Exploritory Structure

It seemed to me that both Whale Hunt and We Feel Fine closely follow what Ryan calls an exploratory model. Where they diverge stylistically is over internal/external perspective, Whale Hunt conforming to the first, We Feel Fine the second. The difference in what I experienced was certainly noticeable. Right away I was immersed in the perspective of the hunter. This is not say I became him, in the context described by Ryan at the end of his essay. It goes without saying I wasn’t sitting at home fashioning a harpoon out of a kitchen knife and broom in excitement, but the text had captured my interest fully, I was eager to see how the narrative progressed.  Part of this was due to the the structure of the narrative, which gives the reader some agency in discovering the narrative or how to experience it. I have no impact on what happens in the narrative, but I do have a say in how it plays out. When I find myself viewing a series of uninteresting shots in someone’s home I can skip ahead to the hunt, and eventual killing of a whale. In a way, progression through the narrative mimics the author’s hunt; we’re both searching for the same thing, but the way we experience that search is different, a case of direct versus vicarious experience.

With We Feel Fine my experience was shaped far more by my own psyche. With Whale Hunt I was satisfying my curiosity over something presented to me, the titular whale hunt. With We Feel Fine my exploration was much more free form. Though what response one receives can be refined, there is a level of randomness that is retained by the engine. Regardless of whether I pick randomly from the cloud or watch a sequence of statuses streamed to me and filtered according to a set criteria, the reader always lacks total control. I don’t think it’s remotely realistic that I would discover the same status twice. What is most important here is the source of the random element, the source material; statuses and tweets pulled from the internet actively. We Feel Fine is a uniquely digital text, simply untranslatable to any other form.

Whereas Whale Hunt is more traditional in that it will inevitably follow a 1-2-3-4-5 or 7-1-2-3-4 -5-6-
(7)-8-9 chronological narrative such as those described by Ryan due to its fixed source material, We Feel Fine follows his infinite network or “plot as travel through a story-world” model on an infinite scale. Even Ryan’s “interwoven destiny line” model can be seen in we feel fine when one watches a stream of status that reflect a shared emotion or concept. Exploratory narratives can be said, perhaps, to not be successful based on “what” a reader is exploring but “how”