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Learn navigation: Doing without the Narrator in artifactual fiction

© 2000 Bill Bly

What good IS a narrator, anyway? Having enumerated some of the services performed by the narrator in most novels, this essay will assess the damage and propose potential benefits of removing the narrator -- a condition which obtains in artifactual fiction. Finally, it will outline the new compact between author and reader that this operation creates.
I. What is "artifactual"[1] fiction?
In most narrative fiction, there is one teller, who relates the tale to the reader in a manner not unlike that of a parent reading a bedtime story to a child: This happened first, this happened next, then this happened after that, and this is what it all means, dear child.
This applies not only to novels with an omniscient narrator, but also to those works that utilize subjective narrators in the first or third person, and even to works that sport the infamous "unreliable" narrator, one whose version of events needs to be taken with a grain or more of salt. The operant word here is "narratOR" -- the single voice "speaking" to us as we read, from which we deduce the univalent consciousness perceiving and interpreting the events it recounts.
In artifactual fiction, this narrator has been removed: more exactly, such fiction deliberately replaces the single-voice narrator with many narrators, who often compete with and contradict each other.
By "artifact" I mean an object with a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). It may tell its story itself, as happens in the simplest form of artifactual fiction, the epistolary novel, or the object may have to be "read" -- analysed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance becomes clear.
Artifactual fiction, where the "content" is shown rather than narrated, presents the reader with a kind of research project: generally, although the materials of the work are arranged with some care in a logical design, they are not processed by the author into a tale tellable by one voice, but rather presented as it were undigested, and the reader must assemble in his own mind a coherent "story" for the whole. The effort required to assemble this coherent story may be, as Espen Aarseth would say, nontrivial [2], and there is also a good chance that no single interpretation or reading of these various narratives will explain everything.
II. What good is a Narrator?
What services does a narrator provide? It might be edifying to ask the standard English Lit. essay question, and sketch in the standard undergraduate (i.e., the expected) answer to it.
Q: What function(s) does a narrator serve in a work of fiction?

The good little pupil will realize that saying: TELL THE STORY -- DUH! -- most likely won't suffice, and will therefore pad out that essentially correct answer by concocting a reasonable recipe:

Set the scene
Introduce the characters
Provide exposition as necessary
Relate the events in a "pleasing" sequence
Draw a conclusion -- i.e., make a thematic statement

