A my h unGerford GPS Historicism When a novel knows where you are standing while you read it, how does the act of reading change? The question is something more than a thought experiment because of a collaboration between a writer and editor named Eli Horowitz and a programmer named Russell Quinn, two men who met through their mutual connection with McSweeney’s, the small San Francisco based press that publishes the literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The unusual collaboration between Horowitz and Quinn led to what I will argue is a significant formal innovation for the novel: a novel contained in an app, one that attempts to shuttle fluidly between the virtual and material worlds. Horowitz wanted to produce, he says, “a novel you could explore,” and he meant that in a literal sense as well as an imaginative one: that by travelling around the country and around the world a reader could experience the novel more and more fully and discover different parts of its narrative. 1 The idea became a work called The Silent History, which was released in daily installments through the app’s delivery system beginning in the spring of 2012 and was, in short order, declared by Wired magazine to be “Entirely revolutionary.” While Wired may have overstated the case, given the novel’s commitment to classic forms of storytelling, The Silent History, by its very design, invites us to consider not only how reading might change when the novel migrates to a new medium, but also how the methods and claims of literary history might change along with the practices of reading. The interaction between novel and reader that GPS-enabled devices make possible has interpretive implications - that is, implications for how we read The Silent History’s meaning and significance as a novel - but it also affects method: the conjunction of literature and new technology makes it possible to know things about readers and their behavior that have rarely been known and have thus rarely been included in accounts of literary history. The use of space in the novel urges the reader to take up a set of concrete practices that differ in important respects from traditional novel-reading, and compel readers to produce traces of their reading practice in an entirely new kind of data. Or rather, a kind of data that became central to business and social networking platforms with the advent of Web 2.0 in the early 2000’s, but that had not yet been harnessed to the form of the novel. That delay, and its meaning for the future of the novel as a form, is something I consider in the second half of this essay. Across the arc of the whole, I argue that building a novel into an app, among its other interpretive consequences, allows one to observe with unusual clarity how New Historicist modes of reading - which 1 Horowitz, Interview with Contents, Issue no. 4, 25 July, 2012-4 October, 2012. Web. Accessed 7 June 2013. 66 A my h unGerford take the form and content of a work to reflect, or even to allegorize, the deep structures of the historical moment in which it is made - might collide with both a sociological mode of reading and with other, more dramatically criticcentered, ways of constructing literary and cultural history. The Silent History speaks to its historical context in two distinct voices - the voice of narrative and the voice of data. The narrative and its GPS features answer my opening questions in ways that suggest the limits of both classic New Historicism and emergent big-data approaches to literary study. At its most venturesome, this argument gestures beyond what I will suggest is New Historicism’s decline to a bifurcated methodological future. On the one hand, historicism may mean something more scientific than we have assumed in the past - exemplified by the use of large-scale data - and, on the other hand, historicism may be abandoned in favor of a more old fashioned reliance on the critic’s unique mind, creativity, and voice - in favor, that is, of the critic’s explicit participation in ongoing literary history. The critic may tell the history of a specific phenomenon (something closer to the history of ideas) or narrate acts of reading for their own sake in hopes of modeling a transformed experience of reading for others. Silent Reading The Silent History borrows significant formal features from the nineteenthcentury novel. First released as a serial, its installments were timed, and composed, for each day of the week. But unlike its Victorian progenitors, the parts of The Silent History were not written by the creator of the work, Eli Horowitz, but commissioned, assembled and edited by him in collaboration with the writers Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby who produced the days’ stories according to a detailed plot outline that Horowitz drew up in advance. Russell Quinn developed the app itself. This is not to say that Quinn’s role was similar to that of someone who designs a book’s cover and chooses paper and fonts. It is more like saying that he’s a specialist who provided structural services to the novel, as if someone other than Joyce had determined the chapter divisions of Ulysses. From the start, the novel’s content and its digital form developed symbiotically, with the story in some ways reverse engineered from the sense of how it would be produced and structured in the app. 2 2 Here is Horowitz’s fuller explanation: “I guess the first element was that I wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore. But I knew there was no way I could fill a whole country myself, so that led to the system of field reporters. But I knew they’d need to be inspired and unified by a central narrative, so that led to the testimonials. But I realized I could never write that narrative by myself, so I found collaborators (Matt Derby and Kevin Moffett), but then I needed to make the varied voice a strength, rather than something to hide, so I settled on the oral history format, and I needed a plot that would allow for hundreds of different perspectives, so I ended up with a sort GPS Historicism 67 Set in 2044, the novel presents itself as a chronologically organized archive of transcribed oral histories that track an epidemic beginning in the United States in 2011, when suddenly, occasionally, children are born without the capacity for written or spoken language. These children come to be called “the silents” and the archive is a government-funded project intended to produce “some understanding, or at least a clear record, of [the] ever-changing phenomenon” of the silents. It contains contributions, we are told, from “teachers, classmates, little league coaches, government officials, faith healers, cult leaders, militia members, pilgrims, imposters.” 