Readings in Narrative Theory: Before Reading

Allow me to preface this by saying that not only is the author of this text a professor of my college, he is actually on the board of examiners that will eventually evaluate my project to determine whether or not I graduate. Not that I'll be overly generous to him or make a point of being nicer than I otherwise would in my analysis. Just fair warning that if, for some reason, you bear a mighty grudge against Rabinowitz (although why you would I have no idea - he seems like a very nice man) - there is a reasonable chance he may read this blog. Bear your audience in mind when leaving comments.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987.

One of the things that interests me in my readings on narrative theory is the idea of reading as construction - specifically as the cooperative construction between reader and author. I use this idea as a counter-argument to a particular thread of ludological extremism that tends to go along the lines of "successful narrative is completely under the control of the author, while a successful game should be as open-ended and player-decision-oriented as possible. Thus, the two mediums have opposing goals and are not compatible." (For an actual example of this argument (well-constructed, for all that I violently disagree with its premises), see this article by Greg Costikyan: http://www.costik.com/gamnstry.html.) (For the record, I'm not against ludology in general - I'm probably a ludologist myself, all things considered. (I will have to write about my exact position in the debate at a later point.) I just dislike the extremist end of the school of thought that declares that video games can't tell stories.)

I happen to disagree with both the assumptions of this argument. The second assumption, that a more successful game must inherently be more open-ended (less linear), is easy enough to undermine with examples of successful linear games like Portal or Call of Duty 4. Games, I might add, that are successful not only from an entertainment/sales point of view, but from an academic/artistic one as well. (I use them both as examples in my paper to support various points about effective use of the medium.)

The first assumption of this argument, that literary narrative must be entirely under the control of the author to be successful, is also faulty. This point is best supported through the analysis of reading as a cooperative construction - a much-explored topic of literary narrative theory. This is where Rabinowitz's book comes in.

Before Reading is about the aspects of reading that go into a narrative construction before the reader even opens the book. These are things like narrative conventions that the reader might expect when picking up a book from a particular genre, assumptions - ethical, logical, emotional - that the reader brings to the construction, or even the way we are taught to read. Thus, before we begin the first sentence, we as readers have already assembled a framework with which to interpret the text. Moreover, this framework will be different for every reader, thus flying in the face of the argument that "literary narrative is strictly controlled by the author."

Here are some relevant quotes from Rabinowitz's work:

"There can be no reading without a reader--but the term reader is slippery, not only because all individual readers read differently, but also because for almost all of the them, there are several different ways of appropriating a text. This fact has been recognized, at least implicitly, by the large number of critics whose models of reading are multitiered. Usually, a two-leveled opposition is posited, although different critics use different terms. For Hirsch, it is "significance" and "meaning." For Wayne Booth, it is "understanding" and "overstanding." For Tzvetan Todorov, there are three terms: "interpretation," "description," and "reading." Many other critics, despite the recent arguments of Fish, remain wedded, in one form or another, to the distinction between literal meaning and interpretation." (20)

"[...] despite the theoretically infinite number of potential authorial audiences, it does not follow that authors have total control over the act of writing, any more than that readers have total control over the act of interpretation. In a trivial sense, of course, they do: authors can put down whatever marks they wish on the page; readers can construe them however they wish. But once authors and readers accept the communal nature of writing and reading, they give up some of that freedom. Specifically, once he or she has made certain initial decisions, any writer who wishes to communicate--even if he or she wishes to communicate ambiguity--has limited the range of subsequent choices." (23-24)

"A reader in the genre [of classical British detective stories] will know fairly quickly what to fasten on to. Of particular importance will be such details as who has seen the victim after the train has left the Gare de Lyon. Such a reader, from his or her experience with other similar novels, will also know that in detective stories, "there must be no love interest." He or she will therefore rightfully dismiss as window dressing the romantic story of the pure and simple Katherine Grey, who has just inherited a fortune from the crotchety old woman to whom she was a companion." (40)

This final quotation is of interest to me for an entirely different reason - the concept of "genre." I've found it interesting that, in gaming, "genre" rarely refers to the narrative content of the story, but instead to the gameplay method. Instead of "mysteries" and "romances" we have "shooters" and "RPGs." (Role-Playing Games) And yet, some of the same reader strategies indicated by Rabinowitz above apply to these game categories as well. A player will come into an RPG with a certain set of expectations about what the genre will provide. This can even include (although does not always) certain narrative conventions. An RPG player may expect, instead of a single main character, that she will control a party of main characters, each with their own unique set of skills. She will expect an inventory screen through which to access the items she's collected. An FPS (First-Person Shooter) player might expect the "jump" key to be located by default on the space bar, "wasd" to be the movement keys, and primary fire to be controlled by the left mouse button. The same way that a reader picks up an example of the mystery genre with an in-place mental framework about how to read the narrative, players of a particular gaming genre come into the game with an idea of how to play it.