Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large ...

oundaries on this activity; it is not clear from her analysis whether those boundaries are
structural or aesthetic.
Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of
undermining the narrative experience. I lose patience with Calvino when he
repeatedly dissolves the illusion. (Murray 40)
Specifically, Murray loses patience with Calvino because of his recurrent uses of
metafictional turns; the “illusion” here is an illusion of “losing oneself in the text,” an
experience of diminishing awareness of a text’s mechanics and a sense of immediacy
with the represented world. This is a point Murray repeats later in the text, when she
discusses agency in digital narratives and demarcates it clearly from authorship: too much
audience power, in her framework, spoils the story. This provokes some questions about
the role of interactivity in Murray’s “interactive narrative”: there are boundaries to what
agency can be, and a violation of those boundaries – too much audience activity –
violates, in Murray’s analysis, narrative as a concept. This provokes a question regarding
what role suspension of disbelief, and some level of yielding to the author on the part of
the audience, has in the definition for a story or narrative, and what to do about stories or
narratives which violate these boundaries of narrative agency. However, it also provokes
an investigation of these concepts of narrative immersion and control; one may consider
whether we are confronted with new ways of conceiving of experience here, and whether
these experiences situate agency and immersion in different ways. Perhaps we have
reached a point where our understanding of suspension of disbelief -- our classification of
"losing oneself" as a key pleasure -- needs to be reconsidered and recontextualized. This,
again, points to phenomena I argue are also endemic to comics universes and to fiction
networks in general: the oscillation of story and storymaking at points of ontological
fusion, the blurring of the thing made and the ongoing act of making it.
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