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from the medium it was conceived in benefit from a move into the electronic medium?
OUT is available at www.altx.com and reading it on-line offers a number of interesting
insights and proves that the novel is still current and relevant.
First of all, it makes a text that was previously only available in the small print run
common for "avant-garde" texts available to a new and wider audience. The postmodem
concept of the avant-garde differs radically from modernism and the other -isms of the
early zoth century (Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism etc.). Ihab Hassan tries to define the
distinction by saying that it is "cooler (in McLuhan's sense of actually inviting
participation), less cliquish, less averse to the pop, electronic society ofwhich it is part.?"
Print can contradict these tendencies, it is not 'pop', it is relative1yexpensive to produce
and distribute and it is not 'cool', it can encourage participation only metaphorically but
not literally; reasons that explain the dissatisfaction with print obvious in many
postmodern novels including OUT. Electronic text on the WWW, on the other hand,
supports these elements: it is easy to produce, easy to distribute and easy to interact with.
It renders "avant-garde" in the traditional, exclusive sense a meaningless concept and
puts in its place avant-pop, a movement ofwhich Sukenick himself says to be one ofthe
inventors and altx is one of the most important collective voices. OUT predates the new
medium and avant-pop but also already anticipates them with its references to popular
culture and pastiche ofstyles and the self-conscious use ofits own medium, which is one
ofthe reasons whyit still works well in its new format.
OUT is an interesting example to contradict the above mentioned dichotomies which
are often build up for print vs screen in both media. In print, most readers, having the
whole text physically present, discover and grasp the underlying typographical principle
almost immediately, an important (non-linear) but often overlooked reading strategy to
make sense of a text as a whole is to flick through the book, to get an idea of its meta­
structure and macro-structure. In the electronic version now available, chapters can be
accessed in any order, but because they are still numbered from 10 down to I, most
readers will access them in what appears to be their "natural" hierarchical order. In
consequence, the gaps in the text, the growing spaces between the paragraphs are
15 Ihab Hassan, ThePostmodem Turn: Essays in Theory and Culture (Ohio State University Press: 1987),
P·9I.
Chapter 6 - page 212