Bournemouth University
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
—Hélène Cixous
Introduction
This essay will not put forward any particular form of technology, hardware, software, artificial intelligence, or extended reality as the future of text, specifically the future of narrative. Technology has always been used to shape and convey narrative, from voice to alphabet to printing press to internet, and as it progresses, narrative will flow into whatever container we devise, much like water. Or cats. What is of interest to me in this essay is not the what or how of narrative text, but the who. The progression of technology has iteratively (and in recent years, exponentially) expanded the who of narrative: who can write, who can share their experiences and knowledge, who has a voice in culture and society. The future of text will certainly be affected by technology; the future of narrative is already here, and it is multiplicative and irrepressible, a many-headed hydra that refuses to be put down by our continued imperialist and patriarchal culture.
Hélène Cixous’s 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” transforms that oft-imagined femme from monstrous to misunderstood: while Hercules’s twelve labours are the default hero’s journey for a Western, patriarchal culture, the “beasts” he fells represent all those who do not fulfil a standard of cisgender, heteronormative, abled, (relatively) wealthy, white maleness. In doing so, she establishes her l’écriture feminine, the realm of “women’s writing” that has been ignored and suppressed in much of Western European/Anglo-American culture. Cixous and most of her contemporaries were primarily concerned with the writing of cisgender, (relatively) wealthy, white women (who were often queer and disabled, but hid those aspects); the privilege afforded cis, wealthy white women is that of proximity to the cis-het white men, a gray area between those in the “room where it happens” and those not quite outside it. From this point of privilege, these women were able to be writers (such as Mary Wollstonecraft) and novelists (e.g., Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf), but still had many disadvantages as “othered” and oppressed members of society: they remained “monstrous”, a position Cixous worked to reframe in Medusa’s laughter.
As civil rights movements have progressed, the door to culture that was cracked to these white women has continued to be shoved open by more of those once labeled as monstrous beasts: people of color, those suffering colonialist rule and imperialist practices (even after “departure” of their colonizers), LGBTQIA+, and those with disabilities. This “global majority” finds a sense of camaraderie in the monstrous as conveyed by hero’s journeys, unfairly maligned by those who have conquered, oppressed, villainized, and ignored them. In their writing, as identified by Cixous and other feminist critics, along with more recent commentators like Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sarah Hoagland, Trinh Minh-ha, José Esteban Muñoz, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (to name but a few), these cultural others and outsiders employ techniques, structures, styles, themes, and topics that express their resistance. Their texts incorporate polyvocality, a plurality of voices and perspectives that reflect the many masks the authors must don to perform their public and private identities. The structures often resist closure, a sign of the uncertainty of outcomes for those writing from the margins, who are neither assured positive endings for their lives/situtations, nor culturally taught that they should have confidence in such endings for themselves.
Through their writing, these monstrous others express themselves and their knowledge of self and society; their narratives form a knowledge-type that has been similarly devalued in a culture formed on the basis of empiricism and positivism. In Anglo-American society, where the work and writings of Francis Bacon have been revered and taught as a matter of course to schoolchildren, it is no surprise that the devaluation of both writing and knowledge from marginalized voices go hand-in-hand: credited with the formation of the empirical “scientific method” for generating knowledge, Bacon also espoused the eradication of the “Hydra” of monstrous multitudes. These included women who were not subservient, colonized peoples, those he considered heretics, and criminals. In such an imperialist approach to people and knowledge, only one “truth” is acceptable and all else heresy—and only the methods deemed appropriate by the dominant hegemony of white, wealthy, male Britishness could contribute to such empirical, objective knowledge.
I will forever be disappointed and dismayed that my own knowledge of these concepts, my awareness of écriture feminine and its kinfolk, was extremely limited until I found my own creative work entering the extended family. My schooling was full of Bacon, leaving out his bigotry, of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, leaving out their slave ownership, of Susan B. Anthony, leaving out her vehement arguments against suffrage for Black Americans. Even at university and postgraduate level, “identity” writings and studies were just that: relevant to the groups they represented, but not of sufficient wider cultural value to be included in basic reading lists for anything other than “specialist” units. I was assigned Nathaniel Hawthorne but not Margaret Fuller, and exposed to endless papers citing Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault but not Cixous or Julia Kristeva. The default for both narrative and knowledge was and is dominated by a patriarchal hegemony, to the great detriment of our understanding of our selves and our wider world.
