|
Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext Vol. 2, Number 1
The pretty packaging offered some ideas as to the contents: Sea Island by Edward Falco is described as ten hypertext poems which "explore themes of memory, desire, solitude, loss, and age," and Mahasukha Halo by Richard Gess is a collection of "snapshots, pleas, and confessions from a future world of alien sex and alien gods, where humans do the dirty work." Okay, sounds good, right? I was initially tripped up when I discovered that the manual accompanying the diskettes was one for Kathryn Cramer's In Large & Small Pieces and Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats. This may not seem so terrible; the "manual" doesn't reveal much about the texts themselves. It is really more of an instruction booklet for downloading the material onto your computer and a guidebook through the maps, text links, toolbars and other hypertext paraphernalia than it is a Cambridge Companion to the works. But for anyone who has never experienced hypertext beyond video or computer games or reading an e-zine while online, this was an intimidating lack. Everyone has a "first time" with hypertext, and for someone who is even the slightest bit techno-phobic, missing manuals can be a real deterrent. But I forged ahead, using the instructions in the misplaced booklet to download my hypertexts. I began with Falco's Sea Island. Falco provides a handy little set of instructions for reading his poems, which includes a default path, or a way to create your own path by choosing links or clicking on words. I appreciated that Falco reminded his readers that hypertext poetry is new and there are not, as yet, any prescribed or preferred methods of reading. I ran through the Falco poems in all the ways he mentioned and found them palatable in all their forms. I moved on to Richard Gess' Mahasukha Halo. Again, the author provided a little instructional preface, with information similar to Falco's. I moved into the storyspace and again gave the text a once-over in all the different ways that I could figure out, based on Gess' instructions. After a couple of hours with both texts, I came to a few basic conclusions. First, the medium of hypertext is both engaging and disappointing. While there is excitement with the relaxation of form inherent in hypertext, care and respect should be taken with the use of the form. While you can put a frame around anything that comes into your mind, it won't make it the Mona Lisa. Just because something is "hypertext" doesn't excuse bad writing. Second, and as a natural addendum to my first conclusion, projects that utilize the medium of hypertext should be considered both as literature (or poetry or nonfiction) and the "experience" of literature. It is not enough to experience a body of text in several different ways. It needs to stand on its own as a body of literature. The complex does not have to be incomprehensible, and complexity does not equal depth. With this in mind, I can say that the hypertext form does nothing for Falco's Sea Island, and the text of Mahasukha Halo does nothing for the hypertext form. In Sea Island, ten seemingly disparate poems take the reader on journeys into and out of himself. The past and present merge in vignettes that are both startlingly simplistic and kaleidoscopic, such as one encounters in dreams. You know the type – one moment you are talking to a friend dressed only in socks and a barrette, and in the next, you are falling down a flight of stairs and shattering your teeth, only to be followed by a sexual dream involving your aunt during which you get news that you never graduated from high school because you were absent on the day of your algebra exam. Of course, it all makes sense in a beautifully interwoven way that is unique to dreams. Many of the poems in Sea Island effectively use this approach. "Five Women in a Bed" is like stepping into a dream world. Five women jump on a bed at a party while a man looks on – observed and observing, both within the picture and outside of it, alone at the party, as someone takes a picture. The bed becomes a lifeboat in which the five women float and in the foreground a man swims hard toward the boat, "only the back of his head and shoulders visible." The poem invites the reader to observe the events as from behind the lens of a camera, then to become a part of the action, but not really:
The most sensitive line of the poem serves to negate the dream imagery somewhat through its overt and emphatic stress on the realism of the women, both physically and psychologically: "Five women at a party jump on their host's bed / Women, not the idea of women." I returned again and again, via the links, to "Women, not the idea of women." For me, this line resonates with a truth that seems to be the bedrock of the poem. Where are we at those existential moments in our lives that the poet compares to the moment of climax? Are we outside the picture looking for a way in? Or a way out? Or both? Do we see others and ourselves as we actually are, or merely as the ideas of what we are? "In This That Just Is" echoes these questions, though sparingly:
With these lines the reader encounters a slight rephrasing of the theme of emptiness and solitude found in "Five Women." "Casting Out" is a fine example of images beautifully wrought through expressive, clear language, though its stream-of-consciousness style does not do it justice.
