Don’t Kick Food!

In this interview with Sean Stewart about alternate reality gaming, points are raised about the nature of the internet and its use suggested a different way of storytelling. This kind of stuff is a combination of hypertext novels and gaming (or maybe it’s gaming with hypertext novel-like elements?).

Stewart’s idea that blogs are “front porch space” is interesting, too. I agree that blogs are often perceived as such, but does the analogy holds up under scrutiny? The things you do on your front porch aren’t preserved and made available to anyone with a computer and internet access. Is this actually an expansion of that space (freeing it from the removal of phsyical restraints), or is the front-porch metaphor an easy way to describe it, glossing over the existence of some fundamental difference between the two?

I debated posting this link later (when we talk about gaming), but I thought the ideas of technology and its use shaping the narrative might be useful to the class now.

The end of the novel returns to the written-letter format that characterized the beginning of the novel. Walton mentions that Frankenstein went back over the notes and revised them and made sure they were accurate. A few letters later, Walton writes that he must go and investigate a strange, almost-human like noise coming from Frankenstein’s room. The next paragraph begins with his return to writing after some events have occurred.

What you have here, then, is an indication that these letters, while they may have been thought about extensively beforehand, are written down exactly as they were, unedited. He did not write drafts and then go back and rewrite them (or, if he did, he disguised the fact). The spontaneous (or, at least, extemporaneous) nature of these letters mirrors that style that many bloggers write in (in my observations across the entire internet, none of which I will link to here because I think that if you’ve read any small number of blogs, you know what I’m talking about) - the “This is straight from my mind, unedited, and therefore more purely ME” aesthetic. Spell-check is unauthentic!

What follows this most interesting paragraph break is a telling of the events that occurred during that paragraph break - Walton’s meeting with the monster at the side of Frankenstein’s deathbed.

The monster speaks to Walton, who then immediately returns to his room to finish his letter, the conversation fresh in his mind. This is important. Every other time the monster has spoken in the novel, it has been through Walton’s written account of Frankenstein’s oral recounting of the monster’s words. They are interpreted by Frankenstein as being dishonest - Walton, who through virtue of his loneliness and desire for companionship was predisposed towards believing Frankenstein’s account. Walton rejects the monster’s point of view because of his relationship with Victor, and what Victor told him about the monster’s persuasiveness. Walton does not want to believe that the monster actually feels guilty - he calls him a hypocrite.

Walton never questions Victor, never asks if he can be trusted. At the beginning of his tale, Victor relates that when creating the monster, he was in the grips of a kind of mania. Focused solely on one thing, his perspective on his goal was unchanged for two years, until he reached it. Keeping this in mind, what does one make of his single-minded pursuit of the monster?

The monster’s behavior has been that of a petulant child - wanting to make his sole parent pay for mistreating him. Unlike a child, though, he has both the intellect and the physical strength to act destructively on his impulses. Victor believes the monster has justified his behavior by distancing himself from society, by pointing out that if a man would kill him guiltlessly because he his not human, then he is freed from any obligation not to kill humans, simply because they are not the same as him. He goads Victor along, providing him with food or clues on where he is headed next, playing on Victor’s guilt for the death of his entire family (excepting his brother Edgar, who simply drops off the face of the narrative).

When the monster talks to Walton, he does not claim innocence of any of the crimes. Instead, he asks why he is the sole villain in the narrative - why all those who have rejected him are absolved from any guilt. He also makes another mention of the state of the devil in Paradise Lost - he may have been cast out from Heaven, but at least he was not alone.

We are presented here with the least refracted representation of the words of the monster (coming to us only through the lens of Walton). Walton intersperses his own interpretation of the monster’s meanings with his explanations. The monster claims to feel guilty, Walton does not believe him. We as the readers are here given the room to believe the monster or not, regardless of Walton’s interpretations. The conversation is fresh enough in his mind that one can trust the accuracy of the words.

After the conversation, the monster jumps out the window, intent on reaching the north pole, where he can dramatically commit suicide atop a burning pyre. Or does he?

Walton’s last letter is one of disappointment - his friend has died, and his crew has threatened mutiny unless he agrees to turn the ship south once it has escaped from the ice. He reaches the aforementioned “most-interesting” paragraph break, goes to meet the monster, and returns to write a paragraph ending with, “the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and wonderful catastrophe.”

