Richard Paez
LIT 3003: "The Forms of Narrative: Narratology of New Media"
Thursday, March 10th

Cyborg Narratology: Digital Narrative and the (Re)definition of Text, Story, Fabula

Scholars of narrative works have established three primary terms to describe the structure of narrative constructs. The physical object—be it a codex, a roll of celluloid, or the voice of a chorus—and the collection of meaningful signs it contains or transmits are labeled the text (Harpold, Keywords 4; Bal 4-6). As opposed to purely instructive, descriptive, or otherwise non-narrative texts, narrative texts are those "in which an agent relates ("tells") a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof" (Bal 5). The fabula, on the other end of the spectrum of tangibility, is the abstracted, chronological, and unelaborated series of events that take place in the narrative (Harpold, Keywords 3; Bal 5-7). The fabula may be conceived as the "zero-degree version of the narrative" (Harpold, Keywords 3); in other words, as the most simplified rendition of the "who, what, where, and why" of the tale. Somewhere between text and fabula is the story—the events as relayed by the narrator, which may deviate from the base fabula in various ways, including variations on the order of events (anachrony), changes in narrator (who tells us the story) or focalizor (whose "version" of the story we are exposed to at any given point in time), by inclusion of descriptive or purely poetic elements, or in a variety of other ways (Harpold, Keywords 4; Bal 5-7). The story is the defamiliarized version of the base events (fabula), complicated in various ways so that it, like Shklovsky's art, "exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony" (Shklovsky, 12).

The advent of new media forms such as digital hypertext narratives has forced a self-reflexive and self-corrective response in the terminology of narratology. In the case of the term text, Michael Joyce's digital narrative afternoon, a story raises questions about the nature of texts, the distinction between text as a vehicle or text as a vector, and the physicality of artifacts conceived as texts. When we open a book (a text), there is no (apparent) doubt as to its purpose as vehicle for symbols (text) on the page that signify meaning. But when we open the packaging of afternoon, a story, we find a plastic disk, approximately five inches in diameter, with no meaningful signs other than the title and copyright information printed on it. When we read our book, we are perceiving signs directly from the page; there is no intermediary other than the sensory systems through which we continually perceive everything and are therefore usually unaware of (i.e., they do not [normally] contribute narratively). When we read afternoon, we must place it in the CD tray of our computer, whose complex programming then interprets the magnetic media (which we cannot read for ourselves, nor understand if we could) into digital code (which we again cannot read nor understand). This code is then interpreted by the Storyspace program (Figure 1) which then provides us, through our computer monitor, with what appears to be the first page of the text.

Readers, as habituated as we have become to our interactions with analog texts, do not perceive other elements of the textual object as part of the narrative. Covers, tables of contents, indexes, chapter and page numbers, and the material from which the pages are made are ignored or relegated to a position of inflicted disinterest by the reader, while he or she does everything possible to settle into an immersive state "within" the story. In other words, we forget that the textual object itself is part of the experience of reading, we tend to "see past it" as we read. Digital narratives counter this in two ways, one an accident of technology and the other a capitalization on the fact that "digital computers [and the texts written and read on them] are general-purpose recombinatorial devices" (Harpold, Digital Narrative 1) by the authors. In the first case, the technology of reading is altered (i.e., different enough to allow us as readers to perceive it without prejudice) with the digital apparatus. Instead of turning pages, the reader must select text-links or navigate the on-screen "widgets" such as the Storyspace "links," "history" and "back" buttons (see Figure 1). This is not a shift in the process of navigation as much as it is a highlighting of the reality of navigation (for a more detailed analysis, see Harpold, Digital Narrative). Thus texts must be re-conceptualized as vectors, in the same way that mosquitoes are vectors for malaria: the lifecycle, habits, evolved traits, and mutations of the textual vector (i.e., the computer, its operating system, and the reading program, in afternoon's case, Storyspace) have as much of an impact on the transmission and reception of the narrative as the arrangement, actors, or authorial quirks of the "story" do.

In the second case, authors of digital texts, by intentionally scripting narratives that are "robustly non-serial and recursive" (Harpold, Digital Narrative 1) force their readers to become like the main character in Shelley Jackson's hypertext Patchwork Girl—the reader of a digital narrative text is forced to make a distinction between the easily assumed concrete and linear nature of non-digital texts and the realization that all texts, like hypertexts, in fact consume and are consumed by their physical manifestation:

When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future. (Jackson, Patchwork Girl {this writing})

Gutenberg's legacy to the western world is the frightening infinity of mobility hidden behind the comforting illusion of linearity. Although texts such as afternoon, a story and Patchwork Girl may seem morphologically different from Gutenberg's Mazarin Bible, the same tenants that apply to non-digital texts apply to digital texts, and the same points of breakdown or decay that are made explicit by hypertexts exist in printed, filmic, and other texts. One of the "natural" assumptions made of texts (that allows for that secure feeling of "restfulness" experienced by Her in Patchwork Girl) is that as finite physical objects (regarding which one can say "I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid"), they contain finite narrative structures. One of the points of breakdown in this assumption highlighted by digital hypertexts is that we can never be sure when we have begun a text, or finished it, or if, in truth, once we have engaged a text we are infinitely both begun and done.

In afternoon, an apparently paratextual node titled {work in progress} illustrates this uncertainty, both in its content and its context (Figure 2). Contextually, the node is reached when the reader asks the Storyspace program for directions when prompted ("for directions click yes (y)," Joyce, afternoon {start}, Figure 1). Although the node and its predecessors (the {a hypertext}, {read at depth} and {in my mind} nodes) seem comparable to the purely instructional "help" files associated with virtually all computer programs, from the perception of the reader, the "pages" are no different in physical appearance or narrative tone than the purely narrative nodes—the reader is already in the thick of it, so to speak.

