This is an early riddle-there are many later, similar ones-with the coin as its answer. Other German Protestant riddlers of the time included Ludovicus Helmbold, who published a book of a hundred riddles; Nicolaus Reusner, who wrote longer riddles less related to folk traditions; and Johannes Pincier. In Spain, the literary riddle developed as distinct from the folk riddle after the appearances of folk riddles in fifteenth-century anthologies. Cervantes included several riddles in his 1585 Galatea. Taylor writes that the first French riddle collection to appear in print was issued during this time, in 1557: Odes, enigmes et epigrammes by Charles Fontaine (Taylor 1948, 109).An earlier French riddle collection, Proverbes en rimes, had been put together around 1480 C.E. and was, as a museum catalog describes it, "the earliest known example of a form of secular text made to appeal to middle-class tastes and pockets" (Johnston 1997, 117). In 1551 C.E. a treatise on riddles by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi compiled what was known about classical riddles; this book drew attention to the form and gained further popularity for the riddle in Italy. During this century Italian handbooks of poetics first discussed riddles in depth and many Italian riddles were written (Taylor 1948, 72). Italy's tradition of literary riddling would grow to become the most vital in Europe; there is a three-volume history of the literary riddle in Italy through 1800 C.E. (de Filippis 1948, 1953, 1967).
In the English Renaissance many notable literary figures wrote at least a few riddles. One of these, by Thomas Wyatt, is as follows:
This "Discripcion of a gonne" provides a genealogy of the gun and portrays it as both defender and killer, and as indifferent to which side it is on. The gun's food, gunpowder, is literally made of three components (saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur) while its strength is not in "zero," but is in "naught" in its other meaning from that time: wickedness. Even without drawing a connection between this poem and another by Wyatt from the same volume-the one beginning "The furious goonne, in his most ragyng yre," which compares the speaker's heart to a gun that "Crakes in sunder"-there is a compelling play between the abstract and concrete: the answer to this riddle could almost be "war," but a few details demand an object that is born of Vulcan, can literally be wraught, is fed with something made from three components, and can be known and used for defense. Riddles would remain of some interest to writers in England; later Shakespeare would incorporate riddling into the gravediggers' banter in Hamlet.
Wilbur (1989) writes, "By the latter part of the seventeenth century, the making and guessing of riddles had become a sophisticated amusement in the salons of Paris" (338). Most riddles during this time were circulated anonymously in France; the Abbe Cotin was unusual in taking credit for his (Cornhill Magazine 1891). By the early eighteenth century, this renewed interest in riddles had spread to England.Wilbur (1989) called Jonathan Swift "the chief figure in this English `riddlemania,"' noting that his voice as a Tiddler was "that of a clever party guest who is entertaining us with a guessing game" (338). Swift wrote riddles that, unlike their serious forebears, were not mysteriously deep and cosmological. Consider this example:
Many of Swift's riddles were longer and more elaborate than this one (whose answer is the moon), offering more and more information until the solution is made evident.Wilbur (1989) finds a reason for the renewed interest in the riddle at this time in England-and for this interest being less serious than at other times:
It is not surprising that the riddle turned into a parlor diversion just at the time when Cartesian philosophy and the scientific worldview were conquering men's minds. In an age when the objects and creatures of the physical world were more and more generally conceived of as mere mechanisms, partaking not at all of mind or spirit, and truly describable only by mathematics, how could one take at all seriously a poetic mode in which clouds and clams pretend to speak, or are treated as fellow beings? (339)
As Wilbur (1989) noted, "when the eighteenth-century riddle craze petered out ... riddles were consigned on the whole to the nursery" (339), but there have been many interesting English literary riddles written since that time, despite the lack of any new riddle craze among English-speaking literati. Emily Dickinson wrote many riddles that remain well known; here is the beginning of her poem 311:
The answer to this poem of five stanzas is snow. Some of Dickinson's riddles are among her most frequently studied poems. One example is 986 ("A narrow Fellow in the Grass"), a riddle with the answer snake. Her riddles have been anthologized separately and a book of criticism has been devoted to them (Lucas 1969). For some of these riddles, such as 297 ("It's like the Light -"), many answers have been proposed and there is still not complete critical agreement about which is the right one.
The most notable book of literary riddles published in the United States in the past century is by May Swenson. Sold as a children's book, Poems to Solve (Swenson 1966) contains many riddles that are rather easy, some even obvious, and yet please both as poems and more specifically as riddles. (Her 1971 More Poems to Solve contained five riddles along with other poems.) One riddle from Poems to Solve that has cars as its answer is titled "Southbound on the Freeway." It begins "A tourist came in from Orbitville, / parked in the air, and said ..." and continues with a description of cars as bizarre creatures, ending with the amusing but profound question "Those soft shapes, / shadowy inside // the hard bodies-are they / their guts or their brains?" If Swenson's book was not an inspiration for the Martian poetry movement, beginning in the 1970s and with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid as its main poets, it certainly prefigured that riddle-influenced school. Other notable poets of the twentieth century composed riddles; Richard Wilbur (1989) quotes riddles from Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, and Donald justice in his case for the riddle in The Yale Review.
