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The following posts are quotes that are harvested from Marie-Laure Ryan's 2001 book Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.

1. APA: Ryan, M. L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Chicago: Marie-Laure Ryan. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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Literature, cross-fertilized with the New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction, took a “linguistic turn” in the mid-twentieth century, privileged form over content, emphasized spatial relations between words, puns, intertextual allusion, parody, and self-referentiality; how the novel subverted plot and character, experimented with open structures and permutations, turned into increasingly cerebral wordplay, or became indistinguishable from lyrical prose. (p: 4 - 5)

In this carnivalesque conception of language, meaning is no longer the stable image of a world in which the reader projects a virtual alter ego, nor even the dynamic simulation of a world in time, but the sparks generated by associative chains that connect the particles of a textual and intertextual field of energies into ever-changing configurations. Meaning came to be described as unstable, decentered, multiple, fluid, emergent—all concepts that have become hall-marks of postmodern thought. (p: 5)

Though this game of signification needs nothing more than the encounter between the words on the page and the reader’s imagination to be activated, it is easy to see how the feature of interactivity conferred upon the text by electronic technology came to be regarded as the fulfillment of the postmodern conception of meaning. Interactivity transposes the ideal of an endlessly self-renewable text from the level of the signified to the level of the signifier. (p: 5)

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The list of the features of hypertext that supports the postmodernist approach is an impressive one. It is headed by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, the practice of integrating a variety of foreign discourses within a text through such mechanisms as quotation, commentary, parody, allusion, imitation, ironic transformation, rewrites, and decontextualizing recontextualizing operations. Whether intertextuality is regarded as a specific aesthetic program or as the basic condition of literary signification, it is hard to deny that the electronic linking that constitutes the basic mechanism of hypertext is an ideal device for the implementation of intertextual relations. Any two texts can be linked, and by clicking on a link the reader is instantly transported into an intertext. By facilitating the creation of polyvocal structures that integrate different perspectives without forcing the reader to choose between them, hypertext is uniquely suited to express the aesthetic and political ideals of an intellectual community that has elevated the preservation of diversity into one of its fundamental values. (p: 7)

The device also favors a typically postmodern approach to writing closely related to what has been described by Lévi-Strauss as bricolage. In this mode of composition, as Turkle describes it (Life on the Screen, 50–73), the writer does not adopt a “top-down” method, starting with a given idea and breaking it down into constituents, but proceeds “bottom-up” by fitting together reasonably autonomous fragments, the verbal equivalent of objets trouvés, into an artifact whose shape and meaning(s) emerge through the linking process. The result is a patchwork, a collage of disparate elements, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a “machinic assemblage” (A Thousand Plateaus, 332–35). As Silvio Gaggi has shown, this broken-up structure, as well as the dynamic reconfiguration of the text with every new reading, proposes a metaphor for the postmodern conception of the subject as a site of multiple, conflicting, and unstable identities. (p: 7)

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While interactivity has been hyped as a panacea for evils ranging from social disempowerment to writer’s block, the concept of immersion has suffered a vastly different fate. At best it has been ignored by theorists; at worst, regarded as a menace to critical thinking. (p: 9 - 10)

If we believe some of the most celebrated parables of world literature, losing oneself in a book, or in any kind of virtual reality, is a hazard for the health of the mind, immersion began to work its ravages as early as the first great novel of European literature ... [] ... The major objection against immersion is the alleged incompatibility of the experience with the exercise of critical faculties. (p: 10)

According to Jay Bolter, the impairment of critical consciousness is the trademark of both literary and VR immersion: “But is it obvious that virtual reality cannot in itself sustain intellectual or cultural development. . . . The problem is that virtual reality, at least as it is now envisioned, is a medium of percepts rather than signs. It is virtual television” (Writing Space, 230). “What is not appropriate is the absence of semiosis” (231). (p: 10)

