Part II

Books between Media

Scrapbooks, Library Books
and Flying Books by Carson,
Hegnhøj, Abrams and Dorst,
and Joyce
5 Remembering Books

[A]s the technology of cultural memory shifts from bibliographical to

digital machines, a difficult question arises: what do we do with the
books?1

In Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 from 1953, the books have
disappeared. They have been banned by the authorities and burned. This
loss has serious implications for human agency and memory. Instead of
reading, people lose themselves in front of wall-sized screens, which bear
a striking resemblance to contemporary flat screens – at least according
to François Truffaut’s film adaptation from 1970. The screens render
the viewers forgetful. However, when the protagonist Montag, once an
eager book burner, begins to read, he also begins to remember. He saves
the books and joins a group of resistance people who revolt against the
state by memorizing the content of the books. Books become tools of
resistance in this dystopic world, because they are mediators of cultural
memory. This connection is stressed in Truffaut’s film version, which
depicts Montag flipping through old volumes and desperately crying out:
“I have got to catch up with the remembrance of the past!”
Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates how books are culturally associated
with memory. It explores a fantasy about what happens to human mem-
ory in a situation where the books have been replaced by new media
screens. For centuries, the book has been a metaphor for human embod-
ied memory. Beyond this metaphorical relation, books have been im-
portant mediators of cultural memory, as suggested by Jerome McGann
in the quote presented above. Books are media for inscribing, preserving
and accessing information about our past. In the same way as the ar-
chive and the library, the idea of the book defines the way we relate to
the past – or it used to do so. McGann addresses the shift toward the
dominance of digital media as the primary mediators of cultural mem-
ory, and asks: “[W]hat do we do with the books?”2
The second part of this book concentrates on this question, or, rather,
it focuses on what contemporary works “do with the books”: display-
ing them, transforming them and remembering them. Thus, while the
134  Books between Media
first part focused on works that reflect on the power of images, on the
influence of photography, film and television on the representation of
the past, the works discussed here by Anne Carson, Mette Hegnhøj,
J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, and William Joyce are all concerned with
remembering the book itself as a mode of organizing and performing
memories. They do so partly in response to the emergence of digital me-
dia as the dominant mediators of memory, responding to the situation
which Hoskins presents as the “second phase of the mediatisation of
memory.”3
Despite these different perspectives, the two parts of the book also
present parts of the same story about what happens to literature in a
situation when it is no longer conceived as the primary mediator of mem-
ory. Part I presented a development from Kluge’s political montages to
Sebald’s micro-historical approach and toward the perspective of inti-
macy that is stressed in Foer’s works. In the age of images, literature may
turn inward, as suggested by Franzen, depicting history “from below”
and preserving the intimacy of literary culture. In Part II, I trace this de-
velopment further. Rather than representing historical events, the works
discussed here focus on processes of individual memory. I investigate
how they connect the thematic representation – or performance – of in-
timate memory matters to the idea of the book as a material and “touch
sensitive” object of memory. Thus, the works all relate to the third cate-
gory of intermedial experiments that were described in my introduction,
experimenting with the book as a physical object. However, as I demon-
strate, they also relate to the other categories; that is, they are also visual
experiments, and they recall, translate or transform older works, not
only remembering the physical book, but also literary tradition. Finally,
they do not all stay within the book but also move out of it, presenting
stories that develop across different media.
I begin with a theoretical introduction in this chapter, investigating a
tradition of associating books with notions of intimacy, with the human
body and with human embodied memory. I present some genres and
works that expose this connection. While thus exploring a historical
perspective, I also investigate how the contemporary works may be con-
sidered to reflect a new tendency, responding to the contemporary media
development in general and to the changing status and function of the
book in particular.
Hereafter, I move on to the analyses. Chapter 6 focuses on Mette
Hegnhøj’s children’s book Ella er mit navn vil du købe det? and Anne
Carson’s monumental book object Nox, both of which imitate the aes-
thetics of the personal scrapbook or notebook. Chapter 7 investigates
J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s experimental novel S. The aim of these
two chapters is to point to a tendency toward associating the book with
intimacy and memory, as suggested by the idea of the handmade or
handwritten book and the scrapbook. At the same time, I demonstrate
 Remembering Books  135
how the works also rely on contemporary media culture. Furthermore,
they move beyond a traditional concept of memory as inscribed and pre-
served within the “book of the mind” and toward an idea of memory in
terms of a dynamic, performative and social process.
I finally examine William Joyce’s transmedial children’s story The
Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which similarly depicts
books as objects and mediators of cultural memory, and even as living
agents. Yet this work also represents a movement out of the book, as it
is developed across different media: originally an animated short film,
it has been made into an app, an e-book as well as a children’s picture
book. The work accordingly functions as a point of departure for con-
sidering what happens when the idea of the book as well as tradition-
ally “bookish” modes of representing memory is projected into other
media  – that is, when the book, and the memory of the book, moves
between media.

