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Marie-Laure Ryan* - References - "Emergent" is the favorite
term of contemporary literary theory for a type of meaning
that comes out of the text, rather than goes into it, and
that is produced dynamically in the interaction between the
text and the reader. At the risk of creating an oxymoron, or
a mixed metaphor, can a form of textuality cultivated for
its emergent quality lure the reader into an immersive
experience ? Since it is always possible for a certain text
to overcome the strictures of its medium, a more proper
question to ask is whether interactivity can be a positive
factor of immersivity. Let me consider here each of the
three types of immersion defined in chapters 4 and 5.
The discussion of the
preceding section has driven the point that interactivity
conflicts with the creation of a sustained narrative
development, and consequently with the experience of
temporal immersion. Among the architectures described above,
the only one that places interactivity in the service of
narrative desire is the mystery story structure (no 6),
because the reader's actions discover, rather than create
the object of this desire, and because the story to be
investigated is itself unilinear, determinate, and external
to the interactive machinery. Temporal immersion
necessitates an accumulation of narrative information. In a
linear text, the more we read and the more we know about the
textual world, the more we can anticipate developments-and
the more pleasantly surprised we are when the outcome dodges
our projections. The continuity of the plot line functions
as a string on which the reader's memory threads information
and keeps it together for easy access. It is not without
reasons that the mnemonic techniques of the Antiquity and
the Renaissance built an itinerary through a building, and
disposed the items to be remembered along this linear path .
The broken up structure of the interactive text thus
deprives memory of one of its most efficient modes of
storage. It has been said that hypertext promotes a pattern
of foregrounding and backgrounding data that mimicks the
associative mechanisms of the brain, but there is a world of
difference between simulating the functioning of memory on
the neural level and strengthening the process of
recall. The special power of
interactive texts to generate a plurality of possible worlds
could be regarded as a feature that facilitates the creation
of an immersive plot. In my book Possible Worlds,
Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (chapter
8), I suggest that one of the properties that contribute to
the intrinsic tellability of a story-another term for
narrative immersivity-is the diversification of possible
worlds in the narrative universe. This principle makes the
prediction that fictional universes that involve
incompatible possible worlds-such as mistaken beliefs,
conflict among the system of beliefs of various characters,
conflict between desires and reality, conflict between
sincere and projected beliefs, consideration by characters
of various lines of actions, and so on,-produce more
interesting plots than narratives in which the private
worlds of characters reflect accurately the real world, or
exist in harmony with each other. (In fact, there cannot be
a plot without incompatible possible worlds.) But this idea eventually
hits the ceiling of the reader's processing ability. The
comedies of errors and romans à tiroirs of the
Baroque area flirt with, and sometimes transgress, these
cognitive limits. Whatever advantage interactive narratives
present over standard ones in the creation of forking paths
and multiple realities leads to a degree of complexity that
no longer supports narrative motivation. Two to four
different endings, a structure easily realized in print,
will for instance receive serious individual consideration,
and the various outcomes will invite comparison; sixty-four
endings only convey the message "there are lots of possible
endings," and each of them is lost in the crowd. At this
point it becomes irrelevant whether there are sixty-four,
two hundred and fifty six, or a thousand endings. In terms
of complexity, hypertext compared to print texts is like
satellite-dish TV, with its 500 channels, versus the mere 50
of cable TV. Do viewers really take advantage of this
complexity ? The brain may be a "massively parallel
processor" on the neural level, as cognitive science tells
us, but on the level of the more conscious operations
involved in reading, it remains very difficult to keep track
of several strands at the same time, and it seems doutful at
best that systematic exposure to hypertext will
significantly increase the mind's performance in distributed
parallel processing. In a frequently drawn
analogy, the hypertextual network is viewed as the image of
the postmodern experience of space. For Fredric Jameson,
postmodern space is an alienating, self-transforming expanse
that offers neither rest for the body, refuge for the soul,
nor landmarks for the mind: "[This] latest mutation
in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in
transcending the capacities of the individual human body to
locate istself, to organize its immediate surrounding
perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a
mappable external world" (44). The only possible relation to
this postmodern space is the feeling of being lost, and the
only possible movement is aimless wandering. Both of these
experiences are reflected in the blind progression of the
reader through the labyrinthine structure of hypertext.
