Narrativity: Experience & Event

A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communication

of The European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

By Deborah Katherine Griggs September 2013.

Table of Contents

1. Statement of Purpose (1)

2. Etymology & Genealogy of Narrat* (3)

2.1 Etymology: narrate, narration, and narrative (4)

2.2 Aristotle: Patient Zero (6)

2.3 Nietzsche: Chiasmic Mimesis and Control (7)

Mimesis (7)

Theory as Cultural Control (10)

2.4 Narratology: Arborescent Branchings (13)

2.5 Narratology: Play (18)

3. Narrat* Rhizome (23)

3.1 Historical Accountancy (26)

3.2 Dream Narrators, Linguistic Unconscious, & Archetype (27)

Dream Narrators (29)

Linguistic Unconscious & The Discourse of Other (36)

Archetype & The Hero's Journey (44)

3.3 Narrative Turn & Applied Narrative (48)

Corporate Narrative (50)

Political Narrative (52)

Narrative Medicine (54)

Enculturation & Narrative Competency (58)

3.4 Narrative Genealogies: Anti-climax (61)

4. Transmedial Thresholds: The Devil's Weed (63)

4.1 Game Design & Interactive Storytelling (63)

4.2 Virtual Drama (72)

4.3 Virtual Reality (76)

Immersion & Interaction (77)

The Virtual (80)

Poetics of Immersion (84)

4.4 Transmedial Narrative (85)

Narrative as Strategy (87)

Oral Narrative: Frames, Boundaries & Gesture (89)

Film Narrative: Material & Function (94)

Pictorial Narrative: Configuration (97)

4.5 Critical Thresholds (101)

5. Narrat* & Philosophy (104)

5.1 Interdisciplinary Landscapes (105)

5.2 Philosophy of Stories (109)

5.3 Narrative Perspective (113)

5.4 Narrative & Time (117)

Temporal Discordance (118)

Narrative Concordance (120)

Mimesis (122)

5.5 Narrative & Experience (126)

6. Narrativity (132)

6.1 Narrativity: The story so far… (133)

6.2 Paradigm (135)

6.3 Performativity (138)

6.4 Mediation (140)

6.5 Dynamic Processes (144)

6.6 Philosophy (147)

6.7 Narrativity Revisited (149)

7. New Points of Viewing (150)

7.1 Experience as the ground for narrative appearance (152)

4-Transmedial Thresholds: The Devil's Weed

The encounter of narrative theory with the so-called digital explosion

and consequently with Virtual Reality (VR) proved to be a critical threshold in

several core morphogenetic processes within narrative tradition. While the

digital explosion engendered much socio-academic skepticism regarding the

effects of digital media and life with the digitally virtual—whether fears

regarding social isolation, loss of privacy, and uncontrolled access to

information or the effects on standardized language and traditional

paradigms of learning—narrative theorists turned to investigations of digital,

virtual and, eventually, transmedial narrative and, in doing so, entered an

interdisciplinary realm that connected to media theory, psychology, and

philosophy. What lies between the explosion and the questions arising from

this interdisciplinary growth is what Deleuze and Guattari would call the

devil's weed—that nurtured in the gullies created by the run-off. One stream

fed rhizomes of narratological bodies, while another nurtured stray segments

carrying philosophical, psychological genes, leaving a bed of genetically rich,

bastard growth with potential to shake narrative's theoretical core.

4.1 Game Design & Interactive Storytelling

Much of the first popular and scholarly work on digital narrative was

undertaken by game designers or those investigating the nature of computer

mediated interactive stories: e.g., designer Chris Crawford's Interactive

Storytelling, scholar and designer Michael Bhatty's Interaktives Storytelling,

or programmer and scholar Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck. This type

of game-oriented analysis focused on such aspects of digital narrative as the

structuring and programming of multi-linear paths within an overarching

narrative, interactive production of storyline, character and storyworld

modeling, user immersion, and replay.

Basing its analytical paradigm on broad views of myth, brain function,

and computer processes, game designer Chris Crawford's Interactive

Storytelling describes narrative as a socio-linguistic phenomenon employing

mental functions of pattern recognition and sequential processing, one that

has naturally developed over the course of human evolution for the purpose

of storing and transmitting cultural information, as well as exploring or

explaining interpersonal relationships. Crawford's theoretical orientation

toward plot is both structural and archetypal, as evidenced by his references

to Propp's morphological sequencing, Georges Polti's list of dramatic

situations, or Aarne-Thompson's catalogue of tale types. His theory of

character or the "personality model" similarly begins with an archetypal core

but is further developed on the basis of programming constraints. The

resulting rules of characterization are that the model 1) cover the behavior

range of [the] storyworld, 2) [be kept] as small as possible [in terms of

data], 3) achieve conciseness through orthogonality, and 4) [mirror] the

behavioral universe of the storyworld. To this basic model, Crawford then

adds four variables: intrinsic personality traits such as "greed, lust, pride,

etc."; mood or "emotional state"; volatility or "readiness with which mood

variables can change; accordance or the "readiness with which relationships

change"; and relationship, i.e., with all other characters. (182-193)

Overall, the conceptualizations of both plot and character adhere to

narrative tradition and convention, focusing on morphological patterns of

structure that lend themselves to logical causal sequencing and patterns of

psychological structure that relate to standard (stock) views of character

motivation—factors that also respond to the demands of computer

functionality, mediation and programming. However, although Crawford does

not explicitly develop or even seem to note the psychological or philosophical

perspectives in his design model, his discussion of the conversion of plot

events into processing sequences or personality models into algorithms

suggests a view of plot and character as dynamic systems of interactive

exchange between user and processer or, in other terms, author and reader,

subject and Other. Crawford's conceptualization of plot shows a flexibility

similar to Barthes' structuralist paradigm, in which the space between fixed,

cardinal functions can be "opened up" to leave room for added subplots or

minor events. In Crawford's plot model, however, the spaces open up as a

result of participant choices or user-defined personality variables. Also

different is the way that interaction transforms plot into "a cyclic process

between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listens,

thinks, and speaks" (29). All of these differences are potentially of interest to

philosophies of narrative. Rather than a view of an archetypal journey or set

sequence according to Jung or Campbell, we see the play of personality

variables, contextually unique conditions, and interaction between

programmer-program-user in forming a narrative sequence of events. The

result in the context of the game is that narrative is viewed as a complex

play of forces, even though there is ultimately potential to achieve only a

limited number of fates in an unalterable, pre-programmed world and the

"play" in this world is the play of gears in the storytelling engine.

Nevertheless, the game here adds the potential for new factors in narrative

theory, even though these are not here realized as such.

In the end, despite the potential for new narrative discovery,

Crawford's logical path-making rests firmly in a traditional essentialization of

narrative. He begins by dividing mental activity into functions that rely on

pattern recognition and those that rely on sequential processing, assigning

visual-spatial and social information to processes of pattern recognition and

natural history and language to sequential processing. Reasoning that the

mind recognizes patterns and that narrative has shown itself to employ

patterns, he concludes that pattern recognition is essential to the machinery

of narrative production. He then concludes that because narrative is reliant

on language, it is also fundamentally related to sequential processing. On the

basis of these two initial conclusions, the reasons that narrative must be

central to human experience because of its ability to allow the functions

based on pattern recognition to work with those based on sequential

processing. Language is seen to "make sense" of social information by means

of narrative, which incorporates both pattern recognition, say, in character

behaviors, and sequencing, visible in the plotting of events. Ignoring the

inadequacy of these mental modules to explain any aspects of being or

identity or to forge questions of how patterns are recognized or created by

the mind, Crawford's analysis of game design reveals where traditional

privileging of linear logic and views of human lives as neat, causal (and

teleological) packages have met computer generated narratives and won.

Applied to the creation of a digitally based game, narrative is once again

bundled up in a scientistic conceptualization, this time in concepts of data

processing and binary logic.

