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Media-realistic readings of urban novels and digital literature: Balzac's panorama, cinematographic Los Angeles novels, and writing the scripted spaces of the computer networks. Dissertation by Søren Pold (Aarhus Universitet) Abstract |
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The dissertation is in four
parts in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The
first part of the dissertation contains a methodical and
theoretical description of the field of the dissertation and
its media-realistic perspective, in which I in detail
account for the structure of the dissertation. Subsequently
the dissertation is structured in three thematic parts or
media-literary spaces (Paris, Los Angeles and the scripted
space of the computer). In conclusion I discuss how a
media-realistic understanding of literature and
media-realistic literature can help us read modern mediated
reality. The first part is structured
in three chapters. The first chapter considers the
relationship between literature and space, and I point out
some convergence points between on the one hand rhetoric,
text, and literature and on the other space. Even though at
first glance the text could be considered one dimensional,
linear, chronological, it turns out to be spatialised
through its rhetorical and literary staging. I explore how
literature deals with space, incorporates space, and can be
spatial itself though its rhetoric, figuration, form and
technology. The focus is not on the denotative space, the
space to which literature refers through its content and its
descriptions, but rather a connotative or formal space that
belongs to literature itself and is separate from spatial
manifestation in more sensuous art forms, with architectural
space as the extreme counterpole. In this chapter the
characteristic spatiality of literature is explored and
defined as a manifestation of the mediality or composed
nature of modern space. In the second chapter this
literary, textual space is laid out against the modern urban
spaces in which the dissertation resides. Here it becomes
clear that urban space and literary space challenge each
other and lead to a dynamic, mutual development, which leads
to the other main track of the dissertation, literature and
the history of media. Literature is challenged by the visual
mass media that gathers momentum from the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and at the same time urban space is
increasingly mediated and thereby also symbolically
organized with reading in mind. From the linear perspective
city-as-artwork the panoramic city is developed, which is
being organized according to a mass perspective more than
from the linear perspective single point of view. With the
panoramic city the individual's perspective of the city is
mediated by the panoramic mass perspective, which functions
both visually and spatially and is furthermore implemented
in the city's architecture and plan. The city and its
perspective exceeds the scale of the individual perspective
and the urban resident slowly becomes accustomed to
integrating a super-individual mass perspective to orient
himself in space. This is also underlined in the
cinematographic city, where movement is added as a
significant factor together with the architectural and
spatially constructed mass perspective of the panorama. The
city is increasingly perceived (as) in motion, either
through screens and projections or through the mobile
windshield perspective, and the movement is controlled by
infrastructure and signs. In the scripted space that also
gradually affects the forms of modern cities, the control of
space is not only visual and spatial but also directly coded
in writing. Space is controlled through a written
representation, it is scripted, and by means of computer
power the script can be integrated directly into the walls
and roads. Architectural urban space and the perception of
it are combined with a new way of writing and thus inherit
the mediality of writing as it was discussed in the first
chapter. In the third chapter I
discuss how literature and literary history can be read in
the light of this spatial and medial development. First I
suggest that literature should be studied as a medium and in
coherence with media history. Then I sketch out some
consequences for the history of modern literature,
especially regarding modernism, after which I present the
literary historical constellation of the dissertation. Here
I propose the current digital media revolution as a
perspective in which to read literature and literary
history. In the dissertation this leads to an updating of
realism in Balzac thorugh a panoramic media perspective,
concurrently with a reading of current Los Angels literature
and digital literature in a media-realistic perspective. In
conclusion I discuss the combination of media and realism in
my concept of media realism as a critical perspective
stemming from the work of Walter Benjamin. The second part of the
dissertation falls into four chapters, the last of which
serves to conclude the section. The first two chapters are
readings of two novels by Honoré de Balzac: La
Fille aux yeux d'or and Ferragus from the
collection Histoire des Treize. The third chapter
deals with the panorama and the mediated urban context in
which the novels take place. Both novels, La Fille aux
yeux d´or and Ferragus, contain a criticism
of the epistemology that is constituted by the classical,
abstract overview as it is depicted by the linear
perspective or the camera obscura, and they dramatise its
crisis in the meeting with the modern metropolis, Paris.
La Fille aux yeux d´or demonstrates how the gaze
and the visual are destabilized and detached from stabile
perception - how the visual is virtualized and at the same
time mobilized; that is, made an object of exchange,
mirroring and projection. The novel illustrates how through
this modernisation the visual becomes a drama with severe
consequences all the way into the intimate sphere of the
boudoir. A development that in the novel is connected to how
gold works as a medium; how it structures perception and
through virtualisation and mobilisation potentially creates
new structures of meaning. Ferragus demonstrates how
the place (which not by accident is Paris) is no longer a
stable frame for perception, but initiates a dynamic where
perception and knowledge are made contingent and where
perspectives and communication are mediated in a circuit of
information that develops its own autonomous, cybernetic
logic. In Ferragus the focus is on how the place is
doubled in a body of social information that operates beyond
the control of the single individual and that is partly
driven by the individual protagonist's unsuccessful attempt
to stage himself as a linear perspective
observer. Both novels thus dramatise
the crisis of the classical linear perspective observer
confronted with the modern urban city; how the abstract
overview comes up against difficulties when meeting the
materialism of the city and its new dynamic social reality.
