Digital Narrative Spaces

An Interdisciplinary Examination

Daniel Punday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367514433
• eBook ISBN: 9781000516029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

There is a broad consensus that digital narrative is "spatial," but what this critical term means and how it is used varies greatly depending on the discipline from which it is approached. Digital Narrative Spaces brings together essays by prominent scholars in electronic literature and other forms of digital authorship to explore the relationship between story and space across these disciplines. This volume includes an introduction with Marie-Laure Ryan's typology of space, followed by thought-provoking individual chapters which explore innovative explorations of electronic literature, locative media, literary tourism, and the mapping of real-world literary spaces. The collection closes with an essay analyzing continuities and discontinuities in theory of space across the chapters. This volume will provide an important framework for establishing a dialogue across disciplines and future scholarship in these fields.

1Transmedial Unnatural Spatiality and Postdigital Dystopicalization in The Pickle Index

Astrid Ensslin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003053880-2

Introduction

This chapter approaches digital spatiality from the vantage point of unnatural, transmedial, and cognitive narratology. Focusing on Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, and Ian Huebert’s cross-platform sci-fi fantasy novel, The Pickle Index: A Novel in 10 Days (2017; henceforth “TPI”), I examine how, in contemporary transmedial fiction, unnatural in the sense of impossible, defamiliarizing narrative structures can permeate all four types of textual spaces delineated by Ryan et al. (2016): the spatial form(s) of the text, the space(s) materially occupied by the text, the spatial context(s) of the text, and the mimetic space(s) of the text. The parenthetical plural endings are placed deliberately to demonstrate the necessity to approach each type of textual space pluralistically in transmedia narratives that involve multiple entry points, multiple material manifestations, and multiple temporalities in their episodic design. This spatio-temporal multidimensionality calls for a dynamic combination of cognitive and material reading strategies, which are, in turn, contingent upon the reader’s extradiegetic spatial constraints.

Narratives across media can “denaturalize our knowledge of space” (Alber 2016: 186) and our perception of the possibilities of spatialized storytelling in diverse ways. Spatial distortion can, for example, take the form of interior spaces exceeding their exterior boundaries. Kings Cross’ railway platform 9¾ in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, for example, is part of an ontologically distinct space (the wizards’ world) impossibly contained within the spatial parameters of a pillar between platforms 9 and 10 in the muggle world. Impossible spatiality can manifest as humanly incomprehensible, infinite labyrinths, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Aleph.” It may involve logically incompatible changes to objects and settings within the same storyworld that defy the principles of non-contradiction, as exemplified by the infinitely looping staircases and ever-morphing corridors in Davey Wreden’s indie game, The Stanley Parable, or it can manifest as chemically and physically impossible geographies like the burning lake in Milton’s Paradise Lost and the floating island of Laputa in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

In postclassical narratology, narratives that exhibit impossible and thus potentially defamiliarizing structures are referred to as unnatural narratives, because they employ “strategies or aspects of discourse that do not have a natural grounding in familiar cognitive parameters or in familiar real-life situations” (Fludernik 1996: 11). Many unnatural narrative structures, such as supernatural, utopian, and dystopian elements in fantasy, science fiction, and children’s stories are fully conventionalized within the repositories of their respective genres. Likewise, epistemically impossible narrative perspectives like omniscient narration, for example, have over time become conventionalized as integral components of novelistic discourse (Nielsen 2011). Other unnatural structures, whilst not fully conventionalized, are nevertheless readily naturalized as readers deploy specific cognitive reading strategies that may, for instance, attribute unnatural spatiality to a specific psychological state (e.g. a surreal dream) or a transcendental realm (e.g. the assumption of supernatural forces). Of particular interest to this study are spatial arrangements that defy conventionalization and naturalization, as often seen in poststructuralist and/or experimental fiction. Such unnatural spatialities operate anti-mimetically (Richardson 2015): they break reader expectations, and they urge readers to bend and flex their experientially developed categorization strategies, and embrace “cognitive uncertainty” (Zunshine 2008: 164).

