Towards a Framework for Embodied Narrativity: An enactive study of narrative phenomenology, through the lens of interactive digital media

Abstract

Narrative is viewed by a growing body of interdisciplinary work as an immanent medium through which humans interpret the world and their life. The author claims that in accordance, a level of narrative interpretation should be situated within the temporality of lived experience, of being-in-interaction with the world. To achieve this, the predominant understanding of narrative as an abstract structure actualized in conscious, reflective thought should be supplemented with a more immediate phenomenological level, where narrative framing is in direct interplay with embodied experience. In this scope, this thesis develops an initial theoretical framework that posits narrativity, the narrative quality of experience, as an embodied and enactive modality.

Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, which develops a model of dynamic circularity between action, narrative interpretation, and the formation of life stories, is positioned at the base of this framework. Ricoeur’s view is adapted and expanded via Alva Noë’s theory of enactive perception, according to which all perceptual experience is actively enacted through implicit sensorimotor knowledge, and involves skillful interpretation via ‘practical understanding’ of movement in environment. The author stipulates that narrativity might be entangled with enactive perception, and therefore construed in relationality to the dynamics of movement and action. This claim is further expanded via Mieke Bal’s narratological concept of focalization –according to which narrative perspective is calibrated through “the movement of the look” – to suggest the concept of enactive narrative focalization.

This framework is applied to discuss interactive digital narrative media, where the spectator is positioned inside the ‘storyworld’ to become an interactor, and stories unfold through navigating an environment. By analyzing past work in this field such as the game Journey (2012), the author claims that his thought on embodied narrativity provides a potentially valuable theorization of how interactive narratives take shape in experience. In particular, the notion of enactive focalization underscores the narrativity of movement, and hence the resonances between the authoring of tangible movement dynamics in digital environments and narrative understanding.