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StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Volume 7, Number 1,

Summer 2015, pp. 75-99 (Article)

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Books with Bodies
Narrative Progression in Chris Wares
Building Stories

Torsa Ghosal

On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of

a book that cant forget it has a body.
Jonathan Safran Foer, in an interview by Steven Heller

This epigraph, quoting Foers statement about his Tree

of Codes (2010), voices anxiety concerning the loss of
books corporeality. The massive tide of book digitiza-
tion projects and the surge of audiences who consume
texts on screens of computers, tablets, and smartphones
provide the immediate context for such a statement.1
Indeed, Google Print, now known as Google Books,
when formally launched in 2004, added greater visi-
bility to digitization projects that had been under way
since the 1990s. These databases, hosted digitally, have
since tried to reproduce information previously con-
tained within a physical objectthe book. Despite dis-
senting voices from various quarters, the digitization
projects have only grown in their scope over the years.
However, in the deep time of media, to use the ti-
tle of Siegfried Zielinskis influential media archaeological study (2006),
there is another, deeper implication in Foers statement. Through our
literary and cultural history, the materiality of books was frequent-
ly overlooked even preceding the popularity of digitization. In oth-
er words, books with bodies were ubiquitous in the print culture, and
therefore those bodies rarely received special attention. The bodies of
books remained vehicles for disseminating knowledge but were not un-
derstood as an indispensable part of the content they circulated. Thus,
when contemporary narrative fictions draw attention to the corporeali-
ty of books, they not only respond to the emergence of digital practices
of production and reception but also to the practice of undermining the
extent to which books bodies structured communication through the
first five hundred years of the print culture.2 In fact, digitization proj-
ects frequently borrow visual and terminological properties from physi-
cal book-objects and thereby acknowledge the far-reaching influence of
books in shaping information.3
Affordances and constraints of the books body underlie forms of
narrative fiction. Steve Tomasula observes that the history of the novel
is also the history of information design (2012). Usually, the structure of
the discourse, the sequence in which the narrative is presented in a text,
overlaps with the form of the book; the beginning, middle, and end of
the narrative discourse visually and materially correspond to the begin-
ning, middle, and end of the physical book. This convention, in turn,
influences reading practices. Even as Peter Stallybrass (2002) observes
that the codex replaced the scroll in ancient cultures because the book
form enabled random access, modern readers do not require special
prompts to begin reading a narrative (as opposed to a dictionary, led-
ger, or encyclopedia) from the first pages of the book and move onward
from there.4
However, when authors such as Foer and Tomasula experimentally
disrupt the conventional book design, latent possibilities for reorganiz-
ing the narrative discourse also surface. Furthermore, like Foer, Toma-
sula also turns to the body, not only of the book but also the human
body, for vital organizing principles, and his novel, vas (2002), fore-
grounds this threefold analogical relation among the book-object, the
human body, and the novel form.5 In narrative theory, the implication

76 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

of this threefold analogy remains unexplored. Daniel Punday (2003),
while propounding a corporeal narratology, suggests that ways of
thinking about the human body shape plot, character, and settings of
narrative fictions. However, the analogous configuring basis, the books
body, does not emerge through Pundays formulations. Thus, in light of
the emergence of narrative fictions, disseminated through books that
insist on the irreducibility of their bodies, a reconsideration of the rela-
tion among books, bodies (of books as well as human beings), and nar-
rative form is necessary.
The books body emerges as a topos in narrative fictions at the in-
terface of print and digital cultures.6 These fictions may or may not be
born digital, but they insist on being engaged in print, which, in turn,
reinstates the relationship of printed books with the bodies of readers
who physically hold them and turn their pages. Depending on the man-
ner in which such reconfigurations of the textual form inflect the read-
ers overall narrative experience, these narrative fictions risk coming
across as gimmicky, fetishizing an older media object, or end up being
successful examinations of the affordances of the books body in the face
of emerging media technologies. In this article, after briefly enumerat-
ing narrative fictions that experiment with the books body and outlin-
ing the scholarly attempts to study them, I use the rhetorical approach,
which understands narratives as acts of purposive communication
from authors to readers, to analyze Chris Wares graphic novel, Build-
ing Stories (2012). Wares experimental and unique book is made up
of fourteen printed documents, ranging from booklets to broadsheets,
enclosed in a box. The novel-in-fragments follows the overlapping lives
of several characters who once lived on the different floors of a mul-
tistoried brownstone apartment in Chicago.7 The different documents
cannot be satisfactorily arranged to establish any singular narrative
order. Thus, Wares graphic novel presents itself as a prominent candi-
date among fictions that subvert the conventional relation of the books
body with narrative discourse. In comparison with the theoretical mod-
els used to examine such experimental books thus far, the concept of
progression from the rhetorical approach, as I will show, attends more
thoroughly to the resulting narrative form. Additionally, while former
analyses of Wares graphic novels argue that architecture remains funda-

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 77

mental to his narrative design, my study asserts the centrality of body
as a structuring analogy.8 I chart the manner in which Building Stories
narrative progression enlists interpretive and aesthetic responses for the
books body through reflections on the human body.