3 As we learn over the course of the novel, the silents do communicate with one another, through complex facial expressions, and their formation into communities of various kinds triggers responses in the mainstream culture over time - responses ranging from the violent to the mystical. It is telling, I think, that The Silent History imagines its own project - the project of documenting the history of a public health epidemic - as requiring an institution much larger and even less individually controlled than the four-person team that is in fact responsible for most of the novel. The fictional conditions of the novel’s existence are laid out in the introductory materials of the work. This begins with “The Archives,” a video of just over two minutes, that explains the structure of the story. As the camera slowly pans across the Georgian façade of an institutional-looking building, a voiceover in a faintly British or Indian accent explains that “In 2011, 32 years ago, we began collecting stories from families and medical professionals who were first encountering a strange new silence among our sons and daughters.” The label, “The Archives,” is superimposed upon the shot of the library-like building, a scene that dissolves into a panning shot of the file drawers housed inside. A second segment of the app’s front matter, titled “The Condition,” opens with the emblem of the US Department of Health and Human Services. It offers a Power Point of graphs and maps documenting the growing population of silents, diagrams of the institution for silents where their communication was first observed, MRI scans of silent and nonsilent brains, and black screens with pithy quotations from doctors, teachers, and concerned citizens about the condition and its social implications. The novel’s ambition, then, is cast in terms of institutional forms of knowledge: the novel imagines a story so extensive, so important, that only a governmental agency has the reach and resources to tell it. Indeed, there would be no story, in the logic of the novel, if silents had not been institutionalized - and thus gathered together. This is why “The Condition” takes such pains to note the role of the Red Oaks Academy in the emergence of communication between silent children. An institution for the care and education of the children, it was simultaneously dedicated to of epidemic, and…well, like that, all the way down to the day of the week in which a given testimonial is released - a Monday entry should feel different than a Friday. The form and content were constantly shaping each other.” Horowitz, interview in Contents. 3 This and all further quotations from The Silent History are taken from the edition released through Apple’s iTunes in 2012, published by Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC. The quotations here are from the Prologue. 68 A my h unGerford collecting information about them; thus the emergence of the silents’ collective life occurs entirely within an institution already prepared to structure knowledge about silent life. That said, it is worth noting, for reasons to which I will return, that neither the market nor a shared national culture is imagined in the novel as capable of containing the development of that collective life or shaping the development of speaking culture’s treatment of silents. Indeed, the pharmaceutical industries associated with treatments and implants don’t enter the story in any robust way - we hear from just a single entrepreneur marketing a device that caters to silents’ existing capacities, and we hear repeatedly from the doctor responsible for inventing the implant device that, later in the story, allows silent children to speak. His reflections focus on his own thoughts and feelings about his work rather than its cultural uptake. The market is imagined as incapable of addressing a population that does not use language. Silents take up residence in the brownfields and abandoned warehouses of post-industrial America, among the detritus of the global manufacturing economy that no longer pulls goods from American factories. This is apparent in the novel’s video trailer (included in the app itself), which prominently features such sites as it introduces the atmospheric settings of the story. For those in the non-silent mainstream who are drawn to these places, the silents are in fact cultural producers, producing something the world needs: an experience and a life outside the shell of American mass-market cultural production. In a striking scene, a curious boy, a silent wannabe, follows a group of silent teenagers into an urban street attraction where customers can have the virtually induced sensual experience of falling out of a plane with a bunch of gorillas. The silents cooperate as they fall out of the plane, forming a human chain in the virtual air, taking the boy along with them, and, once on the virtual ground, they slip through a hole in the skin of the entertainment (as John Barth’s Ambrose does in his own porous fictional funhouse) where they hang out together on a dune until they are discovered and kicked out by the amusement’s operator. It is as if the silents are producing an alternate world from a tear in the seamless surface of American consumer capitalism, a tear through which physical and collective human presence can penetrate a culture centered on increasingly private virtual experience. Government power, then - the power to archive, and, later in the story, the power to make and enforce public health laws, the power that steps in where the market fails - remains the driver of the silents’ history despite the silents’ alternative forms of culture-making, and the novel imagines that state power as faceless. We do encounter the mayor of a small town in California, where the silent commune