Memory as a Book
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was invoked above because it presents a tra-
dition of associating books with human agency and memory. Indeed,
the idea of burning books seems so horrific because the book is con-
nected with the idea of the human – as history tells us, when you burn
books, you might burn humans next. Since antiquity, the book has been
connected physically and metaphorically to the human mind and body.
Allison Muri explains:

Our pages and our bodies have long converged in metaphor […]
A  material surface with boundaries, edges and margins, for cen-
turies the page has been made of skin, and bound in skin. And for
centuries, the body has been metaphorized as book.4

Muri mentions that the book has been physically shaped after the hu-
man body, that is, after the shape of the hand. Parts of the book, such
as the chapter, the header and the footer, are named after human body
parts. This connection between the book and the body is also present
in literary materialist and media-oriented theory – as mentioned in my
introduction, both McGann and Hayles speak of the book as literature’s
more or less neglected “body.”
Furthermore, books are associated with human embodied memory –
despite the fact that writing was first conceived as a medium for “out-
sourcing” memory from the human body. Plato famously complained
that the new technology of writing would lead to a loss of embodied
memory, and similar anxieties have emerged with the arrival of other
new technologies such as the printing press and digital media. However,
as Muri argues, once integrated in culture, technologies of writing and
136  Books between Media
media of inscription – from the wax tablet to the writing pad – have
been established as metaphors of memory. In the case of the book, this
association is famously demonstrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When
swearing to remember his father, Hamlet cries,

Yea, from the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond
records,/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth
and observation copied there,/And thy commandment all alone shall
live/Within the book and volume of my brain. 5