Experimental Books since 1960

Contemporary narrative fictions that defamiliarize the books body can
be grouped into two broad clusters. The correlation between the books
body and the human body receives varying degrees of attention in the
fictions that belong to either of these clusters. The first group of texts
draws upon visual or typographic art to alter the surface design of the
book. It includes William Gasss Willie Masters Lonesome Wife (1968),
Tom Phillipss A Humument (1970), Mark Z. Danielewskis House of
Leaves (2000), Steve Tomasulas vas (2002), Jonathan Safran Foers Tree
of Codes (2010), Adam Thirlwells Kapow! (2012), and even books that
employ graphics in the margins of their pages, such as Sean Stewart, Jor-
dan Weisman, and Cathy Briggs Cathys Book (2006) and Doug Dorst
and J. J. Abramss S. (2013). Gass, Tomasula, and Foer explicitly focus on
the correspondence between books and human bodies, but Danielweski,
Thirlwell, Phillips, and Brigg are also clearly invested in reconfiguring the
books design properties to transform the physical experience of reading.
Therefore, these experimental narratives have received scholarly atten-
tion for making reading a multimodal cognitive experience.9
The second group of texts literally breaks the books body to subvert
narrative conventions. B. S. Johnsons The Unfortunates (1969) is an in-
stance of such a dismantled book. The text came in a box containing
twenty-seven distinct sections in random order, with only the first and
last chapters demarcated. Narratives that appear in physically fragment-
ed condition call upon readers to generate their own sequence of read-
ing. Marc Saportas Composition no. 1 (1961) and Robert Coovers Heart
Suit (2005) are similar to The Unfortunates in this respect.10 Current-
ly, these texts seem to warrant less attention because their manner of
unfolding ostensibly aligns them with postmodern forking-path or pro-
cedural narratives. However, the alignment of forking-path and pro-
cedural textswhich do not necessarily engage the physicality of the

78 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

bookwith this group of experimental texts undermines the role that
media play and reiterates our cultural propensity to ignore the material
significance of books in narrative communication.
Chris Wares Building Stories (2012) is an iteration, with significant
variations, of the form of the book-in-a-box. While the constituent
units of the box in The Unfortunates still look more or less like tradi-
tional chapters, the units of Building Stories are more difficult to clas-
sify, as they range from shorter books within the larger book-in-a-box
to pamphlets and foldouts. The huge cardboard box has an illustrated
lid and a set of instructions on its back cover, and copyright infor-
mation on the inner side of the lid. Opening the box reveals fourteen
printed and illustrated documents. The assortment comprises a folded
board that traces the floor plan of a brownstone Chicago apartment on
the outside and positions the primary characters we follow on the in-
side; a book with thirty-two a4-size pages bound in a cardboard cover
with golden spine; a book with fifty-two a3-size pages bound in green
cloth hardcover; a narrow booklet that resembles a flipbook; a chap-
book with red cover; a few a4-size booklets; pamphlets; two double-
sided accordion foldouts; and two large tabloids resembling century-old
Sunday newspaper supplements. In a sense, therefore, Building Stories
is not a book at all, yet its experimental techniques can be understood
only in relation to the form of the printed book. Glyn Whites obser-
vation about the The Unfortunates applies to Building Stories as well:
The limits of the bound book are exceeded by this novel and, while
we might reflect on the book as artefact when we next read one, [this
novel] is something different... though the experience of completing a
book seems to me to be conjured up by every section (2005: 116). The
Unfortunates is a collection of booklets that does not physically form a
larger book except in the readers conceptual domain, Heart Suit in
fact is a deck of cards, and Building Stories assembles an array of printed
forms to activate analogies that, in turn, reflect on the material form of
the book. By taking the book apart, texts in this group affect the readers
sensory experience of reading; they also complicate the relation of the
narrative discourse with the physical structure of the book.
The peculiar textual and readerly dynamics of books in this second
group have led to discussions of nonlinearity and interactivity (Mont-