Walton’s expedition has failed - he will return from the northern seas with nothing to show for his efforts except a story that was told to him by a dying man who very well may have been mad. A story that he, himself has no part in.

But what if he, too, faced the monster? Stood his ground, criticized the monster for his destruction of a family, and also showed that he was unable to be swayed by the persuasive lies of a hypocritical beast? Yes, he was a failure as a sea captain, but perhaps his voyage could be known for something else. Something fantastic - and he, the best friend of the man to whom most of the events had happened, and also the last person to encounter the monster before his suicide, the only one there to relate these amazing stories to the world.

And all he’d need is a great ending that would tie him into the main meat of the story, to place him in the same physical space as the monster. So what if it were a little fudged - there’s always a chance that Victor’s specific details weren’t exactly right.

The “spontaneous” interruption of the letter is followed by Walton’s showdown with the monster, which neatly ties up any loose ends, suggests to the reader that any attempts to find where the monster is now will be useless (since he’s going to burn his body at the northernmost point of the world, a place that the failure of Walton’s expedition has shown to be all but unreachable), and echoes things the monster has said before (right down to the exact same Milton reference). It’s an ending that, to Walton, seems both “final” and “wonderful”.

The end of the novel, then, in addition to serving as a good end to Mary Shelley’s story, works as an excellent end to Walton’s. It serves Walton’s need for adventure, for having had an amazing experience. Maybe he fudged a few details here and there - maybe he made up the entire ending. As we have no other window into the story except through Walton’s writing, there’s no way to know for sure.

And maybe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t a book about the story of Victor Frankenstein, so much as it is a book about a man named Walton, who on a long sea voyage, for want of a friend (either out of his own desire or to assuage his sister’s concerns about him becoming too lonely) or a justification for an expedition that didn’t meet its goal, invents a man named Victor Frankenstein, and makes himself responsible for telling this man’s fantastical life story.

In order for us to make meaning out of a narrative, we have to engage it. If the only interpreting we do while reading a novel is imagining the physical appearance of the events being described, then yes, a film is going to be less open to interpretation than a novel. The visual stimulus we get from reading is (for the sake of this argument, momentarily ignoring paratext) the typeface. Film gives us an image - representative of something in the real world. A photograph of a tree represents a tree better than a description of a tree (now I’m ignoring ideas of impressionism and its ilk). It can do little else if one defines “represents” as “reproduction of an object’s image”.

What about the other senses? What about taste, touch, and smell? Are these even important? ODORAMA and Smell-O-Vision nonwithstanding, the only way film can convey these senses is through the reaction of an audience. If you want to be very specific, the apparati through which film conveys images (camera, projector, film stock) can only convey images. Even sound comes from a separate (although synched) source. Before the sound era, intertitles were used to convey dialogue, and sometimes provided a description of the action shown in the image.

What happens when you just have images? In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes about a painting of a meeting between Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee:

“[L]ike many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label … it tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, ‘Here are Lee and Jackson together.’ … A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution’ [link mine]. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, ‘Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.’

Granted, this is a still image, not a moving image. Does the addition of motion to an image allow it to tell a story on its own? If so, who can be said to be the narrator in this case?

Abbot argues that a key difference between film narrators and novel narrators is that in a film, we see them acting within the narrative - the voiceover is the narrative, the speaker the narrator. But what happens when there is no voice-over, or when the voice-over and the image conflict?

Near the beginning of Singin’ in the Rain, there is a scene where Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) tells the story of his rise to stardom. The voice-over is accompanied by flashbacks that contradict the glamorous story he is telling. The scene can only play as humorous if we read it as a braggart inflating his past, which requires us to trust the images as the actual story and the voice-over as narrative embellishment.

What does one do if there is no voice-over narration? Again, Abbot says that the characters on screen tell smaller narratives, similar to the way we do in real life. But what about the overarching narrative, the film? The story that these characters move within. Is someone telling that? Is watching a character walk across the room the same as reading the sentence, “She walked across the room”? If so, does this make the image analgous to the written word in the novel? We assume this is the case when making comparisons between films and novels that arrive at the conclusion that a film is less open to interpretation than a novel, because the words can be taken more than one way when the images cannot. That would imply that the camera (and the editing?) functions as the narrator.

