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nonlinear fictions
As promised, here's the second half of what I'm thinking of as my Well-Intentioned Hypertext Rant, in which I argue that even literary / narrative works that aren't traditional hypertext as such are often nevertheless designed to be rewardingly navigated in non-linear fashion (hypernavigated?). Ready? Here goes: "[M]y [earlier] examples are all non-fictional, a little bit of a cheat on my part given that this whole thread got started discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of hypertext as a literary / fictional form. I'll grant that most fiction is designed to be read sequentially, although I'd point to the existence of a "scene selection" menu on nearly every DVD out there as evidence that people value and appreciate non-linear ways of navigating narrative as well. (I can only think of one filmmaker who has successfully resisted the popular pressure to segment the DVD release of their movies this way: David Lynch.) This also gets a little trickier when moving out from the level of the individual text into a "mega-corpus" of related stories, or a storytelling ecology. If we were Star Wars fans, we might read Star Wars tie-in novels in the order of their publication, or in the chronological order that continuity prescribes, or just randomly: each contributes another puzzle-piece to the overall Star Wars mega-corpus in a way that traditional hypertext theory very tidily provides a framework for describing. Comics continuity works similarly: only the most hard-core X-Men collector(s) can even begin to make an attempt to read the overall "story" of the X-Men in the order in which it occurred: the vast majority of readers are instead navigating the mega-corpus in partial, fragmentary ways, assembling the logic of it as they go. Again, hypertext theory provides a very handy way of thinking about this kind of reading. Mythic narrative systems work similarly: Dan [another commenter on the thread] observes that "[r]eligious texts can be read for narrative or as fiction, but that kind of reading generally doesn't involve skipping around." That's definitely true for the Old and New Testament, but less true for the heavily-annotated Torah, and even less true for pre-book mythic systems like the Greek, Egyptian, or African myths, which can be appreciated as fiction or narrative but have no coherent sequential order. Thanks for putting up with me while I indulged my need to be this guy. Labels: comics, fandom, hypertext, narrative, spirituality
Friday, March 07, 2008
j. k. rowling, pirates of the carribean, and world-building
One fact that has not escaped mention in the cloud of discourse surrounding the Harry Potter phenomenon is this one: there are certain metrics that traditionally characterize "good writing," and viewed through some of these metrics, J. K. Rowling does not appear to be a very good writer at all. A few examples: she abuses space-filling adverbs, she circulates through the entire array of distracting synonyms for "said" (including the especially unfortunate "ejaculated"), she relies enormously on wordy expository dialogue (often at the climax of a book), her sense of prose rhythm is clunky, her metaphors are rarely vivid, she intermittently dips into cliche, her combat sequences read like a transcript of a Dungeons and Dragons melee round... etc etc etc. I could continue to populate this list, but really, any fan of the books (and I count myself among their number) could tell you that these things detract from the enjoyment of the books only marginally, if at all. And the unprecendted size of her global legion of fans suggest that there is a whole other unspoken set of "good writing" metrics that Rowling is in fact the undisputed contemporary master of. So what might that be? A clue is provided by Chris Stangl, of the great Exploding Kinetoscope film-blog, who has not written on Harry Potter as such (at least not that I've seen) but who understands something about that sprawling subculture we call fandom (just as a for-instance, note his in-depth appreciation / critique of the comic-book-only Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Anyway, in his 2006 year-end list, Stangl writes about, of all things, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, and in doing so he says: "The story is built out of the elements that satisfy and inspire fan-fiction writers. Careful, obsessive attention to the arcs and quirks of every periphery character, piling on the backstory and complicated relationships, until the puffy summer blockbuster assumes Wagnerian proportion. Every character combination would be a potentially interesting pairing for slashfic. Holes in character histories and the timeline are left open for imagining more adventures. New fantasy elements and characters are introduced with such color and variety, they expand the Pirate-verse in every direction. Any Pirates fan gets a three hour cruise on the funniest, sexiest, most breathless, dreamiest galleon on the water. The rest of you may be lost at sea." Interesting, I thought: and it reminded me of the "mixed or average reviews" that the new Pirates movie, At World's End, had been receiving. Complaints of the movie being over-plotted, talky, tedious, and cluttered made me wonder if these critics weren't just judging it, like some have judged Rowling, by the wrong metric. So let's pop over to see what one of fandom's primary academic champions, Henry Jenkins, has to say: Unsurprisingly, he calls it "one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time." More: "The film ... throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. ... [T]he parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category." And still more: "The modes by which we consume [franchise] films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests." And still more: "Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story." And so all those negative reviews?: "[I]f [people] suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts." Hmm. Nice. I haven't seen any of the Pirates of the Carribean movies, but I think that all the praise that Stangl and Jenkins are loading onto the franchise applies perfectly to the Potter books. People don't care about Rowling's work on the level of prose style, because the books offer a different pleasure from the pleasure of simply reading stylistic prose. Rowling has created a world that people engage with and enjoy. The vast networked ensemble of characters attended to within that world provides a staggering number of points for further engagement. The fact that, ultimately, the amount of information she can supply about these characters is finite is not a disappointment but rather explodes the universe into a practically infinite number of jumping-off points for further imagination, participation, and still deeper engagement. This is what Rowling is good at. To judge from the success of her books it may be the thing that primarily matters. Teachers of storytelling, take note. (Film club this week was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), a film that engages in world-building narrative in its own fashion. But more on that later.) Labels: book_commentary, fandom, media commentary, narrative, writing
