Painstakingly copied from https://www.ceros.com/blog/meta-narrative/
Written by Simon Martin, Design by Martin Flores
It’s a moment that can take you by surprise in the right setting. You're strolling through the park, and there, on a bench, is a lonely stray book. Your curiosity gets the better of you, so you wander over to see which book—of the many thousands in the world—has captured your attention in this moment. Why this book? Why today?
It's something most of us have experienced.
But what if that lost book on the park bench contained not only the words of the published text, but also an entire conversation, darting back and forth in the margins? A story within a story, so to speak… a story that you could perhaps become a part of, if you dared peel back the first page.
This is the premise behind ‘S.’, an example of experimental, interactive literature from the mind of J.J. Abrams. It offers a reading experience—in what has been called “a love letter to the written word”—like no other.
The idea came to me when I was at the airport. I saw a paperback novel sitting on a bench, and I went to pick it up. Inside, someone had written, in pen, “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find it,” explained Abrams, in a 2013 New Yorker interview.
“It made me smile, this optimistic, romantic idea that you could leave a book with a message for someone. It reminded me of being in college, and seeing the notes that people would leave in the margins of the books they’d checked out of the library.”
With the help of creative writing mastermind and novelist Doug Dorst, Abrams built on the romantic idea of the found object as a storytelling device. He constructed, from the ground up, a meta-narrative, centered upon a novel titled Ship of Theseus, written by fictitious author V.M. Straka, in 1949.
The work is presented to the reader as an old library book, masterfully faded to appear aged and worn, with scuffed outer edges, and return dates stamped inside its back cover. Ship of Theseus tells the story of a man with no memory, who is shanghaied onto a strange pirate ship. The multidimensional ‘S.’ experience, however, goes far beyond Straka's tale. In the first few pages of the book, the reader is introduced to another story—one that unfolds in the margins, through various handwriting styles and colored inks. This is the story of Jen, a college senior, and Eric, a grad. student, told through their 'conversation', as they pass the book back and forth via their college library, hoping to solve a multi-layered mystery that the reader soon becomes a part of.
This is a J.J. Abrams project, so there is no single solution, and what might first seem like an answer merely serves as a portal into an entirely new set of unexpected questions. To add to the depth of narrative, other ‘found’ objects, such as handwritten letters, postcards, and maps, are strewn throughout the pages. Readers cannot help but feel that they have indeed found this book on a park bench, and have been drawn in to help unravel the mystery. They have become part of the immersive ‘S.’ experience.
For a better understanding of how Abrams and Dorst conceived this epic meta-narrative, it helps to know more about the creative process that Abrams follows time and time again: it begins with a concept he calls ‘The Mystery Box’.
Abrams is probably best known as the creator of the hit television show Lost, and director of such films as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Trek, and Super 8.
He’s no stranger to mysterious and complicated plots—planned from the very beginning, and designed from the ground up, to keep viewers guessing.
Abram’s own fascination with mystery and, to be more specific, with the concept of infinite possibility, goes back to his childhood. His grandfather owned an electronics store, and would regularly take radios and telephones apart to show the young Abrams how they worked. In many ways, the unlocking of seemingly simple objects to reveal complicated circuitry and engineering details became a metaphor for Abrams' later understanding of storytelling and narrative structure.
Years later, as a teenager living in New York City, Abrams had a particular fascination with magic. A visit to Tannen's Magic, Lou Tannen's famous magic store, changed the trajectory of his life and molded him into one of the most celebrated storytellers of our time. He spent $15 on ‘Tannen’s Mystery Box’, which was said to contain $50 worth of magic tricks, although the buyer would not know beforehand which tricks were included.
Abrams had been collecting magic tricks and had bought the box with the goal of adding new tricks to his collection. Soon after purchasing, however, he realized the mystery element of not knowing which tricks were in the box was more entertaining than discovering exactly what they were. It reinforced his passion for celebrating the sense of infinite possibility that his grandfather had ingrained in him at such an early age.
The concept of ‘The Mystery Box’ still serves as his inspiration as he approaches storytelling and narrative structures. He aims for structures that go above and beyond what’s been done before—multi-dimensional structures, like the meta-narrative in ‘S.’.
“It represents hope. It represents potential,” explains Abrams.
“And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most groundbreaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge, I started getting interested in this.”
It’s no surprise there were so many fan theories for Abrams’s TV show Lost—a powerful catalyst for the imagination. Abrams had essentially constructed a giant 'Mystery Box', in which he, and the rest of the show’s writers, could play. In the multi-layered ‘S.’ experience, he created a similar playground for Dorst. “I wrote Ship of Theseus first, all the way through—everyone agreed that it really had to be able to stand on its own—and then I layered in the marginal notes,” says Dorst, explaining how he worked with Abrams to develop the story.
“A lot of it was trial and error. But I’m a writer; I like making stuff up. This was, basically, an infinite sandbox of joy and fun. There was really no end to the world-building, the history-shaping that could be done, especially since J.J. and Lindsey (J.J.’s assistant) were really encouraging every ludicrous impulse I had to make things bigger and more complex. At any given moment, I’m asking myself, ‘Why stop?’”
The finished product is a celebration of the analog object, in a world that is increasingly more digital. It is so big, so immersive, and so complex, that most readers have to read its 456 pages three or four times, just to make sense of the multiple storylines. After that, there's an entirely new challenge: deciphering the numerous codes and puzzles that make up the rest of the multidimensional mystery experience.
Many of those who have read ‘S.’ claim that the most logical way to read the book is in multiple stages, taking one chronological storyline at a time, starting with ‘Ship of Theseus’.
Written by fictitious author V.M. Straka in 1949, Ship of Theseus is the only physical book in the ‘S.’ experience. Abrams and Dorst designed it to look like a faded and heavily used library book, and paid special attention to ensuring that the book also felt old and worn-in for readers—a key element that adds greatly to the 'found object' concept.
Ship of Theseus tells the story of a sailor shanghaied at sea, but the ink and pencil notes in the margins tell an entirely different story. Readers experience the conversation between students Jen and Eric, as they exchange notes in the margins, where even the ink colors change, to reflect different moments over time. It all adds to the depth of the meta-narrative at the heart of the ‘S.’ experience.
In an effort to decipher the mystery that is unfolding, the two leave additional items with their margin notes—a number of hand drawn elements, newspaper clippings, photographs, and postcards.
Although the foundation is laid in the first few pages of ‘Ship of Theseus’, the marginalia and the various inserts are essential to the entirety of the ‘S.’ experience.
Without giving away too much of the mystery, many who have been avid readers for their entire lives have called ‘S.’ one of the best books they’ve ever read. Some hardcore readers, in fact, have gone so far as to say that they “haven’t been this excited about reading a book since (they) were a kid.”
And it’s easy to see why.
Simply put, there’s just nothing else like it.
The best books of our time are all manufactured as ‘new’, yet the physical representation of ‘S.’—to say nothing of the expansive number of found objects that fill its pages—pulls readers into the story, as involved characters, even before they’ve cracked the book open to page one. Through its complex storytelling and deep interactivity, ‘S.’ feels more like a modern video game than a printed book.
The irony, of course, is that a book like this would have been nearly impossible to produce on a mass level, even less than a decade ago. The faded pages, inserts, bruised corners, and other fine details that elevate the ‘S.’ experience into a genuine 'found object' experience would not have been possible without the very computers it seeks to pull us from.
And in the ever-expanding digital world, experiences like ‘S.’— a meta-narrative told through the printed page, and itself on the cutting edge of technology—will help define how we create immersive and interactive experiments without the need to ‘plug in’.
And who wouldn’t want that?
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