INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What is your definition of hypertext?
Answer
I would define hypertext as any form of textuality - words, images, sounds - that is
presented in chunks or lexes or reading units joined by links. Essentially, this is a form
of text that permits the reader to encompass or to traverse a large amount of information
in ways that the reader wishes as well as the ways that the author wishes. If I were to
define hypertext in one or two sentences, I would say that hypertext is a form of text
composed of chunks of text and images joined by links that permits multilinear reading,
not non-linear reading or non-sequential but multi-sequential.
Question 2
Do you think that there is complete opposition between hypertext and linear texts or do
you think that hypertext is a form of generalisation of texts?
Answer
I'm not sure which way to go on this. Ted Nelson says that hypertext is the most basic
form of text and linear textuality is a subset. Other people have argued that hypertext
is, in contrast, a subset of linear text and an amplification of it. I'm not sure which is
true. Clearly, there is a relationship. I think it's more a matter of the information
technologies which one uses. It's clear that the simplest form of text when one starts
writing involves a roughly linear text. But as soon as one begins to develop more complex
registers in either written text or printed text, one ends up with things like footnotes
or the glossa ordinaria in Medieval Bibles in which one tries to allow additional
information to be added to a linear text. It's almost a matter of sophistication. It's not
so much a matter of the simplicity of the text as it is almost a combination of the text
and the reader. It seems fairly obvious that beginning readers - and that is many of us
much of the time - read only in a more or less linear fashion. But as we become more
sophisticated, we tend to use footnotes, glossaries, and we tend to leave the work we're
reading, consult another work, and then return to the first. That is very similar but not
exactly the same as the experience of reading hypertext. And of course there are some
print works that are more hypertextual than others. Scholarly works which have footnotes
or end notes or glossaries are much more hypertextual than a straight novel or a short
story. On the other hand, encyclopaedias are works which are almost completely
hypertextual in a basic mode.
Question 3
We have a model of hypertext which is probably the most widely known which is the WWW. Do
you think that, when we speak of hypertext, most of the people think of the WWW ? AN does
this affect the way in which people consider hypertext?
Answer
That's a very good question. In the new version of my book, Hypertext 2.0, there's
a long discussion of the extent to which the WWW is true hypertext. I suppose I should
begin by saying that as far as I'm concerned, the WWW, invaluable as it is, is nonetheless
a very primitive and reduced form of hypertext. And it has the harmful effect of taming
people's expectations, of making people want something that is very close to the strengths
of books without the strengths of much that is electronic. There are several reasons why
the WWW is so tame. Part of it is the mode of linking: it is a mode that contains only one
type of link. The other is that there's only one to many linking, and most WWW viewers
permit conveniently only one type of window and only one window at the same time, unless
the reader is very sophisticated. In other types of hypertext systems, Storyspace, Intermedia,
Microcosm, Sepia, one finds people writing in a collage way, experimenting
with forms of argumentation, experimenting with uses of images and colours in very
different ways. But the WWW tends to suppress this. I can give an example: if I work in
one of these other systems and I use one of these overview or homepage documents, I can
make a link to something and then make another link from the same place. Suppose I have a
heading ìliterary relationsîóif I'm talking about work by James Joyce or by
BoccaccioóI can then link to the heading ìliterary relationsî many different objects,
many different arguments. But in the WWW one has to make a simple link to another document
and then manually, by hand, add each link each time a new document comes along. One of the
things that this suggests is that although the WWW is seen as very dynamic, it is very
dynamic is a way that is very retrogressive. It forces people to spend a great deal of
time on adding things manually. One tries to avoid bringing things up to date; things tend
to get out of date, and many of the links die because the system is inadequate. Another
example of a missing feature in the WWW is some sort of dynamic hypergraph. A device that
whenever a reader opens a link tells the reader where he or she can go next. In systems
which have devices like this, Storyspace, Intermedia, Microcosm, one
never gets lost. One is always oriented, because you not only know where you can return
but you also know the ways you can go forward, and you have what Mark Bernstein calls an
"airlock". Before you jump off into the darkness, you have some device that will
allow you to know where you are and where you might go. The WWW has none of these things
at the moment, nonetheless the WWW has been enormously important. It has two things:
first, most people experience it as free. And secondly, it gives part of the vision of
hypertext. It gives us Ted Nelson's notion of a ìdocuverseî, that every document in the
world could be potentially joined together. If you put these two things together -
apparently it seems to be low cost, and at the same time it allows one to become part of a
gigantic world of texts - that makes up for many of the lacks. As far as I'm concerned,
the WWW is to the Internet and it's vision of hypertextuality what hypercard was to the
stand-alone PC. The hypercard relates to the period of computing that depends on the
separate personal computer, whereas the WWW relates to the personal computer joined to the
Internet. In both cases the user experiences the system as software that is essentially
free and is tantalised into wanting much more. You could argue that out of hypercard came
the WWW, perhaps out of the WWW we will get a richer form of hypertext that most people
can use.