This imagistic beginning withers away into disappearing barn walls, changing light, and "the roar of knowing the emptiness we are." I'm not quite sure how the end of the poem (or the beginning, depending on how you read it), in which "the blood pain of a lover's touch/ The mouth of a loved one/ Compelled to bite until blood/ Seeps out of another's body/ Onto dark lips/ In a darkened room/ Where two bodies rock together," fulfills the promise of the images of the poem as quoted above. I was left with a feeling of having accidentally escaped from one of the poems into another, something that is not possible (at least for this reader) to do within Falco's hypertext (thank goodness). On a first reading, the poems appear to be built around the motif of water hinted at in the title, but water is a tool of imagery. The thematic motif centers on the dissonance between "What's in here out there" ("Sea Island"), described in several of the poems thus: "a long line of red light stretching from the open hear of/ out of the open heart of into the/ Open" ("Passion's") "Outside the picture/ You could tell he was looking for a way in/ A way out" ("Five Women") "Living with and without/ That feels mostly without/ That feels sometimes with" ("In This That Just Is") "Entering coming together out of" ("One Line of Sunlight Pierces") I mention this only because these thematic variations are less evident in the poems I liked best, "Summer Flowers" and "God Bless the Child." "Summer Flowers" unveils a lovely story of young and illicit love, no matter how you read it, that is a pleasure to the both the mind's eye and the senses, somewhat in the tradition of Rod McKuen. "God Bless the Child" is a series of prose vignettes in which the first few words of each section are italicized and, when read in order (order according to the default method of reading), form a short poem of their own. The prose sections in "God Bless the Child" are interesting in that they reveal Falco's facility with language in a way that is not always so evident in the poems. The word choice is hard-hitting and clean, active and specific and richly resonant:
Each screen revealed a wholly-contained paragraph, a surprise that may have added to my enjoyment (though I was initially put off by the jarring juxtaposition of the screens filled with writing, so different from the spare screens of the poems, on which maybe ten or twenty words were written), but I prefer to believe it is the writing and not just the more traditional look of the piece. If I have not elaborated too much on the presentation of Falco's poems in the Hypertext medium, it is because they are not perceivably enhanced by having been published as hypertext. If anything, I could visualize the poems in a book, clean and spare and imminently readable — a volume to be dipped into again and again. Although it was visually entertaining the first few times the titles of the poems formed themselves on the screen, there were no graphics or art or wingdings that made these poems any more spectacular than they would be in a traditional text, in whatever final order the words were placed. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for Mahasukha Halo, the hypertext by Richard Gess. In the "Help" section of the work, "mahasukha" and "halo" are defined for the benefit of the reader. "Mahasukha" is defined as a Nepalese Buddhist concept of transcendence through erotic experience, and "halo," of course, as a nimbus, corona or circle. I understood "halo," both as a literal and literary concept without the definition being provided, but was thankful for the author's help regarding "mahasukha." Unfortunately, the definitions as they are presented do not appear to apply to the work itself, in any concrete or discrete way. Sexual images are rife throughout the work, but they are rendered more pornographic than transcendent through gimmicky grammar and stylistic tricks. An example of this kind of contrivance is the following:
Links are provided to information regarding colors and the physiology of feline genitalia, but they do not make the author's meaning any more clear to the reader. I considered the possibility that Reader Response criticism – advocating more emphasis on the features of the text that shape and influence a reader's reading — might be Gess' intention (and it very well may be), but this particular work reads more like literary impressionism. Gess appears to have collated and arranged his considerable body of material into a presentation not geared toward any individual or objective reader, but as he visualized or experienced it at any particular moment. Even the numerous links, seemingly organized on the interminable Tree Map, Chart View, Outline and Storyspace Map, serve not to provide further insight, but to frustrate the reader. Gess is trying to explain his dream or vision, but instead of a recounting that takes into account the vagaries of dream logic, the reader cannot suspend enough