Although I haven't finished reading it, I am getting really excited about the possibilities for teaching with the new novel titled S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. The book itself is supposed to be a novel written by a mysterious East European author, but I believe it is Dorst who writes the text. In the margins of the book are about four sets of notes that I believe are composed by Abrams. The notes consist of a dialogue between a female undergrad and a male graduate student investigating the identity of the mysterious author and developing a relationship along the way. In the books pages the authors have inserted several other texts such as postcards, newspaper articles, and telegrams.
This book excites me because it illustrates so many possibilities for my scholarship and teaching. The notes along with the text of the novel and the footnotes of the novel comprise the kind of multi-voiced and multidirectional narrative that interests me, and that I was trying to play with in my own dissertation. The character in the novel also suffers from amnesia like my Kate. Much of the book examines the notion of a life as a story that can be erased and rewritten. I am also interested, as we move into a digital age, and what this book has to say about the hardcopy or the artifact of the book. The conversation between the two students that occurs in writing on three separate timelines can be compared to email correspondence by online lovers who have never met. But because the writing exists only in this volume that the two pass back and forth, it is private and not public. This also connects to notions of privacy and surveillance which I discussed with my English 102 students this semester.
I would ask students to question what it means that the conversation between the two students happens on top of previous conversations. In some places, for instance, they refer in writing to notes they took previously and rethink them.
What does this suggest about the notion of revision in writing? How might we examine the significance of different fonts, handwriting styles and the positioning of actual text? What can we say about text being multidirectional or even having direction? What are the differences between the types of mediums that you see here in terms of purpose and context? What role do images play?
The book also questions the place and practice of academia, the tensions between self and author, and examines corporate practices as well. Here are some lines that struck me during my last reading:
In the novel text:"To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft."
This is exactly the situation that I see my character Kate in. The grad student asks in his notes, "does the rewriting make us different people? Or just a product of ongoing revision?"
Also in the novel text: "Stenfalk chuckles and claps his hands as the others curse him. 'This,' he says, 'is precisely what campfires are for. The sharing of stories. There's a spiritual connection between flame and narrative."
S. Nods. He understands Stenfalk's proposition intuitively; we create stories to help us shape a chaotic world, to navigate inequities of power, to accept our lack of control over nature, over others, over ourselves. But what do you do when you have no stories of your own?"
Yes. I may mark further lines from this novel as I read. The relationship created here between narrative, evidence, and memory is fascinating to me and intimately connected with the scholarship that surrounds my own novel. Also pretty fun to read. I've been reading the text of the novel first along with the grad students initial notes on it, and then reading the notes between Jen and Eric after each chapter. But you can read it many ways, and there's even a decoder that you might use to crack some kind of code that exists in the footnotes. In this way, the book contains many of the advantages of a digital text. Something to think about.
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