called Face to Face is located; we see him at first protecting and then sacrificing the commune to federal enforcers as public sentiment about silent people shifts across time. And we come to know some doctors who treat silents, particularly Dr. Theodore Greene, who pioneers the implantation device and is father to the silent Flora. We come to understand the device as a misguided product of his longing for connection with his daughter. What we don’t see is the political movement to mandate implants for silent GPS Historicism 69 children; we never know who advocated for this idea or why, or how its proponents persuaded the public to go along. We are left with the feeling that the law was inevitable, an expression of the double hegemony of language and the American “normal.” The mandatory implantation program is the dark complement to the regime of knowledge that the Archives represent, and the implantation program is itself implicitly represented as a collective initiative powered by a hive of persons even more anonymous, and less differentiated, than those responsible for the Archives. In other words, government steps in to reinforce culture structured by a shared language, acting as the regulating institution in a region where the market can’t function - because the silents are not effective consumers - and where money can’t be made. Quinn and Horowitz together have created an institutional narrator that acts as the counterpart to this governmental function: the app’s algorithm, which parses and controls the information we read, which places the story on the map, organizes the narrative, and orients us to our physical and imaginative location within it. Like the “archives” within the novel, the app’s design is a faceless narrator, a narrator created not by that recognizable literary personage, an “author,” but by the quiet technical “developer” and the bureaucratic “editor” - the sort of actors who remain, like the silent culture-makers within the story, culturally invisible within the production networks of the contemporary novel. Given the comprehensive institutional frame of the story itself, it comes as a surprise, in the third section of the front matter, called “The Prologue” to see a report from “Hugh Purcell, Executive Director, Washington, DC” dated 2044, which departs strikingly from the institutional decorum of the other two segments of the novel’s framing introduction. The distinct voice of Purcell, his humor and his philosophical musings, suggest the very flexibility of this imagined institutional frame and the institutional structure that is the app itself. Purcell opens his introduction to the archives with the colorful memory of his first day as a junior epidemiological archivist working to document the phenomenon of the silents, a day that included wandering around seedy neighborhoods, “getting mugged and dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms,” and discovering a hidden community of silents thriving within an abandoned building. Eighteen years later we find him as the Executive Director of the project. Purcell’s reflections suggest his fascination with the very idea of a region of human experience shut off from language - and he thus cues the reader to the Big Questions that the novel grapples with: “Are words our creation, or did they create us? And who are we in a world without them? Are there wilder, more verdant fields out beyond the boundaries of language, where those of us who are silent now wander? Each of us will come to know the answer to that in our own way. We all enter and leave the world in silence, after all, and everything else is simply how we make our way through that middle passage.” (Prologue). Even if Purcell is in charge of the archives we read, the quirkiness of his introduction - he does not speak in a recognizably institutional voice - separates the individual human voice from that structure’s conventions. In a way this is the 70 A my h unGerford product and the thematic echo of the work’s production: the writers, Moffett and Derby, are playful and funny, attracted to an absurdist strain of contemporary literature exemplified by the work of George Saunders. “Dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms”? Falling out of a plane with gorillas? They take Horowitz’s central directives and seed them with the quirky traces of their writerly autonomy. Reading on Site The preceding account of The Silent History is meant to introduce readers to the novel’s basic themes and structures in such a way that one can begin to see how the work interacts with the world we know and how it reflects back on the unusual way the novel was made. Enter, now, GPS tracking: There are certain sections of the novel I have not yet mentioned, called “Field reports,” that can be read only in specific places - very specific. To access any of these documents the reader’s device must be within about ten meters of a location to which such a document has been pegged; for the report to make sense, the reader needs to be looking at the particular thing - be it a dent in a fire hydrant or the trunk of a tree or the opening of an alleyway - that figures in, or is somehow accounted for, in the field report. The reports are written by an array of contributors beyond the four main creators of the novel. The app invites its readers to offer field reports from whatever location they wish and provides detailed instructions about how to write and submit one for review (there will be more to say about this element of the reports). As a reader, one can either travel to see a specific report or make a habit of checking the novel as one goes about daily life to see whether there are newly active reports popping up (if the app is left open, it can alert users when there is an active field report nearby). When one arrives at the site of a report - say, the Henry Whitfield House museum in Guilford, CT - the report turns green on the map and is marked as “active,” and the text tells one where to look, what to notice: That tree in the center of the property is where the fictional author of this report would have his lunch and observe the growth of mushrooms; that well near the house is where the silent girl would linger, tracing the stones with her fingers. This reading practice - and the writing practice that produces it - is made necessary by the noise in the GPS positioning within the app. Horowitz’s editorial instructions to aspiring field reporters explain: “The pin placement within the app is not always perfectly precise, and a reader may have access while not yet standing exactly at your desired spot. Thus, it’s helpful if the text itself can include subtle cues helping readers properly orient themselves.” 