Reading for connection Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction Gero Bauer This article’s aim is to bring discussion of a recent emergence of ‘bookishness’ in the digital age into conversation with debates about the changed and changing status of reading for and in contemporary multimodal metafiction. It inquires into social reading as a cultural practice and the reader as a cultural figure as they are represented in contemporary multimodal metafiction, arguing that, in many cases, these works revolve around the act of reading as an ambivalent social activity. To demonstrate this point, I focus on two popular examples of twenty-first-century multimodal metafiction: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Both novels share a thematic and structural concern with storytelling and reading as fundamental for the making of identity; both imply the actual reader in their performative creation of a ‘bookish’ reading community; and both contrast different kinds of reading as either more or less beneficial for the creation and maintenance of social bonds. I contend that Cloud Atlas and S., while not digital texts as such, gesture towards the functions of literature in the context of digital technologies: through their multimodal setups, they make extensive use of narrative metalepses to enrich the immersive reading experience and make a point about the social and connective nature of reading. They also exemplify a tendency in contemporary fiction to make performative arguments for the value of reading as a social activity by consciously suspending it between embodiment and virtuality, the material and the digital, and by involving the reader, via multimodal elements and challenges, as a participant in the act of reading across ontological boundaries and the making of meaning and community. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0004 Gero Bauer 60 1. Introduction Since at least the turn of the millennium, the question of how the rapid expansion of digital technologies is impacting the field of literature has been a source of interest (and sometimes concern and anxiety) for many who are committed, professionally and/ or emotionally, to reading books and to engaging with books as objects of cultural and aesthetic value. Contrary to what some feared and even predicted, as Jessica Pressman observes, “at the moment of the book’s foretold obsolescence because of digital technologies […] we saw something surprising: the emergence of a creative moment invested in exploring and demonstrating love for the book as symbol, art form, and artifact” (2020: 1). Pressman calls this phenomenon ‘bookishness’, “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within a digital culture, in modes that may be sentimental, fetishistic, radical” (ibid.), and “a complex constellation of technological, social, aesthetic, and affective forces that converge to present the book as aesthetic artifact par excellence for our digital culture” (ibid.: 21). While Pressman primarily locates bookishness in the commodification of the book as object, she also acknowledges it as a literary mode and subject: “contemporary literature depicts the book as a central character in narrative plots and also plays with the aesthetic possibilities of the codexical format” (ibid.: 13). In this paper, I want to take Pressman’s positing of the twenty-first-century phenomenon ‘bookishness’ as a starting point to think about the status of reading - and, more specifically, social reading - as a constitutive element of (fictional) ‘bookish’ reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction. Taking my cue from Pressman, who argues that “[i]n our neoliberal times, in which digital corporations invade our private space and reading time, claiming a bookish identity can constitute an act of rebellion, self-construction, and hope within this sphere” (ibid.: 24, original emphasis), I understand manifestations of ‘bookish’ social reading in contemporary metafictional novels as part of a renewed interest in the abilities of fiction and of reading fiction to bring about community and connection via the intense affects that Deidre Shauna Lynch associates with a love for literature: “lovers of literature construct the aesthetic relation as though it put them in the presence of other people and with the understanding that the ethical relations so conjured must not be instrumentalized” (2015: 8). The last two decades have seen the publication of a wide range of novels that fall under the category ‘multimodal metafiction’. These novels resonate with ‘bookishness’ and the idea of social reading in a formally specific way: they employ a variety of structural devices and multiple modes of communication and meaning which prove challenging to readers, while also arguably aiming for an immersive and sincerely meaningful reading experience. Popular examples include Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), which combines several layers of embedded narrative with Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 61 a creative play with page layout; Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), which turns visual representations of the DNA sequence into a narrative device; or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which contains photographs that help the reader share the perspective of the novel’s child protagonist. More recently, Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting (2014) creatively engaged with the materiality of the page, producing intense entanglements of story, text, image, page layout, and the book as object; and Danielewski’s The Familiar book series (2015- 2017) entered into a complex formal conversation with the logic of television series. The multimodality of works such as these, with their inclusion of unusual typography, graphics, and illustrations, pose, as Alison Gibbons (2012) points out, complex cognitive and experiential challenges to the reader. In particular, as Gibbons and Torsa Ghosal argue elsewhere, these texts speak to “a cultural moment in which distinctions between factuality and fictionality seem increasingly unstable. […T]he combination of semiotic modes and media in multimodal narratives impacts the felt factuality and felt