Question 4
You mentioned Storyspace. It could be interesting to say something about the
history of Storyspace, how it was developed, and its future.
Answer
Storyspace was originally created by a very interesting combination of three
people. The first, John Smith, was a well-known professor of computer science in the
United States. The second was Jay Bolter, the classicist, who has since become a very
important thinker in information technology. He's the author of Turing's Man, and Writing
Space. Finally, Michael Joyce who is perhaps the world's most important, certainly the
world's first decent novelist and fiction writer in hypertext. They designed a kind of
electronic writing environment which would allow one to experiment in electronic space.
They termed it at the time ìthe poor man's intermediateî, that is to say it has many of
the features of the great Intermedia system without much of the cost. It is a
stand-alone system, that is, it's used essentially on one machine, even though one could
network that machine. It does not work like a true network hypertext. That is, if I make a
change on my machine on one hypertext you do not see it until we save the document and
copy it to every machine or distribute it to every machine. It is an asynchronous as
opposed to a real-time or synchronous true hypertext. What is good about Storyspace?
First, it is extraordinarily easy to make links. One does not have to code anything. It
works with a graphics user interface. In other words, if you want to make a link, you can
use your mouse to highlight a word or phrase, you touch a key, then touch down where you
want the link to end. You can then give that a name. You can have several links at the
same time, and when you click on these links afterwards there's an automatically generated
menu. So much of the work is done for you, and it is very easy to reconfigure the links,
to erase them, to rename them and so on. Will this be obviated, destroyed, by the WWW?
Well, to some extent it has been, in that many people who might wish to use a system like
this - Toolbook, Storyspace, Intermedia - can have access to the Web. But one of
the things that I have found in courses that I teach on hypertext and literary theory is
that students who have used Storyspace find working in the Web very frustrating.
They see the Web as a very restrictive and very ìdumbî as they put it version of
hypertext and they have to reduce their expectations to write in the WWW. But yet most
people will encounter the Web. What advantage then might Storyspace have? Well, for
people who are learning to do this it has two important values. First, it is extremely
easy to make links and to prototype a larger Web. Many of the literary and cultural
Websites that were originally done in America were originally done in Storyspace
which exports them to HTML, that is you can do a Web first in Storyspace and then
polish it up and add the fancy things afterwards to it if you so wish. The second great
advantage of Storyspace is that it gives you a larger fuller vision of what you
might wish to do. Therefore it has two very important values. What is its future? I'm not
sure. I imagine all of the present hypertext systems will be limited by the fact that they
live in all the present computer environments. In the next three to five years I would
expect that all of the operating systems that we have now, whether they are the Mac OS
type or the Windows type, are going to have to evolve into something that integrates more
successfully the Internet, the ìdocuverseî, that is, and the standalone machine's
capacities. There are already several computer environment that work in this way. The
British Microcosm and the American Dynatext both exemplify document
systems which have a form of hypertext in which what one does on one's own machine is
reflected in the way one sees the WWW and one sees in the WWW reflected in what one does
on one's own machine. In other words, you could open up someone else's document in Dynatext,
or DynaWeb it is called, and find your links in someone else's document and the
same is true of what can be done with Microcosm. This is a rather seamless blending
of the self and the other. It is an almost automatic way of creating digital virtual
communities of knowledge.