In his dissertation Interaktives Storytelling, game designer and

theorist Michael Bhatty similarly leans on archetypal situations, plots, and

characters, although because his dissertation is written for a scholarly rather

than popular audience, much of the speculation about narrative that fills

Crawford's instructions to future game designers is replaced with discussion

of the way that computer games fit into game theory and narrative

paradigms as such. Identifying narrative as an art form that aside from its

desire to entertain, also transmits information, Bhatty introduces elements

familiar to narrative theory: his narrative tree (Erzählbaum) immediately

reminds one of Deleuze's hierarchical, arborescent structure, just as the a-

plot (A-Handlung)—an essential 'trunk' of plot that cannot be affected by

player input—calls to mind Barthes' core structure of cardinal functions, once

again revealing the usefulness of structuralism to computer-mediated game

designers. That yes-no choices of the user in the branch-plots will lead to the

expansive pockets of variation or sidebar explorations of character, location

and subplot as well as to interruption or delays is evident, although in the

process, Barthes' fugue becomes a web.

The reference to narrative and dramatic theory is also explicit in other

areas. The game-world designer is portrayed as the godlike creator of a

physically comprehensible, livable environment, and the designer of the play

is seen as director-dramaturg. Bhatty spends much time discussing such

aspects of the game as spectacle and mise en scene, evoking thoughts of a

phenomenological perspective on user experience. Rather than setting and

description, we see the term "texture mapping" or the term "isometric view"

to describe the ability to see in a 360-degree view without the ability to see a

horizon. This blending out of the larger view as a visual experience suggests

aspects of narrative thought that though not developed further by Bhatty

have the potential to aid in the re-thinking of narrative concepts of point of

view and spatio-temporal experience.

Another part of Bhatty's discussion that diverges from Crawford's focus

on programming alone is that on game theory. Beginning with a discussion of

chess and strategy games as such, his theoretical description of the field of

play and the rules of the strategy game reveals provocative terminology,

among them Bewegungsgrundlage (rules of movement); Bewegungsfeld

(field of movement) (9); Schiedsrichter or referee that decides winners of

conflicts in multi-player games of contest (11); and Umgebungsparameter or

environmental parameters which affect such aspects as physics, laws, social

mores or customs, etc. (12).

Both Crawford's and Bhatty's analyses reveal ways in which digital

processes have been influenced by convention, as well as by the cultural

view of life experience or path as strategic movement in a pre-defined field of

play in which a sequence of yes/no choices lead to a finite set of potential

outcomes or objectives. While more complex programs add higher degrees of

difficulty and complexity, they do not lead to any sense of a non-causal free

play. Bhatty's example of the demand for "improvisational and combinatory

capabilities" in Star Trek: Next Generation – A Final Unity (28) explicitly

reveals the web of path complexity as more than a metaphor of form, but a

metaphor of entrapment within a storyworld conforming to the definitions of

literary Naturalism. The sense of danger and/or excitement is heightened by

the addition or "real-time" play in which choices, correct or incorrect, are not

accompanied by pauses or game interruptions, an interest of contemporary

narrative convention that one can also see in the fast-paced digital editing in

cinematic action sequences and one that implicitly leads to thoughts of

temporal tension as a narrative force.

While scholar Janet Murray does not primarily focus on the

programming of game design in Hamlet on the Holodeck, her

conceptualization of hyperlinked story development and structure largely

overlaps with that of game designers. Bhatty's range and manner of motion

(Bewegungsgrundlage, Bewegungsfeld) find equivalents in Murray's elements

of procedure and participation (agency), while his designer concerns of

isometric views and texture mapping may be found in Murray's description of

user experience or immersion, part of which results as a result of the

encyclopedic nature of the storyworld, that is, its capacity for incorporating

immense amounts of data that become available to the user/player. Murray

underplays any focus on a designer-god, choosing instead to focus on user

desire—desire that the interactive narrative (game) satisfies by offering

occasions for self-expression, choice, replay, and transformation or "shape-

shifting"—a term with which Murray most closely approaches the issue of

perceived freedom in the limited storytelling engine.

In the hypertext narrative, Murray sees a kind of recipient-

empowerment and potential for fascination with a seeming mise en abyme of

variation, foregrounding the interactive dynamic and its potential for creative

variation in plot, character modeling, and response to environmental

parameters. For this she depends on the participatory and interactive part of

the user in co-creating the story as opposed to the reader of the fully

determined narrative in a traditionally authored novel. However, although the

player physically embodies choices and is afforded an agency of expression,

Murray ignores or underplays the fact that these are limited and, to the

extent that they lie within the environmental parameters and character

modeling are limited, designer-defined choices and expressions.

It must also be asked to what extent the experience of limited player

choice in the game narrative is more profound than the experience of

unlimited reader imagination in the traditional written narrative. While the

interactive participant-player can materially construct fragments of

programmed personality models and affect segments of plot by varying path,

character choices can extend only as far as the personality model can stretch

and plot choices can extend only as far as the next fixed event. On the other

hand, while the reader of the fixed narrative is led down a predetermined

path, this reader is not constrained by time restrictions or pre-programmed

points of attention (e.g., the need to find the proper weapon or tool or clue).

Also, because the location of the narrative visualization is in the mind of the

reader, she may consider choices a traditional character might have made

and explore completely other paths through imaginary extrapolation.

Finally, it is important to remember that along with the scripting of an

intelligent agent such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT)

Eliza—whose deceptively human interaction plays a large part in Murray's

discussion of immersion—comes the scripting of the participant, who by

virtue of the common attitudes, values, and scripted communication gestures

attributed to the generic, has become a kind of stock character. This true,

the question remains whether the computer-afforded expressivity, like the

apparent freedom of choice within the storytelling machine, is in any way

more freeing than the imaginative exchange between book, painting, or film.

That it seems real and that it interacts with real-world perceptions and

behaviors is attested to by the use of computer simulations in the military to

train humans to control emotional and physiological responses in fast-paced,

life-endangering situations and focus instead on the task at hand. However,

the cynicism inherent in this computer-based, military desensitization

conditioning, a cynicism also apparent in the explosion of doomsday

automaton cyberpunk dystopian narratives that accompanied our cultural

digitalization, is something that Murray underplays by portraying interactive

storytelling as a flight toward expression and recipient empowerment in co-

producing story in a sensory and logically immersive spatio-temporal

environment.

The fears and fascinations related to interactive stories and user-

experience are significant for theorists in that they can mask other concerns,

such as the underlying adherence to or break from tradition. From the

discussion of game design, for example, we can see the fascination with the

sensory data and concretization of imagined spatio-temporal environments

as well as the fear of images becoming self-referential with no relationship to

the real but constituting their own reality as in Jean Baudrillard's critique of

simulacra. What might pass by less noticed, however, is the adherence to

traditions of structural and archetypal views of stories and their purpose or

role in human society, although because the first investigations of computer

narrative in games tended to take much of the focus away from the linguistic

connection to narrative theory, new genetic transfer in things narrative also

became possible.

Though the point remains implicit in her preface, Murray describes an

earlier scholarly experience in which she augmented her fiction-based

knowledge of Victorian society by means of cross-referencing information and

perspectival viewpoints in feminist or anthologized autobiographical texts.

She then remarks that, although she did not know the term at the time, she

would retrospectively term this structure of this body of information as

hypertext. (4) In this description she implicitly attributes to flat information

topologies the power to transform purely sequential research-experiences

into a series of associative connections between diverse informational sets.

However, because she does not analyze potential connections between non-

computer-directed experience and computer-human-interface-experiences,

she does not consider whether the configuration of the participant-

designer/writer-reader as co-authors and the possibility of replay are present

only in the computer-generated narrative games or whether the same

machinery might not be present in non-computer-based narrative systems,

say, in systems of intertextuality: i.e., in literary, cinematic, and artistic

allusion, in cross-referencing, or in other rhizomatic narrative transference.

In this scenario hypertext would merely be the short game; intertextuality

would be the long game.