4 The technical necessity becomes, however, a literary invitation to be oriented through the novel and its medium - to wander with one’s eyes pinned to the blue dot of one’s current location. In this way it is also an invitation both to be the silent and to experience a world not unlike the virtual 4 From Eli Horowitz’s “Guidelines for Field Reporters.” Private communication with the author. GPS Historicism 71 street entertainment that the silents penetrate (but usually without the gorillas and the airplane). Readers are asked to locate themselves in space so as to understand a particular story in a particular way, toggling back and forth between the view within the device’s fictional world and the view within the space they’ve come physically to occupy. The invitation to file one’s own field report from a chosen site asks the reader to become a producer of the work, producing content for the app but also producing a shared experience of a place across time, accessible to others who follow the app’s GPS to that location. In this sense the reader is no longer the silent’s double but the actual speaking occupant of an imagined world whose writing brings that virtual world further into being. The reader is also actually standing on a street or lot, becoming the wanderer who begins to change the real-time demographic flow of that place at the behest of the novel. These locations are imagined within the novel as places where “the silences collided with our physical world” (“The Archives,” The Silent History); in real time they become places where The Silent History collides with our physical world. We can understand a field report as an individual reader’s imaginative response to the novel. The app stitches that response to a location, making it possible for the next reader to replicate the first reader’s imaginative extension of the main storyline into a new part of the world. Private acts of reading thus accrete to the novel’s public form, not as paratext - such as blog post, literary-critical essay, or author interview - but as part of the novel itself, subsumed into the editor’s central vision. Horowitz’s vision for these elements of the novel is articulated in his instructions to field reporters, and that vision chimes with the kind of editorial control he exerted over Moffett and Derby, the main writers of the novel. I will quote at length here to give a sense of the sort of teaching these guidelines provide - they run to six single-spaced pages. “The specific physical location of the report must play a central and necessary role,” Horowitz writes. “Ideally this will manifest itself in ways both large and small; for example, an unusual intersection provides a vivid setting for an incident, but the incident also results in odd marks still visible in the pavement. A successful field report integrates the setting in creative and enriching ways, earning the reader’s trip to the location; in fact, field reports should feel incomplete if read anywhere else.” 5 And again: The setting should be utilized more than described; there’s no need to list the facts that will already be obvious to a reader/ viewer standing in that spot. Instead, the location serves as a parallel source of information, accompanying your written narrative; the two sources can subtly support and amplify each other to deepen the authenticity of the incident being described. The setting can also be driving the action, an active force in the story. 6 Reports that contradict the backbone of the novel (contained in the testimonials supplied through the “Archives” to all readers regardless of location) are not accepted for publication. 5 Horowitz, “Guidelines.” 6 Horowitz, “Guidelines.” 72 A my h unGerford The writing practice Horowitz thus guides grows from an imaginative interaction with the story that has long precedent in literary reading practices: “In its own way,” Horowitz explains in an interview, “this project is about interactivity and augmented reality. . .: you interact with the story by physically standing inside it; it augments reality by just providing a different explanation of what’s already there.” 7 We might think of many low-tech analogous cases from the last hundred and fifty years of literary culture: readers touring Baker Street in London to see “where” Sherlock Holmes lived, or travelling to Wordsworth’s Lake District, or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a region roughly corresponding to Dorset (both Hardy and his publishers encouraged his fans to associate the region with his novels). It is as if such literary tourists could then turn around and add to Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected stories, or Wordsworth’s poetry, or Hardy’s novels. Readers are thus drawn by the novel itself into a structure for experience - which is to say, an institution - that assigns both writers and readers to certain roles. It moves us through space, requires our work for expansion, and controls or guides our access to both experience and knowledge. The structure is rigorously historical in a topsy turvy sense possible only in fiction: as Purcell explains in his 2044 Prologue, the story contained in the archive, “presumes nothing about the future; it is strictly a record of the past, of what we looked like before, and how we got here” (Prologue). The chronologically controlled production of the novel in its initial release of six month-long sets of daily installments reproduces for the reader herself Purcell’s claim that we cannot know the future. The app limits the reader’s access to the unfolding story. Post-release, the app prevents readers who purchase the whole novel at once from skipping parts or reading ahead; any one of the chronologically organized “testimonials” will not open if all the previous entries have not been opened (and, presumably, read) first. This interaction between writer and reader is the zone of literary experiment that most preoccupies Horowitz. His previous book, Clock without a Face (McSweeney’s, 2010), is a puzzle-book inspired by the activity of geocaching, where hikers with GPS units hunt for hidden caches where geocachers have left notes, gifts, log books, and the like. The book’s conceit revolves around an apartment building of 12 stories. Each page spread shows the minutely illustrated floor plan of each story; these floor plans act as maps and keys to an actual geographic location in the United States where Horowitz had buried a hand-wrought, bejeweled bronze number corresponding to the floor of the apartment building where its location was encrypted. These were the numbers of the eponymous clock face, to be discovered one by one and kept by the readers who could first solve the puzzles of the book’s pages. Clock Without a Face is ostensibly aimed at young readers - or at those adults who still fancy maps and buried treasure - though the puzzles are so challenging that the numbers seem mainly to have been found by adults working with 7 Horowitz, Contents. GPS Historicism 73 their teenage children. 8 The book induces a heady and aesthetically pleasing kind of play, a kind of play that asks readers to map book onto landscape and to be present in the geography denoted by the book, checking page against real ground with a real shovel, for real payoff. Horowitz’s next project - an ebook created with the writer Chris Adrian, a book with multiple false endings - aims to experiment further with the power dynamics between reader and writer, dynamics with which both Clock Without a Face and The Silent History have meddled. He recounts, as inspiration, the intensity of some readers’ complaints that they cannot access distantly located field reports and their demands for the delivery of new installments of The Silent History, a kind of desire that narrative seriality has always relied upon, but that the instant interactivity of the virtual medium makes newly pressing. Horowitz wondered: what if a reader could earn the right to access the next installment either by waiting a set amount of time (as all readers did who subscribed to the serialized form of The Silent History) or by performing some task - going somewhere, finding something, doing something? 9 Horowitz is experimenting with the ways that new devices for reading, equipped with a whole array of features ostensibly unrelated to reading, might be drawn into a reading practice that blends the virtual reality of fiction with the reader’s bodily, historical life. Contemplating actual readers just before the app began to release its first installments, Horowitz confessed to feeling the limits of his powers rather than their breadth: “Words are easy - you choose which ones you want and they stay where you put them. But the world is messy - these field reports only really exist via a weird combination of text, reader, and physical environment, far beyond anything we can hope to control.” 10 Authors, even those who felt they were the gods of their universes, have always felt the world’s power shouldering in on their own. What is new about Horowitz’s version of authorial control is that the medium itself, powered by smart algorithms, can more decisively giveth and taketh away. Novel Data I have begun to show how several aspects of The Silent History’s form and content reflect the conditions of its production and reception as well as the literary preoccupations of its makers. I’ve noted how the novel imagines silents occupying abandoned zones of the market economy; we might ask whether literary endeavor is also that region where the market can’t function and money can’t be made? We could note how, in the novel, the government puts implants in the brains of silents in order to pipe in language and meaning. The central processing center in Maine, wirelessly connected to the implants, takes its language from public-domain novels, advertising, 8 This profile fits the accounts of number-hunters’ successes that I was able to find posted on the web, where a reading community inspired by the book popped up to track which of the numbers had been found and where. 9 Horowitz, conversation with the author, Feb. 14, 2013. 10 Horowitz, Contents. 74 A my h unGerford and movie trailers. Walking silently around the site of a field report, looking where your device bids you, noticing what it tells you to notice, you find yourself manipulated by a central processor that pipes language into your brain, creating the sort of metafictional experience that ramifies out to our experience of the culture at large. Attaching the novel to the devices that render us silent even as we communicate furiously through them makes us into the very figure of the wandering silent - the person who walks staring intently down at her phone, absorbed in the wilder, more verdant fields of the virtual. And the novel offers a world where institutions much larger than the individual set the parameters for how we narrate history, a thematic feature of the novel that points both back to Horowitz’s experiments with narrative control and outward to the world we live in. In short, I’ve offered a typical New Historicist reading, revealing how at every turn the novel invites us to see in its story an allegory of its production, the reflection of the historical moment in which it was made, and the authorial conditions under which it came into being. Countless novels and other works of art do this for the attentive reader as research uncovers more information about context and as we make more detailed, or more sophisticated, observations about the work at hand. But this novel, as I said at the outset, speaks towards context in two distinct voices. Having listened to the one, we must listen to the other. When Horowitz decided that he “wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore,” in the physical sense that I’ve been describing, he was presented with an immediate production problem: he “knew there was no way [he] could fill a whole country [him]self.” In turn, this determined the form and authorship of the novel, a system that would mobilize a whole cadre of readers and make them into writers. 