Karlin Lillington asks why we should read a book from cover to cover when it’s possible to dip in and out
Now read on – or back, or sideways, or anywhere. Welcome to the world of hypertext fiction, the latest genre to win critical acclaim.
“There is no simple way to say this.” The opening line may not be a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen begins in Pride and Prejudice; it may not introduce the best of times, the worst of times, as Charles Dickens intimates at the start of Tale of Two Cities; nor does it necessarily concede that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Leo Tolstoy suggests at the opening of Anna Karenina. Nonetheless, the first sentence of afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce is considered a classic. Established stars must make room for the precocious literary genre of hypertext fiction.
Written in the Gutenberg era of hypertext – 1987 – afternoon, a story is widely recognised as the standard work of this complex, wholly computer-mediated form of writing. Literary hypertext is still so emergent that, as late as 1993, the New York Times Review of Books critic Robert Coover could claim to have read the entire existing body of hypertext works over a summer.
Joyce’s sentence, with its hesitation and disavowal, embodies the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of the genre. In a non- linear fashion, the reader moves within, rather than through a hypertext. Clicking on embedded links leads one into the backroads rather than the direct route of a narrative. Appropriately enough for a genre which endlessly confounds reader expectations about the orderliness of a storyline, that sentence isn’t even officially the first. Rather, it’s a hinge between Joyce’s elegant explanations of how to read the form, and the story proper.
Hypertext fiction has its detractors, who tend to berate the form as a humourless digital postmodern joke and a threat to Western civilisation (as represented by the book).
Hypertext sceptic Sven Birkerts finds the format infuriating. “Not only is the user affronted aesthetically at every moment by ugly type fonts and crude display options, but he has to wheel and click the cumbersome mouse to keep the interaction going,” he writes in his (printed) book The Gutenberg Elegies. “No matter how serious the transaction taking place, I feel as though my reflexes are being tested in a video arcade.”
The point always mentioned by opponents of hypertext fiction is that you can’t read your computer screen in bed. Supporters readily acknowledge that the PC may be a clumsy piece of reading apparatus, but they argue that hypertext is an original art form – literature with cinematic or live performance qualities – not a replacement for a book. And a comfortable, portable electronic reading device may be close.
But hypertext writing no longer has to hover outside the gates of the literary establishment. Joyce’s tale along with another hypertext work – J Yellowlees Douglas’s spiky car-crash narrative I Have Said Nothing – has just received official canonisation through their inclusion in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. The Norton anthologies are the standard texts for literary courses in North America and have enormous international authority. Joyce and Douglas are included in the section entitled Technoculture, rubbing shoulders with Ursula Le Guin and William Gibson. Other writers in the anthology include highbrow heavyweights Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote and Grace Paley.
“We strongly believe that hypertext belongs on a continuum with other authors in this book,” says Andrew Levy, one of the anthology’s editors. “If you look at Mailer, Pynchon, Burroughs, you see that they were fascinated by the technology and communications media of their time as well. But you also see that they were trying – in the 1950s and 1960s – to break the bounds of the printed page and the models of linear narrative implied by the printed page. Hypertext is the same experiment, but with new tools. In fact, you can go back to Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, and you can see that the desire to reshape the conventions of the printed page goes back centuries. Hypertext is a natural next step.”
Mark Bernstein, chief scientist of Eastgate Systems, a Massachusetts software developer and hypertext publisher, believes the inclusion of hypertext in the anthology is “a trailing indicator” of its acceptance as a legitimate literary form. Eastgate markets Storyspace, the software most hypertext writers use to construct their work, and acts as official publisher for 31 hypertext fiction, poetry, and non-fiction authors, including Joyce and Douglas (most works are available on disk for about 15 in the UK).
Storyspace allows writers to work with “spaces” and links. Spaces can hold text, images, video and sound; writers then build links between the spaces. They then deploy “guard fields” – commands that act like stoplights and determine when and where a reader can proceed within a work – to block readers from accessing some spaces until other text is read first. Even for those wary of the computer screen, the result can be surprisingly compelling: in Joyce’s afternoon, fragmented text releases waves of layered imagery, which slowly emerge, overlap, and dissolve.
“When applied to fiction, hypertext restores something of the live dialogue of storytelling, while retaining some of the permanence and artistry of the novel,” says Bernstein. The reader is an active participant in constructing multiple stories that typically ignore standard print rules for point of view, voice, and – most vertiginously – any sense of closure.
This has made hypertext the obvious practical mate for postmodern theorists, who believe that the only certainty is uncertainty, and that any text is open to endless, shifting readings. But often, postmodern theory becomes the obsessive point of hypertext criticism, rather than the hypertext works themselves.
“Frankly, most discussion about hypertext is not inspiring,” notes Geoff Ryman, a London science fiction author, whose Web- based hypertext 253 explores the outer and inner worlds of 253 passengers on a Bakerloo line tube train. (Many hypertext works are accessible, free, on the Web.)
He is wary of writers who write hypertext only to make it fit pet theories of postmodernism. “What is needed is inspiration, leading to practice and then leading to theory.” Practice has made Ryman rethink the role of the writer. “I do believe that writing interactive fiction changes the way your mind works,” he says. “You care more about your own personal tone of voice; the writing is less objective, more upfront, more personal.”
J Yellowlees Douglas argues that hypertext’s contingency and uncertainty – “this woulda, shoulda, coulda kind of thing” – edges closer to real life than print. “Hypertext forces the reader into the gaps of the text,” she says. “It’s almost like you’re on a roller-coaster rather than a road. You can sneak up on the readers in a certain way and surprise them.”
For the writer, that means “being in this space of shifting possibility,” says Michael Joyce, who teaches English at Vassar College in New York State. “With hypertext, there’s not simply a visual dimension, but a music – of moments, of recurrence, of rhythm.”
For Joyce, writing hypertext retains the “siren songs and seductions” of writing in print, gloriously multiplied. “In this case, it’s like an orgy,” he laughs. “There’s not just one lover – there are several lovers.”
Joyce co-wrote the software program Storyspace because “I was interested in writing a story that changed”.
Change and uncertainty are so central to afternoon, a story that it actually resists readers who assume their goal is to reach a decisive end to the text. If a reader attempts to click through the screens in as direct a line as possible, says Bernstein, “ultimately the text starts fighting back, by offering increasingly tangential references”.
Guard fields enable the writer to undermine the reader desperately searching for an ending – the reader who doesn’t want to accept a postmodern role as master of the text and long for the author to retain control. But Joyce, like Douglas and Ryman, rejects the notion that with hypertext fiction, technology dictates the writer’s hand.
They see the computer as a tool for creating an entirely new art form, just as paper and print enabled a shift from an oral tradition. “I don’t see myself as someone shaping technology,” says Joyce. “I see myself as someone shaping writing.”
Eastgate, which markets hypertext fiction and non-fiction, has a site on the Internet at
http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.htm
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It offers novels, short stories and other texts for order, and runs extracts of reviews of hypertext works from such respected publications as the New York Times