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Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse--novels, films, television series--is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg textuality? In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, Aarseth situates these literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature--a term borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I Ching or Apollinaire's calligrams, with which the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence. Constructing a theoretical model that describes how new electronic forms build on this tradition, Aarseth bridges the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts. He then uses the perspective of ergodic aesthetics to reexamine literary theories of narrative, semiotics, and rhetoric and to explore the implications of applying these theories to materials for which they were not intended.… (more)
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Johns Hopkins University Press (1997), Edition: UK ed., 216 pages
Media reviews
Oggi parliamo di qualcosa di davvero oscuro ai più: la letteratura ergodica. Cos’è costei? Beh, ecco un indizio utile per coloro i quali erano adolescenti negli anni Novanta: ricordate i libri-game?
Ma sì, dai, avrete avuto tra i vostri amici almeno uno di quei nerd che mentre gli altri
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passavano il pomeriggio a giocare a pallone nel campetto della parrocchia, se ne restavano sugli spalti con il naso ficcato tra le pagine di un libro che durante la narrazione a un certo punto ti portava a un bivio e a seconda della scelta che facevi la storia andava avanti (e poi a finire) in un modo diverso.
Perché ne so così tanto? Ok, lo confesso, ero uno di quei nerd. Ma ero simpatica.
Una definizione recente
Da quando io leggevo quei libri è dovuto passare ancora qualche anno prima che qualcuno ne codificasse una definizione: si è dovuto aspettare il 1997.
Ecco dunque cos’è la letteratura ergodica: è quella letteratura che richiede al lettore uno sforzo in più rispetto alla letteratura normale – che si legge ad esempio scorrendo le righe con gli occhi e voltando automaticamente le pagine – sforzo che in qualche modo fa partecipare il lettore al processo creativo che sta dietro e dentro la letteratura stessa, normalmente affare solo dello scrittore. In questo modo, inoltre, è il lettore a conferire significato al testo.
Quindi, nei libri ergodici si può trovare praticamente di tutto, da parti cancellate a parole scritte dal basso verso l’alto, pagine che devi decidere tu da che parte iniziare a leggerle ecc. ecc.
Il capostipite della letteratura ergodica: Cybertext di Espen J. Aarseth
Dal momento che al suo autore si deve la suddetta definizione di letteratura ergodica, possiamo tranquillamente definire questo come il capostipite (consapevole) dei libri ergodici. Il sottotitolo di Cybertext, in effetti, recita così: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Un vero e proprio manifesto.
Nell’opera Aarseth teorizza la possibilità che possa esistere un tipo di letteratura con vita indipendente rispetto al medium da cui è veicolata, cioè il libro. Per analizzare questo tipo di testi, ecco, dunque, due categorie utili: i textons e gli scriptons. I primi sono elementi testuali che osservano regole precise e sono presenti in numero determinato; i secondi, invece, sono le possibili combinazioni di tali elementi e sono, perciò, infinite.
Il «caso» Danielewski
Uno dei più spettacolari testi ergodici così definiti è Casa di foglie dello scrittore americano Mark Z. Danielewski, uscito nel 2000.
Racconta la storia di un documentarista e della sua famiglia che vivono in una casa mutaforma, più grande all’interno che all’esterno, che lentamente li conduce alla pazzia. La storia, inoltre, è raccontata attraverso il classico artificio narrativo del manoscritto ritrovato da un ragazzo di Los Angeles.
Nell’opera, che risulta essere un thriller in definitiva, sono presenti più voci narranti in campo, un’impaginazione particolare con pagine intere che riportano anche una sola parola, note fittissime, parole scritte in colori diversi e particolari, bugie, contraddizioni e rimandi interni di difficile individuazione.
