The text is yours,
and you belong to it
How do readers perform and embody elegiac texts?
By Addie Jennings for DHU339
Ernest Hemingway's 1964 biography A Moveable Feast contains the following passage:
You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
(30)
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The title of this blog post, "The text is yours, and you belong to it," is my interpretation of this quote.
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To me, Hemingway's original line encapsulates core themes of this Commonplace "blog" and of DHU339 as a whole: the coupling of reading and writing; how the two should always occur in tandem; how you form text, and how text forms you.
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In the same spirit, writers and readers work closely together.
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Canadian scholar Anne Carson's visionary work Nox is integral to this blog post. The book is an example of the unique influence readers have on text, and vice versa. Carson and the short story author Lynda Clark, through her interactive digital story Uncle, have created works at the intersection of performance, embodiment, and mourning.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast between 1957 and 1960. He died in 1961, and the book was published posthumously.
Published in 1964 . . .
READING THE DEAD
"I HAVE DECIDED TO DATE DEAD MEN."
​This quote comes from "Two-Part Invention", which is one short story in a collection of fictional short stories written by the Canadian writer Doretta Lau and published in her 2014 book How does a single blade of grass thank the sun?​​
"I have decided to date dead men,"
proclaims the protagonist, and then:
"I start reading biographies because I often find answers in books." (8)
And the protagonist is successful. In this fictional short story, reality collides with the imagined and the two become indiscernible.
She selects the late Glenn Gould as her suitor. She finds every autobiography and personal account she can get her hands on, and gradually, in a merging of real and written worlds that is very much reminiscent of Julio Cortázar's "Continuity of parks", she flies to Toronto and meets Gould in a diner for a date.
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In the words of Canadian professor and author Andrew Piper,
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I could not find one sentence to represent the core revelation of "Continuity of Parks"—a story that is only one page long— because that core revelation crescendoes gradually into a reveal that whose full impact is built off of the experience of reading the events leading up to it. But here is the final sentence:
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"The door of the salon, and then the knife in his hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel."
In "Continuity of Parks", a man sits down to read a book. Gradually, the point-of-view shifts to the events occurring inside of that book. Cortázar writes the story, and the story within the story, in the same tone and style, and so what happens at the end feels strangely natural: The man reading the book appears inside the book he is reading.
Books are how we speak with the distant and the dead.
That the past lives on in books is a commonplace."
(Book Was There 13)
Piper adds an endnote to this passage. It reads:
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"As recent neurological research suggests, when we read we simulate narrative situations in our brain by drawing on our past experiences in the world. Reading is made of through this translation between mental simulation and embodied experience." (163)
Endnote 8...
I see the act of drawing on past experiences as the act of remembering.
THE RECIPROCAL INFLUENCE OF READING AND VISUAL MEMORY
I wanted to know more about the "translation between mental simulation and embodied experience”, so I looked beyond Book Was There for the answers, and this quote from the American Journal of Psychology caught my eye:
“Subjects frequently reported memory for photographs that they had actually never seen, but had read about in a brief paragraph.”
(Intraub and Hoffman 101)
The quote comes from a 1992 study in which undergraduate students were shown photographs, and then textual descriptions of photographs not shown. One week later, they were asked to recall the images and descriptions and to attempt to attribute their recollections to the correct textual or photographic sources. A main goal of the study was to see if subjects would purport having seen a colour image of a scene they had actually only read about, thus confusing the sources of their visual memories. Ultimately, up to 46% of recalled scenes were incorrectly attributed by subjects to photographs they believed they remembered seeing but had in reality only read textual descriptions of. (106)
Ernest Hemingway conveys a more literary interpretation of this phenomenon:
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"I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after much too much brandy, I would remember [the Turgenieff] somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it."
(The Sun Also Rises 149)
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We now know that readers simulate narrative texts in their head by recalling memories. We know also that the act of reading can so effectively ignite the imaginations of readers that the text later takes on the fabricated effect of a visual representation (like a photograph) in the readers' memories.
In the first chapter of his book Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the psychological activities of reading, Richard Gerrig describes the reader experience as being a "performance". (2) Gerrig, a professor of psychology, makes it clear that memory and the notion of "reader performance" are closely linked. (34)
EMBODIED READING: CONTAINERS OF TEXT
The book’s...ability to serve as a container has been another way through which we have found order in our lives."
(Piper 11)
The dimensions of reader performance extend beyond the memory-based visual simulation brought on by the act of reading. Text today is commonly contained digitally as well as physically, and both of these modes enable distinct haptic reading experiences. The medium through which an author chooses to convey her text, then, is a deciding factor in how that text will be understood.
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Physical texts, like books, obviously possess the qualities of tangible, three-dimensional form. The experience of reading a physical book involves the act of turning its pages, of holding it in your hands, of feeling its weight and texture. If the reader wants to read a book, she must be careful not to damage its pages, and she must, of course, have a light-source to read it by. These features are what shape the embodied experience specific to reading certain physical texts.
