Post-Print Fiction

            When I approached this week’s blog, I was a little concerned in which direction I would take. The one idea that kept coming back to me as I was reading Mao II was how I saw it compare to Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

            The first thing I noticed when I was reading Mao II was how the content in chapter one pertained to books. On page 19, DeLillo puts his character in a bookstore, and the way that he was talking about books, reminded me of the scene in the bookstore in Calvino’s novel. DeLillo writes: “He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them.”

            I saw this paralleling the text in Calvino’s introduction where he writes: “Books You’ve been planning to read for ages, Books You want to own so they’ll be handy just in case, Books that fill You with sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified” (5).

           However, in Calvino’s novel, the character was called “You,” whereas DeLillo’s character is referred to as “he.” I think that even though Calvino was speaking in third person, to me, it felt more like the second person tone, with the text directed at me, and DeLillo made it clear that he was referring to another person and his view on the books. I could really relate to Calvino’s character, partly because of the tone of voice.

            I also saw somewhat of a comparison of manuscripts, in Calvino, and photographs, in DeLillo. In Calvino, manuscripts were the sought after object, by You and Ludmilla, where You goes above and beyond to find manuscripts of stories to find the endings and why they got put together. In DeLillo, photographs of writers seemed to be the main object of appeal in the beginning of the novel. It was like who gets their pictures taken, where do the pictures go? It seemed a parallel to me in the sense that the photographer, Brita Nilsson, didn’t seem concerned with “he’s” questions about her pictures or where they ended up, just as the editor in Calvino’s novel didn’t seem too preoccupied with “You” and his adamant worries about the manuscripts.

            Although it was just the beginning chapters that I developed parallels from, I look forward to seeing if any more will be able to be drawn throughout the rest of DeLillo’s novel.

Just as Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler focuses on the role of the reader, Delillo’s Mao II focuses on the role of the writer or as Cawelti would put it, the “persona” of “the writer as a celebrity.” The main character Bill Cray has become too aware of his role as a writer and his persona outside of his work. This “conflicted writer” believes to be in conflict with the language and with his own identity but it might not be so clear that his conflict surges from his relationship with his celebrity status and his audience.

He unconsciously blames the public for turning away from fiction and becoming fixated with sensationalist news. He believes writers will become irrelevant because the fictional stories with which writers used to entertain the masses have become an everyday reality and are no longer exciting to people. He feels he has been left with nothing else to say. “News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.” (42)

In parallel to Bill’s self-obsession, the rest of the characters seem to be obsessed with the writer-celebrity. Brita, a free-lance photographer will only photograph writers and dedicates her work and art to create a “record,” “census,” of writers “in still pictures.” Scott, Bill’s assistant, became almost a servant and an extension of the writer himself and sometimes he even acts as Bill’s conscience.

I found interesting that neither Scott nor Bill had any faith on the work Bill had spent so much time. They both agreed that it wasn’t good in relation to his other work but from the point of view of whether it would be well accepted or not by the public. While Bill complains that “the more books they(publishers) publish, the weaker we(writers) become,” (47)  he, himself has lost his perspective for writing. His existentialist crisis was rooted on the fact that he didn’t know how to protect his work from his celebrity as a writer.

Cawelti’s piece starts by presenting how literature found its way into popular culture by creating and repeating formulaic patterns to penetrate the larger masses. The piece ended with the transformation this popular culture inflicted in the life of the writer and his work as a result of reaching such large masses.

 

Funny how my readings for my English classes seem to mirror the texts I’m reading for other classes. In my English Education Methods class, we’re looking at ways to approach teaching lit theory in the classroom. The book we’ve been reading, Critical Encounters in High School English, discusses reader response theory and how it is usually touched on in English classes but never fully realized (and rarely ever made explicit to students). When teaching reader response theory, you are effectively teaching students how to read. Sure, you’re skipping all the phonics stuff, but you’re still introducing student readers to a new way to understand texts. But when reader response is taught ineffectively, it runs the risk of becoming too focused on individual response and not enough on how that particular response is generated through dialogue with the text, or through ideological/sociological influences. This quickly leads to the “no wrong answers” sentiments towards reading that causes many people to shrug off the discipline, and make it difficult for people who haven’t been properly instructed in theory to take reader response seriously. Students are told that when they read a text, they can create their own unique meaning; while it’s important to have students connect the text to their own experiences, they should do so without digressing to “Romeo and Juliet reminds me of that one time my boyfriend broke up with me and it sucked, and that’s why I like this play.” The writer of my textbook calls this mistaken reader response approach “the cult of the individual.”

