Lawrence
James Clark
New Mexico Tech
ljclark@nmt.edu
During his keynote speech at the 1999 Hypertext
Conference, Eastgate Systems
founder Mark Bernstein asked two important
questions: "Where are the hypertexts?" and "Where are the readers of hypertexts?"
One of the many points Bernstein made in his talk was that hypertext fiction
seems to be written for and read by an extremely specialized audience,
but that it doesn't have to be that way. Much of the hypertext fiction
produced so far has taken advantage of technological possibilities to create
multilinear, polyvocal texts with various paths that the reader can choose
to follow. At the same time, since much of it has been written by authors
steeped in postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, hypertext
fiction has attempted to manifest these theories in the structure and content
of the works. Bernstein challenged his audience, which included hypertext
systems designers and programmers as well as hypertext fiction authors,
to create hypertexts that include elements of mystery, fun, satire, and
even "inspired silliness." Another key issue that Bernstein noted
is that in today's complicated, information-saturated world, what many
people want is not more complication, but simplicity.
After several years of
writing, reading, and introducing college students to hypertext fiction
and poetry, I have found one of my biggest challenges to be trying to convince
students that I am not punishing them by assigning hypertext works as course
readings, and that they can indeed find some sort of aesthetic pleasure
in reading these works. Most of these student readers, many of whom have
never heard of--much less read--hypertext fiction, are not impressed with
the complicated narrative structures full of endless loops and confusing
paths that seem to dominate much of the hypertext fiction published to
date. In my dealings with these novice readers of hypertext fiction, I
have found three major hindrances to readers' enjoyment of hypertext fiction:
the (apparent) lack of closure, frustration with non-linear narrative,
and navigational issues.
Although a Gallup poll would probably find
that the majority of the public is not even aware of the existence of hypertext
fiction, those of us in the field know that it is far from new. Michael
Joyce's seminal work, afternoon, a story, was first published over
ten years ago, and since that time hundreds of hypertext works have been
produced and released on disk, CD-ROM, and the World Wide Web. With the
number of people using computers on a daily basis at home and work growing
exponentially, and with the number of entertainment-oriented software products
that currently grace the market, why has hypertext fiction not won the
hearts and pocketbooks of millions? Why is the major publisher of hypertext
fiction still a relatively small software company rather than a major player
such as W.W. Norton or Simon and Schuster? Jay Bolter, in his 1993 keynote
address to the 9th Conference on Computers and Writing, proposed a simple
answer. People need closure; we (the reading public) are brought up with
the idea that every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Even
though (or perhaps because) real life doesn't work that way, we search
for and have been ingrained with tidy solutions. As toddlers, we listen
to fairy tales and, as grown-ups, we read popular novels or watch situation
comedies in which everything is solved in a span of thirty minutes, divided
into three neat eight-minute segments, divided by two-minute commercial
breaks.
One of the chief characteristics of most
current hypertext works is their non-linear narrative structure. This "problem,"
of course, is not unique to hypertext fiction, and has been a common complaint
of uninitiated readers who are first introduced to many forms of experimental
fiction, such as the postmodern works of Thomas Pynchon. It seems to be
exasperated, though, by the advent of hypertext authoring programs and
the authors experimenting with the myriad possibilities they afford for
providing multivocality, multiple plot "paths", etc. Michael Joyce,
in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, claims that the
answer to this problem is to educate readers so that they look to be satisfied
by achieving a "sense of the whole" rather than simply a feeling that they
have read all of the writing spaces (nodes) in a work. This also
eliminates the need for having to spend months or years trying to read
every single node of a work before reaching a point of "satisfaction."
Although I, as an experienced hypertext reader, am willing to accept Joyce's
argument, is it realistic to expect the uninitiated reader to approach
a work in this manner? The answer, of course, as Joyce suggests,
lies in educating readers to this new way of "experiencing a reading" of
a hypertext work as opposed to the traditional notion of reading a work
from beginning to end with the idea that the whole work has then been "read."
I was first alerted to the problem of navigation
for the user when I wrote a review of Bolter's Writing
Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing in 1992;
the text came with a companion disk for Macintosh (written in Storyspace).
Although this was a work of non-fiction, Bolter took advantage of hypertext
linking to create several "layers" of information beneath the surface of
the original work. I found it fascinating and useful to have this information
available only a few mouseclicks away, but I did become frustrated when
I couldn't find my way back to the section of the original I was reading.
I find that most hypertext fiction works I read today still have the same
problem; this is one of the major complaints of my students, most of whom
are being introduced to hypertext fiction for the first time. Of course,
readers of works published on the Internet can make use of the "back" and
temporary history features of their Web browsers, but if one strays too
far from the original node even these tools can't help.
At the 1998 conference
of the Modern Language Association, Marjorie Luesebrink (M.D. Coverly)
"performed" and also discussed the creation of her forthcoming work, Califia,
written in ToolBook for Windows. In Califia, Luesebrink has recognized
the problem of user navigation and has attempted to orient the reader with
the use of a "toolbox" that allows the following of paths accessible by
means such as theme or character. As a colleague mentioned in a recent
e-mail to a discussion list, "[her] students felt [more freedom] to choose
where they were going" than in other hypertexts work they had read. Although
Califia contains hundreds of nodes and allows readers to follow
several related narratives from various characters' points of view, the
optional toolbox feature goes a long way in helping readers to feel less
"lost" and more in control of their own reading strategy, thus adding to
the enjoyment of the reading experience and reducing the frustration felt
by many readers of hypertext fiction. Adding navigational tools, then,
seems to be one way to help the novice hypertext reader have a more enjoyable
experience.
In my own work, I have tried to keep all
of the above issues under consideration. Although I am not targeting my
works at the mass audience that Grisham, Clancey, and other current popular
writers cater to, I am making an attempt to make my works accessible to
readers, and thus help to increase the possibility that they will derive
some aesthetic pleasure from them. For example, both Fly
(fiction) and WeR1
(poetry/theory) have a finite number of links, and take the reader back
to the opening screen when he or she has finished reading through the work.
Also, Fly has no incidental paths for the reader to get "lost" on;
it is, as Aarseth would define it, a unicursal rather
than a multicursal maze. WeR1 (once the reader drills down
through several cycles) does have paths the reader can choose, but they
all eventually lead back to the original path which, in turn, leads to
the end of the work. I set up the narrative structure of these works in
this manner precisely to allow readers to introduce themselves to the idea
of linking as a poetic device, of fragmented text eventually becoming "whole"
(WeR1) and of a theme being presented through multiple voices and
points of view (Fly).
I am in no way suggesting
that either Fly or WeR1 alleviates all of the "problems"
I have discussed here, or that these problems necessarily need to
be "solved." I am, however, suggesting that these issues remain a matter
of discussion, and that hypertext authors, as well as those who design
the software used to construct these works, keep them in mind as they continue
forging ahead in this new literary genre and seek to gain a wider audience
for their creative works.
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1997.
Bernstein, Mark. "Where Are the Hypertexts?" Kenote Speech at the 1999 ACM Hypertext Conference. Darmstadt, Germany, February 1999.
Bolter, Jay. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.
Douglas, Jane. "'How Do I Stop this Thing?': Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995.
External LinksEastgate Systems. http://www.eastgate.com