In different ways they demonstrate how the urban social
structures are constructed and function as mediations of
visual perception, which thus on the one hand are
destabilised and on the other hand are valorised in a new
visual economy (La Fille aux yeux d´or )
and informational structure (Ferragus).
This visual and informational (statistical, cybernetic)
structure that the novels formulate in a literary way means
that the novels can be read as literary manifestations on
the threshold of a modern urban media reality. La Fille
aux yeux d´or formulates through its rhetoric,
constellations of characters, points of view and narrative
structure a literary experience of the valorisation of the
visual. Ferragus represents through its intrigue,
points of view and its mediated space an abstract,
cybernetic information circuit and demonstrates how this
circuit affects social and material space; how it redefines
the city as a mediascape. In the third chapter I trace
this media character and how it was expressed in Paris
around the panoramic media. The aim of this discussion of
the panorama is to contextualize the media discussions of my
readings in respect to the time of Balzac, and to interpret
and make explicit the implied media-realistic formulations
in the novels. The panorama is used as a perspective that
unfolds a reading of realism in relation to media. The
panorama summarizes cognitive innovations that from the
beginning of the nineteenth century have affect on a large
number of areas ranging from the individual sensory
perception and orientation in the modern world to the
organization of modern society. As the first
culture-industrial mass medium, the panorama opens a process
of mediation that has an effect on both the conception and
the construction of reality. I view this construction of
reality from different angles. In relation to the social or
political construction of modern reality, I discuss the
panorama as a democratic mass perspective versus the
panorama as a panoptic disciplining of the masses. Drawing
on Stephan Oettermann I discuss the panorama versus the
panopticon as a model for the division of the world into
pleasure and work respectively. I also discuss the
'panoramisation' of the world through tourism and train
travel, point at mediatechnological aspect and list the
sisters and heirs of the panorama; the diorama,
phenochistescope, stereoscope, cinéorama and digital
3D VR media. One of the most important points, together with
the already mentioned political, social, infra structural
and media technological changes, is that the panorama marks
a radical commercialisation of the visual. One paid an
entrance fee - an economic transaction that also influenced
what was shown and resulted in a change from biblical,
allegoric motives to more commercially marketable motives.
The panorama developed into an actual cultural industry and
was even exploited for propaganda and commercial purposes.
The commercialisation influenced not only what people
saw but gradually also how; the audience sought the
dizzyingly spectacular, the phantasmogoric forms spread in
the city scape and entered into an intimate connection with
things, as described in Marx's concept of goods. This how can also be
approached by discussing how the panorama was perceived; how
the panorama resulted in changes in sensory perception. In
respect to individual sensory perception, I describe the
panoramic changes brought about by the introduction of a
breech between the seen and the cognitive as well as between
vision and the other senses, a situation in which one sees
the phantasmagoric mediation and is nevertheless transported
into a virtual media space. The panorama introduces an
oscillation in the cognition between representation and
simulation and this oscillation leads to a modern
ontological confusion between the levels of reality in media
reality; between empirical representation that claims to
bring us closer to an underlying reality and a spectacular
simulation of a phantasmagoric dream reality that is adapted
to consumption. In the case of train travel the panoramic
observer steps out of the continual space where the near and
the far are connected and into a mediated space that enfolds
him. Moreover, the panoramic perspective is a mass
perspective, which indicates that changes in individual
sensory perception are connected to social and political
changes. The panorama thus illustrates central aspects of
bourgeois society that are on one hand related to sensory
perception and the individual and on the other to the
structures of society. Both aspects - vision and society -
are connected dialectically and are to be seen as
inseparable in my presentation of the panorama as an
epistemological visual machine for early bourgeois
society. Through my reading of Balzac
in relation to the panorama, Balzac becomes topical as the
founder of a media-realistic literature that is far from the
naïve realism with which various avant-garde and
modernist movements claims to take issue. Balzac
demonstrates how literature can be timely and critically
stage modern media reality by incorporating, reflecting and
demonstrating the presentational forms of the media in its
own literary form. Thus, the media-realistic novel contains
important critical potentials for rendering the forms of
media visible and readable through literary
staging. The third part is divided
into four chapters, the last of which has a concluding form.
