The world on a train: global narration in Geoff Ryman’s 253

Abstract

The focus of this essay is an exploration of Geoff Ryman’s interactive novel 253, which was originally released online in 1996 as 253, or Tube Theatre: A Novel for the Internet on London Underground in Seven Cars and a Crash and two years later also published as a ‘print remix’. Examining Ryman’s text as an example of contemporary global narration, Schoene explores the cosmopolitan techniques and structural devices employed in 253 not merely to envisage the individual’s immersion in global community but to facilitate an enduring interactive experience of it. Aligning the hypertextuality of 253 with Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of community, Schoene argues that Ryman’s use of hyperlinks does not destroy plot, but deconstructs it, reconceiving it as fluid and ‘inoperative’ instead of strictly telos-driven. With close reference to Ryman’s ‘The World on a Train’, his BBC News tribute to the 52 victims of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks, the essay concludes by looking at the new cosmopolitical currency acquired by Ryman’s novel – a currency it did not originally have in the mid-1990s. Recent developments in communication technology have made the world a smaller and more easily navigable place. The world is now more efficiently connected and as a result we seem to be living within much closer reach of each other. Yet, at times, it looks as though instead of evolving into new global neighbourhoods, buzzing with multicultural diversity and cosmopolitan fellow feeling, the globe has begun to shrink into a claustrophobic, inhospitable throng, tighter and more compact than before, but hardly any more intimate or empathic. Individuals lead ever more atomised and isolated lives while the population of the world as a whole finds itself corralled into fiercely inimical identities. Contemporary cosmopolitan fiction’s effort at imagining global community is compounded not only by the sheer number of people in the world, but also by the unwieldy anonymity, mounting competitiveness and neoliberal fractiousness of these people, and as a result cosmopolitan community becomes increasingly difficult to represent within the confines of a single narrative.