Introduction
The question of bodily implication in the endeavour of reading either print or digital texts is neither as simple nor as coherent as it might at first seem. The reader’s embodied experience of a text being read, in the case of print literature, has been conceived by the theorist Garrett Stewart in terms of the ‘buzz’ of subvocalisations, namely the physical reverberations in the body which correspond to a kind of subconscious articulation of the text as it is visually perceived on the page.227
While Stewart’s presentation of embodied readership in terms of this hum of subvocalisations may satisfy the need for a generally applicable model for
considerations of physical engagement with print works, it is scarcely adequate in the analysis of the role of the body as it experiences works of digital literature. Indeed, a greater evocation of the synaesthetic nature of reading – and this as an originary quality thereof – helps to link these digital modes to a prior embodied understanding of the reading endeavour. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes:
For reading, as soon as we attend to its sensorial texture, discloses itself as a profundly synaesthetic encounter. Our eyes converge upon a visible mark, or series of marks, yet what they find there is a sequence not of images but of sounds, something heard; the visible letters, as we have said, trade our eyes for our ears, or rather, the eye and the ear are brought together at the surface of the root.228
Further to this aural/articulatory dimension, embedded in material that is apparently only visual, we might understand writing as the consequence and trace of a physical,
227Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
228David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World
manual gesture of inscription, and also as a form of notation often drawing on physical resemblances: not least in hieroglyphics, for example.
Though the subvocalized dimension may still present itself as one facet of the reader’s engagement with the textual components of digital works, I argue that the broader physical scheme of computing equipment and the implications of the body of the reader thereby engendered must also be considered as an integral dimension of readership, whereas the more intuitive and habitual uses of the standard codex form render it a less remarkable or influential presence.
As the physical presence of the print book represents a minor consideration in the act of traditional readership, then, so too is awareness of the habitual practice of subvocalisations outshone by the further strange and compelling gestures of
engagement required to properly experience the digital text. These gestures, of which I shall expose a number of examples in this chapter, mainly arise in digital textualities that require the reader either to physically manipulate the placement of the equipment displaying the text or their own position in relation to it, or else the letters themselves are moved by gestures that pass through tactile interactions with the computer keys and mouse.
I argue that these motions and manipulations, as they are constructed by the reader’s response to the parameters of the work, may be read as representative of a renegotiation of literary spatiality and constitute new possibilities for the dimensional ordering of literary works which gain, through this choreographic and kinetic
remediation of narrative or poetic material, further affiliations beyond the traditional scope of the literary that approximate the works in question to the plastic and
performance arts.
While, then, the positioning and presence of the print work in relation to its reader is nonetheless a worthy consideration in addressing questions of embodiment in reading, in this chapter’s discussion I shall limit myself to the exploration of a small number of digital texts, focusing on the particular ways in which these call upon the body, inciting dramatic physical interactions with, and responses to, these
The physical components of digital texts
Considering questions of embodiment and physical experience in relation to the reading of digital texts, the most evident starting point is a consideration of some texts which, by means of their content or operational nature, require physical involvement on the part of the reader in ways that might be seen as dissonant with or external to the behavioural patterns that characterise traditional readership.
These texts may be seen as physical manifestations or bodily echoes of what Astrid Ensslin, following Espen Aarseth’s definition of ergodic literature as literature in which ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text,’ terms ‘heuristic ergodicity’: a phenomenon demonstrated by texts ‘that have to be “learned to be played/read meaningfully.”229 In the case of some of the texts I shall be
discussing here, this tentatively meaningful and strategic, ludic mode of reading corresponds to the incorporation of particular gestures and tactile methods which draw the reader’s bodily consciousness outward from the ordinarily ocularcentric sites of readership, and creates a reordered awareness of the continuous and coextensive nature of the interactions taking place between reader, device, and text.
Furthermore, the body, through its visible involvement in the work and the consequences thereof observed, is reinterpreted in terms of its integrality to the work’s structure and message: this idea shall become clearer with the outlining of features presented by some of the texts I will discuss as examples.
It is necessary at this point, however, to signal that plenty of examples of digital literature exist through which the reader’s embodied response is evoked in ways that are far more comparable to the experience of engagement with traditional, print texts. In these cases, the ‘nontrivial’ effort of interpretation and textual traversal remains a more purely conceptual enterprise, largely distinct from engagements of the reader’s physical body. The reading of such works is therefore typically an
ocularcentric endeavour, rather than one that engages parts of the body beyond the eyes, defining the tasks thereof as more elaborate than the visualisation and
decipherment of text and imagery.
229Espen Aarseth, Cybertext.
Nonetheless, such visual and mental engagement may often arise as a route to contemplation of bodily themes, and so the physical enactment of gestures that relate to the text is not the only way of conceptualising bodily themes through digital
literature, though it may certainly be one of the most engaging and interactive ways of doing so. In the previous chapter I explored in this regard Xavier Malbreil’s Livre des Morts, a work whose synaesthetic and animated dimensions call for a contemplation of dispersed subjectivity and reincarnation in a similar way to that in which a
comparable effect could be produced by way of verbal description in a printed literary work.230
In the case of Malbreil’s text, then, embodied experience is contemplated within and in relation to the body of the reader at rest, rather than being hypothetically or mimetically enacted. The text also engages the reader in an exploration of
embodied memory, at one point prompting them to contemplate and record in words the first memorable sensory experience of their lives.
In this way, the Livre des Morts generates a mode of readership that is rooted in embodied experience and draws upon embodied memory, but which endows this experience upon a static and contemplative body, rather than one that is engaged in gesticulatory interaction. As I have already suggested, it is necessary to clarify that the works I am describing in the discussion that follows have been selected
specifically for the illustrative potential exhibited by their unusual requirements of physical intervention on the part of the reader, and so the flamboyant exigencies of these texts are by no means to be taken as representative of the demands and characteristics of digital literature more generally.
It is typically the case that texts falling within the genre of hypertext, for instance, remain more closely linked to the reading modes associated with print works, without calling on the body beyond the minimum conditions for traditional reading. It is no coincidence that such works tend to be much more text-heavy and order their narrative components in a textual and arborescent way, compared to the works on which I shall be focussing in this chapter. Serge Bouchardon, however, similar to Malbreil insofar as both may be defined as practitioners of digital literature in the French context, and whose works I shall be discussing later in this chapter, has
230 Xavier Malbreil, Livre des Morts (2004) <http://www.livresdesmorts.com/> [accessed 6 March
argued that textual forms incorporating physical manipulations of the work by the reader represent one of the major currents in contemporary French electronic works.231
These works, furthermore, represent promising avenues through which to understand the greater detachment of French works from the print literary culture, a separation which is not as pronounced in the American context, for instance, in which hypertext is considered one of the most prominent genres and forms.232
These examples nonetheless represent exciting advances in the technologies that enable particular types of alignment of the reader’s gestures with the display and formation of animated text, representing valuable indications of how a forthcoming embodied and responsive literary experience might operate.
Textual embodiment and tactility
I shall therefore in this chapter be primarily considering the linking of gesture with textuality, and the imperative for embodied readership in the cases of two broad types of instances of this sort of engagement. First, I shall consider physical immersion and implication of the reader in literary texts that are conceived for specific environments such as projection spaces, installations and visualisation areas. Each of these
explorations shall inform the analyses I undertake in the final chapter of this thesis, which examine the scope for poetic inscription on spatial experience, insofar as this might be achieved by entwining literary and narrative texts with the technological devices of everyday experience.
Secondly, I shall explore readerly interactivity in the context of lecture privée,
as opposed to in gallery or installation spaces, in terms of physical enactments
corresponding to readings of particular texts which I see as endowing further nuances or else renovating entirely for literary purposes what I will loosely term the
‘equipment’ of digital readership, ie. the hardware involved in storing and displaying the work, and the parts that allow the reader to influence the display and constitution thereof, notably the mouse or trackpad and keyboard.
231‘This literature, which emphasizes multimedia animation and interactive manipulations by the
reader, constitutes at present a major trend in digital literature in France, but also in Québec. This trend concerns the works intended for “private reading” (“lecture privée”), in particular for the Web.’ Bouchardon, Digital Literature in France.
232Philippe Bootz, ‘The Functional Point of View: New Artistic Forms for Programmed Literary
I consider such texts as necessitating a kind of gestural scheme or
choreography that tends to run parallel to the act of reading, but might also be seen to intersect therewith, intervening and inflecting the flow of readership in a more
influential way, forming mobile and typically ephemeral bridges between reader and work that entail the mutual conditioning of experiences of interpretation on both the physical and textual levels, in some cases fusing into a single process of perception.
Although the concerns adopted in relation to the examples discussed in each of these chapters shall be closely related, the works to be presented in the next chapter represent a further dimension of embeddedness to that of the texts I shall be
examining here, insofar as these are mingled with other mobile applications, with email inboxes and with the more practical and pedestrian forms of ‘notification’ that fleck the reader’s multitasking devices. In other words, whereas the works considered here, whether consulted at home on devices or in public in a gallery or similar space, the texts still bear the distinctness of the Work in their externality to the reader’s own coextensive biological/technological landscape of experience and communication. The literary examples discussed in the next chapter are thus more akin to Text, in the Barthesian sense, insofar as they jostle spatially and structurally with other forms of notation and correspondence.
