Designed Literature (Part Two)

(Continued from Part One)

At the convergence of these typographical trends, modern software lets an author design his own text. Certainly, writers have not absorbed all aspects of typography, and the actual crafting of fonts is still reserved for typographers. But page layout, typeface, proportions and color have all been left to the public by Adobe Suites and freeware.

The world of words is going the way of the music industry. An author can now self-publish by drafting in InDesign, exporting to .azm, and posting a file to Amazon for sale. Today, many authors self-publish, letting readers pay what they think the book is worth. (Additionally, if the bibliophile requires it, an ebook file can be printed for an upcharge by any number of sites that offer Print On-Demand services.)

This phenomena is certainly an economic boon for mainstream authors, but it carries with it the history of avant-garde self-publishing. Most art books of the last century were self-published, and even giants like Joyce personally printed their early works.

So, all this is unexciting. Digital self-publishing is a more convenient incarnation of past practice; nothing new. Certainly, this seems an adequate survey of the present.

But true art is created with the future in mind. So, in pursuit of relevance, I will mention some of the places I see literature meeting design in new ways.

The most obvious of these is probably concrete poetry. Since the Futurist Zang Tumb Tumb, poets have been experimenting with typography. The Dadaist experiments, however, seem the most apt precursor to what eventually became visual poetry. (Dick Higgins, coiner of the word intermedia, was himself a visual poet among other things.) (And to go any further without mentioning Apollinaire would be dishonest.) As the avant-garde grew, this vein of visual poetry adopted by mail artists; and, consequently, is almost completely analog. Analog meaning collaged from other publications; if anything is printed, it is on someone's home printer; color is usually added with paints, etc. In other words, the physical end-product has dimension because it was not designed in software. However, I think this will change. Books, and art in general, are moving to the net, which means moving to 2D (for now).

I believe artists will increasingly rely on software to design their work. The democratization of design tools means that new artists will be changing the traditions we just surveyed. Just as the century-old avant-garde worked outside the canon, the modern artists of consequence will be those willing to reconsider everything.

Prose, and all information, will be digitally designed. There's simply no reason for it not to be designed. Design adds depth, and makes the piece more intuitive: it meets the demands of modern taste.

A draft of my Common App essay.

House of Leaves is a book carefully designed by the author. Page design is central to the telling of the story. (The writer even picked his own typefaces.)

* * *

The other digital design element affecting the future of literature (and every other aspect of culture) is interactivity, or, as the typed word knows it, hypertext.

Wikipedia is probably the best hypertext around. Intuitive navigation hides the project's innovation from most, but considerate readers realize the novelty of their experience. They are free to explore anything of interest to them. The limits are defined only by man's will to populate the pages. Fiction with Wikipedian structure will be something special.

As far as I know, the author writing the most interesting hypertext is Ander Monson (yes, the one I wrote about in the above essay - we're all allowed our Heros, no?). His book Vanishing Point is about the rise of autobiographical fiction. Typographic daggers signal to the reader that the book's website has more information on an outfitted item. If you type a dagger-toting word into site's search bar, you are navigated to an essay about the word, or mentioning the word. Cool enough. But, the essays are interlinked. That is the important step. There are hyperlinks from essay to essay, just as wikipedia links from topic to topic. That is forward thinking.

Monson's main website is also a literary piece of sorts. It gives the expected book write-ups, guest lecture plugs, pride in obscure recognition. But, it's also full of easter eggs: unpublished poems, hypertext meta-games, wandering meditations, full essays, an advent calendar. Many of these extras are also interlinked.

And the site is always growing. Like Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Monson's site is an ever-evolving self-portrait of an epic vision.

Though it may be hard to imagine fiction as an interlinked webpage (my Derrida bobble-head winces as I type this), expository and non-fiction writing have already made the change. You're reading an instance. Essay collections will be paid entry websites, or interlinked ebooks - not awkward, dust-emitting, relics for bourgeoisie coffee tables.

Ultimately these currents will converge, and design will be interactive, and the ultimate conclusion of the postmodern theories will be reached when readers purchase fragments from the author and assemble them into a subjective whole, turning the authors into deconstructionists and readers into synthesizers in a new age where information transfer has caused creativity to be valued above all else.