So where am I going with all of this? I’m still only five chapters into Mao II, and I read the assigned articles with some frustration. Crowds and Power mentioned several times how the crowd is the antithesis to the individual. In the crowd, everyone is equal… individual differences cease to exist. Along with this, being in a crowd means individual accountability–individual creation and destruction–is surrendered. Through my reading on teaching reader response theory, I began to think about ways in which reading is a fundamentally individual act, and stretching that even further, writing can often be thought of as an individual act as well. While the acts of reading and writing necessarily depend on each other to exist, they exist as a conversation between two individuals. Such conversations cannot exist within a crowd or crowd mentality.

Thus, crowds can be thought of as the antithesis–or even the arch enemy–to reading and writing. Perhaps in Mao II, DeLillo is trying to examine the way that modern impulses toward crowd logic (or “groupthink,” to borrow a familiar term) lead us further and further away from a culture that celebrates individual readers and writers. Along with this came a series of other questions: How do crowds perceive texts? Can they perceive texts? And if they can’t, is it because their impulse towards groupthink don’t allow it? If the answer to the last question is yes, it affirms our belief that reading is truly an individual act.

But even further… how can we relate this to our understanding of the way authors exist alongside the “revolutionary” e-books? Internet and electronic publishing have made it easy for anyone to become an author, and in a way, when you spend an hour surfing the web you probably read texts written by anywhere from 10-20 authors (who are writing those tweets? youtube comments? status updates? blog posts?). Has the internet effectively transformed into a “crowd” of authors? Or is this statement contradictory in terms? I might be digressing a little, but  I think these are all important questions that could relate to our understanding of the fundamentals attributes to reading and writing, and the status of reading and writing in a post-print world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the original source of public fascination may be the celebrity’s creations, there is a tendency for public interest to fasten increasingly on the person, rather than, in the case of a writer, on his works. (163)

            Normally if you were to pick up an issue of People or Vanity Fair magazine, you would find such celebrities as Kim Kardashian or Jennifer Lopez on the cover, but in an age where the author is now a celebrity you can find famed Twilight author, Stephanie Meyer, headlining TMZ (a popular celebrity gossip website), J.K Rowling on the cover of Entertainment, and Dan Brown at a red carpet event mingling with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Gisele Bundchen, and Will Smith, among others.

In his article, The Writer as a Celebrity: Some aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture, John Cawelti states that “the emergence of writers for whom celebrity has become in different ways the center of their art, have made writers in general more conscious of the problem of celebrity and its potentially deleterious effect on their work.” Contrary to this statement, though I understand the conundrum of the author of either embracing the media and the idea of “celebrity” in order to reach a higher audience, or risking the possibility of having a smaller audience by remaining relatively mysterious, I believe that today’s author’s such as Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer are more focused on being a celebrity than a writer. Although authors are not on the same the level of fame as Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, nevertheless, they are still celebrities who are making millions of dollars a year and making best dressed lists.

Instead of focusing on their craft and creating new works, J.K Rowling has become the face of numerous charities while Stephanie Meyer has gone on to create her own clothing line. Not to say that what they are doing is necessarily bad, but what about their craft? Since the release of the Harry Potter novels, J.K Rowling has not released any new works, and Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown, aside from their popular novels, have only published one other work which is coincidently or not within the same realm of the novels that made them famous.

This makes me question whether these authors are relying on their franchises and the money they made from them to live, and to hold on to their celebrity status. I feel that these authors believe that they no longer have to continue writing because of the fact that they are set for life. This type of mindset, therefore, gives the author the opportunity to become more invested in the celebrity world. Cawelti warns us of this possibility by writing “the energy and emotional investment he gives to playing the role of person-performer inevitably detracts from what he can give to his proper work.” (171)

This ultimately brings me to my last question – will the “author” ever fade? As a result of the author having been “swallowed up into the myth of his celebrity, of becoming the simplified persona of his public legend” (171), this has given rise to an innumerable amount of pseudo writers. Now that greats like J.K Rowling have taken a back seat, such celebrities as Snookie, Chelsea Handler, Kendra Wilkinson, and others have emerged as writers. Because we live in a society that is consumed with the idea of knowing the past of the author and of who he or she is, we feel confident enough to know who they are through their television shows to send them right to New York Times best sellers list, but are what these “authors” creating really art?

