Marius Lobonţiu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

marius.lobontiu@yahoo.com

 

 

Playing the Text

A call for theory in digital fiction

 

 

Abstract: The development of digital culture and literature have prompted a subsequent need for literary theory to adequate its concepts to the new works provided by the digital medium. These textual experiments have so far been approached with theoretical ambiguity. This paper aims to provide a starting point for a theoretical approach to digital literature, taking into account first and foremost the specificity of this new domain, which lies in its dynamics. Several existing points of view are discussed and two major directions of study are put forth, of which one is ultimately found to be more lucrative. This is the “fourth entity” approach, which proposes that textual dynamics be seen as a new integral part of the traditional author-work-reader triad.

Keywords: Digital text; Digital literature; Ergodic literature; Authorship; Interactivity; Literary theory; Reader; Hermeneutics; Blended entities; Fourth entity.

 

 

How does one assign value to an interactive literary text, where the reader implicitly “steals” so many of the author’s attributes? A critic would be forced to analyze herself, ultimately, given that the substance of the work she is reading is a direct result of her actions. How would one “find one’s way” back to the author, to question her intent, her horizons or to sketch out a hermeneutic structure? Is there a need to postulate a new type of “work”, more open than Umberto Eco[1] could have imagined and more lacking in authorship than Roland Barthes[2] had anticipated?

The death of the author, as Barthes describes it, implicitly foresees the paradigm shift brought upon by the invention of digital text, but does so in terms that are, at least partially, incompatible with the present. For Barthes, the contending discourses that make up a work are focused in a determined point, where the reader must place herself. This focal point anticipates, calls for and formats the reader, and not the other way around. It is the fixed point of interaction between reader and text. Although this perspective is an important step towards understanding the workings of digital text, Barthes still implies the existence of a passive reader, whose entire range of action lies in the ability to obey an imperative that has been pre-established by the text. In the digital space, on the other hand, this focal point is determined by the reader, who, endowed with the freedom of interactivity, can now (to a certain extent) format the work itself, forcing it to refocus its discourses in order to adequately meet its reader.

In addition, any attempt to apply the notion of hermeneutic circle[3] to a dynamic digital text becomes problematic due to the fact that, in an interactive work, each projection of meaning is in fact materialized by the will (and attributes) of the reader. In effect, one can no longer view the act of reading these works in terms of the hermeneutic circle (by envisioning projections of meaning that may or may not be confirmed as one moves forward through the text) because unconfirmed projections no longer exist. In fact, all projection of meaning has been replaced by possible action, as a result of interactivity. One might object that unconfirmed projections still exist in the form of actions that the reader might take which are not allowed by the “rules” of a given interactive text. This would, however, be an unwarranted “stretching out” of the concept of hermeneutic circle; if one were to apply this understanding of Gadamer’s postulate to traditional printed text, it would result that a possible projection of meaning while reading a book, would be to expect video or sound on some of its pages. This is simply not possible within the confines of the medium, just as certain actions cannot be possible within the confines of a given interactive work. Therefore, once a reader understands the “material rules” of an interactive piece of fiction, an accurate application of the hermeneutic circle as a comprehension device would become impossible.

On the other hand, one might argue that the entire mechanism of the hermeneutic circle has been relocated within the reader. If she indeed “borrows” auctorial attributes, than the projections of meaning will take place within herself. In this view, however, the classic notion of hermeneutic circle would need to be substantially redefined and would, in fact, be rendered useless as a tool for criticizing or establishing the value of a work. In the end, the only solid conclusion one is left with after applying Gadamer’s circle to digital works is that the well-known introspective component of reading text has indisputably become more than a diffuse perspective or metaphor used by literary critics – it is now materialized and perfectly real.

There is another trend in critical theory that might, at first glance, be capable of applying itself to digital text: the general shifting of focus towards the work itself. The three main paradigms that can, on the most general level, categorize critical theory over the past century can be surmised as three consecutive focuses: on author, reader and text. As digital text is a prime example of the erosion of authorship, one might be inclined to study it from the perspective of the third paradigm, with the work itself taking center stage and reigning over author and reader alike, in a Foucauldian view of power balances. However, as we have seen above, some of the prime theories of this paradigm, such as the death of the author, still cannot fully explain the workings of interactive fiction. The same can be said for post-structuralism in general, and New Criticism as well (with its text-oriented approach).

