The Wovel

The Wovel

 

On Morning Edition today there was a piece on The Wovel, an audience plotted web novel. It is also a wheeled snow shovel, a device (judging by the number of Google hits), that is more familiar to people than the evolving literary form. The story presented it as an innovation, and a way for publishers to remain relevant.

The idea is hardly new. I’ve been familiar with it for 25 years. In earlier versions the idea was that a fictional universe with predetermined choices would be laid out. The reader has a choice between door number one and door number two. Behind door number one is a booze-guzzling man-eating lion and behind door number two is a gorgeous red head with big tits drinking a pink squirrel.

In the Wovel, the reader sends in suggestions of what lies behind these doors, and the author picks among the suggestions, and writes the next chapter on spec. As a writer I would find this process of writing to spec to be horrifying.

As a reader, my objection, 25 years ago as now, is that I don’t want to write the story or choose at narrative nodes between alternative plot possibilities. The pleasure I get from reading is not knowing what will happen next, or anticipating it. Now, as a poet I have always accepted the necessity of reader participation. A poem is an enigmatic text with several possible readings. The author of a poem does not totally determine the way the poem is to be read. Each reading of a poem is slightly different, according to mood and also level of consciousness. To read a difficult writer, an occult writer, you have to be up to it. If you read with your head too much you will miss the dream. If you leave your head out of it, you may not make it through. Reading a poem is a negotiation between reader and writer. Novels are like this too. But the reader doesn’t supply the content, the reader reconstructs its meaning. The reader brings time, voice, emotion, thought, to the text. The readers embodies the text. The reader imagines the characters as she will, he constructs unstated pasts, children for Lady Macbeth, conflict between Claudius and Old King Hamlet. But he does not write the text, supply the words.

The ultimate undetermined novel would be Finnegans Wake. Every syllable in FW has to be interpreted as to meaning and sound and its relationship to other syllables. It is in the nature of the pun to be undecided, but not undecidable. Joyce’s universe appears to be coextensive with the actual universe, and to be guided by the uncertainty principle. But unlike the physical universe the world of Finnegans Wake has been totally determined by the genius of its creator. The closer we approach to Joyce’s consciousness, to his genius, the more of Finnegans Wake we can understand and enjoy. The text teaches you how to read it. This is different from science say, where you do not have to be like Darwin, Einstein or Newton to understand their theories. They would be useless otherwise. Shakespeare doesn’t demand this either. He uses his genius to make available to the audience what it has divined of the world. Shakespeare had no desire to play god, he really only wanted to be a successful, rich, gentleman. Joyce wanted to sing himself into immortality.

Novels are created art forms, not partially undetermined realities; not totalities with a random element of mutation and chance interacting with a predetermined order to produce novelty and change, as creatures are. Part of the pleasure of reading is the apprehension of a slowly unfolding design; the collaboration in understanding between two separate individuals through the medium of language. So I have no desire to read a Wovel as it is conceived. But I am not saying that such a thing is doomed to failure or shouldn’t be done. Everything should be done.

A web-based, serially published novel is an entirely different creature. I, along with thousands of other authors, have been publishing serially on the web. The Last Bender appears in installments on this website every Wednesday. When the Last Bender is done I will be publishing Endangered Species, a serious literary novel, in the same way. The Wovel is, according to the news story, an effort to keep publishing relevant. But for-money publication, like print media and music, is dying. Authors like me, who are unwilling to go unpublished simply because we cannot get the attention of editors and agents, or because our works are not commercially viable, can simply publish our works online and hope they find and audience. Once I’ve decided I don’t need money, once I’ve accepted that the day-job phenomenon is permanent (as it is for most writers, who teach after all), then I have no need of publishers, editors and agents. I will have to become a good proofreader; I will have to learn to control my ego sufficiently to be a good editor of my own work; I will have to cultivate a small audience of honest readers who will help me vet the work before posting it; but I will not need to grovel before MBAs with Hollywood taste. I can be free.