Why read Composition No. 1

In 1962, Marc Saporta created a book, or a book work, or just some words that confound the conventions of literature. He did so by a minor technical innovation, or un-innovation: he didn't bind the pages.

These words begin the introduction to the 2011 Visual Editions printing of Composition No. 1. Visual Editions aptly chose Tom Uglow, the creative director for Google and YouTube, Europe to write the Intro. Uglow, a well-known designer and creator of hypertext, seems the perfect person to introduce the new printing of Composition No. 1 because he both understands and embodies why the novel is once again important.

Uglow asserts that "the instinct not to manipulate the 'deck' [not to shuffle the pages] is almost overwhelming." What Uglow understands is that, for those of us used to reading literature, conventional bookspace (Lanksheare and Noble) ideas of narrative linearity are seemingly innately sacrosanct. Stories (rather unlike the events of life) must have a beginning, middle, and end (Aristotle), and the writer should maintain careful control of their order. The role of the reader then is relatively passive. She cedes agency to the writer, who guides the reader through a series of carefully constructed and well revised series of narrative events.

Composition No. 1 goes as far as printed literature can in breaking this convention of linearity. As Jay David Bolter notes:

When all other methods of fragmenting the novel have been tried, what remains but to tear the pages out of a book one by one and hand them to the reader? From the ideal of perfect structural control, Saporta brings us to the apparent abdication of control?

Since the order of events in a narrative has much to do with how the reader interprets the story, by handing over control of the order of the story, Saporta hands over a great deal of agency to the reader who chooses how to read the pages, or to blind chance when the reader shuffles the pages.

The experience of reading Composition No. 1, then, relies as much on the reader and pure random fate as it does on the writer. The novel is therefore, in as much as printed fiction can be, interactive.

So, while those of is used to reading literature may find it almost pathologically difficult to shuffle the pages of Composition No. 1 before reading, the act is probably more appropriate to the experience of modern reading where "every narrative [is] fragmented by links, pings, mails and #fails; a world where form augments content rather than defines it, where stories unfold across magazines, games, 24-hour news and 140 character messaging" (Uglow).

In the modern reading experience, we control the information (in some ways) as much as it controls us. When we read news stories, we choose how much background information we want by clicking links that lead us backward through previous or related stories. We discredit information we find dubious or images we suspect have been doctored by murderously typing "FAKE" into a comment box. We crave, seek, demand agency in interpreting texts. Composition No. 1 is important because Saporta seemed ready to play with this idea of agency 30 years before the internet made it commonplace.