Ergodic literature

Now it’s time for my own little pet project – my love of collecting works of ergodic literature. Some people also call them illuminated novels. In a simplified manner, that means the text is accompanied by pictures or other added marginalia that represent or replace a certain part of the narrative. The most often quoted examples are Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and even Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I actually prefer the term ergodic literature to illuminated novels in these instances, definitely in the case of House of Leaves.

House of Leaves

This term isn’t very widely used in the mainstream bookish media, eg Book Riot, most book blogs, or BookTube. Perhaps it’s academically too specific to be of any interest to anyone. However, the books that belong to this genre are definitely becoming extremely popular. So, even if you don’t know the name for the genre, you’ll recognise the books that belong to it after just a couple of initial characteristics. In brief, ergodic literature – as defined in Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature – means that the reader has to put in “non-trivial” effort to consume the text (p1-2). The word itself comes from the Greek words ergon and hodos, which mean “work” and “path”, respectively (ibid). Thus, the reader has to find their own meandering way through the narrative, but on a higher level than the regular movement of eyes and turning of pages. In most cases, the exact order in which to read the text is not indicated. So, ergodic literature means that a text has an added dimension (eg footnotes, pictures, text written in a different way, newpaper cutouts, clickable links in ebooks), and it is up to the reader which part to read first or not at all (many people skip the footnotes in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).

S.
(the book has been made to look
like an old library copy)

Now that the more academic part of the post is over, I think it’s a good idea to have examples. This isn’t an overly detailed post, but I thought you’d enjoy learning a new name to a genre of books you already know, and perhaps enjoy. A great example of a novel where the path of reading is not determined, is JJ Abrams’ and Doug Dorst’s S. The novel consists of a main narrative – a fictional book – and then added marginalia of two people’s conversation about the book and the fictional author of it. This is as Meta as it gets, people! There are added extras, too: actual scribbled upon napkins, postcards, slips of paper! It is the reader’s choice whether to read the in-text novel and margin notes consecutively, or first finish off the novel, and then reread the margin notes.

Note: that little bird picture
can be scanned via an app
for extra content! (Night Film)

Another interesting aspect of ergodic literature is that it is not defined by the type of media – it doesn’t have to be a print book. Ergodic literature refers to the reading experience and so an ebook or any other electronic medium can also be categorised as such. So here the ebook version of Night Film with its clickable links is the same as the print book of House of Leaves with disjointed footnotes and mismatched font size extravaganza. 

I have probably rattled on long enough about the definition and sure, you could just use the term illuminated texts. However, I prefer ergodic literature if only for the fact that it accurately shows how the same book could really be different for anyone. Yes, yes, you can say that about every book – two people might not see the same themes in a work or art – but the mixture of pictures, footnotes, regular and upside down text implies another layer of the reading experience.

Perhaps some examples, if you too think you’d love this interactive experience? The most famous one right now – in addition to the abovementioned – is Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, a novel made out of documents, interviews and chat transcripts. City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg was published in 2015 and includes document clippings as well. Dawn Kurtagich’s The Dead House also came out last year and it is once again told in newspaper clippings, diary excerpts and the like. Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel (again from 2015) and could be seen as belonging to this genre, as the name suggests. A new one just about to be released is Sylvain Neuvel’s Sleeping Giants (note: next week you can read Coll’s review on that). So you see how these novels are cropping up more lately. Of course, books like these have been around for a long time now, but it’s great to see them getting more and more love. Any guesses on what’s behind this new-found love of intricate, multimedia print books? Maybe our attention spans have become too short to just consume a “good old” print book with the text running from left to right (or right to left, depending on where you are), so we need every book to be made into a videogame-like experience or a Choose Your Own Adventure novel? I’m not sure what the theory is behind this new publishing phenomenon, but I for one am definitely enjoying it, and plan to collect a fair few of these books.

What about you? Have you ever thought how these books are called? Do you even care? Do you need a genre name for books you love? Or do you have any recommendations that I have most certainly missed?

My list: House of Leaves; S.; Illuminae; Night Film; Sleeping Giants; The Dead House, A Visit from the Goon Squad, City on Fire, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.