Dr. William Proctor, Principal Lecturer in Film & Transmedia, University of Bournemouth
The EVOLUTION OF STORY one-day symposium opens with a provocative keynote from D. William Proctor who will challenge us to rethink the way in which we think about story. Proposing a ‘quantum’ view of a fractured, forking, entangled and super-positioned narrative that is both puzzling yet engaging. William is a specialist in transmedia storytelling, adaptation, reboots, franchising and audiences and has published on a variety of topics related to popular culture. As he is Director of The World Star Wars Project, we might want to question him as to his opinion on the latest Star Wars. I am sure it will be a lively debate.
ABSTRACT
In Stranger Than What We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century (2015), John Higgs argues that new modes of storytelling emerged almost simultaneously in parallel with Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, modes that spoke to profound shifts in human conceptions of space-time, of fracture, instability, and ‘persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’ (). For Higgs, the authors and artists belonging to what we nowadays describe as ‘modernism’ shared common principles and philosophies with Einstein’s new science—yet it would be a mistake to view the latter as inspiration for the former. Per Higgs ‘Einstein and the modernists appear to have separately made the same leap at the same time [and] that such a strange idea should play out across both the creative arts and the physical sciences at the same time is remarkable in itself’ (Higgs 2015, 51).
Einstein’s theories, notably his special theory (1905), and general theory of relativity (1915), became cornerstones of the new quantum physics paradigm, which further shattered the then-established Newtonian model of spatiotemporal causality and unidirectionality, shored up with the arrival of Hugh Everett III’s ‘many-worlds interpretation’ in 1957, which theorized that the universe was neither singular nor unidirectional, but made up instead of an infinite number of parallel universes. It is perhaps tempting to see the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics as having marked influences on the evolution of story-telling in the twentieth century, and into the new millennium, but it is important to ascertain the origins of this ‘new’ vector, especially whether science helped shape the contours of modernist, and indeed postmodernist, narrative fiction, or as the case may be, the other way around. What’s more, the publication of Jorges Luis Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ in 1941 prophesized and preceded Everett’s theory by more than a decade, suggesting that ‘Borges had not been influenced by work on quantum mechanics, he was not surprised that the laws of physics mirrored ideas from literature. After all, physicists were readers to’ (Lloyd 2006, 101).
Although science and narrative are not usually easy bedfellows, as I have written elsewhere (2017, 319), the impact of the quantum paradigm on story-telling has been explored by academics; in books like Susan Strehle’s Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992), and Samuel Chase Cole’s Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodernism and Contemporary American Fiction (2012), both of which betray literary studies’ elitist bent with their focus on canonical authors and texts at the expense of the popular. However, like the intertwining of scientific and modernist discourses that Higgs emphasizes, it is arguably not in the realm of (so-called) literary fiction that the most radical innovations took place, but in science fiction, with the inception of ‘quantum fiction’ in the mid-1990s, and more pointedly, within the dominion of superhero comics produced by the ‘big two,’ DC and Marvel. Just as Einstein and the modernists shared a common discursive universe, DC Comics began introducing the concept of parallel worlds into their superhero ‘macro-structure’ in Wonder Woman #59, first published in 1952 (five years prior to Everett’s model becoming public). Over time, the DC universe stretched into an expansive ‘multiverse,’ a term that is commonly used in contemporary quantum physics, but was originally coined by science fiction author Michael Moorcock. As a worldbuilding enterprise like no other, both the DC and Marvel multiverses represent ‘the largest narrative constructions in human history (exceeding, for example, the vast body of myth, legend and story that underlies Greek and Latin literature)’ (Kaveney 2008, 25).
What I want to do in this keynote address is consider the way in which storytelling, both popular and literary, may have evolved since the quantum revolution, while also raising queries pertaining to the notion that narrative media, in its many contemporary forms and guises, have truly and profoundly shifted towards a kind of ‘quantum worldbuilding’, of ‘complex storytelling’ (Mittell 2006), ‘temporally fractured narratives’ (Booth 2012), ‘time-loop quests’ (Herman 2011), ‘forking path narratives (Bordwell 2002), and ‘puzzle films’ (Buckland 2009), all of which suggest ‘the replacement of story by stories, puzzles, and fractured timelines’ (Powell 2012, 113). Are these forms and modes explicitly ‘new’? Or are they, as David Bordwell has criticized, ‘pretty limited affairs’ (2002, 90)?
Reference List
- Booth, Paul. 2012. Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television. New York: Peter Lang.
- Bordwell, David. 2002. “Film Futures” SubStance #97, 31 (1): 88 –104.
- Buckland, Warren. ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Coale, Samuel Chase. 2012. Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodernism and Contemporary American Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
- Hermann, Martin. 2011. “Hollywood Goes Computer Game: Narrative Remediation in the Time-Loop Quests Groundhog Day and 12:01”. In Unnatural Narratives—Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinz, 145-161. Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Higgs, John. 2015. Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century. London: Orion.
- Kaveney, Roz. 2008. Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films. London: I.B. Taurus.
- Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap, 58, pp. 29 – 40.
- Powell, Helen. 2012. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B Taurus.
- Proctor, William. 2017. ‘Schrodinger’s Cape: The Quantum Seriality of the Marvel Multiverse’. In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe. Austin: Texas University Press, 319-347.
- Strehle, Susan. 1992. Fiction in the Quantum Universe. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.