Natural Habitat

Natural Habitat. Adam William John Baker. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University, 2007. 1 DECLARATION: I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. ........................................ Adam William John Baker 2 ABSTRACT: The research herein relates to the development and ideology behind the creative piece Natural Habitat, and is concerned with exploring effective narrative techniques. The goal of this research is to provide a methodology towards creating effective narrative in the medium of hypertext by developing a better understanding of how narrative functions. The research explores the social and cognitive elements of narrative, and the manner in which structure impacts the understanding and development of narrative. The genre boundaries of medium and content are explored to gain an understanding of reader preference and expectation. The concept of reader expectation is then applied to multiform narrative in order to understand its functionality, before the question of effective combination of these elements is raised in regards to the medium of hypertext. This methodology is then implemented in the piece Natural Habitat, testing the merit of this approach in the resulting work of fiction. 3 Natural Habitat is a story describing the journey four friends make through the Amazon jungle after surviving a plane crash. Isolated and in a hostile environment, the four survivors find themselves slipping into surreal worlds that seem futuristic, fantastic, horrific, and tinged with noir. Some begin to question their sanity, while others adapt to their environs readily, but each faces their darker side as the fears in their minds begin to play out on the landscape around them. Fighting to survive, their only chance is to find each other and to conquer their inner demons. The story is both the exploration and implementation of the arguments of the thesis, with the research guiding the construction of the story from planning, through initial writings and up to the final presentation. Natural Habitat itself is presented as a traditional novel and a piece of hypertext, facilitating comparative analysis between the two mediums. 4 CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION: 7 CHAPTER 1: NARRATIVE 16 CHAPTER 2: STRUCTURE 43 CHAPTER 3: GENRE 70 CHAPTER 4: MULTIFORM NARRATIVE 107 CHAPTER 5: HYPERTEXT, ART AND WRITING 148 CONCLUSION: 184 BIBLIOGRAPHY: 189 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This thesis has been handled by many hands on its way to this stage, and I‟d like to say a few words of thanks for everyone‟s help. John and Vikki, thank you for helping me develop my ideas into something I could be proud of. And thanks to Jon for helping me finish it all off. Catherine, Elisabeth, Gordon and Ellen, thank you for being supportive and encouraging, and for helping me with finding the time and motivation to work. Patrick and James, thanks for being yourselves. Vanessa, Dean, Matt, Michael, Lisa, Patrick, Craig, Jacqueline, Cynthia, and Joel, thanks for being my error checkers and guineapigs, whether you were earnest and glad to help, or in one notable case outright against the idea. Lisa, Laurana and Kain, thank all of you for giving me a reason to write, encouragement to keep writing, and for keeping everything under control these last few years. Jessica, thanks for helping me wrap things up. 6 INTRODUCTION: Natural Habitat is an attempt to revise the format of the modern novel to better utilise contemporary technology and reading habits. This thesis will argue that readers have become accustomed to segmented text, episodic storylines and have evolved critical and analytical skills capable of piecing together fragments of narrative to create a whole. Our daily lives are evolving to focus on the computer screen, the newspaper article, the text message and the email; these forms of segmented text are ubiquitous today. Furthermore, this conditioning is reinforced by the episodic nature of television and film programming, where a super- saturation of this nature of storytelling has driven the demand for easily digestible segments of information increasingly over the last two decades. Serialised soap operas such as The Bold and the Beautiful1 suggest that segmented narrative reaches a wide audience on a regular basis. This audience is not limited to adults either, as the evolution of cartoon episodes and anime seen in Naruto2, Dragonball3, and Beast Wars: Transformers4 to contain causality and continuity demonstrates. This trend can also be observed in the popularity of sequels in movie fiction such as in The Lord of the Rings5 6 7, Star Wars8 9 10 and 1 The Bold and the Beautiful. Dir. Deveney Marking Kelly. Perf. Maeve Quinlan, Katherine Kelly Lang, Ronn Moss. Bell Phillip Television Productions Inc. 1987. 2 Naruto. Dir. Hayato Date, Jeff Nimoy. Perf. Maile Flanagan, Yuri Lowenthal, Kate Higgins, Tara Platt. Cartoon Network, 2002. 3 Dragonball. Dir. Daisuke Nishio. Perf. Christopher Sabat, Stephany Nadolny, Tiffany Vollmer. FUNimation Entertainment, 1986. 4 Beast Wars: Transformers. Dir. Steve Ball. Perf. David Kaye, Scott McNeil, Gary Chalk. Mainframe Entertainment, 1996. 5 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. New Line Cinema, 2001 (motion picture). 6 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. New Line Cinema, 2002 (motion picture). 7 The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. New Line Cinema, 2003 (motion picture). 7 Back to the Future11 12 13. These works are examples of the visible and observable movements towards segmenting and serialising modern media for audiences of all mediums. Natural Habitat stands as a response to this, and is intended to highlight the manner in which the „modern‟ novel can be contemporised to better entertain the evolving reader. This thesis develops a methodology for constructing a creative work that draws on these historically disparate elements, by examining the development of narrative storytelling in film, television, short stories and hypertext. The methodology developed in this thesis is then used to produce the creative work; a novel that functions as both a traditional novel and as a hypertext piece. Key to this structure is the understanding that simplicity of design does not mean simplicity of concept, and that readers have become better educated in understanding complex narrative. Rather than weakening the narrative storytelling by adopting a more contemporary episodic or segmented structure, Natural Habitat relies upon the well-established codes of interpretation present in popular fiction in order to create a work that is both complex and user-friendly. With the increasing viability of rapid transfer broadband connections, both here in Australia and abroad, the medium of hypertext is potentially ripe for a 8 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher. Lucasfilm Ltd, 1977 (motion picture). 9 Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. Irvin Kershner. Perf. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher. Lucasfilm Ltd, 1980 (motion picture). 10 Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. Richard Marquand. Perf. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher. Lucasfilm Ltd, 1983 (motion picture). 11 Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson. Amblin Entertainment, 1985 (motion picture). 12 Back to the Future Part II. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson. Amblin Entertainment, 1989 (motion picture). 13 Back to the Future Part III. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson. Amblin Entertainment, 1990 (motion picture). 8 revitalising renaissance. While early hypertext was limited by the nature of internet speeds, and challenged by the divergent nature of browsing technology across various computer systems, today‟s environment appears to have overcome many of these difficulties. Redeveloping media to function online, and catering to the particular needs of the audience are no longer the substantial barriers to hypertext as a medium that they14 once were. As these changes have moved slowly, so too has the trend towards bringing fiction back into an online medium, but there is a timely relevance in updating the old approaches to hypertext toward a goal of meeting the new demands of the audience that Natural Habitat has been designed to meet. Genre fiction has become a staple of everyday life, and readers have over the course of their lives developed an intimate understanding of the rules and expectations of these genres, as this thesis explores in further detail. This thesis will argue that popular fiction is indeed so popular because for the majority of readers, interpretation of the narrative does not require learning new structures so much as building upon existing ones. Engagement with narrative occurs when the reader can recognise existing patterns within the text and map an interpretive process on to the story; the joy of the text comes from the various successes and failures of the story to meet these expectations. The exegesis undertaken here demonstrates the manner in which narrative dominates our lives

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