Dato l’enorme successo, Danielewski, poi, s’imbarcò in un progetto ancora più ambizioso: il romanzo che uccide il romanzo, e cioè The familiar, una saga che sarebbe uscita in ventisette volumi a distanza di tre mesi uno dall’altro e che doveva essere una sorta di rivincita del romanzo sulle serie tv. In quest’opera ogni personaggio ha un suo punto di vista evidenziato anche da elementi visivi come colori diversi, ma nonostante l’interesse del pubblico, visto il grande investimento economico che l’opera stessa richiedeva, è stata interrotta dopo il quinto volume.
Un altro lavoro, per così dire più semplice e immediato, dello stesso autore, è Only revolutions, del 2006, che racconta due storie in parallelo ognuna delle quali segue un verso di stampa. In pratica: capovolgi il libro e cambi storia.
Letteratura combinata ed elettronica
Non so se sia corretto definirli antenati o solo lontani parenti, ma per non rischiare di farvi credere che questo tipo di letteratura sia un genere di nicchia destinato a un pubblico ristretto, è necessario introdurre i concetti di letteratura combinata e letteratura elettronica.
La letteratura combinata è una corrente francese diffusasi negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta all’interno della quale c’erano elementi narrativi disposti in base a scelte razionali non modificabili. A questa letteratura aderì il cosiddetto «gruppo Oulipo» che annoverava tra i suoi illustri esponenti Queneau, Perec e il nostro Calvino. Pensiamo ai Cent mille milliards de poèmes, oppure La vita, istruzioni per l’uso e al ben più noto Il castello dei destini incrociati.
Si sono, poi, fatti ricondurre alla letteratura ergodica anche il sacro testo cinese dell’I Ching, con i suoi sessantaquattro esagrammi interpretabili in base al lancio di una monetina, e i Calligrammi di Apollinaire, dove le parole di una poesia sono sparse in direzioni diverse a formare una figura, senza che vi sia un chiaro ordine di lettura.
Citiamo, infine, come esempio estremo, Marc Saporta e il suo Composizione n.1, in cui il lettore veniva invitato a mescolare le pagine dell’opera e poi a estrarle a caso da una scatola, improvvisando così sul momento l’ordine di lettura.
Oggi, assicurano gli esperti, produrre un testo di natura ergodica è molto più semplice di una volta grazie al contributo della letteratura elettronica, quella, cioè che nasce intrinsecamente con il mezzo elettronico. Tutta, ormai, perché nessuno scrittore scrive più a mano. Vi ricorda qualcosa? Mc Luhan forse? Certo: il mezzo è il messaggio e se pensiamo ai social, oggi, è ancora più vero, perciò ecco che arriviamo all’ultimo paragrafo della nostra riflessione…
Il futuro del libro è ora: la rivoluzione dell’ipertesto
Quando io studiavo all’università, nei primi anni del nuovo Millennio, ancora si studiava sui libri la teoria dell’ipertesto, che oggi è pratica quotidiana per ognuno di noi quando, navigando su internet, saltiamo da un link all’altro variando font, impostazioni e colori delle pagine e, di fatto, costruendoci un proprio testo personalizzato diverso da quello di chiunque altro. E questo che cos’è, in fondo, se non letteratura ergodica secondo la definizione che ne abbiamo dato finora? Meditate, gente, meditate… Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member Meredy
Six-word review: Alternative textual structures explicated as literature.
Extended review:
"Choose Your Own Adventure" books came along when my children were young readers. They reminded me of something that I had tried (unsuccessfully) to create on paper when I was about their age. The idea of
Had I done so, I would have become an author of ergodic literature.
In choosing my own reading adventure myself a few months ago, I passed--without realizing its significance--a critical juncture when I chose the left fork in the road and purchased a copy of the 709-page House of Leaves (Danielewski). That work led me to go back for Pale Fire (Nabokov), which I ought to have read about 40 years previously, and to look up some amount of analytic and critical commentary.
I went on to read The Tragedy of Arthur (Phillips) and to reflect afresh on The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (Hoffman) and Possession (Byatt), which are not ergodic literature as I understand it but which nevertheless partake of some of its unusual characteristics.
