he.gi.ra also he.ji.ra \hi-'ji--r*, 'hej-(*-)r*\ n [the Hegira, flight of
Muhammad from Mecca in A.D. 622, fr. ML, fr.] Ar hijrah, lit., flight : a
journey esp. when undertaken to seek refuge away from a dangerous or
undesirable environment : EXODUS
we (the authors of this / fiction) asked ourselves when we
read Hegirascope, Stuart Moulthrop's almost-latest Webfiction.
... but Moulthrop is too prolific, and we,
apparently, are too slow. And here is the rub, Moulthrop tells us: you
blink, and you miss it.
The sidelines start dichotomizing again, as margin is all, the only way
out (in), while center tells a story, like it always does.
The act of "reading" Hegirascope is an interesting one. As I write these
words, Hegirascope spins in the background, loading color after color,
word after word. A backdrop screen-saver? A dropped-back oui-saver?
Even now I try and catch the words, make them stay. I see half - paragraphs
move by these words [send to Back], and I wonder what I'm missing.
Moulthrop would say: not much. But don't you believe him.
It was an affront to get beaten to the link. I started to read faster, so the words weren't pushed from me
until I was done. In
this webbed world of choice / channel flipping, it’s no fun to watch. We
want to click. But Moulthrop heads us off at the pass, does us one (or two)
better, and all we can do is watch.
After a while I found I could beat it, well almost. I waited for a link to push into
another, then I intervened and replaced the URL. "...hypertexts/HGS". Back
to the "top" of the stack, king of the mountain. I won. Until
that first click again -- begin.
Now I just want to SEE everything, to explore
all the links. There's no chance of the link getting me, because I'm not
reading, just counting up the pages until I reach the end.
Tasty, pleasing, like television? It is this, and much, much more.
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"This is Your Brain on the Internet":
A Review of Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope
John Tolva and David Balcom
Is this a joke?
In his perfunctory review of Stuart Moulthrop’s
Victory Garden, Sven Birkerts admits that he did not enjoy
reading the hypertext. He says, “A kind
of paralysis crept over me . . . . I felt none of the tug I had
felt with Cortázar’s novel, none of the subtle suction exerted
by masterly prose.” Undoubtedly Birkerts uses a metaphor
here to describe a lack of interest in Moulthrop’s writing.
Prose doesn’t really tug. Words don’t exert and suck. Or do
they? Sure, we might feel that the narrative so compels us
onward (the hallmark of the “page-turning novel!”), but the
words themselves are merely the tracks along which the
process of reading travels. Even hypertext fiction
taunts, teases, and otherwise beckons, but it never yields
without some provocation from the reader. Perhaps
Moulthrop had Birkerts in mind when he wrote
Hegirascope, for the governing idea behind it, stated and
implied, is the question “What if the word will not be still?”
Indeed. Forget what you thought you thought about the lack
of authorial control in hypertext fiction. Hegirascope does,
in fact, suck. And tug and pull and jostle and generally upset
the reader.
Moulthrop’s “experimental” hypertext takes the idea of
the page-turning novel literally. Technically the most striking
feature of Hegirascope is that pages change without
prompting from the reader. Using the HTML META tag
(which embeds special information in the headers of the page) to enable client pull, the current page replaces itself by
loading a new page after a designated amount of time. No
more than a few seconds are allowed on most pages before
the screen delivers a new text-block. Such fluidity is not, of
course, new in hypertext; it defines the medium. But flux is
usually a function of the reader’s actions, not the author’s
devices. The control that the author of hypertext has most
often ceded to the reader — e.g., determining the explicit
path of the narration — is partially returned in Hegirascope.
The reader of course has choices; there are usually two
links, sometimes more, that the reader may select before the page
“pulls” a new one in. But clicking on a link only to
thwart the default page-turning preempts the reading
experience. One cannot both control the branching of the
narrative and insure that he or she will have ample time to
read the given lexia. Initially this bargain prompted me to
read incredibly quickly, skipping over Moulthrop’s rich and
evocative language in order to finish the text before it
decided I was done and moved on anyway. Gradually,
however I learned to slow down and read what I could
while I could. Surrendering to the incessant flow of
Hegirascope turned out to be much more profitable than
attempting to take in everything at breakneck pace. Viewed
this way Moulthrop’s experiment is thus much like TV.
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