narrative

by Dave,

I give a presentation at the College English Association in a couple of weeks discussing storytelling in relationship to videogames. In all my reading for this, one book I’m focusing on is by Marie-Laure Ryan, titled Narrative as Virtual Reality. In one part of her book, she begins discussing how immersive a book can be, writing about certain authors’ abilities to conjure vivid details. Yet, the hook for readers isn’t always an ability to reconstruct the precise mental image the book is describing, but our ability to assimilate the information and attach it to something more vivid from our past experiences. She calls the end result “spatial immersion”:

Spatial immersion is the result of a “madeleine effect” that depends more on the coincidental resonance of a text with the reader’s personal memories than on generalizable textual properties. Just as the taste and smell of a piece of madeleine dipped into a cup of tea took Marcel Proust back to the village of his childhood, a single word, a name, or an image is often all the reader needs to be transported into a cherished landscape — or into an initially hated one that grew close to the heart with the passing of time. [...] In the most complete forms of spatial immersion, the reader’s private landscapes blend with the textual geography. (121-22)

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