Saturday, August 11, 2007
provoking meaning (part two): excess information
Okay, so I'm following up on my last post here, which dealt with Henry Jenkins' assertion that (let's recap): "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe." There's four traits in that sentence: eventually, I'd like to give sustained thought to all four, but for today I want to focus in on that "excess information" one. Let's start with a given: fandom is a culture that processes information pretty swiftly and intensely (especially now that it has the ability to very closely watch / rewatch / analyze television episodes in DVD or media-file formats, and the ability to share the results of this "close viewing" via the Internet). It would stand to reason, then, that giving this culture extra information to process, then, is beneficial: there's a certain kind of pleasure that can be taken from, say, tracking down all the occurences of the "Lost numbers." And yet... there's a problem here. There's a certain point at which this kind of self-referencing can begin to snarl up the narrative. If the information we're talking about ends up directly referenced and heavily weighted in the show (in the case of Lost, this process begins in Episode 18, "Numbers"), then it can't truly be said to be "excess," as Jenkins would have it: it becomes one of the mysteries that the show then has a duty to solve. Compare this, for argument's sake, against the Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers (1988). In this film—I'll just quote the Wikipedia entry—"the numbers one to one hundred appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters." If you know this, it's fun to watch the film with this in mind, but it functions strictly on a formal layer: the characters never comment on it, it never attains the status of mystery (or even a diegetic occurence, for that matter). If Lost were taking that sort of approach with the occurrence and re-occurence of the numbers, it might function as a fun sort of game (whether that's appropriate for Lost's supernatural-adventure genre is another question entirely). But blowing it up into high significance (having Hurley repeatedly exclaim "The numbers are bad!" in the first season's finale, for instance) drives up the interest in having a narrative explanation for what may be functioning as a formal device. Uh oh. This is a situation, I would argue, that is actually not possible to resolve in a way that will provide audience satisfaction, and the Lost producers seem content to throw it into the heap of things "explained" by the all-purpose "fate" excuse. This problem was already beginning to reveal its intractability over a year ago, when producer Damon Lindelof said, w/r/t the question of the numbers: "I think that that question will never, ever be answered. I couldn't possibly imagine [how we would answer that question]. We will see more ramifications of the numbers and more usage of the numbers, but it boggles my mind when people ask me, 'What do the numbers mean?'" Hey, man, don't blame us: you're the ones who raised the question in the first place. (Postscript: I'm worrying that Heroes is going to make this exact same mistake with occurrences of their recurring symbol, referenced now as a diegetic occurence a couple of times. It appears in some places that can be explained without having to rely on "fate" or "synchronicity" as a pattern-making force, and other places where it can't. (They may be building themselves an "out" by the fact that the symbol itself references actions of God made manifest in the world, although it would be a touch unusual for a show that's been at least partially Eastern-focused to shift to an explicitly [?] Judeo-Christian orientation. But this is feeling like too much digression, and so I'll stop here.)) Labels: fandom, heroes, lost, media commentary, narrative
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
provoking meaning (part I)
For Christmas, I received a copy of Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, his new collection of essays on fandom / "participatory culture." I'm about halfway through and it's pretty great. Perhaps the most interesting piece so far is "Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans," in which Jenkins uses Pierre Levy's notion of the cosmopedia (roughly speaking, cosmopedia can be understood as collective information-banks enabled by computer networking). Jenkins sees Internet-enabled fan culture as an incarnation of Levy's idea: "Online fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture." and he posits a practical reason for why this might be so: "The fan community pools its knowledge because no single fan can know everything to fully appreciate [a] series." But as the fan community develops their collective knowledge-bank, they also develop a pretty intense capability to process series-based information. Jenkins quotes Nancy Baym (who literally wrote the book on online soap opera fandom) on this point: "A large group of fans can ... accumulate, retain, and continually recirculate unprecedented amounts of relevant information." So this would appear to be another force driving media producers to create more complex and dense works (the trend examined by Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You). And, accordingly, Jenkins has a prediction: "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe." This essay was first published in 2002, predating the first episodes of Lost by two solid years, but Lost features those four methods so pointedly that Jenkins should practically get a credit on the show. This also serves as a potential occasion to re-evaluate exactly how "marketable" those four methods are. Critics both at mainstream venues and within fandom seem to be increasingly losing patience with the precise devices that Jenkins argues should be provocative and rewarding. What's behind this frustration? Are the devices inherently misguided, or is the Lost team's particular use of the devices flawed or mishandled? I have some potential answers to this question, but they'll have to wait until the next post. Labels: fandom, knowledge, media commentary, narrative
Sunday, January 21, 2007
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