fictionality of those narratives” (2023: 6). Multimodal narratives thus ask the reader to continuously question, readjust, and (re-)construct the boundaries between the text, themselves, and the world - that is, between different ontological levels: “multimodal literature […] brings into focus the real-world context in which reading takes place and reminds readers of their role in the narrative act” (ibid.: 9). As such, multimodal metafictional novels are particularly interesting case studies for an investigation into the role of reading and the status of the figure of the reader in contemporary literature. They establish an unusually intense and intimately reciprocal relationship between reader and text, are potentially much more interactive than formally less complex fiction, and require the reader to engage in a dialogue with the text and its context(s). My aim in this paper is to bring the idea of ‘bookishness’ into conversation with debates about the changed and changing status of reading for and in contemporary multimodal metafiction. As Tore Rye Andersen, Stefan Kjerkegaard, and Brigitte Stougaard Pedersen observe, recent media developments have not only had a crucial impact on the production and distribution of literature, but also on reading habits and readers. The digital age, they argue, has brought about a dual movement towards both a revaluation of ‘traditional’ book culture and an increased investment in more experimental and hybrid formats. This has resulted in an “ongoing combination of retraditionalization and denaturalization” which, in turn, has “give[n] birth to new modes of reading” (2021: 133) and, we can add, to new kinds of what Stanley Fish (1980) calls ‘interpretive communities’. Far from signalling the ‘death’ of either ‘the book’ or reading as a cultural practice, authors, publishers, and readers in the digital age actively respond to new technological and cultural developments in sometimes contradictory and unpredictable ways, confirming “the central cultural importance of reading” (Birke 2016: 3) for contemporary culture, Gero Bauer 62 demonstrating the perhaps surprising resilience and versatility of “reading fiction as a particular medial practice” (ibid.: 4), and affirming the need to understand reading as “a historically situated process” (ibid.: 5). What I am interested in, then, is the role of reading as a means of connection in the context of the recent emergence of ‘bookishness’ as a response to and in tandem with rapid technological change. As Beth Driscoll argues, all reading is essentially social, “supported by institutional and industrial infrastructure, and a constitutive element of networks of people, organizations, and technologies” (2024: 7). The formal and thematic concerns of contemporary multimodal metafiction, however, foreground the social functions of reading in a particularly emphatic way. To demonstrate this, I want to inquire into the status of social reading as a cultural practice and the reader as a cultural figure as they are represented in contemporary multimodal metafiction. I am also asking what these representations imply about the ‘real’ readers of these texts and about the status of reading and the reader in the digital age. For this purpose, I will be focussing on two examples of twenty-first-century multimodal metafiction to argue that, in many cases, these works revolve around the act of reading as an ambivalent social activity. Their multimodal features mirror thematic concerns with the nexus storytelling-reading-identity-community, and different kinds of reading are contrasted as either contributing to or impeding the making of connection. They also, thematically and structurally, address the status of fiction in the digital age, the tension between the material and the virtual, and reading itself as both an embodied experience and a virtual process. I want to demonstrate these dynamics as they unfold in two popular texts: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Both novels share a thematic and structural concern with storytelling and reading as fundamental for the making of identity; both imply the actual reader in their performative creation of a ‘bookish’ reading community; and both contrast different kinds of reading as either more or less beneficial for the creation and maintenance of social bonds. The most significant difference between the two works is their degree of multimodality and the resulting challenge they present to their readers: where Cloud Atlas remains, despite its unusual structure and nested narrative, a fairly conventional book object, S. makes much more extensive use of the affordances of modern book design, production, and marketing to create a spectacular object and media experience. As such, these two novels represent very different yet productively complementary nodes on a spectrum of the employment of multimodal techniques in contemporary metafiction. While S. presents to its readers a veritable feast of ‘bookish’ engagements with material objects clustered around the idea of the ‘old library book’, Cloud Atlas’ multimodality is much more subtle: it emerges from the combination of multiple writing forms or genres which only take on a properly material media dimension within the storyworld itself, where each story is Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 63 found as a (fragmented) object and (mis-)read/ consumed by the next reader-protagonist in the novel’s complex nested narrative. Despite these differences, I want to demonstrate that both novels, to varying degrees, reflect and participate in what Henry Jenkins calls ‘convergence culture’, which is characterized, among other things, by “the flow of content across multiple media platforms” and by the encouragement of consumers to “make connections among dispersed media content” (2006: 2, 3). While S. has - even since before and particularly shortly after its publication - certainly participated much more extensively in a cross-media dynamic than Cloud Atlas, both novels posit reading as a powerful tool to communicate and make connections across space, time, genre, media, and even ontological boundaries. In this way, these novels also make strong ethical claims about the ongoing relevance of both