Experiments with the Page

The page announcing itself

A writer calling attention to the page is like a dramatist pointing out the stage or an artist highlighting the canvas: suspension of disbelief is broken; the convention in the arts of ignoring the vehicle which carries the artwork is shattered. Unconventional writers (and dramatists and artists) in the 20th century often enjoyed the frisson of breaking the spell under which reading/viewing took place: it made their writing iconoclastic. By foregrounding the page, writers attacked/questioned/investigated venerated literary institutions in radical ways that disrupted old myths about what reading entailed, especially its ways of representing reality. But also, as William H. Gass pointed out, foregrounding the page called attention to ‘another kind of muse, the material character of the book itself’ (Gass, 2008). In saying this, Gass refused to put a negative spin on the concept that the page might come into view rather than remain invisible. He saw the space of the page to be also like the space of the theatre stage or the canvas – a multimodal site where more drama, movement and spectacle could be portrayed than was possible with text alone.

The breaking of the spell of suspension of disbelief is the cardinal sin in the conventional monomodal way of reading. This has been true of the arts post-Caxton in the Age of Printing, when text parted company with the visual. Monomodal reading is deeply invested in the concept that ink, typeface, words and page must disappear. (Similarly, monomodal viewing in the visual arts depends on paint, brushstrokes, canvas, pixels and screen disappearing too.) But for multimodal reading, the case is different. The page or screen is the admitted ground where the meeting of input modes occurs, where negotiation of meaning takes place.