The future of storytelling

Reading Shelley Jackson’s My Body – A Wunderkammer made me question whether it was a story or not. Traditional storytelling tells us that in order to have a successful story, there must be a beginning, middle, and end. There must be a build-up, a climax, and a resolution. Otherwise, the story will not make sense nor will it be interesting to the reader. My Body does not fit into that traditional structure. There is no climax or resolution, though it feels like the different texts are building to something. There is a main character, the narrator, but there is no antagonist that she must face, or internal battle that she fights throughout the text. Does this mean that My Body is not a story? Some would say that yes, it is not a story simply because it is missing those key elements.

But then, what is it if not a story? N Katherine Hayles says that digital literature is different from traditional printed literature. By having hypertext links that take the reader to different pages, My Body is completely non-linear, and it moves away from the beginning, middle, end model of storytelling. By giving the reader the power to start on any part of the original picture, there are multiple beginnings a reader may choose. From there, any page can have any number of hypertext links, making it so there are multiple middles. And the reader can choose when to stop reading and say they have completed the story, thus giving My Body multiple endings as well. All of this is evidence of My Body another type of storytelling entirely.

That is big news for the future of writing and shakes up a lot of what we considered to be a solid foundation of writing. How do we tell if a written text is “good” or not if the baseline (beginning/middle/end and build-up/climax/resolution) no longer applies? What do we teach students? Do we show them these works (or at least a more school appropriate version of these works) and tell them that this is possible to, or do we do what have been doing and ignore digital literature, pretending that it doesn’t exist? I think that is impossible as our world continues to be digitized. But at the same time, the old baseline wasn’t bad. It made for good, understandable storytelling. Non-linear works are fun, but they are hard to get into if you do not understand what is going on.

I enjoyed reading My Body, although the parts about her exploration of her sexual anatomy were somewhat uncomfortable. I liked the well written text, and the narrator talking about her life and childhood were funny and relatable (mostly). There were threads to follow, and references to other pages within the text. The “assemblage” of webs were well put together and easily understood by the technologically impaired. I liked it better than other digital literature I’ve read because of the ease of use, and the connections made between the pages.

It will be interesting to see if digital literature will change how we read, and expect books to be laid out. And I wonder when this new type of storytelling will be taught in schools. Will it be in elementary schools to a new generation, or will it be shown solely in high level college courses to English majors who know how to read and have to be taught this new form from the ground up?

But, how is Interactive Fiction a text? I mean, REALLY?

What I find so intriguing about texts of all kinds (and there are ALL SORTS of kinds) is how amorphous the term “text” really is, especially in reference to these different kinds of it, and once you try to pin down a solid definition. I have been mulling over digital literature as of late, and the realm of more abstract texts. So, I looked to the aid of the Internet in updating my definition of that very word (“texts”). I scoured the Internet for the “definition of text,” and the phrasing and keywords that I plugged into my search engine repeatedly produced the same results: a “text” seemed to only be defined as something that pertained to the conventional written medium, which directly contradicted what I was learning. In addition, if there is anything that I have take away from previous college courses, such as Critical Theory and film classes, it’s that you can look at practically anything as a text. You don’t just have to be reading a book, magazine, or essay.

And, then, like a miracle, I found a definition that fit what I was looking for, after scrolling very far down the page that held the many definitions of “text” on Merriam Webster’s online dictionary.

   (Merriam-Webster)

I was much more inclined to agree with this definition, or at least this basic premise of the idea. A text doesn’t have to be something that you pick up, and read from left to right. It is merely something that is being “examined, explicated, or deconstructed (Merriam-Webster). With that sort of view in mind, which is the kind that I hold, you can, technically, do a close reading of anything, if you view what you are examining as a text.

Lately, I have been delving into the world of digital literature, also known as electronic literature by some. In the past few days, I have been consuming texts that range from generative poetry, all the way to interactive fiction (also known as “IF”). The generative poetry was easy to discern as a text–I clicked on a link to a page, and words started to generate on their own. Voila! I had a text, which fit the conventional idea of such, right in front of my eyes. However, once I dipped my toes into the world of IF, I had to question whether I was examining a text, or simply playing a computer game.

From Pieces of Herself by Juliet Davis

Take, for instance, the image (shown above) from the IF work Pieces of Herself by Juliet Davis. You navigate the program (or dare I say “text”) by exploring different facets of a modern American woman’s life, like the shower, the office, etc. It’s clearly a feminist critique-geared experience.

From RedRidingHood by Donna Leishman

And then, there is Leishman’s RedRidingHood, where a more modern and feminist version of “Little Red Riding Hood” allows you to interactively accompany, and sometimes become, the character of Red on her journey from home. I knew that both Pieces of Herself and RedRidingHood were pieces of digital literature. Heck, they even came from the Electronic Literature Collection website, a site that has archives and archives of (as the name would suggest) digital literature for the public to access, complete with author’s statements and all. I knew it was literature, in a way, but the question still loomed in the forefront of my mind: “How is this really a text? I feel like it is. Judging by context clues and what I’ve learned so far, I know that it is. But how, REALLY?” It all still felt like a game to me, a 90s-born reader who is so conditioned by her love of tangible books, and the fact that the only literature (which I was told was such) I ever dealt with growing up was tangible, as well.

Then, I thought back to the Merriam-Webster definition of a “text”: “something to be considered as an object to be examined, explicated, or deconstructed” (Merriam-Webster). The last three words were exactly what I had been doing to these IF pieces all along–examining, explicating, and deconstructing. I had interacted with Pieces of Herself with the notion that I was dealing with the struggle of the modern American woman and the expectations thrust upon her by society. With RedRidingHood, I had also been interacting, all the way through deconstructing this piece as a reboot of the classic tale with a feminist twist, which illustrated the modern woman’s reality. When I examined how I had been examining (as meta as that sounds) the IF pieces I was interacting with, I realized that I had been dealing with feminist texts, just as legitimate as if I had been reading a tangible version of an Audre Lorde essay. I had been interacting with the pieces like texts all along, but had been initially thrown off by the digital medium of IF.

As you can probably guess, I’m not alone in my initial thinking. N. Katherine Hayles, a writer who has written extensively about digital literature, even said in her essay ““Electronic Literature: What is it?,” The demarcation between electronic literature and computer games is far from clear; many games have narrative components, while many works of electronic literature have game elements.” I wasn’t alone! With modern technology, video games can bleed into literature due to narrative components, and literature into video games.

But, more importantly, Hayles also wrote in the same essay, “Paraphrasing Markku Eskelinen’s elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, whereas in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret” (Hayles). If I had been playing a game, I would have used my interpretation for the sole use of how I played the game. Whereas, with IF, the configuration was already there; it was something I had to follow. Only then, could I interpret and deconstruct the TEXT for myself.

Rewiring and rethinking your own conditioning is always an arduous undertaking, as you’re working against years of what you’ve been taught is “correct,” or “normal,” etc. However, it’s also quite an enlightening undertaking, at least in my own experience. And my search to figure out how IF truly fit as a text, not just in what other people told me and what I read, but in my own conscious understanding was eye-opening. I had known the pieces of the answer all along (i.e., what a text is, how I was interacting with IF), but the answer had been veiled by what I already knew. Unless you’re willing to challenge what you know with what you learn, you may just miss the point.

Works Cited

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” Eliterature.org, eliterature.org/pad/elp.html.

“Text.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/text.