The camera is thought of as reproducing images of things as they are. The camera is a machine, with no will of its own. If the distortion of reality (either in lying, or in creating fiction) is thought of as a willful act, then the camera, on its own, cannot distort reality. If the images are undistorted, then they are representing reality in a way that is not open to interpretation. The camera appears to be the ultimate reliable narrator, with its images as the ultimate reliable text. Arguing that a film locks you into an interpretation of the work assumes both that interpretation is done only with the visual (and,to an extent, auditory) aspects of the narrative, and it assumes that the image is totally reliable. It’s the same assumption that the aforementioned joke in Singin’ in the Rain plays with.

Abbot briefly mentions Rashomon, and its multiple representations of the same story in four different narratives as an example of reliability of narrators, but it is an excellent demonstration of the focalization of cinematic narrative. Each story is clearly told from a different point of view. When a film is indicated as being from a certain point of view, we have little problem reading it as a representation of one person’s views of the story.

If film can work both as “Objective Truth” (as we’ve come to read most narrative films, shown in the Singin’ in the Rain example), and as “Subjective Reality” (as in Rashomon), how does one as a viewer of these narratives come to make that distinction? Why, when watching the opening sequence of Frankenstein, do we interpret the scene on the graveyard set (quite clearly a set, and not location shooting) as representative of action happening in a graveyard, and not as action happening on a set designed to look like a graveyard?

And how many of these conflicts arise because the concept of “narrative” as it is applied to film was developed over thousands of years of oral and written communication - based on words, not images?

And I really can’t tie any of this into the Frankenstein novel.

(I was a film studies major in undergrad, if you can’t tell).

Edited at 10:34PM to finish the sentence that originally read “Before the sound era, intertitles were used to convey”.

Welcome.

I assume that you are here for one of two reasons:

1. You are a part of my Narrative and Technology class
2. You are a friend of mine to whom I said, “I have to keep a blog for a class”. You responded, “HaHA! You-Who-Hate-Blogs must now eat your words!”

I do not hate blogs.

No, really.

It is great that this form of publishing is democratized (at least as far as it is available to anyone with access to a computer), but I have reservations. Blogging is often taken advantage of in a way that is less about communicating with others and more about placing oneself in a spotlight of one’s own creation. Also, its ease of use (both in the original creation of content and its subsequent revision/editing) encourages one to “Get the information out there first, update it later if it’s inaccurate.”

Of course, this isn’t a blog-specific problem (see the recent reporting on the events in Tallmansville, WV, for a very good example), or even one limited to the past ten years (such as when Dewey “defeated” Truman - though that’s more failed-anticipation of an outcome than outright reporting of hearsay as confirmed fact). But this is not a media studies course, so I will now move on to things more related to the class discussion from Monday - namely, framing narratives.

Framing narratives are an excellent tool to create a sense of either foreboding or underlying relief during the embedded narrative - like Abbot says, each story inflects the way we read the other. Film noir is a great place to see this in action.

The film Double Indemnity begins with Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stumbling into an office, bleeding from the stomach. He speaks into a dictaphone, and we flash back to the story of what he’s done over the past few months. We know where he’s going to end up, but we don’t know how he’ll get there. The events of the film take on a fatalistic tone, even when there’s not any reason in the embedded text for us to suspect things will go wrong.

Frankenstein works in the same way. We know that no matter how happy Victor was as a child, he’s going to end up starved and half-crazy on a sled with all but one of his dogs dead on the melting ice of the Arctic Sea. It makes the recollections of his idyllic childhood all the more melancholic, because, again, we know just where he ends up.

It adds suspense, too, because though we know where the stories (or would that be narratives?) that Walter and Victor will take them, we don’t know the specifics.

A large difference between reading a novel online and reading it in book form is the ease of bookmarking specific pages/marking passages and directing people to specific pages. Sure, you could tell someone, “Search for this line of text and read the paragraph it’s in”, but it’s not significantly easier than telling them, “Look at the top of page thirty eight, where it says this line of text.”

Despite my preference for regular old books, I find reading online is superior to listening an audiobook. Those are always read far too slowly for my liking. Coupling that with the difficulty of going back over a passage or saving one’s place results in an experience that is more of a hassle than a convenience.

Blogger has just created a blog for me. I can now add my posts to it, create my personal profile, or customize how my blog looks.