reading as a cultural practice and literary fiction as a form in the digital age. So even though I will be focussing more or less exclusively on an analysis of the two literary texts and book objects themselves - with a few gestures towards their extended lives online - my concern here is precisely with their active engagement with ideas of reading and readers in a time in which ‘bookishness’ is both nostalgically invoked and inevitably transformed, not least in the context of what Simone Murray calls ‘the digital literary sphere’, the “complex interface of literary-digital-mutual interpenetration” (2018: 3), which today characterizes the relationship between publishing, buying, reading, and discussing literary works onand offline. Conceptually, my argument engages most explicitly with the fields of narratology and - in the broadest sense - the sociology and philosophy of reading. Two concepts will be guiding my discussion: narrative metalepsis and ‘paranoid/ reparative reading’. Metalepsis was originally defined by Gérard Genette as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse”, which “produces an effect of strangeness” (1980: 235). Simply put, narrative metalepsis is a crossing of diegetic levels - and thus, by implication, ontological boundaries - performed within a specific work in apparent violation of the ontological rules implicitly or explicitly set up by the work itself. Metalepsis puts the reader in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the text: in encountering narrative metalepsis, we are both made aware of the constructed nature of the narrative and asked to continue to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the fictional world (cf. Herman 1997: 134). As such, metalepsis is a particularly interesting formal feature in the context of a discussion of the role of reading in and for contemporary multimodal metafiction, which combines metafictional strategies with a sincere interest in readerly involvement. For the examples discussed here, Alice Bell’s definition of “interactional metalepsis” as occurring “when the ontological boundary between the reader (in the actual world) and the storyworld is crossed” (2016: 296) is particularly productive. Bell makes a strong argument for the media-specific occurrence of Gero Bauer 64 interactional metalepsis in digital fiction, and argues that, while most instances of metalepsis in print literature have a defamiliarizing effect, “some forms of interactional metalepsis in digital fiction can also have the opposite, immersive effect” (ibid.: 298), not least because “[m]etalepses in digital fictions are a much more established and unmarked convention than they are in print fiction” (ibid.: 299). I would contend, however, that works like Cloud Atlas and S., while not digital texts as such, gesture towards precisely the affordances of literature in the context of digital technologies: through their multimodal setups, they make extensive use of metalepses to enrich the immersive reading experience and make a point about the social and connective nature of reading. Overall, I argue that Cloud Atlas and S. exemplify a tendency in contemporary fiction to make performative arguments for the value of reading as a social activity by consciously suspending it between embodiment and virtuality, the material and the digital, and by involving the reader, via multimodal elements and challenges, as a participant in the act of reading across ontological boundaries and the making of meaning and community. At the same time, thematically and structurally, the reader is presented with a choice between different kinds of reading on a spectrum between what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call the ‘paranoid’ and the ‘reparative’, that is, between reading for closure, in the sense of an unveiling of hidden meaning, on the one hand, and reading for openness, in the sense of the pleasure of unanswered questions and loose ends, on the other. Sedgwick’s essay, which takes its cue from Paul Ricoeur’s (1970) notion of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, has had a crucial and lasting influence on wide-reaching debates about reading and interpretation in the humanities - what has come to be known, in Rita Felski’s (2015) terminology, as ‘postcritique’. Sedgwick herself employs the psychoanalytical vocabulary of Melanie Klein to articulate two critical moods or modalities that can coexist in a text (or in a reading subject) and which enable different effects and (readerly) affects: on the one hand, a ‘paranoid’ attitude to reading and interpretation, which is crucially characterised by a “future-oriented vigilance” (ibid.: 130) and, as a ‘strong’ theory, an overall “conceptual economy or elegance” (ibid.: 134), as well as by a trust in “the efficacy of knowledge per se - knowledge in the form of exposure” (ibid.: 138); on the other hand, the ‘weak’ and ‘local’ qualities of ‘reparative’ critical attitudes. Sedgwick explains that “to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. […] Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and partobjects she encounters or creates” (ibid.: 146). Sedgwick’s argument, of course, specifically addresses habits and modalities of critical or ‘professional’ reading, and we need to ask if and how we can bring her considerations into productive dialogue with the idea of Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 65 reading in general or reading for pleasure, what Beth Driscoll calls “recreational reading” (2024: 6). I believe, however, that precisely because Sedgwick employs vocabulary taken from psychoanalysis and because she herself uses a plethora of examples of everyday ‘reading’ (in both literal and metaphorical senses), her essay in fact calls for being put into conversation with wider cultural (and fictional) negotiations of readers and of social reading as a potentially connective force. Sedgwick also crucially does not privilege one kind of reading over another: both ‘paranoia’ and the ‘reparative’, she argues, can do some things well and other not so well. This notion of a co-existence of different readerly attitudes or modalities within one text and one readerly subjectivity, too, will prove immensely productive for an understanding of the dynamics of social reading in the two novels under discussion in this essay: both Cloud Atlas and S. negotiate reading as a morally ambivalent activity which can both enrich interpersonal encounters and lead to obsessive quests for meaning, identity, and closure. 