Disappearing Rain is a deeply interesting work of electronic literature that explores themes of tradition, spirituality, grievance, and modernity through salient and evocative prose and poetry. But what is most interesting to me is that I felt this way after navigating the Disappearing Rain website and essentially crafting the story’s structure myself. The actual experience of navigating the database structure of the Disappearing Rain website and the way that it affects the impact that the words on the screen have on the audience is primarily what I want to focus on.
Narratives usually follow the format of exposition -> rising action -> climax -> falling action -> resolution, with specific plot points that fit the narrative function of each of those sections being placed in the subsequent categories. This also applies to nonlinear storytelling, the actual chronological position within the plot is less important than the narrative purpose when it comes to where in the work the author will choose to place a particular scene. Think of Gone Girl, which I will not spoil for anyone that hasn’t seen, and how the first act of the movie jumps around chronologically because it has to in order to actually convey what the movie will be about, it’s all exposition placed at the beginning of the movie to serve its role as exposition.
There’s a reason why authors choose to do this (presumably, I’m not doing any research here), and it’s because each category serves as context to the next so that the audience can follow along. If a movie were to break the structure and do something like climax -> exposition -> rising action without moving back to the climax it would confuse or, worse yet, bore the audience because the exposition and rising action serve as the context that invests an audience in the narrative. Similarly, the climax is the context that further invests the audience in the falling action and resolution. (Think the impetus of creating El Camino following what many considered to be an unfulfilled resolution at the climax of Breaking Bad)
Disappearing Rain, and other database-as-database pieces of electronic literature, somewhat throw that structure to the wind because they allow the audience to experience the narrative in whatever order they so choose. There are indeed scenes in Disappearing Rain that would normally serve as exposition and the like, but they are not placed in any particular order, at least not one set in stone.
There are a couple of ways to read Disappearing Rain that you could say are intended by the author given the structure of the website.
- Click each phrase of the poems in succession
- Trace each character pair, clicking through the phrases in succession
- Follow the flow, and click on the links within the body that interest you
Given the name of this blog post, it is likely apparent which route I prefer, but I find the fact that there are multiple to be fascinating in itself. Let’s start with the first. Disappearing Rain is organized into two sets of poems, each with its own poem broken up into a list of links that connect to the actual body of the work. So it’s possible to go down the list of links in the order of the poem. Similarly, each line of the poem represents a part of the story of a character pair, so it’s possible to follow the links in order but move about the lines in order to stay focused on one character pair. However, I haven’t dedicated much time to exploring the work in either of these manners. Instead, I chose to follow the flow.
I began by going to the first overarching poem and began at the first link in its subsequent poem, and from there I let curiosity take hold of me. Inside each body of text, there are links to other relevant bodies. Similar to keywords in natural language-input games, there are some words that stick out to the audience that the audience is compelled to interact with. Here, these keywords are hyperlinks to something relevant to that word. For instance, in the body “Water Leavings” -> “the word is” -> “knowing” there is prose introducing the main mystery of the work: Anna is missing and the only trace of her are these strange love letter emails. The keywords in this body of text are “the bodies [of the emails],” “police,” and “the window.”
Clicking on “the bodies” will bring you to the next link in the line of “the word is,” which is a body of text examining the body of one of these love letter emails. Clicking on “police” will bring you to “River Journeys” -> “in their presence” -> “the river parts” which is a body of text that is a letter to the Berkley Campus Police from Anna that tells them not to search for her. Clicking on “the window” brings you to “Water Leavings” -> “realities” -> “crystal edges” which is a body of text about Anna’s great-grandmother, Yuki, and how Anna’s soul visited her window the night she disappeared. These are all different story beats, with the first two of them being more related exposition about the circumstances of Anna’s disappearance and the third being more exposition about another story thread, being the familial connection and reaction to Anna’s disappearance.
The choice of which story beat comes next is the audience’s, which makes pacing an interesting challenge. There still do appear to be bodies of text that fit each narrative category of exposition, climax, etc. and the map of links seems to be mapped in a way that you don’t encounter anything prematurely unless you choose a starting point randomly. But even though the mapping of subjects is somewhat structured traditionally, there is always the chance of splitting the narrative and not giving plot lines enough time to sit.
For instance, in my first navigation, I was most intrigued by “the bodies” because I wanted to know the contents of the emails left on Anna’s computer, as well as the possibility that it was being used as a double entendre and that I could learn Anna’s fate early on. This kept me on the “Anna’s disappeared and we’re learning some of the context that will serve the investigation of this mystery” storyline until eventually, I clicked on a link that I thought would teach me more about Anna. Granted, that body of text did teach me more about Anna, but it did so in relation to her lineage more broadly, and from there I got more into her relatives, which led me to exposition for a later plot line of the credit card company-soul stealing conspiracy plot line, which, through me trying to get more information on that, took me back to more exposition about the family which led me to a climax of the grieving plotline. On its face, this sounds like a failure of pacing and messy narrative whiplash, but while actually reading it it felt like the exact opposite.
Since every diversion was a decision I made in hopes of finding more information, and each body of text was written to make the audience want to know more, it always felt good to me to just follow the flow. No matter what I clicked on I was getting what I wanted, more information to piece together this maze of mysteries, which acted as its own investment mechanism. Unlike traditional stories which must set up a compelling premise and feed you enough information in a block to make you invested in the rest of the story, the act of searching for the next piece of information served as the investment. I actively wanted to learn more, so when I got off my originally intended path of finding exposition about Anna’s disappearance and stumbled upon a climatic scene of her grieving mother, it felt natural and it felt impactful. It was exactly what I was looking for, an answer to some aspect of this great mystery. In this way, the database-as-database structure allows the audience to create their own narrative progression that follows the flow that they make for themselves, an interesting way of keeping the audience satisfied.
– King Deas
Intermittent Mechanism 