All in all, computer-generated narratives and strategic games based on

storytelling seem to have initially adhered to structuralist and archetypal

ideas about plot, traditional typologies of character, and predictable schemes

of psychological motivation. Moreover, while promising free play and co-

authoring in the interactive digital environment, they end by confining

players to a pre-determined story, albeit one in which they may take runs at

the parametric walls. At the same time, they introduce concepts of potential

interest to narrative theory, e.g., dynamic exchange, character and plot

systems, territories of movement, texture mapping, or environmental

parameters.

Traces: Bewegungsgrundlage. Bewegungsfeld. Umgebungsparameter.

Schiedsrichter. Sequential processing. Pattern recognition Data mining.

Temporal tension. Isometric view. Texture mapping. Flat-topology narratives.

Shape-shifting.

4.2 Virtual Drama

Generically speaking, hypertext narratives consist of webs of story

fragments through which participants navigate in order to create a

personalized, interactive story, while, as Crawford and Bhatty reveal,

computer-generated, game narratives employ nodally organized multi-path

plot structures embedded in digital storyworlds through which the participant

navigates via avatar in order to earn points or achieve other objectives. Due

to the required specificity of game objectives (points, accumulation of

objects, victory over foes, etc.) and the flow necessary to the hypertext story

experience, careful construction and programming of plot events to ensure

progress in the game or continuity in the story become necessary. These

constraints lead to significant limitation in the pallet of choices with which the

participant is confronted. In the face of the need to offer choice while

conforming to story expectations and conventions, use of structuralist models

(nodal in nature) and archetypal characters (predictable and recognizable on

the basis of minimal data) in game design and hypertext is unsurprising.

Virtual drama, however, took on a different focus—that of providing

interactors with a more authentic role-playing experience.

Early experiments in virtual drama (or virtual, dramatized narrative)

proposed to loosen plot structure in order to allow for more authentic 'play'

on the part of the interactor, who in the game or hypertext narrative was

largely relegated to binary yes/no decisions and binary successes (points

attained, objects gathered, tasks achieved) or failures. In order to achieve

more differentiated computer-generated co-characters, Carnegie-Mellon's OZ

project began by employing human actors and directors on stage, the

experiment proposing to explore the effect of multi-character improvisation

on plot and the level of directorial control that would have to be input for the

interactor to achieve a satisfying dramatic experience. Considerations related

to interactor satisfaction were the interactor's feelings of immersion and

sense that co-characters were 'real,' along with the perceived balance

between free choice and clear direction. As in the case of Murray's discussion

of immersion, the focus of this OZ project experiment was interactor

perception of presence or the real.

First, we asked how the interactor felt when immersed in a dramatic

virtual world filled with character and story. In addition to the basic

question, we had questions about the nature of the experience. For

example, would the interactor be able to entire into a world we created,

become emotionally involved, respond, then leave with a feeling of

satisfaction of having experienced something of value?...Would it feel

real, contrived, involving, interesting or boring? (Bates, Kelso, and

Weyrauch 3)

The nodal plot structure, here termed the plot graph, was a field

through which the interactor moved forward, the progress defined as the

frontier of the story. While the interactor influence on the path through the

interactive plot graph is similar in this respect to the hyperlinked story, there

are major differences in the concept. First, rather than the hyperlinked

context in which there are fixed fragments through which a participant can

move according to limited choices, in the virtual dramatized narrative there is

a combination of organic (interactor) and synthetic (programmed) characters

as well as a drama manager, the latter two categories of which can react to

specific and individualized actions by the interactor. Second, the movement

through the story frontier is conceptually different than path through the

hyperlinked labyrinth.

As a consequence of the properties of the graph, it is traversed by

means of a moving frontier. The frontier begins at the left edge of the

graph. As each scene occurs, it moves behind the frontier. A scene can

reach the frontier if and only if all of its predecessors are finished, i.e.,

behind the frontier. (5-6)

While, as the authors admit, the overarching structure limits real

choice and while in stating that any customized path "should be dramatic"

without further definition presumes an adherence to traditional ideas of plot,

there is still a new element here for the narrative, i.e., that of moving

through the frontier of the narrative. This term provides a different image

than that presumed by those who see the plot as a logical or causal or

teleological driving forward toward the "proper" ending. As in Bhatty's 360-

degree view in the game, we do not focus on beginnings or endings here, but

envision a clearing or limited emergent field in which we stand, our

movement prodded by a combination of the graph-story and our own

attention—our free and limited field of potential. Furthermore, the chiasmic

forces of the organic and the synthetic in the virtual realm provide much

provocative thought not only to phenomenology of narrative reception but

also to an indication of how narrative dynamics might interact with

perception as such.

That virtual drama still adheres to Aristotelian theory about plot is

evidence by an early article by Michael Mateas, "A preliminary poetics for

interactive drama and games." Mateas begins by taking on Aristotle's

assumption that prose narratives tend toward the episodic (story as a

"collection of causally unrelated incidents") while dramatized narratives

possess a unity of action. This, of course, disregards logical and causal plot

structures in the novel as well as episodic structure in both traditional and

modern drama, but follows a traditional generalization that is important to

recognize as still forming the basis of much theory regarding digital

narratives or dramas.

Nevertheless, as in other early theories of digital storyworlds or

narrative structures, there are new points of emphasis in Mateas' first work

at a digital poetics. One lies in his focus on material and formal causes. The

formal cause of the play is the "plot that attempts to explicate some theme."

This first cause then determines the characters, which determine the

language they speak, which calls up the spectacle. The material cause is "the

audience view of the play," i.e., that which is taken in as sensory experience,

building patterns of enactment, leading to thought, and, if well done, ending

up at the author-defined formal cause (143). According to Aristotle, the

highest-ranking cause is therefore plot or action, followed in second place by

character, the material cause enactment, then pattern. In the interactive or

virtual drama, Mateas sees the same structure, with the exception that the

formal cause becomes "inferred" rather than explicit. Explicit for the

interactor (i.e., participant) in the virtual drama, however, is a second

structural shell consisting of "material for action" and "user intention" (144).

The "material resources for taking action"—aside from the storyworld and its

properties—are the affordances incorporated into the interface design,

resources that are not only "made available" by the interface but those that

"in some sense 'cry out' for the action to be taken" (144).

All in all, although we have a rather strict adherence to traditional

assumptions made by Aristotle in terms of the 'nature' of prose or dramatic

narrative and a further acceptance of the necessity of the causal plot for

dramatic effect or experience, we have new thoughts regarding character

intentionality and the affordances of storyworlds.

Traces: Narrative frontier. Plot graph. Synthetic character.

Affordances. Material resources. Character intentionality.

4.3 Virtual Reality

In general, game design and hypertext theory focused on how

narratives were affected by digital contexts, game objectives, and/or

participant interaction. Elements particularly under consideration were the

design of computer-generated storyworlds; the modeling of believable,

consistent, yet flexible synthetic characters; and the development of

paradigms for variable yet stable plot structures that offered varying levels of

participant choice or co-authorship. Though similarly concerned with

participant immersion and interaction with digitally created environments,

theories of virtual reality (VR) focused more decidedly on the phenomenology

of the interactor's narrative experience as well as on expanded perspectives

regarding the concepts of immersion, interaction, and presence. Marie-Laure

Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality further identifies immersion and

interactivity as aspects of VR with a capacity to shed new light on a

"phenomenology of reading" or theories of "experiencing" narratives and

narrative aspects of art as such.

