Most of my writing during and after graduate school has argued that contemporary multimodal literature, for the most part, employs an archival poetics.[1] Books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) — which is arguably the most influential example — as well as Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts (2009), Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013), Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013), Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals (2016), Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc (2017), Rian Hughes’s XX (2020), and many, many others, not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifactsfor narrative and other expressive purposes. I call these aesthetic objects book-archives and examine them through the lens of archival poetics, a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission.
In addition to employing a variety of literary modes and linguistic registers, book-archives often include reproduced photographs, paintings, drawings, handwriting, newspaper clippings, x-rays, maps, diagrams, charts, and other kinds of textual artifacts and ephemera. Makers of book-archives tend to also organize their books according to archival techniques and principles such as collation (the combining and comparison of objects), cataloging (the listing and inventorying of various things), annotation (commentary and diagrams of objects), cross-referencing and intertextuality (the citation of texts in other texts), indexicality (how textual objects point to specific places and contexts in the world), and conceptual metonymy (how textual objects stand in for larger psychosocial complexes, spatiotemporal continua, and other textual objects).
Given the physical dimensions, design potential, and portability of books, book-archives often take on the form of compendiums and dossiers. On the one hand, there are the more maximalist or encyclopedic book-archives like House of Leaves and A Life in Books, which recapitulate entire schools and traditions of literary history and printmaking. On the other hand, there are the more minimalist book-archives like Nox and Important Artifacts which are more modest in terms of their scope of documentation and narrative scale. At both ends of the spectrum, book-archives employ archival principles and techniques.
The emergence of book-archives as a contemporary mode of writing and bookmaking occurs at the intersection of literary-cultural history and material-technological development. In recent decades, a wide variety of literary modes and genres, including encyclopedic fiction, metafiction, artists books, electronic hypertext, visual literature, and graphic narratives, among others, have tended to coalesce in individual works, and this convergence has come at a time when the technological affordances of new media, including software like QuarkXPress and Adobe’s InDesign and Photoshop, become readily accessible and fairly easy to use. Nowadays, authors and designers are able to incorporate practically all forms of media into their books. No longer limited to the pen, typewriter, word processor, or letterpress, writers are able to integrate virtually all types of inscription and media into a single object—the book—using various design software on their personal computers. This convergence in large part explains why we have seen the book-archive as a mode of writing and bookmaking emerge when it has.
The rise of archival poetics also overlaps with various responses to supposed threats brought on by digital technology to print and media culture, reading practices, public discourse, social trust and cultural memory. Central to multimodal book-archives are matters of textual authenticity—that is, of determining whether a textual artifact is real or fake, genuine or a copy. And of course, issues of authentication typically tip over into questions about authorship and attribution as well.
So while artificial intelligence and social media, for instance, have created real and pressing concerns pertaining to matters of authenticity, book-archives have tended to respond to these matters by drawing attention to how subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. Book-archives, in other words, use the book object as a vehicle for interrogating some of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.
In my next blog post, I will attempt to tie some of these threads together with a discussion of Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books
1] Those interested in reading more about archival poetics and multimodal literature may wish to read my interviews with Warren Lehrer and Bill Bly, both published at electronic book review. I have also published articles on Anne Carson, Bill Bly, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.
