The Neverending Story

This week I read an extract of Douglas’ The End of Books – Or Books Without End .  The component I read was mostly about interactive narratives, such as hypertext fiction. Hypertext fiction is a new concept to me; I vaguely knew of its existence, however Douglas’ extract further consolidated my understanding. I learnt that hypertext fiction is similar to those books we all read when we were younger, the Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

One of the purposes driving interactive narratives however is the desire for the exhaustible story, the mystery that unspools with a fresh casts of suspects

Douglas makes a valid point. People like interacting. Even though reading is generally supposed to be a solitary activity, people today are all about interaction, and we are not so easily amused as those that roamed the earth before us.

Douglas’ next point I think is also very interesting;

It is hardly likely that digital media like hypertext are going to supersede books

This can be related to Jay Bolter’s concept I’ve studied in the past, remediation.  David Bolter states that remediation is a process whereby old media is refashioned by new media. It is about improving upon mediums to keep up to date with societal development. The traditional book as we know it may be evolving, through such forms like Kindle readers and interactive narratives like Douglas discusses. Just because there are new forms of book technologies evolving, I don’t believe that this marks the end of the book. Interactive narratives and other seemingly innovative adaptations of the traditional book are simply just subject to the natural societal process that is remediation. There can be a place in society for both the traditional bark-from-a-tree book AND innovative developments like Ebooks.

A final point of Douglas’ I wish to comment on is this:

Readers of print fiction…may interpret what they read completely differently their second time through the novel

This is Douglas defending print fiction in that it can be read more than once with new enjoyment each time, much like interactive narratives. Interactive narratives involve having a different turn of events everytime. However, I agree with Douglas in that often the second or third time round reading a book, you may not get a different ending as such but there are most certainly new things you pick up and you might have a new take on the plot. For example, when I first studied Shakespeare in school, the wording was so foreign to me that I spent majority of the time trying to decipher the language, missing many themes, metaphors and twists in the plot the first time around. However, once I discussed the plays in class and analysed them, upon second reading it was a completely different reading experience. I was more knowledgable and therefore had a much greater appreciation for how intelligent Shakespeare’s writing was. Some people might think knowing the outcome of a novel ruins your reading but I disagree- this can often open your mind to clever foreshadowing you were blind to upon your first reading.

It is not a matter of the river being different each time you cross it so much as it is a matter of your stepping into an entirely different river with each journey you take

My thoughts exactly, Douglas.