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Pif Magazine
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On Gold and Silver Ages and the Elements of Hypertext : Page 1, 2
Meanwhile, author Michael Joyce was facing a dilemma, and meeting the people who would help him solve it. As he writes in this excerpt from his book, Of Two Minds,
In 1982, ... I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings; and to make those changing versions according to the connections which I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing, and which I wanted my readers to share. In my eyes paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes ... I found in some obscure computer magazine a thoroughly frightening article about a woman, Natalie Dehn, at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Lab who was trying to teach computers to write novels. Her face seemed kind and so I wrote her a letter and asked her to tell me, please, where I could buy a computer program that would let me write novels that changed every time someone read them. She wrote me back an eight page letter which explained how this was impossible and would be for twenty years ... I began a long correspondence with Natalie, which resulted in my invitation to Yale and, more importantly, in her suggestion that I contact Jay Bolter, a curious combination of Classicist and computerist, who she said had previously been a Visiting Fellow there, was "also crazy," and was interested in similar questions. My correspondence with Jay led to foundation funding of my sabbatical and our initial work on our program. We and his colleague John Smith went on to create Storyspace, which in the Spring of 1987 enabled me to write a hyperfiction afternoon, a story that changes every time you read it.
This passage illustrates one important aspect of hypertext. The essential component that makes a hypertext work different from printed linear narrative is the component of "change", the fact that the work can be "read" in a variety of ways, not whether the narrative is told in text or images, or utilizes a combination of the two.
Perhaps the experience of reading a hypertext is more attuned to the way we "look" at, and "read" a narrative painting. The artist gives us clues – of perspective, image placement, use of shadow and light – as to where he wishes us to focus our attention within a painting. But we have no obligation to follow these clues in any specific order, and indeed our experience of a painting can be different every time we look at it. First we may learn the "bones" of the painting, its main cast of characters, location, time frame. Next, we may pause over a lovingly painted detail, a bit of contoured flesh or fabric, and think about the actual application of the paint. The look on the face of one of the painting's characters may remind us of something personal in our own lives, or a similar story told by another painter, or author.
Our experience of a painting, like our experience of hypertext, isn't "framed and specific," isn't bound by pages and chapters. With hypertext, we choose the length and breadth of our emergence into the work, and though the author may mark a work's boundaries, laying out a link progression with various beginnings, middles and ends, much like a painter outlines a composition, the reader can redefine these endlessly.
Professor and theorist N. Katherine Hayles has no problem identifying work in hypertext, or hypermedia, as she is more likely to call it, as literature. Thus the title of her keynote lecture at DAC seems particularly apt: "Print is Flat, Code is Deep: Rethinking Signification in New Media." Technology has given us hypertext and new opportunities to dip beneath the textual surface. Or as Carolyn Guertin says so succinctly, "The text has moved beyond artistic experience and become an environment."
The linkability of hypertext as a language encourages authors to create works that load in "bits." Could it follow that our perception of narrative will/is change/ing? A developing medium can usually be counted on to do just that, develop, mutate, change. If we look at early films, the timing of scenes and cuts is very different from that utilized in films today. Film staging and syntax initially grew out of the theater tradition, and early film technology was best suited to moving the actors, not the camera. In fact, it took filmmakers quite awhile to figure out they could move the camera, that it could become an integral player in the film, not just a passive audience. But the progression from theatrically staged film to today's cut, fade, dolly, pan, steadicam, crane, keep it moving! cinema was gradual. Doesn't it follow that any evolution in hypertext literature will also be so?
What hypertext authors will make of these opportunities remains to be seen. Perhaps the bigger question is, will the reading public embrace this new form of "reading"? Or do we, as linear-bound mammals, creatures of definition and clear boundaries, feel the pull of narrative progression too strongly to let it go? A new version of Storyspace is on the way from Eastgate Systems, as is javascript language for Web authorship of hypertexts (coauthored by Robert Kendall and Jean-Hugues Réty), so the tools are readily available. But tools are not authors and cannot breathe life, or meaning into a medium.
When it comes to the future of hypertext, I share Michael Joyce's sentiments when he says, "Language and image have combined, contended, and ultimately collaborated to show us both the possibilities of being and the abyss of nothingness. In a time of such polar events, a writer's hopes must reside in the continuity and variety of individual lives." Joyce continues, "I am weary of the inexorable claims of nextness which are pressed upon us by media, government, and especially commerce and which cause us to lose sight of the swiftness of life, the pleasures of slowness, the importance of any moment, and the grace of being."
Asked for his opinion on the issue of hypertext and technology, Joyce recently stated: "I think the division Bob [Coover] suggests isn't over technology as much as over language and, as we saw in Atlanta, narrative. Like any such division I think it is most useful for the space it describes/inscribes between the poles and for the permeation and interpenetration of the respective surfaces." Or we could say, in between the gold and the silver, in between the elements. Sometimes round and textured like a rock, then flat and open to impression like a piece of paper, or ready to be defined, but only for the moment, by the shaping snip of the scissors.
Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com
Jennifer Ley