Story/Story - by David Kolb

In whatever sense of the term “meta-story”, hypertext provides tools that can make the levels of language and their interactions explicit. There are other uses of hypertext narrative, but often an implicit context or background presupposition can be made explicit by links. (Which is not to say that all contexts and presuppositions can be made explicit by links or patterns of links.)

Can meta-story and story can be kept separate, as they are in the explicit levels in logic? This little story attempted to dramatize that they cannot be so separated, that one infiltrates the other, and that the process of mutual infiltration can be made self-aware. One of the goals of storytelling can be to inhabit all levels at once and let them interact with one another.

But such an explicit self-consciousness in the storyteller raises issues about the reader. Isn’t the goal of storytelling to enchant and involve the reader so that they forget themselves and become immersed in the world of the story? I would argue that immersion is only one among many possible goals for storytelling. Its usefulness varies. The straightforward immersion for a horror story to achieve its effects is not like the complex self-reflective reading demanded by Joyce or D. F. Wallace. But even the most straightforward horror story needs some internal distance on the part of the reader, so that the story is not taken to be a news report. All reading involves more levels and interactions than simple absorption.

Hypertext narratives often may not to be absorbing in the immediate way that a romance novel or horror story can be. Hypertext narratives often need rereading, and so demand another kind of absorption.

Sometimes the kind of absorption experienced in social computer games seems to be what hypertext narrative should strive for. Computer games have many features in common with hypertext narratives and can be intensely absorbing once one has become accustomed to their machinery.

Yet the kind of absorption in computer gaming is itself not a simple one-level phenomenon. I may be involved in my character's activities and talking with friends joining in a quest, but I may also be thinking about the machinery of the game and how to use it to my advantage, and I may be evaluating the production values of the game, its graphics, its parser, etc. In some games I may be struggling to get to a status where I can influence the rules and environment of the game. Reading a hypertext narrative can be a similar mixture of absorption in the story, struggling with the mechanics, working to consciously reconstruct and predict the narratives, comparing the text to others I have read, constructing a meta-story about the process of my reading, and so on. None of this is simple absorption or one-level consciousness.

Here I find helpful some remarks by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. He asks us to to think about the ways in which a story is incomplete ([23] TN3 167-68). First, a narrative presents schematic views of characters and actions that always include some indeterminate aspects, lacunae we are invited to fill in, to concretrize into images. “However well articulated the schematic views proposed for our execution may be, the text resembles a musical score lending itself to different realizations” by different readers (TN3 167). In addition, the text presents its world to us through a sequence of sentences which continually modify our expectations about what will come next and our retrospective interpretations of what has gone before. Reading a narrative involves the constant play between fragmentary evidence and our active memories and expectations.

A successful reading of a narrative synthesizes it into a sort of whole that presents a “world,” which need not be the actual world.

Unfortunately, this simulation of the past by fiction has subsequently been covered over by the aesthetic discussions provoked by the realistic novel. Verisimilitude is then confused with a mode of resemblance to the real that places fiction on the same plane as history…. It is precisely when a work of art breaks with this sort of verisimilitude that it displays its true mimetic function. (TN3 191)

Narrative can provide more insight when it is free to roam beyond the actual, showing us, as Aristotle said, not what happened, but the nature of people and society and events.

In this connection, Ricoeur talks about the difficulties and new possibilities introduced by 20th century fiction. Try reading the following paragraphs with your favorite examples of hypertext narrative in mind.

First, the act of reading tends to become, with the modern novel, a response to the strategy of deception so well illustrated by James Joyce's Ulysses. The strategy consists in frustrating the expectation of an immediately intelligible configuration and in placing on the reader’s shoulders the burden of configuring the work.

The presupposition of the strategy, without which it would have no object, is that the reader expects a configuration, that reading is a search for coherence.

In my own terms, I would say that reading itself becomes the drama of discordant concordance, inasmuch as the “places of indeterminacy” … not only designate the lacunae of the text with respect to image-building concretization, but are themselves the result of the strategy of frustration incorporated in the text as such on its rhetorical level.

What is at issue is therefore something quite different than providing ourself with a figure, an image, of the work; the work has also to be given a form.

At quite the other extreme from readers on the edge of boredom from following a work that is too didactic, whose instructions leave no room for creative activity, modern readers risk buckling under the load of an impossible task when they are asked to make up for this lack of readability fabricated by the author. (TN3 169)

Ricoeur has here distinguished two kinds of narrative on a spectrum from didacticism to problematic modernist novels. In some ways, his distinction is akin to Michael Joyce's distinction between exploratory and constructive hypertext, although still within the range of exploratory writings being read to obtain the author's intended meaning. But Ricoeur also believes that all writings, from the most experimental to the most didactic and straightforward contain unintended excesses of meaning.

This first dialectic, by which reading comes close to being a battle, gives rise to a second one. What the work of reading reveals is not only a lack of determinacy but also an excess of meaning. Every text, even a systematically fragmentary one, is revealed to be inexhaustible in terms of reading, as though through its unavoidably selective character, reading revealed an unwritten aspect in the text.

It is the prerogative of reading to strive to provide a figure for this unwritten side of the text. The text appears, by turns, both lacking and excessive in relation to reading. (TN3 169)

This is not the same as Michael Joyce's constructive hypertext [10] or Stuart Moulthrop’s expansion of that idea [20], but, given Ricoeur's notion of “discordant concordance”, the kinds of unity and wholeness which he seeks in reading are flexible and complex, and the self-consciousness of the reader ends up being flexible and complex as well. This means that immersion in a story is only one aspect of reading, always in tension with its opposite.

A third dialectic takes shape on the horizon of the search for coherence. If it is too successful, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and readers, feeling themselves to be on an equal footing with the work, come to believe in it so completely they lose themselves in it. Concretization then becomes an illusion in the sense of believing that one actually sees something.

If the search for coherence fails, however, what is foreign remains foreign, and the reader remains on the doorstep of the work.

The “right’ reading is, therefore, the one that admits a certain degree of illusion–another name for the “willing suspension of disbelief” called for by Coleridge–and at the same time accepts the negation resulting from the work’s surplus of meaning, … which negates all the reader’s attempts to adhere to the text and to its instructions….

The “right” distance from the work is the one from which the illusion is, by turns, irresistible and untenable. As for a balance between these two impulses, it is never achieved. (TN3 169)

Neither the text, nor the reader, nor the reading is a single-leveled event.