Shakespeare presents the book as a container, and memories as content

to be preserved within the “book” of the brain. This metaphor reflects
a traditional idea of the human mind as an archive where memories are
stored.
However, this conception is at odds with the modern understanding
of memory as a dynamic, cultural and performative process that takes
place in the present, between people, texts and media. During the twen-
tieth century, modern and postmodern works have challenged the met-
aphor of memory as a book, that is, the understanding of memory as
something that is inscribed and preserved within the human mind, by
experimenting with the physical format and structure of the book.
One such experimental memory work is B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortu-
nates from 1969.6 The Unfortunates is presented in a box, containing
loose sections of printed pages that may be read in any order – except
for the first and the last section, which frame the story as they are pre-
sented as respectively the beginning and the end. The work is about a
man, arguably Johnson himself, who arrives in a city in order to report
a football match. Here, he begins to remember a friend from that city
who died from cancer a few years earlier. According to Johnson’s fore-
word, the work’s experimental form is supposed to reflect the process
of memory. He wanted to depict “the randomness, the lack of structure
in the way we remember things,” but this randomness, he had come to
realize, was “directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound
book, for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the
material.”7 This statement reflects a postmodern concept of memory,
emphasizing ideas of association, fragmentation and randomness. The
book is understood as a totalitarian structure that controls its content by
integrating the remembered material into an established form, a linear
narrative – as in Kluge’s work from the same period, we see a resistance
against the traditional chronological modes of representing of the past.
Thus, the experimental form of Johnson’s “book in a box” is supposed
to “free” the memory content of the work from the structure and format
of the book.8
This idea of the book as associated with structural control corre-
sponds to perspectives in poststructuralist theories that emerged in the
 Remembering Books  137
1960s and 1970s. Jacques Derrida, for instance, presents the book as
a totalitarian order in his work de la grammatologie (1967). He even
wrote an experimental work himself, Glas (1990), which attempts to
resist this order by dissolving the text into columns and small boxes of
text.9 In these postmodern works, as in Kluge’s neo-avant-garde mon-
tages, intermedial strategies are connected with a (political, philosoph-
ical) resistance against the traditional form of the book as associated
with a tradition or ideology that imposes a fixed – linear – structure on
the raw material of memory.
A different view on books is represented by the tradition of artists’
books that also emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. This genre is also
a central reference for the new works. In this context, the book was
considered as an essentially open and democratic form. That is, from
the perspective of art history, the book appeared as a format capable
of reproducing art works and transporting the art out of the museum.
Thus, as noted by Mikkel Bolt, the artists’ books in the 1960s were
part of a larger “attempt to bring about a radical democratization of
art’s conditions of production and reception.”10 Bolt furthermore argues
that the artists’ books were related to an ambition of “dematerializing”
art, revolting against the idea of the work of art as an institutionalized
material object, and against the emergent consumer culture surrounding
it. According to Johanna Drucker, artists’ books are characterized by
a medial self-reflexivity, emphasizing the “bookness” of the book. As
Holland Cotter sums up in his introduction to Drucker’s The Century
of Artist’s Books, artists’ books “transform the condition of bookness
and complicate it.”11 Through their experimental strategies, they draw
attention to the physical object of the book and change it.
Artists’ books, however, focus on the book as a medium for circulat-
ing visual art rather than as a container or mediator of literary texts.
The extreme examples of this tendency are the works that Garrett Stew-
art presents as bookworks or bibliobjects.12 Drawing on the tradition
of ready-mades, especially on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Stewart
writes about works that make monuments out of books in order to re-
flect on the cultural status and function of the book. These works, ac-
cording to Stewart, have a different agenda than the artists’ books. They
do not aim at dematerializing art; on the contrary, they tend to return
to, and celebrate materiality, turning the book into a museum or a mon-
ument in itself. The bibliobject cannot be read: it refers to books that are
demediated. That is, according to Stewart, these works expose the me-
dium without the message, refusing any idea of “content” and focusing
on the book merely as a thing and a symbol of what it once was.
Some of the works that I discuss here may be related to this category
of demediated book works – Foer’s Tree of Codes, for instance, surely
appears as a book that is turned into a ruin, bearing witness to loss and
absence. However, I want to insist on the continued relevance of the
138  Books between Media
“message” in these works. Indeed, the materialist approach assumes that
medium and message cannot be separated. Even if the work is unread-
able, its material aspects may still be read as a “message.” Furthermore,
the readable semantic content is still very much present in the works
considered here; even Tree of Codes may still be read as a story. Hayles
argues that while the contemporary experimental works draw on the
intermedial strategies of the classic artists’ books, they differ from this
tradition in that they “remain committed to long narrative fiction.”13
That is, they are still primarily literary works, highlighting as well as
challenging the traditional qualities of the book.
The result, according to Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, is “a book product
still meant to be read, as part of a literary practice, not just an object
to be seen, but that questions the commonsensical structures and met-
aphors of the book.”14 This aspect of medial self-reflexivity in the new
works recalls Hayles’ notion of the “technotext.” According to Hayles,
a technotext occurs “when a literary work interrogates the inscription
technology that produces it,” thereby mobilizing “reflexive loops be-
tween its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that
creation as a physical presence.”15 This description may be related to
Cotter’s idea of “complicated bookness,” referring to books that reflect
on themselves as books – only now, this reflection is situated within the
still functional literary text rather than in the artist’s book or the ruined
bibliobject. Wurth concludes: “Such hybrid books, hovering between
the verbal and the visual, use value and aesthetic value, show us what the
book still has to offer us today as a bearer of the literary.”16