Digital media afford a medium-specific array of embodied experiences that draw from a wide repository of semiotic modes – from the more conventional linguistic and audio-visual forms of representation known from print and cinematic narrative to the gestural (Bouchardon 2014), environmental (Jenkins 2004), ergodic (Aarseth 1997), and procedural (Hawreliak 2019) forms of narrative interaction characteristic of interactive screen media such as video games and digital-born (or digital) fictions (DFs). DFs are fictional, interactive texts made and perused in a variety of computational technologies ranging from standalone hypertext to three-dimensional (3D) narrative games, touchscreen story apps, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) fictions. In DFs, conventional forms of textual and narrative space can become medium-reflexively amplified, foregrounded, and/or anti-mimetically subverted. DFs can therefore break not only the conventions of linear storytelling but those of digital-interactive narratives themselves (Ensslin and Bell 2021). These medium-specific conventions include, for instance, forms of interactive-multilinear storytelling, intradiegetic-navigational game maps, and a variety of extradiegetic, spatialized gestures like click, swipe, and tap, which reader/players must deploy to trigger and respond to intradiegetic events and actions.

This chapter focuses on an experimental DF that diversely denaturalizes narrative spatiality: The Pickle Index consists of a paperback codex, a set of two hardcover volumes, and a touchscreen app. It can be read through multiple entry points and in various material combinations. Furthermore, its app component uses the format of a digital map to spatialize and animate human connections in the storyworld and to visualize how they serve as trajectories for grotesque pickle recipe exchanges. TPI weaves the reader into its storyworld metaleptically, thus evoking a surrealist, anti-mimetic experience. I argue that TPI stands in a postdigitally critical, satirical, allegorical relationship to the Internet, and that the spatial impossibilities, illogicalities, and physical awkwardness that characterize the reading experience as a whole embody a form of geocriticism that exposes contemporary social media as a carnivalesque threat to the very foundations of democracy.

This essay makes a contribution to a number of theoretical areas within postclassical narratology. From a cognitive-narratological vantage point, my analysis re-evaluates Jan Alber’s (2016) unnatural reading strategies and maps them onto Ryan et al.’s (2016) typology of textual spaces. I further translate Ensslin and Bell’s (2021) medium-conscious reading strategy of “accepted as an unnatural construction” into a postdigital, cross-media framework. This framework foregrounds the material and embodied situatedness of reading across digital-interactive, ambi-linear print and visual-graphic media as well as across ontological spheres in a transmedial aesthetics of difficulty. It further allows me to read spatial unnaturalness in TPI allegorically and to introduce postdigital dystopicalization as a new concept for medium-specific geocriticism.

Unnatural Spatiality and Digital Fiction

In Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996), Monika Fludernik defines “natural narrative” as “naturally occurring [and], mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling” (13) which “cognitively correlate[s] with perceptual parameters of human experience” (9). Conversely, “non-natural narratives” do not have a “natural grounding in familiar cognitive parameters or in familiar real-life situations” (11). Thus, the starting point of natural narratology, according to Fludernik, is anthropomorphic experientiality and natural narratives typically yet not exclusively include real-life, everyday storytelling as exemplified by anecdotes, interviews, and observational narratives. Unnatural narratology, by contrast, examines narratives that lie beyond or subvert human experience. What is often neglected by (un)natural narratological theory is that human experience is culture-specific and idiosyncratic, and that notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” cannot therefore be treated as anthropological universals but only within their specialized societal and cultural environments and paradigms. The concepts of natural and unnatural narration assumed in this essay are deeply anchored within a Western, Anglo-American tradition, yet since I critically engage with the problematic implications of this nomenclature elsewhere (Bell and Ensslin 2018; Ensslin and Bell 2021), I shall omit it here.

Unnatural narratologists distinguish between mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic narratives. Mimetic texts “seek to reproduce in fiction typical characters and events from the actual world” (Richardson 2011: 31). Narrative forms that do not represent the actual world are either non-mimetic or anti-mimetic. Non-mimetic structures, which are conventionally found in fantasy, fairy tales, and science fiction, “will follow non-realistic conventions” (Alber et al. 2013: 102), yet nonetheless maintain the “mimetic impulse” of a logically structured and inherently consistent story world. Anti-mimetic narratives, conversely, are blatantly subversive and “strikingly impossible in the real world” (Alber et al. 2013: 102). They draw attention to their “own constructedness, the artificiality of many of [their] techniques, and [their] inherent fictionality” (Richardson 2011: 31). Anti- and non-mimetic representations thus differ in terms of the degree to which they “defamiliariz[e] … the basic elements of narrative” (Richardson 2011: 34), “contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres” (Richardson 2016: 3). Distinguishing between non- and anti-mimetic structures is therefore a matter of degree, and the two concepts may better be conceptualized as end poles of a spectrum than in a binary, mutually exclusive relationship. While not all unnatural narratologists accept non-mimetic texts as part of their remit, I shall engage with both non-mimetic and anti-mimetic structures in my analysis of TPI to show how both interlace, thus affording a defamiliarizing, entertaining, and critically thought-provoking reading experience.

