From Reading to Deleting: Erasure and Temporality in Digital Literature

Abstract

Textual operations of erasure were widely used in avant-garde print literature in the 20th and the 21st centuries, spurring reflections on how meaning emerges from the dialectics between imprinting and suppressing signs from a page. In most of those works, the model reader was conceived as a discursive entity subsequent to the time of the utterance whereby the textual materiality would be erased, so he should only read a product that was previously erased, cut or scratched. On the other hand, due to interactive resources, some works from digital literature engender new temporalities in the dynamics of erasing-writing, especially instantiating the reader as a contemporary of (and responsible for) those operations that alter the body of the text. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of two digital literature works – Petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction, by Philippe Bootz (2005), and Degenerative, by Eugenio Tisselli (2005) – under the light of French post-structuralist theories about the relation between writing and erasing. In that perspective, we herein investigate how different deletion operations within digital literature create a topological fold in which the reader is always sent back to the present time – or to some present time – of the crime against the text, thus entailing and erasure that paradoxically destroys textuality, but builds the reading.