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Narrative As Virtual Reality : Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media / Marie-Laure Ryan

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Narrative as Virtual Reality PARALLAX: RE-VISIONS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner SERIES EDITORS PARALLAX Narrative as Virtual Reality Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media Marie-Laure Ryan THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS | BALTIMORE AND LONDON 2001 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved. Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found at the end of this book. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 0-8018-6487-9 To the genius loci that dwells between the waterfalls of Cascadilla and Fall Creeks, and to the one that haunts the Devil’s Gulch CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PART I | VIRTUALITY ONE The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual 25 TWO Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology 48 INTERLUDE: Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover 75 PART II | THE POETICS OF IMMERSION THREE The Text as World: Theories of Immersion 89 INTERLUDE: The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola 115 FOUR Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion 120 FIVE Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion 140 INTERLUDE: Virtual Narration as Allegory of Immersion 163 PART III | THE POETICS OF INTERACTIVITY SIX From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game 175 INTERLUDE: The Game-Reader and the World-Reader: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler 200 viii | Contents SEVEN Hypertext: The Functions and E√ects of Selective Interactivity 204 INTERLUDE: Adventures in Hypertext: Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue 225 EIGHT Can Coherence Be Saved? Selective Interactivity and Narrativity 242 INTERLUDE: I’m Your Man: Anatomy of an Interactive Movie 271 PART IV | RECONCILING IMMERSION AND INTERACTIVITY NINE Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama 283 TEN Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media 306 INTERLUDE: Dream of the Interactive Immersive Book: Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age 332 Conclusion: Literature in the Media Landscape 347 Notes 357 Works Cited 375 Index 389 FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES 1. A recenterable possible-worlds model 102 2. A text typology 208 3. Title page of Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue 227 4. The complete graph 247 5. The network 248 6. The tree 249 7. The vector with side branches 250 8. The maze 251 9. The directed network, or flow chart 252 10. The hidden story 253 11. The braided plot 254 12. Action space, epic wandering, and story-world 256 13. Decision map for I’m Your Man 273 14. Three types of stage design 299 TABLES 1. The Meaning of Virtual 28 2. ‘‘The Text as Game’’ and ‘‘The Text as World’’ 192 3. Immersion, Interactivity, Design, and Pleasure 354 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If by village we understand a community of minds, and by community all the minds that are linked to the author’s without necessarily know- ing of each other’s existence, it indeed takes a village, perhaps even several, to write a book. There is the global village of the minds that the author has encountered in books; there is the local village of friends, family, and personal acquaintances; and there is the virtual village of people met in cyberspace or through regular mail. The list of Works Cited that appears at the end of this book identifies some of the most influential members of the global village. Here I would like to express my gratitude for the support o√ered by both the virtual and the local village. The longtime interest in my work of Thomas Pavel, Gerald Prince, Uri Margolin, Lubomir Doleˇzel, Harold Mosher, Monika Fludernik, and Katharine Young is one of the reasons I have persevered in the ‘‘career’’ of independent scholar. To the support of N. Katherine Hayles I owe the opportunity to have written half of this in Ithaca, a place to which not only Ulysses yearns to return. Maura Burnett, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, was a dedicated and e≈cient advocate of the project. Thanks to the sharp eye of Mary Yates, my copy editor, ‘‘the signifier’’ doesn’t get confused with ‘‘the signified,’’ and all improperly raised negatives are lowered down to their rightful logical position. Mary’s editing skills will benefit not only this book but my future writing as well. The collective intel- ligence of the electronic discussion list of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature served me as prosthetic memory when I could not remember references. Through the list, Janet Galligani Casey, Deborah Martinsen, Antje Schaum Anderson, Caroline Webb, Edina Szalay, Charlotte Berkowitz, Laura Beard, and Ted Mason shared with me their experiences of fearing fiction and generously let me use their input in this book. Many of the people who started out as members of the virtual village crossed over into the sphere of personal friends. This includes two eminent narratologists, Emma Kafalenos and David Herman, who kept me constantly stimulated by sending me materials and ref- xii | Acknowledgments erences relevant to my interests, by commenting on this project in all its phases of development, and by providing inspiring e-mail ex- changes. Among those who were never virtual friends, I am grateful to my hiking buddies in the local village for showing me all the sides of the mountains, especially to Jon Thiem and Jacques Rieux, who pro- vided not only useful materials but also challenging views on litera- ture and cyberculture—views all the more challenging because Jon pretends to despise computers, and Jacques (faithful reader of the technological pages of the New York Times) categorically refuses to own one. And finally I would like to express my gratitude to my immediate family for putting up with a body whose mind was usually in virtual worlds. Phil and Caitlin lured this body to places in Colorado where the world displayed itself from such a lofty perspective that the topics discussed in this book no longer seemed to matter, while Duncan, my teen-aged system manager, made sure that our computers, Ama- deus and Hieronymus, were always equipped with the latest software, whether or not I needed it. As Duncan’s expertise deepened, the disas- ters became rarer, and the benefits of his constant reconfigurations of the system grew more substantial. Besides forcing me into a state of permanent learning, Duncan also generously dispensed his wisdom on computer games and, when all the electronic devices were turned o√, serenaded me with his viola, in his view the most perfect instru- ment ever engineered. The writing of this book benefited from a grant in 1998 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant FB-34667-98) and from a postdoctoral fellowship in 1999 from the Cornell Society for the Humanities. The e√orts of Tim Murray, acting director of the society, in organizing an exhibit of digital art, ‘‘Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM,’’ had a significant impact on the views presented in the book. I am also grateful to Richard Gilligan of the Cornell Theory Center for introducing me to the VR CAVE. Though this book was conceived as a global project, not put to- gether out of a collection of articles, many of the chapters include material from previously published essays. The seed for the entire book is ‘‘Immersion versus Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,’’ published in electronic form in Postmodern Culture, Septem- Acknowledgments | xiii ber 1994, reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. An expanded print form appeared in Sub/Stance 89, 28, no. 2 (1999): 110–37, reprinted by permission of the University of Wiscon- sin Press. Chapter 1 contains passages from ‘‘Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text,’’ published in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 78–107. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. The interlude to chapter 5 is excerpted from ‘‘Allegories of Immer- sion: Virtual Narration in Postmodern Fiction,’’ published in Style 29, no. 2 (1995): 262–86. Reprinted by permission of the journal. Chapter 6 is based on ‘‘The Text as World versus the Text as Game: Possible Worlds, Semantics and Postmodern Theory,’’ published in Journal of Literary Semantics 27, no. 3 (1998): 137–63. Reprinted by permission of Julius Groos Verlag. Chapters 8 and 10 expand ‘‘Interactive Drama: Narrativity in a Highly Interactive Environment,’’ published in Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (1997): 677–707, Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Joyce for allowing me to quote and reproduce art from his hypertext fiction Twelve Blue: Story in Eight Bars, published by Postmodern Culture and Eastgate Systems, 1996 and 1997. Joyce’s book Of Two Minds was the inspiration for the architecture of the present one. Narrative as Virtual Reality Introduction Few of us have actually donned an HMD (head-mounted display) and DGs (data gloves), and none has entered the digital wonderland dangled before our eyes by the early developers of virtual reality: a computer-generated three-dimensional landscape in which we would experience an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; leave our bodies and see ourselves from the outside; adopt new identities; apprehend immaterial objects through many senses, including touch; become able to modify the environment through either verbal com- mands or physical gestures; and see creative thoughts instantly real- ized without going through the process of having them physically materialized.
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