The not-so-new concept of interactivity

Reading Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls,  the masterpiece of the famed Ukranian writer  (1809 – 1852), I recently realized just how old and how unexplored the concept of interactivity in publishing really is.

Readers of Revolutions in Communication know, for instance, that Elizabeth Eisenstein found instances where  map makers and scientific publishers asked readers with new information to correspond so that updates to gazettes and scientific journals could be incorporated in later editions. And many newspapers were produced with a fourth blank page that could be used to pass along family or community micro-news to other readers.

But I never came across anything quite like Gogol’s concept of interactivity in fiction:

… How excellent it would be if some reader who is sufficiently rich in experience and the knowledge of life to be acquainted with the sort of characters which I have described herein would annotate in detail the book, without missing a single page, and undertake to read it precisely as though, laying pen and paper before him, he were first to peruse a few pages of the work, and then to recall his own life, and the lives of folk with whom he has come in contact, and everything which he has seen with his own eyes or has heard of from others, and to proceed to annotate, in so far as may tally with his own experience or otherwise, what is set forth in the book, and to jot down the whole exactly as it stands pictured to his memory, and, lastly, to send me the jottings as they may issue from his pen, and to continue doing so until he has covered the entire work.

I’m not sure if  anyone actually took Gogol up on his offer. But since he died young, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to take advantage of this idea and put together the meta-novel that he envisioned. But that’s not so hard today.

So imagine a meta-author creating a template and each writer filling in her/his own character descriptions based on their own lives, and doing this in order to have a broader frame of reference and insight into human character.

In a way, this is already taking place on a plot level.  There’s an enormous volume of fan fiction for everything from Star Wars to My Little Pony, and fan writers use known characters to describe novel plots.

What Gogol had in mind was the inverse of this:  writers using known plots to describe characters.  I wonder if it would work.