Bookishness Now
Why do these hybrid literary works appear now, in the age of digital
media? Hayles, as mentioned, considers the contemporary intermedial
works as reflections of literature’s “traumatic” responses to the “colo-
nizing incursions of other media,” reacting by “bursts of anxious cre-
ativity” and, hence, “changing what it means to be a novel in print.”17
Literature reinvents the book because it is afraid of losing the book.
Hayles also describes this fear as a “corporeal anxiety”: “a fear that
[the works’] bodies are in jeopardy from a multitude of threats, es-
pecially the dematerialization that comes from being translated into
digital code.”18
Hayles writes about technology and media, but her metaphors point
beyond that perspective. The book has a body and a mind. It is trau-
matized and anxious. In this way, she evokes the discourse introduced
above: the book is associated with the idea of the human, the human
body and mind. As such, it is presented in opposition to digital me-
dia. Indeed, the cultural anxiety about new media may be related to
the idea of a “posthuman condition” where the human body, identity
 Remembering Books  139
and memory are feared to be lost and replaced by new technologies,
which are associated with virtuality, incorporeality, immateriality and
fluidity.19 In contrast, older media, especially printed books, become
celebrated as media of embodiment, supporting human identity and
embodied memory. Indeed, books almost come to appear as “human
things” themselves, as suggested by McGann’s and Hayles’ metaphors. 20
This discourse is expressed aesthetically and thematically in the works
by Carson, Hegnhøj, Abrams and Dorst, and Joyce. I argue, however,
that these works do not merely aim at preserving the past, or the book
as a thing of the past. As stressed in my introduction, both intermedi-
ality and memory are currently being theorized as dynamic processes,
taking place in the present, and relying on the interaction between old
and new media, past and present. The intermedial works may be read as
reflections of these dynamics. Hayles argues that these works celebrate
the book, while also “changing what it means to be a novel in print.”
Jessica Pressman highlights a similar dynamic relation between old and
new media in the works that represent what she calls the “aesthetics of
bookishness” in twenty-first-century literature:

These novels exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw
attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and
connected to digital technologies. They define the book as an aes-
thetic form whose power has been purposefully employed by litera-
ture for centuries and will continue to be far into the digital age. 21