The first chapter outlines a media-realistic history of Los
Angeles literature based on the mediated character and
mythology of the city. The city with no centre has in more
than one sense Hollywood in its heart and its identity is
built up from set pieces. My starting point is in the
designation of the city as cinematographic and here I
elaborate on how the cinematographic aspects affects the
city and the perception of it, as well as how this is
formulated in Los Angeles novels. I also include critical
views and discussions of the city's mediated character and
how this mediated character is related to a cultural economy
of an almost mythological nature that is split up into the
contrasts of sunshine and noir. Noir
is the inversion of the sunshine mythology that has very
effectively sold the city to tourists, newcomers and cinema
audience all over the world. However, noir was
quickly appropriated by the movie industry and is selling
just as well as the sunshine myth to which noir was a
response. After this outline
historical outline of Los Angeles novels, I take a closer
look at how the cinematographical perspective and noir
sensibility is unfolded in the writing of Raymond
Chandler and in his protagonist Marlowe. Especially The
Little Sister demonstrates how Hollywood builds up and
controls the presentation of reality. Through cinematic
dialogues and metaphors, the mobile and superficial
perspective, and descriptions resembling set pieces, as well
as the general obsession with deceit, Chandler stages a
detective who is totally immersed in a filmic reality, which
in the end leads to a breakdown for the illuminating gaze of
the detective. Thus, The Little Sister introduces a
reading of Chandler's writing and the noir literature
as a literary adaptation of the cinematic presentation and
recognition of reality. Mediation is basic to Los Angeles
and is therefore the closest one gets to the city's fleeting
identity. Los Angeles has Hollywood under its skin and in
the heart. Noir acts out this mediation and can thus
be read as media realism that deals with how reality is
mediated and produced in cinematographic
urbanity. The second and third
chapters are analyses of two contemporary Los Angeles
novels; Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers and Steve
Erickson's Amnesiascope , which in different forms
intensify the media-realistic tradition of the city. In
Ellis's novel the cinematic anaesthetisized observer is at
the centre of a novel without a continuous narrative told by
anti-narrators resembling surveillance cameras, who instead
of narrating simply pass information on, which the novel
primarily registers. However, the novel's form is filled
with caesuras to a degree that one almost stumbles over them
and it thereby invites to being read through its gaps. The
narrative form of the novel is close to a point zero, which
Ellis however shows a way out of through the humoristic
leads he places in the novel and in his following novel,
Glamourama. To this, of course, is added Ellis's
mastery of literary form, which he uses in a media-realistic
critique of a (post) modern, cinematic, urban
reality. Steve Erickson shows another
course, which is far less noir and dystopical.
Erickson's narrator breaks up the media metropole's space
and time with its own measures, moving around on the city's
"great non-sequitur streets" and taking advantage of the
holes in the city's time zones. Whereas Chandler and Ellis
concentrate on the cinematographic aspects as we know it,
Erickson displaces the familiar media technology and
overemphasizes the phantasmagorical-magical aspects. In
Amnesiascope he even builds up his own fictive and
fantastic media, which becomes the utopian-impossible
perspective of the novel - the point which would gather its
form and articulate its reply to what Los Angeles is if it
is no longer a city. Through this fictive and
phantasmagorical perspective, Erickson succeeds in telling a
different story about Los Angeles, about its erotic city
spaces and fantastic, phantasmagorical dimensions. Even
though in Erickson's novels Los Angeles is not clearly
articulated, but is deferred and unfolded in a continuous
narration, it is a narrative that thematises how media
urbanity seduces and why it is seductive. The fourth part consists of
three chapters and a conclusion. In this part of the
dissertation I move beyond the safe covers of the book and
into a digital field where I explore emergent literary
forms. The starting point for exploring an emergent digital
literature is the code and the fact that the computer medium
can be seen as a writing technology, which supplies a basis
for a literary perspective and some extraordinary literary
possibilities. The first chapter discusses the relation
between code and literature, in which I discuss some
mediatheoretical definitions of the computer medium, after
which I read Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel as a
staging of anecdotes of the code. My reading of Puppet
Motel thus uncovers how the literary occurs in the
anecdotic formulations around and in the coded space of the
computer and the interaction with this. In the first
chapter, after having explained my starting point in the
code and in the understanding of the computer as a writing
technology, I use this literary starting point to explore a
range of interaesthetic and interdisciplinary
points. In chapter two the
multimedial, primarily visual effects of the code are
examined through Myst's staging of the multimedia
computer's ekphrasis and genre related discussions between
text and image. My reading of Myst serves as a
corrective to the prevalent view of the computer medium as
an extension of the visual media, as is for instance the
case within the Virtual Reality (VR) discourse. The VR
discourse appears in its pure form as a repression of the
scripted nature of the computer and the effect of this
approach may at worst be a restriction of the readability of
the computer medium, or at least a justification for a "user
friendly" cover up of the its scripted nature and
readability. Blackout thematizes the consequences of
such a cover up of its readability and through an alter ego
stages a schizophrenic user who when trying to read the
scripted space is read and written himself to an extent that
in the end the user is entangled in the cybertext's trap.