False starts, and closures, continually reappear throughout a reading of afternoon. Thus, just as the true nature of the narratological text-construct must be reconsidered after the reading of digital texts, the algorithmic and formulaic conception of the story or arrangement of fabula elements must be reconsidered. Reading afternoon in the most direct manner, by hitting the return key at every node, leads to what appears to be the "final" node, {°} (a blank space on the Windows version of the text, Figure 3). Hitting return again, however, leads again to the {work in progress} node, with its blatant admission that

Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading ends. Even so, there are likely to be more opportunities than you think at first. (Joyce, afternoon {work in progress})

As with the first exposure to this node, hitting return leads to the {begin} node (Figure 4). The reader is forced to ask if he or she has "finished" the story. Further exploration (this time through following more random connections, clicking on words or browsing the links made available through the "links" button) may lead the reader to the {false beginning} node (Figure 5), which both reiterates and deviates from the {begin} node, signifying both in its content (its difference from the true {begin} node) and its context (a previously unvisited node) that the story has not been fully plumbed.

By following these random paths, the reader is engaging with the hypertext in a manner that highlights what Harpold describes as "the increased flexibility with which digital texts may be recombined, repurposed, and manipulated by the reader or viewer," which "calls attention to this dimension of their reception, which may be less evident or practicable in recombinations of comparatively 'chunky' analog media" (Harpold, Digital Narrative 2). While the author of both analog and digital texts may structure and arrange the elements of the fabula into a story for specific narratological reasons, both analog and digital texts (in various ways and to differing degrees) allow for "narrative branching," which may

be understood in terms of an active reworking or transgression -- a performance -- of diegetic limits, such that the player or reader functions as a pseudo-actant or -focalizor, spanning intra- and extra-narrative fields (Harpold, Digital Narrative 5).

This repositioning, both of the reader within the narrative and of the story as a variable mosaic, reflects back on the story element of non-digital narratives, asking the reader whether he or she is a passive or active participant in the generation of narrative dialogs when engaged with any type of text. When a reader says "I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid," can he or she really say the equivalent "I am a third of the way through a narrative story?"

This leads directly to questions regarding the fabula-construct. As defined by Harpold, the fabula is "the serial expression of events that would be the briefest, most compact version of the story the narrative recounts" (Harpold, Keywords 3). However, multiple readings of Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue force us to question whether the fabula is a text-specific construct (i.e., every narrative text "contains" one complete and concrete fabula) or if the fabula is in fact a reading-specific construct (i.e., texts in fact contain a number of fabula-elements which, depending on the reading, can take place or not take place, or occur in different spatial or temporal positions).

Twelve Blue begins on the {Twelve Blue: Michael Joyce} title-node (Figure 6), from which the reader may select one of eight possible beginnings (html pages {sl1} through {sl8}). The most direct reading, in which the reader begins with the {begin} node (corresponding to html page {sl1}) and selects only the hypertext links within the text (ignoring those in the sidebar), leads through nodes {How she knew}, {Long time after one}, {cornflowers}, {each ever after}, and {seething}, which returns us to {each ever after}, with its hyperlink exit now rendered invisible. In this version of the narrative's story, the fabula consists of Samantha's experiences, beginning with what appears to be her conversation with a carnival worker and the comparison of it to her mother's romantic interests, followed by the onset of her menarche during school, her planning of a tea party during which Javier, his daughter, and her boyfriend who drowned are mentioned, and the subsequent conversation regarding tea parties with her mother Lisle. The story seems to end in the cyclical movement of the next three nodes, where {each ever after}, a self-reflective node discussing the readable textuality of all existence, leads to {seething}, an image or reeds and the waterline so prominent in the text, which in turn returns the reader to {each ever after}.

The fabula presented above, however, posits the existence of only five of approximately a dozen main actors and only four of over a hundred scenes. Additionally, the prominence of the numbers twelve and eight in the title-node (Figure 6) allude to the eight-by-twelve structure of the text, indicating that there are in fact 96 nodes comprising the entire text. While exhaustive exploration of the in-text and side-bar hyperlinks may lead a reader to every node available within the text, leading one to the theory that there is indeed but one fabula to be uncovered, this position would be unreasonably elementary in that it would ignore both the tendency of readers not to explore so ergodic a text with such fidelity and the structure of the text itself, which reaches apparent endings continually (by delivering the reader to the {seething} and subsequent {each ever after} nodes, or to previously visited nodes, both in either case now missing their hyperlink exits, forcing the reader to stop reading or to force his or her way back into the narrative through the sidebar image links). More reasonable is the hypothesis that fabulas in digital narratives, and indeed, to some degree in all narrative texts, are not the linear, indivisible constructs we would like to imagine in a stable universe, but instead much more like the variable and mobile particles of the semi-stable reality described by quantum physics. Thus, regarding the definitions of text, story, and fabula alike—as readers—ourselves particles in this reactive and reflexive universe—our position, movement, and very existence contribute to the form and structure our textual realities take.

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2d ed. Totonto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Gutenberg, Johannes. Mazarin Bible. c. 1455

Harpold, Terry. "Some Narratological Keywords." LIT 3003. University of Florida, 2005.

- - -. "Digital Narrative." The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Routledge, 2005.

Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1992.

- - -. Twelve Blue. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996.

Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.

Shklovsky, Victor. Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J Reis. Ed. Paul A. Olson. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
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