Can we really say that Snookie, the same girl who said that she feels “like one of those pilgrims from the 1920s” while washing dishes, an author? The more that real authors are swallowed by Hollywood, more of these nonsense novels are created, therefore, over time decreasing the significance and value of the “author”, and the art of writing. Eventually less great works will be made, and the notion of the “author” will come to an end.

 

 

 

 

 

Bill, as a writer in Mao II, demonstrates the relationship audiences shape authors into celebrities like John Cawelti discusses in “The Writer as a Celebrity: Some Aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture.” Cawelti points out that, at first, the audience’s “fascination may be the celebrity’s creation” but “there is a tendency for public interest to fasten increasingly on the person” (Cawelti 163).  I think this is true for Bill.  Bill tries to reject his role as a celebrity by refusing to have his picture taken and cutting himself off from society.  He feels that “the language of [his] books has shaped [him] as a man” so, like Cawelti states, Bill wants to be “known wholly through [his] works” (DeLillo 48; Cawelti 72).  However, this proves difficult because his audience wants to know more about him.  People try in vain to find out where he even lives.  Like Brita tells him, taking his picture taken will make Bill “someone’s material” and that “the moment [his] picture appears [he’ll] be expected to look just like it” (DeLillo 43).

By increasing the mystery around him, his audience becomes more obsessed with figuring out who Bill is.  Without this knowledge, Bill fails to be the “performer-person” that audiences seek in their authors (Cawelti 173).  This means that Bill cannot provide the audience with any clues to “understand and respond to” his work (Cawelti 173).  Brita feel that there is a connection between the person and their work and so that she “out to know the person as well as the work” when she photographs authors like Bill (DeLillo 37).  However, Brita also expresses uneasiness about meeting Bill as a celebrity.  Like Ludmilla who would not meet authors in If on winter’s night, Brita knows that Bill will not be the same “man who had lived in her mind for years” (DeLillo 34).  By idealizing Bill as a celebrity that counters who he really is, Brita shows how “true celebrity is a human creation” (Cawelti 174).

In my early reading of Mao II, I was intrigued to see Delillo make the connection between terrorists and novelists. It’s obviously a bold (intentionally so) statement to make, but I think the authors point of both the terrorist and novelist being voices in the formation of culture carries some truth.

In Delillo’s own words, “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists.” (41)

Continuing on in the passage, Delillo makes the point that in the West, writers who once had profound influence on the consciousness of their readers, are now becoming revered symbols and nothing more. He seeks to make the point that rampant and amorphic violence seem to do more these days in shaping human thought and understanding.

“News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” (42)

As Delillo continues his point, he seems to suggest its not just violence itself, but news of violence which is increasingly hijacking the minds of individuals “addicted” to violence in news.

This sparked a tangent of thought within me, centered on the question, “Is it better to be well-read, or well-informed?”

I gravitated toward this line of questioning I think because I am a journalism enthusiast, with a certain level of appreciation for newswriting nonfiction writing forms. Part of the reason I  am interested in working in the journalism field is because the work of journalists, the words they write, are perhaps more instantly useful or effective to a large group of people.

I think it goes without saying that it pays to be “in the know” on at least certain news items. In certain cases, being informed of news topics can save your life and your livelihood.

Still, the work of journalists is influence in the short-term. They can tell you where and when the bad guy got caught, which highway route to take home from work and might help you decide which stock options you want to hold onto.

The work of a novelist or, affectionately, a writer, is of long term influence. “Classic” novelists have an eternal quality about them. They trigger discourse on topics to be debated for centuries, perhaps forever. This realization brought my attention back to the Foucault reading about certain authors being “founders of discursivity.”

Delillo’s lamentation in this passage seems to be that readers are being near-sighted with the kind of writing they are taking in. They seem to care less about the long-term formation of their consciousness and instead are neglecting it for the arguably more accessible, short-term influence of news and disaster. An interesting thought.

For and Delillo and presumably, the rest of us, the trick would be strike a balance in our lives of an equal intake of short-term and long-term thought building.

