『어둠 경작하기』: 2인칭 서사를 통한 가상현실 체험

Abstract

Despite the traditional book form, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark uses second-person narration to demonstrate an intriguing case of novelistic remediation of digital media by appropriating the latter’s aesthetic effects and compositional techniques to revitalize the novel form. Similar to Marie-Laure Ryan’s argument, this novel exemplifies narrative, print or hypertext, as virtual reality with the union of immersion and interactivity in which readers can create a palpable three-dimensional space through the act of reading. It is a novelistic rendition of digital virtual reality in print. The second-person narration maximizes the reader’s experience of immersion in the text, recalling the narrative voice and mood in early text-based computer games such as Colossal Cave Adventure. The story of Adie Klarpol, a Seattle designer participating in the creation of a virtual reality machine called the Cavern, directly connects to the contemporary development of virtual reality technology, in reference to the University of Illinois’s CAVE project. In another narrative of Taimur Martin, a hostage held by Lebanese terrorists, the second-person narration offers the reader an intensive VR experience of immersion into the text. The position of the reader-addressee in Taimur’s second-person narration reminds us of the role of a user-player in hypertext and interactive fiction, summoned to interact with the story world. Despite the limitations imposed by the book form on the degree and nature of the reader’s interaction with the text, through the second-person narration and the embedded narrative frames, Powers suggests that literature and art in general provide the audience a VR experience of dwelling in a time-space of verisimilitude. Powers’s experiments demonstrate that the reader of print narratives can play an active role in the immersive story world.