Shifting Points of View
Edward Picot
Pages in a book are printed and bound
in a fixed sequence, which
encourages us to read them in a fixed sequence too.
Because the
book is a
supremely efficient piece of technology for storing and conveying
text,
it has come to dominate our thinking about literature, to such as
extent
that we tend to imagine fixed-sequence or "linear" writing to be the
only kind possible, especially in prose, and most especially in prose
fiction.
This is not the case, however, and because pages on
the Web are
laid out non-sequentially, in a "cloud", and can be connected to each
other in a whole variety of different ways, the advent of the World
Wide
Web has stimulated a certain amount of experimentation with nonlinear
forms.
Nonlinear writing can be structured in a whole variety of ways.
One
good example of what might be called the "maze" structure is Millie
Niss's poem Sin and Subways - a complex pattern of short
text-passages or "nodes" connected to each other by a multitude of
hyperlinks.
From most nodes it is possible to choose several different paths, and
when you choose a path you're never sure where it's going to take
you,
which is why it feels like being in a maze.
The poem comes
complete with
a short but very illuminating explanation of this structure in terms
of
graph-theory.
Another nonlinear structure is the "multiple helix", in which two or
more narrative filaments are twined round each other, interconnecting
at
various points, like the strands of a DNA molecule.
Each strand
can be
read separately from beginning to end, and the strands can be read in
any sequence, but the full sense of the story only emerges after all
the
strands have been followed and their connections understood.
Milorad
Pavic's story The Glass Snail is an example of this kind of
structure, and my
own story for children, The Goblin and the Cupboard is similar.
Perhaps the most ancient nonlinear format is the "pile of scrolls",
which consists of a group of writings with broadly similar themes or
subject-matter, written as separate texts but then collected together
into a
bundle which can be read in any sequence.
The Bible is an
example of
this - but the Bible also exemplifies another format, which might be
termed "conflicting testimony".
In this format, the same
sequence of
events is described from more than one point of view, and the
different
points of view may sometimes conflict.
The story of Jesus, as
we find it
in the New Testament, is an example.
Recently, in the WebArtery forum, the writer Tom Bell was
wondering about the
possibilities of representing not the same story, but a particular
scene, from
several different points of view at once.
The parallel which
suggests
itself is a live television broadcast, shot from several different
angles and distances, where the TV director sits in front of a bank
of
monitors looking at a range of camera-shots which are being taken for
him
by a number of different cameras, and choosing which one should
actually
be broadcast at any given moment.
Today, of course, with
interactive
TV, the viewer can make his/her own choice, instead of being dictated
to
by the director.
It ought to be possible, using digital technology, to present various
written accounts of a particular scene in accordance with this "live
broadcast" model.
You could have your "chosen" text enlarged on
the
right-hand side of the page, while on the left-hand side of the page
you
displayed all the other text-points-of-view which were available.
One
difference would be that a TV director's camera-shots are all running
simultaneously in real-time, which means that all the shots are
automatically synchronised with each other (leaving slow-motion
playbacks out of
the question for the moment), whereas a text only starts to "run"
when
somebody starts to read it, and then it can run at any speed,
depending
on the speed at which the reader's eye travels.
This problem
could be
overcome by having the different bits of text all scrolling
automatically at a set rate all the time - Noah Wardrip-Fruin did
this with The Impermanence Agent when he put it together as
a
display for the Whitney Museum's net-art portal.
Alternatively
you
could rig it so that the reader was allowed to scroll the main text
in the
usual way, but all the other texts would automatically be scrolled in
sync.
Another difference between text and camera-shots is that you can see
what's going on in a camera-shot comparatively easily, which makes it
easier to glance across and choose a new angle from the bank of
monitors
or mini-windows; whereas it isn't so easy to glance across and choose
from a whole array of scrolling texts.
But there could be some
mileage
in the idea for text combined with images.
This arrangement would enable readers or viewers to shift quickly
from
one point of view to another within a single scene, but it would
certainly be laborious to set up.
Apart from all the coding and
layout
involved, the writing in itself would be a chore.
The scene
would have to
be carefully-chosen - it would have to be one that was worth seeing
from
various different angles - presumably one that involved a lot of
people
with quite different points of view about whatever was going on.
Each
point of view would have to be written out in just about the same
number of words - and if all the strands of text were to by
synchronised
with each other, any major events would have to happen at the same
point
in each strand.
Let's say someone was shot, for example.
You couldn't
have one person hearing the shot at word 1500 and another hearing it
at
word 250.
You couldn't allow the reader to select a particular
point
of view and come across a description of the shooting, then select a
different point of view five minutes later and come across a
description
of the shooting again.
One of the advantages of linear writing is that it makes very
economical use of its resources.
Everything written in the
linear format is
meant to be read, as the readers make their way through the text in a
straight line from beginning to end.
Writing out lots of
different points
of view when readers can't possibly read them all at the same time,
and
may never read some of them at all, involves a great deal of extra
work
by comparison.
Much of the text in "The Impermanence Agent" was
collected and spliced into the narrative automatically, and you can
see the
attraction, in nonlinear literature, of using mechanical processes to
supplement or replace old fashioned writing, when you consider the
form in
terms of writing input vs. reading output.