Lost (and found) in a good book

Wide awake at 5 a.m. ready to lecture on narrative conventions and rhetorical templates--yes, I am a literature nerd. African-American Lit class starts on Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days today so I get to talk about a topic rarely touched in an upper-level literature class: the importance of page numbers. This issue arises very early when I teach Whitehead's novel. "Turn to page 9," I will say, and the students will fumble with the text before finding page 11 and turning back two pages.

And it's not just page 9: John Henry Days has no numbers on even-numbered pages, on the title page for each new section (or its reverse side), or on the first page of a new chapter--and there are many chapters. Fewer than half of the pages in the book have numbers on them, and the right combination of conditions results in stretches of three or four pages without a number. 

Readers tend to take page numbers for granted: we don't really notice them most of the time, but when we need one and it's not there, we get annoyed. How do we know where we are without page numbers? Why would a publisher resist such a simple convention as the page number? What other conventions might this book violate--and why?

And suddenly we find that the lostness caused by the dearth of page numbers is at one with the ethos of the piece. Look at the pronouns--notice how many chapters start with an ambiguous pronoun, sending us on a search for antecedents and inspiring us to make connections across the unnumbered white spaces between chapters.  Look at all the types of narrative templates on display--the perp walk, the press release, the Who-What-Where-Why-When-How news story lede--and note how the facts resist convention and the template deforms the truth. Notice how Whitehead makes us notice the book as a faulty and incomplete vessel--starting with the absence of page numbers.

John Henry Days defies expectations, crumbles conventions, tampers with templates, and launches us on a narratological thrill ride only a literature nerd can love, and I know some of my students will resist the opportunity but today I intend to tell them: Fasten your seatbelts--it's going to be a wild ride.