Powerlessness In Electronic Literature: By Blake Aschenbrener, Sriram Satyavolu, and Savannah Walters

Traces Left

Types of Traces


Bourchardon plays with the word “trace” in its noun and verb form; the first leaves a small piece of physical evidence, a clue for instance, and the second means both to unearth and to outline an image. In this work, the word “trace” refers to the five meanings, each correlating to a numbered section of the text:
 


 

1. a message left by a stranger

2.  memories of the speaker and reader

3. a mark on another person
4. self-expression
5. one’s child



 

Traces of the Past

Memories, the second form of tracing, make themselves especially pertinent. The past interactions, although an intangible record of existence, remain in their mind as an image/idea of you, as a trace of you. This suggests that your relationships are also traces, so long as the memories are alive.  In short, you leave a trace every time you leave a memory in someone else’s mind. In Untrace, the reader only comprehends the artifacts left of the narrator’s past. The reader becomes an investigator of the speaker’s story, putting the pieces together to retrace a cohesive narrative. The bits and pieces from the character’s memory stand as the only basis of information about the speaker. In Memory and Motion, an academic article on digital writing by Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs, states, “…the developments of the human mind and of material culture have co-evolved in a relationship where human knowledge is reliant on forms of externalised memory” (3). This claims our informational knowledge depends on verbally (or artistically) expressed memories. In the case, the narrator expresses their past in visual, verbal, and perhaps audio. making Untrace a fascinating path of narrative breadcrumbs.

Definition of Trace

    With his manipulation of “trace”, Bouchardon prompts the reader to question its specificities. Can you leave a trace without identifying its owner? In other words, can you leave an untraceable trace? A traces lead you to the thing it embodies. Bourchardon negates the word into the title Untrace. Does this addition of the prefix “un-” refer to untracing as in following the path back to its roots? Or undoing or avoiding any clue received? It could refer to any number of definitions. If I, however, trace my hand on a sheet of paper, it silhouettes the shape of a hand, and the brain fills in the outline with the skin and bone it’s missing. If I trace a drawing, by following its lines I inherently make a copy of the original image. A trace can mean a trackable piece of evidence that leads back to a source or a sprinkle of something, i.e. “Just a little bit”. In fact, all of these definitions of “trace” lead the tracker to whoever left something behind.

 

 

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