To me, one of the interesting aspects of this is that you can in fact see all three modes at work in actual literary works as conventionally defined (I specify that because I believe that role-playing games are in fact, by their nature, literary works, but with some distinctive traits).
That there can be narrativist literary works is more or less obvious. But let me tell a story to illustrate how one might say that a literary work is distinctively narrativist: Years and years ago, my then roommate was taking a course in set design, and was trying to work out the stage set for a play that her college was putting on. She asked me for advice on something. And I pointed at one of her walls, and asked her, "What's on the other side of this wall here?" And she looked at me blankly for a moment, and then said that there was nothing on the other side of that wall; it was the back of the stage, and whatever was behind it would not come into the action of the play. And I said that to visualize that the front of the wall looked like, I had to know what I was supposed to imagine as existing on the other side of the wall—which she had never thought about, because the drama was only taking place on one side of the wall.
So I think there is an approach to literature where the characters, the people you are bringing on stage or telling a story about, are "real," and what happens to them is real and is defined—but nothing that is not directly interacting with them has any substance, because it's not part of the narrative.
There is a simulationist interest in literature. It often has to do with envisioning a world with its own natural laws, its own geography and biology and cosmogony and so on, and working out how it functions as a self-consistent whole. This is the kind of thing that's found in Poul Anderson's fiction, or Hal Clement's, or that of other hard science fiction writers.
And there's also a gamist approach in literature. For example, the classic murder mystery is a game between the author and the reader: the author reveals all the clues, and the reader knows as much as the investigator, and is challenged to solve the mystery faster than the investigator does. Note that readers of such works talk about the author "playing fair" with the reader.
Or, for aspects of formal contest, consider the traditional Japanese custom of an exchange of verses between two people, each person's verse being expected to take off from what the other person just sent. For that matter, all traditional verse, verse that scans and perhaps rhymes and may be in a defined form, has a "game" aspect. Once you've written lines AbA' of a villanelle, the succeeding verses MUST rhyme aba, and must end alternately by repeating line A and line A' as the third line, until the final verse is abAA'. That purely artificial structural requirement makes writing villanelles something of a game.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 01:56 pm (UTC)That there can be narrativist literary works is more or less obvious. But let me tell a story to illustrate how one might say that a literary work is distinctively narrativist: Years and years ago, my then roommate was taking a course in set design, and was trying to work out the stage set for a play that her college was putting on. She asked me for advice on something. And I pointed at one of her walls, and asked her, "What's on the other side of this wall here?" And she looked at me blankly for a moment, and then said that there was nothing on the other side of that wall; it was the back of the stage, and whatever was behind it would not come into the action of the play. And I said that to visualize that the front of the wall looked like, I had to know what I was supposed to imagine as existing on the other side of the wall—which she had never thought about, because the drama was only taking place on one side of the wall.
So I think there is an approach to literature where the characters, the people you are bringing on stage or telling a story about, are "real," and what happens to them is real and is defined—but nothing that is not directly interacting with them has any substance, because it's not part of the narrative.
There is a simulationist interest in literature. It often has to do with envisioning a world with its own natural laws, its own geography and biology and cosmogony and so on, and working out how it functions as a self-consistent whole. This is the kind of thing that's found in Poul Anderson's fiction, or Hal Clement's, or that of other hard science fiction writers.
And there's also a gamist approach in literature. For example, the classic murder mystery is a game between the author and the reader: the author reveals all the clues, and the reader knows as much as the investigator, and is challenged to solve the mystery faster than the investigator does. Note that readers of such works talk about the author "playing fair" with the reader.
Or, for aspects of formal contest, consider the traditional Japanese custom of an exchange of verses between two people, each person's verse being expected to take off from what the other person just sent. For that matter, all traditional verse, verse that scans and perhaps rhymes and may be in a defined form, has a "game" aspect. Once you've written lines AbA' of a villanelle, the succeeding verses MUST rhyme aba, and must end alternately by repeating line A and line A' as the third line, until the final verse is abAA'. That purely artificial structural requirement makes writing villanelles something of a game.