But this does not mean that immersive pleasure is in essence a lowbrow, escapist gratification, as Bolter seems to imply. ... [] ... As for the allegedly passive character of the experience, we need only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world. Since language does not offer input to the senses, all sensory data must be simulated by the imagination. In “The Circular Ruins” Jorge Luis Borges writes of the protagonist, who is trying to create a human being by the sheer power of his imagination, “He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality” (Ficciones, 114). Similarly, we must dream up textual worlds with “minute integrity” to conjure up the intense experience of presence that inserts them into imaginative reality. (p: 11)

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Becoming Virtual, the English title of Pierre Lévy’s Qu’est-ce que le virtuel, may seem at first sight to confirm Baudrillard’s most pessimistic prediction for the future of humanity. But the impression is dispelled as early as the second page of the introduction to Lévy’s treatise:

"The virtual, strictly defined, has little relationship to that which is false, illusory, or imaginary. The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence." (16) ... [] ... The possible is fully formed, but it resides in limbo. Making it real is largely a matter of throwing the dice of fate ... [] .... All it takes to turn the possibility into the actuality of a snowstorm is to delete the symbol O (possibility operator) in front of the proposition “It is snowing today.” The operation is fully reversible, so that the proposition (p) can pass from mere possibility to reality back to possibility. In contrast to the predictable realization of the possible, the mediation between the virtual and the actual is not a deterministic process but a form-giving force. (p: 35)

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The pair virtual/actual is characterized by the following features:

1.    The relation of the virtual to the actual is one-to-many. There is no limit on the number of possible actualizations of a virtual entity.
2.    The passage from the virtual to the actual involves transformation and is therefore irreversible. As Lévy writes, “Actualization is an event, in the strongest sense of the term” (171).
3.    The virtual is not anchored in space and time. Actualization is the passage from a state of timelessness and deterritorialization to an existence rooted in a here and now. It is an event of contextualization.
4.    The virtual is an inexhaustible resource. Using it does not lead to its depletion.

These properties underscore the essential role of the virtual in the creative process. For Lévy, the passage from the virtual to the actual is not a predetermined, automatic development but the solution to a problem that is not already contained in its formulation. (p: 36)

As this idea of feedback suggests, the importance of Lévy’s treatment of virtuality resides not merely in its insistence on the dynamic nature of actualization but in its conception of creativity as a two-way process involving both a phase of actualization and a phase of virtualization. The complementarity of the two processes is symbolized in Lévy’s text by the recurrent image of the Moebius strip, an image that stands in stark contrast to Baudrillard’s vision of a fatal attraction toward the virtual. (p: 36)

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The concept of virtualization involves any mental operation that leads from the here and now, the singular, the usable once-and-for-all, and the solidly embodied to the timeless, abstract, general, multiple, versatile, repeatable, ubiquitous, immaterial, and morphologically fluid. Skeptics may object that Lévy’s concept of virtualization simply renames well-known mental operations such as abstraction and generalization; but partisans will counter that the notion is much richer because it explains the mechanisms of these operations. If thought is the production of models of the world—that is, of the virtual as double—it is through the consideration of the virtual as potential that the mind puts together representations that can act upon the world. While a thought confined to the actual would be reduced to a powerless recording of facts, a thought that places the actual in the infinitely richer context of the virtual as potential gains control over the process of becoming through which the world plays out its destiny. (p: 37)

The power of Lévy’s concept of virtualization resides precisely in its dual nature of timeless operation responsible for all of human culture, and of trademark of the contemporary Zeitgeist. In our dealing with the virtual, we are doing what mankind has always done, only more powerfully, consciously, and systematically. (p: 37)

If we live a “virtual condition,’’ as N. Katherine Hayles has suggested (How We Became Posthuman, 18), it is not because we are condemned to the fake but because we have learned to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential. In contrast to Baudrillard, Lévy does not seem alarmed by this exponentiation of the virtual because he sees it as a productive acceleration of the feedback loop between the virtual and the actual rather than as a loss of territory for the real. (p: 37)

