Toward a Genealogical History of the Ivanhoe Game

In light  of the difficulty of assembling an annotated bibliography for the Ivanhoe Game, we humbly offer instead this tentative list of potential ancestors and anticipatory plagiarists.  We by no means intend, however, that this list be exhaustive.  In fact, we would like to encourage everyone to send their amendments to Brian at glavey@virginia.edu, so that this page will continue to grow as the semester progresses.
 

Alfred Jarry and the College of ’Pataphysics

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), author of the Ubu plays, did the world the great service of "discovering" 'pataphysics, which he defined as follows:  “'Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”
In a certain sense, though, 'pataphysics is by its very nature the science of the indefinable, the science of exceptions, anomalies, and the particular.  The college of ’pataphysics was founded in 1949 to explore Jarry's ideas.  Members of the college included Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar,  Marcel Duchamp, and the Marx brothers.

OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle)

 Initially a sub-committee of the College of ’Pataphysics, the OuLiPo began out of a collaboration between the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician Francois de Lionnais to produce the combinatorial sonnet sequence 100,000,000,000,000 Poems in 1961.  Originally, the intent of the group was to explore the productive possibilities of the intersection between mathematics and poetry, but it soon began to investigate the broader question of the relationship between creativity and constraint.  By adopting rigorous formal constraints, the group found that they were pushed to produce works of literature that they would otherwise have not been able to create.  Perhaps the best example of this is Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (translated as A Void,) a nearly 300 page lipogrammatic novel which does not contain a single letter “e.” (Perec later wrote a novella, Les revenentes [translated as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex] which contained no vowels other than “e.”)

 Some of the forms which the OuLiPo has recovered involve textual performances not wholly disparate from the Ivanhoe Game.  For instance, the method known as N+7, which involves taking a bit of text and substituting each significant noun with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary.  Another example is Mathews Algorithm, a permutation system devised by Harry Mathews which creates a new poem by verbally shuffling the words in an already existent work.  Click here to see some examples.

Some notably OuLiPian works include:

Calvino, Italo.  The Castle of Crossed Destinies.  Trans. William Weaver.  New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1997.

——.  If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Trans. William Weaver.  New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Mathews, Harry.  Cigarettes.  New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.

Perec, Georges.  Life a User’s Manual.  Trans. Davis Bellos.  Boston: D.R. Godine, 1987.

——.  A Void.  Trans. Gilbert Adair.  London: Harvill, 1994.

Secondary material:

Mathews, Harry and Alistair Brotchie, eds.  Oulipo Compendium.  London, Atlas Press,
1998.

Motte, Warren F.  Oulipo: a Primer for Potential Literature.  Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1998.

Tom Phillips' A Humument

This on-going work is a particularly 'pataphysical intervention which treats a Victorian novel (A Human Document) by painting over the pages, leaving certain words intact and calling attention to the white space between the words, in effect rewriting the novel by pulling out what was already there.

Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch

This novel informs you at the very beginning that it can be read in at least 2 ways.  If you choose to begin at the beginning and read it as a "traditional" novel, you will reach "The End" somewhere towards the middle of the book, and are explicitly told by the author that you need feel no guilt about not reading the subsequent chapters.  If you choose the "hopscotch" reading however, you begin in the middle, and then progress in a decidedly non-linear fashion throughout the book, flipping pages as you move from chapter 6 to chapter 66 and back to chapter 2.  In many ways, this novel is a hard-copy predecessor of hypertext.

Hypertext

Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Computer disk. Cambridge, MA: The Eastgate Press, 1990.