Immersion & Interaction

Distinguishing the "symbolic representation of the spiritual essence of

things" in pre-Renaissance painting from the "illusion of their presence" in

perspectival painting, Ryan uses this historical shift in the manner of

representing objects and environments to introduce a parallel distinction

between signification and simulation and the way in which these speak to the

inner or the embodied eye respectively. (2) With this conceptual pallet as a

foundation for a discussion of immersion, Ryan describes the means with

which perspective draws the embodied eye into the painting by "assign[ing]

spatial coordinates—the center of projection, or physical point of view—to the

body of the spectator...[and thereby] immerses a virtual body in an

environment that stretches in imagination far beyond the confines of the

canvas" (3). In this fashion, Ryan sees visual immersion in terms of an

"illusion of penetrable space," one that is a continuation of the physical space

of the spectator. (3) Using the same logic, she describes the manner in

which, conversely, modern, two-dimensional art "[expels] the body" of the

viewer from the pictorial space or the manner in which cubism "[shatters]

the physical integrity of both space and the body by forcing the spectator to

occupy several points of view at the same time." (3) Replacing "the

projection of the virtual body in the virtual space" with the "purely mental

activity of grouping shapes and colors into meaningful configurations,"

conceptual art is more concerned with the "eye of the mind" rather than the

"eye of the body,"(3) and surrealism become a partly mental, partly

embodied experience. With the advent of the installation then comes the

subject's physical entrance into the virtual work. (4)

That Ryan places the discussion of visual immersion before the

discussion of linguistically achieved immersion is significant. Unlike theories

treating language or writing as the privileged medium of narrative, a virtual

theory of narrative provides the means to oust language from its privilege

simply by viewing it as one among many means of expressing narrative

experiences such as the visual, mental or even physio-digital relocation of

the recipient-interactor into a virtual-fictional realm. Virtual reality provides a

springboard for this shift: from the view of narrative as an inherent part of a

system of linguistic codification or as the decentered play within codified

structures of meaning as such, to a view of narrative as mediated sensory

experience and a means of interaction or play between subject and text or

subject and narrative space. Ryan's idea of involvement is neither

destabilizing nor decentered. In fact, although not presented as such, the

focus on play between creates the potential for a system paradigm that is all

center, encompassing the author and the work or the recipient and the work

in a realm of dynamic of exchange.

Further implicit in Ryan's discussion is the idea that a conceptualization

of narrative as play-between may allow us a new view of traditional narrative

devices, such as the popular 18th century practice of shifting between

immersive technique and the (self-)conscious narration—e.g., the epistolary

novel's voyeuristic distance from the correspondence vs. the transparent

internal scenes within the letters or the direct address of an overt narrator

vs. the invisible omniscient narrator. Embedding such devices in a historical

description of the 'taste' for immersive experiences, she contrasts the

preference for transparent transition to the illusory storyworld in the 19th

century with the distancing play of the 20th century avant-garde narrative (4-

5). Had she discussed the theater, similar points would have emerged: issues

of the fourth wall, the desacralized stage, theatricalist devices, or agitprop in

avant-garde theater would have supported similar perspectives on varying

practices and points of view regarding spectator immersion in dramatized

narrative played out in spaces of theatricality. The importance of immersion

is seen to wax and wane with intellectual movements, conventions, or

cultural concerns, e.g., the fascination with the play of the senses, a 'falling

for' the illusion vs. the fear of losing oneself in the work, thereby losing

critical distance or even sense of self. Thus the perceived nature of narrative

as evident in much of its tradition is revealed as reflective of cultural

concerns rather than reflective of element essential to narrative as such.

Of equal interest is Ryan's configuration of the play between the

physically embodied-eye and the mental-eye/inner-eye and the potential of

this play to evoke new perspectives on Lacan's concept of the linguistic

unconscious: while she focuses on a playful opening between the

possible/virtual world of the artwork and the embodied world of the recipient

in terms of phenomenological experience of the recipient, it is just as

possibly applicable to apply the play between the work and the artist. To see

such interplay and exchange between work and artist, as well as between the

work and recipient, potentially changes the nature of Lacan's discourse of

Other, positing a balanced, dynamic system where he saw split and discord

between the subject and the discourse of Other. It brings into question the

accusations that language is a violence against the subject or that semiotic

imprinting or inscription is by necessity (rather than by practice) damaging to

the 'natural' subject. Viewing this relationship as immersive, interactive play

allows for a fluidity that echoes the structuralist fugue described by Barthes

or the interplay of narrative modalities described by Genette; however,

rather than placing this play in the structure or the modes of the narrative

product, it assigns play to the experience of the making, viewing, reading, or

otherwise receiving narrative. This difference also has the potential of

thinking about multiple gazes differently, transforming the reflective gaze of

Lacan's mirror and its potential for creating a mise en abyme of ever more

distancing gazes into a play of lights arising from prismatic reflections, that

is, the play of light on the multiple surfaces of a unified object.

Aside from providing potential for new thought on the production and

reception of narrative otherness, this play redefines the nature of interaction

already described by game designers—that amounting to choice and self-

determination in plotting paths—for the new meaning that arises from each

new assemblage of the hypertext can also be seen as not merely a new path,

but an occasion for discovering new coherencies, causal relationships, or

identities. According to Ryan, hypertext is the rhizomatic (re)organization of

the narrative (7), and it is with this idea that the same choice or limited

freedom described by game designers and virtual dramatists comes to a

different activity—that of bricolage.

The Virtual

Looking at immersive, interactive aspects of fictional spaces and

narrative experiences provides a first step away from theories that portray

the function, structure or play of language as the goggles through which one

must by necessity study narrative. A second step away is accomplished

through the focus on the virtual and the search for its relations to narrative

experience.

Ryan's approach to a definition of the virtual intends to unite historical

conceptualizations of the virtual with those found in the digital context. From

the world of early programming, she extracts a definition of virtual machine,

i.e., the "machine with which users and high-level programmers think they

are communicating," this as opposed to the underlying material processes

(25-6). At first glance, this seems to coincide with the position of those

media theorists who say that when we communicate via digital networks it is

not "we" who communicate but the computers who are talking. However, in

the context of Ryan's discussion of immersion and interaction, it can just as

easily call to mind the difference between the body's physiological sensory

machine, the function of mind that reflects and processes thought, the

limiting and shaping mechanism of language and gesture, and the physical

apparatus that expresses by moving, speaking or writing. We constantly

employ various communicating devices in our own virtual and physical

apparatuses. Thus, in Ryan's sense of the mediated virtual, there is no need

to separate the human from the computer, but rather to see them as

mutually influencing mechanisms of thought and communication. Similar to

her conceptualization of immersion as play between the embodied-eye and

inner-eye or spatio-temporal play between object and subject, the virtual is

studied in its relation to the actual and as a force of potential.

The classic example of the virtuality, derived from Aristotle's distinction

between potential and actual existence (in poentia vs. in actu), is the

presence of the oak in the acorn." In scholastic philosophy "actual" and

"virtual" exist in a dialectical relation rather than in one of radical

opposition: the virtual is not that which is deprived of existence but that

which possesses the potential, or force, of developing into actual

existence. Later uses of the term, beginning in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, turn this dialectical relation to actual into a binary

opposition to real: the virtual becomes the fictive and the nonexistent.

(26-7)

In this passage, besides getting a first glimpse at Ryan's ideas on the

virtual and its relation to the actual, we can see the kind of cultural shifting

that affects schools of thought and artistic movements—e.g., realism,

surrealism, or expressionism—in which conceptual frameworks desire to

judge the nature of literal representations as they relate to commonly

accepted, everyday reality, classifying these as possible and plausible, as in

literalist realism; as representations of alternate, physically impossible,

realities, as in surrealism; or as expressed by subjective distortion of

commonly perceived everyday realities, as in expressionism. In Ryan's

portrayal of literary theory, the work of art and the concept of virtuality have

lost connection to the realm of the potential, a connection that may be

theoretically reconnected by the virtual narrative.

Ryan further reveals virtual narrative's threshold position with regard

to the literary, the psychoanalytical, and the philosophical in her discussion

of the virtual as simulacrum. Citing Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of

Simulacra," she considers the four stages of the fake described therein—from

the simulacrum as a reflection of the real, the denaturing mask of the real, or

a cover-up of the absence of the real, to its position as a completely

unrelated replacement of the real. Rather than taking on the view of the

double or simulacrum as a deceptive, inauthentic or uncanny copy of the

real, however, Ryan examines the interaction or exchange between the real

and the simulated, or in the terminology of the post-digital theoretical

landscape, the real and the virtual. The change of vocabulary that came with

the virtual reality (VR) is not insubstantial as Ryan's discussion reveals.