For Marc Auge, the
characteristic space of "supermodernity," as he calls the
present time, is a non-place that we traverse on our way to
somewhere else, and that we come to inhabit, since the
postmodern condition is a state of perpetual transit. These
nonplaces are called airport, subway, freeway, and the
network of Information Superhighways that criss-cross
Cyberspace, the most non-place of them all. Cybernauts and
hypertext readers spend most of their time clicking on the
non-places of the links, never dwelling for long on a
textual segment, because each of these segments is less a
destination than a point of departure for other, equally
elusive destinations. Theorists of electronic culture (for
instance Nunes, "Virtual Topographies" and Moulthrop,
"Rhizome and Resistance.") make a virtue of this sense of
never getting anywhere by regarding hypertext as a textual
implementation of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "smooth
space." For Deleuze and Guattari,
smooth space exists in contrast, though in constant
interrelation, with an organized, hierarchical and largely
static space that they call "striated." "In striated space,
lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one
goes from one point to another. In the smooth, it is the
opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory"
(478). Smooth space is nomadic (like the sea or the desert
it offers no home, only an experience of its immensity),
sprawling, continually expanding (you can always add a link
to hypertext), amorphous (you can add wherever you want),
heterogeneous, without clear boundaries, tactile rather than
visual (through clicking, the reader grabs segments), and
constituted by an "accumulation of proximities" (488). These
proximities are links that negate physical distance, since
all it takes to make two points adjacent in a network is to
draw a line between them. The interactive text may
convey an exhilarating sense of power and mobility (a sense
fortified by the tendency of the imagination to
reconceptualize the travel of data on the Internet as travel
of the user to distant sites), but the cost of embracing
space in its globality is an alienation from its locality
that prevents growing roots in any given site. The system of
links of the interactive text is a constant temptation to
move beyond the present screen. As Michael Heim observes:
"Hypertext thinking may indeed reveal something about us
that is agitated, panicky, or even pathological. As the mind
jumps, the psyche gets jumpy or hyper" (Metaphysics,
40). Sven Birkerts, admittedly no friend of hypertext,
concurs: "For the effect of the hypertext environment, the
ever-present awareness of possibility and the need to either
make or refuse choice, was to preempt my creative or
meditative space for myself" (162). One of the consequence of
the mosaic structure of hypertext is that the lexias are
rarely long enough to let an atmosphere sink in. The link is
a jump, and each act of clicking sends the reader to a new,
relatively isolated textual island. It always take a while
to make oneself at home in a text, to grow roots in the
fictional world, to visualize the setting, to familiarize
oneself with the characters and their motivation. It is for
this reason that many people prefer fat novels over
collections of short stories. In his novel If On a
Winter's Night a Traveler, as we have seen in
Interlude5, Italo Calvino allegorizes the difficulty of
immersion by embedding in the narrative of the primary level
the beginning of a dozen other novels which are brutally
interrupted after a few pages-just as the reader begins to
view herself as a citizen of the fictional world. In
Calvino's novel, the reader is left stranded at the end of
every chapter; in hypertext, the threat of uprooting occurs
with every change of screen. Every time the reader is
called upon to make a decision, she must detach herself from
the narrative "here and now" and adopt a point of view from
which she can contemplate several alternatives. Once the
choice is made, the reader may regret her decision and be
haunted with the "could have been." What Gareth Rees writes
of his experience of tree fiction is even more to the point
in the case of a more complex network: "I think that as
readers we are not ready for tree fiction: I know that when
I read such a story, I want to find out all the consequences
of every decision, to read everything that the author wrote,
fearing that all the interesting developments is going on in
another branch of the story that I didn't investigate. I
want to organize the whole story in my mind." The body of
the reader's imaginary persona in the fictional world would
have to undergo a dismembering to take all the roads at the
same time, and to overcome the nagging feeling of missing
something along the way. Can immersion be experienced by a
corps morcelé, as Christopher Keep describes
the hypertextual reconfiguration of the body ? In defense of electronic
technology, however, it must be said that all these
deficiencies of interactive textuality with respect to the
experience of spatial immersion can be compensated by
