96. Shuffle Literature

Works of shuffle literature are not simply anti-books, nor are they exemplars of or homages to codex books. As they unbind the pages of the stereotypical book, allowing for their rearrangement, they also copy and evoke many of the aspects of the traditional book in a complicated relationship with it. Furthermore, although it is a cliché to imagine shuffling the cards, stacking the deck, or being dealt a certain hand as effecting a fundamental alteration in fate – and the authors of shuffle literature sometimes explicitly reinforce this idea of re-ordering changing the nature of the world or the future – what shuffling actually does in the cases we consider is mainly to rearrange the discourse and model processes of memory, random association, and cognition.

We discuss several shuffle literature works, focusing on five of them. These, formally, consist of text segments that may be read in any order. Materially, they consist of separate sheets, cards, or in one case pamphlets that are presented in some container but are not bound together. Shuffle literature of this sort does not challenge the idea of text that can be read completely; a reader is still supposed to read every word of text, as with a typical book. (This may not happen in either case, but it is the supposition.) These works do, however, either explicitly ask or implicitly invite the reader to shuffle the segments of text into an arbitrary order.

(…)

The works we focus on are:

• Composition no. 1 by Marc Saporta (translated by Richard Howard)
• „Heart Suit“ by Robert Coover
• Sentences by Robert Grenier
• The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson
• Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm by Herta Müller

/ electronic book review

shuffle:

• 7. (die Karten) mischen;

III. v/t.

• 8. hin u. her schieben, fig. a. ,jonglieren mit: shuffle ones feet siehe 5;
• 9. schmuggeln: shuffle away wegpraktizieren;
• 10. shuffle off a) Kleider abstreifen, b) fig. abschüŸtteln, sich befreien von, sich einer Verpflichtung entziehen, Schuld etc. abwäŠlzen (on[to] auf acc.);
• 11. shuffle on Kleider müŸhsam anziehen;
• 12. Karten mischen: shuffle together etwas zs.-werfen, -raffen

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