With such a title, it’s easy to expect a lot from this text (on the other hand, it’s also easy to be disappointed, and let’s face it, the second hand is far more probable). But disappointments aside, once you’ve read the text (and regardless of whether you understood, you think you understood, you understood only partially, you understood something -but that something has nothing to do with what you read-, and whatever other possibilities you can imagine) and you’re faced with the task of writing something about it, anything. That is when fun things start to happen (hence the subtitle and the story that follows).

As I read and read and read and re-read some more, to see if I was missing something, I kept wondering: perhaps I got it all wrong (it’s rather likely, but nonetheless, I’ll carry on), perhaps Derrida is deliberately going round and round this subject, stopping here to turn there, to jump somewhere else, to go back once more to where he started from, going on and on about the book to come with one clear goal in mind: making some time for the book to come to actually arrive!
Ding-dong.
“Who is it?”
“It’s the book to come!”
“Say what!”
“I think you’ve been expecting me.”
Derrida opens the door, and takes a good look at it.
“You’re not the book to come, go away!”
“Now wait a minute…”
“What?”
“Why do you say I’m not the book to come?”
“Well, duh… You’re here.”
“So…”
“Well, if you were the book to come you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”
The book to come hesitates.
“I took a cab!”
“And…”
“The driver knew all the shortcuts to avoid traffic, that’s why I’m a bit early, you see.”
“Impossible!”
“Unlikely yes, but not impossible.”
“No, what I mean is that it’s simply impossible for you to be the book to come for the reason I’ve already mentioned.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I know these things, now go away, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Wait a minute, I’ve traveled from miles and miles just to be here, the least you could do is offer me a drink!”
Derrida agrees and the book to come finds its way into a comfortable chair in the living room. Where the argument resumes.
“Why do you keep saying that I’m not the book to come? To tell you the truth I find it a bit insulting, after all, how would you like it if I told you you were someone else, eh?
“Who would I be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now, come on, tell me!”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Of course it matters, everything matters!”
“Okay, you’re Marilyn Monroe.”
“I don’t look anything like Marilyn Monroe!”
“I know you don’t, it was just an example. I’m sure with a few more of these -he says, signaling to the drink he’s having- you could.”
“After that comment, believe me, there will be no more of those.”
An awkward silence follows.
“Let’s assume for a moment that you were the book to come, although I don’ believe you are, not even for one minute, but in case you were, tell me something about yourself.”
“I can’t, you have to read me.”
“And how do you suppose I would do that?”
“You don’t know?”
“Well I…”
“Oh, what a waste of my time! To come here from so far away, thinking you would be able to read me.”
“I would be able to read you if you tell me how, even tough if I could read you, I still wouldn’t believe you are the book to come.”
“Maybe you don’t know how to read me because you’re not prepared to do so, which would prove I am the book to come!”
“Okay, you leave me no other choice. I didn’t want to tell you this, but there’s another reason why you can’t be the book to come.”
“What?”
“There’s no such thing as the book to come.”
“Oh, I feel a little lightheaded, I think I’m going to faint.”
“Be careful, don’t let go of the glass! You’ll ruin the carpet!”
“Who cares about your stupid carpet? What do you mean there’s no such thing as… me!”
“Well it’s not just you, it’s this whole thing… what should I call it? This strange institution called literature, hey that sounds catchy!”
“I’d like to put you in an institution.”
“What?”
“Nothing, go on.”
“As I was saying, this thing we like to call literature, well, we’ve been studying it for so long, ever since it was invented. We’ve studied its history…”
“So…”
“Well, its history is constructed like the ruin of a monument which basically never existed. It’s the history of a ruin, the narrative of a memory which produces the event to be told and which will never have been present.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea what it means, but it sounds great doesn’t it? Hey, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving!”
“Wait, you can’t leave, I’ve got more of this stuff: the book contains what it can’t contain! Literature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere! Wait, don’t go!”
But it’s too late. The book to come has left the building!

I recognize that what I’ve written has nothing to do with the aims of the class, but in my defense, it’s the best I could come up with. So please forget everything you’ve read and do find it in your hearts to forgive me.

