Gimlé

How the Long List Became the Short List.

You can’t throw a pebble into a crowd these days without hitting a narrative theorist. This forces any sort of project based on narrative theory to begin by choosing the theories to be used. Narrow down the angles you intend to focus on, do it quickly, and know why you’re dismissing a theory when you do.

In this case, being an interactive media project, there is already a large body of work on hypertext and hypermedia by theoretical luminaries such as Landow, Bolter and Michael Joyce.

But I am not a hypertext theorist and this project is not a hypertext project. The hypertext theories need to be addressed at some point, for sure, but they are not a part of the fundamental nature of this project.

Hypertext is an associative form, it gains its narrative power from its associations, what is being associated with what and the nature of that association. It does not need to be an electronic text, any structure whose main strength is in its associations is a hypertextual structure.

The goal here was not to look at a text and analyse the inherent associations within it but to look at how a structure whose strengths lie in its language and form works within an electronic space.

Deliberate experimentation where we try and find out how traditional narrative structures and traditional narrative theories cope with electronic space.

That criteria quickly narrowed down the number of applicable theories.

M.M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin’s theories focus on a specific kind of narrative structure, the novel, which he defines as the interplay between various voices and narrative styles.

This novelistic structure does not have to be what we normally consider to be novels, the examples he uses come from poetry and drama as well as prose.

And, although Shakespeare’s work would not be classified as novelistic by Bakhtin as it is too dependent on the dramatic act structure, Shakespeare does provide us with good examples of what Bakhtin means with voices or “linguistic images”.

The contrast and interplay, for example, between the boisterous gravediggers, the joking fool, the serious generals and the whining aristocrats in those plays is fundamentally novelistic. The voices of the gravediggers and the whining of the aristocrats gain meaning from being in context with each other.

The difference between Shakespeare’s plays and what Bakhtin calls a novel lies in the fact that the plays’ primary motive power and emotional engagement comes from the dramatic monologues and the act structure while a novel’s strength lies in the contrasts and interplay between the voices it represents.

One is a journey, the other is a tapestry, woven. Different things by nature.

It bears pointing out that there is nothing specifically that demands that Bakhtin’s novels be linear. That fact was one of main reasons why specific experimentation with Bakhtin’s structures in electronic space are of interest.

Claude Levi-Strauss.

Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist who has done a lot of work in analysing mythology and the structure of common myths.

His concept of binary oppositions is not really a structure in itself but a quality common in many narrative structures and Levi-Strauss’ theories describe a methodology, a process, for drawing this structural quality out of existing stories.

The idea is that picking out two fundamental oppositions in the text and analysing them will reveal, shed a light on, the other structural components related to the opposites, telling us something about who the story is built up.

One example would be to use this methodology to study a hypertext. You pick out a binary opposition and then analyse the associations that link them. That process will reveal the nature of those associates and the tensions in the structure. You can view this as a way for a theorist to test the structural integrity of a story and find its focal points.

This makes it particularly useful as a tool to find out how narrative structures adapt to their context, what works and doesn’t work when a text is transposed to electronic space. By analysing the binary oppositions before and after the transposition we can get an idea of what has changed in the text’s structure in its new context.

Derrida.

Derrida changed everything. His ideas and theories can be argued about but they changed the way we look at every single idea that preceded him.

I’m saying this mainly to give you an idea of how hard it is to refrain from analysing how his ideas inform and change the use of the other two theories the project is based on. But I’ll try.

In this context Derrida’s main contribution is that he gave us a theoretical tool to observe and analyse ancillary structures, which he calls Parergons. Constructs that are related to other structures, inform them, surround them and define those other structures but are not a part of them.

The specific example Derrida had in mind was the concept of a painting’s frame. It defines where the painting begins and where it ends. It comments on it by nature of association and context (consider for example the case of the gilded frame vs the plain one), it lies on the painting’s edges without being an integral part of it.

But the theoretical concept Derrida was looking at was not only the frame but the frame as a comment, and other ancillary structures that worked as comments on their associated structures. The veil over a statue or a footnote to a text.

So Derrida both gives us an alternative method to analyse relationships in structures, superstructures and substructures, and he gives us a tool to analyse a structure’s context by analysing the satellite structures around the text.

The web-browser interface is a satellite structure, a Parergon, to the browser’s content, and Derrida gives us the tools to analyse their relationship.

The Whys and Wherefores.

Narrative experiments have to have a subject. So I had to pick a narrative, a story, which I could use for this project, preferably a text that made my life easy.

It had to have a multivocal structure as defined by Bakhtin, with fairly clearly defined voices and characters.

It had to lend itself to analysis through its binary oppositions, so it had to have fairly clear polar opposites as a part of the text’s fundamental structure.

It had to lend itself to commenting to enable us to experiment with the use of Derrida’s ideas of ancillary structures.

