An Overflow of Gazing at the Unseen

As I've been working on our McLuhan project, I've been able to dive deeper into some of the concepts introduced into McLuhan's work and I think they're particularly appropriate when considering Nick "A Companion to Digital Literary Studies" and his ideas regarding the role of interactive fiction as a conceptual way to better understand Oulipo's theory of potential literature.

I hope this doesn't confuse anyone, because my goal here is to incorporate more traditional literary ideas with newer ones in order to facilitate understanding because that's what helped me comprehend some of the more complex theories.

First, McLuhan defines the exchange between reader and author, saying, "Mechanical multiples of the same texts created a public -- a reading public" (McLuhan 122). This reading public (generally referred to as 'the reader') constantly watches and influences the way the authors write and produce their literary texts.

Now, this reminded me of a literary concept that I've been discussing in my 20th Century American Lit class called the Panopticon, which helped define the powerful impact of the gaze on the subjects of the gaze. Here is an image to help you visualize:

Here's the idea behind the image: The watchtower has a view of the prisoners twenty-four/seven, and therefore influences the way the prisoners behave because the prisoners are constantly aware that they're under the gaze of the watchtower. 

In this way, authors are constantly under the gaze of the reading public. However, what happens when the reading public and the authors merge? I believe this is where interactive fiction and Oulipo's theory of potential literature occur. 

Monfort talks about the role of the author (or the interactor) in interactive fiction, saying, "The interactor could have typed something different and gone into a different area at first... Bronze [the interactive story referenced in the article] provides a specific set of possibilities, however, not every imaginable text..." (Monfort). 

The interactor has become both audience and author, because he or she is able to control the direction of the story to his or her own satisfaction. Oulipo's concept of potential fiction takes that and sets in on an unlimited stage by incorporating the digital components. Stephen Ramsay says in An Algorithmic Criticism, "The computer revolutionizes, not because it proposes an alternative...but because it reimagines that procedure at new scales, with new speeds, and among new sets of conditions" (Ramsay 31). 

Monfort's description of the relationship between human and computers in interaction fiction says, "If interactive fiction were simply a riff on the command-line way of interacting computers, it would be of little interest. But it has been more than that for decades, providing a fascinating structure for narrative human-computer conversation, bringing simulation and narration together in novel ways" (Monfort). 

I believe that this human-computer interaction is reflective of the shift from a drastic separation between reading public and authors into a reading public that are simultaneously authors. 

Works Cited:

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam, 1967. Print. 

Montfort, Nick. "Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction." A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. N.P., 2008. Web. 01 Oct. 2014. 

Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: U of Illinois, 2011. Print.