hypermedia effects. Of the three types of immersion, the
spatial variety has evidently the most to benefit from the
built-in spatiality of pictures. It seems safe to predict
that the interactive texts of the future will make much more
extensive use of visual resources than the literary
hypertexts of the present, and it would therefore be unfair
to pass judgments of immersivity on purely verbal attempts
to convey an experience of space. I cannot think of a more
efficient way to celebrate the spirit of a place than a
well-designed interactive network that combines images with
music, poems, short prose texts, maps, and historical
documents. Once again the question is
not whether the reader of hypertext can develop the kind of
affective relations that lead to feelings of happiness or
sadness when things turn out for the better or for the worse
for a certain character, but whether or not interactive
mechanisms can be used to enhance this emotional
participation. Janet Murray writes that the sense of the
irrevocability of life is alien to the spirit of interactive
art: "Our fixation on electronic games and stories is in
part an enactment of [a] denial of death. They offer
us a chance to erase memory, to start over, to replay an
event and try for a different resolution. In this respect,
electronic media have the advantage of enacting a deeply
comic vision of life, a vision of retrievable mistakes and
open options" (175). (1) One of the trademarks of the
spirit of comedy is a playful detachment from the characters
that precludes an affective investment in their fate. This
detachment is strengthened by the knowledge that the
character's life is simultaneously acted out in several
possible worlds, and that if we do not like one of these
worlds we can always jump to another. Emotional immersion
requires a sense of the inexorable character of fate, of the
finality of every event in the character's life, but as
Umberto Eco observed in a radio interview, this outlook is
fundamentally incompatible the multiple threads generated by
interactive freedom. "A hypertext can never be satisfying,"
Murray quotes Eco as saying , "because 'the charm of a text
is that it forces you to face destiny'" (296). The obstacle to immersion in
an interactive text lies however as much in the aesthetic
philosophy of its theorists and literary practitioners as in
the inherent features of the medium. We are told that the
virtue of hypertext is to "propel us from the straightened
'either/or' world that print has come to respresent and into
an universe where the 'and/and/and' is always possible" (J.
Yellowlees Douglas, "Hypertext," 155; view endorsed by
Joyce, Of Two Minds, 5). This view suggests that the
aesthetic ambition of hypertext is an awareness of the
plurality of worlds contained in the system. Since this
plurality can only be contemplated from a point of view
external to any of these worlds, the proper appreciation of
the multidimensionality of hypertext is incompatible with
recentering and imaginative membership in a fictional
reality. How can hypertext, or more
generally interactive textuality, compensate for this
immersive and narrative deficiency? Futurology is a risky
discipline, but I see three avenues of development, between
which there should be ample room for hybrid forms and
connecting trails. One of these avenues will be explored in
chapters 9 and 10. The second one calls for a deeper
understanding and bolder exploitation of the idiosyncratic
properties of the electronic medium than we have seen so
far. When electronic technology presented literature with
the gift of point-and-click interactivity, it did not
include a user's manual. Thinking in terms of the categories
of the literary system of their time, hypertexts authors
conceived this strange gift as a way to free the novel, even
more radically than postmodern works of the print variety
had done, from patterns of signification inherited from the
nineteenth century. This conception of hypertext as a
new form of novel was detrimental to the nascent
medium for two reasons. First, the traditional
length of the genre motivated hypertext authors to start
right away with large compositions that made unreasonable
demands on the reader's concentration. Instead of being
gently intiated into point-and-click interactivity readers
were intimidated by the forbidding complexity of a maze
which they had no fair chance to master. With the arrogance
typical of so many avant-garde movements, hypertext authors
worked from the assumption that audiences should be
antagonized and stripped of any sense of security, rather
than cajoled into new reading habits. Second, the model of the
novel created a pattern of expectations that subordinated
local meaning to a global narrative structure, and even
though this structure hardly ever materialized, its pursuit
distracted readers from the poetic qualities of the
individual lexias. Abandoning the model of the novel would
allow hypertext to explore two avenues: The renaissance of pure
textuality that accompanied the early development of
electronic writing may indeed have been a short respite in
its ongoing loss of cultural territory to visual media.
