narrative line

I attended the ELO’s 2012 conference at WVU as a novice in electronic literature—primarily as a fiction person with an interest in the creative possibilities of new media, particularly given the ways in which the nature of the cinematic experience is becoming more personal. (Though I am a writer rather than a scholar, I have written critically on this topic in “The Lost Origins of Personal-Screen Cinema,“ a chapter in the anthology Small Cinemas Discovered Anew, forthcoming in 2014 from Lexington Books/Rowman-Littlefield.)

At ELO 2012 I saw a presentation on the SCALAR authoring system (by Eric Loyer of the University of Southern California’s Alliance for Networking Visual Culture), and immediately knew that I had to use the system to tell the story of my relationship with my late father, which has been vexing me for decades. (Please see the companion to this submission, a Media Arts show proposal called “daddylabyrinth: a new media memoir,” for a description of the project.) I would like to discuss, in the sprit of several talks I saw at the 2012, my experiences working with SCALAR and the possibilities it offers as a creative medium for writers who are not also programmers—a community for whom I believe it can be a groundbreaking tool.

This would include a contextual look at two forces driving electronic literature—polylinear narrative and navigational readership—and how writing with SCALAR enables what I call “synaptic writing”: creating meaning in the writing process based on a relationship between units (to borrow Ian Bogost’s formulation from Unit Operations) that is not linear but associational. Writing in this mode is not a process of exploring a narrative line but of exploring a narrative environment, and the author’s role is to create a balance between the reader’s twin needs of navigational freedom and a sense of coherence provided by the author.

On the navigational reader’s part, the construction of narrative also occurs associationally. (Wolfgang Iser’s Reader-Response Theory is perfectly tailored for the reader of electronic literature, who is called to be highly active in bringing discrete units into coherence.) Understanding the reader’s function in this way has necessitated, as I work with SCALAR, many adjustments to my writing and revision practice from traditional linear habits to polylinear ones—from following a linear model to following a synaptical one, which gathers meaning as it moves from one unit to the next.

This presentation would follow up on the one I made in September 2013 at the inaugural conference of Oxford University’s Centre for Life-Writing, which was entitled “Electronic Lives of Physical Objects: Weaving daddylabyrinth.” I would take a more personal approach than I did at Oxford, focusing on how I work with SCALAR and questions on the nature of digital authorship.

A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index, and I would include portions of it in the presentation for demonstration purposes.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.

How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.

Stretchtext reacts against the perceived incoherence of hypertext narrative, promising stability and context -- free and knowing navigation -- as a defense against the perceived anarchy of exploratory and constructive hypertexts. Rich stretchtext formalisms are now readily supportable through javascript libraries and AJAXian services, but the narratological restrictions that conventional stretchtext imposes on hypertext narrative have not been fully appreciated. This paper describes those limitations and introduces an implemented generalization of stretchtext that matches the expressive and formal capabilities of classical hypertext systems while appearing to be a conventional stretchtext and while running within the confines of a Web browser.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)