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 79

fort and Hayles 2012; Husrov and Montfort 2012). Zuzana Husrov
and Nick Montfort, for instance, use the term shuffle literature to de-
note narratives that either explicitly ask or implicitly invite the reader
to shuffle the segments of text into an arbitrary order (2012). An em-
phasis on the shuffle function underscores the fragmentary nature of
these texts. Consequently, Montfort and N. Katherine Hayles mention
that texts like The Unfortunates and Heart Suit mimic certain recog-
nizable prototypes in order to make sense to the readers. The narrative
ensemble in The Unfortunates works because of the readers familiari-
ty with narrative conventions associated with the flow of memory, and
Heart Suit works because the story is archetypal, dealing with sex,
suspicion, and state power (2012: 454). Montfort and Hayless shuffle
function thus classifies the experimental material structure as a formal
feature and contends that this form inhibits sophistication or complica-
tion at the level of what is being told. In other words, evaluating the
experiments as merely a formal feature undermines the possibility of an
ingenious macro-narrative arc in shuffle literature. However, it is worth
considering whether the particular manner in which these texts manip-
ulate the books body can offer readers a self-reflexive macro-narrative
experience, connecting them with the author over and beyond any spe-
cific narrative archetype. By a self-reflexive macro-narrative experi-
ence I suggest that the fragmentation of the book while operating as a
structural resource may also function as a thematic meditation on that
body itself to which the archetypal stories, which Montfort and Hayles
identify, serve as entry points; and how particular texts experiment
with their physical form and prompt the readers physical engagement
with that form may govern what they communicate. Thus, the mech-
anism of shuffle incorporated in these experimental narrative texts only
captures the manner of unfolding of these narratives; a deeper analysis
of these texts points to a larger purpose behind the shuffle, one involv-
ing a self-reflective awareness on the part of both the author and the
audience that the books body is both the means and (part of) the im-
plicit subject matter of the narrative communication. Rather than in-
viting us to look through the affordances of the media to the content of
the communication, as so many print and digital texts do, these books
not only defamiliarize those affordances but also make them part of the

80 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

communicative content. A valuable way to offer the deeper analysis of
such texts is provided by a rhetorical approach to narratives through its
concept of progression.

Narrative Progression, Building Stories

Whether different readers can experience the same book in similar
ways is a fundamental question on which rhetorical narrative theorists
dwell.11 Narrative form unfolds over time, and hence the sequence in
which a book is read influences the readers judgment and understand-
ing of the storyworld as well as the authors communicative goals. The
possibility of variance in the experience of reading is especially rife in
the case of shuffle literature, wherein readers organize the narrative dis-
course in different orders. Unlike the traditional concept of plot, which
charts the order of and interconnections among events within the dis-
course, the concept of progression is more useful for discussing texts
that depend on the readers ability to configure the narrative. As defined
by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, progression . . . [is] ground-
ed in the link between the logic of the texts movement from beginning
to middle through ending (what we call textual dynamics) and the au-
diences temporal experience (readerly dynamics) of that movement
(2012: 58). In other words, the concept of progression charts beginning,
middle, and ending according to the readers experience of the same.
Progression is, therefore, central to the understanding of any narrative,
but it is especially relevant when the discourse is not stable, as is the
case with the experimental print texts that activate multiple reading
paths through mechanisms such as the shuffle function.
Returning to the question of whether different readers have simi-
lar experiences while reading the same book, we will note that Wares
graphic novel is an instance of shuffle literature in which, despite the
availability of multiple paths for arranging the narrative discourse, the
books physical form ensures the readers configuration of a self-reflexive
macro-narrative arc, where the thematic concerns of the text surface.
The rhetorical approach to narratives is enriched from a close examina-
tion of this text, because it adds material form to the repertoire of re-
sources available to the author for constructing a shared and embodied

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 81

macro-narrative for the readers despite the multiple paths of progres-
sion. In addition, Wares narrative is exemplary for using both strategies
identified as recurrent in contemporary experimental books: Building
Stories not only uses the shuffle function but also, being a graphic nar-
rative, relies on visual art. Although my reading attends more closely
to the implications of the shuffle order of reading than the elements
of visual art, it also highlights the ways in which Wares book-in-a-box
goes beyond the scope of conventional graphic narratives in deploying
the form of the printed comic book and its relation with other printed
documents, seemingly threatened with obsolescence in the contempo-
rary digital culture, as a narrative tool for specific ends.
How Building Stories is told includes the narrative progression, the
selection of corporeal printed forms that channel that narration, and
the handling of temporality. An unnamed woman with a prosthetic
limb is the narrator and protagonist for a major portion of Wares narra-
tive, but there are other distinct voices as well. The brownstone Chicago
building in which the unnamed woman lived for a few years, the build-
ings landlady, a middle-aged couple who are tenants in the same build-
ing, and a bee named Branford assume the roles of character-narrators
at different points. Notably, in a moment of narrative self-reflexivity, the
unnamed woman tells her daughter a bedtime story with Branford the
bee as the protagonist. Thus, not all the character-narrators belong to
the same diegetic level in the storyworld of Building Stories, and they
certainly are not all aware of each others existence; only Ware and his
audience have that knowledge. However, all of the character-narrators
mentioned, with the exception of the multistory building, have at least
one document in the box narrated almost entirely from their perspec-
tive. The building, as a character-narrator, infiltrates the documents and
the perspectives of the other character-narrators.
Physically as well as in terms of the visual and verbal content, Ware
presents his readers with gaps among the multiple documents with the
understanding that the readers can configure the narrative through
those gaps. There are three major levels of gaps: the gaps or gutters that
distinguish the various frames in the graphic narrative, the temporal
gaps in the narrative from one piece to another, and the physical separa-
tion among the different documents. The various guttersthe space be-

