Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, and: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (review)

Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. By Maria-Laure Ryan. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiii + 399 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. By N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 350 pp. $49.00/$16.20.

Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop). Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unmargining and intertextuality claimed by Barthes, Kristeva, or Derrida, and to facilitate the reader's emancipation as an author. This early phase of theorizing now seems to be waning as a new generation of theorists rethink the nature of electronic textuality. In Cybertext (1997), Espen Aarseth warned explicitly against applying existing literary theory to the new media, arguing that this constituted a kind of colonization. Janet Murray situated narrative within the current and futuristic framework of virtual reality in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997). Now, in Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), Marie-Laure Ryan, in perhaps the most detailed and thorough study to date, considers narrative processes across a broad range of texts from the traditional printed novel to such vehicles as electronic games, interactive films, as well as hypertext.

Ryan organizes her discussion around some key concepts. Like Murray before her, Ryan closely considers the experience of immersion in narrative media, and opposes this to interaction. Interaction has been a key term in these debates since the earliest hypertexts, although Aarseth rejects it as too imprecise, and Murray refines the concept into such aspects as agency and role-playing. Ryan's account of interactivity complicates our understanding by showing its problematic relation to narrative. She examines the currently popular metaphor of the game for our relation to texts, but finds this inadequate on several grounds (e.g., we do not so much follow rules during literary reading as transgress them; and our readings of texts do not have the clear outcomes that characterize most games). She suggests that hypertext fiction is more appropriately considered a kind of game, since our desire to figure out its structure or plot makes it competitive, a game of defeating an obstructive author. But the design of hypertext is inherently limiting: "The effect is that of an amnesic mind that desperately tries to grasp some chains of association but cannot hold on to them long enough to recapture a coherent picture of the past" (229). Thus interactivity seems to be opposed to immersion: it undermines the coherence of narrative, suggesting that the interactive media of the future will be made up of little episodes, rather than an overarching narrative (330).

Interaction appeals to the postmodern sensibility, but immersion has on the contrary been deprecated, as Ryan points out: given the postmodern insistence on the visibility of signs in constructing reality, the transparency of text required by immersion represents a denial of "the importance of the medium" (175). Thus Ryan's book is particularly helpful in paying extended attention to the neglected topic of immersion—that absorbed mode of engagement with a narrative that brings an imagined world into being. Ryan considers it in three perspectives: spatial, temporal, and emotional. These are examined in three corresponding sections on reader's imagery and deixis, the experience of suspense, and the emotional involvement evoked by narrative events (the paradox of feeling real emotions for fictional matters). It is in these sections that Ryan's treatment raises the most questions. Unlike interaction, which hinges on logical and explicit features built into electronic texts, immersion depends on more liminal psychological processes about which we...