Walker


The participants, Jill Walker:

Notes on reading Donna Leishman's The Possession of Christian Shaw
The Possession of Christian Shaw is a visual narrative based on accounts of the demonic Possession of a young girl, Christian Shaw, in the 17th century in Scotland. Donna Leishman retells the story using graphics and interactivity, twisting a story that already has several tellings and several possible interpretations. Although six men and women were burnt for allegedly causing young Christian's Possession, the documents from the case are anonymous, and so similar to documents from the witchcraft trials in Salem a few years earlier that there is good reason to treat the documentation as fiction as much as fact.

By taking an old story that has been told in many different ways and retelling it in a new medium and with new interpretations, Donna Leishman continues her strategies from Red Riding Hood and The Bloody Chamber, which are retellings of familiar fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood is modernised but recognisably follows the well known children's story. The Bloody Chamber is more abstracted but still clearly plays on the Bluebeard tale, so that the iconic use of blood, keys and keyholes is easily related to the story.

It is a greater challenge to retell a story that the audience is not familiar with, like the story of Christian Shaw. Or perhaps more to the point, it is a greater challenge for the reader to follow an interactive narrative that retells an unfamiliar story.

When I started to read The Possession of Christian Shaw I had no other knowledge of the story than that which I found in the title. Somebody called Christian Shaw was possessed, and the story, I assumed, would be about that Possession. I was confused though, when the main character of the story was a little girl - knowing only men named Christian I assumed that the Christian who was possessed was a man. So I kept wondering which of the male characters was Christian Shaw. The priest? The fatherly man who takes the little girl to the doctor's office? I wondered whether the little girl was somehow causing a Possession of someone else, and as that became less and less likely, I became more confused.

Possession is of course not a conventional narrative where events are described or shown in a straightforward manner. Instead the story is told largely by suggestion, and through the unsettling atmosphere of the graphics. The cityscape is the backdrop for narrative fragments of many kinds. A skyscraper opens up to show strange creatures inside. Other spots open squares with cycles of images: the girl, a snowman, flowers, a tree. I cycle through the images by clicking on a small cross next to each of them, and returning to the first image, find that clicking each may cause small changes. The girl spits coals (actually until I read the final summary of the story I didn't realise they were coals and I thought the lines were of smell, not heat. I was disgusted anyway, so I don't think it mattered) and the flowers's petals drift upwards. Many of the changes are eerie and captivating, but only a few, such as the coals falling from the girl's mouth, appear to be plot events that move the story onwards. In some of the cycles I click listlessly through wondering whether I'm missing something.

There are some larger plot events, or sequences that do move the story forward. The first occurs after the girl has spit coals: in the church a man reaches out to take the girl's hand and the girl refuses. If the reader coaxes the girl by mousing over her unwilling hand (I had to ask for help to figure this out), the girl will take the man's hand after all and go with him to an office. I thought it was a doctor's office, given the modern visual language of the cityscape, but it might have been the office of any authority figure. Later, a house rises and people step in front of it, accusing or accused, I was not sure until I read the story at the end and realised that they must have been the people accused of causing Christian's Possession. These people are burnt one by one, but not until the reader clicks in the appropriate places. This sequence reminds me a lot of Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starr's Dream Kitchen (2000), where the user is also made complicit in a public burning. In this section of Dream Kitchen the user is led through a series of scenes in which a gang of pens taunt a lonely pencil, finally burning it at the stake. It is the user who sets each of these scenes in motion, each click of the mouse moving the drama a step forward: one click ties the pencil to the stake, the next strikes the match, then the mouse cursor becomes the lit match and the only option the work gives the user, short of quitting, is to set the match to the bonfire and thereby light it. Possession does much the same thing in this sequence, never allowing the user any options other than to burn these people, though it is entirely unclear to the user - or a t least to this user - why they must be burnt. They haven't shown up in the story at all until then, or if they have, I didn't recognise them.

The sequence does have the effect of upsetting me, though. I feel complicit in something which I don't understand, and I'm relieved that after this scene, grass grows, signifying the passing of time, the cityscape disappears and finally a text describing the story of Christian's possession and its various interpretations. At this point I am able to fit most elements of Possession into this story, finally making sense of it.

Presenting the reader with fragments of a story that are hard or impossible to fit into a whole until everything is read is not an uncommon narrative device, and is not at all restricted to interactive narratives. Detective novels build their entire genre upon keeping key plot events hidden from the reader until the end of the book. Unreliable narrators or narrators who only know aspects of the story are related techniques.

This is not quite what happens in Possession. There is no clear narrator or focalisation here, other than the focalisation present in the view of the narrative world that the user is presented with: a semi-abstract yellow landscape of skyscrapers, a huge screen slanting in the background, a church, a small house, a hill and some trees. The final explanation allows the user to retrospectively fit the bits of the story together.

I found Possession interesting and intriguing, but I got very frustrated as I was reading. I got completely stuck two or three times and needed Donna's help to figure out what to do in order to move on in the story. In addition to this fairly mechanical effort of figuring out where to click, I found it hard to piece together a narrative as I moved through the work. The final time I read the piece, after having worked out all the right places to click, the whole experience turned out to be fairly short, probably taking less than half an hour. I reached the final explanatory text soon enough that I wasn't too annoyed at not having been able to understand what was going on.

The work does ask a lot of its readers. Not only must we try to follow an unfamiliar story, in addition we need to search diligently for the tiny area of the screen where the mouse must be clicked in order for the narrative to move on. Sometimes it feels as though the work is taunting me as I read: in one of the cycles, mousing over the bumps of a cactus makes the cursor become "clickable" at regular intervals, but once I try to click, the clickable spot eludes me, apparently moving just ahead of where I click the mouse, to where I can never reach it. This reminds me of Mission 01: Kill Bin Laden, a web game in which the little bin Laden figure darts back and forwards on the screen according to where the crosshatch of your mouse-controlled "gun" is - always just out of reach. The bin Laden game later does the opposite, letting bin Laden follow your cursor, making it impossible not to kill bin Laden. Perhaps one could say that Possession also reverses this taunting of the user at the end, going from teasing the user by hiding the way forward to forcing the user to burn Christian's tormentors whether she wants to or not.

Jill Walker

March 2004