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Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media by Marie-Laure Ryan Quotes from the Introduction* ->
VR [virtual reality] has been defined as an
"interactive, immersive experience generated by a computer"
(Pimentel and Texeira, 11). As a literary theorist, I am
primarily interested in the two dimensions of the VR
experience as a novel way to describe the types of reader
response that may be elicited by a literary text of either
the print or the electronic variety. I propose therefore to
transfer the two concepts of immersion and interactivity
from the technological to the literary domain and to develop
them into the cornerstones of a phenomenology of reading, or
more broadly of art experiencing. In the course of this
investigation we will visit both traditional literary texts
and the new genres made possible by the digital revolution
of the past two decades, such as hypertext, art CD ROMs,
synchronic role-playing games (MOOs), the largely virtual
genre of interactive drama and its embryonic implementations
in electronic installation art. My purpose will be twofold:
to revisit print literature, more specifically the narrative
kind, in terms of the concepts popularized by digital
culture, and conversely to explore the fate of traditional
narrative patterns in digital culture. ->
In the literary domain, no less than in the visual arts, the
rise and fall of immersive ideals are tied to the fortunes
of an aesthetics of illusion, which implies transparency of
the medium. The narrative style of the eighteenth century
maintained an ambiguous stance toward immersion: on one
hand, it cultivated illusionist effects by simulating
nonfictional narrative modes (memoirs, letters,
autobiographies), on the other it held immersion in check
through a playful, intrusive narrative style that directed
attention back and forth from the story told to the
storytelling act. The visibility of language acted as a
barrier that prevented readers from losing themselves in the
storyworld. The aesthetics of the
nineteenth century novel tipped this balance in favor of the
storyworld. Through techniques that are examined in greater
detail in chapters 4 and 5 of this book, high realism
effaced the narrator and the narrative act, penetrated the
mind of characters, transported the reader into a virtual
body located on the scene of the action, and turned her into
the direct witness of events, both mental and physical, that
seemed to be telling themselves. Readers not only developed
strong emotional ties to the characters, they were held in
constant suspense by the development of the plot. The
immersive quality of nineteenth century narrative techniques
appealed to such a wide segment of the public that there
was no sharp distinction between "popular" and "high"
literature: wide strata of society wept for Little Nell or
waited anxiously for the next installment of Dickens' serial
novels. The rest of the story has
been told many times: how literature, cross-fertilized with
the New Criticism, structuralism and deconstruction, took a
"linguistic turn" in the mid twentieth century, privileged
form over content, emphasized spatial relations between
words, puns, intertextual allusion, parody and
self-referentiality; how the novel subverted plot and
character, experimented with open structures and
permutations, turned into an increasingly cerebral word
play, or became indistinguishable from lyrical prose. This
evolution split literature into an intellectual avant-garde
committed to the new aesthetics and a popular branch that
remained faithful to the immersive ideals and narrative
techniques of the nineteenth century. (Ironically, the high
branch turned out to be heavily dependent on the resources
of the low branch for its game of parody.) As happened in
the visual arts, immersion was brought down by a playful
attitude toward the medium, which meant in this case the
exploitation of such features as the phonic substance of
words, their graphic appearance, and the clusters of related
or unrelated senses that make up their semantic value field.
In this carnivalesque conception of language, meaning is no
longer the stable image of a world in which the reader
projects a virtual alter ego, nor even the dynamic
simulation of a world in time, but the sparks generated by
associative chains that connect the particles of a textual
and intertextual field of energies into ever changing
configurations. Meaning came to be described as unstable,
decentered, multiple, fluid, emergent-all concepts that
have become hallmarks of postmodern thought. ->
In hypertext, the prototypical form of interactive
textuality (though by no means the most interactive), the
reader determines the unfolding of the text by clicking on
certain areas, the so-called hyperlinks, that bring to the
screen other segments of text. Since every segment contains
several such hyperlinks, every reading produces a different
text, if by text one understands a particular set and
sequence of signs scanned by the reader's eye. Whereas the
reader of a standard print text constructs personalized
interpretations out of an invariant semiotic base, the
reader of an interactive text thus participates in the
construction of the text as a visible display of signs.
Although this process is restricted to a choice among a
limited number of well-charted alternatives, namely the
branching possibilities designed by the author, this
relative freedom has been hailed as an allegory of the
vastly more creative and less constrained activity of
reading as meaning formation ->
While hypertext can bring together the heterogeneous, it
can also break apart elements traditionally thought to
belong together. The dismantling effect of hypertext is one
more way to pursue the typically postmodern challenge of the
epistemologically suspect coherence, rationality and
closure of narrative structures, one more way to deny the
reader the satisfaction of a totalizing interpretation.
Hypertext thus becomes the metaphor for a Lyotardian
"postmodern condition" in which grand narratives have been
replaced by "little stories, " or perhaps by no stories at
all-just by a discourse reveling in the Derridean
performance of an endless deferral of signification. Through
its growth in all directions, hypertext implements one of
the favorite notions of postmodernism, the conceptual
structure that Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome.