Although riddling has not occupied the place in English literary tradition that it held in other cultures, the literary riddle is of importance in world literature and has made its mark in English as well. Riddles are particularly helpful in understanding the nature of interactive fiction. They will certainly also remain of interest not only to folklorists and anthropologists but to poets and critics of literature as well. With respect to literary riddles as well as folk riddles, the remarks of two scholars of the riddle are apt: Riddles, "far from being no more than an amusing bit of entertainment, are inextricably bound to those most sophisticated of human systems: language, culture, and art" (Pepicello and Green 1984, 144).
The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996),
It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our ideas, we may use any of many possible expressions, from the prosaic and literal to the elaborate and artistic, without having to be confined to the riddle format. (311)
So the riddle is best at giving a new perspective on something already familiar in certain ways, in reorganizing our perception or thinking. "The process involved is inherently enigmatic and also transformative: the transition effected leaves reality changed, restructured, its basic categories restated, recognized, affirmed" (Hasan-Rokem and Shulman 1996, 4).The riddle thus excels at recategorization and transformation-both of the external world and the world of our consciousness. Certain IF works, including Wishbringer, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Shade, present IF worlds that change during the course of the narrated events and relate to this aspect of the riddle in a particularly interesting way that I consider later.
There are interesting points made in these anonymous comments about the riddle:
For a good enigma we must have a perfectly true description of a thing: every term used must be as scrupulously appropriate as in a logical definition; but it must be so ingeniously phrased and worded that the sense is not obvio
us, and the interpreter is baffled. There is vast room for the development of skill in this art, to make an enigma such that it shall be not merely obscure, but at the same time stimulating to the curiosity. A further step is to give it the charm of poetic beauty. This is quite germane to the nature of the enigma, which has a natural affinity with the epigrammatic form of poetry. (Cornhill Magazine 1891)
How a riddle's description can be "perfectly true" in some "logical" sense probably needs further elaboration; the "logic" mentioned here seems to be of a more prosaic sort than Lorca's poetic logic. Also, the "charm of poetic beauty" is probably better considered as being integrated with the riddle's purpose instead of being mentioned as a "further step." But an essential point is made here: that an excellent riddle should be "not merely obscure, but at the same time stimulating to the curiosity." This principle suggests that a work of interactive fiction should motivate the interactor to continue to figure out its world just as the riddle should compel further thought and further work toward a solution, which is consistent with Adam Cadre's (2002a) advice to authors: "The player should always have a pretty compelling reason to type something other than QUIT."
There are some more recent and more interesting poetry principles to consider, inspired by the riddle and offered by Howard Nemerov:
it came to me to write five riddles in verse; whence arose a probably impossible ideal for poetry, thus:
1. a poem must seem very mysterious.
2. but it must have an answer (= a meaning) which is precise, literal, and total; that is, which accounts for every item in the poem.
3. it must remain very mysterious, or even become more so, when you know the answer. (qtd. in Wilbur 1989, 350)
These have rather direct application when interactive fiction is considered in terms of the riddle. The first principle suggests that a work of interactive fiction should invite the interactor to solve it, by being enigmatic in a certain way or by presenting something to be solved that is alluring. This is similar to the earlier point that riddles, and thus interactive fiction, should be "stimulating to the curiosity" and is related to the allure of the secret as discussed in the previous chapter. Principle 2 also provides for the economy of objects in the world. If there are "red herrings" provided in an excellent work, they must be part of the meaning of the work even if they are not involved in the explicit answer or solution; there is no room for things that are extraneous in every sense. Or, as has been suggested with regared to interactive fiction authorship: "The pieces of text you write are the player's reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding. Every diegetic piece of text should have something to recommend it" (Cadre 2002a). What is poorly formulated as "replay value" can be better considered in light of principle 3. When the explicit mysteries of an interactive fiction are solved, a work that becomes more profoundly mysterious can be experienced again with interest even when the solution is known.
This is the case even with a simple riddle such as the one related in the last chapter, "I am the greatest of all teachers, but unfortunately, I kill all my students." It certainly is not the case that arriving at the answer time leaves the riddlee comfortable, everything important having been settled. To solve this riddle is to uncover the disturbing nature of the world, leaving one with other worries and plenty to think about. Even when the answer is not an abstraction, the literary riddle resonates beyond its answer. Northrop Frye (1976) makes this point in his discussion of riddle 33 from The Exeter Book, the answer to which is iceberg:
The real answer to the question implied in a riddle is not a "thing" outside it, but that which is both word and thing, and is both inside and outside the poem. This is the universal of which the poem is the manifestation, the order of words that tells us of battles and shipwrecks, of the intimate connection of beauty and terror, of cycles of life and death, of mutability and apocalypse, of the echoes of Leviathan andVirgil's Juno and Demeter and Kali and Circe and Tiamat and Midgard and the mermaids and the Valkyries, all of which is focused on and stirred up by this "iceberg." (147)
The riddle, venerable ancestor of interactive fiction that it is, also goes a long way toward explaining how the literary and puzzling aspects of the form are hardly inherently antagonistic, but rather must work together for the effect of certain IF works to be achieved. Of course the riddle does not explain everything about interactive fiction, despite the many ways in which the poetics of the riddle relate closely to those of the IF form. Interactive fiction also has other ancestors, both on and off the computer, which are considered in the next chapter.
