Narrative, Labyrinth, Simulation

Janet Murray gauges all texts by their narrative potential, arguing that the immersive power of narrative is all that is necessary for interactive media or cyberdrama to mature. She bases her position, in part, by creating a continuum, one that links Homeric epics to Aristotelian poetics to folktales and, finally, to cyberdrama.  This is a problematic progression, particularly when considering the rhetorical situation, which includes the degree of activity, past experience with the form, and human physiology.

For instance, the link between Homer and current conceptions of collaboratively authored narrative (or digital storytelling, as it is increasingly being referred to) is more tenuous than has been acknowledged. Milman Parry's research on Homeric extant texts in the 1930s dashed the prevailing view of Homer as a genius who single-handedly constructed masterpieces such as the Illiad and the Odyssey, although his work was not expanded on until about 30 years later, when Albert Lord extended Parry's research on Homer to consider its implications for performance and literature, and Eric Havelock, Ong's frequent collaborator, used it to explore speech and literacy. The difference in approach leads to differing conclusions about the boundaries between literature and rhetoric, fact and fiction, entertainment and work. Parry's careful analysis of the Odyssey and the Iliad revealed them to be highly formulaic, and as Ong explains, "The meaning of the Greek term 'rhapsodize,' rhapsoidein, 'to stitch song together,' became ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker" (1982, 22). These prefabricated parts were not the sort of mulitvocality often associated with interactivity  (e.g. gamers interacting with each other or with a narrative) but were more akin to the legal system which is updated and often redundant, and established by an institutional voice and not by individuals. These epic poems were also not meant as entertainment, but rather as a system of governance (Ong, 1982). Calling these "narrative," seems quite a stretch.

For Murray though, narrative becomes the threshold object in digital space and interactivity is not problematic. Rather than Cioleridge's willing suspension of disbelief, she argues for actively created belief. She sees games as able to reach their full potential when they can provide catharsis. One possibility she notes comes by way of Rob’s Suicide, a hypertextual scenario which would feature the user coming upon the character of Rob, whose internal dialogue would be represented as he contemplates suicide. The hypertext would cycle through his thoughts which move from hopeful to hopeless. As the scenario advances, the frequency of dismal thoughts would increase until the screen goes black and the suicide takes place in "real time." According to Murray, “the reader would have both enacted and witnessed the decision and would feel the sense of understanding, inevitability, and sorrow that we call catharsis" (177). This inevitability is born of both helplessness and surrender.

Espen Aarseth’s approach differs by focusing on the "text at work," and he argues against media specificity, instead charting the textual attributes that may be applied to any text, whether paper or digital. His approach regards computer-generated texts as non-distinctive simply by virtue of their medium and, therefore, accords the ancient I Ching as sharing more features with, say, an online help tutorial than an 18th century British novel. Same genre, different medium. Further, he frames ergodic explicitly as a replacement for narrative, seeing it as hegemonic and, as such limiting. Calling aporia-epiphany master tropes, he suggests they may generate narrative when experienced, but narrative is not some native structure for life and expression.

Aarseth uses the labyrinthine metaphor to describe a human's engagement with complex texts, though he notes that current conceptions of the labyrinth are very limited and limiting. In mediaeval times, he notes, the labyrinth signified both multicursal and unicursal structures, while today it's come to mean only the former. Since the mechanism of hypertext serves to alienate the reader, when engaged, the hypertext "quickly turns into a dense, multicursal labyrinth, and the reader becomes not so much los as caught, imprisoned by the repeating, circular paths and his [sic] own impotent choices" (91). The aporia here results from the inability to effect the progress that will end the cycling.  This aporia is replaced by an epiphany, "a seeming detail with an unexpected, salvaging effect: the link out," (91).

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