“The future belongs to crowds” (16). Could it be that Mao II’s crowning point did not even make it into the first chapter? I would surmise that to be so, as Don DeLillo’s novel paints a more colorful representation of cult logic than Andy Warhol’s silkscreen painting of the Chinese Communist leader.

Writing this with only an exposing up to the 5^th chapter, I can already develop the issue of crowding (and further, cults). Initially, what struck me as intriguing was not even regarding the plot itself, but the point of view. Unlike our previous novel (and thank God for that), the POV displays the third person. However, DeLillo does not just leave the POV as third, but he treats the reader to free indirect discourse. The reader gets a sense of 3^rd person description told in the idiom of each character (Karen, Karen’s parents, Brita, Scott, and Bill – so far). As a book on crowds/cults, I found this extremely evocative toward the overall plot as the POV itself indicates a matter of crowding. The line between narrator and character is blurred, which allows a continual movement between the interior and exterior qualities of each viewpoint. The metaphysical nature of the novel allows the reader to exhaust his or her invisibility throughout each character’s persona and not have have to centralize a certain voice. Depicting some of the characters’ thoughts in fragments rather than complete sentences presents the characters with senses of authenticity and accessibility that breathe life into their typeface lungs. The characters seem to have a position of reality. This blending of interior/exterior qualities also becomes prevalent in chapter 4 of the book with the interaction between Brita and Bill, “Her hand on his face, how surprised he’d been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch” (DeLillo 55). Bill’s dissecting of Brita’s existence in his house and his life allowed the intrusion of Rabinowitz’s Rules of Signification to reinforce the idea of crowds in my reading. This interior monlogue is significant in satisfiying a portion of Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” when Brita’s touch forces Bill to a self-conscious/anxious mentality,

“Any free or large gesture of approach towards another human being is inhibited…no man can get near another, nor reach his height. In every sphere of life, firmly established hierarchies prevent him touching anyone more exalted than himself, or descending, except in appearance, to anyone lower” (Canetti 18).

Bill’s ability to let Brita “in” is what Canetti labels a “discharge”, which, removes the hierarchies within a crowd and promotes equality. The successful intimacy with an outsider forges an advancing chronology as the reader will start to see the development of the crowd and later the cult. A fair assumption, right? Unfortunately, Karen’s presence after Bill’s discharge made me question if she was the leader,

Brita: “And you hate me for leaving here with all that film.”

Karen: “It’s just a feeling of there’s something wrong. We have a life here that’s carefully balanced. There’s a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there’s a crack all of a sudden” (57).

Karen’s urgency to remain secluded (geographically and communally) seemed to reflect the idea of the closed crowd, “The closed crowd renounces growth and puts the stress on permanence. The first thing to be noticed about it is that it has a boundary. It creates a space for itself which it will fill” (Canetti 17). While she lives to serve Bill, could it be that she is the epicenter for this crowd transforming into a cult? Is it because of her that the three have been secluded for so long? Karen’s dominance in the prologue and in Bill’s household will push me to consult the Rules of Signification throughout the entire novel.

I had never read Barthes before – he is certainly very enthusiastic!  He is being deliberately incisive, I think, but he does so because he is addressing a mode of thinking that was dominant in his time – that is, the traditional schools of criticism that placed all emphasis on the author and his psychology, and on the search for the ultimate singular “meaning” that he embedded into his texts. 

Many modern critics would at least acknowledge nowadays that such meanings are usually nonexistent or unimportant, that a readers’ interpretations are a reliable source of truth, and that what a writer writes is not necessarily reflective of a specific idea or psychology.  In Barthes’ time, though, that kind of thinking was probably fairly rare.   So I understand why he writes so passionately about the “death of the Author” and the ascension of the reader –  he is trying to spark debate.  He was attempting to change the viewpoint of a critical society that did not yet have all the pieces, so to speak.  The author does provide a possible avenue for analysis, but he is not the only avenue that exists. 

Obviously, every single work of writing has some kind of author behind it.  Books do not fall from the sky.  What I think Barthes is getting at, though, is that the relationship between an author, or storyteller, and the text has changed over the centuries, and it only continues to evolve as it is exposed to new philosophies and forms of media.  