Question 5
You mentioned that there is the new version of your book, Hypertext 2.0. Can you
tell us the main differences between this new edition and the first edition of the book
and which are the points which have changed or evolved.
Answer
Hypertext 2.0 has tried to keep up with what's going on in hypertext and digital
culture. That is like trying to hit a target moving at great speed. Obviously, the most
important thing one has to take into account would be the question of what is the relation
of the WWW to true hypertext. The first chapter has been split into two new chapters.
There's still the attempt to show a convergence between different forms of hypertext and
temporary critical theory, the theory of post-modernism and post structuralism. The new
materials, however, try to survey a wide range of hypertext systems from the WWW through
others like Dynatext, Storyspace, Sepia or HyperG, showing how
each one is in some way an embodiment of the theories of hypertext. Every chapter, in fact
every page has been changed because rather than referring largely to Intermedia I
tried to refer to a more generic medium of hypertext and then refer to specific systems as
I go along. There have been some new materials added about literary theory. There's a new
section on Deleuze and Guattari and plateaux and the idea of the rhizome and hypertext as
rhizomatic writing. The sections on education have been added, as my use of hypertext in
education has changed and as it has moved from merely informational highly structured
hypertext to applications of hypertext which emphasise having the students invent the new
forms of writing for electronic space. Similarly, the chapters on hypertext fiction and
poetry are much longer, as we now have many more examples of first-rate hypertextual
fiction than when I first wrote. There's an entirely new chapter on writing for electronic
space which sums up what I've been able to conclude about the rhetoric and stylistics of
hypermedia. Again, there's more material in the section on the politics of hypermedia in
which I introduce some questions raised by the WWW, talk about censorship and my idea that
most of the questions that have been raised about censorship are really about economic
issues and not about upholding morality at all.
Question 6
The theory of hypertext seems to be connected with the destructuralist approach to
literary criticism. From the other side it seems that hypertext is something which is
quite structured. What is your opinion on the relation between hypertext and
deconstructuralism?
Answer
Looking for a connection between hypertext, constructuralism and constructivism, one has
to remember that there are various modes and genres of hypertext just as there are
different modes and genres of writing and print. Surely, when one looks at something like
an encyclopaedia, a reference manual, an engineering compendium, it is highly structured,
and one wishes to prevent anyone from adding to or changing this. You do not want to have
the manual for repairing the plane you are flying on tinkered with by an amateur. On the
other hand, educational hypertext and creative hypertext tends to vary in its degree of
structuralisation. Michael Joyce, the hypertext novelist, commented several years ago in
an important article that there are two types of hypertext: hypertext in which you
discover things and hypertext which you construct. For one theory of hypertext it is read
only and the material as in an encyclopaedia is already there but readers create their own
experience, depending on what they choose. The other form of hypertext in which the
readers can contribute is much less highly structured. That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at this is it depends on how wide the net, how large the net is. If
you're talking about an encyclopaedia of culture of art history or a dictionary in
electronic form, and you're only talking about that dictionary, it is highly structured.
But if that dictionary is inserted into the WWW so that anyone can come upon an element in
that dictionary by using a search tool or a link, then that same document becomes much
less structured because it can be approached in different ways. There are various forms of
hypertext. If you look at their genesis, one form of hypertext is originally created for
print for separate volumes. Another form of hypertext is hypertext created for an
electronic environment. And they each bear their traces of how they are to be used and how
they have been used in the past. One question must be: what happens to structuration when
a document, a lexia, a reading unit, can serve multiple functions? I'll give you an
example. If one has a print or very small hypertext edition of a scholarly work or of a
creative work, take a passage from Dante - if you look at a passage and you find a
reference to Augustine, you could have a footnote in a book. You could also have the
equivalent of a footnote in the WWW. But because length is much different, resources are
different in electronic form, what has to be a small footnote in print, in the WWW or in
another hypertext system could be an essay. Now the point is that the essay could be the
main document and Dante could work as the footnote or Dante could be the main document and
that essay could be the footnote. That same essay can actually join to something on St.
