Plotting the Database Fiction
The cultural explosion of “database logic,”continues to challenge our understanding of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic art. The line Manovich draws,”database and narrative are natural enemies,” is not about the incompatibility of two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum: between the modularity of the database and the linearity of narrative. In discussions about database and narrative, definitions and categories become quickly slippery, because narrative forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums. “Database” refers to the unique nonlinear capabilities of a computer: complex networks, hyperlinking of data, instant retrieval, random access, etc. And yet, a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plot as discrete narrative units. A TV series on a website or DVD is a kind of database narrative. Narratives in traditional media (print, theater, film) can have database-like depths of allusion and intertexuality. But typically, the usefulness and pleasures of plot, as a unifying device, is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and modular environment. In the navigation of a database, temporal ordering is handed over to the user, leaving familiar techniques of engagement, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.
Without plot, what holds a database fiction together as a conceptual whole? What models in contemporary and past narrative forms can help us re-imagine an affective-expressive narrativity that is less reliant on plot devices, cause and effect chains and central conflicts? Non-Western, non-mimetic and antimimetic narrative traditions offer a rich history to draw from. Narrative forms that ignore, dismantle, displace or otherwise diminish the structural role of plot, also engage the attentive mind as single entities (stories). Cohesiveness comes through the discursive style; the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. In other words, the interface.
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