Literature: August 2008 Archive Page

As homework for another class, a student asked me to give her my definition of a story.  I didn't pull out any narrative theory books to refine it, and I didn't try to put any special cybertextual spin on it, which I would have done if I'd spent more time thinking about it.  Anyway, here's here's what I came up with.

A story is a casually causally-connected sequence of events that focus on a central character's moral choices, or that present for the reader's judgment the central character's obligation to respond to events outside of the character's control, or that expect the reader to make a moral judgment responding to the character's actions.  I don't mean that a story has to be preachy, just that the events described have to be significant enough that we can see a change in the central character (or that we see the central character choosing not to change, which is, of course a moral choice). 

 

I'd say that the same story (such as Cinderella, or The Prodigal Son) can be presented in verse, prose, on stage, in a painting, etc., but that any one particular telling of the story (such as the Egyptian version of Cinderella, or the Disney Cinderella, or Sesame Street's CinderElmo) shouldn't be confused with the core elements that make up the essence of the story (the fact that you need a lowly person, the magical intervention, the person in a high position falling in love with the transformed lowly person, the clue left at the separation, the search, and the searcher's acceptance of the transformed person's true identity).

Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning.

One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."

Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."

So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore." -- Nancy Schnog, The Washington Post

While I think it's an important part of a liberal arts education that a student know something about the great, formative stories of his or her nation and/or tongue, I can sympathize with Schnog. Several students in my "History and Future of the Book" course last term reported that school made them fall out of love with reading. And I'm not surprised, when I see how many English majors arrive on campus with the idea that studying a work means memorizing the contents of the Big Dusty Book of Literary Meanings (you know, the one that says blue symbolizes peace, and that if you can match up a detail in the story with a detail from what Wikipedia says about the author's life, then your job interpreting the text is done).  I realize that high school students generally aren't ready for college-level critical thinking, but I'm still surprised at how tightly some students cling to the expectation that my job is to tell them what a passage means, and that their job is to memorize what I say and spit it back.

I enjoy teaching "Introduction to Literary Study" and "Writing about Literature" because I'm free to sample different time periods, genres, and geographical zones.  Likewise, I get a lot of flexibility when I teach "Drama as Literature" -- I can cover anything that counts as drama.  I always hope that somewhere along the way students will encounter a text that inspires them to dig beneath the surface. 

Mark Bruno offers his version of the "Remember text adventure games? People are not only still playing them, they're writing new ones!" essay. I thought his discussion of the relationship between IF and electronic literature showed some insight.

I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they had since "grown up" and began "hanging out" with the literature crowd (though it still regularly writes home) -- which is to say that in much latter-day interactive fiction, particularly things produced since 1996, storytelling had been increasingly emphasized and the puzzles deemphasized. Not that puzzles were gone, but more and more authors of IF were trying to integrate puzzles into a coherent and compelling plot, rather than (as was often the case in earlier years) letting the story serve as an ostensible premise, but populating the thing with puzzles that had nothing to do with the plot. Now, some interactive fiction goes whole hog and abolishes puzzles altogether!

So, why continue to try to tell a story through this medium? Because making the player/reader drive the course of the story allows for some interesting effects; a skillful author can get the player/reader to identify with the protagonist in ways that simply aren't possible in static fiction (because the player/reader has a sense of complicity, to use a favorite word, in the plot that the static fiction reader lacks). Plus there are all sorts of neat things that can be done with narrative when you have a computer on your side.

While there are plenty of puzzle-centric games that also happen to be well-written (Lock and Key comes to mind), it's true that the more literary IF works have attracted more attention from critics and reviewers.

McSweeney's:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a little better.)