Reza's Interpretive Essay
From English 194 Wiki
Beyond the Rye
What is gained when literary texts are interacted with in a new medium? Better yet, what is lost? Is it possible to do a text justice when recreating it? These are a few, from a plethora of questions that UCSB’s ENG 194 considered and The Catcher Team set out to see what would manifest through its internet game, Beyond the Rye.
Our group’s project, Beyond the Rye, is a coalescence of Photoshop modified pictures and Salingeresque text that we wrote ourselves. In short, we focused on a brief excerpt from four chapters in Catcher in the Rye, which we felt would make for the most intriguing and captivating redo of such a classic text. Our excerpt begins when Holden, the story’s protagonist, enters Ernie’s, a New York Jazz Club, and culminates with his conflict with Sonny, a young prostitute, and Maurice, a low life elevator boy who doubles as a pimp. We strove to maintain the essential elements of the text, while readapting what we felt were components that could be altered without losing the authenticity of the original. Visually, our results were astounding; the effects attained through Photoshop were surreal and distorted much like Holden’s recount of his story. Textually, we rewrote a storyline to fit the mold our pictures created while doing our best to maintain Salinger’s syntactical idiosyncrasies. The marriage of the aforementioned resulted in, what we like to think of as a, 21st century redo of a canonical American text.
Firstly, our group had to decide if what we were striving to achieve was even plausible because we were attempting to model an original. Per our discussions in class, we were often conflicted with whether or not a model’s end product can ever achieve a state that is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the original. We figured the best way to do this was to maintain the imperative ingredients (i.e. characters, scenes, scenarios) and then alter what we felt were factors that were not as crucial (i.e. dialogue, mood, chronology). Our group frequently referred back to the discussions in class that revolved around an artist attempting to create a painting inspired by reality. In class we posited that the painting would never achieve a state of realism, because this implies the artist would have to capture every detail--hair, freckles and pores included--from the original. Even if the artist reached unmitigated authenticity, would it be an injustice to call the painting a replication of an original? In my opinion, yes. Plato and Aristotle, for example, held that poetry, or in our case prose, is twice removed from the original because god’s creations were simply representations of the truth and essence of nature. Therefore, Salinger’s text, following a sixty hour period in a boy’s life, is the initial degree of separation from essence, because it is a recounting of reality, a recounting of real life. Thus, Beyond the Rye is thrice removed because we recreated a recreation. Additionally, the fact that we only partially recreated a recreation, only serves to further us from authenticity.
We chose Salinger’s work simply because it was simple. We wanted a text that was easy to follow, and in our opinion a story following a boy for a couple days was just that. The notion of our conclusion is very reminiscent of William Wordsworth’s conclusion on why poems of kings and nobility were less favorable than poems of simple people in simple life: The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
Simultaneously, Holden lives a “humble” life, in which “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity…”
Now that we had our text, the next step in our process was to decide what portion we would center our project around and why. We chose to begin with chapter twelve because it can be seen as the rising action to the climax, and ended with chapter fourteen because it is the end of the climax and beginning of the story’s resolution. In short the three chapters recount the segment of the story in which Holden has a few drinks at a bar, and agrees to have a hooker sent to his room. After not sleeping with the hooker, he refuses to pay five dollars more than was initially agreed to, and is subsequently smacked, punched and “flicked” by Maurice, and then “chiseled” for the five dollars he refused to pay by Sonny. We felt that the excerpt we chose could be, in itself, a short story. Thus, “the player” could begin three-fifths into the story’s plot, yet feel as if it was the beginning. Not to mention that the portion we dealt with is one of the more exciting and stimulating of the novel. At the same time, our project could be seen as a prototype to a game that would be expanded upon if the game were to go into production. Our game would have a plethora of dilemmas with corresponding options, which would lead “the player” as close or as far from the original text. Decide to stay at Pencey, and Holden has a breakdown in class and throws himself out a window like James Castle. Game over. A full game would have question after question, each altering the next one to be posed and thus forging a new literary path. Imagine being able to purchase iBooks that could be uploaded to mp3 players or PDA’s and being able to fully interact with, and alter texts. For Catcher in the Rye’s iBook, there would be a hidden meter that would gage Holden’s mental state and psychological threshold, and if one too many unfavorable decisions were made, Holden would have a break down. As a group, we made sure to stay away from words like right, wrong, correct and incorrect, because who’s to say what is right and wrong, good or bad? In my opinion, in Holden’s case there is only favorable and less favorable.
The games potential progress would resemble a web more than a storyline. In my opinion, the best part of it all is that since literary beauty is in the mind of the reader, there could me many plausible happy endings. For one person that may be Holden playing checkers with Sally, for another it could be Holden riding the carousel with Phoebe. At the same time, there are an infinitesimal amount of not so happy endings that could be brought on in an equal amount of ways. For example, “the player” might choose to go through with Holden’s suicidal sentiments and throw himself out the window after the incident with Maurice. The possibilities…and impossibilities are endless.
Additionally, we chose Catcher in the Rye because it is an American classical and in the canon of literature along side Huckleberry Finn, 1984 and A Brave New World. For us, this meant that we would have a built in readership that would be inclined to play and hopefully, have a familiarity with the text already. Moreover, since we were presenting “the player” with decisions to make at various points, there would be an air of intrigue and captivation before even playing, because a new level of interaction was ascertained in a new medium.