Augustine. At the moment there seems to be an opposition between carefully structured
hierarchies and what happens to texts in the WWW. I think people who work with SGML and
theories of text structure have to create dynamic forms of structuring texts so these
tight structures both exist and yet modify as they are read in different contexts. You
asked about the relation of literary theory. From my point of view there is very little
connection between hypertext and structuralism. I think the connections are between
hypertext and post-structuralism. One of the things that Derrida - the sort of saint of
post-structuralism - teaches us is that it does not pay to have crude binary oppositions;
therefore, you cannot really diametrically oppose print and hypertext or print and digital
text and treat them as black and white, as two opposed things because they interpenetrate.
It's more a manner of thinking in terms of spectra, that in certain areas of
interactivity, of notions of the self, of intellectual property, of impermeability, print
texts exist at one point on the spectrum and somewhat farther away we have hypertext. And
digital text is in the middle. You really cannot think of absolute oppositions; it doesn't
make much sense.
Question 7
It seems that from your exposition you have a conception of hypertext in which the
possibility of dynamically changing the way in which things are structured, the
possibility of collaborating is very important. What happens to the author?
Answer
Our feeling that the author changes in an electronic environment is absolutely correct.
Because I think that our notions of authorship and our fear of collaboration and many of
our notions of copyright and authorial property derive directly from the world of print.
It was necessary to provide ways for printers, booksellers, and authors to survive
economically - most of the first printers went bankrupt - and therefore we developed
notions of authorial property which greatly fictionalise what actually happens in writing.
When you think of it, it's very bizarre. We claim this strong notion of authorship in
which essentially what authors are supposed to do is create something from nothing. But
either the post-structuralism view or the Medieval view, which says that the only true
creator is God and that human beings just combine things, makes a lot more sense. A lot of
this appears very shocking. I think if you change your paradigm, everything becomes much
easier to accept. The notion of the strong author makes quite a good deal of sense if you
think of our paradigm being a book and with an electronic book that does not work as well.
But think of our paradigm as being not the book but the library. Each author only has a
certain amount of say in the library. And we're not surprised that I will write a book, I
will publish it, it will be put into the library, and then another month later another
book appears. That is what is really happening all the time in an electronic environment.
And once one shifts one's paradigm to think of a library instead of the individual book,
this notion of shared control of all of the ideas going on in an intellectual space is not
at all surprising because that is what goes on. Read the book review section, you see that
the ideas change as new ideas are added. So I think we have to adjust our thoughts, so we
think of electronic libraries as the way of approaching this crisis of culture and not
still think of it as the separate document and the separate book. When you think of the
way books are actually written, of course, we're much closer to films. My editor has a
great deal of say about things or even the book designer. Not only that, but all the
people who have contributed to my ideas should be part of this. And as I pointed out in
both versions of my book, in the sciences the notion of authorship is very different than
it is in the humanities. It's not that we are right or that the sciences are right. It's
that different economic conditions have controlled the conception of what is the strong or
the weak author. If in medicine you own a laboratory and you get financing for the
laboratory, your name goes on papers which are written in that laboratory. If you run the
main part of an experiment in many of the sciences, your name goes on all of the papers
that come under that rubric. In the humanities I could give my students my notes, I could
give people paintings that I have collected that are very hard to come by, I could give
them manuscripts, and if I am lucky, I will be thanked for being a help in the preface. If
this were the sciences, I would be a co-author. This has happened to me several times.