I'd like to confidently make the claim that this was one of the first sophisticated formal explorations of the fictional potential of the hypertext environment--in reality, though, I'm including it because its the only text of this sort that I've encountered so far.  It is a story consisting not of pages, but of a series of "lexias" that are linked in complicated ways, most likely producing a different reading each time someone sits down to the computer.
Terence Harpold discusses the implications of its lack of a definite conclusion in an essay in the following work:

Hyper/Text/Theory.  Ed. George Landow.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

Books on Books

To a certain extent, the work that the Ivanhoe Game seeks to do--to expose and develop latent narrative threads in texts--has been the work of all good literature.  Texts are, inevitably, always already about other texts.  Since we are dealing with Wuthering Heights and Ivanhoe, let’s address novels specifically.  Whether explicitly or implicitly, all novels are about 1) the process itself of writing novels and 2) other novels.  Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, locates a latent narrative thread in Bronte’s Jane Eyre to rewrite and rework:  that is, the story of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, or, as Gilbert and Gubar remind us, the madwoman in the attic. Of course, the great modernist example of explicitly rewriting a text is Joyce’s Ulysses.

Alternately, all good literary criticism is always already about other criticism--we often speak about the “critical conversation” surrounding a work or works.  Conversation is, of course, dialogic (or, at least, good conversation is); and the critical conversation, at its best, can be quite dialogical.  What the Ivanhoe Game seems to do, at least for me (Sarina), is bring together the project of fiction-writing (writing novels about other novels)  and criticism (writing criticism about criticism).   And it does this in an immediate format--instead of drawing out the conversation over years, even decades, the Ivanhoe Game places writers/players in conversation with each other in the same time and space--a kind of critical “chat room,” if you will.

Or, to change the metaphor, the Ivanhoe Game turns writers into players on a stage.  We engage in a kind of dramatic improvisation session in which players give and take from each other.  (I highly recommend the British version of the  television show, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” as a great example of the possibilities of improv.)
 
 

Popular Culture

There are also a number of examples of popular culture doing the kind of work envisioned in the Ivanhoe Game.  Our group came up with three, but we are sure there are more.  Remember reading those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid?  The text was comprised of a series of narrative threads that intersect and diverge at crucial points in the plot sequence.  Your job, as an active reader, is to choose which thread to follow.  Each thread leads to distinctly different conclusions to the narrative.  Part of the fun of those books is the joy of having more than one possible narrative.  Hey, if you don’t like where you end up the first time, go back and pick a different thread!  This is part of the fun of the Ivanhoe Game--e.g. rewriting Ivanhoe as a trashy bodice-ripper, etc.

Mad-Libs are another link to pop culture.  If you remember, Mad-lib narratives require readers to be active in that you must fill in every seventh word or so.  The text asks for a noun, verb, adjective, etc.  Once plugged into the established narrative, these random word selections change the meaning of the text.  Mad-libs can be used over and over again--each time, new narratives emerge.

Finally, popular novels (not ‘high art’ per se, although the distinction is questionable, at best) often engage in Ivanhoe-Game-like rewriting.  Last year I researched twentieth-century sequels to Jane Austen’s novels--for which there is a huge readership and market although they have received no critical attention.  I expected to find that these novels were driven purely by the narrative desire to hear more about Austen’s characters--that readers simply couldn’t get enough of Elisabeth Bennet and Anne Elliott.  What I found was something far more complex and interesting:  these modern sequels tended to deconstruct Austen as much as they affirmed or reified her narratives.   And while the quality of writing in these sequels taxes one’s readerly charity,  I now read Austen’s novels differently--seeing in her narrative new possibilities.

Feminist Literary Criticism

 One of the fundamental principles of feminist literary discourse has been to uncover marginalized voices of women, whether by exhuming forgotten texts by women authors or interpreting texts with the intention of foregrounding women's experiences.  The Ivanhoe Game follows suit by allowing a player to expand upon a marginalized character's storyline.
 

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing

 Manifestos of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing assert that texts do not refer to meanings outside of themselves, but rather produce meanings by the very action of the writing.  Thus, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing eschews interpretation of the text and instead embraces the activity of the text itself.  Similarly, the Ivanhoe Game makes clear that it is not interested in adding new textual interpretations in the manner of traditional literary criticism, but rather it invests itself in the performativity of writing new threads of the story.
 
 

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