dematerialisation in literature

sufi

lala
didnt someone say that books need to be set before 1986 to avoid becoming instantly dated by rampant tech acceleration, iris murdoch? someone stuffy like that
 

version

Well-known member
I was talking to someone about modern references taking me out of a book the other day. Pynchon's latest was set in 2001 and had references to Pokemon, Metal Gear Solid and Rachel from Friends. It feels like it's not a 'real' book or something.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I reckon you have to do something only a book can do but which taps into what the internet does and is. The advantage a book has, imo, is it forces you to work with it. You can read things online which require a similar commitment but the other media on there are constantly nagging at you in a way that's a few steps removed when you're reading a book.
Good answer but wouldn't that be doing something slightly different from just simulating the internet? Or maybe that's a facile comment cos obviously a book wouldn't actually literally try to be the internet obviously so what I said before had to allow some wiggle room.
 

woops

is not like other people
it just seems like pure tokenism. there was a real meaning to this thread title. i'm not just trying to get at experiments and mentions of the internet in literature. has the novel played itself out, has it dematerialised into a new form or inexistence, are the limits of experiment reached and what does it leave, iris murdoch's first one under the net is good fun by the way.
 

version

Well-known member
Good answer but wouldn't that be doing something slightly different from just simulating the internet? Or maybe that's a facile comment cos obviously a book wouldn't actually literally try to be the internet obviously so what I said before had to allow some wiggle room.

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. You have to do something other than simulate the internet whilst still engaging with it in some form.
 

version

Well-known member
it just seems like pure tokenism. there was a real meaning to this thread title. i'm not just trying to get at experiments and mentions of the internet in literature. has the novel played itself out, has it dematerialised into a new form or inexistence, are the limits of experiment reached and what does it leave, iris murdoch's first one under the net is good fun by the way.

Perhaps we should outline what 'dematerialisation' means in the context of the novel?
 

woops

is not like other people
I was talking to someone about modern references taking me out of a book the other day. Pynchon's latest was set in 2001 and had references to Pokemon, Metal Gear Solid and Rachel from Friends. It feels like it's not a 'real' book or something.

patronising and dad-like. martin amis was referring to e-mails as "e's" in 2003. past it
 

woops

is not like other people
Gibson's probably the worst for it.

...but was one of the best at it early on - the stuff in Burning Chrome is full of neologisms so perfectly chosen they need no explanation. that confidence is one of the most impressive things about his early writing.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it just seems like pure tokenism. there was a real meaning to this thread title. i'm not just trying to get at experiments and mentions of the internet in literature. has the novel played itself out, has it dematerialised into a new form or inexistence, are the limits of experiment reached and what does it leave, iris murdoch's first one under the net is good fun by the way.
I didn't understand the thread at all, I just took my cues from everyone else... maybe if you had said that comment at the start though...
 

version

Well-known member
I reckon dematerialisation in this context could simply refer to abstracting the form as far as possible without it becoming poetry or some other medium.
 

woops

is not like other people
yeah somewhere in my mind was the death of the novel. has it happened. when. how. what follows or replaces it. does it bear any comparison with the musical dematerialisation referenced elsewhere.

annoyingly there are loads of pesky oddities that go as far back as part 2 of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and what have you that anticipate all this and ruin my thread, but there is a certain acceleration in the 1900s and i'd say a bit of a crisis at the moment - innovation has stalled since those heady modern or post-modern fun times and we've gone back 150 years or so to boring realism for the most part in style and subject. i think.
 

version

Well-known member
How far you can remove it from the physical in terms of content? That does seem like an endpoint to me. There's a quote on the back of my copy of the trilogy which refers to it as a "terminal style" -

"In the trilogy, Beckett is creating his own death in prose, quarrying right down to that subterranean country of his heart. . . . What remains is a terminal vision, a terminal style and, from the point of view of possible development, a work at least as aesthetically terminal as Finnegans Wake."

-- A. Alvarez
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
yeah somewhere in my mind was the death of the novel. has it happened. when. how. what follows or replaces it. does it bear any comparison with the musical dematerialisation referenced elsewhere.

annoyingly there are loads of pesky oddities that go as far back as part 2 of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and what have you that anticipate all this and ruin my thread, but there is a certain acceleration in the 1900s and i'd say a bit of a crisis at the moment - innovation has stalled since those heady modern or post-modern fun times and we've gone back 150 years or so to boring realism for the most part in style and subject. i think.
That's pretty much what Will Self said (repeatedly and at length) while announcing his new book which would change all that. Anyone read it?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I reckon dematerialisation in this context could simply refer to abstracting the form as far as possible without it becoming poetry or some other medium.
So... isn't that another way of saying 'experimental'?
 

woops

is not like other people
well, how far can you get from realism? to extremes like those of joyce and beckett? is there anywhere else to go and still be a novel?

and again it seems to me that the successful experiments of technique are those that serve the character, plot, narrative, missing a few good words there probably, where form ≈ content.

here's EM Forster's list of aspects of the novel, good as any: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm.
 
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