At first, I had the idea to make a traditional book that had tabs, which were flipped to dependent on decisions made by “the reader”. For example, if “the reader” ended a passage and a question was posed, the reader would choose (either A or B, Yes or No) and then flip to the corresponding tab. Each tab would then be written as if the new page was a new paragraph, and the story would evolve as such. However, text alone would be very bland and fail to capture “the reader”, so naturally a visual companion came to mind. No one in the group was a talented artist, and neither cutting and pasting pictures onto pages with text, nor printing pages with text and pictures was appealing. Surprisingly, it took us a few days to think of actually utilizing a computer and creating it by streaming a series of pages together. If choosing Catcher in the Rye as our text opened windows, utilizing a computer opened doors.
We first set out to find pictures to fit our storyline, online. However, this task proved far too tedious because not only would we have to cite each photo individually, but the pictures we needed to progress our plot were rather particular. For example, finding a picture to fit “Sonny walks into hotel and by Holden with green dress” would be almost impossible to find, even in a picture bank of thousands. Therefore, we decided to take our own pictures based on the storyboard we had created to progress our plot. The pictures that we took are all rather simple and plain shots of city life and city people, with the exception of a few for character development.
Once we had our pictures, we chose to use Photoshop in order to alter them so that they weren’t just regular pictures. We knew that certain photos would have certain and particular effects, however all the pictures were given an overall “blotting” in order to make them look surreal and distorted. Since Holden is recollecting from the past, we decided that his memory would not be as accurate as when the events originally occurred, so naturally the pictures, should be distorted as well. The Photoshop effect we used, Sum-i, accounts for the photographic dissonance. At the same time, we also followed the prelude to Holden’s mental breakdown, and we tried to represent this in our photo’s effects as well. The overall feel of all our photos are hazy and blurred in order to capture what a few tumultuous days before a psychological breakdown occurs might look like. We knew we achieved the desired effect when Ben, our friend who played Maurice, said the pictures looked “crazy”.
We also used Photoshop’s tint and contrast altering effects in order to give certain pictures a yellow tint. We did this because Holden, especially in the portion we covered, is often cowardly and succumbs to others, all while wishing he had the nerve to carryout his internal fantasies of fighting back and standing up for himself. Almost every single photo has yellow in it to serve as a subtle reminder of Holden’s cowardice and fear.
We also used a blurring effect in the series of pictures at Ernie’s, the local jazz club. As Holden is approached by Lillian Simmons, a girl his brother used to date, Holden immediately comments on her, and her date’s, innate phoniness. Throughout their conversation Holden repeatedly refers to her superficial demeanor, which compelled us to communicate this via visual alteration. At first, we had her and her gradually disappear, a crescendo into black, if you will. But that didn’t seem to convey superficiality. We then used a blurring mechanism on Photoshop which allowed us to control how blurry we wanted the shot to be. The best word that comes to mind is blurry; however, the effect, more or less, makes it look like they are standing behind a glass shower door that can be seen through, but undiscernibly. For us, this was perfect because the blurry effect was demonstrative of her lack of substance. The fade to black would have been vague, and I’m sure most people would mistake it for them simply walking back to their table.
Another Photoshop feature we used was a simple photograph rotator in order to flip an image of a UCSB dorm hallway upside down. We did this because the shot that we flipped was one of Holden walking to his room after he agrees to have a hooker sent to his room. We felt this to be the moment in which everything gets turned upside down. Basically, the downward spiral Holden experiences, ensues almost the moment he agrees to have Sonny sent up to his room. In our “game”, once he agrees everything is downhill; discomfort during a sexual encounter; money problems with Sonny; altercation with Maurice; and ultimately defeat at the hands of Maurice. We realized that the subtlety of the effect on the photograph would most likely go unnoticed, however, we also realized that, subtle or not, the photographic effects were all we had to work with.
Finally, we used a Photoshop feature that would allow us to scratch out Sonny’s face in order to emphasize how she was a jaded character who couldn’t be trusted. For us, we were hoping that the scratch out would imply a sense of mystery and a lack of knowledge, which would then instill skepticism and mistrust in “the player”. Once again, the subtlety of our effects would most likely go unnoticed; however, like Salinger’s text most subtleties also go unnoticed the first time around.
Although, we weren’t able to fully recapture and recapitulate Salinger’s classic, our end product simply did what we intended; a new take, in a new medium of the traditional. In the end, our project was a coalescence in more ways than one; first, a marriage of the old and the new, text and technology; second, it was a marriage of readapted text and original pictures. Although, we would have liked more time to turn Beyond the Rye into something more substantial, and not so abrupt, we were extremely happy with our results. Our photographs were initially simple and plain, however, when reworked and refinished with Photoshop, they took on a whole new life and, ultimately, became storylines themselves. Our text wasn’t Salinger, however, only Salinger can write like Salinger, and we feel that we captured his (and in the end, Holden’s) idiosyncrasies the best we could. Ultimately, although much authenticity was lost, a picture is worth a thousand words, and we have over sixty pictures. The new medium in which we displayed a traditional text, allows “the player” to (literally) see the text in a new light.
Work Cited
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1798.