Pressman evokes the concept of “bookishness,” which has been defined

by Alan Liu as “the idea, psychology, sociology, value, and culture (if not
also cult and religion) of the printed book.”22 Both Liu and Pressman
associate bookishness with an idea of continuity, the book as something
that “will continue far into the digital age.” Furthermore, contrary to
Drucker and Cotter’s concept of bookness, which merely describes that
which makes a book a book, bookishness appears as a quality that may
transcend the physical object and be transported into other media – Liu,
for instance, analyzes bookishness in the bookshelves and sidebars on
online reading environments.
The works discussed here may certainly be related to the tendencies
described by Pressman and Hayles, toward celebrating bookishness.
They support an idea of continuity, exploring the book’s historical and
emergent connections to other media, while several of them are also
characterized by an idea of loss, exposing nostalgia for the printed book
and for the literary culture associated with it. They present, and recall,
literary tradition and literary institutions, antiquarian bookshops and
libraries, as well as the traditional modes of engaging with texts and
with other people who are associated with print culture. In this way, the
works point to the printed book and literary culture as “something to
140  Books between Media
hold on to,” in the words of Chris Ware, while this nostalgic approach
also transforms the book into something else, a material thing of the
past.
In Chapter 3, I invoked Bill Brown’s distinction between things and
objects. “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop
working for us,”23 Brown writes. It certainly seems like we begin to
confront the bookishness of the book when it might stop working for
us as a medium. Brown, like Hayles, describes a cultural situation that
is dominated by the fear of losing the material as well as the “bodily”
aspects of life. The thing, or the experimental book, here becomes as-
sociated with a counter-strategy, signifying a material or even bodily
presence.
However, Brown’s materialist perspective also offers a point of de-
parture for problematizing the discourse that associates the book with
the idea of the human, and thus presents it, with McGann, as a “human
thing.” This is because the notion of the thing is defined not only by
its material presence, but also with an essential otherness. We saw this
ambiguity in relation to Sebald’s teasmaid, which established a sense of
presence, its glow producing nostalgia, while also embodying otherness
as a “strange and hybrid gadget.” I point to a similar tension in the
works discussed below: they idealize the book as an old thing, which
radiates presence and intimacy, while also transforming it into a hybrid
gadget – a thing which hardly qualifies as a book in the conventional
sense of the word, thus embodying a sense of otherness and even provok-
ing a certain Verfremdungseffekt.
The latter perspective is stressed by the fact that most of the interme-
dial works are actually not old books. They merely imitate the aesthetics
associated with more classic experiments such as the handmade artists’
books or Stewart’s bibliobjects, while they are in fact mass-produced
and commercialized works. Several of them are even quite popular.
­Foer’s Extremely Loud was made into a Hollywood film, while Car-
son’s Nox has been translated into numerous languages. S. was “pro-
duced” by J.J. Abrams, a successful director of film and television series,
who “cast” the author Doug Dorst to write it. These facts suggest that
intermedial literature, which is traditionally associated with radically
experiments residing somewhere in the outskirts of literary culture, has
become a more common phenomenon in contemporary literary culture.
This development may be explained by the fact that digitalization has
made it cheaper and easier to mass-produce intermedial works. At the
same time, the readers have arguably become more used to reading and
interacting with texts that combine different media and which are de-
veloped across several different media platforms. In Chapters 7 and 8, I
refer to Henry Jenkins’ theories of modern convergence culture, arguing
that despite the apparent nostalgia of the experimental works, most of
them are in fact deeply grounded in contemporary media culture.
 Remembering Books  141
Thus, it becomes possible to present a development where the interme-
dial works no longer appear to be as radically experimental as Kluge’s
montages or B.S. Johnson’s book in a box. Rather than qualifying as
avant-garde in the sense that they resist the established conventions, the
new works reflect that the convention itself is changing – with Hayles,
these works are “changing what it means to be a novel in print.” Yet, it
is still not these bookish experiments that dominate the shelves in the
bookshops. The new intermedial works are interesting exactly because
they are situated between the experimental outskirts of literature and
conventional literature. As such, they may be read not only as works that
celebrate the past, but also as indications of where print-based literature
might be going in the future.

Touching Books
The tension in the new works between returning to the book as “some-
thing to hold on to” and exploring its connections to other media may
be related to the way in which these works represent memory. That is,
on the one hand, they present memory as something that is preserved
within the object of the book while on the other hand, they highlight
processes of performing memory in the present, between different me-
dia, texts and people. Thus, I argue that the new works celebrate the
traditional idea of “memory as a book” at a discourse level while also
pointing toward a new performative concept of memory by inviting in-
teraction with the book as a “touch sensitive” object. To describe this
difference between the idea of memory as a book and the performance of
memory through the book, I will briefly return to Bradbury’s ­Fahrenheit
451, which I compare to Truffaut’s film version, focusing on the works’
different representations of books and of the books’ status and function
as memory objects.
In Bradbury’s novel, the endangered books function as symbols. The
book that Montag reads in the novel is the Bible, representing, in Schul-
zian terms, “The Book” as a symbol of cultural memory. There are no
quotes or detailed descriptions of the books in the novel, indicating that,
in this case, the medium is certainly not the message. It is all about the
content of the books. This idea is confirmed in a dialogue (that is not
included in the film) between Montag and an old professor of literature.
When Montag asks the professor about whether “books might help,” he
answers:

You’re a hopeless romantic! […] It is not the books, you need, it’s
some of the things that once were in the books. The same things
could be in the “parlour families” today. The same infinite detail
and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors,
but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it
142  Books between Media
where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pic-
tures, and in old friends, look for it in nature and look for it in your-
self. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of
things we were afraid we might forget. 24

The content of the books is not media-specific; it may as well be found

within the new media. It is absent because of a political system that con-
trols the media – not because of the new media themselves. ­Bradbury thus
focuses on criticizing a system of political totalitarianism – ­Fahrenheit
451 has often been read as a criticism of the McCarthy era. Books are
represented as symbols and media of resistance because of their function
as classic mediators of cultural memory; they “stored a lot of things we
were afraid we might forget.”
Truffaut, on the other hand, in the 1970 film version, emphasizes the
concrete visual and material aspects of the books. “The book becomes
an object that one cherishes more and more,” he writes in an essay on
his film. “Even the binding, the cover or the smell of the pages acquire
great sentimental value.”25 The film displays the books as tangible old
things. They are represented with individual titles, which most readers
will recognize. In a scene where a library burns down, the camera fo-
cuses on the burning of specific classics, and the pages are dramatically
turned over. The viewer is invited to read in the books. This perspective
is repeated when Montag gets home, opens a book and begins to read:
the spectators read the text with him, most likely recognizing the open-
ing lines of Oliver Twist. 26
Thus, while Bradbury’s novel highlights the book as a symbol and as
a transmitter of cultural memory, Truffaut points toward the aesthetics
of bookishness, celebrating books as recognizable, individual and visual
objects. This emphasis results in a film that is about loss, and about
“saving” the past. In this way, the film may be related to a traditional
idea of archival memory: memory, indeed as something to be preserved
within an archive or library – something which may be lost in the age
of new media. According to Ann Rigney, the idea of archival memory is
always associated with loss since it concerns the preservation of a past
that is already, per definition, lost. 27 She contrasts this perspective with
the idea of performative memory, which cannot be about loss since it is
not about preserving the past. Rather, it is about actively reshaping the
past, performing memory in the present. 28
The endings of the different versions of Fahrenheit 451 may be read
as an illustration of these different conceptions of memory. Montag,
as mentioned, succeeds in escaping the totalitarian society and joins a
small society of refugees, the “book people.” The book people revolt
against the state by remembering the forbidden books. They have each
learned a book by heart and now wander around “performing” the book
by saying the text out loud. In this way, they all may be said to embody a
 Remembering Books  143
book. 29 The book literally “becomes human” – at least, that is the idea in
the novel, which stresses the importance of a dynamic relation between
books and humans, past and present. You should not merely preserve
things, one “book man” argues; you have to change and “touch” them:
“It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something
from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you
after you take your hands away.”30 Bradbury thus emphasizes an idea
of dynamic interaction. The book people do not preserve the books but
remember them by touching and altering them – above, we saw a similar
idea in Foer’s revision of Schulz’s original text, presenting the idea of
creating a new story out of the old work.
However, I argued that Tree of Codes could not fully realize this idea.
Rather than presenting a new story, the work primarily appears a tex-
tual ruin, reflecting absence and loss. The same may be said of Truffaut’s
film. The film’s ending was intended to be as optimistic as that of the
book, but it cannot escape a certain melancholy: “Oral literature is be-
ginning once again in the natural surroundings of the countryside,” says
the film’s script.31 But oral literature just does not seem to be that great
according to Truffaut: the book people in the film wander mechanically
around in the falling snow, reciting the books. “Truffaut’s book-men
are totally without the story-tellers spontaneity and invention,” George
Bluestone wrote in his review. “They talk at, not to each other”, and
­“recite by rote, as mechanical as computers.”32 Ironically, the book
­people seem to have become as mechanical as the people in front of the
new media screens. They do not add to or change the books, they recite
and reproduce. The ending of the film in this way illustrates an idea of
memory as mechanical reproduction: the book people have to reproduce
the book and let go of their own human identity in the process. The mel-
ancholy that surrounds the film’s ending, despite the intended optimism,
suggests that this is an impossible task: something will be lost in the
process of mediation.
Several of the intermedial memory works are marked by a similar
melancholy, as we have already seen in relation to Sebald and Foer’s
works: a longing for the past and for the authentic lost book. The
works discussed here may, however, also be related to the central idea
in ­Bradbury’s novel – memory as a process of touching and translating
the things and texts of the past into the present. The idea of performing
memory by touching books is invoked by Julia Panko, who argues that,
in the age of new media, the book becomes important not as a medium
of preservation but as a “touch sensitive” thing to interact with:

