hauntology

Part of a series about trying to make sense of #hauntology

I was trying to think about how to make interactive narrative immersive and engaging. I had recently led a 6-part lecture series on narratives for media students, and so was suffused with diegesis, sjuzet, structure, framing, metonymy; oozing Midas-like drips of narrative thinking on everything I touched.

I also had many discussions with my colleague Jim Pope, whose doctoral work had explored the 'vernacular' response to non-linear narrative and hypertext, and showed that a common response to what academics and critics might acclaim as continuing a modern/postmodern development in literature was actually bemusement and alienation. The 'common reader' found hypertext narrative hard to engage with, uninvolving and dissatisfying. Jim recently wrote about this work at interjunction and I implore you to read his hard-earned thoughts instead of my groundless, buffeted words.

In this context I found myself thinking that one of dominant topics in my teaching area, (what we easily call 'interactive narrative' without worrying too much about what that might really mean), might actually be an oxymoron: that a narrative is something provided by a narrator - a voice of providence, a hidden logic, an overarching guide, to wit, an author; and that interactivity is the effacement of the author, the rejection of a providential God who guides and oversees, and an acknowledgement of the tangible, workable, universally masterable, demotic, participatory, revolutionary, anarchic interception of the narratee.

The listener speaks, the spectator mounts the stage, the viewer is seen, the user creates, the reader writes, the audience become the makers, the recipients participate, the public revolt. These role-changes may have been prefigured as the death of the author in the sense of interpretive freedom, but not in the sense that the author must concede even their original skill: the conception of the story and the control of the plot. The writerly text made manifest is not simply that numinous text which is brought to life in every act of reading: it is much more - it is patricide and regicide, it is author reduced to facilitator, god reduced to resource manager, maker reduced to supplier.

In short, interactive narratives are like palpable obscures and darknesses visible: conceptual possibilities designed to confound us by their actual impossibility. To experience a story is to be a fish caught in the net: to tell a story is to weave the webbing for the catch. They are opposites, and there is no overlap, only repulsion.