Let’s look to Borges’ story, The Garden of Forking Paths.  As its introduction helpfully points out (I don’t know if I would have made this connection myself), the story’s narrative describes the concept behind the hypertext novel, which is described as a kind of infinite labrynth that branches off into an infinite number of possibilities through time.  At the time he wrote this story, Borges did not know about the internet, and indeed his conceptualization of hypertext was probably based more on mathematical breakthroughs of the time (quantum physics, etc.) than it was on any conceptualization of computer systems.

But his idea is now (at least partly) possible, with the help of a computer, and particularly with the help of the internet.  Anyone can put together a hypertext document that branches off indefinitely, or at least as far as its links can go.

Of course Borges was the author of his own story – we cannot remove him from it – but what happens when you have many authors working all at once on a single project?  The work would be reflective of all of their ideas, all of their psychologies, and so would be completely opaque to the traditional modes of criticism that Barthes is attacking.

Then we get to works that incorporate media with text –  pictures, sound, and so on.  The storyteller is still present, surely, but as we see in The Whale Hunt, temporal boundaries break down, and stories become more of an experience than a traditional straightforward narrative.

We also are beginning to see the rise of more collaborative forms of writing, where the faceless mass traveling the colorful wastes of the Internet conspires to create new works of writing and art.  Sites like Drawball allow people to scribble whatever they want, and see the scribbles of others, and anonymous forums allow people to write whatever they feel like writing, and talk about whatever they feel like talking about.  Communication itself is becoming a whole new medium.

We Feel Fine operates under similar principles, although it lacks direct involvement from its content-producers.  Thousands upon thousands contribute to the site, creating a huge amount of disconnected emotive narratives.  They are all authors, all operating under an entity that acts as both a storyteller and medium: the webcrawler that culls their stories in accordance with its programmed algorithms.

What we are seeing, as our technology continues to advance, is the rapid increase in new communicative mediums.  The “author” is not dying, but rather is changing at an exponential rate.  It is the old concept of author (old in the sense that it existed before this current moment) that is dead, as countless new concepts pop up in its place.

Whether it is a human being who is putting stories together, or a computer algorithm, it seems inevitable that these infinite, collaborative forms of writing will only grow more prevalent as the Internet becomes increasingly more relevant to our daily lives.  The distinction between “real life” and “digital life” blurs a little more each day, as we see ideas that were once merely conceptual (like Borges’ hypertext) become realized by technology.

What will happen when three-dimensional object printers become as ubiquitous as the inkjet?  When we can print objects from stories and give them tangible forms?  What happens when the resolution of flexible displays becomes so fine that the images they display are indistinguishable from reality?  The same for projected light images?  What happens when we create a sensory interface that makes interaction with light images indistinguishable from real ones?  What happens when virtual reality becomes reality, and we can grow on a whim Borges’ infinite labyrinth?

These all are projections for the future, but what is clear is that the author is something that constantly evolves when exposed to ever-changing media.  It is therefore difficult to pin down what exactly the author is or will be or “means” – we just know that it is changing.  We don’t yet have all the pieces, and perhaps we never will.

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”

 

When considering how technology can be used to support the construction of narratives, it is important to note that human interaction is still necessary.  Marie-Laure Ryan, in the chapter “Toward an Interactive Narratology” from her book Avatars of Story, lists four “properties of digital systems… that I regard as the most relevant for narrative and textuality” (98).  These four properties concern the ability to adjust behavior based on user input, the ability to change what is displayed, the ability to utilize multiple media channels, and the ability to connect to other computers and users.  Ryan goes on to write that “interactivity… does not facilitate storytelling, because narrative meaning presupposes the linearity and unidirectionality of time, logic, and causality…” (99).  Ryan proposes a new type of narrative combining the design of a storyteller with input from individual users.  Ryan’s structure would aim to reward the user with a “coherent narrative” that is a product of their own input, not entirely pre-scripted by the designer (Ryan 100).

Clearly, the web-based works We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt take advantage of the four properties listed by Ryan to create a rich experience for the user, or visitor to the sites.  It is debatable, however, to what extent these two web sites reward the user with a coherent narrative.  Both sites seem to emphasize interactivity over meaning, as the user certainly has choices, and may be inundated by words and images, yet is left to grasp at the thinnest connections to pull together a hint of a narrative.