It has been through writing my current “hypernovel” (a form of electronic literature experimenting with hypertext narrative in Extensible Markup Language and published as an .epub ebook) that this awareness grew. Seven Sisters Unmet (working title) is a study of a character across seven different alternative histories, their stories in distinct voices conveyed by a scientist narrator as outputs of her research observations on “atomic memory”. As a practice-based researcher, I conduct my work to explore questions about how we create, how we think and process creativity, and how creativity is shaped by tools and environment. I have meticulous recording and analysis processes. And as my hypernovel developed, I found myself engaging in techniques and expressions of knowledge that were completely new to me: multiple expressivities, lack of closure, resistance to dominant narrative story arcs (as espoused by writing guides and instructors). In seeking a way to pull the disparate pieces of my novel together under one narrative roof, as it were, I created the narrator/scientist figure. The entirety of the hypernovel is the output of her research observations, communicated not through dry “empirical” reports but through different forms of narrative: the mechanism by which humanity conveyed knowledge for tens of thousands of years before the formal structures of “science” as we now practice them.
The excitement over these creative expressions is what led me down the rabbithole of (initially) women’s writing and then the wider appreciation of narrative and knowledge as expressed by the “other” of our Western patriarchal society: indigenous knowledge, queer experiences, post-colonial stories (the strikeout because no colonized nation or people is ever truly free of the impact of their colonization). As I read more, I learned that my ideas were not new, but that they have been part of the frustrated discourse from the “outsiders” of culture as long as… well, as long as we’ve had discourse. It has simply been othered, devalued, disregarded, and thus hidden, a factor that is acknowledged: Elaine Showalter (a nineteenth-century women’s literature scholar) and Joanna Russ (a feminist, science fiction writer and essayist) both note that because this discourse is brushed aside, we all have to regenerate and rediscover it anew, building from the ground up over and over again (as I have) rather than building on it and advancing it.
In this essay, and my other related work, however, I am trying to do just that: build on écriture feminine, queer writing, post-colonialist narratives, intersectional experiences, and indigenous knowledge to enable a better way of speaking about narratives crafted to resist and dismantle the dominant and dominating imperialist culture. As is apparent in the previous sentence, however, it is extremely difficult to talk about narratives from this global majority without either doing them the extreme disservice of clumping them into a monolith, or defining them by what they aren’t (works of cis-het white men) and/or by what has been done to the communities and individuals creating them (“marginalized”, “under-recognized”, etc.).
Cixous used her Medusa to represent (white) women; I find it insufficient as such. It is a welcome reclaiming of the monstrous, but only for a small proportion of (relatively privileged) outsider voices. For a more inclusive metaphor, I turn to Medusa’s cousin: the self-same many-headed Hydra that Bacon deemed other and monstrous. “Hydraen narrative” refers to stories and creative work that integrate multiplicities in voice and perspective, leave tales unfinished or open-ended for the reader/community to continue, engage collaborative or participatory practices, embrace unnatural or unconventional structures or techniques, and generally resist the “normal/default” narrative forms and outcomes that are so well-documented in literary studies and narratology and by extension writing guides. The Hydra has no one head, no singular consciousness. While they have been vilified as monstrous by contemporary culture’s dominant narrative, serpents across many world mythologies are associated with creation, life, mothering, healing, and wisdom. Moreover, the Hydra was arguably the one labor that Hercules failed: he required his nephew’s help to cauterize the heads once cut off (lest they multiply with every strike); he was unable to kill the beast entirely, instead having to bury the body to prevent rejuvenation; and the blood of the Hydra on his blade was eventually what killed him. The Hydra represents a polyvocal, intersectional, irrepressible collection of identities, values, communities, and voices that remain their own even as they resist the “heroic” forces seeking to behead and inter them.