I've published in scientific journals or journals and someone has said, Oh, we've put your
name on the paper, and I find out I've written something. So clearly this is a matter of
cultural definition, of cultural construction, and of economic determination. We've
accustomed ourselves to a particular notion of the strong author; it's been very necessary
until now, I think in many ways it falsifies things. One of the bizarre things that has
happened is there's a wonderful book written by a man named James Boyle on law and the
Internet, and he points out that modern Western problems with the third world often arise
with conceptions of copyright based on our notion of the strong author. For example, a
tribe or a group of people cannot copyright something; that's in the public domain. So if
a Western scientist goes to some rural community and takes grain which these farmers have
developed over a millennium and that is resistant to mould and rot, takes it home, does a
little something to it, the scientist or the scientist's company can then copyright that.
So the farmer now has to pay for the seed that he contributed 99 percent to. The rural
farmers think that their work has been stolen from them. The company that produces the
seeds thinks that their seeds are being stolen from them, and it's because both have
different conceptions of the strong author. Is the strong author the community or is the
strong author the individual who can be a company in Western definitions of the self?
Here's a case where both definitions make sense; they both come from different cultures
and they're causing a great deal of hardship and misunderstanding. I think our notions of
authorship have to become more self-conscious before we can get to a solution of what we
want to do about it.
Question 8
On the other side, it seem that the author who is no longer strong still feels the need to
have a strong message. There is something definite which he wants to say, especially in
the humanities. How can the author maintain this possibility of giving a strong message in
a context in which he is no longer a traditional, strong author.
Answer
I think there are ways in which an author can maintain that unitary voice, if that is what
the author wishes to do. Again, it goes back to the difference between the book and the
library paradigm. If you wish to maintain the isolation of the voice or the power of the
single voice, you have to create a zone of isolation around that voice. In other words,
people who are writing in these multivocal, complex environments have to develop a
rhetoric and politics of the strong voice, and that's quite possible. On the other hand,
when we did the electronic version of my book, I think that you could say my book has a
strong voice running through it. It has a very characteristic tone, very characteristic
choice of arguments; that is in print culture my voice. When I made it into an electronic
book, we attached to it many other voices. You could argue that I've lost - as I think I
have - the control over the discourse because we've created a miniature electronic
library. If you don't like my theories or my views of Barthes or Derrida or Marxist
critics, you can follow someone else's. The question would be: how do I make sure that you
maintain your voice or my voice? One thing to do would be to make it very clear to the
reader where my text starts and someone else's begins. We need a rhetoric, in other words,
of where are the edges and limits of the document. This is often done on the WWW by
creating a style of background colours, images at the top of the file, images at the
bottom, so that once you leave my document you know you've gone on to something else. When
you come back you know where you are. In other words, I think it's quite possible to
maintain this unitary voice if that's what one wants to do. I've worked hard to do that
with some of the things that I've created. And you don't have to shut off the benefits of
the multi-vocal voice. In other words, the same text could be read different ways. I think
many authors would be willing to have the multi-vocal voice the same way many authors are
willing to have their books in the library next to people with whom they disagree, as long
as their books can be read the way they like once. So it would be quite possible in
electronic form to have the reader able to choose in what way the book is read. It might
be possible to only allow the book to be read in isolated form. It's hypertext but it's
only to my own writing the first time through; afterwards new links would then open up.
Question 9
Is there a difference in the way in which you express your voice, your opinion, your
position, when you write in a linear form in a standard book and when you write in
hypertextual form?
Answer
I think that there is both a different tone and a different set of strategies or
characteristic techniques in both print and digital writing, particularly hypertext. For
one thing, linking permits both the reader and the author to approach arguments, to
encounter arguments in different order. Many times when I'm talking to you, I will say
there are three ways of doing something. Now, those three ways are just a matter of
numeration. There's no actual climax. Three is not necessarily more important than one.