2. Reading and dreaming and sensing: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas David Mitchell’s work is, in many ways, an obvious place to start an investigation into the relationship between ‘bookishness’ and social reading in the context of contemporary metafiction. His literary output is characterized by a deep concern with human connection across time and space. This concern manifests itself not only in a recurring negotiation of humanist ideas and ideals in his novels, but also in a structural investment in the affordances of literary form to performatively create (or at least imply) connection across ontological boundaries. This becomes evident within individual novels, which often contain episodic narratives that span vast distances of time and space, but also in Mitchell’s oeuvre as a whole, which emerges as a complex network of interrelated stories, “a fictional universe of which one mere fouror five-hundred-page novel is just a fractional part” (Dillon 2011: 5). Themes, objects, and characters from one novel reappear in others, and in a crucial sense, his fiction is an artistic plea for the power of the telling and reading of stories to counterbalance the darker sides of history and human existence. Out of all of Mitchell’s novels, his most popular and commercially most successful work Cloud Atlas makes the most extensive use of the idea of reading as a social and connective force on the level of form and content. Here, Mitchell combines multiple embedded narratives and narrative metalepses with a sincere story of the struggle between the human drive towards cataclysm and destruction, and the possibility of individual acts of resistance inspired by mutual affective recognition via acts of reading and appropriation. The novel consists of six separate storylines set in different times in the past, present, and future, between the nineteenth century and Gero Bauer 66 a far-off post-cataclysmic future. Half of each story is told in the first part of the book in chronological order, with “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an Ev’rythin’ After” at the centre the only uninterrupted episode in the book. This movement is then reversed, and the novel ends with the second half of the first storyline, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”. Each of the six parts emulates a different literary form or genre: a journal, letters, a spy novel, a memoir, an interview, and oral storytelling. Many critics (and Mitchell himself) have pointed out the novel’s indebtedness to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), which consists of several unfinished ‘beginnings of novels’ and foregrounds the act of reading as the sustained attempt of a fictional subject to make sense of a fragmented narrative without closure (cf. e.g. McMorran 2011). Mitchell’s own rendering of fictional subjects that literally read each other across sometimes vast temporal and geographical distances combines this interest in the epistemological function of reading with the conscious manipulation of narrative pace and linearity. It asks questions about the workings of both story and history, and about the place of the individual acting and reading subject in a web of global connections. In terms of its multimodal features, Cloud Atlas is much less complex than S. For the most part, the novel invites back-to-back linear reading and is printed in standard font, with only occasional uses of italics or bold print to indicate, for example, the difference between the archivist’s questions and Sonmi’s answers in “An Orison of Sonmi ~451”, or reported speech and thought in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”. The novel makes minimal use of alternative fonts to indicate the material contexts of the individual episodes: the section title and dates in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”, for instance, are made to look like handwriting, and the section title and chapter numbers in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” use a font which suggests that we are reading a typewritten manuscript. As discussed above, multimodality, in Cloud Atlas, emerges as an idea which connects the nested narratives, and it is mostly up to the reader to imaginatively contextualize and materially flesh out the different textual forms and genres. Nevertheless, the novel uniquely combines an episodic, interrupted narrative with a reliance on the reader’s ability to ‘properly’ align their reading with the various forms, genres, and fictional ‘bookish’ objects the different episodes emulate, and a multi-layered mirroring of this activity within the novel itself. I argue that this makes Cloud Atlas a productive example of the oscillation between readerly investment and readerly distancing characteristic of contemporary multimodal metafiction. Ultimately, the text makes a strong claim for the fundamentally social and connective potential of reading and the cultural importance of the figure of the reader. Mitchell introduces several themes and symbols, such as dreams, déjà vus, epiphanies, and a comet-shaped birthmark which five of the protago- Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 67 nists share, to emphasize the idea that the different episodes and their protagonists are part of one large, intimately entangled story of, on the one hand, individual people’s struggle against an overall human drive towards cataclysm and destruction, and, on the other hand, a sincere, humanist belief in community and connection. This ambivalence is mirrored in the novel’s use of these themes and symbols: all elements Mitchell employs to construct the group of six protagonists as an idealised transhistorical social community of revolutionary readers are ambiguously suspended between the mode of the fantastic and the possibility of realist explanation. The comet-shaped birthmark, for example, implies the idea of the rebirth of the same soul in different times, but is also