The materiality of the book is important not in the vein of glib argu-
ments about readers being unable to take their Kindles into the bath,
but because it can be the means of another kind of record-making,
created from the physical traces a reader’s body leaves in the process
144  Books between Media
of handling a book, rather than from the reduction of a human be-
ing to a data set or literary description.33

For Panko, the idea of remembering by touching is specifically –

­nostalgically? – associated with the printed book. Below, in Chapter
6, I explore this idea in relation to the works of Carson and Hegnhøj.
Drawing on the aesthetics of the handmade scrapbook and notebook,
these books in boxes at first glance present themselves as intimate ob-
jects of bookish memory. Yet, I also point to a movement in them away
from the perspective of media nostalgia, a movement out of the box and
away from the idea of memory as a book.

Notes
1 Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters. Memory and Scholarship
in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Harvard: Harvard University Press,
2014), 1.
2 For a reflection on books as media of cultural memory, see also William
Paulson, “The Literary Canon in the Age of its Technological Obsoles-
cence,” in Reading Matters. Narrative in the New Media Ecology, eds.
­Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (New York: Cornell University Press,
1997). Paulson focuses on the literary canon, which according to him has
served until now “as a kind of synecdochic quintessence of the cultural
storehouse of information” (230). He investigates how this status is af-
fected by media development, emphasizing the fact that “the […] connected
computer is replacing the personal library as the resource used by and
symbolically associated with those who work with their minds” (­ Paulson,
“Literary Canon,” 231).
3 Andrew Hoskins, “The Mediatisation of Memory,” in Save As… Digital
Memories, eds. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
4 Allison Muri, “Virtually Human: The Electronic Page, the Archived Body, and
Human Identity,” in The Future of the Page, eds. Peter Stoicheff and Andrew
Taylor (Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press, 2004), 235.
5 William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” The Complete Works
of William Shakespeare (London: Springs Books), 1.5, 99–105.
6 Bryan Stanley Johnson, The Unfortunates (London: Picador, 1999).
7 Johnson, Unfortunates, xi.
8 With the first and last section being “fixed,” there are limits to Johnson’s
experiment: the story is framed as a traditional narrative with a beginning,
a middle part and an end. I return to this observation in my analysis of
­Hegnhøj’s Ella er mit navn vil du købe det? in Chapter 6 which presents
a similar tension between aiming at dissolving the book and keeping it to-
gether, in order.
9 Derrida later revises his view on books, as reflected in Paper Machines,
Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
10 Mikkel Bolt, “Fall-Out, Collapse and Implosion. Four Observations on the
Critical Potential of the Artist’s Book,” Danske Kunstnerbøger/Danish Art-
ists’ Books, eds. Thomas Hvid Kromann, Louise Hold Sidenius, Maria Kjær
Themsen and Marianne Vierø (Copenhagen and Cologne: Møller & Verlag
der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013), 113.
 Remembering Books  145
11 Holland Cotter in Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artist’s Books (New
York: Granary Books, 1995), xi.
12 Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (­Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In a Danish context, Niels
Brügger has provided a historical overview of these kinds of books in “Bogen
som medium,” Passage 48 (2003). Furthermore, Thomas Hvid Kromann’s
(literally) large anthology, Danske kunstnerbøger/Danish Artists’ Books
(Copenhagen and Cologne: Møller and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther
König, 2013), focuses on the artists’ books produced by the Danish avant-
garde in the 1960s.
13 Hayles, “Combining Close and Distant Reading,” 227.
14 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, “Re-vision as Remediation. Hypermediacy and
Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Image & Narrative 14.4 (2013): 25.
15 Hayles, Writing Machines, 25.
16 Wurth, “Re-vision,” 25–26.
