Learning to Speak Braille
As I've mentioned several times before, one of my primary areas of research here at
UMdCP is what I call the cross-sited narrative, stories told across two or more media. Unsurprisingly, this was also the focus of the first section of my
PhD exams in November. Over the course of my presentation, I argue that not only do cross-sited narratives validate the notion that convergence is a product of
narrative as much as technological intersections, but also that, in some cases, the structures of these stories are often inseparable from the corporate structures that produce them-- either expansive (horizontal) or redundant (vertical). They are, in essence, complex systems of both narrative meaning and textual distribution, where simplex sites work within a larger (virtualized) complex of meaning.
One of the key consequences of this trait is the creation of a storyworld that in many ways resembles the ideal text so long theorized by Barthes and others as requiring a corresponding ideal reader to comprehend its whole. What's interesting to me, though, is how these categories of idealization transfer over to the media conglomerate models that produce these works. In other words, the process of idealization-- of gap filling, of nuance, of textual (in)exhaustion through limitless possibility-- is exactly the process that is exploited in the creation of a cross-sited narrative. Here, though, the work's potentiality is spread across media, creating both local and networked idealized storyworlds as well as anticipating (and appropriating) the creative output of fan communities.
The Matrix is
quite a good, if not prototypical, example of this dynamic, and my discussion of it centers on the the ways in which the storyworld revises itself through what I term migratory cues, signs within a text that point towards content present in other channels. These cues are not only the means through which the narrative is compounded, but also the models through which the ideal reader becomes an ideal textual consumer.
Cross-siting, though, is also a narrative and rhetorical strategy, a means through which an artist/author/ designer/ etc. expresses not only plot and story, but also the materialities of each medium in use. Mark Danielewski's
House of Leaves, for instance, is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of intermediality, a convergence of media, form and content. Although Mark B.N. Hansen (and others) point to the "orthographic dilemma" (
Hansen 2004) that the house poses to those who wish to catalogue, contain, constrain and inhabit it, he also notes that the "stated aim" of
House of Leaves itself is to "champion the superiority of print" by using/ abusing "the novel's long-standing correlation with the body". What I think that most criticism of
House of Leaves omits, though, and what I point to briefly in this presentation, is that this "body", however much it is a whole, is also a space constituted by its utterances-- in this case, of mediated extra-textual (at least from the perspective of the novel itself) expressions (through reprinting [
The Whalestoe Letters and the storied PDF fragments of the text], music recordings [Poe's
Haunted] and live performance [Danielewski has toured and performed the book multimedially since its inception-- some pictures from his Chicago performance are
here]). The "referential void" often attributed to this novel is not, in my view, an absence created solely by the book but, instead, by its relationship with the other media that constitute the complex textual ecology of
House of Leaves outside of its print incarnations.
Later in the presentation I also address ARGs (Alternate Reality Gaming) as an example of what I call the embedded network-- a cross-sited narrative that is also part of another network in itself. I look at
Halo 2 and briefly sketch the interrelationships between the game and the hugely popular
I Love Bees ARG.
As this was an exam, I wasn't able to freely select the texts that I could use for this presentation. Neil Young's
Greendale (which I've written about before on this blog), for instance, is perhaps the purest form of cross-sited narrative I've come across. Young's mastery of exploiting the blindspots in each medium foregrounds materiality through narrative, allowing a story about media intrusion to become a story about its own inscription in various media. We are never more aware of a medium's materiality than when we approach it already familiar with the narrative it possesses. Young uses this to startling effect.
Knowing that I would probably focus on it heavily, my committee wisely banned Greendale from my exam. A good thing, in retrospect.
Although I recognize the formalist nature of these theories (one of the main comments of my committee was to "let a little sunlight in" on my research), I think that, to a certain degree, some formalism is necessary here at the outset of this study of cross-sited narratives. Cultural and media theorists (UPDATE: and those whose focus is media studies and narratology with a dash of cultural studies and HCI [computer science]) have done much research into the larger mechanics of these texts (see
Christy Dena,
Jason Craft and, of course,
Henry Jenkins), but not the ways in which they work in networked individuation. Hopefully, this is something of a start.
(Oh, and if anyone knows how to embed files in a PDF Powerpoint [i.e. mpeg, mp3, etc.], please let me know. This presentation contains some media files which did not make the transition online. Thanks!)
Learning to Speak Braille: Convergence, Divergence and Cross-Sited Narratives
Posted by marcusrp at February 26, 2006 11:54 PM
| TrackBack