While interactive fiction has a special relationship to the riddle, the nature of interactive fiction as computer program, simulated world, generator of narrative, and game means that it has many other ancestors. The idea that devices could generate texts using procedures was realized many centuries earlier. Such devices have been classed as ergodic literature (Aarseth 1997, 9-13) but here it is reasonable to appropriate an earlier and simpler term, literary machines, to describe them. This reflects their literary nature and also calls attention to some of the concepts of cybertext theory. Another often-mentioned (but seldom examined) forebear is the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, a framework for a theatrical interaction, for the exploration of simulated spaces, and for puzzle solving. Within computing, three earlier types of systems were particularly influential in the development of interactive fiction: computer games, early conversational systems such as ELIZA/DOCTOR, and more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, exemplified by the natural language processing program SHRDLU. After looking briefly at these progenitors and their histories through the early 1970s, this chapter describes how Adventure came about-and thus how interactive fiction as a form and ideal began.
LITERARY MACHINE S
The literary machines that precede Adventure are not always physical machines. They could be considered as such, from one perspective: any set of procedures can be taken as a description of the action of a physical machine, if one allows the human being who carries out the operations of text manipulation to be considered a mechanical component (Aarseth 1997, 21). The phrase literary machine serves nicely to indicate text-generating machines, physical or conceptual, created for literary purposes. "Literary machines" was used by Theodor Nelson (1981) as the title of one of his books and was employed to refer to a more general sense of "literature" and to advance a concept of hypertext, albeit one much more sophisticated and complex than is seen in the link and node model popularized by the Web. The term is appropriated here to unite two ideas, that of an assembled text as literary and that of the computer as a machine that manipulates symbols. The I Ching is a formal system for generating different literary texts, for instance. It incorporates chance and provides explicit procedures for how to assemble fragments into a final text; it is thus a machine in the sense of the mathematical formulation of the general-purpose computer, the Turing machine (Dewdney 1989; Lewis and Papadimitriou 1981).
Translator Richard Wilhelm (1950) writes that "the Book of ChangesI Ching in Chinese-is unquestionably one of the most important books in the world's literature" (xxvii); it is this book, and machine, that will serve to begin the short history of literary machines here. The I Ching does not offer a unilinear text; it is actually a literary machine, a set of procedures for generating texts. It may be the earliest one known. Aarseth (1997) writes that "like the origin of Adventure, the origin of the I Ching ... is not easy to establish" (177), although legends and scholarship provide some insight into its very early origins:
In Chinese literature four holy men are cited as the authors of the Book of Changes, namely, Fu Hsi, King Wen, the Duke of Chou, and Confucius. Fu Hsi is a legendary figure representing the era of hunting and fishing and of the invention of cooking. The fact that he is designated as the inventor of the linear signs of the Book of Changes means that they ... antedate historical memory. (Wilhelm 1950, xxxviii)
The I Ching began, Wilhelm explai
ns, as "a collection of linear signs to be used as oracles" (xxix), corresponding at least loosely to ancient Greek oracles such as the one at Delphi. These Western oracles almost certainly had some established systems for generating different texts under different circumstances. Such systems may have involved composition by male intermediaries (Parke 1939, 39) or direct address of the petitioner by the prophetess in a trance (Fontenrose 1978, 212); there is some evidence that the inhalation of intoxicating gases by those providing the oracle's reply was involved (de Boer, Hale, and Chariton 2001). Whatever procedures were used were esoteric. Thus, they did not remain to influence future Western providers of oracular wisdom, such as those participating in today's Internet Oracle (Kinzler et al. 1989-2002). (If Internet Oracle replies are written under the influence of intoxicants, presumably this is not due to the ancient oracular traditions of Greece.) Internet versions of the I Ching, on the other hand, directly encode the traditional procedures of divination.
The I Ching also grew to become more than just a means of fortune telling, earning it an even more important place in Chinese and world literature:
[T]he book of divination had to become a book of wisdom.
It was reserved for King Wen, who lived about 1150 B.C., and his son, the Duke of Chow, to bring about this change. They endowed the hitherto mute hexagrams and lines, from which the future had to be divined as an individual matter in each case, with definite counsels for correct conduct. (Wilhelm 1950, xxxiii)
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