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Digital texts, like this blog post, obligates its audience to read differently. Authors of digital text may harness the endless interactive features of digital mediums to shape, or at least influence, how readers navigate the narrative. The haptic experience of reading digitally sees traditional reading actions replaced by scrolling and clicking.
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​Reading electronic literature is
not only about accessing or receiving texts
but also about producing and performing them."
(Pressman)
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Authors who construct text using hyperlinks encourage expansive, horizontal interaction with their work and so relinquish or reject the desire that their text be read in a specific sequence.
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Reading electronic literature is not only about accessing or receiving texts but also about producing and performing them
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PERFORMING THE ELEGY
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Because readers are known to perform simulations of narrative text imbued with their personal embodied experiences, I thought it would be interesting to observe performance and embodiment by readers of texts that were themselves created to reference, preserve, or honour the memory of something. The genre of elegy exactly represents this kind of memorial text.
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THESE HYPERLINKS EMULATE GRIEF
This bookcover is a visual representation of recursive grief. "Silver Repetition", written by Lily Wang, is a book of "endless, perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return", as The New Press so beautifully describes it.
Perhaps you may have already noticed, but while most of the hyperlinks on this page serve to remove readers from the page, taking them to external resources, a few of the hyperlinks within the text of this blog serve to remind readers of topics that appear earlier in the blog. This hyperlink is an example. Upon clicking such a hyperlink, the reader will float back up to a section of the page they likely already visited. This adds a cyclical dimension to the physical experience of interacting with this blog, and this cyclical quality is reminiscent of the recursive nature of grief. By "recursive", I am referring to the belief that grief is a process of revisiting. Feelings of grief reoccur and instigating events are revisited.
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As such the reader, in interacting with this site, undergoes an embodied experience that is reminiscent of the grief experience. In this way, readers of this website may themselves perform grief.
Below are two elegiac texts. One is a website, the other is a physical book. Both texts harness the affordances of their respective mediums in ways that provide readers embodied experiences that are novel not just in the realm of elegy but in the reading experience itself.
NOX (ANNE CARSON)
Anne Carson is a poet, a translator of ancient Greek and Latin, a professor of Classics—the list goes on. She is also a writer and lover of poetry. In 2010 she published Nox, a culmination of her years of training and a fusion of her wide-ranging expertise.
Nox is an elegy and an epitaph for Carson’s late brother, Michael, or Nox (1). It is a facsimile of a scrapbook, 192 pages, that Carson assembled just after her brother’s death in 2000. It combines poetry, translation, collage…ancient history revisited, and personal history shared in cryptic fragments.
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Formally, Nox is a translation of the Roman poet Catullus’ poem "Catullus 101" (2), which is, itself, an elegy for a dead brother. Carson devotes one whole page to the linguistic breakdown of each word of the poem (3). And on the adjoining page, Carson will typically leave a trace of her personal life. Page by page, the translation is performed, and so is Carson's grief.
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THE EMBODIED EXPERIENCE OF READING NOX is shaped by the book's anomalous physical format. It is entirely impossible to interact with the book without confronting its idiosyncrasies.
The corpus is shaped like a thick hardcover book, but it turns out to be a sort of skeuomorph that opens like a jewellery box (4). The contents are a tall springy bed of paper, and it is revealed that the “pages” are made up of one extra-long length of thick paper, folded like an accordion. This begets an atypical experience of “turning” pages, in that, to view the next page (or fold), the reader can't help but shift and pull open the following folds.
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This format allows readers a choice not often granted with standard physical books. A reader may attempt to read the book as one reads a folio—flipping from page to page—or she may stretch and smooth out the singular sheet of text and glide along the narrative.
Nox is one step removed from the traditional printed book format, so regardless of how readers choose to interact with the text, they will always fail to exactly replicate the embodied reading experience expected of physical books.
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At first glance, on the surface, Nox appears as a book with a traditional format. But it isn't. It's body should feel familiar, but it doesn't. This is one way that the embodied experience of reading Nox evokes the act of mourning.
Moving through the world while mourning is like reading a book that, on the surface, appears normal, but really is unfamiliar, disjointed, and shaped by the experience of grief.
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Carson begins the book with "Catullus 101" in its original Latin.
3
Courtesy of Writing with Images
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ADDRESSING ASH:
PERFORMANCE THROUGH TRANSLATION
Nox's remarkable haptic features are not the sole instigators for reader performance. In her undergraduate thesis, Addressing Ash: Rituals of Translation and Grief in Anne Carson's Nox, Peper Langhout asserts that Carson "induces" reader performance through the systematic translating that acts as the text's framework. (2)
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In making Nox a process the reader undergoes alongside/as Carson, we ourselves are historians, translators, holders of grief, sisters, brothers…”
(35)
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Most important is the fact that as the translation of "Catullus 101" is constructed piece by minute piece, so, too, is Carson's memory of her brother. The two build and take shape in tandem, becoming inextricable. Langhout notes, too, that the semantic breakdowns Carson provides for even the relatively innocuous words are tinged with signifiers of grief (5), and that the photos or textual excerpts on the adjacent pages, however arcane, serve to bolster those themes. (13)
Translation deals with a subject matter that never stagnates. That the meanings of words in any language will constantly evolve to suit their current cultural contexts is a guarantee. Carson engages this linguistic pliability to produce a translation that honours both the source material as well as the circumstances of her own grief.
