The Analogue Technology of S: Exploring Narrative Form and the Encoded Mystery of the Margin

The 2013 publication of S, J.J. Abrams’ and Doug Dorst’s “love letter to the written word,” represents a particular intervention in the debates surrounding the future of the book and the relationship between analogue and digital publication. In S we see how the analogue nature of this particular book drives much of the narrative structure of the text, indeed the physical presentation of the book informs much of the imaginative contents of the narrative. In this article I would like to consider the theoretic bounds of this novel and its form, from the question of marginal (and fragmented) writing that is evoked in the work of Jacques Derrida, to the importance of the medium and the message that it carries as described by Marshall McLuhan. One could furthermore consider the manner in which S integrates itself into the imagination of the reader both in textual and in literal terms in light of Umberto Eco’s notion of the “open work.