Section II: Group Traversal on Judd Morrissey's "The Jew's Daughter"
On 15 April 2019, Dr. Dene Grigar and the students from her graduate seminar on Electronic Literature performed a group traversal on Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. Morrissey's The Jew’s Daughter is an interactive fiction that revolves around the conflicts that arise in Jewish community due to the conversion of a Jewish girl. This fiction uses swipe technology instead of hyperlink. On each screen of this text, there is one word in blue. When the audience swipe over that blue word, the text slightly changes. The story advances with the change of a few sentences each time. The text is rich in metaphors and symbols and much of its meaning depends on these metaphors and symbols. To understand the meaning of the text properly, the audience have to notice the slight differences in sentences and the added metaphors and symbols. In addition to being non-linear, the text provides flexibility to its audience to either start reading from the top to the bottom or from the place where the text changes. Even though the form is circular, each reader’s style of reading does contribute to the ways the narrative unfolds. Thus, the readers’ involvement entails more than just swiping blue words to change the content. Each individual reader’s style can make a difference in the way they perceive the story.
During the performance, Dr. Grigar and her students read around 25 slides of the text. Each of them took turn, swiped the blue word, and read the slide from the beginning. After each cycle of reading, Dr. Grigar and the students had brief discussion sessions on various topics, including the function and importance of traversals. According to Dr. Grigar, traversals are created for two primary reasons: 1) traversals help the authors inform their audience about their works; 2) traversals help the practitioners of Electronic Literature curate and save e-lit pieces from extinction after their technologies become outmoded.
However, the purpose of the group traversal of Morrissey's The Jew’s Daughter was different. Emphasizing on the performative quality of the e-lit pieces, Dr. Grigar claims that “e-lit is second orality.” Her claim is exemplified by the way the students responded to the group performance. The students unanimously agreed that their experience of silent reading of The Jew's Daughter was significantly different from their experience of group reading. Even though at a first glance The Jew's Daughter seems an e-lit piece that prioritizes linguistic mode, the group performance brings out the text’s multimodality. Communal reading makes this fiction sound like a poem. The group performance made it possible to experience the beautiful rhythm and sonic quality of this e-lit piece, that the individual silent reading of this text did not.
This group traversal has pedagogical implications for Electronic Literature classrooms. Since the beginning of the semester, we have been discussing about various forms of audience engagements and interactivity. This traversal exemplifies how group performance can enhance the aesthetic quality and meaning of a particular e-lit piece. Even though Morrissey has used stream of consciousness in The Jew’s Daughter as a narrative technique, the communal reading takes this stream of consciousness to a different level. As each reader reads the same section (with slight modification), the repetition allows the readers to experience the psychological complexity and intense emotions of the characters. The variety in the tones, rhythms, accents, paces, and reading styles of different readers makes the stream of consciousness more meaningful.
After listening for a while, the group performance sounds like an ancient ritual of communal storytelling.
