Many people insist PalmPilots are solely good for reading. You download information to it from your desktop computer and read it on your PalmPilot when you’re away from your main PC. I’ve attempted to read various literary documents using a handy little program for the PalmPilot called AportisDoc, and it has not been fun. The screen is so small that you can’t view a full Shakespeare sonnet without having to scroll down, making the reader pause in the middle of the piece.
But what about texts intended to be read on computers? Inspired by the theories of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and others, a generation of cyberwriters is experimenting with creating fiction and poetry intended for the computer screen rather than the printed page.
Hypertext, attempts to share control of literature with the reader. A reader can click through a document without conforming to any linear order the person who created the hypertext document might have intended. The key creative problem in building literary hypertexts — is delivering a satisfactory reading experience, including tension and closure.
It is only technology and pace that differentiate many 18th-century novels to late 20th-century e-mail correspondences. Groundbreaking alinear fictions like Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and nearly everything by Thomas Pynchon emphasize that even without computer screens, we live in a hypertext world where random information dances across our consciousness and then disappears and where digressions rarely link back to the main subject.
Even the newly crowned Modern Library Book of the Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses, aims to capture the interior of a working mind and heart as closely and intensely as any of the experiments now going on on-line. The hypertext way of experiencing and describing events in art is everywhere. The chronology of the film Pulp Fiction owes something to hypertext.
The genius modernists aside, most great fiction is linear and computer programs are not. Hypertext may be a superb organizing principle for many kinds of information, but attempts to capture the accumulating narrative of fiction don’t work well on the Web. This is in part because Web-building tools aren’t up to the task yet. The leading one, Eastgate’s Storyspace, hasn’t become enough of a standard to warrant widespread development, and the current generation of Web-building tools are geared for designers and programmers, not writers.
The many elements competing for attention, may be what makes reading literary hypertext on a screen so difficult. Hypertext writers need tools that make it impossible for a reader to do anything other than read the work while it’s open. When a person reads a book, there is no real distraction. When a person sees a movie or a play, the room is dark except for the stage and/or screen and therefore he can’t help but to be focused on it. To be successful, hypertexts must be as immersive as other media.
A big part of immersion is knowing when it’s over and when a reader can come up for air. It’s not the writer who creates closure in hypertexts, it’s the reader. Either the reader thinks he has gotten all he’s going to get out of the story and puts it down, or there is a distraction and he closes the file without saving his place and he’s left with an incomplete experience.
Hypertext poems like Judy Malloy’s Its name was Penelope generates random pages that add up to fascinating patterns over time. It is an example of hyptertext where readers get to create their own narrative and connections, regardless of the order in which the screens are presented. Every time a person reads it, it’s a different story. The reader gets to make the decision as to when the story is over. This is a perfect example of what hypertext-based literature can achieve and what paper-based writing can’t — share power.
WHAT DO WRITERS THINK ABOUT LITERARY HYPERTEXT?
Most great fiction is linear, most great Web sites are not. Hypertext may be a superb organizing principle for many kinds of information, but attempts to capture the accumulative narrative drive of fiction have not yet been successfully translated to the Web.
One Watertown, Mass., has created a program to achieve that organizing principle. Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.com) produces Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment for the Web that’s ideal for the construction of fiction. The storytelling tool meets the conventional criteria (drama, excitement, tension, coherence) and translates well onto a computer screen.
Storyspace uses the same basic tools as regular Web sites including discrete pages, links and integrated multimedia. Authors can construct different narrative paths for different kinds of readers. For example, armchair voyagers can travel through plots sequentially or in an entangled manner.
Authors can use guard fields to ensure that readers don’t arrive at a particular page until after another has been viewed. In addition, Storyspace allows various multipage searching techniques including a keyword search.
To prove its concept, Eastgate has published dozens of fictional hypertexts, the best of which are as rich and open as most fine modernist fiction. Poetry works better than prose in this medium, but try Stuart Moulthrop’s “Victory Garden” for a hint of the new shapes traditional narratives might take on the Internet.
