Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

10 Those Insane Dream Sequences

230 10 Those Insane Dream Sequences Experientiality and Distorted Experience in Literature and Video Games marco caracciolo In the years since the publication of Monika Fludernik’s Towards a “Natural” Narratology, her key concept of experientiality has established an impressive citation record. Defined as the “quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience” (Fludernik 12), experientiality provides a tight conceptual link between classical narratological research on the representation of conscious experience in fiction and post-classical, cognitivist approaches . However, Fludernik’s central claim that experientiality is the defining feature of narrative has not withstood closer scrutiny. Starting with Meir Sternberg (122) and Jan Alber, scholars have argued that experientiality cannot be straightforwardly equated with narrativity (see Wolf 181; Ryan, “Theoretical Foundations” 4; Herman, Basic Elements 211). And yet, this conclusion does not imply that experientiality holds no narratological interest. Theorists such as Werner Wolf and David Herman (“Cognition”; Basic Elements) have taken a more prudent course than Fludernik’s by including experientiality among their “narratemes” or “basic elements of narrative” without equating it with narrativity. For example , Herman has defined experientiality as “the impact of narrated situations and events on an experiencing consciousness” (“Cognition” 256). What remains unclear, however, is the level at which we should investigate this impact. Indeed, in fictional narratives there is a significant— and obvious—difference between characters’ consciousnesses and the real consciousnesses involved in the act of narrative presentation, or that of the story producers and the recipients. Is experientiality, as in Fludernik’s model, a representation of the experiences undergone by a character—usually, the protagonist (see Fludernik 30)? Or should it rather be understood as a measure of the impact a story has on its flesh-andblood recipients? Those Insane Dream Sequences 231 In this chapter I attempt to show why it is important—and to some extent necessary—to tie up these aspects of experientiality. In short, my suggestion is that characters’ experiences can be represented only because stories tap into the experiential reservoir shared by the recipients, cueing them into attributing experiences to fictional beings. Conversely, a story can have an impact on its recipients because it plays on this experiential repertoire in order to bring the characters’ experiences to life. Experientiality becomes, then, the tension that arises between the recipients ’ experiential background and the experiences that they attribute to characters on the basis of textual cues.1 An important caveat here is that this tension is not always foregrounded by stories; in many cases, the recipients react to the situations and events in which the characters are involved as if from the outside, without engaging with characters’ experiences in any meaningful way. Even when the recipients’ reactions are directed toward the experiences of a character, they may take the form of a sympathetic feeling for the character (we may feel hatred for a villain or compassion for someone who has suffered a tragic loss, for instance ). Only rarely—and as an effect of specific textual strategies—does the recipients’ engagement with characters involve the empathetic perspective taking that I explore in the following pages. Indeed, both of my case studies invite recipients to imaginatively engage with a character whose experience is distorted by hallucinations or dreams. Martin Heidegger remarks in a passage of his Being and Time (sec. 32) that we become aware of the structure of our experience only when something disrupts the flow of our interaction with the world. Likewise, examining two texts that present a character’s non-ordinary experience will yield important insights into our experiential engagement with characters and more in general with stories. I analyze a passage from William S. Burroughs’s experimental novel Naked Lunch (1959) and a few dream sequences from the video game Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003) developed by Remedy Entertainment. In the first, a character has drug-induced visions during an interrogation. This text addresses the Burroughsian theme of language as an instrument of control via the reader’s empathetic engagement with the character. For its part, Max Payne 2 is an interesting test bed for transmedial narratology because of the way it implements multimodal techniques and intermedial references to tinge the game world with the dream-like quality 232 Caracciolo of the protagonist’s experience. In considering these texts, I describe the medium-specific techniques through which literature and video games generate a tension between the recipients’ and the characters’ experiences. At the...