Because life is so utterly elusive all the way down to the end, you have two basic choices if you want to say anything about it. You can say a lot, too much even, and be satisfied that at least you’ve dumped as much clutter on the matter as you could. Or you can withhold, take little tiny pecks at the thing, and be satisfied that the gaping silences are doing the job. -Morgan Meis

Raymond Carver always made the latter choice. Or so we thought. As I’ve mentioned before, it turns out what we believed to be Carver’s style was actually the combination of Carver’s initial ideas and the ruthless editing of Gordon Lish, who not only cut Carver’s stories by up to 50%, but also often asserted his own style on them in the process.

Now, from this piece in the Times Literary Supplement, we know that certain stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are being rereleased by the author’s spouse in a form closer to Carver’s initial drafts [via]. As someone with a deep attachment to both Carver’s work and his style, my reaction to this careens back and forth between “I must read them now” and “I must pretend these don’t even exist”.

But a discussion of the elusiveness of ‘the real text’ is coming at the right time. Despite all the competing visions of what the electronic book should be, one common hope for the ebook is that it will be adaptable, editable, ‘annotatable’ – a constantly shifting vision, unfinished and forever incomplete. At the same time, this utopian ideal always sounds less appealing when applied to fiction. To pick the extreme example, what if Shakespeare went back and had Hamlet neatly and heroically dispense with Claudius? It wouldn’t simply be different; it would be an entirely different play.

But what is the ground underneath our fear of changing texts? We have this historically groomed affinity for fixed stories, partly, I’d guess, because stories are how me make sense of our lives. Change those stories enough and you’re asking people to make sense of themselves again. Regardless of what you think about the issue, it means the fear is understandable: the ways we understand our lives are at threat of being under constant revision.

But, rather than only talking about significant change to texts – where a character or plot event is radically altered – what Carver’s example shows is that editing can open up space; when things are taken away, we also create the new. Whether you like Carver’s stories after or before the edits, his ‘post-edited’ stories work because of the yawning gaps of possibility and imagination that lies pregnant between the words. What if the adaptable novel or story weren’t about a re-writing of key moments or characters, or about a continual wiki-style augmentation and addition, but a paring down of explication so as to open up imaginative possibilities?

The metaphor always is: a text is never finished, it is always being rewritten every time it is read. What if, like so many things in our connected age, technology made the metaphor manifest? And it did so by paring down texts to open them up to more and more ways of reading. To wit, the less you say, the more your reader can imagine.

Will ongoing editing of fiction work in a manner where certain structural and ‘factual’ elements of a story are generally left intact, but others are tweaked, not to change the story per se, but to open up other possibilities of interpretation? After all, there are many books in which readers ask “well, I wonder if the narrator was actually insane” or “maybe that character was a figment of that other character’s imagination”. What if authors picked up on those re-readings of their work and, rather  than re-imagining and re-writing the stories, made changes in order to re-frame the appeal of certain interpretive frameworks?

What if the emphasis of the electronic book was always to produce more readings by showing less?