New Narratives in a Postnarrative World

for the quest for narrative – even in such a hostile environment – is a prevailing human
concern. What passes for narrative in the new born-digital storytelling forms is hyperactive,
postmodern, postdramatic, self-reflexive, and repetitive. Instead of emulating the act of
reading, what we perform in these spaces is a visual task of browsing. It is the act of
pattern recognition in a spatialized form. As a result, the whole concept of “story” has been
transformed by its migration into the spaces of digital media. The interactive or
performative nature of the new media alters how and why we read. In the intervening
years since the electronic hyperlink was born, many new innovations have continued to
transform the nature of storytelling space and our expectations of it. Some exemplary
emergent forms have arrived, including interactive fiction, narrative computer games,
responsive environments, podcasting, and tactile and wireless interfaces, and we can see
them as indicators of present and future trends.

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

(p. 233). Wiley. Edición de Kindle.

To understand where we are going though, sometimes we first need to take a look at
where we have been. In 1967 a revolutionary new way of seeing was introduced to
televised sports: the instant replay (Schoenherr). Media guru and visionary Marshall
McLuhan was so enthralled by this effect that he dubbed ours “the age of the instant
replay” (1973: 218). The replay was revolutionary because of the way it spatialized time-
based events and, for the first time, allowed the viewer to derive the meaning of an event
without having lived the experience (McLuhan, 1973: 219). A kind of flashback, it
foregrounded the notion of seeing again or of recognizing the familiar in the new. McLuhan
dubbed this “pattern recognition” (1965: 63) in sympathy with the ability exhibited by
artificial intelligences to identify voices or visual repetitions. The idea of seeing again or
revisiting the place of known moments is integral to storytelling as much as it is to the new
kinds of narrative that are emerging within digital culture.

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

(pp. 233-234). Wiley. Edición de Kindle.

As the fluidity of multi-linear narrative forms allow the reader or browser greater and
greater freedom to replay a text, the more the browser returns to her recollections of the
intertwining threads of the story. She follows links back to earlier readings to construct a
narrative from the fragmentary nature of the literary text. Like the instant replay, the return
to see a familiar passage in a text a second or third time alters our understanding of the
meaning of the whole. This is not pastiche, which merely celebrates or reminds us of an
earlier telling. Like the instant replay, in the digital narrative revisiting passages is,
according to N. Katherine Hayles, a reshaping, a reconfiguration that changes what the
text means precisely because what it means has already been established in the reader’s
mind. Rereading unsettles as much as it settles, an insight further emphasizing the
exfoliating multiplicity of hypertext narrative. Given this multiplicity, it is not surprising that
hypertext narrative also leads to a different sense of time than one that follows a more
straight-forwardly linear progression. (1997:

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

(p. 234). Wiley. Edición de Kindle.

While Hayles is specifically concerned with the literary form called hypertext, rereading or
replaying – revisioning – exposes our earlier perspectives on and assumptions about the
time of a textual event in any digital literary experience, and, by doing so, resituates us and
it in place and space. An earlier hypertext theorist, Michael Joyce, sees rereading as
actually forming another space in the continuum of the text: a theoretical one (1997: 582).
Such is the webbed nature of new digital narratives: the browser not only becomes a part
of the text, but the act of re/seeing it does too.

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

(p. 234). Wiley. Edición de Kindle.

Digital narratives can take many forms including the aforementioned hypertext, networked
art, mobile computing, and immersive virtual reality installations. What links these works of
diverse technologies, motivations, and materials is the presence of the computer writ large
as the medium of production, performance, storage, and distribution, and with the ever-
constant notion of return or revisitation. Or to restate the obvious: repetition. The browser
as she wanders these works is required to retrace her steps. Peggy Phalen notes in the
context of theatrical performance that absolute repetition is simply not possible and that
reversible time as a result is a fraught concept (1993: 127). Representation can never
perfectly reproduce the real, she argues, for there is always a gap between them. Physicist
Ilya Prigogine expanded the perspective of quantum mechanics in the same way, arguing
that not only is time not reversible, but the repetition of an event – what he calls the
“second time” of an event – is always a new and unique occurrence (Phalen 1993: 127). In
our performance of these works, we can return to the same moment, but it is always a
revisitation, and our experience is different because it is informed by our memory of past
visits. These works require a peripatetic engagement that keeps bringing us back in
contact with our earlier gestures and movements in space and time. A hypertext like
Michael Joyce’s Reach , for instance, keeps hands and gestures always in mind on a
thematic level as we move through a space of saturated hyperlinking where every word is
a doorway to somewhere else. Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, Or A
Modern Monster requires us to enter each section of the text through “her cut”: a diagram
evoking cuts of meat that form a palimpsest to Mary Shelley’s unborn female Frankenstein
monster’s tale, sliced and diced for the digital browser in a fractured space-time. Another
part of the text has us enter into the monster’s thoughts and the voices of her unruly body
parts’ previous owners through a phrenological diagram of her competing subjectivities.

This altered sense of the temporal and spatial is born of a unique or customized path
through a digital narrative as a metatext of our reading. The more the text emphasizes our
own displaced visual orientation, dislocation in time, and our sense of information
overload, the more aware we are of the flesh and the bones and the individual cells of a
narrative’s complementarities, echoes and returns. One of the most profound
transformations of the nature of narrative along with everything else in the digital revolution
may also be one of the most visible. For perhaps the first time since the arrival of the
vernacular media – the realm of the curiosity cabinet and the scrapbook, the happy snap
and the home movie – professional standards of production are within reach of anyone
who has access to the tools of creation. Hand in glove with this transformation comes the
rise of Remix Culture, and customizable (or personal) media.
Derrick de Kerckhove says “hypertextuality means interactive access to anything from
anywhere” (1997: xxvii), which bears a particular resemblance to Thomas Pynchon’s
definition of paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow : the realization that everything is
interconnected. But hypertext is, de Kerckhove continues, like digitization, a “new condition
of content production,” and so “hypertextuality is therefore the new condition of content
storage and delivery” (1997: xxviii). The significance of this implementation of hypertextual
principles on the World Wide Web in particular is the unprecedented scope – it is global
(1997: xxviii): “The principle of hypertextuality allows one to treat the web as the extension
of the contents of one’s own mind. Hypertext turns everyone’s memory into everyone
else’s and makes of the web the first worldwide memory” (1997: 79). 1 This has significant
consequences for the new digital narratives,

The ubiquity of the web has consistently eroded this gap, for there is no notion of public
and private on the Net at all. It is all simultaneously public and private. The cell phone,
wearable computing, and the podcast (the personal broadcasting of multimedia files over
the web) have taken this still further to the point where we are always immersed in
information space. The concept and practice of private space was born with the printed
book. Prior to public education and widespread literacy, all reading was done in public and
aloud.

As we leave the age of mass production and private space behind in favor of this new time
dominated by the instant replay, digital sampling, and modular remixability, it is apparent
that we are becoming our own authors, readers, and publishers. Michael Joyce, Carolyn
Guyer, and the other authors of The Mola Project (a text with total linking that becomes a
many-layered quilted surface for the browser to navigate) observe that in hypertext fiction:
“The reader is the structure, the builder, and the architect, and in this creation, it has
created life. The burden of clarification is lightened because there is less of a need for
clear-cut answers. The answers are a product of creation” (15c). Interactive authorship
and personal publishing was a trend started not by hypertext but by xerography (patented
in the 1940s, it did not become popular until the technology was perfected in 1959)
(McLuhan 1966: 83). That

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

(pp. 238-239). Wiley. Edición de Kindle.