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For Pierre Lévy, the virtual as potential represents not only the mode of being of the literary text but the ontological status of all forms of textuality. “Since its Mesopotamian origin,” writes Lévy, “the text has been a virtual object, abstract, independent of any particular substrate” (Becoming Virtual, 47). Paradoxically, this virtual object originates in an actualization of thought. The act of writing taps into, and enriches in return, a reservoir of ideas, memories, metaphors, and linguistic material that contains potentially an infinite number of texts. These resources are textualized through selection, association, and linearization. But if the text is the product of an actualization, it reverts to a virtual mode of existence as soon as the writing is over. From the point of view of the reader, as reader-response theorists have shown, the text is like a musical score waiting to be performed. (p: 45)

The virtuality of texts and musical scores stems from the complexity of the mediation between what is there, physically, and what is made out of it. Color and form are inherent to pictures and objects, but sound is not inherent to musical scores, nor are thoughts, ideas, and mental representations inherent to the graphic or phonic marks of texts. They must therefore be constructed through an activity far more transformative than interpreting sensory data. In the case of texts, the process of actualization involves not only the process of “filling in the blanks” described by Iser but also simulating in imagination the depicted scenes, characters, and events, and spatializing the text by following the threads of various thematic webs, often against the directionality of the linear sequence. (p: 45)

As a generator of potential worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences, the text is thus always already a virtual object. But the marriage of postmodernism and electronic technology, by producing the freely navigable networks of hypertext, has elevated this built-in virtuality to a higher power. “Thought is actualized in a text and a text in the act of reading (interpretation). Ascending the slope of actualization, the transition to hypertext is a form of virtualization” (Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 56). This virtualization of the text matters cognitively only because it involves a virtualization of the act of reading. “Hypertextualization is the opposite of reading in the sense that it produces, from an initial text, a textual reserve and instrument of composition with which the navigator can project a multitude of other texts” (54). In hypertext, a double one-to-many relation creates an additional level of mediation between the text as produced by the author—engineered might be a better term—and the text as experienced by the reader. (p: 46)

When Lévy speaks of the virtualization of the text, the type of hypertext he has in mind is not so much a “work” constructed by a single mind as the implementation of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex: a gigantic and collectively authored database made up of the interconnection and cross-reference of (ideally) all existing texts. (p: 46)

In Lévy’s words, the screen becomes a new “typereader [machine à lire], the place where a reserve of possible information is selectively realized, here and now, for a particular reader. Every act of reading on a computer is a form of publishing, a unique montage” (54). As the user of the electronic reading machine retrieves, cuts, pastes, links, and saves, she regards text as a resource that can be scooped up by the screenful. (p: 47)

If text is a mass substance rather than a discrete object, there is no need to read it in its totality. The reader produced by the electronic reading machine will therefore be more inclined to graze at the surface of texts than to immerse himself in a textual world or to probe the mind of an author. Speaking on behalf of this reader Lévy writes, “I am no longer interested in what an unknown author thought, but ask that the text make me think, here and now. The virtuality of the text nourishes my actual intelligence.” (63) (p: 47)

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The dream of the ultimate artwork has taken many forms and nourished many myths: Pygmalion’s statue transformed into a live woman, the words of language becoming their own referent in a poetic transubstantiation, and the text as a field of energies that produce perpetual becoming and regeneration (this one a favorite of hypertext theorists). All these conceptualizations involve the transmutation of art into some kind of life not far removed, as N. Katherine Hayles suggests, from the artificial life, or alife, generated by computers (“Artificial Life,” 205). (p: 347)

Through the VR metaphor, however, the emphasis on life as the ultimate purpose of art (and artifice) is shifted from the artwork as live object, capable of growth and autonomous behavior, to the artwork as life-giving and life-sustaining environment. The total artwork is no longer something to watch evolve forever but a world in which we will be able to spend an entire lifetime, and to spend it creatively. (p: 347)

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What enables VR to serve as a metaphor for a complete habitat for the mind and the body is its reconciliation of two properties once described by Marshall McLuhan as polar opposites. In its pursuit of immersive interactivity, VR wants to be at the same time a hot and a cold medium. (Hot medium: high definition/lots of information. Cool medium: low definition/little information) (Essential McLuhan, 162) (p: 347 - 348)