11 But even in the diffusion of authorial control that resulted, the raw materials of a different kind of control were amassing within the technical structure of the app. I asked, in the first sentence of this essay, what happens to the act of reading when your novel knows where you are standing while you read it. And so there is another kind of answer that comes into view: reading produces new kinds of traces. The Silent History produces entirely new data about readers’ behavior. We can watch the reader as she moves through the novel - it is possible for Horowitz and Quinn to know how far each reader has read in the story, for instance, and how fast they read it, and on what day; readers’ imaginative responses, in the form of those field reports, are gathered and selectively added to the novel itself; Horowitz and Quinn know when and how often field reports are accessed. If they wanted to they could determine exactly when a reader stopped reading and where they were in the novel. There is nothing to suggest that Horowitz and Quinn are interested in the 11 Horowitz, Contents. GPS Historicism 75 creepier forms of surveillance and control that one can easily imagine given these features of the technology built into the novel. 12 But we might be interested in that data. And by we of course I mean we who are interested in literary history and the history and practice of reading. This is just the sort of thing that scholars laboring in archives try to reconstruct, and always in a provisional way. Thankfully for us, some of the data The Silent History’s app gathers is both accessible and nicely visible through the novel itself. Even simply using the field reports and the GPS mapping an ordinary user can amass a certain kind of data and from that data establish some basic inferences about the novel’s social network. First, we might observe that field reporters are in some sense a network made by the guidelines Horowitz supplies for those who might like to contribute: “There was a lot of trial-and-error required to craft guidelines that would elicit a pretty reliable level of success from a varied group of writers,” Horowitz says. “In theory, the specificity of the form will result in a smaller but more dedicated group of contributors.” 13 And he’s right: Horowitz’s six-page, detailed, guidelines do create a group, a group defined by their investment in writing as a craft and by their willingness to become students of that craft. And who, in the social sense, were the dedicated group of contributors? “The first group of reporters were a couple of friends,” Horowitz says, “[t]hen it was friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends - wider and wider circles, in order to simulate the even-wider circles” that the novel would ultimately create. To return to the meditation on literary method: The Silent History’s multiple authors and its GPS innovations construct an actual map of its own literary sociology, making visible the expanding “circles” that constitute the repeated formal structure of the work itself, from its design to its narrative structure to its actual production. Horowitz makes it clear that the collaborative aspect of the work is not modeled on the classic interactivity of multiplayer games, or posting to a blog, though the field reports seem to follow that logic. The Silent History works differently because of Horowitz’s editorial “guidelines” and because the contributors are drawn from a preexisting set of social connections rather than being generated by the work itself - which is to say, Horowitz embraced the primacy of other social networks in the 12 Horowitz explains that the data the app collects is by no means without complications, even regarding the number of “readers” who have used the app. Special offers such as free downloads on a certain day, or different purchasing options (volume 1 free, then you get the option to pay for the rest when you finish that volume, or you buy all six volumes at once but only pay for five) suggest analogs to, say, picking up a book off a shelf in the store, browsing it, but not buying it. Horowitz attests to being mildly curious about some aspects of reader behavior but also leery of what he might find out. “I would guess that the numbers would be slightly chilling,” he says, considering whether he’d want to figure out where readers stopped reading - noting, however, that this would be potentially discouraging data to possess if we could know it for any kind of book. Interview with the author, 29 May 2014. 13 Horowitz, Contents. 76 A my h unGerford generation of virtually networked literature rather than relying, as other digital literature innovators have tried to do, on social circles entirely assembled by the virtual work itself. Sociology, and the novel itself, tell a story about those social networks. For instance, we can note the importance of the writing program to its existence as we look at two regions of The Silent History’s integrated world map: the UK and Florida. In both these regions - distinct, say, from the empty maps of European countries such as Germany - there are clusters of field reports pegged to locations. One of these clusters was generated when Horowitz’s invitation to contribute a field report, sent to a friend in a writing program at the University of Florida, was circulated in the department’s newsletter. The dense UK plot, Horowitz explained, was occasioned by the writing program at the University of East Anglia, where an enthusiastic contributor was studying. The cluster of reports in Australia is the product of a different network: a young man living there who is a subscriber and fan of McSweeney’s invited Horowitz to a literary festival he was running; Horowitz went, and talked about The Silent History, and the connection bore fruit in the Australian field reports. What Horowitz describes as simply “a fluid community of readers and writers with an element of guidance at its core” is revealed to be just that, except that the element of guidance is visible on the map as an effect not of editorial control, but of social acts and facts outside the novel that produce the aesthetic investments that define the network the novel in turn produces. 