The Future of Books

[coalescent]

A lecture given by Umberto Eco at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. He touches on all the usual points - how online resources are well-suited to research but poorly suited to traditional narrative fiction - and then starts to spin off in some more interesting directions:

A book offers us a text which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy's War and Peace: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatolij; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had War and Peace on a hypertextual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable "War and Peaces", where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert!

He's not suggesting that all novels will be replaced by this form of jazz writing, rather that hypertext adds new possibilities. Which I guess it does, although on one level his suggestion just sounds like a high-concept choose-your-own adventure novel. :-)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

He's wrong, though, isn't he. If you've got a hypertext on CD, or on the web, you can't edit it any more than you can a paper book; Ted Nelson may be spinning in his grave, but today's hypertext isn't communally editable (with some notable exceptions (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb), of course). Conversely, paper books are editable - anyone with a pen, a pair of scissors, some glue and the will to do it can transmute base literature into gold.

-- Tom

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't want choice/multiple versions in a story. That's the whole point of genres like tragedy. You desperately want it to be the case that, for example, Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after, but they won't, not in any reading of the play. That's what makes books like that worth reading; the story imposes itself upon the reader and not vice-versa. Yes, there's room for individual interpretation, but there's always a fixed text that controls the fundamental facts/rules of the story. Interpretation, for me, is about getting inside the text and getting the most out of it, working within those rules, but not changing them.

(Maybe that's why I'm having trouble getting my head round fan fiction. For me, it seems to be crossing the line into rewriting the text in the fan-author's own image, which to me isn't really interacting or appreciating the text at all. To impose yourself too much on the story is to miss the point of it. Hey, maybe that's my controversial fannish opinion?)

If I wanted to write a story according to my own desires I'd go off and do it, and write my own story. The reason I read fiction is to interact with other people's stories.

[ficlogic.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

What would be the point in Hamlet, or anything by Kafka for that matter, if they had happy endings?

[(Anonymous)]

Gregor: OMG it was all a dream! LOL!
Servant Girl: I love you Gregor!!!

*** TEH END ***

-- Tom