He combines this with the function of a library, a location where we place books (traditionally, and correspondent with the Greek bibliotheke, a book case), which doesn’t have to be a library in the way that we think of one now. The library found at Qumran was a bunch of scrolls placed in large jars in a cave, so we know it wasn’t anything like today’s libraries, nor will it be necessarily so in the future. As Derrida points out, the library becomes a space “for work and reading and writing that was governed or dominated by texts no longer corresponding to the book form: electronic texts with no paper support…”

So the book to come, how it is interpreted, read and understood could be something very different from what we know. Derrida seems preoccupied with the shift that occurs with time, text and technology and how it affects us, perhaps moreso how we define anything. I read that Derrida once said that there is no “transcendental significant”, that each of us determines significance by a self-referential system. I think that in light of this, The Book to Come was a little easier to read.

“The Book to Come” is asking “what is a book?” The book as a concept and not as a physical object. We shouldn’t associate the book with writing, as an interactive medium (pg6 in Paper Machine). Ultimately getting to the main thesis that the concept of the book is not being replaced. Could almost say that it’s being remediated, but I don’t know how Derrida likes Bolter and Grusin. That’s about the jist of what I can figure out and what I remember from last semester reading these articles. What I like is that Derrida is honest about his thesis about the book concept as not changing. We’re living in a time where people are attempting to redefine what the book is. And we’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle. While the physical medium of the book may be changing, the theory of the book will remain the same. Derrida’s words refocus the issue into the right direction. Again, I get lost in his writing really fast, but when I finally understand the thesis, it makes a lot of sense.

*calling this the random post since I don’t know what to focus on*

“In the content of literary texts, there are always philosophical theses.” [page 9].

“Nothing is ever homogenous.” [page 11]

“A counter-institutional institution can be both subversive and conservative.” [page 14]

“…This is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very close: but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard.” [page 15].

i picked these other four excerpts as points that peeved me. I tried to gather where I was being taken. Was I to believe that Derrida considered all ideas and texts to be “incomplete”, in that they could not contain all necessary data to form a complete literary work? He believes in a “wholeness”, but that wholeness must contain all that is whole and that which is void. He wrote that literary texts always contain philosophical theses, but he also said that nothing is ever homogenous. To which leads, that not all works are homogenous, because not all literary contain philosophical thesis, as we are to believe Lolita has no philosophical theses. Which goes to the idea that all things are relative to their contexts. It could be easy to say. “Everything is nothing”…so long as the context is that the word, everything, has not, a definite definition.

I would like to know more about what the deconstructionist theory is all about. I’d also like to explore more of Derrida’s duality in how he sets up his arguments. (See Becky’s post, above. Thanks for noting all of these, Becky!)
One take-away I did manage to grasp occurs on page 69 – where Derrida the concept of singularity. He states that, “the Romeo and Juliet which bears Shakespeare’s signature, takes place only once.” Again, I balk at actually stating a groundbreaking set of new thoughts here. But I’ll give it a go nonetheless. Does Derrida mean that once the play is written (as in Shakespeare’s own ink) that the play is never the same, never in its ideal form? That is actually and only occurs in this “single, first and last time?” I don’t quite fully grasp this concept. Furthermore, what is it, exactly, that constitutes my countersigning response? I understand it as my reproduction or derivative work of his piece. But does that include my comments about it in passing conversation (or my blogging about it, and dare we call this literature)?

In this article, Derrida questions the status of the book and what will become of it in the coming years. Will it evolve? will it go extinct? will it conform? will it completely transform? The article kind of gave me an idea of what he was trying to explain. For example, Amazon.com is selling a computer notepad where you can download and read all forms of “literature”. The Kindle, as it is called, makes reading text more convenient and transportable.Now, the question is: Are the stories downloaded onto the Kindle considered “books” or just digital information? We have always considered books of having tactile properties such as covers and pages to flip through but if it is converted into data information will the identity change as well? The story hasn’t changed just the means of reading it. If Derrida knew about the Kindle,he
might reference this particular article. The identity of the book might evidently change structurally to conform with new modes but the idealogy of the book will never cease to exist.