82 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

tween the panelsare often filled with the narration or thought report
of the character-narrators. The physical segmentations among the dif-
ferent documents constituting the book are related directly to the gaps
in temporality, and together these gaps influence what the readers gath-
er through the process of building the stories.
Within each of the fourteen documents of Building Stories, the
chronology is linear even though it may involve abrupt temporal leaps.
However, where a particular document belongs in the trajectory of the
narrative is more difficult to determine. The temporality of one docu-
ment may be superjacent with another. Or, a particular series of episodes
in one piece may temporally come in between the linear arrangement of
panels in another. The book with the golden spine, for instance, until its
penultimate page, follows the life of one character-narrator, the unnamed
woman with a prosthetic limb who is in her twenties and resides in the
brownstone Chicago apartment on September 23, 2000. On the final page
of the same book we jump to April 20, 2005, with the same woman now
driving past the same apartment with her daughter, Lucy. We understand
that she no longer lives in the apartment, which will be demolished soon.
Though there are temporal and causal gaps in the narrative of this piece,
the chronology remains linear, moving from 2000 to 2005prompting
readers to associate the bound book with temporal linearity. However,
there are multiple materials among the other thirteen pieces that come
chronologically in between the penultimate page and the final page of
this piece. One of the double-sided foldouts has the woman walking in
snow, ruminating over the prospect of motherhood. This episode comes
before she has given birth to her daughter, Lucy, and hence precedes the
final page of the book with the golden spine. These temporal shifts within
the documents, which remain unaccounted for from the perspective of
the character-narrators, in turn reinforce the authors role in the narra-
tives progression and the synthetic nature of discursive order, further
recalling the fact that there is no organic relation between the physical
form of books and narrative discourse. The relation is one of convention,
which has become ubiquitous.
The multiple paths of progression, presented through superjacent doc-
uments that can be physically shuffled, have a significant bearing how
readers configure the narrative and meaning of Building Stories. In his

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 83

review of Wares graphic narrative for Public Books, Jared Gardner (2012)
presents a tentative order of reading. It starts with the green hardcover
book that familiarizes the readers with the unnamed woman with a pros-
thetic limb early on in her life and then moves on to the book with the
golden spine, the pamphlets, and so on. His reading furnishes a chrono-
logical trajectory, though each document still disturbs that linearity as
it incorporates analeptic or proleptic content. The readerly experience
that Gardner charts presses the theme of a collapsing American dream.
By the end of his review, he remarks that if one peruses the contents in
a different order, one will come up with other readings. And, of course,
the shuffle structure encourages such different readings and thereby chal-
lenges not only the stability of the discourse but also the assumption of
a stable relation between story and discourse, insisting on a dynamic
interface among what is told and how it is told.
The first time I read the narrative, I started with the document titled
Disconnect, which comes chronologically at a later point in the story.
This document has the unnamed woman coping with the proliferation
of electronic technology, economic recession, and aging. I then picked
up the two other comic books of similar size that follow the landlady of
the brownstone apartment and a middle-aged couple who were the un-
named womans neighbors when she stayed in that apartment. My order
of reading, therefore, attuned me to the concerns of multiple focalizers.
After having read all the documents, I did not dispute Gardners claim
that the unnamed woman assumes a primary role in the narrative or
that the narrative charts a transforming cultural situation. However, as
multiple focalizers initiated me into experiencing the storyworld, I paid
more attention to the implied author-audience relationship and distin-
guished the authors rhetorical framework from those of each of the
characters to a greater degree than Gardner.
At the same time, the multiple paths through Building Stories
Gardners, mine, other readersconverge on the point of the texts the-
matic interest in media and print culture. Gardners review enumerates
the different textual forms, and in particular the forms of comic art that
Building Stories uses. Similarly, in The Comics Journal, Katherine Roed-
er observes that Ware showcases the comic medium itself by includ-
ing representative examples of all its sundry forms: comic books, mini-

