This week in my graduate seminar on hermeneutics and contemporary narrative (a.k.a.: "Interpretation Theory and the Freaky New Stories That Really Make Us Need That Kind of Theory"), we began discussing N. Katherine Hayles' latest book, Writing Machines. (Her new book, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts isn't due out until next month, but what a title!)

In the course of our discussion, we thought about a point Hayles makes about her own scholarly transition from "solving problems" to "investigating problematics." The students were, justifiably, unsure as to what she meant by this, so I brought up a universally-acknowledged problematic text to ground our investigation of problematicity: William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In the interest of time, we focused on one problematic aspect of the play -- Hamlet's indecision and inability to take action. We proposed a problem-solving approach to this aspect of Hamlet, positing that Shakespeare's lengthy play about equivocation and ambivalence is really a statement of the ultimate futility of life; i.e., Hamlet isn't the only one incapable of making a difference, of righting a wrong -- this is the essence of the human condition in an uncaring and unjust world. In this interpretation, the problem of what to make of Shakespeare's wallowing in Hamlet's paralysis gets resolved quite nicely.

However, the problem with this sort of interpretation is that it shuts down (or tries to, at least) other interpretations. And when these other interpretations muster enough strength and evidence, they tend to discredit this interpretation. It's also rather pat, isn't it?

Against this, we set a different approach, one that explores the dynamics of what makes the play problematic, and that refuses to presume that problems in interpretation are equal to failures or flaws. In the previous model, the problem of Hamlet's ambivalence is, essentially, a flaw in the greatness of the play until it can be rationalized through an interpretive solution.

In this approach, the problematic features of Hamlet make the play more interesting and valuable, not less. With this perspective, Hamlet's failure to exact revenge throughout the play allows us to generate multiple interpretations -- maybe we should think of Hamlet as: a Freudian neurotic, a product of class-based privilege, caught in the midst of an inescapable conflict about gender, sex, and power... the list could go on forever (and does, in Hamlet scholarship).

The conflict between problem-solving and problematics is one that continues to be fought at all levels of literary endeavor. We'd like to think (at least some of the time) that even the most difficult and problematic works can be successfully interpreted, that there's a meaning in there somewhere, and that we could find that meaning. We want that problem to be solved. And even though most of literary work in academia investigates problematics, to get to the dynamics of the problem, the researcher has to embrace the ideology of problem-solving! (After all, we may be open to the possibility that the problem may reveal an entire world of ideas and beliefs, but we have to believe in our own interpretation as being the approach that best opens up that world (i.e., the solution).

It's a tricky game, and one that we're often not aware of playing.

But we can be aware of playing another tricky game, Robin Johnson's The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Games of this sort are alternately called "text adventures" and "interactive fiction." I grew up playing these games (as you can read in my latest fabulous star-profile) , and I always called them text adventures. However, the move in the academy has been to adopt the more erudite nom de jeu interactive fiction, which gives rise to the initialism "IF," which allows for the malapropic acronymic pun in the title.

Anyhoo, IF comes from the dark ages when personal computers were so powerful that they could display text on a screen! That was it, really. The player is given a paragraph or so of text setting the scene, and then is left to type in simple commands to direct the action of the game. At the end of the text provided by the game will be a sideways carrot, like so: > This is the player input line. Type what you want yourself/your character (Hamlet, in this case) to do, and if the game recognizes (parses, in computer lingo) the words you used, it will carry out those actions.

In Hamlet, for instance, after leaving Hamlet's bedroom, you/Hamlet run into Horatio, who tells you about seeing your father's ghost. You, of course, head out into the cold to see this ghost!

Balcony
You are on the palace balcony. Bats are flapping around in the twilight. Miles and miles of crinkly Danish countryside stretch out below you.
A ghost is here.
An exit leads south.

> look at ghost
He looks a little paler and more transparent than you remember him, but this is unmistakably the ghost of your late father. He is dressed in full armour and looks a little bit peeved, just as you would if you were dead.

> talk to ghost
"Hey Dad," you say cheerily. "What's up?"
"Hamlet," says the old man after a sigh, "you remember how I was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back? Well... it's like this. Your uncle Claudius poisoned me so he could become king and marry your mother. I'd be awfully grateful if you could kill him for me."
"All right," you say, "I'll do it!"
Your life suddenly seems to have purpose.

Now, besides being clever and amusing, it's also an interesting way to play with narratological concepts (such as the implied reader, the narratee, the author, the implied author, and speech acts) and to investigate the multiple rich problems presented in and by the original text.

So, for all of you academic types who made it this far (over 1,000 words! Not exactly an example of Berubean exuberance, but well outside the usual bounds of blog terseness) -- what thinkest thou of problem-solving, problematics, and IF Hamlet?

(Thanks to Boing Boing for spotting this!)