View of Norman M. Klein & Margo Bistis, The Imaginary 20th Century

IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.3 (2016) 117

Norman M. Klein & Margo Bistis, The Imaginary 20

Century

Jan Baetens

Urban and media historian but also novelist, Norman M. Klein has been a pioneering voice in the progressive disclosure of the mutual shaping and reshaping of storytelling in print and the narrative possibilities of the internet. His database novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (2002) has been a key moment in the recent history of digital narrative for a very wide audience (a presentation of this DVD-ROM can be found on here: https://vimeo.com/109082263) and his other productions have always been keen to defend new media research targeting a broader audience. A faculty member of calarts as well as a frequent collaborator of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, his multimedia and cross-genre work ranges among the most important contributions in the field. His most recent production, The Imaginary 20th _{Century, a work made in creative}

complicity with cultural historian and curator Margo Bistis, is both a deepening of previous experiments and the result of new reflections on forms and formats of storytelling in the digital age.

The Imaginary 20th _{Century is a two-sided project. On the one hand it is, basically speaking, a book, but}

this book does not just contain a novel, the life story of a woman named Carrie and the network or meshwork of relationships between a heroin and a historical period that help tell the story of the twentieth century in more than just one way (hence the reliance on the basic claim that “the future can only be told in reverse”). In fact, the novel told in The Imaginary 20th _{Century resembles more an encyclopedia or if one prepares a creatively}

treated archive: not just one storyline but four storylines, not just fiction but enhanced fiction, that is fiction completed with substantial visual counterparts as well as faction, often of a very self-reflective type (Klein and Bistis play ball with the reader and viewers, explaining her the ambition, the context and the procedures of the novel). From that point of view, The Imaginary 20th _{Century could be approached as a contemporary version}

of the classic “great American novel”, seen from a more global perspective and including a large number of paratextual and metatextual material. It should be stressed however that this enrichment of the stuff the book is made of does not kill or hamper the novelistic impulse: Klein is an avid storyteller and the picaresque thread that he is using to unfold the verbo-visual archive provides him with the perfect tool of narrating a story that can be broken up into many pieces while never becoming a pure addition of shattered fragments. Klein is a great storyteller and the achievement of his work does not only depend on the reader’s amazement (hence the idea of “Wunder”, that Renaissance mix of astonishment and admiration we find at the heart of the Wunderkammer aesthetic of this novel) but also on his capacity of striking the right balance between surprise and suspense. And since the life story of the heroin is the flip side of a larger history, that of the ‘Los Angeles oligarchs’ who made the history of the 20th _{Century, the novel also carries a strong critical and political commitment that sets}

it apart from the entertainment culture that was further institutionalized in these years.

Yet the book, here, is only half of the story, since the work in print has a companion, an online tale Norman M. Klein & Margo Bistis

The Imaginary 20th _Century

Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2016, 240 p., b/w & color ill.

IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.3 (2016) 118

interactive archive of more than 2.000 images, made available to all those who purchase the book. It is important to stress that the relationship between print and screen does not entail any hierarchy. The online archive is not simply the database that contains the source material of the subsequent book. And the book is not the primitive version of a more complex work that digitally remediates the work in print. Both realizations can be read and enjoyed separately (in this regard it is a pleasure to underline that the audio files that accompany the visual online archive have the same narrative qualities as the book, whose storyline is maintained in such a way that the online reader and viewer is never lost any kind of digital translation whatsoever). The images do not ‘illustrate’ the text, they extend it with other means. In a similar vein, the texts do not add narrative or nonnarrative captions to the images, they offer possible interpretations via specific combinations and recombinations of the often astonishing visual material. And both texts and images succeed in offering fictional (or semi-fictional) worlds that are at the same time perfectly closed and totally open to further expansions.

From a purely technical point of view, The Imaginary 20th _{Century may not present a dramatically}

revolutionary step in the development of storytelling in print and digital form. Klein and Bistis offer the reader a very didactic and highly readable take on history and the way in which literature makes sense of something whose internal logical, if there is any, may remain totally hidden to us. Yet such a reading would misinterpret what is really at stake in this work. The Imaginary 20th _{Century is in the very first place a springboard in the}

history of the combination of print and online storytelling. It brings together some major achievements of what is possible online, and only online, while not being afraid of leaping into the history of the novel in order to revisit the heritage of the picaresque novel. Corollarily, it demonstrates the added value of combining media in modern storytelling in a nonexclusive way. A crucial statement in a period where so many writers, including very young ones, are emphasizing the charms and opportunities of print culture.

Jan Baetens is editor in chief of Image (&) Narrative.