84 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

comics, newspaper comics, chapbooks and picture books.... Ware has
created a miniature pantheon of comic art, taking it out of the museum
and off the computer screen and giving us all something we can hold on
to (2012). Roeders reading highlights that even when the comic form
of Wares text is the focus of an analysis, the texts printed physical form
and that forms relation with the readers bodies emerge as dominant
strands for understanding the narrative.
In fact, graphic narratives engage the bodies of texts on which they
are imprinted and the bodies of readers who peruse them in particu-
lar ways. The material surface and the mark of the hand remain central
to graphic narratives unfolding: graphic narrative demonstrates an ex-
plicit awareness of its own surfaces. Because of this foregrounding of
the work of the hand, graphic narrative is an autographic form (Chute
and DeKoven 2006: 767). In addition, the visual dimensions integral to
the comic form inflect both reading and signification. So, for instance,
the unstable relation between story and discourse is to an extent proto-
typical of the graphic narrative form itself. As Steven Surdiacourt notes,
the inextricability of the material form and the content of the draw-
ing in comics (2012) make it impossible to separate the signifier from
the signified, which, in turn, problematize assumptions about the inde-
pendence of the signified (story) from the signifier (discourse). Thus,
certain experimental strategies of Building Stories are less radical when
contextualized within the history of the comic form. Indeed, Ware typ-
ically leverages conventions of the comic form to cultivate what Peter
Schjeldahl identifies as Wares cult of difficulty and employs those to
decelerate the progression of his narratives (qtd. in Ball and Kuhlman
2010: ix). In Building Stories the strategy of slow and nonlinear progres-
sion enables Ware to commingle snippets from the history of print cul-
ture with the temporality of his storyworld.
The documents that make up Wares narrative, many of which can be
chronologically located in the storyworld between the penultimate and
the final page of the book with the golden spine, range from clothbound
books to pamphlets to flipbooks.12 Within the print culture, pamphlets
and flipbooks represent forms that are more ephemeral than the bound
book. Pamphlets have been used to advertise and circulate information
for centuries, but the life of a pamphlet is usually short; they are easily

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 85

published and easily lost. Flipbooks that predate animated films and mo-
tion pictures were popular in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries. In the twenty-first century their popularity has largely waned.
Recognition of the ephemeral printed forms and their history is neces-
sary to appreciate the experience of physically piecing together separated
units of the narrative in Building Stories. The implied author invites his
readers to physically interact with these units and read the erratic history
of the printed forms as a parallel to the shuffle dynamics accounting for
the progression of his narrative. The analogy is intricate. Readers experi-
ence this analogy to varying degrees based on their investment in and ac-
quaintance with the various forms that constitute the book. However, as
the three distinct analyses undertaken by Gardner, Roeder, and this arti-
cle show, this analogy is a central part of Wares communication. Through
this analogy, the topos operates explicitly and reveals Wares interest in a
media archaeological project that resists teleological and linear telling of
the past.13 Ware problematizes progression as a straightforward move-
ment from simple to complex media by foregrounding both the conti-
nuities and the ruptures among the discarded and the existing printed
forms. In Building Stories shuffle narrative, past and present exist side by
side, on the same plane, in the different documents making up the book.
Thus, Ware physically fragments the storyworld but interweaves the his-
tory of print culture and comic art to facilitate a shared and embodied
self-reflexive experience for the readers.

Books with Bodies

In an interview with Christopher Irving, Ware observed:

I feel that a book influences, and has as much of a contributing effect

on the story as the drawings, the ink, colors, and paper.... To me, a
book is a fairly obvious metaphor for a human body: aside from the
fact that it has a spine, its also bigger on the inside than it is on the
outside.14... It can affect how the whole story is felt. I like books.
Theyre my life. (Ware 2012b)

Accordingly, Wares corpus demonstrates his interest in books, in print,

and in the relationship of books with different kinds of printed ephem-

86 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

era. He deploys these materials in his tale not for the sake of reifying
these forms but because he is deeply invested in what these mean to his
readers in the context of his stories. Building Stories converges the tra-
jectory of Wares repertoire of graphic narratives, which are typically
attentive to material surfaces and their ocular-tactile affect, with other
contemporary experiments with the books body.15
Given that Building Stories presents readers with multiple paths of
narrative progression and prompts them to interact with the textual
units, it is tempting to draw analogies with the interactivity activated
in hypertextual digital narratives. However, not all kinds of readerly
interactivity are identical. Ware invites readers to interact with three-
dimensional physical forms replete with cultural history as opposed
to the readers interactivity with the digital screen while perusing hy-
pertexts. It is not as if one form of interactivity is superior to another;
rather, they afford different dynamics. Andrew Piper observes that in
bibliographic reading it is the graspability of the book, in a material
as well as spiritual sense, that endow[s] it with such an immense power
to radically alter our lives. In taking hold of the book . . . we are tak-
en hold of by books (2013: 376). Digital reading practice, on the oth-
er hand, reimagines the visuality of reading and takes us toward the
likely, the proximate, and the scalar (377). Thus, Piper distinguishes
print and digital texts based on the differences in the readers bodily re-
lation with them. How we read books is not how we read off screens.
The interface of print and digital, which has prompted the proliferation
of experimental books, has simultaneously affirmed the embodied na-
ture of reading books. It is the readers body that is engaged in physical-
ly shuffling the documents of Building Stories. Wares attention to these
embodied aspects of reading is evident on the cover of Building Stories,
where he writes: With the increasing electronic incorporeality of ex-
istence, sometimes its reassuringperhaps even necessaryto have
something to hold on to. Holding the bookits graspabilityemerges
as a key element in Wares narrative.16 However, Building Stories is con-
cerned not only with the readers corporeal interactions with the book
but also with the characters bodily experiences within the storyworld.
All of the character-narrators of Building Stories build monolithic
narrative arcs focusing on their discomfort with their own bodies in or-