I would definetly recommend Professor Nadin’s Civilization of Illiteracy as an alternate source of reading. Because of his studies in semiotics, it is possible that books might alter to this course as well.

Here is a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pa1pS7ert8&feature=related

Like several who posted before me, I found Derrida to be quite a bit overwhelming. I can’t say that I understood much of anything in this reading, but it definitely made me question my own idea of what literature is and isn’t.

What I found most intriguing, though, was a passage near the end of “The Strange Institution Called Literature.” In it, Derrida says, “By definition the reader does not exist….The dream we were talking about concerns what it is in the work which produces its reader, a reader who doesn’t yet exist, whose competence cannot be identified, a reader who would be ‘formed,’ ‘trained,’ instructed, constructed, even engendered, let’s say invented by the work.”

This idea that the reader doesn’t exist seems to be both extremely insightful and painfully naïve.

Insightful because authors never really know exactly who they’re writing for. As a reporter, I never knew exactly who would read my work, so everything had to be extremely generic and clear enough for someone who read on a seventh to eighth-grade level to comprehend.

At the same time, though, I had a general idea of who my audience was and what I could and couldn’t get away with in terms of linguistic style. I knew that a large chunk of my readership was educated and lived a middle-class or better lifestyle. I knew that some topics would be ignored, while others would be e-mailed between friends for weeks on end.

That’s where I think that Derrida is naïve. Most successful writers have at least some sense of the type of person most likely to pick up their work. They may not be able to come up with a definitive list of names of readers, but they know enough about their audience to ascertain what they will and won’t overlook.

Again, I could be completely misreading Derrida’s statement, but I think it’s a stretch to say that readers don’t exist before a work is completed. After all, who wants to write something that nobody will ever read?

The same goes for the Jackie D’s (thank you Jaime!) thoughts on the book. Are the hundreds of objects on my shelves books? They are paper bound in embossed covers, newsprint bound in glue and paper backing and random diaries, but according to JD they aren’t really books because we can’t limit the definition of a book to the presentation anymore. So all of the e-books I’ve downloaded are books. Or maybe they aren’t books because they are on the screen. Wait, that goes back to delivery method. As Charlie Brown would say, “Arrrrrrgh!”

What the combination of this week’s texts comes down to, at least for me, is Derrida’s frustration with the language of our time. He saw objects out-evolve their descriptors to the point their descriptors no longer descried them. (There’s that spiral again.) But what I didn’t see in either article (and this, I guess, is my frustration) is him acknowledge the human ability to accept a descriptor as able to grow and encompass evolutionary offshoots of an original item. It seems to me Derrida tears language down to the point that it no longer has any meaning. The sign/signifier/signified issues are complex, but after reading this week’s texts they should no longer have value. From what I’ve gathered, we have no valid way to use our language to describe our world. We just mumble incoherently about things that don’t, or shouldn’t, exist. There must be a huge field of noise between his sending the message, whatever it is, and my receiving it. What did I miss?

“Books,” literature, and each literary event, have ancestors and descendants. Are electronic hypertexts and video games then, as iterations of the “book to come,” descendents of the novel, especially hypertextual novels such as “Lolita” and others we’ve discussed in class, just as these hypertexts in codex form and even the traditional hard-bound novel are the antecedents or ancestors of electronic hypertexts and video games? Dave suggested last week that these digital narratives are the novel of the 20th and 21st centuries in that they caused “a similar media frenzy that we could equate to what video games go through now.” Do the interactive learning or teaching games geared for children reflect or parallel the early idea that the novel had to be used a tool for moral instruction in order to be accepted and legitimated? If so, then electronic hypertexts and video games are simply another kind of “book” that inhabit a new literary space within the institution of literature. And, if this is the case, then wouldn’t it be reasonable and appropriate to judge them by the rules of and hold them accountable to the standards and conventions—in modified form, reflecting the new narratives—of the institution of literature?