And so it begins.

Up to this point, I've done only introductory work on Composition No. 1, as I have been in the middle of another project as well. That has ended, and the introductory work seems sufficient, so it is time to begin the actual reading of the novel.

So, this is a simple note to report how I will proceed. The idea of this blog is to provide an online space for me to record my experience and interpretation of Composition No. 1 as it infolds. This is because the experience will be different for each reader, which is always the case but even more so in a novel where the narrative is in different order for each reader. The idea is that other readers may compare their experiences with mine, that we may learn something about interpretation, reader agency, narrative linearity or whatever.

For this reason, my reading will be meticulous. I will read only five pages per sitting and I plan to take careful notes as I read. The purpose of the blog, then, it to provide a real time catalog of my reactions to the piece. If I can get the word out about this book, I'd love to see others do this project as well, and I am on the prowl for others writing similar blogs.

I hope folks will enjoy following along with my experience, and I hope that we will all take something from it.

Shuffling the Pages: A Video Post

In the video I've posted here, I show the act of shuffling the pages of Composition No. 1 in order to randomize the page order, as per Saporta's instructions. Though we only filmed the shuffling of pages one time, I actually did so four times in order to really mix them up. It was interesting that, just as Uglow suggested in his introduction, I had highly emotional reactions to this act. I put it off for a long time despite feeling like I should practice the act before filming it (I did not shuffle the pages once until the day I filmed this) because it did not seem appropriate to do so until it was time to begin the book. I felt as if shuffling was a part of reading. I also considered (though not seriously) how I might know what pages they had originally come in and whether knowing this might have significance. I thought this despite the fact that I knew that the randomness was part of the experience. All in all, I felt incredibly uneasy about performing these simple instructions, even at the command of the author.

My feelings while performing the simple act of shuffling the pages is an example of how emotionally and ethically invested we are in book-space ideas of what literature ought to be. Even a radical like me feels tradition bound, as if there's something naturally "right" about the way it's always been done. Read left to right, top to bottom, front to back. This is the way it's supposed to be. But who says? Who started that, and why were they right? Who is Aristotle but a long-dead Greek?

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.