And on the pragmatic side it had to be in the public domain, or otherwise free to use and distribute. Also, having a text that has been fairly well analysed in the past enables us to focus on analysing how it adapts to experiments in electronic space, giving us a firm foundation to refer to regarding the story’s structure.

Which pretty much ruled out using my own work as a basis, as that would have been a shaky foundation for analysis to say the least.

The public domain issue led me to look at the medieval texts which had been one of my primary focuses in my Comparative Literature Bachelor’s Degree, and being Icelandic I thought of the Icelandic family sagas.

Egill’s Saga stood out immediately.

That Story.

Egill’s Saga is possibly one of the most analysed and researched Old Norse text in history, third after the two Edda’s, the Prose-Edda and the Poetic-Edda. In fact, many believe Snorri Sturluson, the writer of the Prose-Edda, to be the author of Egill’s Saga. A fairly debatable assumption as the writing styles of the two works differ considerably.

It is also in the public domain, both the English translation and the Old-Norse original are freely available in proofread digital form which would make my work quite a bit easier. And it is easily abridged, the title character doesn’t enter the picture until almost halfway through the story, and the reading of the text in Icelandic schools has a history of skipping a large part of the first half.

Multivocality.

The story is also useful in the way that although it has relatively few voices represented in its structure compared to later novels those voices are very distinct.

The primary voices being the almost callously impartial narrator. Egill’s arrogant but intelligent voice, contrasted with his father’s and his grandfather’s less cultured but as arrogant voices. Then we have the voice of Egill’s daughter who helps nurse Egill through his grief after losing his sons.

And finally we have the Poetry, a voice, an entity on its own. This poetry is what you could call the historical voice of Egill Skallagrimson, preserved for years, and most likely composed by a real person named Egill Skallagrimson.

The relationship and contrast between Egill’s poetic voice and Egill’s prose voice is an important one. The story’s focal point lies in the binary opposition between the prose and poetry.

Oppositions.

So the story has a binary opposition at its centre as its main driving force. But it is littered with interesting oppositions throughout: Egill the killer vs Egill the father. Egill as a son vs His father. The young arrogant Egill vs the old, grieving Egill. Almost an embarrasment of riches.

Parergon.

Egill’s Saga is not only conducive to Derrida’s satellite structures, the comments, they are essential to the story’s structure. The structure of Old-Norse poetry is fundamentally based on references and Norse mythology as a superstructure.

They have to be taken apart, commented upon and analysed to be understood (even in the old days, the term “rada i kenningar” often used in the context of understanding a poem implies that you’ve taken the poem apart, figured out what is being said and referred to).

The reading of an old norse poem was a similar sort of process as the English tradition of solving a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Foundation.

Almost every word in Egill’s Saga has been analysed to death. Research has been done on almost every single variation of word occurences, statistical analysis of word use, every phrase has been linguistically analysed many times over. It has been read, reread, referred to, taken apart, analyzed, deconstructed and criticised in almost every concievable way known to man. The letterforms of the original manuscripts have been analysed. The composition of the old hide it was written on has been analysed.

In short, it is a very stable base to work from. Meaning that if it breaks or if something doesn’t work in the electronic context there will be a wealth of data to refer to to compare and contrast it with the original to teach us why it fails in that context and how.

And if something goes wrong it will be entirely my fault.

Post-Mortem.

I am occasionally reminded that I’m the only one around here with a Comparative Literature background.

These notes were used in my presenation yesterday to the rest of the Phd researchers here at UWE along with an assortment of UWE Art, Media and Design staff.

Most of it went alright but the discussion was taken over by one person in the audience who insisted that comparative analysis of works and tests as I proposed was relative, arbitrary, and in the long run impossible.

And he also kept on about asking what the point was, “the burning issue”, essentially wondering why the hell I want to do this.

He kept returning to the point of the arbitrary nature of the research, ignoring my points that

1. I can’t be expected to present anybody’s point but my own and that the reasoning behind my conclusions, the tests I intend to make, as well as the original piece of work will all be freely available so that anybody that’s interested can go over the data and decide to agree or disagree with my conclusions.
2. The methodology behind structural textual analysis is well tested and has a long history. It’s flaws are well known (Derrida pointed out a host of them himself) but it’s the only tool for this sort of work that he have.
3. The flaws being known makes the relatively structuralist approach a more reliable approach for analysing data than the relativistic stance he was taking.

Of course I didn’t manage to make those points that clearly yesterday, instead I, shaken, spewed them out one by one in a broken, rambling fashion because I simply couldn’t believe how contrary that person was being.

I guess we live and learn.

I might simply not have understood what he was talking about. I thought I had presented my idea clearly (judging by the questions I got), what I intend to do and how. He may have simply tried to get me to clarify a point or two about what I am trying to do.

But, unfortunately, he only managed to sound to me, as if he was simply stating that what I was trying to do was impossible, that I shouldn’t even be trying and that I must be trying to do something else and am not telling him.

Sheesh.

Baldur Bjarnson.