I want to analyze the site We Feel Fine in the light of Marie Laure Ryan’s Avatar of Story and the opposition of narrative vs database offered by Lev Manovich because I think this website is the best example of what is happening to narrative and storytelling when it interacts with new media.
In Toward an Interactive Narratology, Ryan points out that Espen Aarseth in his book Cybertext presents us with a “communication model of classical narrative” as “a transaction involving a real author, an implied author, a narrator, a narratee, an implied reader, and a real reader” (97). He applies this model of classical narrative to digital texts such as hypertext fiction and text-based adventure games even if with adjustments.
But then Aarseth denies digital texts as a species of narrative. Such statement provokes some questions, is he implying that if the communication model of classical narrative does not completely apply to film and theater, then these are not a narrative? Is he saying that interactive fiction being closer to movies and theater, they don’t say that something has happened but instead pretend that is currently happening? Are these forms of expression not telling us a story just the same?
The idea that narrative tells somebody that something has happened and it happened in a certain order there fore it should be told in that order is being challenged by the database nature of the new media. Manovich does a great job at explaining the place of narrative in the human experience as “a means to make sense of the world” (255). It just happens that it does it in a chronological way. Database also offers a way to make sense of the world but instead of chronological presentation it gives us a pool of clues to which we reach at our own pace and make our own sense of it. Then is not that database goes against narrative but that every individual can chose a different point of beginning and point of end for the story.
We Feel Fine comes to exemplify this ability of database to tell stories even if there is not a voice narrating, or a hand that wrote it, not a chronological order in which it happened, or even if it is still happening. Ryan’s hypertexts and games, and Harris’ websites are all database forms of story telling explained by Manovich not as substitute of narrative itself but as the forms in which it has evolved as we acquire new ways to grasp the world. Classical narrative (chronological narrative) used chronological order and the written and spoken word because that is what we had at hand. Now that new media has provided us with so many options to communicate and changed the way we view the world then we tell stories in that way too. We have learn to see the world as a pile of options to pick from so it is only natural that we tell our stories in a pile of versions or possibilities. Harris has mastered the art of communicating in database through all his websites.
Seferina
I like your emphasis on the way the database breaks from the classical chronological storytelling we find in many traditional narratives. I wonder to what extent databases play with conceptions of chronology–and what do they say about our perceptions of time if they reject chronology altogether? Certainly we can’t assert that humans no longer consider temporal settings when we “make sense of the world.” Many databases do use a sort of chronology to organize data entries, although We Feel Fine doesn’t. It includes a vague indication of when the ”feeling” entry was written, but other than that, it doesn’t place much importance on the “when” data. The Whale Hunt contains a certain level of chronological storytelling, but there are different modalities to view the story that allow us to ignore temporality completely.
What does all of this mean? I can’t say for sure, but I wonder if it IS possible to construct an aesthetic narrative (or anti-narrative) that truly exists without chronology or temporality.
I’m glad you highlighted this short summary from Ryan of Aarseth’s description of classical narrative. In particular, I think it’s worthwhile to think through how some of these terms—say, real author and implied author—play out in works like We Feel Fine or The Whale Hunt. What is the difference between these two types of authors, and does that distinction have an analogue in electronic literature?