But we were taught rhetorically when you are writing to try to build up to the climax. If
you're writing electronically which allows branching, all you have to do is inform the
reader that there are these arguments. The reader may wish to look at some arguments but
not at others. They may just accept what you've said and not want to go too deeply into
this. There's also the possibility that supporting documentation can get richer and richer
and take you farther and farther from the main argument if that's what the reader is
interested in. So you may be able to slim down your argument the way some people do books
and allow the information on demand. The other possibility is that if you link to other
people's ideas or to other versions of your earlier work, other selves, you may change the
tone quite a bit. Yet another characteristic that comes out is that I think people tend to
quote or to use information rather differently. One of the things that we learn when we
write a book is if you quote something else, if you quote too much, it looks as though
you're depending upon the other person. So the way you master another person's text is to
sum it up in your words and quote little parts. Then you may quote once and then you refer
to it after that with a tag phrase or a summary. But in doing an examination on a passage
by Boccaccio or by Dante or by Joyce or Thomas Mann, you might wish to have a long
passage, too long to quote in print, that you just mention and you link to it and the
reader can bring it up many times in your argument. And when you handle not just primary
choices but other scholar's work it seems more honest to drop a large section of text in a
Bachtinian mode; let the text speak for itself rather than trying to master that text.
That creates a very different tone. It's almost a humbler tone, because you are willing to
let the other person have his or her say by having their text gain more presence. Those
are three of the ways. A fourth way that the argumentation is different is that one can
use images much more frequently because it's cheaper to use images in terms of resources
in a hypertextual environment. If you mention texts, you can link to them. Similarly, you
mention images; you can either introduce the image or you can introduce a link to the
image in ways that would be very difficult to do in a text because it would get in the
way. This way it's easy to allow people access to these things. That can obviously change
the ways you refer to things in passing; there will be a different type of rhythm of
argument, I think.
Question 10
How do you use new media and hypertext in your education activity?
Answer
There are three ways that I have used and continue to use hypertext in education. The
first is as a large electronic library or reference tool so that students can
contextualise a particular literary work or phenomenon and find out what was going on in
society, in political theory, in literary theory, in economics, at the time. The second is
to use the hypertext in its more dynamic form as a continually changing collaborative work
environment, that is, the student can add his text to the electronic library, so the
student becomes automatically a part of the text. What you end with is a kind of
prosthetic course memory. Certain courses - what we call in America a course, a certain
set of reading - gathers to itself a group of voices who may have graduated from the
university a decade ago but are still part of the seminar. It's like an ongoing Germanic
seminar in which the older people keep coming back and people can argue with them year
after year. The last form of using hypertext educationally is for the development of modes
of writing, modes of rhetoric, learning how to argue and to write both for creative and
discursive prose in an electronic environment, both hypertextually but other forms of
digital text. For example, there's a good deal of digital text on the WWW which is not
truly hypertextual. There's hypertext fiction on the Web and there is really digital
fiction which is very long text streams with animation, sounds and colours which you
couldn't do in a book but nonetheless does not have true hypertext branching and there's
no interest in the author to do that. That's not saying that some of these things are bad.
But in each case we have a different type of rhetoric and stylistics that students have to
learn how to do or have to invent.
Question 11
We have a project for a number of video tapes and books for schools. It would be
interesting to your practical suggestions. Which would be your practical advice to a
teacher who has the possibility of using new media?