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 87

der to elicit empathy, but they end up disconnected from one anoth-
er and even with the readers. The unnamed woman with the prosthet-
ic limb suffers from self-pity and worries about gaining weight. These
traits are conveyed visually through her tense facial expressions along-
side the verbal narration. Toward the middle of the green clothbound
book, the unnamed womans body is pictured in almost a4 size, first
fully clothed and then naked (fig. 1). In both, her eyes are closed and
eyebrows are arched downward, which makes her look agitated even as
she is trying to relax within the immediate context of the narrative dis-
course. Her spine in both of these diagrams runs parallel to the books
spine, recalling Wares interest in correlating the book with the body. In
fact, the human body and the human face are frequently at the visual
center of the documents in Building Stories.17
On the page where the unnamed woman is pictured naked, she says,
except for a few weirdos and fetishists, people with missing limbs ar-
ent generally considered attractive members of the society, and so I
dont need to be fat to complicate matters... (even though I am...).18
Though the unnamed woman mentions her missing limb in this pas-
sage, a notable feature of Building Stories is that she dwells on body
weight and aging more often than she does on her prosthetic leg. Mar-
garet Fink (2010) argues that within the unnamed womans narration,
the prosthetic limb is just there, and this narrative strategy demystifies
her physical difference. However, the visually domineering presence of
the protagonists amputated leg evokes analogies with the broken body
of Wares book and the ensuing broken narrative.
Wares strategy of overlaying the protagonists clothed and naked
bodies in the green clothbound book further references a book that
she read at her grandmothers house. She recollects, My grandmothers
house was full of books and one of my favorite ones to look at was the
A volume of the encyclopedia, because it had a section of acetate over-
lays of the human body that you could peel away, starting with the skin,
all the way down to the skeleton. Through her encounter with this par-
ticular body within a book, the unnamed woman recognizes her own
body, what real heart looked like, what naked, albeit hairless, adult
bodies were made of, and so on. Here, the storyworld plays with the
multifarious connotations of the topos, books with bodies, as the pres-

88 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

Fig. 1. Building Stories. Copyright 2012 Chris Ware. Used with permission.
ence of bodies within books as well as the relationship of bodies with
books are highlighted.
The old lady, who is the owner of the brownstone building, has lived
in it for most of her life. Like the unnamed woman, she is overly anx-
ious about her body image and remains wary of forging relationships
of any kind. In the comic book that is focalized through her, she is pic-
tured in her underclothes, looking at her body in the mirror in distress
(fig. 2). The middle-aged couple also craves companionship but is un-
able to connect with each other; this woman also stares at her own body
in the mirror and remarks, how long has it been since he touched me
in a way that didnt betray the obvious repulsion he feels, anyway? then
again, maybe I am repulsive. Thus, the character-narrators struggle to
accept their own bodies. Despite their growing desperation to connect
with one another, they end up more and more disconnected psycholog-
ically as well as physically: the book with the middle-aged couple at its
center starts with them sitting together on the doorsteps of the build-
ing and ends with them visibly drifting apart; the flipbook starts with
the unnamed woman expecting her child and ends with her husband
leaving her bed at night; and the book with the golden spine starts with
the building connecting all the characters and ends with it being demol-
ished. Further, since the readers, owing to the authors design, experi-
ence the deficiencies of the character-narrators, they also feel progres-
sively disconnected from each of their rhetorical goals. Thus, within the
storyworld, relationships and connections gradually fall apart.
However, Building Stories design contrasts the characters inability
to accept their own bodies and forge connections with the authors ex-
altation of the texts physical formthe fragmented body of the book
enables the shuffle function, which underlies the self-reflexive macro-
structure that connects readers with the author as opposed to the grow-
ing physical and psychological disconnection among the various char-
acters within the storyworld of the narrative.

Conclusion
Building Stories progression necessitates the paths of diverse readers to
converge on the thematic that concerns the status and function of the

