puzzles and riddles surrounding the objects they engage in together. These objects allow for an active and what we might call, in reference to Umberto Eco, an “open” engagement. These interactive, medial forms of involving audiences⁵ change and shape fan communities: fans labor together to create Wikis (i.e., the Lostpedia for the popular, puzzle-ridden television series Lost) to trace character developments or transcribe episodes, write fan fiction, or recap episodes online.⁶ Social media and Web 2.0 offer a myriad of innovative means to tell stories⁷ in a digital environment. Frank Rose calls this deep media—“stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive, taking you deeper than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit” (Rose 2011, 3). This is a reading experience of keeping the loose ends and cliffhangers neatly organized and comprehensible. Think here also of hashtags that appear on screen during TV shows and how they entice audience members to engage with each other. Even historical events, such as the Civil War, have been “live-tweeted” on the New York Times website. Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box” (2012) was published on twitter, and Chris Ware’s graphic novella The Last Saturday (2014), which will be discussed in the chapter on Building Stories, can be accessed for free on The Guardian website.

These media practices look current and new and decidedly digital, but what I suggest is that they indeed replicate reader interaction borrowed from other domains in life. These interactive practices of hunting for clues, solving the riddles in TV shows, or following disparate plotlines are traceable in earliest childhood experiences—think of scavenger hunts, building fortresses, collecting baseball cards, and, of course, Choose Your Own Adventure novels. These YA novels expose something equivalent to fusing literature with games. These “gamebooks” are written in second person point of view, and the reader (addressed as “you”) has to choose her own path through an adventure (i.e., a cave exploration mission). At the end of a chapter, the reader is asked to choose how she would like to proceed in the narrative. She has to make a deliberate choice how the adventure is to unfold by following her own chosen path. The Choose Your Own Adventure books premise narrative progression on anticipation and retrospection: the reader must take into account what she already knows (say: the cave is dangerous) and, when faced with how to proceed, must make the wisest choice for progression (should I go deeper into the cave? Should I run away from the mysterious monster living in the depths of the caves or should I fight it?) as well as for closure.

Upon rereading the Choose Your Own Adventure novel, she is aware of the dangers that might await her in the dark cave. The next time around, she is able to plot out an entirely new story. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks picks up on the question of the anticipation of retrospection. He asserts that a

sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot. (Brooks 1992, 94)

He calls this “narrative desire”: at the “end of a narrative we can suspend time in a moment when past and present hold together in a metaphor . . . that moment does not abolish the movement, the slidings, the mistakes, and partial recognitions of the middle” (Brooks 1992, 92). Narrative desire,⁸ according to Brooks, is a desire for the end, yet the reader comes to appreciate the twists and turns the story can take between beginning and end (see Brooks 1992, 52).

Narrative desire, closure, yet recognizing its twists and deferred endings—Is the contemporary reader in for something else than “for the end”? We might say that she reads for the experience. One gesture toward this idea is the appreciation of the slidings, glitches, mistakes, gaps, and riddles that Peter Brooks fleshes out. This recognizes Jason Mittell’s “narrative complexity,” a concept⁹ he develops to discuss complex television serials that reject “the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres” (Mittell 2006, 32). Instead, he allocates technological changes as well as a changing perception on the legitimacy of the medium as key factors for such narrative complexity to emerge. Mittell writes decidedly of television and its serialized structures, but here we can trace a shift toward narrative complexity within media that employ smaller units to unite to a larger fictitious universe. This could include an episode or a new installment of a comic strip or even a new action figure that needs to be insinuated into the logics of a story’s universe. In my understanding, Mittell’s ideas serve to identify a more systemic change visible in fiction and the “desire for the end” today. Planned confusion implies larger repercussions on the legitimacy of off-kilter genres and their legitimacy in academia or mainstream media, for instance. In terms of reader interaction and narrative complexity, Jason Mittell writes that

one of the central shifts stemming from the rise of narrative complexity is television’s growing tolerance for viewers to be confused, encouraging them to pay attention and put the pieces together themselves to comprehend the narrative. While television rarely features an avant-garde level ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: When the Internet Dropped Its Capital “I”
• 1 Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor
• 2 A Tale of Two Buildings: Chris Ware’s Building Stories
• 3 The Broken Record: Beck Hansen’s Song Reader
• 4 Kentucky Route Zero’s Netherworld of Slowness
• Coda: What’s the Matter, Media?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright