Jessica Pressman's Reading List

"Twelve Blue is by Michael Joyce, who is the author of afternoon , called ‘the grandfather of hypertext’. He’s a master of the form and is truly just a beautiful writer. And you can see the influence of that other Joyce – James Joyce: the writing flows. And the play with puns, visual and verbal, as in the kinds of sea metaphors that are taken up in the blue text. I read it years ago, and I was hooked; indeed, it was with this piece that I decided to focus in this field. I started reading the novel in the late afternoon and realised at around midnight that I had completely lost all sense of time and was immersed in a work on screen. I dove into this digital work about the sea. It’s so beautiful. But also so simple. It’s just a hypertext – it’s just text on screen in which there are lexias, meaning it’s a nonlinear narrative comprised of chunks of text connected by links that demand reader interaction to produce the plot. So you and I could read Twelve Blue in completely different orders. When you’re teaching it, you’re aware that some of the students have seen certain screens and some haven’t. It requires a very different understanding of what it means to read, close read, or even finish reading a work. It is a great work in terms of its content, because it’s one that uses its form, as good literature should, to create beautiful content. There are full-blown characters here and a deftly intertwined plot. You can forget, as I did, the fact that you’re clicking through windows onscreen to access a disorienting hypertext and just be lost in the story. That’s why I selected it – because I think it exemplifies the hypertext genre. And it’s available online for people to see. And it is really just beautiful. Hypertext actually has been around a long time. Think Tristram Shandy , or Nabokov’s Pale Fire , or – later, much later – David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest : these kinds of works rely on footnotes to move the reader in a nonlinear fashion through the text. These can also be considered hypertexts – or at least proto-hypertexts. But hypertext became identified as the first genre of electronic literature because when the internet went public, it was text-based and based on hyperlinks. The hypertext period became associated with the larger category of digital literature, but it is really and more rightly defined as the first generation of electronic literature."

"I think it’s a print novel that presents a multimedia sensibility in a high literary art form. I think it appeals to people who read for entertainment but also to literary critics and teachers, readers of Derrida and deconstruction – people who have read the works that are alluded to in its pages. It’s a highly intellectual and literary text. So it spans readerships in a way that few novels, and certainly few contemporary novels, do. And it is also, of course, really fascinating in terms of its form, its print body. It re-mediates cinema and the internet, and it beautifully exploits the possibilities of the print page. So there’s a lot there for a lot of people. Well it doesn’t. It’s a big paperbound book! But I see this novel as residing in a network of other media forms. So there’s an accompanying website published at the same time as the novel (the House of Leaves bulletin board is a massive website that continues to receive thousands of hits and discussions in their forum, which is amazing for a literary print book published nine years ago); and then there’s another print book that was also published simultaneously that contains and expands upon the epistolary section between the protagonist and his mother. And the most interesting aspect to me is the musical album by the author’s sister, the recording artist Poe. She produced an album that accompanied the novel, called Haunted . If you listen to the music and lyrics in conjunction with the novel you hear that there’s a kind of cross-traffic of narrative and clues going on. So I’ve argued (in an article) that some explanations for the enigmas within the novel are contained or illuminated in the music. So it’s not that this is a digital novel, but it does in some way live within this multimedia universe, a network connected via the internet. I think it can be read both ways and I think that’s why it’s such a successful novel. There are some people who read it and get absolutely absorbed in the layers of storytelling and mediation that are happening in it. But there are other people, who, as you rightly point out, are absolutely aware of the meta-level questions it raises. This is a work that, like some of the digital works I selected, are interested in being self-reflexive, in looking at the space they inhabit, not only in terms of their print and digital media, but in terms of the larger cultural spaces and value systems that literature inhabits in the contemporary world. This isn’t just about plot or characters but also about reading and about how reading has always been dependent on various technologies. House of Leaves is really fun to read. It’s an addictive text. Some people don’t get interested, but if you’re game, this is a book that can rule your universe for a good few weeks – and terrify you. Even though it’s highly mediated, as we’ve discussed, it starts to seep into your own personal world. It directly addresses the reader on the first page, stating ‘This is not for you’; so you end up not knowing what’s real and what’s not. Indeed, my husband started reading it when I was out of town and he had to put it in a drawer and hide it because he got so frightened of it. It’s really fun."

"It’s definitely a popular book and seems inspired by House of Leaves . I don’t think it’s as sophisticated or as ambitious, but it is interesting and very fun – so that people who like House of Leaves will also like The Raw Shark Texts . You know, yesterday I actually received an e-mail from Steven Hall, the author. He’d seen something on the net about a talk I’d given on The Raw Shark Texts at an academic conference, and he was interested to hear what I had to say about his novel, to read my talk! And you know, that would only happen in the digital age. I mean, it’s not as though an academic conference would usually catch the eye of an emergent, popular writer, particularly, and this is really ironic, a conference titled ‘Bookishness in the Digital Age’! The novel is supposedly going to be turned into a movie, so it obviously struck a popular chord. Unlike House of Leaves , which went viral (and whose author refused movie deals for the book), The Raw Shark Texts seems to have had a sophisticated multimedia marketing campaign framing it from the beginning. For example, one of the teasers on YouTube is a short but very polished clip of Tilda Swinton reading an excerpt from the novel in her incredibly calm and terrifying voice. So the novel was released already envisaging itself as a mass market, multimedia phenomenon. I would say the latter. I would say that both books rely on readers’ multimedia literacy as a means of producing their own literariness. And this takes us back to our initial discussion of literacy versus the literary in the digital realm. When House of Leaves came out, the idea that it could be connected to the net, that you could discuss it on line, that people were beginning to research on Wikipedia what was and wasn’t true in this book, was pretty new and exciting, and that was part of the adventure of reading the 700-page novel. But The Raw Shark Texts seems to be addressing a different kind of readership, one that has evolved since House of Leaves ’s publication in 2000. I think there’s been a change in the way that people read and a change in what they expect to read even just over the last decade. A radically new form of literacy? Absolutely. I think that people are reading in different ways. And I think the place to look to see these changes is the location where conventional print literature and digital literature meet. That’s where these works live – House of Leaves , The Raw Shark Texts , and digital literature too – at the interstices."

"Well Katherine Hayes is a major shaper of this field, and I think this book is a valuable addition because it’s an introduction, a primer to what digital literature is and how it can be incorporated into the kind of conversation we’re having here. There’s a lot of work to be done in the criticism of this emergent field: to explain not only the link between print and digital media but also the link between contemporary and older works, literary forms and reading practices. As a critic, I’m not only interested in the new works for the sake of their newness but also for what this new literature can expose about what was previously normal, canonical, and valuable, both in terms of literature and literacy. Yes I do, exactly."