Resting on Pierre Lévy's conceptualization of the virtual as a "fecund and

powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the

future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical

presence," (qtd in Ryan VR 35) and Gilles Deleuze's conceptualization of the

virtual in relation to the actual, Ryan conceives of the phenomenological-

virtual as a dynamic event (one might add, of consciousness) rather than as

an inauthentic deception.

In contrast to Baudrillard, Lévy does not seem alarmed by this

exponentiation of the virtual because he sees it as a productive

acceleration of the feedback loop between the virtual and the actual

rather than as a loss of territory for the real. (37)

The potential of this view of VR to inspire a retrofit of linguistic theory

with new perspectives on play and new views on "nature" of language is

evident in Ryan's text:

Language originates in a similar need to transcend the particular. The

creation of a system of reusable linguistic types (or langue) out of an

individual or communal experience of the world is a virtualizing process

of generalization and conceptualization. In contrast to a proper name, a

noun like cat can designate not only the same object in different

contexts but also different objects in different contexts with different

properties: my cat, your cat, the bobcats in the mountains, and the

large cats of Africa. It is this recyclable character of linguistic symbols

that enables speakers to embrace, if not the whole, at least the vast

expanses of experience with a finite vocabulary. (38)

Together, her ideas of immersion, interaction, and the virtual have

profound ramifications for an attitudinal shift toward play. Rather than a

violent naming, a tortuously unstable shift of meaning, play here is exchange

between the subject and the object, the naming, re-naming, re-experiencing,

re-casting of the real through a view to the potentiality and flexibility of

linguistic defining, semantic combinations, and syntactic play. Accordingly,

the virtual, the simulacrum moves from E.T.A. Hoffman's fear-inspiring

automaton in "The Sandman" to the more subtle questioning of the

relationship to the simulacrum in Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's adaption of

Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Rather than

Nathanael's scream of dismay when, seeing Olimpia's mechanical eyes

exposed, he realizes he has become enamored by an automaton, Blade

Runner lets us ask the question, if we love or desire, does it matter if that

which arouses this feeling is human or simulacrum? The question becomes

less a neurotic search for the real and may become a desire for a certain

being at rest with oneself in the stance toward the world and its objects—real

or simulated.

Poetics of Immersion

The poetics of immersion that follows Ryan's analysis of immersion,

interaction and virtual, presents many points of long-term interest to

transmedial narrative and suggests significant connections to the

phenomenology of perception and philosophical problems:

The idea of textual world presupposes that the reader constructs in

imagination a set of language-independent objects, using as a guide the

textual declarations, but building this always incomplete image into a

more vivid representation through the import of information provided by

internalized cognitive models, inferential mechanisms, real-life

experience, and cultural knowledge, including knowledge derived from

other texts. (91)

The acknowledgement of multiple influences in the construction of

story is significant to this new manner of poetics. In shifting focus from

arguments on language as resulting from thought or determining it, by

allowing for cultural purpose, linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive models,

inference, and so forth, the study of narrative here neither a plot moving

toward an end, a character moving toward fate, a set of techniques, nor a

pattern of structure, but a dynamic assemblage, always in motion, always in

the process of territorialization. Ryan goes on:

The world metaphor thus entails a referential or "vertical" conception of

meaning that stands in stark contrast to the Saussurian and post-

structuralist view of signification as the product of a network of

horizontal relations between the terms of a language system. In this

vertical conception, language is meant to be traversed toward its

referents. (91-2)

This assertion further supports the idea of play-between, negating play

in the unstable, self-alienating codified discourse, but the topology of the

story traversing vertically toward its referents—the play between subject and

object echoed in the play between language, story and world. This centrally

important aspect is reinforced by the first element in her poetics, i.e.,

transporting or the act of the readers transporting themselves to the virtual

or possible world, the second element in her poetics of immersion. Elements

three and four are make-believe and mental simulation, involving the use of

props to transform the virtual into the imagined actual and the talent for

empathetic simulation as a means of projecting self into characters. The

poetics takes into consideration both spatial, temporal and emotional

immersion as well as interactivity. In this immersion within the textual world,

Ryan says, the words do not "disappear"— the medium not becoming

completely transparent—but that the virtual "emerges out of words" in an

acknowledged aesthetic experience.

Out of this study of the virtual arises a view of the narrative as a

dynamic system of expressivity and exchange between subjects (whether

author/designer or recipient/interactor): mediated, virtual worlds; and

actual/real worlds.

Traces: Prism. Phenomenological presence. Illusion of presence.

Traversing. Potentiality. Possible world. Play between. Emergence.

4.4 Transmedial Narrative

Investigations of virtual reality and interactive storytelling, such as

those by Crawford, Bhatty, Murray, or Ryan opened up new perspectives on

narrative, for although each of the paths through the nodally connected

events of the hypertext narrative was clearly modeled on traditional concepts

such as logical sequencing, continuity, dramatic tension, suspense, or

consistent character, the introduction of participant choice and with it the

material co-production of text strengthened an interest in narrative

experience. Also, rather than concentrating on poststructural problems of

texts—disparities between an intended meaning, an unstable set of linguistic

signs, and the recipient's signature interpretation—theorists concerned with

narrative in digital environments began investigating dynamic systems in

narrative experience, interaction between participant and text, the traversing

of the subject to virtual spaces, or the virtuality of a text at different stages

of its inception, production, mediation, and reception.

These new areas of investigation gave rise to reevaluations of core

elements in the narrative tradition. As spectacle, the materiality of the

dramatized narrative took last place in Aristotle's prioritization of formal

causes. In the time of transmedial narrative, the material in which narrative

is embedded and the means of its transmission takes on as much importance

as issues of logical or causal sequence—or even ordering as such. With this

focus on mediation and accompanying interests in interaction, immersion,

virtuality and narrative experience, we move from the etymologically evident

purpose of ordering and come closer to the association with knowing or going

beyond etymology, to experience and expressivity.

The burgeoning of transmedial narrative theory that came about in the

first decade of the 21st century, only partially took advantage of this the

openings created by theories of the virtual, often taking the more traditional,

looking-back, looking-forward stance of theoretical self-referentiality. Looking

back led to previous considerations regarding the purpose and nature of

stories while looking forward aimed to study the interaction between story

and medium, and eventually to an increased interest in a concept of

narrativity that could produce theoretical underpinnings applicable to all

mediated narrative. The following essays all stem from the anthology

Narrative Across Medium from 2004.

Narrative as Strategy

The desire for a bridge between traditional and transmedial

narratology is explicitly evident in David Herman's essay "Toward a

Transmedial Narrative." Herman begins by looking back, asserting the

inability of structuralist theory based on literary products to "account for the

complexities of larger, suprasentential units of language" or provide

adequate "conceptual and methodological resources to substantiate its claims

to generalizability" (47). Less abstractly phrased, he is saying that any base-

level structure, e.g., Propp's steps of "the hero leaving home" or "the hero

meeting a helper," cannot account for the subtlety of the structure of, say, a

narrative in which what happens is arbitrary and what is thought or felt is

primary. Looking at City of Glass or Kafka's The Castle, we may easily

questions the significance of any actions of plot in comparison to the

significance of the state of consistent doubt expressed by the protagonist. In

both of these novels, doubt permeates literalist reality like a fog, and the plot

or ordering is significant only in that it supplies the fodder for doubt. This

inability to get at the 'heart' of narrative through structure seems the kind of

inadequacy to which Herman's statement refers.

Herman similarly considers the sociolinguistic approach to narratives

of "personal experience," only to reject this as quickly as he rejects

structuralism, this on the basis of sociolinguistic theory's inability to explain

the full range of "narrative possibilities," e.g., the complex use of flashbacks,

the ability to portray both actual and perceived time, and so forth. Herman

begins his search for a transmedial concept of narrative by judging both

studies of form variation and studies of "naturalistic use of stories in

everyday communication settings" as inadequate accounts of narrative as

such. While structuralism limits itself to sequencing or structure,

sociolinguistic theory limits itself to strategies of natural language and telling.