Containing 3,214 photos, The Whale Hunt is based upon a huge but static database of images, captions, and descriptions. The user may set several different variables, including focusing on a particular character, subject, or time period.  Even with user interactivity, it seems to me that the basic story of The Whale Hunt remains the same, and any subplots are the result of filtering the main story.

We Feel Fine, on the other hand, is based on material that is regularly updated from across the Internet, and which may change significantly over time.  The user must interact with the database by specifying search parameters in order to extract any data.  The results, therefore, are likely to be unique for each individual visitor.  The chances of extracting a coherent narrative from We Feel Fine, however, seem slim.  It may be possible to derive the raw elements of a story, such as the skeleton of a dialogue, which the user could then develop into a narrative.

Constructing a coherent narrative seems to require structure, plus human intelligence to select and link elements in a manner we can understand as a story.  The web sites The Whale Hunt and We Feel Fine, while providing the raw materials for a good story, are not intended to complete the job; for that, we still need humans.

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 really enjoyed the two pieces by Harris, We Feel Fine, and The Whale Hunt. I remembered them from the 325 seminar last year, but looking at them now, along with the current readings about authorship really made me dive deeper into the meaning and have a greater appreciation for it.

           “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes). This ending quote to Barthes piece really stood out to me both in wrapping up that reading as well as connecting it to the two pieces that Harris created. What I gathered from the reading on authorship, Barthes was saying that the author puts words out there, a story out there, but it is up to the reader to hold the pieces together, to gather information, make their own assumptions, and create the story.

          In The Whale Hunt, there were three options in which to view the story: the mosaic, the timeline, or the pinwheel. Giving this option to the reader, at least in the way I saw it, provided a different reaction for each. For the mosaic option, I was overwhelmed by all of the pictures and chose specific ones based on color similarities. The pinwheel and the timeline were similar in their appearance, showing spikes where excitement occurred, however, this made me more interested in the pictures in those areas rather than all of them.

           I was skipping over pictures based on similarities and excitement and therefore missed parts of Harris’ story, creating my own based on my own interests. And although Harris had captions that explained what pictures were, the actual events going on, the dialogue, and thoughts were absent, thus leaving me to my own creation.

           As for the We Feel Fine piece, I felt somewhat the same about authorship. However, instead of just one author, there were millions of people contributing to a streaming of emotions. Through each line that I read, I was able to create a sense of background in their story. “I am to address this suffering I feel I have to first come in touch with my perception of believing.” What is this person suffering from? What do they need to believe in? It is up to me to answer these questions, thus creating the loss of the author.
  
            This site also provided various ways to view the text, like in a stream line based on the time they hit the internet and in categories of connections like feelings and other words that tie them together somehow. This put many different thoughts and feelings together, coming from different backgrounds, but as a reader, you can assemble them to fit into one, or to create one story as well as several individual ones. I liked We Feel Fine more than The Whale Hunt, because I felt that I had more responsibility as a reader in creating storylines and interpreting what I read.

            Both of these pieces initiated reader responsibility, giving more leeway for creativity.

“Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing,” (Barthes 141).

Wrong. Writing is that biased, composite, defined space, where our subject presents itself, the positive where all identity is found, starting with the very identity of the body writing. Right? What I am writing at this moment, as an author of a blog, is not neutral nor can it ever be viewed as neutral. Barthes may like to believe that The Author is dead and gone and in its place we have this idealistic neutrality where every text can be freed from the limits that Authors place upon it, but that is simply not the case. Authors cannot be removed from their work, even if they exist incorporeally or as anonymous or unnamed attachments. The fact of the matter is that words do not simply appear out of thin air, even if they float around like the colorful dots of We Feel Fine. Every one of those dots represents and author. Every word that is written has an origin and an agenda.

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child (Barthes 145).

If you believe in the existence of The Author, and I certainly do, then you may believe that the author is always present in the text and has some sway over it or some influence in its construction. Authors would not exist without text and text cannot exist without some kind of author. Someone has to write to codes, the epics, the novels, and the laundry lists. Someone has to take the pictures and upload them. These are not random acts, even if these authors want to create something random. Creation, or writing, is bound by its execution: we make decisions before we type something out, we calculate how we are going to randomly arrange those random lines of English Syllabi, and so on. The product may end up being something unexpected, but that does not automatically remove the author from the creation of the work.