Reading for connection: Fictional reading communities in contemporary multimodal metafiction

<jo:p>This article’s aim is to bring discussion of a recent emergence of ‘bookishness’ in the digital age into conversation with debates about the changed and changing status of reading for and in contemporary multimodal metafiction. It inquires into social reading as a cultural practice and the reader as a cultural figure as they are represented in contemporary multimodal metafiction, arguing that, in many cases, these works revolve around the act of reading as an ambivalent social activity. To demonstrate this point, I focus on two popular examples of twenty-first-century multimodal metafiction: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Both novels share a thematic and structural concern with storytelling and reading as fundamental for the making of identity; both imply the actual reader in their performative creation of a ‘bookish’ reading community; and both contrast different kinds of reading as either more or less beneficial for the creation and maintenance of social bonds. I contend that Cloud Atlas and S., while not digital texts as such, gesture towards the functions of literature in the context of digital technologies: through their multimodal setups, they make extensive use of narrative metalepses to enrich the immersive reading experience and make a point about the social and connective nature of reading. They also exemplify a tendency in contemporary fiction to make performative arguments for the value of reading as a social activity by consciously suspending it between embodiment and virtuality, the material and the digital, and by involving the reader, via multimodal elements and challenges, as a participant in the act of reading across ontological boundaries and the making of meaning and community.</jo:p>