Answer
I would think that all of the things I've been talking about on hypertext should start in
early secondary school, not in university. Students who are going to survive after the
millennium economically, educationally, intellectually, need to start this quite young and
in fact I think that the young are very accustomed to this. But when I talk about the new
media, I am more interested by and large in hypertext as text image than I am in moving
images. Michael Joyce, the hypertext theorist and programmer and novelist, has said
several times that hypertext is the revenge of text upon television. And I think a great
many of the new media really attempt to put that broadcast mode back into control, whereas
I think the great educational value of hypertext is that it gives the learner what the
learner needs when the learner wants it: it is learner directed. Educational hypertext and
the best of the new educational media are learning environments, not teaching
environments. I think this type of constructivist learner activation has to dominate if
it's going to be efficient. I do not think that video tapes and television broadcasts are
the most efficient way to go. It puts students back in the same old, large classroom,
listening to someone - no matter how brilliant - talk at them. There's certainly a need
for this. But I think it's much more valuable where the student has to act to get a
result. One learns much more quickly when one is doing something. One of the things I've
found is that students write much better when they know they're writing for another
reader. Students never believe the instructors read things or they think the instructor is
a robot. It doesn't count. But as soon as they know their work is going to be read by
other students or by people in other places throughout the world, they go back and make it
much better. That is an example of some of the unintended, benign consequences of writing
for a networked environment. I think the habit of thinking of a broadcast paradigm as
paramount is very dangerous for the new media. We're talking about things like push
technology where you turn on your WWW and it becomes a form of television and things are
thrown at you. I think there's always a need for television. One don't always want to work
at choices. But for education I think one has to have student choice and students driving
these media. Again, this doesn't mean that students just play around aimlessly: they have
to be given assignments both to discover and to produce knowledge that make them be
active. People don't go to the library and people don't go to scholarly and educational
tools aimlessly: they go because they've been given an assignment or they have a goal or
they want to learn something.
Question 12
And hypertext fiction?
Answer
Hypertext fiction is new. If one looks at the relation of hypertext fiction to the newness
of the medium, it's remarkable how well it's doing. But of course you can't say: where is
the great hypertext novel ? People are just starting. There are some works which I think
are very important and they have many different paradigms. Michael Joyce's Afternoon
really is the high modernist paradigm. He emphasises not so much reader choice but the way
the hypertext novelist can use multiple branches to allow the reader to construct multiple
stories all of which he is in control of, so that one does not have to lose control with
hypertext; one can in fact become more of an author, more of a strong author, if that is
the way you wish to work. Carolyn Geier in Quibbling is one of those authors who
allows one to move into the individual documents as one chooses and not just follow links.
One can go to a map and follow something that one is already interested in. To my mind the
most interesting of the hypertext thus far is Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl. This
is a Storyspace fiction which can be read in both Windows or in Macintosh
environments. I think it's better in the Macintosh environment because there's more
functionality there. It tells the story of a female Frankenstein monster, who in Mary
Shelley's novel is never completed, but in this story has lived to be 180 years old, is
seven feet tall, and very healthy. Constructing her body as we read through the story
becomes a paradigm for the way we construct gender, the way we construct identity, and the
way we read all texts. So like many of the best hypertext fictions at the moment, it is
very self- referential, very post-modern; it's a very serious text but very amusing at
times. It uses pastiche and collage. And one reads through it and one has to determine
meanings. One can also take many different routes through the same story and one
encounters an aesthetic, which means that as one comes upon the same lexia or reading unit
from a different point of view it has to work with a different beginning and a different
exit. I think this succeeds very, very well. Now, one argument has been from Robert Coover
who is one of the great advocates of hypertext. This post-modernist novelist argues that
perhaps hypertext is primarily a poetic rather than a fictional medium. And surely a lot
of the work that one sees works according to various kinds of echoing and metaphor and
it's quite possible to look at it this way. That hypertext is perhaps a poetic narrative
form a lyric novel or a truly lyric form. What it does to narrative is more Asian or
Japanese, that is, one may have very intense moments and set pieces in mood but one rarely
gets to the powerful climax. But that is, of course, only something that is very strange
if you're thinking about the 19th century novel. If you're thinking about the Decameron
or even Chaucer or some old and contemporary Japanese fiction, that is a quite acceptable
way of constructing narratives rather than narrative. I expect that what we'll find as we
look back at the age of the voice, one has the epic. If one looks to the age of writing
and reading aloud, one has the romance. If one looks to the age of print, one has the
novel. The question is, what will the age of digital writing be? It may well be hypertext
fiction but the fiction takes a rather new form and it does not resemble the novel as we
know it. It may be more dispersed, richer, have more voices in it. Think of the difference
between the film version of a novel when it succeeds and the novel originally. If they're
really successful, they're different works because they're in different media.
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