In this reading game, your score doesn't suffer if you take the steps out of order. But your experience of point C can be really different, depending upon whether it's preceded by point B or point D.
And that, in fact, is part of the point, according to author Aarseth.
To understand more about what I'd been reading and why (like the Navidson house itself) these works seemed to me much larger than their actual and metaphorical dimensions, I took a deep breath and plunged into Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Disclaimer: I'm not an academic. I earned my degree in English at a time when none of us had ever heard of word processing, and Internet Protocol (IP) hadn't been invented yet. Despite a 30-year career in publications, most of it in high tech in Silicon Valley, I'm more than a little out of my depth in reading this book. I make no claims for my understanding of its more esoteric content, much less for owning a suitable context or framework in which to place it. Any failure of comprehension and interpretation is my own and should not be laid at the author's door.
Several sources citing Aarseth's work on ergodic literature quote him as follows (page 1):
"In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text."
Some extend the excerpt to quote the next sentence (page 1):
"If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages."
This, I believe, is intended as description but not as definition. The characterization of a serious reader's engagement with a challenging but traditionally structured text as trivial tends to provoke a distracting surge of indignation that leads away from an understanding of the concept. Most literature that is worth reading involves a nontrivial effort on the part of the reader; but Aarseth does not mean to disparage conventional literature or the work of reading it. Rather, he is talking about a difference in the essential nature of the work.
It took me most of the book to arrive at a definition that I feel is warranted by the author's treatment of his subject, this formulation being my own and not the author's. Appropriately enough, it's phrased as a question and not a statement. At the bottom of page 114 I wrote in pencil:
Would it be correct to say that ergodic literature is literature that must in some sense be navigated by the reader, who must figure out how to do that as part of the reading process?
In the concluding chapter, on page 179 of 183, we come at last to this:
"The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes {sic} between successful and unsuccessful users." In other words, there are rules for extracting something like meaning (or sense, or experience, or something else for which the signs and forms stand, as we extract meat from a nut) from the composition (or work, or program), and part of the reader's (user's) task is to figure out what those rules are.
I think it's worth dwelling on this matter of definition at some length because comprehension of the concept itself might be the most useful result of my reading of this book. (If something is interesting, it's automatically useful, although not everything that's useful is necessarily interesting.)
Other ideas prosecuted in the course of this relatively short but influential work are the meaning and, where applicable, interrelationship of text, of hypertext, of authorship, of narrative, of medium, and of reading. History, exploration, and analysis of aspects of postmodernist and posstructuralist literature, text-based adventure games, and multiuser dungeons (MUDs) figure prominently in the process. Allowing for the fact that this book was published sixteen years ago and that much of what we find commonplace now in experiencing computer-based media was either undeveloped or in its infancy, the author's detailed analyses and typologies furnish a revealing perspective, exactly as the title promises, on literature that bends or breaks the old rules and even on literature that doesn't.
If you enjoy the entertainment of watching a bravura display of mental athletics and you can muster some hard-headed persistence in following, dictionary in hand, several lines of thought pertaining to verbal works that you might not have known how to think of as literature, you may take away from this possibly novel experience something more than you anticipated going in.
Extended review:
"Choose Your Own Adventure" books came along when my children were young readers. They reminded me of something that I had tried (unsuccessfully) to create on paper when I was about their age. The idea of
Show More
virtual exploits with variable outcomes and only imaginary risks appeals to the armchair adventurer in many of us. Adult video gamers bear witness to the fact that this is not an appetite that ends with childhood.Had I done so, I would have become an author of ergodic literature.
In choosing my own reading adventure myself a few months ago, I passed--without realizing its significance--a critical juncture when I chose the left fork in the road and purchased a copy of the 709-page House of Leaves (Danielewski). That work led me to go back for Pale Fire (Nabokov), which I ought to have read about 40 years previously, and to look up some amount of analytic and critical commentary.
I went on to read The Tragedy of Arthur (Phillips) and to reflect afresh on The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (Hoffman) and Possession (Byatt), which are not ergodic literature as I understand it but which nevertheless partake of some of its unusual characteristics.
