The Affordances of the Electronic Codex

One of the things that interested me most about our readings were the short stories that we were assigned. In both, the books mentioned tested the limits of the affordances of books we had previously discussed while also reinforcing others. Take Ts’ui Pen’s Forking Graden, for example. While the labyrinth is volumetric, it appears to be only sequential as opposed to both sequential and random access. The Book of Sand seems to be both sequential and random access, but surely not finite because the pages multiply and rearrange every time the narrator opens its cover. Of course, neither of these books written about are real books; both exist within the finite boundaries of the short stories in which they were created. This does, however, raise a few observations and questions for me. Borges wrote “The Book of Sand” in 1975, “The Garden of Forking Paths” in 1941. This means that people have been imagining and playing with the notion of books existing beyond their most basic affordances as early as 1941. Borges paints said notion as being a magical, mythical occurrence, but the notion of books existing beyond their covers has become more real than imaginary with the creation of computers and the internet allowing people to expand upon books in a multi-faceted way with the opportunity to encompass more facets than imaginable. Take Queers in Love at the End of the World, for example. If written into a traditional book, the story would only have one ending and one way to get there. Since Anthropy created the story online, however, the story is allowed over one hundred different storylines and even embodies the acute sense of time Forking Paths begins to explore (although in the opposite sense of time limiting what one can glean from a story). The age of electronics has muddled the affordances of the codex we read about from Kirschenbaum, but what are some affordances that technology has served to offer to literature?

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