This perhaps simplistic view is not, however, to be despised: when we talk about novels before say 1950, we are describing works whose primary job is to accomplish these five things, whatever their other virtues, through the use of a single-voice narrator.
However, in thinking about it more deeply, we can also perceive a more personal register in operation: the narrator can be seen as the emissary of the author to us, the bearer of the message, a herald, almost, bringing us tidings of what the author is thinking about. This narrator is obviously not the author herself, but a special character whose job it is to relate the tale to the reader.
It is in this register that the reader forms a personal relationship with the characters and events of the story -- comes to care about what happens. An analogy to music is not inapropos: the author is the musician; the narrator is the instrument upon which the author plays; the piece of music is the "story" of the novel; and the reader is the listener, moved as much by the performance as by the music itself. To push the analogy to its uttermost extreme, without the narrator the author would be dumb, and the reader would "hear" nothing.
III. Doing without
What is lost when this apparently essential "character" -- the narrator -- is removed -- or, rather, exploded? Clearly, there is some comfort for the reader in the single point of view, a feeling of being taken care of, and a kind of (re)assurance that things will make sense at the end. These intangibles will have to be forfeited.
Well, OK, life's a bitch and so on -- but much harder to give up is that sense of a necessary sequence of events which the single-voice narrator provides. It's important to note, however, that there are two sequences here: the deduced chronology of events as they transpired in the "story", and the actual sequence in which these events are told, which may be anything but chronological. Cause-and-effect relationships seem to be implied by sequence (and are almost always inferred from it), but there are other ways in which events may be related to each other: they may be recurrent or synchronicitous, for example -- among many others, see Everson [3].
Worse, a kind of vertigo takes the place of sequence. Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the composition of his novel _Jealousy_ thus: "The narrative was... made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external chronolgy would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence to an impasse. And this not with the stupid intention of disconcerting the Academy, but precisely because there existed for me no possible order outside of that of the book. The latter was not a narrative mingled with a simple anecdote external to itself, but again the very unfolding of a story which had no other reality than that of the narrative, an occurrence which functioned nowhere else except in the mind of the invisible narrator, in other words of the writer, and of the reader" [4]. Talk about an unreliable narrator!
What? No "real" story behind the narration? You mean we can't ever know what really happened? Nor imagine a life for these characters before, after, offstage? Well, of course we *can*, what we can't get is any validation of these imaginings, because if it isn't in the story, it doesn't exist. And the story only exists in that one place: the narration. There is no "story" apart from its telling.
The enchantment of the single-voice narrator is so strong that, even though we know in our minds that the foregoing is true, we can't help but feel that this isn't right, somehow; isn't it self-evident that a story is told *of* something, something that happened whether the story is told or not? Well, this might hold true for the historian (then again...), but not for the fictioneer, who -- need it be said? -- is making everything up.
On the other hand, perhaps there's a trade-off of some kind. What could be gained by ridding ourselves of this bossy know-it-all, the single-voice narrator?
First and most obvious, we gain the ability to make up our own minds about what it all means. In fact, we realize upon further cogitation, we always had that ability, but were perhaps too well-brought up to question the speaker's (narrator's) motives or veracity, at least until he'd finished his piece. Now, however, we'll be required to do so, time and again, with each new artifact we encounter.
Let's make a virtue of necessity. A sure benefit to be derived from reading artifactual fiction is a sense of accomplishment from having made it through a nontrivial effort. We may not be accustomed to thinking of entertainment in the form of reading as being strenuous, but many sports and hobbies, not to mention puzzles and brain teasers, in which we also indulge as a form of entertainment, can and do involve stenuous effort and considerable endurance, and nobody complains about that.
More to the point, the best literature, like the best music, always involves a degree of energy-investment, and pays off in proportion to that investment with a deeper sense of the convolutions and subtlety of life. Moreover, artifactual fiction is in one sense a more accurate reflection of life than narrative fiction: there is no narrator in life; we experience life piecemeal and parochially; if there is a global meaning to it all, it comes to us in the same way -- without warning, in no necessary order, according to a logic we often cannot perceive -- and our understanding of that meaning is ever unfolding, rewriting itself with every new action or occurrence.
In particular, artifactual fiction can enhance in us an appreciation of the multivalence of any event, helping us to see it not just as the inevitable effect of a single cause, but as a kind of lens, itself empty, through which pass numerous (perhaps innumerable) threads of past time, where they are gathered and refracted, forming chaotic images of breathtaking beauty, before departing on their separate ways into the future.
Ultimately, reading artifactual fiction can furnish a more satisfying (because more complex) engagement with another mind -- that of the author.
IV. Hypertext
Artifactual fiction is almost by definition also hypertextual. That is, even if the artifacts in the work are arranged in some "inevitable" pattern (whatever that might be) which requires a linear reading from beginning to end, there are still bound to be cross-references, recursions, and retellings, and the reader will want to pursue these in an order that seems best to her at the time. The considerate author will foresee how this multilinear reading will take place, and create apparati that facilitate it: the standard scholarly troika of TOC, glossary, index; categorization schemes, such as alphabetizing or numbering, for searching out particular information; and, in electronic hypertexts, links and paths for following tangential story lines; bookmarks and history lists for easy return to previously read passages; maps for locating and orienting oneself in the structure of the work.
In addition, the author often will provide an over-arching metaphor for the work as a whole, ideally one that will continue to provide insights to the thoughtful reader as his experience and understanding of the work expands and deepens. In Milorad Pavic's print novel _Dictionary of the Khazars_, this metaphor is the lexicon, a dictionary of dictionaries of Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic sources on the conversion of the Khazars (8th or 9th century) [5]. In John McDaid's hypermedia novel _Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse_ -- the artifactual hyperfiction par excellence -- this metaphor is the contents of the hard disk of the mysteriously vanished Arthur "Buddy" Newkirk [6]. In Adrianne Wortzel's Web fiction _Electronic Chronicles of the Casaba Melon Institute_, the metaphor is a final report on research on our artifacts, conducted by a scholarly group from the far future. [7]
V. Conclusion: A new compact
The new rules of engagement between author and reader proposed by artifactual fiction can be summarized thus:
The task of the author in artifactual fiction is no longer normative or even moral -- i.e., advising the reader on behavior to emulate or avoid, by providing exemplary situations and actions taken or omitted therein -- it has become administrative, even hospitalic: to arrange the artifacts in a hypertext that is designed to be both easy to navigate and a pleasure to manipulate.
This requires a nontrivial act of imagination, what might be called conjuring the reader, who must be envisioned in detail and with compassion, and provisioned with an interface that is sturdy, flexible, and easy to manage, through which to conduct her journeys within the hypertext.
The task of the reader is to learn navigation: to explore the hypertext in its entirety -- not just the "content", but also its interface, structure, apparati, and governing metaphor(s) -- and to ponder each of these elements separately and in relation to each other. As John McDaid puts it, "In a hypertext, EVERYTHING is text."
Obviously, this effort is nontrivial as well, and requires patience, persistence, and perspicacity. But the reward promises to be commensurate with the exertion.

REFERENCES
[1] The term "artifactual" was first used by John McDaid to describe works such as his hypermedia novel _Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse_.
[2] Aarseth, Espen. _Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature_ (Johns Hopkins, 1997).
[3] Everson, William. _Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations_, edited by Lee Bartlett (Black Sparrow Press, 1982). "There is something about cause-and-effect which seizes the mind, and we yield ourselves to it voluntarily, because it is so factual and so concrete. Yet, if you peer deeply enough, you will see that this also shares part in recurrence. What looked to be cause-and-effect is basically a kind of mutuality" (17).
[4] Robbe-Grillet, Alain. _For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction_, translated by Richard Howard (Northwestern University Press, 1989), cited in Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, _Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time_, (Princeton University Press, 1992).
[5] Pavic, Milorad. _Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words_ (Knopf, 1988).
[6] McDaid, John. _Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse_ (Eastgate Systems, 1993).
[7] Wortzell, Adrianne, _The Electronic Chronicles of the Casaba Melon Institute_ (WWW: http://artnetweb.com/projects/ahneed/first.html, 1996).