Reading Nicholas Daly, and Thinking about Form

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the fin de siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

I’m glad I found this one… it does a good job of tracing the connections between late 19th/early 20th-century “revival” romances like Dracula or H. Rider Haggard’s She and the adventure genres of popular film (and, later, the adventure “milieux,” to use the terminology from King and Krzywinska’s ScreenPlay, of games). It also does a good job of locating the development of the romance “revival” as a momentous distinction from modernism, a separation of high and low literature extending from a more unified popular literature not long before:

For what we see now as a chasm between two distinct literary cultures, the great divide, was scarcely more than a crack in 1899. In many respects this was still a homogeneous literary culture… authors whom we now see as “serious” and those whose names we have all but wiped from the slate of literary history, or consigned to the nursery as writers of children’s literature, debated the merits of their particular schools, but they did not see themselves as radically different in kind. (Daly 4)

The book has a nice analysis of the “popular” that accounts for Frankfurt School ideology and cultural studies arguments alike… it also makes a quite interesting argument to explain the affinities between the revived romance and popular film while acknowledging their formal differences:

Discussion of the relations of film and the romance in terms of images and dreams runs the risk of eliding the formal specificity of the two media. Nobody is likely to think they are reading a novel when they are actually watching a film: the romance is above all a verbal, narrative form while cinema partakes of both narrative and spectacle, the sheer visuality of individual images always threatening to impede the forward motion of plot, or (in sound film) override the dialogue. But this distinction between the two may in turn shed light on a transitional moment in cinema history. How does one explain the rapid rise to dominance of the narrative feature film? Early cinema is closer to the spectacle of the fair sideshow, or the music hall, both in terms of content and spectatorship… Spectacle certainly retains a vital role in popular film… but it rarely replaces narrative as the dominant element in filmic structure, even in the most elaborate of special-effects blockbusters. (Daly 161-62)

A well-made point: film and narrative are not intrinsically linked, as early films show. But film has, over time, taken on narrative as a predominant element in its composition.

Novels and cinema, as forms, are different. There’s no disputing that. But there are clear and traceable points of connection between them, and those connections can and should be accounted for. Likewise, games are radically different from film, and from drama, and from stories. There’s no disputing that, either. Many people have argued that “colonizing” the study and development of games with unmodified concepts of narrative is more likely to obfuscate than clarify their formal study, and I would tend to agree.

But, at the same time, there are clear and traceable points of connection between games and other forms that inform games all the time, for good or ill, and those points of connection, I would think, should likewise be accounted for. Yes, games are games, and narratives are narratives. But if Star Wars as a film series is a narrative, and if Star Wars: Galaxies is a game… are both part of a fictional space called Star Wars? I dare to say that one might receive a range of answers to that question. And, if this is the case — if the manifold, formally diverse things that bear the name Star Wars are, in their distinct ways, constitutive of the fictional world of Star Wars — then in what ways do this continuity of implied fiction, and the inevitable discontinuities of form among these artifacts (games, movies, novels), mutually inform one another? I’m pretty sure this is a question worth asking.

I’ve just started the aforementioned ScreenPlay, which talks about these issues, so I’m sure I’ll have more to chew on soon.