‘S.’ Marks the Spot: Navigating J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s Meaningful Maze

In August 2013, J. J. Abrams’s production company, Bad Robot, released a pair of mysterious trailers, initially giving no context as to what it was previewing. Was S. a movie, a television series, or something else entirely?

Soon, however, the answer emerged: S. was a book, published in October 2013, conceived by Abrams and executed by novelist Doug Dorst. But rather than a simple novel, it is composed of several layers of narrative. At its core is the “novel” Ship of Theseus, purported to be the final work by an enigmatic author V. M. Straka. The text readers experience is set up as an ex-library copy of the English edition, translated and rather stridently annotated by the equally enigmatic F. X. Caldeira. This text then becomes the means of a hand-written conversation between an English graduate student, Eric, and an English undergrad, Jen, as they communicate via scribbled marginal notes, along with various inserts—letters, postcards, newspaper articles, even napkin notes. Their scrawled conversation turns into a significant relationship but also involves the pair in intrigue, as they seek to research the true identities of Straka and Caldeira, which are encoded within the text and which involve them in a still-current web of danger and espionage. Further information is revealed on various websites connected to S., including a purported alternate ending to the book that Jen posts on Tumblr. (The website SFiles22 helpfully tracks down clues and has a handy list of potentially official S. websites.)

Of course, S. is hardly the first book to be presented as a layered set of narratives. The first Gothic work, The Castle of Otranto, was published as an ostensible translation of a medieval document, and the eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne, delighted in creating elaborate conceits for works like Tristram Shandy. The German fairy tale writer E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote his Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr as two distinct fictional autobiographies accidentally yoked together by a printer’s error. More recently, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a novel narrated almost entirely in annotations to a fictional poem.

Still, the sheer complexity of Abrams and Dorst’s project is in itself laudable. The book is designed with faded pages, while the handwritten notes by Eric and Jen change subtly in penmanship as their lives progress, which (along with ink color) helps the reader discern when they are writing what (their marginal notes are not always chronologically placed). Postcards, articles, and photographs are printed to appear authentic.

For all its bells and whistles, S. is in many ways quite old-fashioned.All of this extravagant attention to packaging is done with a purpose: S. as a whole is about books, both as purveyors of meaning and content, but also as very tangible sites for human community. As a book, S. cannot be fully divorced from its physical context. Indeed, one of its beauties (and frustrations) is that a reader cannot really skim the text—not just because the narratives are quite engrossing, but also because its unwieldy physicality requires careful handling. Inserts are placed on very specific pages, so that they cannot be removed without losing some of the narrative force. It also presents issues in trying to discern how to read it. There are, after all, at least four different texts present: Ship of Theseus itself, Caldeira’s notes, Eric and Jen’s marginalia, and their various inserts. I personally did a two-tiered reading, beginning with Ship of Theseus and Caldeira, then going back to work though the hand-written and miscellaneous material. But others have tried other systems.

Underneath all these layers, however, lies a fundamental question: Is S. any good? Critics and readers are bound to have divergent answers to this question. Some find the entire project unnecessarily overwrought while many dislike the Straka novel at its core. And truthfully, if you are of the “less-is-more” school of writing, then it is likely not worth the effort. As I rather like complexity of both plot and style, such concerns were a draw to me rather than a red flag. I found Ship of Theseus itself to be a gripping (if sometimes ambiguous) narrative that I read through almost compulsively, and Eric and Jen make for fascinating characters with distinctive, well-realized voices. Dorst had a daunting challenge with Ship of Theseus: write a book that is supposed to be regarded as a classic, that can become the site for philosophical and personal discussions between two ordinary people, and that can included encoded communications. Overall, I was convinced.

And for all its bells and whistles, S. is in many ways quite old-fashioned. As Abrams has quite outspokenly noted, his brainchild is designed as a tribute to the experience of reading physically bound books in an increasingly digital age. Beyond that, however, the book also tilts toward some less fashionable perspectives on the relationship of authors to the meanings of texts. After all, a key to solving the mysteries in S. lies in uncovering the identity of V. M. Straka. To a degree, this sets it against the prevailing winds of contemporary literary theory. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was common to read great books with the perspective that they gave people insight into the workings of great minds. Such theories were largely replaced by New Criticism, which decried undue attention to authorial intent and emphasized close readings of the text itself. In recent decades, greater attention in theory was brought to the roles audiences play in the interpretation of texts.

Abrams and Dorst are quite aware of the hazards inherent in drawing attention to authors. Dorst has claimed that he first wrote Ship of Theseus to stand on its own as a novel before crafting the other layers of narrative. Yet Ship of Theseus itself is heavily invested in tracking creative artists’ rationale for their art. The plot follows a mysterious amnesiac simply called S. who finds himself serving a muse-like (yet quite real) agent Sola in her seemingly hopeless battle against the unscrupulous and nigh-omnipotent arms dealer Vévoda. Between “missions,” his home base is a ramshackle ship with a cryptic crew, a crew who at various points stand in for the artist figures. Most of the crew take the step of sewing their own mouths shut (as the trailer displays), which seems to be a symbolic representation of the creative artist who, upon completing his or her work, abdicates the right to further commentary.

Yet in Ship of Theseus, linguistic communication—in literature, as well is in the many pictographs and symbols that appear in its pages—is linked closely to authorship. Stories are told to preserve truth, to insist that life is more than survival or pleasure; stories are told to create and foster community, linking people in shared space but also across time (centuries, even millennia). In these regards, divining authorial intent is, to a certain extent anyway, integral to the very heart of literature and communication. Eric and Jen similarly develop relationship through written communication, and their research reveals that the polyglot F. X. Caldeira is also using language this way.

This attention to communal language is deeply compatible with a Christian understanding of language. Of course, Scripture shares misgivings about the limits of linguistic communication; indeed, since we, like Paul, “see in a mirror dimly” now (1 Corinthians 13:12), we should take to heart the Bible’s own model, which (like S.) is a compilation of various narratives in various styles and genres, self-referential, written across time. And like S., the Bible is a site for community, both in its stories, doctrines, and principles, but also in its very tactility—whether through biblical texts copied lovingly by scribes since its origins or through a family Bible passed down across generations. One of Scripture’s most significant ways of depicting Christ’s own role is as the Logos, the eternal Word—communicating the Father’s love through his Son. For a truly Christian hermeneutic, then, understanding the intent of the Author—the source of the Word—is absolutely vital, and that cannot be done without acknowledging the designs of the original human authors.

S. certainly does not go this far. Indeed, every level of the text demonstrates an agnostic or even downright atheistic worldview. Notwithstanding its many narrative protestations to the contrary, S. is always perched precariously near the precipice of outright nihilism; it presents an existentialist approach to human relationship that often seems hopeless in the face of power-hungry figures. The characters’ communications persevere in the face of Vévoda and other pragmatic forces, but only barely, and they have nothing to cling to for hope, save each other.

Christians do not—or at least should not—hold on to their faith because it gives our lives eternal meaning; we should hold on to our faith because we believe that the Bible’s claims are true. But if these claims are true, they present a cosmos in which the struggle for significance—while still brutal and bleak at times—is ultimately redeemed and made gloriously meaningful. That is not the cosmos of S. Yet the book can help remind us of that meaning, of the need to soldier forth and forge relationships, across space, across time, across texts—and for the Christian, through the one meaningful Word.