Upon finishing Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (which, don’t mind if I be yet another person saying, is pure genius), my research led me to this article by Jeffrey Paris that mentions the use of supra-textual spaces in the book. Even though this is the first time I saw this specific wording, the concept is quite simple: the space created not by the what the text says, but by what it doesn’t say. The text that is outside of the text, sort of.

In Infinite Jest’s context, the narrative follows this annular structure that not only leads to a recursive loop, but that also avoids directly mentioning events that are in the center of the story. Those events, despite being crucial both as the logical sequence of one part of the book and as the cause for another, are never directly referred or explained. Their absence, however, not only marks the existence of those events, but also encourages hypotheses about what they are.

A similar process happens in micro-short stories and other pieces of flash fiction. Hemingway’s alleged six-word narrative is quite a nice example: “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” — one is automatically led to think about all the possibilities around these shoes. Why are they being sold, if never worn? Something tragic, possibly. Or a case of Benjamin Button, perhaps. One can never know, and one cannot help but instantly produce all these stories automatically, out of sheer absence of information.

Moov, a Lisbon-based architecture and art company, deals with what they call Narrative Landscapes, that is, landscapes concerned with the narrative potential of physical spaces. Influenced by Christian Norberg-Schulz and his consideration of places that go beyond pure functionalism, they think of the urban space as naturally narrative. Even more, as a place where the flux of human beings is of itself motivated by the amazingly huge web of relationships between people, places and things in economical, political and cultural levels.

In one of their works, Long Streets for Short Stories, Moov uses a street as the structure of a narrative. That narrative was inserted in the space through the use of fluorescent light bulbs along the path and its logic depended on the direction of the passerby: if going up the street, one would be presented with a story of despair and decadence; if going down, with one of hope and redemption.

One of the most interesting points this brought me was the realization that there is already at least one narrative space on top of every place. Considering the public space as somewhere where different people, each one of them the central piece of their own narrative and as actors in others, many places are the stage for small bits of each one of those stories. These bits of stories are, albeit quite short, stories on themselves.

Thinking, then, that most of urban spaces are treasure troves of small pieces of stories, how can we then tap into them? One way would be to use technology to extend the information available to us on that place, a practice that Andrew Wilson verbosely calls Portable Digital Technology Mediated Site-specific Literature. By augmenting places and infusing them with even one story, the potential of that place could be brought to the attention of whoever has the technological means of reading the stories.

My mind gets excited with the possibilities. The same way Adam Rothstein on QR Code City “would rather [his] appliances and infrastructure danced for no reason, other than they feel sexy”, I would rather my streets opened themselves with all the stories they contain. These would never be complete, but they would inform and misinform. The same way Infinite Jest or Hemingway’s one-liner, those stories would be pregnant with the possibilities, instead of dead and finished.