Then I did it! "View source"
killed the remote control, at least temporarily. I saw the code, and the
code stopped loading.
I saw it as it *really* was, the "essential" text:
<tr>
<td colspan=3 align=middle>
<font size=5>
Drivers
</font>
</td>
</tr>
Pay attention to the man behind the curtain!
"Reading a well-done hypertext story often feels like the temporal equivalent of watching a Polaroid snapshot develop. What begins as a blank field soon begins to show vague suggestions of line, color and contour that slowly coalesce to create an environment environment both clear and complex." The Wall Street Journal [huh?], Thursday, March 28, 1996
Questioner: "Are you still working on atomic bombs?"
John Von Neumann: "I am working on something much more important. I am working on computers."
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One gets the experience of this story never ending, or even and in fact,
never beginning. The reader hasn't a chance to keep up with the server
pushes (see tag, META), so he's left trailing behind pillars of words that
simply won't keep still. It fills up our history list with
itself, replacing its own letters, so it's all we are, the only place we've
ever been. Is it us? The experience is one of the chase, and if we could
only catch them, if the words would only stay long enough, long enough for
us to begin the websurfing frenzy that we desire. If we could only click …
Moulthrop is clearly challenging assumptions about narrative with Hegirascope, though
in his introduction he tells us:
"This is not a novel, nor will it necessarily meet your expectations about
interactive fictions. I am trying to explore forms of narrative writing --
and stories -- that emerge from Web hypertext and seem well suited to that
environment. For the moment anyway, that is my hegira."
Is he giving the game away? Is Moulthrop telling us the end before we even
begin?
What he tells
us is this: they're the same, clicking and watching. The server pushes, and
it's all the same -- we watch, we click, we watch ourselves click, we click
ourselves and watch.
Yet after a few minutes of watching, it's so very nice to simply stare at
the screen, which doesn't need us anymore. It's tasty, pleasing, like
television. Even the yellow-letters-on-black-background "-click-" re/moves
itself if we don't touch it. This is one story that doesn't need us at all.
An excerpt:
Zero and Other Values
Did you know the Internet was designed to survive a
thermonuclear attack?
No shit.
Back in the early days people didn't grasp the
significance, but now we understand. The Net is
reversal of the Bomb. The Bomb takes the world as
we know it and turns it into a big zero. But the Net
creates another world inside this one. Lots of
worlds, in fact. Worlds without end.
- click -
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