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Book Remixing

Chris Flynn October 09

The introduction to Tobias Wolff’s 2008 short story collection, Our Story Begins, which contains ten of his previously un-anthologised stories and twenty-one of his classics, contains a statement from the author that I found alarming. In it he claims that the publication of this new collection was the perfect opportunity for him to tinker with the stories all over again—to rewrite sections and sentences in order to make them better, because even after all those years he still wasn’t quite satisfied with them. We’re talking about some seminal moments in 20th Century American literature here—‘Bullet in the Brain’ has to be one of the greatest short stories ever written, and yet Wolff was ready to dive back in and tweak them to ostensibly create new versions.

‘Remixing’ of this nature has been going on for centuries, in the form of different editions of books being released—many classics are abridged to suit younger audiences or publishing needs – but it is a wonder such a practice is not more widespread in the modern era. China Miéville has just ruffled a few literary feathers with a speech on this topic given at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Miéville puts forward the proposal that books will follow the same route as music, in that texts will be chopped, changed and ‘remixed’ by readers and editors working online, to create new versions of narratives, much in the way songs are by GarageBand experts around the globe. Check out a site like SoundCloud for often superb remixes of tracks – to launch their last album Swim, Canadian band Caribou held a competition in which they made tracks available to fans for free so they could be remixed. The result was several new albums worth of reinterpreted songs.

Miéville proposes that ‘guerilla editors’ might do exactly the same thing with books, that there will be, “a blurring of boundaries between writers, books and readers, self-publishing, the fanfication of fiction.” It’s an interesting idea and will undoubtedly be something that happens whether anyone likes it or not (remember, 50 Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fan fiction). What remains to be seen is how much control writers and publishers will have over their texts, which Miéville seems to believe will be available for free to plunder on the Internet, despite any anti-piracy steps publishers might take. Given the precedent set in the music and film industries, one has to wonder exactly what publishing houses will be able to do to prevent such a scenario.

Writers do occasionally take it upon themselves to present alternative versions, and not just by indulging in a sneaky rewrite like Wolff. Dave Eggers all conquering debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was released in 2000 but later printings of the book included an enormous addendum entitled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making. This included alterations to the main text and tips on how better to enjoy reading it by skipping certain boring sections.

A new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms has also just been released, in consultation with the Hemingway estate. This contains the forty-seven alternative endings Hemingway wrote, kept until now in the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The ending (spoiler alert) was already bleak but here are a few of the new versions, remixed by Papa himself:

The Nada Ending: That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.

The Fitzgerald Ending (suggested by F. Scott Fitzgerald): The world breaks everyone. Those it does not break it kills. It kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

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