Hypertext has had a huge effect on creative writing, pushing it to places it has been trying to go for decades
Karlin Lillington
When Apple decided to supply a copy of a little program called Hypercard on all Macintosh computers back in the 1980s, it prepared the way for what would become the Web’s most distinctive feature – hypertext. It also unknowingly launched a small literary revolution.
Hypertext is the bone and muscle of the Web, the crucial element that lets people move through cyberspace rather than sit looking at a static image on a screen. Click with a mouse on a bit of hypertext (which can be a letter, a word, or a chunk of text), and you’re whisked off to whatever is linked to it. But hypertext existed well before the Web, and Hypercard introduced hundreds of thousands of people to the concept.
Hypercard enabled people to connect information by association rather than in the more structured sequence of a written document. Users could create “stacks” of virtual notecards (hypercards) on a subject, and create links between cards (hyperlinking them). A reader – or more appropriately, an explorer – could go literally anywhere, in any direction through the stack.
Hypercard gave ordinary computer users the physical embodiment of one of the most startling insights of Vannevar Bush, science adviser to Franklin D Roosevelt, who wrote a prescient essay in 1945 called As We May Think (archived at www.isg.sfu. ca/~duchier/misc/vbush). In it he imagined the Memex, an electromechanical device much like a modern-day PC, which could store information and allow it to be recalled in wayward but sensible patterns. The human mind, he argued, works not by creating hierarchies of infor- mation but by association. “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”
By 1972 computer pioneer Ted Nelson was exploring this concept on computers and had coined the word hypertext. When, in the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee mated the visual world of Hypercard and hypertext and the interactive connections of the Internet, a powerful new hybrid, the World Wide Web, was born.
But well before the Web was conceived, writers had begun experimenting with Hypercard and soon seized upon the artistic possibilities of hypertext. What if one could read in a non-linear way, enabling – or, some would argue, forcing – the reader to create a new reading of a poem or story every time one ventured into it?
Soon a program for writing hypertext was on the market, which allowed writers to structure a work by deciding how text would unfold to a reader. To read a hypertext, a reader moves between screens of text called lexias. A lexia can contain one or many links – usually an interactive word or phrase – to other lexias. Sometimes a certain lexia cannot be revealed until a reader has read other lexias first. Reading becomes a fluid experience – and a highly uncertain, unstable one. With the advent of the Web, writers quickly moved to creating works online as well as on disk, and a wide variety of work can be perused from your desktop. Disk-based works tend to have more structural complexity, however.
Hypertext proponents say that hypertext enables a writer (and reader) to break free of the rigid, linear format of the print book. They point to Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy, Virginia Woolf with To The Lighthouse, and James Joyce with Ulysses, as authors who struggled to do this in print. Hypertext, they argue, pushes literature into places it has been trying to go for decades.
Critics say hypertext is a lot of complex and pointless literary nonsense, merely a vehicle for testing out the pet theories of convoluted postmodern theorists like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. But their long-standing complaint that it’s annoying to read a work on a computer may have to be abandoned with the availability of new, small reading devices.
One of the best places to delve into
hypertext is at the site of its leading publisher, Eastgate. Publisher Mark Bernstein is a devotee, writer and essayist and nurtures a range of writers, sells hypertext works and critical writings about it, and has extensive links to essays, online hypertext and more. While there, have a look at Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, who wrote the haunting Afternoon, A Story, considered a hypertext classic.
One of the more extravagant online hypertext works is Mark Amerika’s Grammatron while a wide range of texts reside at www.turbu lence.org. You can even view James Joyce in hypertext at www.mpx.com.
Non-fiction works abound as well: try the Dictionary of Sensibility, www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/dictionary,
or Singing In The Rain: a Hypertextual Reading.
Poetry has also proved popular as an online hypertext format. Visit the Electronic Poetry Center, Ubuweb, or Rice, a suite of poems about Vietnam, www.idaspoetics.com.au/rice/ rice heading.html.
A recent edition of online magazine Feed featured an essay on hypertext by writer and critic Robert Coover, with links to previous Feed discussions on the topic, www.feed mag.comdocument/do291_master.html. If by now you are appalled, entranced or outraged by hypertext, jump into the continuing online discussion that follows the essay.