90 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

Fig. 2. Building Stories. Copyright 2012 Chris Ware. Used with permission.
books body. The obvious pun in the title suggests building stories by
shuffling documents as well as levels of apartments. This connection be-
tween the literal and the figurative implications of the books title inau-
gurates yet another complex analogy between the material forms that
the two buildingsthe story and the multistory apartmentembody.
This analogy has received greater attention than Wares use of and focus
on the human body as a structuring principle. Multistory apartments,
represented by the century-old building in Wares narrative, were new
in late-nineteenth-century Chicago. Daniel Bluestone observes, Chi-
cagos late-nineteenth-century apartment buildings helped to transform
the urban landscape. They provided architects with novel design prob-
lems and accommodated tens of thousands of residents (2004: 150).
At present, though multistory apartments continue to exist, the archi-
tectural peculiarities of the earliest buildings have been gradually re-
placed. Thus, in Wares book, the antiquated apartment, which becomes
the locus of individual and shared experiences of the principal charac-
ters, evokes cultural accomplishments of the past. It simultaneously an-
nounces the thematic issue concerning the presence of outdated materi-
al forms in a transforming cultural milieu, which is at stake in the text.
Consequently, the narrative has to address the connections between the
presence of a century-old multistory building in a rapidly changing ur-
ban landscape and the resurgence of printed forms amid a culture of
digitization in Building Stories.
Most studies of Building Stories attend to Wares paratextual com-
mentary eulogizing ornamental architecture. The thematic focus on
nostalgia and memory in Wares earlier texts have led scholars to read
the intimate portrayal of the house in Building Stories as an implicit
plea against the demolition of historic buildings (Godbey 2010: 123),
but the brownstone buildings representation in the narrative reveals a
different ethical and aesthetic paradigm.19 The building is anthropo-
morphic; it acts as a focalizer, and in certain sections of the text it has a
narrative voice. Like the other character-narrators of Building Stories, it
is anxious about its bodys outmodedness. Being a tired, old building
that nobody had ever much cared about, it anticipates its own dem-
olition, shedding a shinglethe buildings equivalent of tears (green
clothbound book). However, Wares narrative does not betray an over-

92 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

ly sentimental attachment to the building. Its demolition is mentioned
only in passing, and temporally, the narrative does not end there. This
is not to say that Ware favors the gentrified urban space that replaces
the century-old building. In the context of the other latter buildings that
surface in the narrative, Wares tone is matter-of-fact. Of course, the au-
thors stance with respect to the demolition of a material form that no
longer serves its practical purpose, like the brownstone building, may
seem to be at odds with his choice of upholding printed forms in the age
of the digital. However, a closer look at the scenes dealing with the ten-
sion among print and digital media show that Ware juxtaposes the out-
moded building with the older media of print, in the narrative and in
the pun of the texts title, to contrast rather than equate the two forms.
In the booklet aptly titled Disconnect, the unnamed woman
dreams of stumbling upon a book while browsing... but not on the
internet, in one of those big chain bookstores that dont exist anymore.
The description resembles the text we have at handBuilding Stories, as
it has everything in it... [her] diaries, the stories from [her] writing
classes, even stuff [she] didnt know [she]d written. Her media-specific
remark is significant. She relates the dream to her daughter and makes
aesthetic evaluations: it was kind of good... interesting.... All of the
illustrations (and there were a lot of themthere seemed to be more
and more I looked) were so precise and clean it was like an architect
had drawn them... so colorful and intricate. During this metafiction-
al leap, when the synthetic aspects of the narrative come to the fore-
ground, readers may be inclined to align the unnamed woman with the
author, and consequently the building with the book. However, the dis-
sonance between the values of the character and the author resists such
identifications. The author achieves what the unnamed woman could
only dream. Therefore, her identification with the author is mimetically
implausible. But more importantly, at a thematic level, the author values
the books body for its ability to activate distinctive textual and readerly
dynamics ,whereas the unnamed woman, in keeping with her character,
reifies the book for more sentimental reasons.
Building Stories is presented as a book comprising fourteen separate
documents encapsulating the history of print, because it thematizes the
ability of the textual form to build and sustain cognitive and corporeal

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 93

connections within a dynamic material culture. The theme emerges with
clarity through the self-reflexive macro-narrative where the divergent
temporal experiences of the readers converge. In the twenty-first centu-
ry, newspapers and print magazines have faced economic challenges, and
after the recession, several presses have had to shut down. However, as
Michael Schudson observes, the book endures in something very much
like the form it acquired centuries ago (2009: 1), and books with bodies
abound. The emergence of digital media has provided the impetus to
experiments with books bodies rather than making them thoroughly
redundant for ingenious narrative communication. The interaction of
textual and readerly dynamics in Wares Building Stories demonstrates
the affordances of the books fragmented body and establishes it as fun-
damental to the rhetorical framework of the narrative. Consequently, in
the wake of proliferating digitization projects, Building Stories, like other
such experimental texts, including Heart Suit, Tree of Codes, and The
Unfortunates, has managed to reinvigorate the books body.

Notes
1. See Hayless analysis of Foers Tree of Codes (2013: 22631).
2. Contemporary interest in the body of the book is not limited to twentieth-
and twenty-first-century narratives and their interpretations. Couturier (1991)
reflects on the dearth of works investigating the bookhood of novels and
closely reads Tristram Shandy to draw attention to the novelists interest in the
print media. To ignore the printed body of modernism is to ignore one of its
salient aspects observes Kaufmann (1994: 16). Fulton (2013) argues that Shake-
speares and Donnes poems relate verbal content with the papers material qual-
ities, like its gilt edge. Lupton demonstrate[s] a wide variety of discursive tricks
used in the 1750s, 60s, and 70s to create texts that appear cognizant of how they
are made (2011: ix).
3. Liu observes that the best way to think about the book in the digital age may
well be to focus on bookishness. From the point of view of the digital, the book
has already gone away. So the remaining question is what happens to book-
ishness? Or, again, where does bookishness go? (2009: 499). Bookishness
stands for an adherence to the physical and the conceptual form of the book.
For an application of the concept of bookishness in narrative studies, see
Pressman (2009).
4. This is the case unless the author prescribes otherwise, as is the case with Julio
Cortzars Hopscotch (1966) or Ana Castillos The Mixquiahuala Letters (1992).