In a rhizomatic organization, in opposition to the
hierarchical tree structures of rhetorical argumentation,
the imagination is not constrained by the need to prove a
point or to progress toward a goal, and the writer never
needs to sacrifice those bursts of inspiration that cannot
be integrated into a linear argument. ->
To the skeptical observer, the accession of the reader to
the role of writer (or "wreader," as some agnostics
facetiously call the new role) is a self-serving metaphor
that presents hypertext as a magic elixir: "Read me, and
you will receive the gift of literary creativity." If taken
literally-but who really does so ?-the idea would reduce
writing to summoning words to the screen through an activity
as easy as one, two, three, click. Under these conditions,
no writer would ever suffer from the agony of the blank
page. Call this writing if you want; but if working one's
way through the maze of an interactive text is suddenly
called writing, we will need a new word for retrieving words
from one's mind to encode meanings, and the difference with
reading will remain. One wonders what conclusions would
have been drawn about the political significance of
hypertext and the concept of reader-author if the
above-mentioned critics had focused on the idea of
following links, or on the limitation of the reader's
movements to the paths designed by the author. Perhaps they
would have been more inclined to admit that aesthetic
pleasure (like political harmony) is a matter of unbridled
license but of controlled freedom. ->
The cause of immersion has not been helped by its resistance
to theorization. Contemporary culture values those ideas
that produce brilliant critical performances, that allow the
critic to deconstruct the text and put it back together
again in the most surprising configurations, but what can
be said about immersion in a textual world except that it
takes place ? The self-explanatory character of the concept
is easily interpreted as evidence that immersion promotes a
passive attitude in the reader, similar to the entrapment of
tourists in the self-enclosed virtual realities of theme
parks or vacation resorts. [...] As for the
allegedly passive character of the experience, we need only
to be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into
the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world.
Since language does not offer input to the senses, all
sensory data must be simulated by the imagination.
[...] we must dream up textual worlds with "minute
integrity" to conjure up the intense experience of presence
that inserts them into imaginative reality. Is this the
trademark of a passive reader? ->
To counter these two trends it will be necessary to take a
more critical look at interactivity, and a more sympathetic
one at immersion. This attitude is admittedly no less biased
than the approaches that I want to avoid, but it offers an
alternative to both the rapturous celebrations of digital
literature and the Luddite laments for the book that have
greeted the recent explosion of information technologies. If
I appear harsher on interactive than on immersive texts, it
is not because I view the intrusion of the computer into
literary territory as a threat to humanistic values, as does
Sven Birkerts, the most eloquent champion of immersion, but
because interactivity is still in an experimental stage,
while literature has already perfected the art of immersive
world construction. It is precisely its experimental nature
that makes interactivity fascinating. I am not interested in
the device as a ready-made message-in-the-medium, as its
postmodern advocates read it, but as a language and as a
design problem whose solutions will always be in the making.
In my discussion of interactivity I therefore avoid
allegorical readings, and concentrate instead on the
expressive properties of the feature, its potential and
limitations, its control of the reader, and its problematic
relation to immersion. ->
The organization of this book grew out of the very
definition that inspired the whole project: "virtual reality
is an immersive, interactive experience generated by a
computer." We will begin by visiting the virtual as
philosophical concept, move on to VR as technology, explore
its two components, immersion and interactivity, and we will
conclude this itinerary by considering what is for me the
ultimate goal of art: the synthesis of immersion and
interactivity. This book, then, is as much about virtual
literature-literature that could be-as about the actual
brand. ->
Even when narrative coherence is maintained, though,
immersion remains an elusive experience in interactive
texts. In the last two chapters, I argue that the marriage
of immersion and interactivity requires the imagined or
physical presence of the appreciator's body in the virtual
world, a condition easily satisfied in a VR system but
problematic in hypertext because every time the reader is
asked to make a choice she assumes an external perspective
on the worlds of the textual universe. In VR, we act within
a world, and experience it from the inside, but in
interactive texts of the selective variety, we choose a
world, more or less blindly, out of many alternatives, and
we are not imaginatively committed to anyone of them,
because the interest of branching texts lies in the
multiplicity of paths, not in any particular development.
->
But why should the synthesis of immersion and interactivity
matter so much for aesthetic philosophy ? In its literal
sense, immersion is a corporeal experience, and as I have
hinted above, it takes the projection of a virtual body, or
even better, the participation of the actual one to feel
integrated in an artworld. On the other hand, if
interactivity is conceived as the appreciator's engagement
in a play of signification that takes place on the level of
signs rather than things and of words rather than worlds, it
is a purely cerebral involvement with the text that
downplays emotions, curiosity for what will happen next, and
the resonance of the text with personal memories of places
and people. On the shiny surface of signs-the
signifier-there is no room for bodies of either the actual
or the virtual variety. But the recipient of total art, if
we dare to dream such a thing, should be no less than the
subject as Ignatius de Loyola defined it: an "indivisible
compound" of mind and body. What is at stake in the
synthesis of immersion and interactivity is therefore
nothing less than the participation of the whole of the
individual in the artistic experience.
*Excerpted
from Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media 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 paragraphs from the
introduction in dichtung-digital. (top) |