The Hydra reside in Lerna, a liminal landscape shaped by the life-bringer, water, full of caverns and passages to the underworld. Not only are such cthonic spaces and those who guard and guide those within often considered to be feminized and othered, but the landscape reflects a key aspect of Hydraen narrative that is often neglected in studies of femme/queer/diaspora/intersectional writing: archontic structures. We are familiar with such structures in architecture, particularly in “ad hoc architecture”, wherein elements are added as needed to existing buildings. These are exemplified in tent cities, shanty-towns, Hoovervilles, and other unregulated residential sprawls. Narrative, of course, has always been archontic: oral storytelling (including gossip, jokes, and everyday conversation) uses tales previously told and embellishes and alters them. All stories are constructed of what has come before, whether deliberately or by cultural influence, education, experience, and exposure. The towering example of archontic narrative is fanfiction: narratives that build upon a foundational tale (usually a media property, but not always), adding and re-imagining and intersecting one another until each is its own Kowloon Walled City (RIP) with constantly evolving passageways, rooms, communites, and structures. Others that have emerged are wiki stories such as the SCP Foundation, social media stories, memes, and internet folklore such as creepypastas.
Here is where technology has progressed the future of narrative text: affording democratizing (to an extent) technology that enables Hydraen voices to bypass the cultural gatekeepers of the dominant culture (royalty publishers, scholars, critics, editors) to reach their audiences, and provides space and connectivity for them to revivify the communal, archontic nature of oral narratives in a writerly medium. The ubiquitous, networked, global, text-based nature of digital devices and the internet has exhumed the Hydra from their grave, freeing the immortal body to generate their many heads, multiplicitous voices, their multitudinous perspectives, stories, and knowledge. The serpent storytellers have resumed their places in the knitting circles and quilting bees where sharing feminine knowledge was once the (culturally hidden) norm. The last fifty years have witnessed an explosion of indie publishing from ebooks to electronic literature to fanfic, with niche genres blossoming in wild patches as writers and readers find each other around the world, no longer denied contact by industry or culture.
In doing so, Hydraen narratives expand not only our conception of narrative, culture, voice, and experience, but our understanding of knowledge. Our recent history emphasizes scientific experimentation and direct observation, so-called empirical knowledge that is reproducible, repeatable, and undeniable, in a positivist attempt to understand the singular “truths” of our world. It’s an imperialist approach at its core, where one type of knowledge is more important, more valued, more worthy than others. We laud STEM subjects and call the humanities “soft” and “mickey mouse”, when the intangible, experiential, emotional, and communal knowledge shared through stories and art is what can help us to not push the button on that weapon of mass destruction science created. In a global society, with mutual goals of equality, education, quality of life, and ecosystem preservation, where peoples of differing experiences, values, and expectations intermingle, we are desperately in need of knowledges that enable complex understandings of multiple perspectives, emotional connection, and creative solutions. Hydraen narratives convey just the kinds of subjective, multiplicative, and cultural knowledge we need to truly improve our world.
Hydraen narratives are indefinable, multi-faceted, and irrepressible. They are a fundamentally resistant practice. They defy the cultural order of canon and “quality” and scholarly theories as to what narrative is. They break narrative structures, embracing the “unnatural”. They eschew definitive endings and closure, instead inviting audiences in to imagine—or indeed, write—their own continuances. They present the Hydraen experience of monstrous otherness, the multiple masks of identity performance and societal compliance, the hidden languages and lives of queerness. They embrace knowledge that is not default: that is subjective, experiential, creative, innate, narrative, and emotional. They revel in chaos, which is not chaos at all but rather an inclusive acceptance of a multiplicity of perspectives, knowledge, and realities.
The future of technology is evolving quickly, so fast that laws and practices and ethical approaches have little ability to keep pace. The future of narrative text, however, is already here, and it’s changing our world just as powerfully, and perhaps more positively, from the Arab Spring movement to extended civil rights to worldwide pushes for equality and understanding that have emerged as we engage in a greater variety of narrative perspectives from Hydraen authors. The future of text is found not only in hardware and software, but in the previously unheard voices such advancements proliferate and amplify.