LIMITE unbound: François Bon’s digitalized fiction and the reinvention of the book

Abstract

Since 2005, François Bon, who began his literary career in the 1980s as a novelist, has gradually shifted the focus of his work onto his now all-encompassing web-based literary and multimedia oeuvre, tierslivre.net. As part of this transition from paper to web, Bon returned to his printed books to showcase them digitally. Most notably, in 2010 he undertook to retype his second novel, Limite (1985), to publish it in the form of a blog, prefacing each passage with an autobiographical and critical commentary. Once completed, he reedited the full commented text as an e-book. This article argues that even though all three versions have the same narrative at their core, each stage of this project offers something different to the reader and suggests a different focus and conception of literature. Together they illustrate that the shifts between media change the reading experience even without exploiting much of the potential for hyperlinking and interactivity, and that before and beyond all the possible narrative experiments it enables, the digital transition means for literature a move away from the logic of the book towards the 'logic of the project'.

The Novel in French and the Internet

“…More than just a new edition, the blog, e-book and POD question the limits and identity of the novel in the digital age, drawing attention to the fact that forms and works no longer need to be fixed and definitive, and any closure might only be temporary, if not illusory. 27 Like Bon and Chevillard in their own ways, Renaud Camus uses the web to question the novel as a form and dominant mode of discourse. His Vaisseaux brûlés ('Burned boats', ***) 28 continues the book titled P.A.…”

Enregistrer le réel

“…Enregistrer le réel et vice versa, la reprise des livres en blog (Bonnet 2014 ;Fülöp 2016), la conjonction de l'usage de la photographie numérique et de l'écriture (Bonnet 2012 ;Méaux 2010), l'autoédition et l'impression à la demande (Bon 2016c). Tout en modifiant chaque fois ses pratiques d'écriture, ces explorations restaient toutefois dominées par la textualité.…”