In his examination of unnatural spatiality in print narratives and drama, Alber (2016) defines anti-mimetic spaces as “[n]arrative spaces [that] can be physically impossible (if they defy the laws of nature) or logically impossible (if they violate the principle of non-contradiction)” (186). Anti-mimetic spaces may range from situational frames to entire worlds, and they denaturalize our spatial schemata to “fulfill a determinable function” in the narrative (187). These functions are for the reader to decode via a range of reading strategies. These can involve, for example, frame blending (combining previously unconnected cognitive structures, such as the possibility of a unique unit existing in two ontological spaces at the same time), generification (attribution to one or more narrative genres and their conventions), transcendentalization (positing a transcendental realm such as a supernatural or divine presence), subjectification (attribution to a character’s or the narrator’s psychological condition, such as dreams, hallucinations, or psychopathology), satirization, parody, and/or allegory (evoking an extended metaphor and/or a critical-humoristic stance), and foregrounding of the thematic (reading the unnatural in terms of amplifying a thematic concern, such as postmodern identity fragmentation. For narratives that “can serve as a construction kit or collage that invites free play with its elements” (Alber 2016: 53; see Ryan 2006), as often seen in choose-your-own-adventure novels and hypertext fiction, Alber suggests a “do-it-yourself” strategy. Finally, to come to terms with structures that do not lend themselves to a naturalizing reading, Alber suggests a “Zen way of reading” (2016: 54). This strategy requires an “attentive and stoic” (54) stance that accepts and embraces aesthetic effects of bewilderment and non-comprehension.

In their medium-specific development and transmedial refiguring of Alber’s strategies, and particularly the “Zen” approach, Ensslin and Bell (2021) introduce the idea of paying attention to and accepting medium-specific, anti-mimetic “unnatural constructions” (Richardson 2016) as a new reading strategy. This kind of approach is required when considering the affordances of digital media for unnatural narratives. Narrative contradiction, for example, is a staple technique in multilinear hypertexts that allow different pathways through the story, which often lead to mutually contradictory endings. Logical contradiction, such as the possibility of a character dying in one path and surviving in another, is fully conventionalized in digital narratives such as video games. However, the extent to which the logical impossibility of contradiction is also defamiliarizing depends on how anti-mimetically it operates. It also depends on whether readers are either led to naturalize them as possible paths in a variationist yet inherently consistent storyworld or whether the paths are so defamiliarizing and incoherent that they draw attention to their own medium-specific constructedness. In the latter case, which occurs in many Storyspace hyperfictions, for example, readers must adopt not only a Do- It-Yourself approach to patch together one or more possible plotlines, but they also need to develop a Zen-like stance that enables them to reflect critically on the affordances of the medium itself and to accept non-closure, disorientation, and ambiguity as sine-qua-non of literary hypertext.

Spatial impossibilities – as measured against real-world mimeticism – are ubiquitous in digital narratives. Video games in particular...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Four Types of Textual Space and their Manifestations in Digital Narrative
• 1 Transmedial Unnatural Spatiality and Postdigital Dystopicalization in The Pickle Index
• 2 Tailing Rebus: Plotting a Consipiracy in Digital Space
• 3 Virtual Wandering: Embodied Spatial Narrativity in Walking Simulators
• 4 Mapping Imaginary Spaces: From Database to Folk Cartography
• 5 From Screen to Silicon: Reverse Engineering the Computational Infrastructure of Nick Montfort’s Round
• 6 The Digital Terrain of the Literary Anecdote
• 7 Footprints in Spatial Narratives: Wearable Technology, Active Reading, and a New Digital Literary Mapping of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Scafell Pike Excursion
• 8 Archival Interface and Nationalist Memorializations of 9/11
• Conclusion: Digital Space and the Keyword
• Index