Compared to the hypertexts of the early nineties, the more
recent ones are much more dependent on hypermedia effects,
undoubtedly because of advances in the technlogical support.
Michael Joyce's Afternoon offered no visual pleasure,
but the more recent Twelve Blue makes a substantial
use of color and graphics, and Twilight: A Symphony
includes pictures, video clips, music, human voices and
various other sounds. Gregory Ulmer envisions the future of
hypertext as the exploration and implementation of new
relations between image and text. Several hypertext web
sites lauched in late 1998 (2)
use for instance a combination of text and of 360-degree
interactive panoramas created in Virtual Reality Markup
Language (VRML). These panoramas can be explored with the
mouse, and they may serve as either illustrations or
story-navigating devices. In this latter case, clicking on
an object in the picture will create a surprise, such as
animating the object, displaying textual screens or
activating audio recordings. In a multimedia environment,
the instantaneous sense of presence that can be achieved
through visual document, or through the intensely personal
modulations of a human voice provides a way to compensate
for the loss of immersivity that results from the fragmented
structure of the work as a whole.
(3) A particularly promising
form of multi-media hypertextuality is the thematic cluster
and electronic activity kit. In this type of project, the
system of links creates a guided, but flexible tour through
a collection of semi-autonomous documents that either relate
to a specific topic or develop a diversified vision. The
interactive apparatus allows users to decide what to read,
hear or see, and occasionally lets them manipulate the
individual documents. This formula encourages the pure joy
of "doing things" with text or pictures, and because it does
not construct lengthy chains of logical dependencies between
screens, it leaves users without remorse if they want to
skip a certain segment. A particularly attractive example of
this approach is Agnes Hegedüs' CD ROM artwork
Things Spoken (1998): By moving the cursor
between the two lines the interactor can switch between
two self-sufficient and rather short narratives read in
contrasting voices: male versus female, or German versus
English. The user can also jump to other screens by
clicking on highlighted words. Since the text moves from
right to left, "catching" these links with the cursor
requires some hand-eye coordination that lends tactile
interest to the work and turns its operation into a game
of skills. Once the interactor has successfully clicked
on a highlighted word, she is transported into another
narrative that contains the same key word, even though it
describes a different object. The impression is one of
synapses firing each other in the brain, opening up new
pathways into the secret caches of memory and thickening
the web of its associations. The third possibility I have
in mind is to turn the interactive text into a form of
conceptual art through a clever and diversified enactment of
the idea of self-referentiality. I am not suggesting that
hypertext content itself with a crude version of McLuhan's
all-too-famous slogan "the medium is the message," for no
art form can survive if all it has to offer is a fully
predictable message. (4)
Even in genres as stereotyped as TV comedies or Hollywood
movies, the invariant message "I am a comedy" or "I am a
movie" that results from the formulaistic use of canned
laughter or the traditional car chase is only acceptable
because it stretches like a watermark design across a more
visible and variable image. In the best specimen of
postmodern literature, similarly, self-referentiality does
not carry the text all by itself, but combines with other
sources of interest, such as theme, style, and original
narrative or anti-narrative techniques. The device is also
far more successful when its message is not merely generic
but specific to the text. In this individuated
self-reference, the text will not merely say "I am an x
(novel, fiction, text, hypertext)" but "I am me, a unique
use of the resources of my medium." This type of self-reference,
the polar opposite of the predictable message of stereotyped
devices, can be considered a form of conceptual art because
it arises spontaneously from the novelty of the productive
idea. The trademark of conceptual art is that its formula
must be entirely original. The generative idea resembles the
