Response to Question #1

Richard Paez

Prepared for Dr. Terry Harpold, LIT 3003: "The Forms of Narrative: Narratology of New Media"

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Actors are those characters, objects, and other constructs that serve functional roles in narratives. In her Narratology: Introduction to The Theory of Narrative, Mieke Bal divides actors into classes of actants based on the functions they fulfill within the process that constitutes the narrative. Applying Bal’s terms to the actors in a first-person video games such as Rand and Robyn Miller’s Myst is a valuable exercise because it forces attention to the detail and flexibility of the terminology.

The major actant in a narrative is the subject, and the goal strived for by the subject is the object (Bal, Narratology 197). The relationship between subject and object is known as their function. Bal presents the equation of subject-function-object in the form of a sentence, structured as subject-infinitive preposition-direct object (Figure 1):

It is important to note that the verb in this formulation is always transitive—the (direct) object is necessary for there to be a story, a narrative process. The subject needs not be a human being—it can be a group (such as Bal's example of the old people from Louis Couperus' Of Old People) or any other construct with a desire to fulfil, the ability to act on that desire, and the will to do so. Likewise, objects need not be material—and rarely are in complex narratives, as Bal's second and third examples indicate. Complex narratives may have more than one subject and more than one object, with webs of functions connecting them (Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction is a prime example of this narrative possibility).

Narratives contain at least two additional actants, the power and the receiver. The power is the actor that stands between the object and its realization, "which either facilitates or blocks the [subject's] achievement of the aim" (Bal, Narratology 199). In many ways, a narrative's genre is often defined by the nature of its major power: in horror narratives the power is a monstrous manifestation of evil, which attempts to block the subject's aim of survival; in Christian Mythology the power is either the grace of God or the subject's power of faith, which facilitates the subject's aim of overcoming temptation; in science fiction narratives the power is often the universe itself—the difficulties of surviving space travel, the limitations imposed by the laws of physics—and in the best science fiction, the power acts both as the impediment to the subject's aim (negative power) and, once the subject reaches an epiphany or receives assistance (see the discussion of the helper, below), as the facilitation of that aim (positive power). Many narratives have multiple powers—Ridley Scott's science fiction/horror film Alien contains two powers: the alien itself and the environment of space, both of which act to block the subject, Ripley, from her aim of survival. In the end, however, Ripley uses the second power (the deadly vacuum of space) to defeat the first power (by blowing "it out the Goddamn airlock," Aliens).

Conversely, the receiver is the actor to which the object is given, the beneficiary of the achievement of the aim. The receiver can be thought of as an indirect object in Bal’s sentence-structure. The subject is often the receiver, or part of the group which acts as the receiver. Luke Skywalker, the subject of George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, achieves two objects in the course of the narrative: overcoming his father's evil nature, thus avoiding the fate of following in his father's footsteps, and destroying the Empire, thus freeing the citizens of the galaxy from the tyranny of the Emperor (Star Wars Episode VI: Return of The Jedi). Skywalker is the sole recipient in the first case, and a member of the group of recipients in the second. The subject need not be the recipient, however. In many narratives the subject quests for a cure to another actor's illness, the key to another's freedom, and so on.

While both power and receiver relate to the object of the narrative, two more actants, which relate to the function itself, are found in narrative constructs. The helper is the actor which assists the subject in achieving the aim, while the opponent is the actor which seeks to prevent achievement of the aim. In Alien, the ship's computer, Mother, and the android, Ash, act as Ripley's opponents—both function to stop her from achieving her aim. Indeed, both Mother and Ash act as symbols and representatives of the overarching opponent in the Alien movies, the greedy Company, Weyland Yutani. The remainder of the crew, especially the Captain, Dallas, and the mechanic, Parker, act as Ripley's helpers, providing her with the tools, experiences, and ultimately, the determination needed to achieve her object. Bal describes the grammatical roles of the helper and opponent as adverbial adjuncts of the function verb: the adverbial constructions "in spite of the corporation's treachery" or "thanks to Dallas' sacrifice" place Ripley's helpers and opponents in the syntax of Bal's grammatical system.

The delineation of an actor's actant-classification is not always clear, however. As illustrated above, actors often play the role of one or more actants. The subject in many narratives is also the recipient of the object; the object is often the power (as in Bal's example of Mary (Figure 1), who is both the object of subject-John's aim to marry and the power who will block or facilitate his achievement of that aim). In psychological narratives, subjects often embody the powers that block their aims—in Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's film Memento, Leonard Shelby is both the subject of the narrative and the vessel of his amnesia, the power that blocks him from achieving his object of vengeance. In Rand and Robyn Miller's Myst, the objects, powers, helpers, and opponents are not always as clear-cut as Bal's sentence analogy would make them seem.

Myst, in many ways, is remarkable due to its apparent poverty of actants. Besides the character "controlled" by the reader, the avatar, only two living beings populate the bulk of the narrative—the brothers Sirrus and Achenar. Two more characters are part of the story. Atrus is the brother’s father, who is trapped on the age of Dunny and who the reader does not meet directly until the end of the narrative. Catherine the brother’s mother, who is made mention of in the story but never appears. This apparent poverty of actants, however, is overcome with the acceptance of Bal's definitions. Actors need not be human or material, and one actor can, and often does, take on the role of more than one actant.