14 In its very bones, in its foundational data structures, the novel reveals other sociological realities as well. The Silent History makes visible particular kinds of workers who are important to the contemporary development of the novel. These include workers we might call “subsistence writers,” people who write often without pay in what is experienced as a gift economy, and whose income comes mainly from other forms of work (they are economically speaking what the sociologist Bernard Lahire calls plural actors, writers with a “double life.”) 15 The two main writers of The Silent History were recruited by Horowitz with the promise of only modest payment: they were offered a small sum up front as an advance, and a generous percentage of anything made on the app; both writers turned down the advance. More persuasively, Horowitz offered the incentives of working on a new kind of novel, of breaking new artistic ground, and of working collectively with other writers. That appeal worked - perhaps in part because Moffett and Derby had enough other employment to make a living (one is a professor, and the other works for a videogame company), and perhaps also in part because the project provided other kinds of capital - it was, for instance, a project that distinguished 14 Certainly manipulation was not Horowitz’s point, or at least that is not the aspect of the project he emphasizes: “I do know that I wasn’t trying to build a wiki, and I don’t particularly see this as ‘user-generated content.’ To me, it’s not so modern or unusual, just a fluid community of writers and readers, with an element of guidance and structure at its core.” Horowitz, Contents. 15 See Lahire, “The Double Life of Writers” and, for his broader analysis of the individual’s social plurality, The Plural Actor, tr. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). GPS Historicism 77 Moffett when he applied for academic jobs. Field reporters are not paid, unless they contribute a number of good reports, in which case, Horowitz says, he might send them a little check, out of the blue. The interaction preserves the sense of generosity and surprise that lies at the heart of the collaborative dynamic Horowitz created. 16 Subsistence writers have always been with us, even if the forms of their subsistence might change over time. But literary experiment on digital devices also requires technical craftspeople who will sign on to the same inverted economy that has been shaping literary taste - and sustaining subsistence writers - since the 19th century, an economy where the intrinsic interest of art and its cultural value are not bolstered but threatened by commercial success. What’s more, technical craftspeople must be recruited to that inverted economy against the pull of the right-side-up economy, since technical craftspeople, unlike writers, are voraciously absorbed by the institutions of mass market capitalism. Even small-time programmers, it seems, can get rich quick, or at least subsist, with a nifty app and 99 cent downloads, and those truly skilled as programmers - as Quinn is - are the targets of intense desire emanating from the start-ups and behemoths that rule the virtual universe. In this sense, the Silent History app itself, like the communities of silents whose stories it tells, is operating in a space little developed by market forces. The fact that it is a highly designed app rather than a beautifully designed book, say, places the novel in a region of cultural production that has been almost entirely owned by capitalist enterprise. Russell Quinn, the app’s developer, is that unusual programmer who is content to work without massive salary or the hope of massive future returns. Glancing back to the story’s preoccupation with abandoned warehouses, we might think differently about where the novel speaks loudest to contemporary capitalist culture. Its very existence as an app novel - the data point described by the novel itself - tells us more about the conditions under which literary experiment can happen in the corners of capitalist culture than any creative reading of those old warehouses. But it is worth noting that Horowitz himself doesn’t see the novel’s social networks in these terms. To him, “friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends, all the way out” produces something more like a random demography, a community of strangers. This is part of an ideology of art important to contemporary literary production: that creativity is socially connective, in and of itself and apart from structures such as the school or the market; that its connectivity serves an aesthetic democracy. For neither Horowitz nor Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s seem to want to know, or need to know, what 16 My account of the recruitment and payment of writers contributing to The Silent History is the product of a series of interviews I conducted with Horowitz in early spring of 2013 and 2014. For details on the process of writing the novel as a team, from Kevin Moffett’s point of view, see Moffett’s interview with Adam Levin, The Rumpus, 1 Oct. 2012. Web. Accessed 28 May 2014. Money is not mentioned at all in the interview’s discussion of Horowitz’s appeal and Moffett’s work on the project. We might also note, in passing, that Levin is a McSweeney’s author: his enormous novel, The Instructions, was published by the press in 2010. 78 A my h unGerford they might know about their readers - Eggers reacted negatively to an early request to survey the quarterly’s readers for this project, for instance, associating the effort to gather such information with the marketing strategies of publishers like Condé Nast. Horowitz and Quinn do not broadcast or seek to use the data on readers that their remarkable novel produces; that data is time-consuming to clean up and inessential to their creative or business purposes. The kind of knowledge valued by a literary scholar stands in this sense at odds with, or at least apart from, the values of the creative enterprise. The critic Andrew Goldstone has been urging the digital humanities to attend to readers as a source and object of large-scale data analysis - a version of this line of research is evident in his analysis of the professional readers who leave traces of their reading in the pages of journals and books cataloged by the MLA bibliography. 