Though the term participation may suggest immersion, the type of involvement that McLuhan associates with cool media is much closer to the interactive than to the immersive dimension of VR. A hot medium facilitates immersion through the richness of its sensory offerings, while a cold medium opens its world only after the user has made a significant intellectual and imaginative investment. The media that offer data to the senses are naturally hotter than language-based media because in language all sensations must be actively simulated by the imagination. (p: 348)

Anticipating the vocabulary of hypertext theorists, McLuhan observes that “in reading a detective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much has been left out of the narrative” (166). (p: 349)

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As [users] enter the virtual world, their depth of engagement gradually meanders away from here until they cross the threshold of involvement. Now they are absorbed in the virtual world, similar to being in an engrossing book.

The question isn’t whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. This is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game. (Pimentel and Teixeira, Virtual Reality, 15) (p: 89)

For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world ... [] ... “the text as world” is only one possible conceptualization among many others... (p: 90)

In a textual world these meanings form a cosmos. “How does a world exist as a world?” asks Michael Heim, theorist of virtual reality. “A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole.’’ It is “not a collection of things but an active usage that relates things together, that links them. . . . World makes a web-like totality. . . . World is a total environment or surround space” (Virtual Realism, 90– 91). (p:91)

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The function of language in this activity is to pick objects in the textual world, to link them with properties, to animate characters and setting—in short, to conjure their presence to the imagination. The world metaphor thus entails a referential or “vertical” conception of meaning ... [] ... In this vertical conception, language is meant to be traversed toward its referents. Sven Birkerts describes this attitude as follows: “When we are reading a novel we don’t, obviously, recall the preceding sentences and paragraphs. In fact we generally don’t remember the language at all, unless it’s dialogue. For reading is a conversion, a turning of codes into contents” (Gutenberg Elegies, 97). (p: 91-92)

The idea of textual world provides the foundation of a poetics of immersion, but we need more materials to build up the project since poststructuralist literary theory is hostile to the phenomenon because it conflicts with its concept of language ... [] ... The building blocks of the project will therefore have to be found in the quarries of other fields: cognitive psychology (the metaphors of transportation and being “lost in a book”), analytical philosophy (possible worlds), phenomenology (make-believe), and psychology again (mental simulation). (p: 92 - 93)

The frozen metaphors of language dramatize the reading experience as an adventure worthy of the most thrilling novel: the reader plunges under the sea (immersion), reaches a foreign land (transportation), is taken prisoner (being caught up in a story, being a captured audience), and loses contact with all other realities (being lost in a book). The work of the psychologists Richard Gerrig and Victor Nell (Experiencing Narrative Worlds (10–11), follows the thread of these classic metaphors to explore what takes place in the mind of the entranced reader. (p: 93)

The best illustrations of this script come from the realm of fiction, but Gerrig’s stated purpose is to describe a type of experience that concerns “narrative worlds”—what I would call the worlds of mimetic texts—not just fictional ones. The metaphor of transportation captures how the textual world becomes present to the mind, not how this world relates to the real one, and this sense of presence can be conveyed by narratives told as truth as well as by stories told as fiction. Victor Nell writes that “although fiction is the usual vehicle for ludic reading, it is not its lack of truth—its ‘fictivity’—that renders it pleasurable” (Lost in a Book, 50). (p: 95)

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Make-Believe: Kendall Walton locates the key to immersion in a behavior that we learn very early in life—earlier, arguably, than we learn to recognize the rigidity of the ontological boundary that separates story-worlds from physical reality. The comparison of fiction to games of make-believe is not a particularly new one; it is implicit to Coleridge’s characterization of the attitude of poetry readers as a “willing suspension of disbelief.” (Biographia Literaria, 169) (p: 105)