The first kind of readership situation, by virtue notably of its being a shared experience, is more difficult to summarise in terms of unifying features, and involves a less directly tactile and more immersive, embodied experience of textuality. Such works include exhibitable text installations created to be experienced by a number of reader-viewers at a time. Drawing on two examples from French creators in this chapter, I shall return to these immersive text installations, Balpe and Benayoun’s
Labylogue (2000), and Balpe et al’s MetaPolis (2002) shortly.
The two examples of the second type of text that I shall discuss here, texts whose reading involves direct, tactile intervention from an individual reader, are the online texts Déprise (2010) and Toucher (2012) created by Serge Bouchardon, each of which is hosted on a website specifically created for the work. The first of these works,
Déprise, is the first part of a trilogy entitled Hypertensions.233
233All three of the texts may be read on Bouchardon’s website: Serge Bouchardon, Digital
Though alike, in terms of relating textuality and the body of the reader, there are notable differences in the way these works operate: the juxtapositions I shall create in this chapter shall thus allow for the way in which these text/body relationships are established to be explored in greater detail. In the case of exhibited text installations, there are issues of accessibility and ephemerality that naturally do not affect online text. The online work may, of course, be displaced from its URL, and as such its address should not be stressed as one that is fixed and permanent. Furthermore, often distinct from the exhibited work, whose term on display is limited, the work hosted on a website is offered much more scope to evolve over time, as more contributors have a chance to access and participate in its elaboration.
While the openness of the online work to worldwide and accessible participatory expansion, this does little to raise its value in terms of worklike distinction: in this regard, the relative obscurity of the exhibited text or gallery installation can be seen as paradoxically enriched by its enclosure and obscurity in this sense. The exposure given to works such as MetaPolis through exhibiting these lends such installations a mark of distinction, implied by the curatorial decision to place them on display, but also the conditions of exhibition and rules governing entry and participation maintain a protective barrier for the work and its manifestation. This engenders a particular kind of authority and attention that would not otherwise be experienced by one
interactive website among masses of others: one might argue that visitors to a website are not themselves on display in the way that exhibition visitors are the subjects of a quiet, implicit set of controls.
Indeed, other than ‘pointing’ readers towards particular sites from reviews or other forms of online discussion, a mark of distinction comparable to selecting a work for exhibition is scarcely achievable in relation to an online work hosted on an interactive site. The imagined ubiquity and accessibility of the digital work versus the closed and elitist structures that guard print texts can then be clearly not so easily applied, with the actual mixture and scale of the physical components of the work in question determining such matters to a greater degree.
Gesture is used in a particular way in the MetaPolis installation: though distanced from the display screen, the visitor to the exhibition may nonetheless see the text rotate in accordance with the rotations of the reader’s own hand. I shall return to this
gestural interaction later, comparing this to the more tactile way in which gesture is employed in Bouchardon’s texts.
In each of these two types of physical experience of literary works – the more direct, tactile form of physical interaction, and the more immersed form, whereby text becomes a constituting element of the reader’s spatial and physical environment - the equipment employed is reconceptualised and endowed with specifically literary features and aims, as the result of a specific elaboration of the experience of interactive readership deliberately conceived by the creators of these works.234
In addition to such provisions made by the creators of these texts, the reader must also actively intervene and engage with the emergence and display of text in a
distinctly physical way, involving much of the body in the reading endeavour and understanding the move away from ocularcentric readership precisely by enacting and experimenting with these alternative modes.
Gesture and Immersion: Installations and site-specific textuality
As I mentioned in my introduction, the first rough category of embodied reading and textual gesture I shall now briefly explore has to do with two installations by Jean Pierre Balpe and collaborators, Labylogue (2000)and MetaPolis (2002). Both works differ from the texts by Bouchardon that I shall turn to shortly, insofar as they are created for public exhibition, rather than private reading, and thus are typically experienced and conceived for a congregated public of readers rather than a computer-facing individual.
These differences imply significant changes in the creation of such works and the experience of reading and interacting with these. Not least, the characteristic and consideration of site-specificity is one that reminds us that digital literatures are not necessarily always more accessible and easily communicable forms than their print counterparts, and indeed the literatures developed as installations for reading on a particular piece of equipment or in a particular, immersive environment remain consultable only to those suitably positioned to visit these and acquaint themselves with their particular features.
234Such features include those intradiegetic elements that correspond to the use of a ‘mouseover,’
whereby the reader brushes the laptop touchpad with her fingertips, often corresponding to the uncovering of some obscured text on the screen, or other, related gestures and belong to a kind of