Don’t Kick Food!

(for example, when Carl explains the communication systems to Miranda – even though it feels a bit awkward when he describes them as different from telephones and cable television)

I reread this passage when editing the post about The Diamond Age (I had mistakenly referred to Snow Crash as Stephenson’s first novel, which it was not). It occured to me that I should engage this a bit more, perhaps summing up what the gigantic post below was so verbosely aiming at.

The reference to telephones cable TV in The Diamond Age in the conversation referenced above is a bit forced – the character Carl Hollywood describes the contemporary information systems in the world of the novel in terms of how they are different from these two forms that we, the readers, are familiar with. There’s no reason Miranda would need this kind of comparison – she was only familiar with TV and telephones because of the “passives” (movies). It’s done for our benefit.

Stephenson partially breaks the fourth wall to explain to us what’s going on. Shouldn’t I like this, though? The acknowledgement of the artifice of the text? That’s not exactly what’s going on. If the rest of the novel is acting as a window to the events of the text (which I think it is), this kind of a moment differs from that. Its purpose is to tell the outside reader what is going on. What makes it “awkward” is that it is written in a way that is neither fully integrated into the world of the narrative (thus preserving the “window on the world” metaphor), nor does it go sufficiently far enough in the other direction, openly acknowledging the reader (“Reader, I married him. And then he explained to me exactly how we purify our water.”).

It reads clunkily because it is straddling the gap between these two kinds of writing which I below called ‘reference’ and ‘narrative’. It is the former attempting to be the latter. That’s a rather simplistic breakdown, I know, and so perhaps one day I will get around to fleshing it out and making it a more complex comparison. Or maybe I’ll just find a website that already makes that kind of a distinction and just link to it.

Andy (of the Mulkerin variety) (does turning his name into a hyperlink to his blog imply that I think of him and his blog as one and the same?) has written a piece about MySpace.

An excerpt:

I think the foremost question regarding MySpace ought not to be whether it’s a bottom-up, malleable internet community controlled by the youth who use it or a method by which “they” can perpetrate their power- and profit-driven schemes (because surely it’s a mix of both); the question ought to be, how does MySpace and its architecture affect the way in which its users (and even to an extent its non-users) communicate, and is its effect positive or negative?

An apology offered; Marxist Theory; Upsides and downsides to certain interpretative practices; Form follows function in defining “infodump”; Problems of writing a text that has no outside reference texts; a solution in hypertext; an attempt to tie this to the final project.

I am a little late with this entry – my usual blog-writing time has been taken up by extensive resume work and cover letter writing – but it is rather long, to make up for the lateness. I was originally going to write a post about The Diamond Age and the propagandic use of technology as a teaching tool (and how it works to hide the human input in its creation), but Classmate Dan already did something about that, grounding it in literary history far more solidly than I could.

My point was going to be much more vague than his, but touch upon the ideas of socioeconomic class I rambled about last Wednesday (and how Nell’s movement through various phyles and claves, with a variety of adult mentors, results in a more well-rounded individual (think Pip, in Great Expectations, after he’s come to terms with his past and therefore is all the better for it because he has been both poor and rich – ethnic variety not being an issue in 19th century England, all it takes is a little variety in monetary income and you’ve seen all the place has to offer. Very different from Atlantis/Shanghai).

Brief aside related to that: I didn’t intend to come across as a spouter of Marxist literary theory, reading everything as a conflict between classes. Whether or not Marxist theory is applicable to real world interaction is a different issue than whether or not it is applicable to reading texts. These texts are created by people whose perception of the reality they are writing about is colored by their understanding of it – therefore, understanding the theory can help us understand what is trying to be conveyed through the text. In a way, these theories are more useful for understanding the production of a text than for understanding the consumption of a text (pesky Marxist terms again…). That’s a dangerous place for academics to go, though, because of its closeness to dealing with authorial intention, the acknolwedgement of which almost has to undermine the academic’s authority in the situation, since the author would know his or her intent better than anyone. Unless, of course, the author is dead. In that case, the intended meaning of every “is” is up for debate.

It can also be used to shield an author’s writing from criticism. “Well, that wasn’t what he was going for!” is a pretty argument-stopping comment, especially if your angle is based on divining the author’s intended output and then measuring how close the work actually comes to this ideal. This is a rubric I find myself applying often – its result is usually less an analysis of the text and more some sort of warped celebrity worship/dismantling that seeks to determine the skill (and sometimes overall worth) of the author. At the same time, it’s far more reflective of me and my tastes and my interpretive frameworks – how well does my interpretation of what I read/view/play match up with what I think I am supposed to be reading/viewing/playing?

For example, when reading a book, is the point to convey a narrative, or to build a world? Do these two goals (out of the many potential goals a text could have) automatically exclude one another? Is a thoroughly fleshed-out world necessary for an engaging narrative? Is it possible to integrate the two, or is the infodump necessary?

The “infodump”. There is no Wikipedia entry for this word, so a definition of my own understanding (and my own wording) follows:

infodump: noun. The parts of a science fiction or fantasy story where the narrative stops and the cultural and technological differences between the society in the book and the society of the intended readership are explained to the reader. One way to accomplish this is to have two characters partake in an extended discussion about the nature of what is going on around them, whether or not it makes any sense in the context of the story. Frequently boring.

Having read one of Stephenson’s earlier novels, Snow Crash, I was prepared for this to occur in The Diamond Age, and it does happen. Granted, it’s more integrated in this novel (in Snow Crash, there are extended sequences where the story grinds to a complete halt as the main character, Hiro Protagoniste (Get it?) is lectured on sundry topics, including linguistic theory and ancient Sumerian mythology). Here they don’t go on for more than a page or two and are usually part of a conversation between two characters with some amount of plausibility (for example, when Carl explains the communication systems to Miranda – even though it feels a bit awkward when he describes them as different from telephones and cable television).