5
On the left page, Carson provides a detailed definition for the latin word atque. The final phrase reads: "just like him I was a negotiator with night".
"Nox" means "night" in latin. Carson folds the memory of her brother into the translations she performs.
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Courtesy of Writing with Images
UNCLE (LYNDA CLARK)
Lynda Clark is an English author. In 2021, shortly after her sister died of cancer, Clark published a short story called Uncle on the indie game website itch.io Uncle is a Choose Your Own Adventure-style IDF (interactive digital fiction) in which the protagonist, whose actions the reader controls, observes a grieving family member. Through Uncle, Clark "sought to express a big loss through all the tiny losses." (Clark 2)
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The story takes just a few minutes to run through. I encourage you, reader, to try it out before continuing.
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Clark refers to "tiny losses" that make up Uncle's core grief, and I feel those losses are represented in every decision the reader is forced to make in order to progress in the story. Each narrative choice bars access to an unknown number of other possible avenues, which produces, in my experience, a small sense of loss that only builds as I move forward.
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PERFORMING UNCLE
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The embodied experience of reading/playing Uncle ressembles the description of digital text given earlier in this blog post. Because the sections of the story are linked by hypertext, the reader clicks through the story. No scrolling is involved. All readers would experience, then, very little deviation from the specific haptic experience that the interaction with hypertext provides.
Where Nox offers readers more options for how they may physically interact with the text, Uncle, with its multiple possible storylines, certainly offers more narrative leeway—with certain limitations: "The reader-player may choose how they respond to the Uncle, but not how this makes them feel" (Clark 7)—and we, the readers, enact a personalized experience of the narrative. We are then granted a sense that we actually helped to create the outcome of the story. Uncle enhances my belief that reading text is performing text.
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In the article "All the Small Things: Depicting the Randomisation of Grief in (Digital) Short Fiction" written for Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, Clark argues that Uncle "[confirms] technologically aided writing as a tool which further expands writers’ expressive capabilities, particularly when depicting complex emotions." (2) She acknowledges that not all interactive, randomized stories suit digital platforms (8), but that central to Uncle is the "[collaborative]" and "collective" features only a digital medium can afford.
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There is ‘comfort’ in the sense of ‘not being alone’ fostered by collaborative co-creation."
(8)
CONCLUSION
Over the course of this Commonplace blog post, I have sought to draw explicit connections between textual mediums and reader memory, embodiment, and performance.
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I hope readers come away with a greater understanding of how embodied reading is shaped by the physical or digital container of text. I hope also to have conveyed that physical and digital mediums are equally legitimate methods of reading, a conclusion at odds with the trendy sentiment that reading physical text is inherently superior to reading digitally. This blog goes beyond a purely textual treatment of grief in text, because the unique affordances of Wix as a digital writing tool have allowed me to emulate the recursive nature of grief through the use of hyperlinks.
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I also hope that readers might now, if they did not prior, see reading as a performance. This performance occurs through our own embodied memories that colour the text we read and through techniques like translation or functions like hypertext.
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Finally, I hope it is clear that we can mourn by reading and writing. Text, in all its various forms, has a miraculous ability to wrap us up into it, and that is a characteristic that serves grievers well.
Works Cited
Carson, Anne, and Gaius Valerius. Catullus. Nox. New Directions, 2010.
Clark, Lynda. “All the Small Things: Depicting the Randomization of Grief in (Digital) Short Fiction.” Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, Apr. 2022, pp. 7–17, https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00045_1.
Clark, Lynda. “Uncle.” Itch.Io, https://notagoth.itch.io/uncle.
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Cortázar, Julio. "Continuity of parks." Blow-up, and Other Stories. Translated by Paul Blackburn, Pantheon Books, 2013.
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Gerrig, Richard. Experiencing Narrative Worlds. First edition., Routledge, an imprint of Taylor and Francis, 2018.
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Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1964.
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Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner, 1954.
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Intraub, Helene, and James E. Hoffman. “Reading and Visual Memory: Remembering Scenes That Were Never Seen.” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 105, no. 1, 1992, p. 101, https://doi.org/10.2307/1422983.
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Langhout, Peper. Addressing Ash: Rituals of Translation and Grief in Anne Carson’s Nox. 2018. https://scholarship.depauw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=studentresearchother.
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Lau, Doretta. "Two-Part Invention." How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? Nightwood Editions, 2014.
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Pressman, Jessica. “Navigating Electronic Literature.” Electronic Literature, https://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=14.html
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“Silver Repetition.” The New Press, https://thenewpress.com/books/silver-repetition.
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Wang, Lily. Silver Repetition. House of Anansi Press, 2024.
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