Raymond Roussel wanted to make his involved interlocking texts, nested to
the ninth degree with endless series of ennumerations, digressions, footnotes
and parenthetical expressions, more clearly readable with different colored
print - in 1932, however, his publishers rejected such a complicated procedure.
Then in a surrealist exhibition in 1937 a "Roussel Reading Machine" was shown,
for which the text is mounted on cardboard like a kind of circular index: the
upper edge is marked with a different color depending on the degree of nesting.
The cards are mounted on the axis of a drum that the reader can turn with the
right hand using a handle, while holding the desired text card by a protruding
colored marking with the left, so that the text cards that belong together (on
a certain nesting level) can be turned one after another.
Throughout the course of literature innumerable conceptual (virtual) poetry
machines, combinatorics devices and narrative concepts have been designed,
which require an active reader - because of separations due to production
technology and the fundamentally different media conditions for authors and
readers, however, it has rarely been possible to evoke "truly" poetic activity
on the part of the reader...