In this reading game, your score doesn't suffer if you take the steps out of order. But your experience of point C can be really different, depending upon whether it's preceded by point B or point D.
And that, in fact, is part of the point, according to author Aarseth.
To understand more about what I'd been reading and why (like the Navidson house itself) these works seemed to me much larger than their actual and metaphorical dimensions, I took a deep breath and plunged into Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Disclaimer: I'm not an academic. I earned my degree in English at a time when none of us had ever heard of word processing, and Internet Protocol (IP) hadn't been invented yet. Despite a 30-year career in publications, most of it in high tech in Silicon Valley, I'm more than a little out of my depth in reading this book. I make no claims for my understanding of its more esoteric content, much less for owning a suitable context or framework in which to place it. Any failure of comprehension and interpretation is my own and should not be laid at the author's door.
Several sources citing Aarseth's work on ergodic literature quote him as follows (page 1):
"In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text."
Some extend the excerpt to quote the next sentence (page 1):
"If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages."
This, I believe, is intended as description but not as definition. The characterization of a serious reader's engagement with a challenging but traditionally structured text as trivial tends to provoke a distracting surge of indignation that leads away from an understanding of the concept. Most literature that is worth reading involves a nontrivial effort on the part of the reader; but Aarseth does not mean to disparage conventional literature or the work of reading it. Rather, he is talking about a difference in the essential nature of the work.
It took me most of the book to arrive at a definition that I feel is warranted by the author's treatment of his subject, this formulation being my own and not the author's. Appropriately enough, it's phrased as a question and not a statement. At the bottom of page 114 I wrote in pencil:
Would it be correct to say that ergodic literature is literature that must in some sense be navigated by the reader, who must figure out how to do that as part of the reading process?
In the concluding chapter, on page 179 of 183, we come at last to this:
"The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes {sic} between successful and unsuccessful users." In other words, there are rules for extracting something like meaning (or sense, or experience, or something else for which the signs and forms stand, as we extract meat from a nut) from the composition (or work, or program), and part of the reader's (user's) task is to figure out what those rules are.
I think it's worth dwelling on this matter of definition at some length because comprehension of the concept itself might be the most useful result of my reading of this book. (If something is interesting, it's automatically useful, although not everything that's useful is necessarily interesting.)
Other ideas prosecuted in the course of this relatively short but influential work are the meaning and, where applicable, interrelationship of text, of hypertext, of authorship, of narrative, of medium, and of reading. History, exploration, and analysis of aspects of postmodernist and posstructuralist literature, text-based adventure games, and multiuser dungeons (MUDs) figure prominently in the process. Allowing for the fact that this book was published sixteen years ago and that much of what we find commonplace now in experiencing computer-based media was either undeveloped or in its infancy, the author's detailed analyses and typologies furnish a revealing perspective, exactly as the title promises, on literature that bends or breaks the old rules and even on literature that doesn't.
If you enjoy the entertainment of watching a bravura display of mental athletics and you can muster some hard-headed persistence in following, dictionary in hand, several lines of thought pertaining to verbal works that you might not have known how to think of as literature, you may take away from this possibly novel experience something more than you anticipated going in.
Show Less
LibraryThing member breadhat
A little bit dry, a little bit dated, and I wish it covered a broader range of material. It is, however, rich in meaningful theoretical content; recommended to anyone interested in video games from a literary/semiotic standpoint.
LibraryThing member Braden_Timss
Felt like I could learn a lot from this book's pragmatic, methodological approach to deciding what questions to ask. Aarseth presents the work here with the authority of someone who has truly poured over the history and research, coming away with a lay of the land tangible enough to know that some
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questions are simply interesting while others are productive. (but also interesting). The sober grasp on conducting an aesthetic analysis of cybertextual literature's difference from other literature is just impressive. Real PhD hours in here. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1997
ISBN
0801855799 / 9780801855795
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