If McCaffery was "quite literally reading a different book from the one most other readers would be reading," it was still a book whose primary narrator is Johnny Truant. Truant's privileged position requires a similar subordination of the potential themes that Pelafina's letters make available, such as family dysfunction. One need only consider the example of her typographically complex letter of January 3, 1988 (p. 627), which forcefully demonstrates that her letters are not direct conveyances of her inner voice and that her character is a figure for the necessary mediation of the voice, the living present, the self-identical self. Because Pelafina simply could not have typeset the complex overlay of the word "forgive" on the typewriter available to her, her letter confronts us with evidence of the irreducibility of mediation: her alleged "direct" expressions are thoroughly mediated and subject to all of the interpretative intrusions that comprise the novel's sustained assault on orthography. The important point here is that any effort to recuperate a level of thematic interpretation falters in the face of the material-epistemological-ontological hurdles the text insistently sets into place everywhere the reader turns.
xvii. This claim forms the basis of my analysis of the digital in New Philosophy for New Media.
xviii. As we shall see shortly, the text asserts the impossibility of being outside all frames—something that would amount, following the governing analogy with the digital, to processing raw digital data directly, without any mediating interface.
xix. As if this were not sufficient to prove the point at hand, the narrative goes on to enumerate various instantiations of the theory of subjective space, including Günter Nitschke's notion of “experienced or concrete space"; Michael Leonard's conception of the "sensation of space' where the final result ‘in the perceptual process is a single sensation—a “feeling" about that particular place ..." (175); Kevin Lynch's concept of the personal basis for the emotional cognition of environment; and Jean Piaget's understanding of the perception of space as “a gradual construction” (177).
xx. See Tabbi (2002) for an interesting account of contemporary fiction in the context of systems theory.
xxi. The term "medial presence" comes from Rick Poyner's review of the novel in Artbyte, as cited in Tabbi (145, note 3).
xxii. Accordingly, information in the technical sense can be defined as a statistical measure of uncertainty equal to the logarithm taken to base 2 of the number of available choices. Thus, if a message can be specified following five binary steps or choices, the statistical measure of uncertainty (or information) can be specified as: C = log2 32 = 5.
NOTES
296