This chapter thus demonstrates how digital literary works
can formulate media-realistic understanding of the computer
medium, which through literary stagings of the code builds
up an understanding of the computer's significance that can
function as a critical corrective to the prevalent more
high-flying and commercial visions. At the same time the
chapter formulates perspectives for a multimedia
literature. Whereas chapter two
concentrates on multimedial, digital literary expressions,
chapter three concentrates on hypertext. The central point
is the link that makes the text electric and whereby
literature develops from a work to a network. At the same
time, the concentration on hypertext gives the opportunity
to critically discuss the influential hypertext theory and
its juxtaposition or "convergence" (George P. Landow) of
post structuralism, (post-) modernistic avant-garde and
hypertext. As an alternative to transferring a literary
theoretic tradition to digital media, the dissertation
discusses how the scripted space of the computer can be seen
in connection with the development of urban forms as
described in the first part and in continuation of the
media-realistic view of literature that the dissertation
proposes. In reading hypertexts I aim
to uncover the new grammar of the link and to interpret what
this new grammar has already generated. As
Hegirascope demonstrates, the text has become
electric and kinetic and has acquired its own restless
temporality. Etoy demonstrates convincingly
discursive economy of the link through its own popcultural
irony, ironically appropriating the commercial rhetoric and
aesthetics of the World Wide Web. Jodi's HTML-lyric
is a deconstructive work with the basic linguistic nature of
the code, thus undermining the interface and demonstrating
the construction of the computer's mode of presentation.
Jodi demonstrates how media reality is coded and at
the same time they demonstrate how literary, absurd,
hacker-humour still can lead the codes of media reality
astray. At the end I present The Web Stalker as a
textual parallel to the visual panorama. This is a parallel
that not only demonstrates continuity, but also stages
difference. As a parallel to how the picture with the
panorama breaks the frame and leaves the canvas to enfold
the viewer, The Web Stalker , as a hyper textual
panorama, demonstrates how hyper- and cybertext leaves the
book to enfold the reader. The Web Stalker is thus a
literary corrective to the post-symbolical visual language
of the Virtual Reality discussion. My focus on the code of the
computer aims to uncover and illuminate an emergent digital
literature, to clarify how the literary arises around a
formal exploration of the code, which gradually becomes a
formulation of the code's significance. I end this
exploration by suggesting The Web Stalker as a
literary tool for understanding the forms of the Internet
and the construction of a digital conception of text beyond
the paper and the book. In my conclusion I sum up
the salient points of the dissertation and put them into
perspective in relation to a wider literary, aesthetical and
cultural field. I discuss how art and literature is
digitalized and how they reflect the digital; either as an
outer reflection that easily becomes phantasmagorical and on
the terms of the media and the industry, or as a
media-realistic reflection that both keeps up with media
development and integrates media development in relation to
the tradition and the formal reflection of the work. In the
latter case digital and media development becomes an
integrated part of the production of meaning in literary
works. Media-realistic literature thus obtains an important
role as a field that formulates media reality and gives us
access to an interpretation of it through its formal
reflection and in relation to traditional forms. In relation to the general
development of the media it is possible to observe two lines
of development: On one hand, the development and importance
of the visual media will continue and the
visual will continue to be central; on the other,
visual media will be integrated in and affected by the
digital scriptedness - by the fact that the digital
media are technologies of writing. Thus, in the first place
we will see a continuous literary thematizing and processing
of the visual and the visual media reality, which
this dissertation has investigated from Balzac (primarily
La Fille aux yeux d'or) to Chandler, Ellis and
Erickson. Secondly, we will see a literary processing and
exploration of the scriptedness or forms of the
digital textuality, of which we see the antecedents in the
literary processing of the statistical, informational and
cybernetic in Balzac's Ferragus as well as in Etoy
and Jodi. The dissertation proposes a
media-realistic concept of literature and history, in which
the development of literature itself as well as the general
media development are considered an integrated part of the
literary. In view of the media-realistic concept of
literature digital media does not present a threat to
literature, but on the contrary the computer presents a new
digital literary field, which is an obvious challenge to
writers, to the literary field and literary criticism.
Literature is engaged in making the mediated readable and
this is not possible by standing outside the mediated, but
on the contrary through a medial self-reflection and by
passing through modern media. It is precisely by virtue of
this literary media consciousness ex libris -
from and out of the books - and the way in which it is
constantly staged and put into play in relation to forms of
new media, that literature has a critical potential. As a
literary staging that makes possible a reading of the
imprint of media and of media reality. Søren
Pold, August 2000 Thanks to Marie Louise Bro
Pold & Stacey M. Cozart for translation. |
