A friend wrote some weeks ago: “i like… the way your words get all twisty when you’re sleepy.” Well, that’s lucky for me, because sleepy seems the only state in which I write these posts lately.
Today, I completely surprised myself by getting through upwards of 45 pages of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, which I’m re-reading for work. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s thoroughly enjoyable. It’s that I am a very slow reader. As recently as yesterday or today, there was a discussion of common reading speeds over at ifMUD, in which people were saying that one minute per page is decently common. On a good day, I can get through at about 3-4 minutes per page; usually, it takes much more time.
I used to swallow books whole, when I was a kid. Lightning-speed reading. Then I learned English, and then Italian, and never worked on reading speed in those languages. Didn’t know how: reading quickly in Russian always came naturally, from a very young age. (Thanks, big brother, for sitting me down and making me learn to read. His patience, in retrospect, is remarkable. Have I mentioned how very cool my brother is?) Nowadays, it’s difficult to get lost in a book – unless, for some unexplained reason, it’s the Harry Potter series or a handful of other authors, including Sturgeon, Gaiman and some Heinlein. I don’t mind it one way or the other, but graduate school reading load being what it is, time management has been a challenge.
On the other hand, when I know that any given project is more than halfway done, the rest seems to come more easily. Cybertext is way more than halfway done. Woot!
Particularly delightful this evening has been Aarseth’s explanation of the interactive fiction “walkthru” – “a step-by-step recipe that contains the solution, and ‘walks’ the user through a game.” (117) A recipe! That contains the solution, which is another name for potion, which requires a recipe in order to be made! But the recipe contains the solution; the description of the ingredients and their proper mixing procedures contains the ingredients themselves. I love recursive word happiness.
I’d promised myself to not write another entry without wording something new about RolandHT. It’s difficult, though, to get started. Finding a recent Planned Obsolescence post about this tonight is kicking me into writing something. So what if it’s disjointed. I’m just out to voice it, before I forget it. Sometime in the near future this will get reworked and stuck into the thesis somewhere. (Comments from my dear, numerous readers will of course be invaluable in this.)
Roland is a corpus of works, spanning oral and written poetry and prose; drama; painting and drawing; music; electronic hypertext; and god knows what else. He may or may not have been a real person; if he did exist, he lived in the 8th century A.D. and died in 778 in the service of King Charlemagne of France, as the captain of his Breton March. Historical reality is pretty much irrelevant here, though, because in late 11th century the Song of Roland (Chanson de Roland) was written down in France, and from there spread like wildfire. I say written down, because it is obviously an epic poem strongly rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, which had to have been in existence long before the first extant manuscript.
So, from there, everyone and their brother has written about Roland in the West. This has been true for upwards of 900 years, and shows no signs of stopping. Most recently, there have been two Italian prose retellings of Renaissance-era epic poems about Roland; a Warren Zevon song (”Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) which recalls strongly the plot of the French epic; an electronic game based on this character; and a four-issue comic book based on the French Song of Roland. He’s so rooted most everywhere in the West, it’s ridiculous.
So, here’s the main, most pressing problem. Here is a corpus of Roland works which has never been studied as a whole. How should it be approached, from a theoretical perspective? I tried applying Propp’s morphology of the folk tale to some Roland stories, but that morphology is meant to be a literary tool, and does not speak to Roland’s other forms. Numerous literary theorists, useful as their work is, are again working with literature. A new typology should be worked out for the study of a character’s permutations along a complex multi-dimensional coordinate scheme defined by temporal, cultural and generic axes.
Aarseth’s right: a typology for the study of cybertext (Roland’s a cybertext; I’ll write about this further another time) must be functional. But how do I come up with such a typology without ever having studied (say) art history formally? There seems to be an overwhelming need for knowing everything about all these constituent art forms. To know everything is impossible, so I’ll find a compromise; but what’s enough?
For that matter, I’ve looked for formal studies of character (fictional or historical or both; the key being, across art forms), and have been unable to find any. If anyone has suggestions for sources, I’d love to hear them.