The reason for this is that a digital work of fiction does not, in fact, exist without dynamics (of which interactivity is a component). Dynamics is, inevitably, the very substance of these works. This holds true to a far greater extent than in the case of fixed-media text, such as printed books: an unopened book lying on a shelf is still a coherent body of text, written down and immutable. It is a potentiality with a precise substance, even while it remains inactive (while it is not being read). But an ergodic[4] text that is not being “used” or an interactive text that has no reader to interact with, lack any kind of substance – they are pure, empty potential, at most an inert collection of components for a possible future work, akin to the notes an author takes before starting to write a novel. Interaction is the real body of these works. It is within digital text that we are finally left with no choice of separation between the three entities. Critical focus can no longer be shifted between author, reader and work, as they become so intricately blended and diffuse, that new theories seem to be needed to explain how they work. It is the task of these new theories to decide whether a “blended entities” approach is more adequate, or one that sees dynamics itself as a fourth entity, both uniting and mutating the previous three.

The “blended entities” approach appears to be the more problematic of the two. It is obvious that the reader (or “user”, or “receiver”) takes over many of the attributes of the classic author. Then, the concept of “work” itself poses some problems, as its classical definition of “what the reader sees” is no longer valid. It now lacks the quality of a static end-result of the author’s creative process, presented to the reader in a finished form, just as the author cannot remain “whole”, as an entity, when so many of her privileges have been “usurped” by the reader. It seems to be nearly impossible to analyze this blending of entities without throwing away nearly all of the traditional constructs of critical theory. The separation of entities is so entrenched in the old paradigms and so unanimously taken for granted, that changing it would radically destabilize these otherwise valuable theories.

The fourth entity approach, would be, therefore, more desirable. By inserting a new agent within the traditional triad, there is a greater chance that the old literary theories can be adapted – together with the concept of literature that they have so far constructed. This critical project will need to begin by accurately placing the new agent among the old three.

It will need to reside between the author and the reader, without being completely superimposed over the work. It is at this point that we discover that such a position has in fact existed, throughout time, in various forms, and has been filled by various types of intermediary agents – from the bards of antiquity, who served as interpreters and performers of the text, to the divided authorship of the Middle Ages, throughout the Renaissance, when the notion of divine inspiration rested between authors and their work, and up to the age of mechanical reproduction, when the printing press became an important agent in the production of literature[5]. An accurate history of this intermediary position can and should be drawn out, in order to support the idea that while the concept of dynamics is new and specific to digital text, the position that it occupies, between author and reader, has existed up to the modern age of authorship, as a means of dividing, reducing or otherwise eroding the hegemony of the author. Such a study would provide a further argument for the historical necessity of the apparition of interactive text, in view of the evolution of the concept of author. At first nullified, then present but divided, then steadily gaining in power up to its peak during Romanticism, then once again losing its authority, only to once again become nullified (or extremely close to it) in postmodernism. This final effacing of the author now takes place without a specific foreign agent to take over her attributes, (other than the reader, in a poststructuralist view). All this, until the invention of dynamics, the new valid contender for the position.

Such a perspective on the history of authorship would establish digital text as the logical outcome of a historic process, confirming its place in the evolution of literature.

Questions regarding interactivity and the dissolution of the traditional author have been raised throughout the previous decades in the field of art. The fact that certain forms of digital art – including, of course, textual ones – arrive at the same issues is another obvious symptom of the apparition of a new aesthetic space, with its own rules and functionality. It is, therefore, all the more imperative that an adequate critical approach be devised, together with an equally adequate theoretical understanding.

Before any further arguments are presented for the “fourth entity” paradigm, a clarification is necessary. What exactly is meant by interactive text? What is the specificity of digital works, and, most importantly, should they be viewed as extensions of traditional text, or as a new type of work altogether, both literary and plastic, dynamic and aesthetic? While the last question leaves room for a long and arduous debate, the first two are comparatively easier to tackle.

To begin with, the specificity of digital works is heir to a long lasting confusion. In short, works that can only exist in the digital medium are specific (using interactivity, interconnectedness, dynamics or actual programming as indispensable components) while other works that reside in this medium are merely “transcribed” (or calqued) into it from a traditional one (such as paper) and are perfectly capable of existing on their own, outside the digital, without losing any of their meaning or style. This includes literature websites, online literary salons, forums, blogs, chat (including its transcripts) and the ever-downloadable e-books, all of which, regardless of their potential aesthetic value, cannot be seen as forms of digital literature, but rather a digital culture, laudable in itself, but certainly far from being a new literary frontier. It is an all too common fallacy to view e-books as examples of digital text. They are, in fact, the equivalent of photographing or filming a regular book. The change of medium does not affect the work itself – though it should be noted that it may do it a great service by making it far more accessible.