deconstructed by one of the readercharacters as an unnecessarily gimmicky narrative device: “far too hippiedruggy-new age” (Mitchell 2004: 373). Similarly, dreams and moments of epiphany and déjà vu imply that the protagonists can access memories from the others’ existence: Journalist Louisa Rey, for instance, experiences such a moment when listening to a piece of music, the Cloud Atlas Sextet, which Robert Frobisher, the protagonist of the storyline preceding Luisa’s, composed: “[t]he sound is pristine, riverlike, spectral, hypnotic … intimately familiar” (ibid.: 425, original emphasis). At the same time, this and similar instances are also framed as potential coincidences to be dismissed by those who, like Luisa, “just don’t believe in this crap” (ibid.: 122). The implication of transhistorical connection introduced via recurring symbols and epiphanies thus reflects the novel’s overall oscillation between an ironic metafictional mode and a sincere message. It also implies an actual reader who will have to decide whether to buy into the fantastic implications of these elements, or to remain, with many of the novel’s characters, a (paranoid) sceptic. The most prominent use of narrative metalepsis in Cloud Atlas, however, is much more radical in terms of its ontological implications: the six different narratives literally intrude upon one another, as one story reappears as a textual artefact in the chronologically following one. Robert Frobisher finds a copy of the second half of Adam Ewing’s published journal - the first half of which we have just read - in his bedroom at Vyvyan Ayrs’ house (“It begins on the 99 th page, its covers are gone, its binding unstitched” [64]); Luisa Rey receives Frobisher’s letters from his lover Rufus Sixsmith; Timothy Cavendish is sent a manuscript of Half Lives, the novel in which Luisa features as protagonist; Cavendish himself reappears as a character in a fragment of a film version of his memoir which Sonmi finds and watches in secret; and Sonmi’s final public broadcast becomes the founding text of the dominant religion in Zachry’s post-apocalyptic future. The characters thus literally read each other across sometimes vast temporal and geographical distances, and these acts of reading imply intriguing questions about the ambivalently connective and social nature of narrative communication. They are also deliberately constructed as ontologically contradictory: within a realist logic, Adam Ewing’s journal could Gero Bauer 68 plausibly have ended up decades later in Vyvyan Ayrs’ house, and Rufus Sixsmith’s appearance with Frobisher’s letters in Luisa’s storyline is, again, plausible; however, the exposure of Luisa’s own episode, in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, as the product of a novelist’s imagination gestures towards the fact that Cloud Atlas self-consciously defies ultimate coherence in its use of metafictional strategies. On the one hand, then, storytelling, in Cloud Atlas, crucially determines a character’s identity, and the transmission of a story from one narrative level to the next charges the act of reading with a powerful potential for connection. The protagonists literally become each other’s readers (or audience, as in the case of Sonmi, who watches a fragment of a film with Timothy Cavendish as protagonist, and in the case of Zachry’s episode, in which he tells his tale to an anonymous group of listeners), which creates a sense of kinship and community between them. By extension, the actual reader of Cloud Atlas is implicated as a participant in this act of fictional worldmaking, in a process which Courtney Hopf calls “a remediation of the reading subject” (2011: 107): “by foregrounding narrative levels at such an extreme, the novel encourages the reader to see herself as just another such level, and to imagine the self as a discursive construction as well” (ibid.: 111). Or, as Hélène Machinal puts it, “the reader is also submitted to the fictionalizing process as he shares the position of reader with each new narrator” (2011: 133). Through its combination of an extensive use of metalepsis with the figure of the reader and the act of reading, then, Cloud Atlas positions the act of reading as a powerful social and connective force. On the other hand, these metaleptic transgressions across narrative boundaries and the way each character reads these transmissions always remain ambivalent, and misunderstanding, misreading, and creative appropriation become just as important as ‘successful’ narrative communication. Reading thus gets suspended between effecting ironic distance and affective identification, between deconstruction and reconstruction, and between a ‘paranoid’ reading for closure and a ‘reparative’ reading for loose ends. Several critics have pointed out that the consumption of each story by the following protagonist mirrors the novel’s prominent themes of cannibalism and hyper-capitalist consumption (cf. Hopf 2011: 119; McMorran 2011: 165; Ng 2015: 118; Wiemann 2017: 509). At the same time, as creators and receivers of stories, the six protagonists become agents of change and members of a community of readers and storytellers whose actions are inspired by their appropriation of textual artefacts. Crucially, however, this process of reading-as-inspiration is never straightforward. The characters ironize, sentimentalize, capitalize on, misread, and appropriate the fragmented stories they encounter, and often question the authenticity of the material they come across, thus foregrounding its potential fictionality. Finding and reading Adam Ewing’s journal, for example, Robert Frobisher comments on “[s]omething shifty about the journal’s authenticity - seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true” Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 69 (Mitchell 2004: 64). Louisa Rey’s reading experience of Robert’s letters is as much visceral as it is intellectual, and she asks: “[a]re molecules of […] Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, swirling in my lungs, now, in my blood? ” (ibid.: 453, original emphasis). Timothy Cavendish decries the quality of Half-Lives - the spy novel, authored by “Hilary V. Hush” (ibid.: 158), which questions the non-fictional existence of Luisa