A couple weeks back, Matt and I had the chance to test drive NINE's new Ivanhoe Game software (George has blogged about his use of the IG in the classroom). While we weren't asked to sign any anti-disclosure agreements, I won't be posting spoilers here. But I had so much fun that I wanted to transcribe a couple of game moves.
Matt and I decided to put our heads together and play as a team, our rationale being that neither one of us could afford to devote excessive amounts of time to IGing, as tempting as that might be. Collaborating was a way to divy up the play load.
The play text was Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." We created two personas over the course of the week, playing first the House (personified) and later a mysterious figure known only as "Mme. Lynn." If you've read the story, you might recall that Roderick Usher's sister is named "Madeline." While we never developed a clear identity for Mme. Lynn, we always had a vague sense that she was Madeline's avatar (hence the phonetic and orthographic similarities between the two names).
For my first move, I used Poe's mention of stringed instruments as my hook. I've been researching weaving and textiles off and on for several years, so my idea was to combine music and textiles in some fashion. The congruence of the two has strong historical and literary roots: I think of Blake ("the weights of Enitharmon's loom plays lulling cadences on the winds of Albion"); Edna St. Vincent Millay ("Ballad of the Harp Weaver"), Shakespeare (Falstaff alludes to weaving songs in one of the Henry plays), and many more. Among other things, the association between the warp-weighted loom and the aelion harp is ancient . . . There are also oblique mythological allusions (e.g., Procne and Philomela).
So here's what I wrote, role-playing the House [note: in my interpolated text, "The Worm" is the moniker the disgruntled House bestows on Poe's actual narrator]:
Much to my displeasure, the Worm continues his sojourn chez Usher, apparently inured to my dissuasive techniques. He taxes my senses daily. His dissipation reeks, an unholy mix of opioids, liquor, silk, and indolence. He is a blind Worm with anesthetized senses. A confirmed sybarite. His visual cortex extracts only the vaguest features of the rich synaesthetic interior of the chamber. He sees neither the phosphorous lights in the corners nor the maggots that crawl along the vaulted ceiling. No, such deep ocular penetration is the blessing and the curse of the House of Usher.The Lady Madeline's harp, too, escapes his notice, notwithstanding its grim stateliness. It fills my vivid dreams at night, its foot pressed against the baseboard just below my field of vision so that I must turn my gaze inward, downward, to study the finely carved head mounted on top of its ancient column. A thick web of fungi encases my body, enters my eyes, and then purposefully creeps along the black oak until it reaches the harp, weaving its way through the strings, over and under, over and under, until Madeline arrives to direct the tangled woof in more complex figures, gradually covering the strings with inlaid ciphers. I have seen this ritual performed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, and its rhythms regulate my breath, my thoughts, my inexorable decay. As the cloth grows, so does the dark story woven within and without.* A small spider spins a web across the pedals of the harp, and in its angles I see the ciphers repeated.
It is late now, and Madeline has nearly completed the winding sheet that portends her death, my death, our death. The fetid scent of the tarn wafts through the room and plucks out a dirge-like ballad on the warp-strings, which Madeline answers in a tenebrous key, her whalebone pin-beater doubling as a plectrum. The clock strikes midnight. She cuts out a swathe of cloth and grafts it to my ashen skin, pressing it into the calloused crevices of my body until it disappears within.
The next morning the Worm langourously crawls into the chamber. Still he does not see the winding sheet or hear its mournful song.
[*I cribbed this phrase--"woven within and without"--from Blake.]
For my next move, I decided to spoof textual criticism--spoof my own approach, in fact, which is conjectural (the Latin term for conjecture is divinatio). It takes the form of a letter, signed by Mme. Lynn (thanks to Matt for some of the grace notes--"avowed charlatans" is his touch):
Dear Colleague,Having just read a press release regarding your pathbreaking research on the recently discovered holograph of Edgar Allen Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," I write to acquaint you with our newly established Center for Paranormal Textual Criticism at the University of Southampton, and to invite you to apply for a year-long residential fellowship that will offer access to state-of-the-art equipment, workshops, library facilities, seminars, and research services. Funded in part by an anonymous endowment in early 2003, the CPTC was chartered to explore anomalous information transmission and remote perception within the context of applied textual criticism in the Humanities. Founding members include textual critics and bibliographers, parapsychologists, historians, mathematicians, statisticians, quantum physicists, and avowed charlatans. An important assumption of the Center is that paranormal approaches can serve as an adjunct to traditional physical bibliography and textual criticism. To that end, our textual toolkit includes votive candles and ouiji boards in addition to Hinman Collators and magnifying lenses. And while we offer standard courses in analytical bibliography and the genealogical method, we supplement this core curriculum with offerings in, for example, bibliomancy and gematria. (A popular seminar taught by analytical bibliographer Berry Tellanger on Papyromancy is regularly standing-room only.)
I will be delivering the keynote address at the upcoming Society for ParaTextual Scholarship in NYC. Perhaps we could arrange to meet for a drink one evening to further discuss the CPTC and the role it might play in your ongoing research into Poe's early draft of "The Fall of the House of Usher." Following the conference banquet, I will be hosting a seance at the Grolier Club, where we fervently hope to ascertain whether Shakespeare wrote "solid flesh" or "sullied flesh" and whether William and Catherine Blake really did play Adam and Eve in the garden at Lambeth (beware the serpent!). I do hope you can join us.
These initial invocations, however, are but a prelude to the main event, which is to summon the founding father of American Gothic himself. As you may have learned through back channels, I recently completed fiber analysis of the "House of Usher" fragment that was discovered three months ago in the floorboards of the Spring Garden home in Philadelphia where Poe resided in 1843-44. The text--no more than a handful of words--is inscribed on a small swathe of fabric whose underlying weave structure is unusually complex. At this juncture, I feel that our empirical methods have yielded as much information about the artifact as we are ever likely to glean. Let the walls bleed: it is time to speak with the dead.
Yours in Spirit,Mme. Lynn
There's more, of course. I haven't posted Matt's moves (he wrote a wickedly smart and funny letter to one of the other characters), but this gives you a sense of the tenor of the game. What I really liked about the IG was the way it allowed me to instantiate research and intellectual interests in creative rather than expository/academic prose. I'll look forward to playing again.
In the meantime, I'm in the market for a ouiji board . . .