Each 'tells' a part of the story but is finally unable to encompass the

complexity of narrative.

Still looking back, Herman pits Gerald Prince's argument that story is

independent of both narrative and medium—the same story capable of being

related in narrative or non-narrative modes and also communicated through

different media (52)—against ideas of communication theory positing that

each (re)telling "alters the story told," the argument here echoing certain

positions on media determinism. Is the story media independent? Or, in

reshaping content to fit the constraints of its semiotic pallet, does medium

(re)create a different story altogether?

Ultimately Herman comes up with what he calls a gradient view, that

"medium dependence is a matter of degree" with varying degrees of

translatability (54-5). Taking on Deborah Tannen's view of oral storytelling as

a narrative medium emphasizing interpersonal relationships or "involvement"

and written stories as a narrative medium emphasizing "content," he looks

away from the kind of involvement examined in studies of narrative and

virtual reality or in virtual drama experiments. Those examinations viewed

involvement as that taking place between interactors-participants-readers-

viewers and virtual environments, i.e., that involvement enabled by dynamic

systems of immersion and characterized by the traversal between the actual

and virtual as well as by the relocation in the spatio-temporality of

storyworlds. The exploration of the virtuality or experience of narrative,

however, is not the focal point of Herman's essay, which attempts to

distinguish between translatable, i.e., stable elements of content from gaps

created by untranslatable content or additions induced by media conversion.

By looking back to look forward, Herman ignores many of the doors

opened by the study of narrative in digital environments and virtual reality.

He does, however, suggest new theoretical trajectories. By looking at what

he terms story logic, in which narrative is a "strategy for structuring and

thereby making sense of experience...for problem solving in the broadest

sense" (56), Herman opens up the possibility of looking at narrative

strategies rather than generalized structural elements. His approach to story

logic looks at such factors as discourse context and shifts in time and space,

as well as at the narrative encoding of perceptual, material, relational, and

verbal processes that are embedded in participants or participant interaction.

Consequently, while Herman's transmedial conceptualization of story logic

moves back to a traditional, essentializing view of narrative as a function of

ordering or making sense of experience (a view harmonizing with

anthropological, cultural, and communication theories), it moves forward by

implicitly involving narrative in a dynamic system of perception,

intersubjectivity, materiality, and expressivity.

Oral Narrative: Frames, Boundaries & Gesture

Narratologists have long studied the world of the story or storyworlds

as coherent, possible worlds, in which character behavior occurs within the

framework of the fictional storyworld, adhering to its rules of physics, law,

society, relationship, and so forth. Formalist or structuralist studies have

often acknowledged moments of transition between the reader's world and

the world of the story, whether through the differentiation between

modalities of narrative voice or through the recognition of structural frames.

In studying virtual reality and narrative, Ryan expanded the study of reader

response or interpretation to the study of participant/interactor experience,

i.e., the phenomenological experiences of immersion, traversal of virtual

spatio-temporalities, or presence within the virtual. Theories concerned with

oral storytelling have roots not only in narrative theory but also in

sociolinguistic and communication theory. Transmedial theory of oral

narrative therefore looks back to interpersonal aspects of storytelling,

discourse analysis, and structuralist perspectives on narrative grammars

while looking forward to examine unique aspects of medium.

In keeping with sociolinguistic and communication theory, Katharine

Young's "Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative" posits

storyrealm and taleworld frames as elements of metacommunication. Frames

are separators between the spatio-temporal realms of the here and now of

conversation and the there and then of the story world and also indicators of

the relationships between communicators or attitudes toward the story.

According to the theory, the frame of the taleworld (the place in which

events of the story occur) separates it from the surrounding storyrealm (the

place in which stories are told), the frame of which separates it from the

realm of conversation as such. Her narrative grammar is structured in terms

of openings and closings between these framed realms, orientations, and

laminations.

The frame of a story is a hard border that can define the parameters of

various dimensions, whether those separating narrative from other forms of

discourse, those distinguishing one genre from another, or those identifying

the type of narrative event. The frame also delineates attitudes toward

events as real or imagined or defines modes of affect toward the story, e.g.,

humor or melancholy. Like Derrida's description of theoretical centers that lie

outside of the object of which they claim possession, the frame lies outside of

the thing it frames and is therefore foreign to it. This structure of multiple

frames presents an interesting paradigm of layers which might be used to

examine relationships between story and nonstory discourse or other

taxonomies of communication; however, it seems unlikely to further the

study of narrative experience and the implied view of narrative as a dynamic

system interacting with other dynamic systems—those areas opened up in

the study of the narrative in interactive, digital contexts and in relation to

virtual reality.

Young uses the concept of boundaries to represent "cues, or, more

closely, metaphors, for conceptual frames" – that which "open and close an

alternate realm of experience" (79). While there seems a sense of potential

for traversal to and from the taleworld in this concept, Young's narrative

grammar is very different from the fluid experience of immersion in the

virtual narrative and follows a rigid theory of structural discourse. Narrative

is a "technique for recapitulating experience" in which narrative units (or

clauses) "match the temporal sequence" of the events (81). The cues for

opening and closing realms are studied as codified signals to manipulate

attention to the proper frame just as grammatical cues within the story

reveal signals for the movement from beginning to end.

Young's conceptualization of boundaries has potential for a connection

to the virtual that remains unrealized, for unlike frames, boundaries do not

lie between realms, thus remaining external to both and emphasizing

separation or difference; rather, boundaries lie within a territory and thus

emphasize the "boundedness" of that which lies within. "Events are bounded;

realms are framed" (76). The potential connection to the virtual lies in the

rejection of Young's structural theory of discourse and rigid

conceptualizations of opening and closing to discrete, separate realms. If,

instead, events within the story are viewed as bounded by the soft border of

the more porous boundary, that is, if they designate a story territory rather

than a hard-edged storyrealm, the result is a model reminiscent of OZ's

virtual drama, in which the events lie on a plot graph and the movement of

the participant through the graph becomes a mapping of the story frontier.

Moreover, by replacing all of Young's frames with such boundaries, also

viewing the taleworld as bounded rather than framed, we would have a

completely open, breathing system allowing the dynamic exchange between

the actual and the virtual. By using frames—separators that do not belong to

either realm—Young prohibits overlaps in presence, asserting that although

both the storyrealm or taleworld are "available at any given time" during the

telling, only one can be "apparent" to a listener at any one moment. If,

rather than accepting the storyrealm as a static, framed space, we envision

the separation between storyrealm/conversation and storyrealm/taleworld as

frontiers, we again have fluid play between, as well as dynamic relationship

and exchange.

This kind of fluidity and crossing-over between physical, interpersonal,

and virtual spaces in the narrative is more explicitly present in Justine Cassell

and David McNeill's discussion of gestural techniques in oral storytelling,

where the narrative product is physically embodied by the storyteller.

Although the narrative theory that the authors present clearly rests within

structuralist and linguistic traditions, their typology of gestures implies an

overlap of virtual and actual spatio-temporal zones that complements ideas

from theories of virtual reality and narrative. Moreover, if we went a step

further to view the narrative as embodied in the storyteller, we have a

chance to gain new perspective on location of story, interaction, and

immersive transformations. Of primary importance is the fact that Cassell

and McNeill are not talking about fixed, codified gestures, but spontaneous,

often unconscious gestures.