punch line of a joke, in that viewers may or may not get it,
and if they do, they often get all of it. This is why
conceptual art specializes in those intense bursts of
creative energy that need no further development, and leave
no foundation to build on, besides the memory of their
ingenuity. In contrast to those artistic formulae that can
be used over and over again and be adapted to many types of
content and effects, the idea that forms the message of
conceptual art exhausts its expressive potential after a
single use. By suggesting that
electronic literature take the conceptual route I do not
wish to say that interactivity per se is one of those
devices that should be used only once, but rather, that the
electronic medium can be a powerful tool-kit for the
production of one-of-a-kind textual forms such as the
projects listed below. Not all of them are literally
interactive, but they are all dynamic, and they all put the
visual and kinetic properties of their medium in the service
of a precise idea, often the literalization of a well-known
metaphor: Sending interactive
textuality on the conceptual route is intellectually
stimulating, but it is also a risky decision that involves
two pitfalls. One has been lucidly diagnosed by Umberto Eco:
it discourages reading the work, after the reader gets the
productive idea: If interactive textuality
opts for the conceptual approach, moreover, its place within
literature will remain that of a marginal experimental form,
comparable in impact and significance to the introduction of
the 12-tone scale in the history of music. Arnold
Schönberg, pioneer of the new scale, once reportedly
said "I can see one day when everybody will be whistling my
tunes." This hasn't happened. Nor will hypertext novels, in
all likelihood, ever top bestseller lists. There is
something about the 7-tone scale and about linear narrative
that seems to make them indispensable to Western culture,
and arguably for the latter, to culture in general. But
music and literature deserve recognition, and are both
substantially richer, for having dared to challenge the
commanding position of these two forms of
expression.
2. For
instance Stuart Moulthrop's The Tomb Robbers
(http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/tr/index.html;
accessed 9/20/99), which consisted of only a few screens at
the time of this writing. For a list of hypertext sites
using VRML on the World Wide Web, see Matthew Mirapaul,
"Hypertext Fiction Adds a Third Dimension."
(back) 3. On the
particularly strong immersive effect of the human voice, N.
Katherine Hayles writes: "Whereas sight is always focused,
sharp, and delineated, sound envelopes the body, as if it
were an atmosphere to be experienced rather than an object
to be dissected. Perhaps that is why researchers in virtual
reality have found that sound is much more effective than
sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated
worlds" (How We Became, 219). (back) 4. McLuhan's
formula is widely interpreted as the expression of the
self-referentia character of postmodern art, but there is no
mention of self-referentiality in the original context . For
McLuhan, the formula expresses a variety of rather disparate
ideas: (1) that a medium--for instance, electric light--has
no intrinsic content: "The electric light is pure
information. It is a medium without a message, as it were,
unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name"
(151); (2) that the message of a medium lies in its social
impact: "For the 'message' of any medium or technology is
the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces
into human affairs" (152); (3) that the content of a medium
is another medium: "The content of a movie is a novel or a
play or an opera...The 'content' of writing or print is
speech" (159); and (4) that media shape perception: "for the
medium determines the modes of perception and the matrix of
asumptions within which objectives are set" (188).
(back) *Excerpted from Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (second part of chapter 8 "Interactivity and Narrativity") by Marie-Laure Ryan forthcoming from The Johns Hopkins University Press in December 2000. © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. See http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/f00/f00ryan.htm - We thank Marie-Laure Ryan and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to post these parts of chapter 8 ("Interactivity and Narrativity") in dichtung-digital. (top) |