The next task that presents itself in regard to digital specificity requires that we attempt to sketch out a rough taxonomy of digital text and its dynamics. The three categories that follow are provisory and meant solely as a general guideline for a more detailed division of digital works.

The first type of dynamics is that of the work. It includes those works in which the reader’s capacity to influence the text is reduced to a minimum, in the sense that the reader is at her most passive here, of all the three categories. It includes experiments where dynamics can produce a large number of permutations within the text, either randomly or following certain rules imposed by the author. This means that the reader will see a different text at each contact with the work – or rather, a different configuration of the same text – without, however, having any other influence upon the text aside from the fact that she sets it in motion (much like a player pulling the lever of a slots machine: nothing would happen without her influence, yet she has no control over the final outcome of her actions). A famous example for this type of experiment predates the digital medium in the sense that it has been described before the technical means were in place for its actual construction. The experiment in question is Raymond Queneau’s famous Hundred Thousand Billion Poems[6], a work consisting of ten sonnets of identical rhymes (with the rhyming sound being the same as well). The verses can be shuffled in any order, and their combinations can result in 10¹⁴ sonnets, all intelligible and formally valid. While it has traditionally been impossible (or, rather, unprofitable) to actually print all of the possible combinations (the number in the title is accurate), the digital version of this text is quite simple to use. One needs only to push a button for a new shuffling of verses to appear on screen (a simple internet search will reveal dozens of incarnations of Queneau’s experiment, with slightly different interfaces). With the evolution of computers, the billion poems idea has finally come to have an accurate rendition.

In the field of digital dynamics, this type of experiment affords the least amount of freedom to the reader. At the same time, the author herself has very little control over her work – at least over the form in which it reaches its reader. If, in the case of writing a traditional literary text, the most elementary of the author’s prerogatives is the ability to decide the order of words within her own work, in the case of digital fiction, authorship is often transformed into the function of game creator. Without being able to foresee any individual incarnation of the text, the author is constrained to devising a set of rules and some type of material support, while the reader is called upon to play the text. As far as authority is concerned, neither writer nor reader is privileged. Instead, they both serve, in their own way, the unpredictable dynamics of the text, an entity which, in this case, seems to resemble the automatons of the baroque, lifelike and predisposed to anthropomorphization and yet decidedly mechanical.

The next category is the dynamics of the reader (or user, or receiver). Of all three categories, this is where the reader holds the greatest amount of “power” (or is the most active). She either chooses a path through the work (in the case of ergodic text, for example), or “floats” through an informational entropy that is impossible to read (or perceive) in its entirety. In essence, the work cannot exist without the reader’s constant action, although, on the whole, it still obeys certain rules established by the author (or game creator). What separates this category from the previous one is that here, the reader appears (in a certain sense) to have more control over the work than the author herself, by consciously and constantly choosing the form that the work will take before her eyes, while the opposite pole of authorship is divided between the human author and the dynamics of the work.

It is noticeable, at this point, that the “four entities” approach allows for more clarity of concept by still maintaining an epistemic divide between those who create and those who read or use. It would be easy to argue correctly, based on observation, that given the great power of the reader in this particular category, she has taken over some auctorial attributes (doing this would mean using the “blended entities” approach). However, we can now choose not to take this perspective, as the introduction of the fourth agent is fully capable of explaining the workings of this type of text, while being a much more useful methodological approach, in the sense that it allows us to maintain a larger part of the classic definitions of reader, author and work.

The game analogy is applicable to this category as well. The author is once again “reduced” to a creator of rules and “objects” (such as the board, the pawns or, more specifically, text and multimedia), while the game itself is set in motion by the players – only to a far greater extent than in the first category. It follows that an author cannot know how any one game will be played out, or what moves a player (or reader) will make. She can only anticipate these, and her projections have the same value as those of any other individual that is familiar with the rules of the game.