Walton’s project is more ambitious than defining fiction: the stated goal of his book Mimesis as Make-Believe is to develop a theory of representation and a phenomenology of art appreciation that make the term representation interchangeable with fiction, saying that "in order to understand paintings, plays, films, and novels, we must first look at dolls, hobbyhorses, toy trucks and teddy bears. . . . Indeed, I advocate regarding the activities [that give representational works of art their point] as games of make-believe themselves, and I shall argue that representational works function as props in such games, as dolls and teddy bears serve as props in children’s games." (11) (p: 106)

In 1997, when Walton revisits the phenomenology of art appreciation in “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime,” he sharpens his analysis of the mechanics of involvement in a textual world by borrowing from psychology the concept of mental simulation. In its psychological use, the term mental simulation is associated with a recent debate concerning the strategies of common-sense reasoning, or “folk psychology.”An important aspect of this reasoning is the operations that enable us
to imagine the thoughts of others with sufficient accuracy to make efficient decisions in interpersonal relations. Simulation theory can thus be described as a form of counterfactual reasoning by which the subject places himself in another person’s mind ... [] ... Fiction has been hailed (and also decried) for its ability to foster understanding and even attachment for people we normally would condemn, despise, ignore, or never meet in the course of our lives. As we project ourselves into these characters, we may be led to envision actions that we would never face or approve of in real life. This idea is crucial to Walton’s appeal to simulation in support of his theory of mimesis as make-believe. (p: 110 - 111)

Mental simulation should therefore be kept distinct from retrospective and temporally free-floating acts of imagination, such as storymaking, daydreaming, and reminiscing. When we compose a narrative, especially a narrative based on memory, we usually try to represent “how things came to be what they are,” and the end is prefigured in the beginning. But when we read a narrative, even one in which the end is presented before the beginning, we adopt the outlook of the characters who are living the plot as their own destiny. Life is lived prospectively and told retrospectively, but its narrative replay is once again lived prospectively. Simulation is the reader’s mode of performance of a narrative script. (p: 113)

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Spatial immersion is often the result of a “madeleine effect” that depends more on the coincidental resonance of the 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 trans¬ported into a cherished landscape—or into an initially hated one that grew close to the heart with the passing of time. (p: 121)

In the most complete forms of spatial immersion, the reader’s private landscapes blend with the textual geography ... [] ... The philosopher who pioneered the phenomenological study of the experience of space in literature, Gaston Bachelard, conceives spatial immersion in terms of security and rootedness. The titles of the various chapters of his book The Poetics of Space are all symbolic expressions of an intimate relation to a closed, enveloping environment: the house; drawers, coffers, and chests; nests; shells; corners; miniatures; and, in a conceptualization of open spaces as cozy habitat, “intimate immensity” and “the universe as house.” (p: 122)

These sedentary dreams stand in stark contrast to the “deterritorialization” and nomadism that have come to pass, under the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as the quintessential postmodern experience of space. Whereas Bachelard reflects on a “sense of place,” postmodern literature con-ceptualizes space in terms of perpetual movement, blind navigation, a gallery of mirrors, being lost in a not-always-so-funhouse, a self-transforming labyrinth, parallel and embedded universes, and discontinuous, non-Cartesian expanses, all experiences that preclude an intimate relation to a specific location. We could say that in Bachelard, space is sensorially experienced by a concrete, bounded body, while in postmodern literature its apprehension presupposes a dismembered, ubiquitous, highly abstract body, since real bodies can be in only one place at one time ... [] ... Yet if the nomadic, alienating space of postmodernism prevents an immersive relation, I would not go as far as to say that spatial immersion precludes travel. Textual space involves not only a set of distinct locations but a network of accesses and relations that binds these sites together into a coherent geography. A sense of place is not the same thing as a mental model of space: through the former, readers inhale an atmosphere; through the latter, they orient themselves on the map of the fictional world, and they picture in imagination the changing landscape along the routes followed by the characters. (p: 123)

... the textual universe cannot be a homogeneous Cartesian space with stable reference points but must be something more akin to the space of modern physics: a self-transforming expanse riddled with invisible black holes through which we are unknowingly sucked into parallel worlds. (p: 125)