17 But far more reading is done by amateur readers - and it is the amateur reader who still drives the literary culture, if only by virtue of her aggregated preferences as these are assessed by editors and suppliers of books. The experiment of The Silent History suggests that there is a lot more to know about ordinary readers, that there are things we can and may soon routinely know if more literary workers like Russell Quinn emerge (we are already awash in subsistence writers). While the market for a programmer’s skills might underwrite her literary projects - in her double life she can easily earn money as a consultant - the facts of literary culture virtually require that literary programmers use money in this way. The Silent History thus relies on a classically inverted artistic economy that not only thrives on scarcity - where small market share suggests elite cultural value - but also leads to a kind of scarcity unhelpful to the development of the art form in a technical age. The scarcity of literary programmers sharply limits the pace of artistic development for the novel in digital media. Can the aura of literary taste and the social networks that revolve around literary enterprises produce literary programmers in numbers great enough to allow the novel to continue to develop as a virtual form? The world’s cultural institutions, it seems, must somehow produce the technical artist who will donate his labor at well under its market value - ramping up a process of cultural reproduction that has caused the over-supply of writers, successfully turning out ever-increasing numbers of would-be novelists, but that hasn’t yet produced many programmers of app novels. Our culture probably won’t produce them until the Program Era gives way to the Programming Era. The rise of standard programming courses in primary, secondary, and postsecondary curricula indicates that this will happen eventually. At Stanford, already, the largest major is Computer Science, and the English department looks to grow its numbers by partnering with them in a double major program. One wonders what broad effects these disseminated means of cultural reproduction will have on literary experiment, when one considers, for instance, the ethnic and gender profiles of the technical elite. While the GI Bill 17 Andrew Goldstone, “Seeing with Numbers” panel, Modern Language Association annual convention, January 2014. GPS Historicism 79 and multiculturalist politics dramatically expanded the demographic range of writers working in the literary field, what will it take to create a similar effect in forms of digital literature that require programming skills? There is one last thing to say about the data-point that is The Silent History: the novel, as of the summer of 2014, also exists as, yes, a book. On paper, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. The critic Kate Marshall reviewed the novel upon its release in this traditional form, charged with assessing how it compared with the app version, and what she actually read, in order to do the job, was the paper version. Her argument therefore focuses on the difference that serialization as such makes to the novel, and in this sense her interaction with The Silent History plays out exactly what Horowitz didn’t want to happen: the print form, which is easier or at least more familiar to read, overshadowed of the app version and its formal innovations, which are all too easily dismissed as a set of inessential extra features. 18 What is ephemeral in our study of literary culture? In this case, the very form of a novel. 19 Works Cited Horowitz, Eli. “Interview.” Contents, Issue no. 4, 25 July, 2012- 4 October, 2012. Web. Accessed 7 June 2013. ---. “Guidelines for Field Reporters.” Private communication with the author. ---. “Interview with the Author”. May 29, 2014. Horowitz, Eli, Mathew Derby, Kevin Moffett, and Russell Quinn. The Silent History. Released in serialized form as app through Apple’s iTunes from October 1 2012 until April 19, 2013. Lahire, Bernard. “The Double Life of Writers”. New Literary History 41.2 (Spring 2010): 443-465. 18 In her review, Marshall poses the crucial formal questions: “to what degree do the serialized, electronic format and limited interactivity provided by the app version of The Silent History contribute to its status as an innovative, experimental work of fiction, and if they do, why should you read the print novel instead? ” Kate Marshall, “Waiting for the Plague: A Field Report from Contemporary Serialization,” (review of The Silent History, both app and print forms), Iowa Review 44.2 (Fall 2014). 19 We may wonder, then, why Horowitz published the novel in paper form. He explains that he did it for two main reasons: for money, and to increase readers’ access to the story, which its creators had come to care more about having worked on it for two years (at the beginning, he says, their main focus was on the intrinsic interest of the form). The firm - Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC, which owns the novel - was paid a $25,000 advance for the right to print it, which was split between the agent and the four creators. This was not the first time that the original form of the novel was provisionally set aside, either: before the app was released, also in an effort to generate some income, Horowitz sold the film rights, which, if a film were ever made, would again translate the novel to a different medium. Horowitz was content to allow these formal permutations of the work, and happy for the income, because he thought that neither one impeded what he calls a “full reckoning” with the electronic form of the original release. He notes he would not have agreed with a simultaneous release of the app and paper versions, because doing so would forestall a full engagement with the app on its own terms. (Horowitz, interview with the author, 29 May 2014.) 80 A my h unGerford ---. The Plural Actor. translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Marshall, Kate. “Waiting for the Plague: A Field Report from Contemporary Serialization”. The Iowa Review 44.2 (Fall 2014). Web. Accessed 14 July 2015. Moffet, Kevin. “Interview with Adam Levin”. The Rumpus, 1 Oct. 2012. Web. Accessed 28 May 2014.