A Single Ouroboros Scale by Naomi Norbez is a hypertext trip through the archive of a fictional hypertext author, AlgieFreyir. The archive entries all have a trajectory towards extremity: The author's work is never received the way they want in IFdom so their internal fury mounts. Their mental health declines and their frustrations increase. Their lucidity decreases. Their physical health declines and death looms. The reader's position in this is as a moderator on the Jot Archive Volunteer Project, tasked with ultimately deciding whether AlgieFreyir's material is worth archiving. Or at least venturing their opinion on the topic to a doddering/patriarchal-seeming, gatekeeping overseer called REvans.
This is a frightening read. Dying, being forgotten, thrashing against everything in the space you've chosen to work in. It works best as a wave of honest emotion. For logic or likeliness of the specificities of the IF world the foreword says it mirrors, it often doesn't make sense. For instance, digital storage space is cheap. The content-blind IF Archive can and does archive everything that anyone puts into it. The IFDB (Interactive Fiction Database) is the same, to the chagrin of some. IFWiki is editable by anyone. This hypertext's situation of having a prejudicial gatekeeper deciding which articles to save or delete on a one-by-one basis to shape history is better read as a metaphor for the broader feeling of rejection of one's work the game fixes on, and a tie-in to the fear of being forgotten in general.
The dynamic of the narration is excellent. The minutiae of thoughts skittering back and forth, and the general evolution of AlgieFreyir's outlook from an almost naive positivity to thorough, passive-aggressive bitterness by the end, is perfectly written. Inevitably, a good chunk of it is thoroughly unpleasant to read, too, in the way that a litany of negativity usually is. It comes back to the need for love near the end, but by that point it's also like a cry from a tunnel. Too little too late for the narrator.
Pieces with an autobiographical slant often lead me to an autobiographical slant as a reviewer. I don't know if the result is a review-review as I usually call the thing I'm writing about an IF; it's something else I haven't named.
I dislike and try to ignore moves to frame my response to creative work before I've experienced it, a few of the kinds of things Ouroboros says in its foreword. I do believe you put art out there, people receive it, and for the most part, you don't tell them how to receive it. Otherwise you may simply be the new gatekeeper you decry.
Once I started reading, I found the narrator character irritating in terms of his constant moves to pre-frame responses to his own ideas, the blind spot of desiring empathy but being so solidly bound up with his own assumptions as to share little of it specifically. This is reflected again in the Ouroboros-like circle of the idea of reputation that surrounds the narrative. The narrator wants a name and reputation, but all the baddies (the popular, the revered, etc.) are people with names and reputations. In turn, this made me think that part of the issue for the character is being in a social vacuum. They declare in the finale of the text that they've lost almost all their friends. The kinds of conversations the narrator is having with themselves aren't the kind that people can have healthily in their own heads at length. We need other people. Some of us need psychiatrists. By bouncing an idea off a real person, we can often return to reality in seconds. This is potentially one of the curses of intelligent people, that they can mount and sustain such negative self-talk for an eternity. I once read a description of this phenomenon by a "reformed" depressive as "a perverse form of mental masturbation". As someone with long term major depression and anxiety essentially behind me now, I wryly related to that description from my sense of where I am today.
The end of Ouroboros is interesting in that in different dimensions, it may be a very anti-hope piece of narrative or a generous conceptual gesture on the part of the text. At the conceptual end, it lets the reader decide whether they want to advise REvans to keep AlgieFreyir's Jots or delete them. The player can also choose to read as much or as little of AlgieFreyir as they like before they make their decision. In light of the thrashing of the entire narrative and its frequent foreclosing of other's thoughts and responses, this feels like a respectfully democratic moment for the player, an acceptance that others get to make up their minds about something offered to them. In the anti-hope camp, there is the fact that that REvans will veto the player's decision anyway, deleting AlgieFreyir's material and kicking (in a superficially genteel way) a recalcitrant player from the volunteer position. Again, the title image is appropriate: the snake will eat itself, the impulse will go around and self-destruct. Since I read REvans more as a metaphor than a real person, I didn't find the anti-hope element to be too heavy or didactic. It's certainly an accurate representation of the narrator's state of mind.
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