“The 21 Steps” as digital short story

I’m writing to share and recommend a text that recently worked very nicely in an “Introduction to Literature” course for me here at UC Davis and that I look forward to transferring into Ecomedia courses in the future. “The 21 Steps” is a digital short story by Charles Cumming posted on the UK Penguin website as part of a six digital story series. The story itself is delivered in a series of quite small text boxes. One clicks a link in the box to proceed to the next bit of the story. These text boxes appear against a full-screen backdrop of GoogleEarth images showing the story’s setting and movement. Often the click to the next bit of text triggers first a movement of the GoogleEarth imagery before the next text appears. Very occasionally, in place of text, these clicks will pop up a text box with a photo instead, either of an object or of a computer screen featured in the story. What follows are two of the concepts and connections that emerged through class discussion.

Intertextuality. In the brief website blurb about the story, there is a link provided to The 39 Steps by John Buchan, the well-known novella that served as kernel for Alfred Hitchcock’s film by the same name. [And, I would argue this lineage is extended into William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” and its film adaptation.] We discussed basic issues of print fiction to film adaptation but were then able to extend this to thinking about whether this latest digital rendition was an adaptation or if different conceptualizations and language of the multiplicity of intertexts might be useful. Students were particularly engaged by the notion that novella to film seemed to them a transfer from a single medium to another one, while this latest transfer seems a hybrid of print, cinematic, and digital/computer media—a literary movie website. Complex discussions of textual ecosystems ensued with a particular focus on the concept of “distributed narratives” that I take from Pawel Frelik’s work (as with The Matrix: films, comics, computer games, websites…).

GIS and Focalization. Ursula Heise raises some excellent questions in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet about how technologies like GoogleEarth are modifying (or not) our sense of being, being earthlings. “The 21 Steps” is a great text for pursuing such questions with students in a classroom. My own approach to teaching “Intro to Lit” is to incorporate formal concepts of POV and Focalization into the production of compelling interpretations of texts and the contexts written into them, and this story offers an extension of formal analysis in light of digital media capabilities. The God’s-eye view presented graphically between the texts creates a dynamic tension with the First Person narration of the text-boxed print. GoogleEarth is something we usually control by ourselves via the keyboard, so there is a seeming interactivity, yet the destinations to which the imaging satellite move in this story are pre-chosen by the narrative events themselves. As such, not only does the visual background create dissonance with the First Person narrator, but it is, itself, uncanny—familiar yet working in an unfamiliar way. Students have described the resulting impression as experimental. When they are encouraged to focus on the variables of POV and Focalization, students find “The 21 Steps” an attempt at bringing the ancient act of narrating up to date with new technologies that are showing us views of ourselves and our world for which we do not yet have narrative capacities.

This is a vital space where we are trying to catch up our narrative capacities to technologically-mediated views (of ecology), where experiments bring together “old” and “new” media, and where critical approaches and tools are leveraged and modified to account for this coexistence of previous, present, and coming media modes. “The 21 Steps” can suggest to students that their conceptualization of the world and what they can do in it is not fully determined, at least not yet.