When people talk, they can be seen making spontaneous movements

called gestures. These are usually movements of the hands and arms

(although occasionally the rest of the body participates, especially so

with child speakers), and they are closely synchronized with the flow of

speech. (114)

Casell and McNeill identify four types of such gestures: iconic,

metaphoric, beat, and deictic. The iconic gesture is a symbolic acting out of a

story element. The example provided is the sentence "And she dashes out of

the house," accompanied by a hand gesture in which the hand begins as a

fist, but then stretches out, all fingers forward, the arm propelling the hand

forward, away from the body (115). A metaphoric gesture is similarly

representative but does not point to a "concrete object or event," for

example, the opening up the arms to present a space in which an event is

taking place. A beat is a gesture of rhythm or emphasis indicating significant

story elements or occurrences, while a deictic gesture points to a person or

object that is being described or affected by the story. As described, these

comprise elements of a nonverbal language system that interact with

storytelling purpose, copying similar structuralist theories based on linguistic

grammars of telling. Different here is, however, the physical embodiment

and expression of dual spaces. In an example of combined narrative spaces,

Cassell and McNeill describe a situation in which the storyteller says, "and

you see him swinging down [across a rope]," and simultaneously clasps his

hands, which then "move from a location in front of the narrator's right

shoulder to the front and left" (127). The authors analyze this narrative act

as follows:

From this trajectory we infer the perspective of an observer who is

standing in the middle of the space that the character is swinging

through and is watching him swing from rear to front. The space was

thus inside the fictive world, with the narrator not as one of the

characters but as a participant observer. The speaker in this framework

is playing the role of a fictive entity, the narrative observer. The

gestures puts the narrator right in the middle of the action, while the

speech…distances him with reference to the viewing of the even with

"and you see…" (127)

This spontaneous, uncodified movement will not fit in a structuralist

theory identifying characteristics of language such as tense or characteristics

of plot structure such as sequence. If in telling a story, the narrator opens

her arms and looking at this space makes an assertion about occurrences in

that space, the gesture can be see to open up the virtual location in exactly

the same manner that Ryan sees in the case of perspectival painting opening

up to draw in the embodied eye. While such gestures are generally handled

as narrative levels or modes, they can just as easily represent the opening of

the virtual, the conflation of time and space, the fluid and simultaneous

system of narrative experience occurring between author, speaker, text, and

recipient.

Traces: Intersubjectivity. Expressivity. Narrative strategies. Gestural

spaces.

Film Narrative: Material & function

A prominent break-out artist among transmedial narratologists is film

theorist David Bordwell, whose critique of structuralist theories is well known.

In an analysis of neo-structuralist claims that the shot is the quasi-atomic

unit of film narrative, Bordwell, writes the following:

Of course, in practice the shot does tend to function as a unity of

narration; ellipses within a shot are rare; disjunctions of time and space

are often covered by cuts. But these are empirical goal-oriented

choices, the result of the common practices that have grown up in the

course of film history. It is an interesting and important fact about films

that the shot has tended to serve as a narrational unity, but the

theoretical point remains: any narrative relations can in principle be

manifested in any configuration of shots, including a single shot. (Neo-

Structuralist 206)

Surprising here is the simplicity with which Bordwell describes a much larger

tendency in the narrative tradition as a whole—the confusion of convention

or practice with essence. Another run at this problem is phrased as follows:

It is an error, then, to assume that a material unit…or string of such

units…ipso facto constitute a narrative unit. This is to take contingent

norms for logical necessities. Narrative structure and narration mobilize

all sorts of material properties of the medium in a wide variety of

manners. This occurs because narrative structure and the process of

narration are both function driven, and in varying historical

circumstance different functions have come forward and have been

fulfilled in distinct material ways…but there always remains the

possibility of fulfilling the same functions in other ways.

To illustrate his point further, Bordwell refutes a neo-structuralist claim

that the preterit tense is a stable signal of narration in early silent film

intertitles, citing the case of The Virginian, in which the first expository

intertitles appear in the past tense, but then move to the present tense as

the film progresses. As is evident in the above quotes, however, the point of

this criticism is not merely to refute the accuracy of a theoretical claim: it is

to critique the reduction of narrative or narration to structural units and the

confusion of practice with necessity. Bordwell then argues a much more

flexible and holistic view of functionality, still using The Virginian as an

example. Besides the shift from the past to present tense, the density of

intertitles also changes during the course of the film, from very dense during

the exposition, to less dense in the middle of the film, to almost nonexistent

in the last part of the film. Bordwell takes both practices together to indicate

a function of absorption, one we might call a shift from information to action

or distance to proximity. He cites a very different technique of absorption in

the practice of "fading" into the film action through such means as, say,

establishing shots or character-orienting montages. His point here is that

tense and density of intertitles are not isolated elements of narrative

structure but material techniques functioning in a framework of viewer

sense-making and shared narrative competency.

Narrative competency demands sense-sharing, in Bordwell's case,

sharing between filmmakers and viewers. Further distancing himself from a

"taxonomic impulse," but not joining the post-structuralist view of a gap

between intended meaning, language, and recipient, Bordwell rejects the

"[tendency] to look for isolable aspects of the film, treating it as a static

array whose elements and relationships may be subsumed with a paradigm

of difference," (212) and focuses on the viewer activity that is necessary to

the making sense of the narrative.

When The Only Son or Play Time represents the passage from night to

dawn [in a single scene and/or without noticeable ellipsis], the spectator

presumably grasps the action because she or he has the night-to-dawn

concept stored as knowledge. (212)

A similar ability to make sense of techniques that go against the grain

of narrative practices is noted with regard to a major element of structuralist

theories of literary narration—tense. Citing works in which narrative

continually shifts between the past and the present tenses without confusion

of temporal sequencing for the reader. Shared knowledge is the sense in

which the film is said to "[seek] certain intersubjective regularities." For

Bordwell, there are insubjective regularities external to the film and also

internal to the film in which the filmmaker, the film, and the spectator

participate in the process of narrative sense-making. Here again, we have an

image of narrative as dynamic system of exchange at each phase of the

narrative's existence.

For narrative at large, the significant aspect of Bordwell's approach to

the critique is not any one particular refutation of neo-structuralist

generalizations but the overarching premise that techniques, elements, and

practices are contextual and that practice or convention is not essence. Along

with many other transmedial narratologists, in looking back to look forward,

he makes the transition from taxonomies to experience, in this case narrative

sense-making and a focus on material functionality.

Traces: Material functionality. Material potentiality. Narrative

competency. Sense-making.

Pictorial Narrative: Configuration

Wendy Steiner's discussion of pictorial narrative is a good example of

what happened when the new media awareness and the advent of virtual

reality hit narratology. While Ryan's examination of immersion notes the

manner in which perspectival representation allowed the painting to open up

its virtual space to conjoin with the spatial reality of the viewer's embodied

eye, thus occasioning spatio-temporal openings and crossings-over, Steiner

focuses on structuralist concerns of sequencing, temporality, and

configuration. The looking forward of the text lies in her new idea of

configuration, which integrates issues of narratives as flat topologies rather

than linear sequences and which attempts to integrate aspects of media

perspectives on an overarching view of narrative or narrativity.

Steiner begins her text with a quote from Albrecht von Haller: "Nature

knits up her kinds in a network, not a chain; but men follow only by chains

because their language can't handle several things at once" (145).

Connecting this picture to Ariadne's thread unwinding in the Minotaur's

labyrinth and Hansel and Gretel's pebble trail, designed to lead them back

home, Steiner shows how myth and folktale "echo" Haller's idea of

knowledge as a "path cut through a maze, a line attempting adequacy to a

plane, a mere chain seeking dominion over a network" (145). If we consider

the connection between narrative and knowing, as indicated in the

etymological root of narrative in gnarus, then it is a short jump to view

narrative as inherently sequential. Steiner uses the quote to address a

traditional view of temporal arts as sequential and spatial arts as

configurative, a view that Steiner sees as having broken down on the side of

literary theory with the contemporary acknowledgment of configurative

elements in language-based narratives. Perceiving the lack of a similar

breakthrough in the area of visual arts theory, Steiner uses various examples

to address pictorial narrativity.

Moving from established definitions of narrative art as that depicting

events or scenes that suggest a narrative framework, sequences of images,

and so forth, Steiner shifts her attention to the "knowledge potential" of

pictorial narrative. In shifting her focus, she also acknowledges the school of

narratology concerned with the narrative strength (also discussed in terms of

levels of narrativity) of texts, a judgment call often based on the density of

what have been identified as essential narrative elements by structuralists,

e.g., Prince's claim regarding tense and certainty:

If narrativity is a function of the…specificity of the (sequences of) events

presented, it is also a function of the extent to which their occurrence is

given as a fact (in a certain world) rather than as a possibility or a

probability. The hallmark of narrativity is assurance. It lives in certainty.