My gut instinct is to treat an infodump as bad writing – if the information isn’t somewhere within the plot of the story, then it’s probably not necessary. I don’t really accept the argument that these books are trying to do something different than a conventional narrative, and therefore cannot be criticized for the stilted feeling these asides give a text.

I understand that an author creating a fantasy or science fiction story would not necessarily have the luxury of relying on accepted social and technological standards that the readers would already know from other texts, be they fictional or historical, or that they have experienced themselves. Texts set in a “real” historical time and place (past or present) have access to something like this. These other texts can create a rich world that a reader has no connection to other than the book itself (see Jane Austen – how many people have actually experienced aristocratic life as she wrote it? Please excuse my statement that Jane Austen is a significant literary author and all the assumptions that implies, but I need an example here, and it is the first one that comes to mind). The key to understanding the parts of these texts that are strange to us (namely, the customs and the technologies) can be found elsewhere, in an encyclopedia.

If all the author was concerned with doing was creating a world, then they could have written extensive reference-style entries on the world and its inhabitants. Placing their world-building passages awkwardly in the middle of narratives set in these worlds and then justifying poorly written prose as “world building” is misleading, though. There are precedents within the science fiction and fantasy publishing worlds that get around this issue.

Look at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books – they have appendix after appendix with tons of extra information helping flesh out the world of the fantasy that are not placed in the main text because they’re too numerous. Extracting these bits of information and placing them outside of the main narrative (but still within the same physical volume) helps keep those books from getting even more bogged down than they already are (I do not care for those novels, and sometimes choose to be extra-critical of them to provoke people into a debate, hoping to learn something more of why people like them so much. It ties in to the above-mentioned way I tend to read – if I can just figure out what it is that these books are doing well, maybe I can come to appreciate them for what they are). All of the work the author put into the history can be appreciated by the reader who is interested in learning more about the world of the novels. At the same time, it’s not in a place where it encourages an uninterested reader to begin skimming or skipping large sections of text in order to get back to the narrative.

The above passage that runs from “The ‘infodump’” to “cable television” is, in the context of this blog post, an infodump itself. And it is there because I lacked an outside source that could have explained it, just like most fantasy/scifi writing. These texts have to function as their own reference materials. Tolkien split his into pieces, but most texts do not do this, instead choosing to use “infodumps” to make the main body of the story serve a dual purpose – narrative and reference. This tends to weaken both of them, as the schema for reading a narrative is often based on a cause and event plot, where what happens next is the most important draw of a story. Reference reading is based on taking it all in, processsing the information and using it to make sense of some other information.

Hypertext would allow these texts to resolve their dichotomy in a way not unlike Tolkien’s appendices. Pieces of technology, cultural practices, even slang and other parts of language could be linked to another place that explained them, leaving the reader free to infer what these things were, or to pause and go look it up in the built-in encyclopedia that came with the text. This could make for some choppy reading at first, in having to leave and come back to the narrative part of the text. I don’t think this is really that different from the process of reading The Diamond Age, though, except that the author controls when I leap from story to infodump. Their inclusion in the same body of text means that I have to shift reading gears (from wanting to find out what happens next to wanting to know exactly how this giant city purifies its water) without much warning. It also assumes that I, as a reader, care about how future water purifiers work (I don’t).

Powerpoint seems best suited as a medium to convey information in a reference sense – bullet points abound. My final project will be an attempt to negotiate these different ideas, and see if it is conducive to suggesting a narrative through reference style entry information. Possibly. Unless I can’t pull that off, in which case I’ll have to think of something else.

The two articles we read for this week, Jenkin’s “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” and Montfort’s “Interactive Fiction” were more grounded in specific games, puzzles, etc (I hesitate to say “texts”) than the previous readings we’ve done regarding ludology. This is a nice change of pace. It is very noble to want to be sure that a new discipline is not unfairly colored by the influence of other seemingly (though, the argument goes, not actually) related disciplines. I have a hard time discussing concepts like “narrative” and “play” outside of a specific context, though.

These ideas don’t exist in the ether, they are grounded in some kind of physical object or interaction, whether that be a book or a game or a ball or simple conversation between two people. I don’t find it particularly useful to talk about the nature of “play” in a theoretical sense. Games, like books or films or any other kind of narrative, are constructed by people who exist in a specifc place at a specific time. What is to be gained by discussing them as if this was not the case?

I must admit, though, that there is something trashy-but-appealing in reading the responses to essays in First Person, watching academics deftly avoid engaging one another in debate and using their skill with words to insult one another instead.

Anyway, on to the final project proposal:

It was suggested to me by a friend in conversation a few weeks ago that Microsoft Powerpoint presentations can function as a medium for conveying narratives in a lecture. I don’t know whether or not this is the case, but it something I would like to try out. Since we have about six weeks until the final is due, this is subject to change.

Keyword searches used to find this site, as tracked by Statcounter.com:

• “he was soon borne away”
• “victor frankenstein feels guilty”
• “subjective focalization myst”
• “specific details about frankenstein”

On Monday, Slate began publishing The Unbinding. From the intial announcement, published a week ago:

While novels have been serialized in mainstream online publications before, this is the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net Novel—one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet. The Unbinding, a dark comedy set in the near future, is a compilation of “found documents”—online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet’s unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it.

Must remember to take a look at this sometime soon.