Margaret Mackey

Narrative pleasures in young adult novels, films, and video games

Acknowledgements Asking the Questions: How We Understand Stories Beginning: Designing the Project Thinking It Through: Theoretical Frameworks Paying Attention: Provisional Observations and Inferences Entering the Fiction: The Subjunctive and the Deictic Centre Orienting: Finding the Way Forward Filling Gaps: Inferences, Closure, and Affect Linking Making Progress or Making Do: The Unconsidered Middle Concluding: Reaching Provisional and Final Judgements Inhabiting the Story: Comparative Perspectives Understanding Narrative Interpretation References Appendix: Details of Groups and Sessions Index

Paying Attention: Provisional Observations and Inferences

When the participants sat down in the meeting room, they had no idea what kinds of text they were going to encounter. It is an axiom of interpretation that nobody can pay heed to everything all the time and they had to decide swiftly how to allocate their attention. In Judith Langer’s term, they had to establish ‘orientations toward meaning’ (1995, p. 24, emphasis added). Wolfgang Iser talks about meaning as ‘something that happens’ (1978, p. 22). The text on offer (Run Lola Run on the first day) would supply some of the energy that would make it happen, but some of the constructive effort also had to come from the viewers. They had to prepare to create a fiction out of both what was present and what was absent on the screen in front of them, as Iser describes: ‘Communication in literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated not by a given code but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment’ (1978, pp. 168–9).

Beginning: Designing the Project

To move from a set of relatively abstract questions about narrative comprehension to an operationally effective project is an elaborate process, and like the story itself, it involves time. For this project I invited 12 undergraduate volunteers at a western Canadian university, working in groups of three, to read a complete novel, watch a complete film and play a digital game to its conclusion. I will address the elements of this project in the order in which they arose.

Making Progress or Making Do: The Unconsidered Middle

The middle parts of a story don’t always get as much respect as the beginning and the end. Even Rabinowitz’s rules of notice privilege openings and closings; if we pay special attention to these marked elements of a text, is there a kind of ‘unspecial’ attention that we devote to the middle? Crago (1982) noticed that his annotations fell away as he became engrossed in the mid-stages of A Chance Child. I noticed the same phenomenon as I flagged my own personal reading of Dangerous Spaces (Mackey, 1993). Victor Nell, hoping to explore deeply engaged reading, asked his participants to read at least the first 50 pages of a book to establish that they truly liked it before bringing it along for the research project (1988, p. 103). As we move deeper into a story, it may well be that the need to be continuously on the alert and to be actively making connections devolves into a more unconsidered kind of absorption and obliviousness, and a focus on the gathering momentum towards an ending.

Concluding: Reaching Provisional and Final Judgements

The fact that a story has an ending at all marks it as different from our daily, real-life ‘human possibilities’. I know that my own personal life story will come to an end, but I do not know that I will have the opportunity to reflect on it after it is over. Even if there is some post-life reflecting room, it will have to take account of much accidental and incidental detritus. As we begin our exploration of the subjunctive world of the story, we can make connections to our own sense of human life; as we come to the end of this shaped and selective narrative, we can make fewer comparative links to the hodge-podge of daily existence. The ending is, in some ways, the most artificial element of the story; in Ryan’s terms, we must consider ‘a sequence of events forming a unified causal chain and leading to closure’ (2006, p. 8). As we explore this most unnatural, most un-life-like element of the story, we must shift the deictic centre out of the events and back to ourselves as interpreter, looking to make sense of the whole.

Understanding Narrative Interpretation

The battle between the narratologists (the game presents a story) and the ludologists (the gameplay itself is what matters) has abated. But as platforms merge and mutate, as ways of presenting fictional worlds become more complex and multimodal, we may find ourselves perplexed at proliferating new forms, wondering how to understand them and how even to approach them in ways that maximize their interest and value. In 2010, new forms include the vook (e-book with video inserts), the digi-novel (e-book with audio and web extras), the augmented reality version (offering 3-D capabilities for a variety of flat screens and even book pages), the social media game (such as Farmville — see Ebner, 2009, B6), and the wiki novel — among many others. How will we navigate this complex territory, bringing our astonishing repertoire of conventional understanding to bear on new ways of making stories?

Filling Gaps: Inferences, Closure, and Affect Linking

Orienting involves relatively high-level decisions about where to direct attention, and often draws on intertextual awareness. At the level of page or pixel, however, it is necessary for interpreters to flesh out the information on offer with their own supply of experience. As in so many aspects of interpretation, the top-down and bottom-up perspectives must interact and inform each other. In this chapter we look at how interpreters activate the data they are given and bring it to life in their minds.

Orienting: Finding the Way Forward

In an ideal world, this chapter and the next would be printed and read side-by-side. To divide the topic of how we make headway in a text, I have arbitrarily taken the idea of orienting as a kind of macro-level, top-down approach, while filling gaps and making inferences is taken as occurring at the more local level of sentences and paragraphs. In reality, interpreters almost certainly oscillate between the two.

Inhabiting the Story: Comparative Perspectives

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen make the strong case for a monomodal past: For some time now, there has been, in Western culture, a distinct preference for monomodality. The most highly valued genres of writing (literary novels, academic treatises, official documents and reports, etc.) came entirely without illustration, and had graphically uniform, dense pages of print. Paintings nearly all used the same support (canvas) and the same medium (oils), whatever their style or subject. In concert performances all musicians dressed identically and only conductor and soloists were allowed a modicum of bodily expression. The specialized theoretical and critical disciplines which developed to speak of these arts became equally monomodal: one language to speak about language (linguistics), another to speak about art (art history), yet another to speak about music (musicology), and so on, each with its own methods, its own assumptions, its own technical vocabulary, its own strengths and its own blind spots. (2001, p. 1)

Thinking It Through: Theoretical Frameworks

Contemporary definitions of literacy would fill a large conceptual map, featuring many battlegrounds where conflicting ideas about what counts as literate behaviour are negotiated. This book occupies a territory that amounts to a small corner of this map. Overarching general theories about changing communications are important, but so are smaller-scale projects that attempt to improve our awareness of particular forms of understanding. In this study, I am specifically looking at ways in which we come to comprehend narrative fiction in three distinctive media, one very old, one middle-aged, and one young and new. To use a distinction that Andrew Elfenbein borrows from psychologists, I will investigate many online and some offline interpretive processes.