This happened then that; this happened because of that; this happened

and it was related to that (Prince qtd in Steiner 147).

Steiner uses the quote to identify the central attributes of pictorial

narrativity: temporality (focus on action or event) and specificity (specific

rather than generic action). According to Steiner, while the representation of

generic action is low or weak in narrativity, the portrait of a specific person

performing a specific action is judged to be stronger or higher in narrativity.

Another aspect separating so-called sequential arts such as literature, film,

drama, comics from painting, a so-called configurative art, is temporal

sequencing, an element that narratologists also generally consider essential

to narrative or narrativity.

However, as Steiner reveals, configurative arts also have means of

expressing sequence, for example in the "repetition of the subject." The

temporality here is not forced by medium (i.e., the demand that we move

forward through from sentence to sentence or watch a series of frames pass

before our eyes) but is brought about what Bordwell would probably call

spectator sense-making. If spectators share the knowledge (or belief) that

they cannot be in two places at once, they will get the implicit message that

the image of the repeated subject is to be understood as a sequence (154),

although this interpretation also depends on tacit agreements regarding

literal realism (as opposed to psychological or social realism) and its basis in

a shared sense of everyday plausibility and possibility.

Another element of narrative configuration (which might also be called

configurative narrativity) is revealed in Steiner's analysis of Benozzo

Gozzoli's The Dance of Salome and Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The

painting juxtaposes three distinct temporal instances – the dance, the

beheading, and the presentation of the head – in one configuration.

The repetition of figures, so crucial to narrative recognition, is especially

obvious here. Salome not only appears in both the first and third scenes

with the same clothing, but her face is repeated in exactly the same

profiled attitude (except for her streaming hair in scene 1). Like a

cameo relief, she connects the beginning of the story with the end, and

so similar is her face in each case that one wonders how to construe the

fact that the same look that bewitches Herod is trained on her

approving mother [during the beheading]

This bivalent look is all the more significant when compared to the

mother's appearance in each of her two occurrences. Unlike, Salome,

Herodias wears different clothes and headdresses in the two scenes in

which she figures. Although Salome should have been unveiled in the

course of her famous dance, the painting instead uncovers the mother

to reveal the harlot's red below. She looks away from her dancing

daughter in scene 1 toward the cubicle where John is being beheaded.

Of course, at the time that she looks he is not being beheaded, but in

the simultaneity of the painting she does appear to have her eyes upon

him, while her daughter, with the same colored clothing as the

executioner, her arm raised in a mirror image of his arm clenching the

sword, looks away from the future scene. (163).

Following this passage, Steiner states that although the connections

revealed in her analysis of the painting—e.g., the focus on the mother's

"pimping" of her daughter at the saint's expense—are "implicit" in the story,

they are "explicit" in the visual associations (gaze, repetition of color and

posture) within the painting.

Implicit in this analysis, however, is also a suggestion of the manner in

which a fixation on linear, causal sequencing in narrative structures is

countered merely by shifting the analytical attention to alternative

connections between actions or to implied sequences—those appearing in the

peripheral, in the visual conflation of time and space, or in a collection of

experienced and projected (imagined) views.

Steiner's essay is relevant here for a number of reasons—not only

because it applies elements of narratological theory to painting, but also

because she reveals the ongoing, pervasive presence of structuralism in

contemporary transmedial theory—one might add, despite post-structuralist

ruptures. In fairness, it must be noted that the passage quoted from Prince,

asserting that narrative "lives in certainty," was written in the 1980s, before

popular mainstream film narratives such as that in eXistenZ, Memento, or

Inception began not only to reveal themes of fundamental uncertainties

about reality but also to firmly embed elements of uncertainty within

narrative structure and within the image itself. However, while the post-

digital, post-virtual mainstream doubts about reality came after Prince's

article, pre-digital-age novels such as Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a

Traveler, Paul Auster's City of Glass, absurdist plays by Samuel Beckett,

Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet or Edward Albee, as well as early expressionist

and surrealist plays, films, or novels would require a re-evaluation of

temporal order or logical certainty as the key essential elements of

narratives. It is perhaps not odd that Prince wrote that in the 80s, but that

Steiner is still compelled to focus on these structuralist claims decades later.

Traces: Configurative narrativity. Repetition.

4.5 Critical Thresholds

Like the rupture in structuralist thought that Derrida occasioned with

his paper on structure, sign, and play, the explosive developments of digital

culture and new media in the 1990s and 2000s, together with the ensuing

prevalence of studies in media theory, the virtual and the digital, have

created new areas of focus in narrative studies. Where the study of

relationships between natural language, consciousness, cognition, writing,

communication and narrative dominated structuralist and then poststructural

theories, the shift of focus to medium and mediation represents a rupture

with potential to uncover new perspectives on what the core of narrative and

narration might be, a core that includes but does not privilege language or

structure.

David Bordwell puts the ongoing dissatisfaction with structuralism

aptly when he writes that while theories of "isolable, static elements" in static

structures show much about common practice or what is commonly called

convention, the mere validity of the descriptions of practices, structural

patterns or narrative modalities present in existing narrative products does

not prove that these structural paradigms are a logical necessity of narrative

as such. This is not to discount the value of studying narrative modalities or

linguistic signs of the narrative in traditional Western narrative products, nor

the value of investigating the potential relationship of the unconscious to

linguistic structures or a discourse of Other. It is, however, to claim that new

experiences of digital technology, media, or the virtual, along with a newly

directed study of phenomenological aspects of narrative experience, are

bringing with them new thoughts or reemerging old thoughts about

narrative, narration, and narrativity and thereby opening up investigative

paths that may allow us to go beyond the study of structure or the nature of

linguistic meaning.

With the study of narrative as mediated experience, for example,

come new perspectives on materiality, relationality, spatio-temporality,

mediation, and the virtual. With a focus on medium and materiality comes a

new respect for technique, style and rendering that since Aristotle were

generally handled as "fine points"—perhaps of importance in studying a

particular artist's work, but not the central focus in understanding the nature

of 'the beast' as such. In this light, when Bordwell discusses film technique,

he discusses the elemental nature of expression via the material at hand, the

eye of the camera, the rhythm of the cut, the focal point of the frame, that

with which the spectator interacts, and when Ryan discusses the techniques

of immersion and the perception of the virtual, she is discussing the web of

sense and perception that weaves our embodiment into the world and to

which our minds respond.

With this expansive sandbox and the openings explicitly or implicitly

introduced by transmedial narratologists and virtual reality theorists, it is all

the more surprising that traditional interests and perspectives still build the

core of narratological discussion, as revealed in the transmedial theories

explored in this last section. While the phenomenology of the reader-

recipient-viewer-interactor has come under closer scrutiny, the narrative

experience as interaction between author-text-reader and the way that this

exchange might dovetail with events of perception, expressivity and

consciousness, do not appear to have been fully exploited.

With this in mind, the question becomes, how might we move more

decidedly to the new ground without merely arguing against individual points

of fundamental aspects of traditional theory? One readily available approach,

the one that has organically appeared in this investigation is to exploit the

intensification of cross-pollination between narratology, media, and the

philosophy, a practice that has crept into transmedial narratology without

fully showing itself but one that has been of interest to philosophers for some

time. The other is to consider not only the empirical vivisection of the fallow

text or its consumer, but to revive interest in the inception of the text in the

artist's experience, relating this to the narrative as dynamic system and

event.

The path that this investigation will now take is one that avoids

reference to previous narratological or linguistic theories but instead

investigates narrative experience and makes use of impulses explicitly or

implicitly present in philosophical and theoretical discussions of perception,

virtuality, spatio-temporality, and the embodied consciousness, in order to

arrive at a concept of narrativity that is not bound up in theories of structure

or language, but rather is directly connected to phenomenological

consciousness, experience and the mimetic event.