The avatar assumed by the player is both the subject and receiver of the Myst narrative. This is evidenced in several ways: through focalization, the reader's fabula-story construction, and Bal's subject-object function. The entire text of Myst is focalized from a fist-person subjective perspective—the player experiences what the avatar "sees," (Figure 2) and the actions performed by the avatar are those which the player performs "through" the avatar.

When the reader constructs the narrative's fabula (by describing events that transpire in the game to a third party), it is invariably in the form of a first-person declarative: "I found the note Atrus left for Catherine;" "I solved the puzzle of how to operate the elevators in Channelwood." Plotting the actors in the narrative onto Bal's sentence-structure (Figure 3) also indicates that the avatar is the subject of the narrative—in any possible formulation, the avatar falls into the subject position:

Although Atrus unquestionably has aims of his own, his incarceration and absence until the very end of the story limits his role as a possible subject. Once he is freed to act, it is in a very limited sense narratively—he destroys his son’s prison books, guaranteeing that they will remain trapped forever, but this act does not advance the fabula in an appreciable way. Since the brothers were trapped already, destroying the books does not advance the plot.

The avatar-subject pursues one major object in the game-narrative: the truth behind what happened on Myst Island, served by the function "wants to discover." Additionally, each of the five islands or ages provides the subject with a minor object: the need to achieve free access to and from each age. Thus, this double-structure can be reformulated as a complex sentence: "The avatar needs to achieve free access to the ages to discover the truth of what transpired on Myst Island."

Up until this point in the sentence-structure, the actant-roles of the actors are clear. However, defining three of the remaining roles, that of power(s), helper(s), and opponent(s), becomes more difficult. Myst, like many complex narratives, appears to have two powers: one positive and one negative. The positive power is the avatar's persistence in exploring the ages of Myst, the powers of observation and deduction the avatar brings to solving the puzzles contained in each age. The negative power is the structure of the ages themselves. The bulk of the narrative consists of finding and solving puzzles—first to find and unlock the books on Myst Island that connect to the various ages, and then to find and unlock the book in each age that allows return to Myst—presumably designed by Atrus himself to prevent his sons from travelling freely from age to age. As with the subject-object relation, this dual-power structure may also be plotted using Bal's system:

Ironically, the power which acts against the subject stems from Atrus, the very actor which the subject needs to rescue in order to achieve the major goal of discovering the truth.

In both subject-object relations, the avatar is also the recipient. The power in each function, however, is different. In the quest for truth, the power is positive: the avatar's persistence in discovering what happened facilitates the subject's (its own) progress. In the quest for freedom of movement, the power is negative: the five ages of Myst, and the puzzles or obstacles contained within them, block the subject's progress. The avatar-subject's major object, the quest for truth, is helped by the clues discovered in the brother's rooms (the knives, skulls, gold, and other symbols of violence, treachery, and greed), and opposed by the brother's lies. Paradoxically, the avatar-subject receives help with its minor object, crossing each age's boundaries, in the forum of clues left by Atrus (the note for Catherine and the clues in the clock tower, for example), and opposition in the form of puzzles, also left behind by Atrus:

Once again, the actor Atrus, himself a writer, transgresses boundaries in the definitions of actants. Atrus simultaneously represents the avatar's primary object (he holds the truth), the power which stands against the avatar (the difficulties encountered by the avatar are of Atrus' own design), and the avatar's helper (for it was Atrus which left behind the clues).

Atrus’ multiplicity is strangely familiar to the reader, for the structure of interaction with the Myst narrative itself forces multiplicity on the part of the reader. The reader is not part of the diegesis. However, he or she is in control of the avatar which serves as both subject and receiver within the narrative. Furthermore, the positive power, that of persistence and perception, belongs to avatar, who acts only when "told" to do so by the player. Unlike a character read about in a book, which the reader can imagine has a sense of motivation because of the way the character is written, the avatar in Myst is hollow—it severs only as a vessel within the diegesis for the player to project his or her motivation. As Marie-Laure Ryan observes in her discussion of narrative elements in software design:

Although theorists such as Stanley Fish have made it clear that reading is an active process, during the act of reading the reader is passive in terms of the diegesis—he or she plays no role in the world of the narrative. In other words, the reader is free to interpret signs, grammatical and narratological structures, and so on, but not to manipulate those signs and structures. We cannot ask Hamlet to ignore Yoric’s skull. In Myst, however, manipulation of signs and actors is fundamental to the act of reading. We could, for example, decide from the beginning to not help Achenar at all, or chose to ignore Atrus warning regarding the yellow page—something impossible to do with the actors in print narratives. Thus, for the player, the act of reading Myst is in fact the act of writing Myst, much as Atrus’ Oedipal absence from Myst Island realizes his presence there.

Myst thus serves not to disqualify Bal's terminology, but to illustrate the power with which her terms approach the complexity of narrative texts such as Myst. While the roles of actors in an interactive digital narrative such as Myst are not as clearly delineated as in print texts—and perhaps, considering the unusual extradiegetic position of the reader, impossible to delineate at all—analysis of actors and actants within such texts allows for explorations of the terms that may not be possible using standard print texts.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
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