The Literature of Discovery

     

Digital fiction is primarily a genre that encourages individual discovery, with the user actively uncovering hidden ‘bodies’ of text. Unlike traditional print literature, in which the author controls the progression of the text, digital fiction encourages the user to seek information from within a database of separate literary ‘nodes’. The narrative is also different for each user, hence one user may read a part of the text situated in the future, for which they have no context, until they can discover a node describing the past. Deena Larson’s online web fiction Disappearing Rain is such an example, with the website mimicking the ‘flow’ of water, creating an almost ‘fluid’ narrative.

There are multiple directions through which to explore the disappearance of Anna, as well to uncover her family’s history. One could use the character biographies, hyperlinks within the nodes, the Japanese characters on the left of the screen or words from the hyperlinked haikus. One possible reading is to follow the haikus, clicking the next hyperlink in the line, which leads to a new story node. After completing the first line the user progresses on to the second, at which point the first changes, thus it becomes impossible to progress through one line of text whilst keeping the other in a fixed state.

Each time we decide to start again new nodes are uncovered, so that we shift between characters and through time, with characters predominately occupying different lines of text. Users ‘discover’ nodes in different orders, and so may read Anna’s story about building a website to find her sister before they learn about Sophie’s distrust of the internet, or Yuki’s decline into senility before Kit’s struggle to provide financially for her family. Each node has a loose history, often centring on the construction of Anna’s website, and each time we begin again with a new storyline we read another version of events from a different perspective. Therefore, we are continually ‘discovering’ members of this family whilst we search for Anna, learning the thoughts and concerns of each member, which intermingle as the narrative progresses and as characters interact.

Each node is titled by a few words, forming separate haiku lines, such as ‘the illusion’, which give the user a vague, often metaphoric depiction of the narrative within the node. Every time we select one of these titles we are exploring a textual body that we know nothing about, and so clicking on each new title is an act of discovery. The haikus invite us to open them and explore their ‘story’, which we continue to piece together with the rest of the narratives in the web fiction. One hyperlink takes the user to a website which claims to be Anna’s web dairy, and depicts a very different Anna from the one we piece together through observing her family. The blog explores Anna’s wild sexual abandonment and questionable group of friends, and so the user uncovers an entirely different narrative to that which is found on the main web fiction page. Larson therefore creates her own web, allowing the user to discover information about Anna which we can only find if we explore each hyperlink within the text.

Reading Disappearing Rain is a ‘fluid’ process, as following one story node will direct the user to another. The text continues to shift as we explore each character’s history, and so every journey into the interactive web fiction is a unique experience of discovery.