Rey - only to be inspired by its potential to become “a publishable thriller” (ibid.: 373), and to follow in Luisa’s investigative steps in his own attempt to escape an old people’s home (cf. ibid.: 379). And Sonmi, instead of reading Timothy Cavendish’s memoir, only sees a fragment of a film adaptation, which nevertheless inspires her to revolutionary action (cf. ibid.: 243). Reading, for the characters in Cloud Atlas, thus emerges as an unpredictable process of mediation and remediation, of appropriation, misreading, and distancing. The novel makes sure that the metaleptic appearance of one story in another in the form of a textual or visual artefact never reduces itself to a mere repetitive act of reading-as-inspiration. Nevertheless, the different instances of mediation and remediation, of appropriation, misreading, and distancing ultimately serve to foreground that, as Jason Howard Mezey observes, “for Mitchell’s characters, the textual artefacts they encounter help them to answer central questions as they attempt to make meaning to their lives and histories” (2011: 16). At the same time, these readers share an investment in narrative closure: as Robert puts it, “[a] half-read book is a half-finished love affair” (Mitchell 2004: 65). This readerly investment within the fictional world gets projected onto the extradiegetic level in the way the novel tempts its readers to identify with its several reading subjects, and to actively participate in turning the fragmented narrative - as ‘paranoid’ readers - into a coherent whole. As Will McMorran argues, we continue to look for a unity that entails completion, for reassurance that the text we are reading is not going to be ‘just’ a collection of stories […W]e want to read in the knowledge that the pieces of the puzzle will fit together, that there is still a link between the artist and the artisan. (2011: 169) Cloud Atlas, then, on the one hand, makes use of a thematic integration and a metafictional foregrounding of the act of reading and the figure of the reader as symbolic and metafictional means to emphasize the fragmented, incoherent, and ‘fictional’ nature of history and subjectivity. On the other hand, it also makes a strong claim for the power of literature and reading to create community: it suggests the potential of creative and appropriative reading as an activity that can connect, in uncertain and unpredictable ways, disparate stories and subjectivities across time and space. Gero Bauer 70 3. Readers on a scavenger hunt: J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. In terms of a thematic and structural concern with the connective potential of the activity of reading, J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s ambitious novel S. shares many characteristics with Cloud Atlas. S., too, is a book about the relevance of storytelling for the making of identity. Like Mitchell’s novel, it is populated by characters who are obsessive readers (and writers), and its structure can easily be understood as a performative argument for the social and communal value of reading. At the same time, S. goes much further than Cloud Atlas in its use of narrative metalepsis and its engagement with the book as a physical object. S. comes in a black sleeve - the only obvious place holding information about the book’s authors and title - the back cover of which announces that this is a book fundamentally concerned with reading and its potential to connect: “[o]ne book, two readers, a world of mystery, menace, and desire […; ] a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author […; ] and so begins an unlikely conversation” (Abrams & Dorst 2013: back cover). The sleeve contains a novel called Ship of Theseus, written by one ‘V. M. Straka’ and purportedly published in 1949. A lot of work went into making this novel look like a specific copy of an old library book: the binding emulates the look and feel of cloth; the paper the novel is printed on looks old and faded; a sticker on the spine identifies the book according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (“813.54 STR 1949”); and the first and last few pages contain library stamps (“book for loan”, “property of Laguna Verde H.S. library”, “keep this book clean”) and a list of dates between 1957 and 2000 on which the book was allegedly taken out and returned. The book also contains a foreword and footnotes by its fictional translator and editor ‘F. X. Caldeira’, and in its margins, PhD student Eric Husch and undergraduate Jennifer (Jen) Heyward conduct an extensive conversation, which appears in digitally reproduced handwriting. In addition, the book holds a collection of paraphernalia - letters, photocopies of documents, postcards, newspaper clippings, even a map drawn on a paper napkin - which the reader finds tucked in between specific pages. In essence, then, S. is a complex ‘bookish’ object containing or implicating four diegetic levels: the novel Ship of Theseus; the editorial comments by ‘F. X. Caldeira’; Jen and Eric’s conversation; and the world of the reader itself, which contains the book and its paraphernalia as material objects. In terms of the relevance of the idea of social reading in S., I want to outline three aspects: a thematic concern with reading communities and reading-as-connection; the use of narrative metalepsis as a means of connecting reader-characters across diegetic and ontological boundaries; and the juxtaposition of ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ kinds of reading as ambivalently related to the making or unmaking of community. Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 71 Thematically, S. is concerned with the role of story and reading for the making of identity and connection. This theme appears on all diegetic levels, and this mirroring or repetition, in turn, connects the levels and characters to each other. The novel Ship of Theseus is about a character called ‘S’ who cannot remember who he is, and who stumbles through a fictional world in which he begins to write down his own story in order to find himself, participate in a political revolution, and connect to the love of his life, Sola. Throughout the book, the reader learns that Ship of Theseus in fact reflects ‘real’ events from Jen and Eric’s world, and the editor and translator F. X. Caldeira or ‘Filomela’ - with the narrative help of Jen and Eric - reconstructs Ship of Theseus as an homage to her unfulfilled love for the author Straka, whom she has only ever communicated with via letters and the work on his novels. In her foreword, Caldeira points to the text’s overall concern with the entanglement of storytelling and identity, which, in tandem with our knowledge of her unfulfilled love for Straka, implies the activity of reading as an act of love: “V. M. Straka was not just a storyteller, he was a story. And story is resilient, protean, eternal” (ibid.: xiii). Eric and Jen themselves, finally, are on a quest to find out the identity of Straka among possible candidates from a group of early-twentieth-century political novelists, and, in the process, they discover their love for each other. Their interaction remains - perhaps a bit implausibly, but fully in line with the idea of ‘bookishness’ as a literary mode - largely restricted to an excessive communication in the margins conducted by passing back and forth Eric’s (stolen) copy of Ship of Theseus, even after they finally do meet in person. As Eric argues, “I try to keep my life analog” (ibid.: 115). However, their shared investment in reading and working towards solving the mysteries they find in the book makes them fall in love with each other. At one point, Eric calls the book “a scrapbook of you + me” (ibid.: 76), the two exchange increasingly flirty comments, and towards the end, Eric explicitly reflects on how their relationship on the page has been transformed to a real-life love story: “I love you. I love you on the page + I love you in the library + in the coffee shop + in the last row of the varsity. I love you here” (ibid.: 423), while ‘here’ remains ambiguously suspended between meaning ‘here’ in the book or ‘here’ somewhere in the physical world. Mikko Keskinen calls Jen and Eric’s readerly/ writerly quest “a critical, textual, or scholarly duelling, a competition complete with intimate or at least romantic overtones” (2019: 145), and he frames the literary communication in S. in terms of the epistolary, pointing out that what emerges from Jen and Eric’s interaction in the margins is something truly intimate, a “collective mutual interiority” (ibid.: 154). As reader-writers, Jen and Eric intervene in and change the text and object that becomes the vehicle of their connection, creating the illusion of a work of reading-in-process, an object “continuously altered and reshaped in the present” (Tanderup 2017: 155). This holds true for the process of Gero Bauer 72 reading-as-connection on all diegetic levels: the character ‘S’ in Ship of Theseus inscribes his quest for identity and love first into the wooden surroundings of a ship’s cabin and then in the margins of old newspapers; Filomela begins to co-author Straka’s last novel and hides secret codes in the footnotes in the hope for Straka to find and decipher them; and Jen and Eric change the surface of the pages of the book whose passing back and forth becomes their means of readerly/ writerly connection. Several critics have pointed out that while S.’ modes of communication, especially between Jen and Eric, make a strong claim for the material and analogue, this kind of reading-and-responding also invokes modes more strongly associated with digital technologies: email, messengers, and social media (cf. e.g. Tanderup 2017: 162-163; Keskinen 2019: 149). While S. thus, on the one hand, nostalgically invokes the power of a connection generated via the shared ‘bookish’ readerly investment in a book as material object, the novel also subtly acknowledges and integrates modes of communication specific to the digital age and is, overall, “deeply grounded in the contemporary media culture at the level of both form and content” (Tanderup 2017: 150). In fact, Jen and Eric’s comments originated as a conversation between Abrams and Dorst using the Microsoft Word commenting tool, which was later made to look like a handwritten conversation in the margins of an old book by a team of designers and with the help of various digital technologies (cf. Tanderup 2017: 163; Nørgaard 2020: 244-245). Apart from the mirroring of the theme of connection through reading and writing, more concrete instances of narrative metalepsis in S. further emphasise the idea of readerly involvement as conducive to the making of community. In the novel Ship of Theseus, ‘S’ learns that his own writing is ontologically connected to the world he moves in, and it ultimately enables him to find his love Sola. Jen and Eric repeatedly encounter a mysterious ‘S’ symbol on campus (cf. e.g. Abrams & Dorst 2013: 41, 290, 350), which plays an important role in the storyworld of Ship of Theseus, and which they also find drawn into the margins of the book by someone who is not them; and they learn that objects mentioned in Ship of Theseus turn up in their own world (cf. ibid.: e.g. 42, 57), where they become part of the puzzle around the identity of Straka and the political conspiracy involving a mysterious group also called ‘S’. For the actual reader, finally, Jen and Eric’s world physically transgresses the boundary into their own through the illusion created by the handwriting in the margins and the fact that objects Jen and Eric leave for each other between the pages end up in physical form in the book we are holding. In each instance, Jen and Eric’s narrative in the margins mentions these objects (although their precise location in the book is not always immediately plausible), sometimes in direct address to each other, such as when Eric asks Jen to “[c]heck out the note” (ibid.: 86) which the reader has already found between the pages. The reader of S. is thus not only a passive ‘voyeur’ of Jen and Eric’s (and ‘S’ and Sola’s, and Straka and Filomela’s) adventure, but is repeatedly interpellated to Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 73 identify with Jen and Eric’s reading experience. This effect is arguably reinforced by the inclusion of visual elements, such as the ‘S’ symbol and the digitally reproduced handwriting, “positioning the reader with the protagonist” of the novel-within-a-novel, “seeing what he