A fitting example for this category can be found in interactive novels. These are “systems of textual exploration” that appeared as a phenomenon after the popularization of computer networks, in the early 90s. The writer of an interactive novel creates the chronotope of a world through which the user-reader is free to roam (and interact). Reading such a novel is similar to using an IRC[7] chat system: the reader inputs a command (or question, action, direction, thought) into the program window and the system responds to it by feeding back a paragraph of text, after taking into account the context of the command, the writer’s predefined responses and, in some cases, a type of text generation subroutine that can either pull information from the internet or remix data that has already been inputted – or both. Discovering, piece by piece, her own version of the content and possibilities of the fictional world, the reader is drawn into the plot of the “novel” – one that she shapes by her decisions.

If this radical democratization of narrative authority appears familiar, it is because it resembles, almost literally, the theoretical claims of post-structuralism or of the more recent postmodern textualism. Once again, this is precisely where the specificity of digital fiction reveals itself: the metaphors used by theorists are here literally incarnated in the text. For instance, Umberto Eco’s idea of an “open novel”, comparable to a city in which the reader can enter and exit by any gate was applied to James Joyce’s Ulysses[8] as a critical metaphor – yet this is now possible, literally, in digital text. This phenomenon (the materialization of critical metaphors) once again underlines the importance of studying digital fiction from a theoretical perspective.

The third and last category of digital literature comprises works in which both of the above types of dynamics appear. In these experiments, the author creates a dynamic system without providing it with content (or supplying very little of it – the game board, but not all of the pieces). Content is provided, in degrees that vary with every work, by the reader-user, to a smaller extent by the author and, often, by the internet itself, through complex author-defined algorithms. In other words, the influence of the author is now reduced to an even more abstract presence in her own aesthetic construct. This is the category where digital text meets digital art (and art in general) and can be seen as a diffuse border between the two.

A good example is provided by the interactive textual and visual experiment We Feel Fine[9], an online application that indexes all available phrases on the internet that contain forms of the expression “I feel”, together with a series of contextual metadata (who is writing, where, when, in what meteorological conditions, etc.) and then displays them according to the reader’s choice, in various visually dynamic groupings. Bits of text can “dance” around the mouse cursor, seek each-other out, bounce, become strident or hidden, varying in color and dimension, all in accordance with the type of sensation they are describing (text recognition is provided by machine algorithms fine-tuned by the author). They can form groups based on user inputted criteria, giving the reader the ability to sort feelings (or, more ambitiously put, zeitgeist bits) in a visual and pseudo-statistical display.

This form of data mining as art can ultimately add a second layer of meaning to otherwise disparate phrases (ranging from the banal to the poetic, idiotic, intelligent, unintelligible, etc.). This second meaning appears to be stronger – or, at least, more poignant – than the original one: each phrase is transformed into a synecdoche of the idea of universal access, immersion into the zeitgeist or infinite openness to real (and real-time) human emotions. It can be seen as introducing an aesthetics of the hyperlink, this simple digital tool now being valued aesthetically for its sheer mechanism and not, as one would expect, for the contents it bridges. This entire system, is, of course, inert in the absence of a user.

The aesthetic nature of such a work is undeniable, and the radicality with which it reinvents the auctorial function can only serve to stress, once again, the great relevance of the digital environment for art and literature.

On a final note, it is important to mention one last argument for the “fourth entity” approach to the theory of digital fiction. The three categories above have been formulated by using games as a metaphor to describe different types of dynamics. This comparison is naturally and logically derived from observing the works themselves. We discover, however, that a very similar notion of game is proposed by Gadamer in Truth and Method, as a preamble to his description of the hermeneutic circle. While the circle itself is not applicable to digital works, the game concept is remarkably fit to describe them. In short, Gadamer proposes that we view the acts of writing and reading text as activities that are not distinct and separated by time and space, but rather as a game that is played by author and reader simultaneously. The implications of this view run deep, and can serve, among other theoretical concepts, as a starting point for creating a theory of digital fiction.

Digital text, although markedly different from the traditional kind and constantly growing in specificity, need not be separated completely from the other objects that literary theory studies. This would be a perilous undertaking that might, in the end, render itself as an argument for the accusation that digital fiction is not, in fact, literature. Specificity does not imply separation. With the proper methodology and epistemic approach (which, in our view, is the “fourth entity” idea), digital experiments can be studied within the scope of traditional literary theory, as long as a series of necessary adjustments and additions are made.

 

 

Notes