Many Houses, Many Leaves: Cross-Sited Media Productions and the Problems of Convergent Narrative Networks

Humanities scholarship has traditionally viewed a
literary work of art as an act of production belonging
to larger social and cultural networks, yet remaining
relatively fixed within a single medium. The recent
identification of patterns of convergence in technological, social/organic, economic and global contexts seems to suggest, however, that although these same traditional models of literary production still constitute a significant portion of the cultural output, they are being transformed
and shifted in order to accommodate increasingly
intersectional exchanges between media forms and content.
In many cases, these shifts have made it possible to
develop new structures that shatter the fixity of narrative
as a single-medium endeavor and establish instead a multiply-mediated storyworld, a cross-sited narrative, defined here as multisensory “clustered” or “packeted”
stories told across a divergent media set. The
proliferation of cross-sited narratives—across film,
literature, music, video games, live performance and the internet—presents significant challenges to the current modalities of humanistic theory and practice. As both a product of and a reaction to the process of the discrete nature of digitization, cross-sited narratives require us to not only “imagine an infinitely segmentable media
market” (Coit-Murphy 91) but also, it seems, an infinitely
segmentable and infinitely mediated story that, as a network, draws and exchanges narrative information from site to site. Evidence of this sort of networking can be seen in works such as Mark Danielewski’s House
of Leaves, which operates across no less than 5 media channels (novel, novella, live performance, recorded music, the web), each integral to the establishment of the narrative storyworld.
The question posed by this paper, then, is whether we can use current models of digital archiving and editioning as the means through which to preserve and distribute a
narrative network such as Danielewski’s. Is it possible, in the context of contemporary textualities, to retain even a semblance of such a work? Although similar crisis points have always plagued the arts, exposing in many ways the utter ephemerality of even venerated and “durable”
technologies such as codex book, we’ve looked towards the digital as the means through which the fragile materials
of paper and print are hardened and made permanent from a bitstream that flows from an electronic fountain of youth. Paradoxically, studies of new media have recently (and perhaps belatedly) moved toward the preservation of
digital objects such as early computer games and interactive fictions, recognizing rightly that an entire generation of artifacts is in danger of being obliterated by hardware and software advancements. Although it is universally acknowledged that there is obviously no possible way to replicate the historical moment during which a given
work is produced, we have, for the most part, been
content to instead refashion the work into whatever
single medium seemed to have the greatest potential
for preservation. Friedrich Kittler’s assertion that “the transposition of media is always a manipulation and must leave gaps” (1990:267) does hold some sway
here but, in the sense that a given text (such as Emily Dickinson’s letters or William Blake’s illuminated
manuscripts) has content that is somewhat extractable from its form, such gaps are acceptable when the tradeoffs are vastly improved distribution and conservation. It will be argued here that such an approach will inevitably fail when confronted with the preservation of a cross-sited narrative, as the transcoding of a narrative that relies
on the tensions between multiple media sites into a
single medium will irrevocably disrupt the network that constitutes its storyworld. We’ve found ways to
overcome the displacement of a medium, but can we hope to approximate a narrative/media network? In short, we can’t.
Drawing upon (cognitive) narratology (Herman 2004; Ryan 2003, 2004; Bortolussi and Dixon 2004), cognitive linguistics (Turner 2003; Fauconnier and Turner 2002), convergence theory (Jenkins 2004, 2006; Kittler 1990),
archiving strategies for “network” fictions (Montfort
and Wardrip-Fruin 2004; Liu, Durand, et al. 2005) and Pierre Levy’s theories of virtualization (1998), the
focus of this paper will be as follows: 1) to outline the structures of cross-sited narratives, focusing particularly on their network structure, 2) to assess the current methods
of archiving/ preserving literature, such as those
proposed by the Electronic Literature Organization, and especially methods that deal with transient texts and networked stories (such as hypertext and interactive
fiction) 3) to propose that such methods are inadequate
for transcribing the complex interactions between
media that occurs within cross-siting and 4) to suggest a new model of temporal textuality that argues that these networks cannot be transposed except through primary materials, and that, often, this primacy is fleeting and not reproducible. In fact, it is possible that the only remnant
of these textual networks that will remain are in the
annotations and collaborations left by users on message
boards, blogs and chat rooms.
The structures that will be recommended for cross-
siting are presented as a series of gradient models
representing the continuum between a text’s materiality
and it’s narrative. The works that will be studied
include Danielewski’s House of Leaves, The Matrix, Neil Young’s Greendale and the alternate reality game, I Love Bees, a selection that provides a range of blindspots in
current practices of textual preservation. Through text, gaming, comic books, live phone calls, the texture of
paper and the spontaneity of live performance, each of these works exposes the single-medium logic through which most textual preservation operates. If we are truly entering an era of convergence where media come
together in conversation over narrative, then we must also be aware that this coming together is not without consequence. Indeed, the end product of this convergence
just might be the erasure of many of the networks it
produced.
References
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