sees” (Norgaard 2020: 243). Torsa Ghosal argues that the inclusion of handwriting in S. draws attention to “the embodied nature of the reading experience” and “enables the reader to experience literature as a spatially constructive task” (2019: 192). It also “forces the readers to make active decisions about how to read the novel” (Norgaard 2020: 247): is it better to read Ship of Theseus first, and then Jen and Eric’s conversation? Or both at the same time? And in which order? Should you start reading again once you have made sense of the temporal layering of the notes’ colour coding (I had only made sense of it after about a hundred pages)? S. is, thus, “a book that demands interaction” (Tanderup 2017: 164). And although the reader only observes Jen and Eric’s readerly interaction with Ship of Theseus without actively participating in the conversation, the spatial experience of the handwriting places the book “in the actual readers’ visual-tactile field of experience” (ibid.: 202). Similarly, the actual reader’s physical interaction with the paraphernalia found between the pages aligns them with Jen and Eric’s quest for truth and love. Narrative metalepsis in S., then, serves to implicate several perspectives, including the actual reader’s, in processes of social involvement via the physical interaction with texts and objects. As such, S. invites, in exemplary fashion, the sort of actively engaged reading characteristic of contemporary multimodal metafiction which uses the kinds of interactional metalepses usually associated, in Alice Bell’s logic, with digital fiction. This type of reading also, and essentially, invokes sociality: as Sara Tanderup puts it, in S., “[r]eading is described as a process of actively working through the text, decoding footnotes, collecting fragments, and interpreting data, if possible collectively” (2017: 164). This becomes even more evident in the extended life of S. on websites, social media, and book blogs prior to and in the immediate aftermath of its publication (cf. ibid.: 165-168). Finally, S. not only foregrounds reading as crucial for the making of identity and community, but also asks what kinds of reading - ‘paranoid’ or ‘reparative’ - might be either more or less conducive to the work of connection. In one sense, S. is all about reading as a quest to uncover mysteries and “to fill the gaps” (Abrams & Dorst 2013: xiii), as F. X. Caldeira/ Filomela puts it in her foreword. This quest, as a shared endeavour, leads to strong affective bonds between the characters involved, within and across diegetic levels. The novel Ship of Theseus is concerned with the bonds provided by a secretive mission against a common political enemy. Jen and Eric bond over the obsessive search for the true identity of the author V. M. Straka, trying to “figur[e] out the authorship q[uestion]” Gero Bauer 74 (ibid.: 19) and to decipher the ‘code’ Filomela has worked into her footnotes for Straka (and Jen and Eric, and the reader of S.) to find. Readers of S., finally, are, as outlined above, implicated in these riddle-solving reading projects, either as they imaginatively join Jen and Eric via the interpellative power of the book’s multimodal features, or as they literally become part of an online community of readers - with or without the additional incentive of engaging with websites that have continued the story, or purchasing a ‘reading group kit’ which the publisher released in 2014, medial extensions which make S., for Sara Tanderup, “a product of contemporary convergence culture” (2017: 169). The book thus puts ‘paranoid’ reading centre stage - in fact, the novel constructs both the character ‘S’ in Ship of Theseus and Jen and Eric as paranoid subjects in more than one way (cf. e.g. Abrams & Dorst 2013: 37, 70, 90, 202, 230, 320). The actual reader, in turn, can connect with other readers of S. to solve more puzzles, which originally even extended beyond the book into blogs and social media. At the same time, this paranoid energy is counterbalanced by characters who disentangle the social and connective potential of reading from the characters’ (and the ‘real’ readers’) tendency towards reading for closure. In Filomela’s letter to Jen and Eric, which is the last object the reader finds in the book, she suggests that not every question must be answered. Matters of the past may be allowed to remain in the past; matters of the present and future may be allowed to go unexplored. The world will not end in any case. I will tell you what matters most […]: it is love. (416-417) Throughout the novel, in fact, the characters’ readerly obsession with solving puzzles, finding ‘true’ identities, and getting to the bottom of various mysteries is repeatedly interrogated by an undertone of ‘reparative’ readerly positions. As Eric wonders, for example, “[m]aybe you don’t solve the BIG MYSTERY, but you find smaller truths” (ibid.: 200, original emphasis); or, as the character ‘S’ in Ship of Theseus, realizes, “[t]he mystery no longer moves him. […] He can see the stars; he no longer has a need for the constellations” (ibid.: 394, 395); and on the book’s very last page, Jen ends the handwritten part with the words: “[h]ey, put the book down. Come in here + stay” (ibid.: 457). There are, then, S. seems to suggest, limits to the connective work that the shared search for hidden meaning and a shared enthusiasm for reading can do. Both Cloud Atlas and S., through the use of multimodal elements and narrative metalepsis, appear as intriguing arguments for the way the reading of fiction has connective potential across different ontological realms, and for the way it involves the virtual exchange of words just as much as actions in the ‘real world’. As these texts (and book objects) illustrate, contemporary literature has found (and will most likely continue to find) creative ways of engaging with the status of literature and of reading literature Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction 75 in the twenty-first century without either opting monolithically for a nostalgic commitment to the ‘good old times’ before the advent of the digital or subscribing fully to the disembodied affordances of the digital sphere. 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