A POET OF THE WEB
Maybe it’s the tools that are holding back an onslaught of great hypertext writers. One of the most intriguing of the hypertext poets, Robert Kendall (http://wordcircuits.com/kendall/), doesn’t write in Storyspace at all. His “A Life Set for Two” (wordcircuits.com/kendall/poetry/life.htm), published by Eastgate, was put together in Visual Basic.
“At the time I was doing this,” Kendall said, “I wasn’t aware of better approaches that would let me create the sort of complex interactions I wanted to create in this poem. My choice was either jettison some ideas I had because off-the-shelf software couldn’t accommodate them, or take a roll-your-own approach to get me closer to my ideas. Of course, I had to budget about 10
times as much time and effort.”
Kendall’s goal in “A Life Set for Two” was to create an electronic poem that wouldn’t work as a print poem. “The main difference is the dynamic element which print is incapable of capturing,” he said. “The changeability of the perceptions of the character in the poem, the instabilities of his emotions, you could describe them in print, but you couldn’t capture and replicate them in print. Not that there’s anything bad about writing linear poems, but hypertext is a new medium where connections can be made in so many ways.”
One of the hypertext connections Kendall is trying to forge is giving better tools to hypertext authors. “I have a lot of hope for the Web. Right now, it’s pretty primitive. HTML editors aren’t even on a par with word processors when it comes to ease of use and sophistication. The Web is such an open system. You can add widgets and components, which you can’t in closed, standalone system like Storyspace or Director. One of the projects I’m working on now is a library of components or widgets written in JavaScript (www.wordcircuits.com/connect/dynlinks.htm) that people can plug into their HTML hypertexts.”
A proud Luddite
If Kendall represents hypertext literature at its most forward-looking, novelist Pagan Kennedy (www.channel1.com/users/pagan/), describes herself as a Luddite. Kennedy is no stranger to computers — she teaches a course in Web design and creation, markets her books (www.channel1.com/users/pagan/product.htm) and in a previous career was a copy editor at a trade publication. She says she is not quite sure what to expect in the future as far as literary hypertext is concerned.
Her main complaint is that such works have no entertainment value. She said that their narratives are very off-putting and gimmicky and that only a few of them work. “Hyperfiction is like being handed a stack of 3×5 cards and then you’re told read these in any order you want,” Kennedy said. “It turns literature into a game. Few of them have any logic. They’re random, I feel like I’m being dropped in the middle of fragments.”
Kennedy said hypertext can be a useful tool for annotating, or doing something encyclopedic or doing an activity when you know what you want and what you’ll get. “In fiction, you’re supposed to put yourself into someone else’s hands. You don’t know where you’re going,” she said. “I’m not saying it can’t work, but that I haven’t seen it work.”
LITERARY HYPERTEXT RESOURCES ON THE WEB
The World Wide Web is filled with examples of both literary hypertext itself and experts commenting on the amorphous art form. The following are suggestions of the best places to start your investigation into the subject.
– Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.com) produces the hypertext-building program StorySpace and publishes many overtly literary hypertexts.
– Long before any writer had ever heard of the Internet, a small company called Infocom developed a series of text-based games that offer a level of wit and interactivity that most of today’s pieces are lacking. A fan site (www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/) lets you download some of the most popular Infocom games. If you want to try your hand at writing any Infocom-style games, you can explore a tool called Inform (www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights /8200/overview.htm).
– Many practitioners of literary hypertext are working together on the form. One of the most impressive ventures was a promotional “Greatest Story Ever Told” contest, in which John Updike wrote the first and lastpassages(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ subst/features/g/greatest%2Dtale/greatest%2Dtale% 2Dhome.html).
– Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in1965(www.feedmag.com/html/document/98.02nelson/98.02nelsonmaster.html). Another hypertext pioneer was Vannevar Bush, whose 1945 essay “As We May Think” (www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/atlweb/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm) still casts a shadow over many attempts at creating literary hypertexts.
– MIT professor Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace” (web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/HOH.html) established her as one of the most insightful, forward-looking voices in the field.
– Finally, when you want to dig even deeper, Word Circuits has an exhaustive list (wordcircuits.com/literature/) of examples of hypertext.
