Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

1 Story/Worlds/Media

25 1 Story/Worlds/Media Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology marie-laure ryan Both of the two terms that form the title of this book, “storyworlds” and “media,” are common in contemporary narratological and critical discourse , but they tend to be used in a very loose way. In this chapter, I explore the difficulties involved in turning them from conveniently vague catchphrases that can be used in many contexts into the sharp analytical tools that will be needed to impart narratology with media consciousness. Media Gregory Bateson once described media as “a difference that makes a difference ” (453). This formula is seductive, but it cannot offer a satisfactory definition of media because it rests on an unanswered question: a difference for what? Media studies would operate in a vacuum if they were not able to name the object of this difference. But if we take a narrative approach to media, the answer becomes obvious: the choice of medium makes a difference as to what stories can be told, how they are told, and why they are told. By shaping narrative, media shape nothing less than human experience. Narrative is not, admittedly, the only possible answer to the question “a difference for what”; we could say, for instance, “a difference for art” or “a difference for communication” or even “a difference for human relations.” The various domains for which media can make a difference mean that the list of all phenomena that have been called “media” by one scholar or another is strangely reminiscent in its heterogeneous character of the Chinese taxonomy of animals that Jorge Luis Borges mentioned in an essay. This taxonomy divides animals into the following categories: “those that belong to the emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids , fabulous ones, stray dogs, those that are not included in this clas- 26 Ryan sification,” and so on (Borges 103). The list of phenomena that have been labeled “media” includes: (a) channels of mass communication, such as newspapers, television (tv), radio, and the Internet; (b) technologies of communication, such as printing, the computer, film, tv, photography, and the telephone; (c) specific applications of digital technology, such as computer games, hypertext, blogs, e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook; (d) ways of encoding signs to make them durable and ways of preserving life data, such as writing, books, sound recording, film, and photography; (e) semiotic forms of expression, such as language, image, sound, and movement; (f) forms of art, such as literature, music, painting, dance, sculpture, installations , architecture, drama, the opera, and comics; and (g) the material substance out of which messages are made or in which signs are presented, such as clay, stone, oil, paper, silicon, scrolls, codex books, and the human body. Some scholars even consider air to be a medium (as the substance through which sound waves travel in oral communication), and the term “biomedia” has been floating around to designate manipulations of the dna code (see Thacker); however, in this present volume we can easily ignore these interpretations because they have no direct narrative relevance. The confusion that reigns in media studies is epitomized by the occasionally heard term of “multimedia media” (or mixed media media), which describes the vast majority of the categories I have just mentioned. Only the purely semiotic categories of language, image, and sound are single-medium media. (W. J. T. Mitchell goes as far as claiming that all media are mixed media.1) If we give the same meaning to both occurrences of “media” in the expression “multimedia media,” we get something as difficult to conceive of as a set that is a member of itself, which is a well-known paradox in logic. But people have no trouble understanding the expression “multimedia media” because they spontaneously interpret the two uses of media differently—the first (in multimedia) in a semiotic sense and the second (in media) in a technological or cultural sense. Multimedia media are technological or cultural phenomena such as film or theater that use signs of various kinds and speak to various senses. We have become so accustomed to live performances and art installations that mix various types of signs and technologies in an innovative way that multimedia almost becomes a medium in itself. Like most words in a language, medium or media has multiple meanings . Working out a definition of media that covers all of its particular Story/Worlds/Media 27...