Abstract
This volume of essays is a welcome addition to recent attempts to extend narratological analysis beyond its traditional sphere of language-based literary fiction to other semiotic modes and new technologies. A successor to Marie-Laure Ryan’s groundbreaking Narrative Across Media (2004), the volume shares with other edited collections such as Ruth Page’s Narrative and Multimodality (2009), or Page and Thomas’s New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in a Digital Age (2011), a determination to push the discipline beyond its classical boundaries. Featuring many of the leading thinkers in contemporary narratology, Intermediality and Storytelling presents a fascinating insight into the challenges and rewards of the ‘medial turn’, and poses some fundamental questions about the nature of narrative and narrativity in the face of ever-increasing media convergence.
From the outset, the editors confront the thorny issue of defining intermediality, recognising that many competing terms (transmediality, multimediality) also purport to map out the new media landscape. Drawing on an illuminating analogy with intertextuality, intermediality is defined simply and broadly as referring to any kind of relation between different media. The introduction is also refreshingly honest in allowing that the contributors’ use of the term is not entirely consistent, and it has to be said that the term barely features in many of the ensuing chapters.
The volume begins with Ryan examining the concept of fiction across media, providing an interesting historical perspective on the evolution of the term and its culturally situated links with the notion of truth. Engaging directly with long-standing debates within narratology about exporting terms and concepts derived from the study of prose fiction to film, Ryan argues that we need to move beyond the futile attempt to insist on a completely equivalent relationship between language-based narratives and other cultural artefacts, and focus instead on analogy rather than identity. The chapter is therefore crucial in setting up the intermedial approach to contemporary narratives for the remainder of the volume.
The chapters that follow cover a wide range of contemporary media forms. Some are organised in clusters, for example chapters on comic books, photography and film, providing interesting points of comparison in terms of the approaches taken. However, the organisation of the volume manages to avoid the impression of taking each of these as discrete forms, and also avoids the temptation of hierarchical or chronological imposition.
Brian McHale and William Kuskin both focus on comic books, in McHale’s case Martin Rowson’s (1990) adaptation of The Waste Land, while Kuskin considers the work of Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman. McHale’s focus on cross-media adaptation demonstrates the need for narratology to engage with non-narrative organisation in texts, and he turns to poetry for a set of theoretical tools to address the specific demands of what he calls ‘mixed’ texts. In particular, he draws on the notion of segmentivity to claim that both Eliot’s poem, and Rowson’s narrativising of it, are ‘mixed’ texts in which narrativity and segmentivity interact, albeit in different ways. McHale contends that considering comics alongside poetry is especially productive because both rely so much on readers gap-filling ‘in the place where meaning stalls out’ (p. 46). This insistence that examining the formal characteristics of a specific medium is only ever part of the story is echoed in many of the later chapters, with much emphasis being placed throughout on reader and audience response. Kuskin’s chapter complements McHale’s in arguing that recent attempts to define comics as a unique medium results in artificially separating them from the rest of literary history. Kuskin proposes a new term, ‘graphia’, to refer to the interplay of media that he claims has been a long-standing feature of the expressive uses of the book format, thus paving the way for recognising comics as a legitimate cultural mode.
Narratology has tended to overlook television narratives, perhaps because of their relatively low cultural status in comparison to film. Jason Mittell examines the techniques used in complex TV shows such as Lost to engage viewers’ memories using both verbal and non-verbal cues. As well as providing a fascinating account of the range of devices employed, Mittell draws an interesting distinction between working memory and the activation of long-term memories, both of which play a significant role in serialised narratives. Meanwhile, Paul Cobley argues that post-9/11 narratives such as 24 and Spooks weave the latest technologies into the very fabric of the narration to create a paranoid style in which the increased role of surveillance in our everyday lives is played out in a ‘frenzy of the visible’, reflecting the dominance of the audio-visual over print in contemporary thrillers.
Demonstrating the merits of an intermedial approach to film narrative, Samuel Ben Israel examines the emergence of the multi-protagonist film, arguing that the genre disrupts traditional narratological concepts such as those of character and story. Multi-protagonist films, it is claimed, in fact represent a new kind of relational narration, which acts as a critique of the mainstream. Also focusing on film, in this case the much-neglected genre of the musical, Per Krogh Hansen examines the ways in which song and dance are integrated, continually challenging our notions of ‘the real’. The chapter takes in a wide range of examples, from the classic Hollywood period to the postmodern, and while wary of imposing his own teleology, Hansen shows how contemporary musicals perhaps more radically exploit the intermedial possibilities of the form.
Both chapters on photography reveal how the narrative dimension of this medium has been largely ignored. Covering a variety of photographic forms, Jan Baetens and Mieke Bleyen maintain that while it is possible to reread photographs from a narrative point of view, it is important to restrict the ways in which narratological terms are applied. Markku Lehtimäki offers a more extended analysis of James Agee’s 1940s’ photo-documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to show that narratology can usefully highlight the differing relations between word and image in this kind of text. Lehtimäki stresses that it is not enough to read visual representations through verbal paradigms, and maintains that the reader’s role is vital in activating the many possible meanings prompted by the relationship between word and image.
In the first of two chapters exploring narratives relying on digital technologies, Ruth Page provides a timely critique of existing accounts of interactivity, calling for increased engagement with models developed for the study of face-to-face communication. She shows how such an expansion would ensure that the concept of interactivity can encompass users and participants not just relations between humans and machines, and would also allow us to respond to the opening up of new channels for interaction post-Web 2.0. David Ciccoricco’s analysis of the videogame God of War (2005) demonstrates the merits but also the limitations of applying narrative-theoretical frameworks to new media, especially when it comes to the concept of character. Ciccoricco shows how videogame characters, like many others, rely on players being able to draw on recognisable schemata and to accept the illusion of having access to a fictional mind, but his analysis is also sensitive to the unique relationship that playing alongside a character brings into being.
Multimodal narratives face specific pressures when it comes to competing for our attention according to Elsa Simões Lucas Freitas, both because they have to ‘plunder’ many different kinds of text and because they need to constantly reinforce their message across media. In her analysis of a multimodal advertising campaign, Freitas highlights the importance of the role of the viewer, interacting with the advertisement and co-operating so as to fill in the blanks left by the narrative. Alison Gibbons’s chapter also deals with a multimodal narrative, in this case Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, published in 2000. Gibbons engages much more explicitly than others in the volume with questions of definition and pinpoints specific intermedial references in Danielewski’s writing. Gibbons argues that the novel demands from the reader an embodied connection with the book as a material object, so that each and every reader can have access to a unique intermedial aesthetic experience.
Concluding the volume, Marina Grishakova explores the tensions between the verbal and the visual with reference to a classic metavisual film narrative (Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 1954), and an example of a metaverbal text (James’s Turn of the Screw, 1898). Metarepresentational narratives, it is claimed, highlight how we piece together the multiple clues (verbal, visual, aural, olfactory, etc.) available to us, but in ways which vary from individual to individual. Grishakova claims that this is central to understanding how the art work takes us beyond the immediate communicative content to provide access to new meanings.
Intermediality and Storytelling clearly succeeds in extending the reach of narratology, with each chapter providing a model for applying key theoretical terms and concepts to specific examples. The essays also offer illuminating insights into different media and intermedial relations, making the volume of interest to academics from a wide range of intellectual backgrounds. However, it remains to be seen whether the concept of intermediality itself will hold out quite as strongly against competing terms, and in this respect perhaps the volume would have benefited from a more explicit and thoroughgoing championing and debating of its unique contribution to the field by some of the contributors.