94 Storyworlds Vol. 7, No. 1 summer 2015

 5. Muri (2004) observes that not only the book as a whole but even the page
has a long history of embodiment. The page is regarded in terms of the header,
body, and footer; and recent developments in medical imaging conceive of the
human body in terms of the page.
6. I adopt my use of the word topos as a historically and culturally contingent
notion from Huhtamo. Topos, Huhtamo explains, is a stereotypical formula,
a clich that is evoked over and over in different guises for varying purpos-
es through particular cultural periods (2011: 28). Huhtamo (2013) studies the
materiality and the history of forgotten, lost, and antiquated objects like the
trottoir roulant in relation to the topos traditions those inspire, but I am
adopting his notion to study a form whose overall history has not been lost on
us, even as its materiality has been undermined in that history.
7. An antecedent of Wares text could be Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual
(1978), which encompasses the lives of residents in a Parisian apartment block.
Though Perecs text is a traditional book (unlike Wares), it contains interwo-
ven stories and includes numerous puzzles, which might well be echoed by the
jigsaw-puzzle semblance of Wares book-in-a-box.
8. See Bredehoft (2006).
9. See Pressman (2014), Gibbons (2012), and Panko (2011).
10. The UK-based design studio Universal Everything reimagined Composition
no. 1 and turned it into an iPad app in 2011. Rather than undermining the cen-
trality of print for Saportas narrative, the project provides, in the words of its
publishers, an insight into what makes a book a book.
11. See Phelan (2007: xiii).
12. See Gardner (2010) for a detailed description of the different comics forms
used in Wares text.
13. While investigating media objects, media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski
studies attractive foci instead of looking for linear progressive arcs, because
the history of the media is not the product of a predictable and necessary ad-
vance from primitive to complex apparatuses. The current state of art does not
necessarily represent the best possible state.... Media are spaces of action for
constructed attempts to connect which is separated (qtd. in Huhtamo 2011: 52).
14. Danielewskis House of Leaves relies on this aspect of books. The eponymous
house is bigger on the inside than on the outside. However, barring a few
scholars (like Alison Gibbons), most have read it as a metaphor for ramified
electronic networks.
15. Wares Jimmy Corrigan (2000) also contained three-dimensional paper cutouts,
but when compared to Building Stories, the former texts thematics were not as
clearly focused on media forms.
16. The incorporeality that Ware aligns with electronic media need not be taken
literally. Ware recognizes the bodily dynamics triggered by the touch mecha-
nism on electronic devices like iPads. Notably, he published Touch Sensitive

Ghosal: Narrative Progression in Building Stories 95

 (2011), a graphic narrative for the digital audience, before publishing Building
Stories. Having successfully used the digital media in Touch Sensitive, Ware is
arguably less paranoid about the digital and more playful while exploiting the
interactivity that print has to offer. In fact, the materials of Touch Sensitive
are remediated, with certain variations, through the printed documents of
Building Stories, thereby interrogating the finality of book digitization projects.
The change in media also results in different possibilities for navigating the
narrative; for instance, while panels appear on the screen, one after another,
when touched in the iPad version, the print versionthat is the version of ma-
terials from Touch Sensitive included in the printed text of Building Stories
presents several panels on pages as visually concurrent.
17. In a broadsheet newspaper that makes up the book, Ware presents the face
of the unnamed woman at the center of the page, and in another the sleeping
body of her daughter, Lucy, is symmetrically drawn along the midsection of the
paper.
18. There are no page numbers in Building Stories. Therefore, when quoting from
the text, I have identified the document I am excerpting. The lack of page num-
bers further reinforces Wares interest in defamiliarizing reading conventions
associated with books.
19. See Godbey (2010) and Worden (2010). The edited collection The Comics of
Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking (Ball and Kuhlman 2010) was pub-
lished before Ware printed Building Stories as a book, and hence the essays
analyzed the strips that would ultimately make up Building Stories. Thus,
Godbeys scope of analysis was narrower at that point. In a later article, Godbey
observed, I focused almost exclusively on the buildings characterization...
Situating the strip in the context of debates over gentrification and the transfor-
mation of urban space, I suggested that [Ware] offered a corrective to the over-
haul of 21st-century cities that have taken place in the name of a never-ending
push for progress.... Now, with Building Stories publication, which culminates
more than 11 years worth of work, I realize that... such debates form only a
small part of the backdrop of the lives of these characters (2012).

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