Andrew Gallix wonders what happened to e-lit:
Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara’s hat trick, the surrealists’ automatic writing or Burroughs’ cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?
So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climactic. [Chris] Meade himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. I can but concur. Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts - and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext? In spite of all this, [Mark] Amerika may well be on to something when he claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a “digitally-processed intermedia art” in which literature and all the other arts are being “remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed”. My feeling is that these “other forms” will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?
First posted: Friday, September 26th, 2008.
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Johnson’s pages were loose, but they still came in a box. The internet is no box; or if is, it’s a mighty strange looking one
/ Posted by G Riecke on September 27th, 2008 at 12:19 am / Permalink /I just meant that some hypertext-based stories work on a similar principle.
/ Posted by Andrew Gallix on September 27th, 2008 at 9:32 am / Permalink /No, I agree with you on that. At least, I think they want to work on the same principle. I’m just missing the box; something tangible to keep it all in.
/ Posted by G Riecke on September 27th, 2008 at 1:08 pm / Permalink /I’m with you now!
/ Posted by Andrew Gallix on September 27th, 2008 at 1:13 pm / Permalink /These are interesting comments and I agree with a lot of them. However I am not sure if e-lit is dead but rather hasn’t even properly been born yet.
Media other than text, particularly video and audio, is now in full bodied flood across the web and it’s soaking up attention and bandwidth because it’s easy, established, quick and often instantly-rewarding (not just to enjoy but also to self-produce). Reading text off a screen by all means isn’t as easy or rewarding, particularly if you’re doing it for pure entertainment reasons in the way you’d read a novel or a short story. Why would you bother doing that? Most people read off the screen because they’re reading their own email, or looking up something they want to find out about – the exception being perhaps blogs, although even then there’s a lot of self-interest involved for most. E-book readers might have paper-like screens and immediate book download capability but – and I have one myself – they’re still pretty crap and don’t really do anything new. One of the main results of the introduction of e-book readers has been to emphasise to many keen regular readers just how cool and fantastic physical books actually are and what a wonder it is that we invented them.
It’s interesting that people like Chris Meade and Kate Pullinger are being noted as the loudest and most authoritative voices on the subject of digital literature in many intrigued spheres. There’s a lot of other material out there that to me seems to be pushing the boundaries further, most prominently in my opinion a website called Dreaming Methods http://www.dreamingmethods.com which the Times picked up on late last year but which doesn’t seem to get anywhere near as much attention. Perhaps this is because it’s not linked to any universities or research projects or previously print-published authors. The works on this site whilst still falling into the endlessly experimental trap seem to promise a far richer and unusual direction for e-lit with better production standards, visual manipulation of text that doesn’t seem out of place or for-the-sake-of it, and less obvious connections to traditionally published writing. I guess you could argue about some of the work being completely inaccessible, but I think it’s not just about writers coming up with cool new digital stuff that actually somehow grips us, it’s about readers getting more educated and savvy about how to actually approach fictional and poetic written work produced for computer screens – how to actually get into the mental space to read it and get immersed in it. And with millions of people reading from screens these days probably more than they do from paper, (even if it is mostly just their own emails or reviews of that new book they want to buy - not downloaded - from Amazon) perhaps that sort of shift is starting to happen.
Sure, it’s all mostly shite the e-lit stuff that’s out there, and at the moment it really does feel like nobody gives much of a toss and would rather watch poxy trash on YouTube, but personally I think there’s hope yet.
/ Posted by Max Penn on September 29th, 2008 at 10:38 am / Permalink /Hi there Max,
Thanks for your insight. I agree with virtually everything you say.
/ Posted by Andrew Gallix on September 29th, 2008 at 6:27 pm / Permalink /