17 Hayles, “Future of Literature,” 85.
18 N. Katherine Hayles, “Corporeal Anxiety in ‘Dictionary of the Khazars’.
What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About
Losing Their Bodies,” Modern Fiction Studies 93.3 (1997), 800.
19 Jacques Derrida, for instance, describes “writing with ink (on skin, wood
or paper)” as “less ethereal or liquid, less wavering in its characters, and
also less labile than electronic writing” (Derrida, Paper Machines, 60), and
Hayles opposes “the fixity of print” to the “flickering signifiers” that char-
acterize text read on screen (quoted in Julia Panko, “‘Memory Pressed Flat
into Text’: The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts,”
Contemporary Literature 52.2 (2011): 280), while she notably maintains
that new media texts are not less based in materiality than print-based texts.
Her argument concerns the experience of reading text on screen.
20 As pointed out by Paul Duguid, the nostalgic tendency that mourns the loss
of the book is contradicted by a tendency toward celebrating new media in
terms of liberation. Jay David Bolter, for instance, writes about the “revolu-
tionary goal” of “freeing the writing from the frozen structure of the page”
and thus “liberating the text” (Bolter quoted in Duguid, “Material Matters,”
498). Duguid criticizes both the “gloomy bibliophiles” and the “triumphant
technophiles” for establishing a too simple dichotomy between old and new
media, and concludes that “both of these positions too easily separate the
past from the future, the simple from the complex, technology from society,
and information from technology” (Duguid, “Material Matters,” 505).
21 Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetics of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century
Literature,” Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age.
Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (2009): 465.
22 Alan Liu, “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins
and Social Computing,” Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Dig-
ital Age. Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (2009): 511.
23 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4.
24 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Glasgow: Collins International, 1985), 80.
25 Truffaut quoted in Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, Trans.
Alistair Fox (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 169.
26 A new filmatization of Fahrenheit 451, directed by Ramin Bahrani, aired on
HBO in 2018. Like Truffeaut’s film, this version also focuses on visuality of
the book objects – for instance, in the scene in the old woman’s library, the
camera dwells at the burning pages of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels
among other books, bringing the literary tradition that is represented in
the story up to date. However, Bahrani’s film appears less nostalgic than
146  Books between Media
Truffeaut’s, especially since new media are not only associated with the en-
tertainment and surveillance screens in the bookless society. Digital tech-
nologies also offer the “salvation” from this society, making it possible to
genetically encode the cultural memory and knowledge from the books into
a bird – thus, in the age of rising ecological awareness and climate change,
rescuing the books becomes associated with rescuing nature.
27 Rigney refers to the “original plenitude and subsequent loss-model,” where
memory is “conceptualized on the one hand in terms of an original ‘store-
house’ and, on the other hand, as something that is always imperfect and
diminishing, a matter of chronic frustration because always falling short of
total recall.” Ann Rigney, “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cul-
tural Memory,” Journal of European Studies 35.1 (2005): 12.
28 Rigney, “Plenitude,” 17.
29 Here we may recall Peter McDonald’s argument that the book itself is al-
ways a performance of a given text. Hence, the book people only do what
books arguably always do: embody and present the text in a certain way. See
Peter D. McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature. After
Theory?” PMLA 121.1 (2006).
30 Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 152–53.
31 Cf. George Bluestone, “The Fire and the Future,” Film Quarterly 20.4
(1967): 6.
32 Bluestone, “The Fire,” 6.
33 Panko, “Memory,” 295.