disbelief to grasp an inherent theme or motif. If you follow the links, you are provided with various sources for seemingly every word, including words such as "jelly" — from "I hated the jelly, it was so cold, they were all watching like they'd never seen someone with only, only one sex in himself, the jelly was so cold you burned..." For this the source said: "These people were grotesque, man, they didn't care, they told me to do it myself so that they could all watch, it's just like they'd never seen someone with just one dick, just one sex..." What does this mean? Is this a thought process of Gess, or is it quoted from someone else? Although many of the links provide actual bibliographic information that an interested reader can pursue at his or her local library, the above quotation was simply labeled "Hya notes 4 / Hya notes 10." No matter how I tried, I could not find a bibliography that corresponded with this information. Other text links provide sources for such words as smoke, never, lustral, snow, shit, pistils, twenty, deep, heads, wires, barbs, baring, shoved, can't stop, like oh, and others – the list goes on and on. Sources include a variety of authors, song groups and other folk; director James Broughton is the source listed in the link for shit; William G. Eberhard and his no doubt fine tome, Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia, is the source for barbs (as in "It had barbs all over it like a cat penis"). This is fairly self-explanatory; I assume that Eberhard discusses that a cat penis has barbs. But frustration mounts when a reader follows links for sentences such as this one: "Their shit littered the streets, they thought shitting towards the sun killed the demon" (from the work called "Lay Contractor"). Its link takes us to a source for the word littered that is Robert Crafts's "Top of the World: A Nepal Diary" (from the New York Review of Books). Sources such as these are irritating because while the reader knows what "littered" signifies in the original text, by linking it to a source that has no corresponding example, the connection is obscured. I would have been more motivated to follow links listed in the outline, such as Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies" (from Killer), The Doors' "Crystal Ship" (The Doors) and "Hyacinth House" (L.A. Woman), "Citadel" by The Rolling Stones (Their Satanic Majesties Request), and tunes from the group United States of America, if the sources had given the corresponding example that inspired Gess. I went back to the advertising hype printed on the sleeve to see if I could cull any further meaning for myself, but to no avail. While Mahasukha Halo may very well have been "snapshots, pleas, and confessions from a future world of alien sex and alien gods, where humans do the dirty work and put on the dirty shows," the further claim that "sex and religion are polyvalent, and body parts proliferate" is incomprehensible. What does this mean? Polyvalent is a great word, defined by my trusty Oxford English Dictionary as multivalent, or having the property of counteracting various poisons. Multivalent, of course, means having many degrees of valency. I think this is a perfect analogy for the work as a whole. All in all, the body of literature that is Mahasukha Halo was bewildering and, more importantly — in terms of building a readership — stupefying, with writing so indeterminate as to be self-defeating. The medium of hypertext in no way justifies or lessens its unreadability. Annie Dillard, in her fine guidebook The Writing Life, describes the need for the writer to be courageous in self-editing, to throw out any and all writing that weakens a work, writing which the writer often feels emotionally tied to, sometimes because it is the original key passage upon which a work began or upon which (the writer believes) it continues to hang. Her advice is good. She explains, and I concur: "Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip." I almost want to apologize for all my prefatory comments regarding the hypertext that hadn't as yet addressed the works themselves, or the fact that I spent more time analyzing the actual literary efforts of Falco than I did those of Gess, but I won't. It is safe to say that a goodly proportion of the world's population understands how to open a book and begin reading on page one. We may skip to the last page to see what happens, or backtrack to reread things we misunderstood or liked, but we understand (or have understood, before the advent of hypertext) that in order to get the full gist of an author's work, we must begin at the beginning and read through to the end. Poetry, of course, is an obvious exception, in that you can skip around from poem to poem, but most people still read poetry from the first line to the last within an individual work. Hypertext, though, involves a lot of work. Unlike a book that involves a linear reading from cover to cover, hypertext is by its very nature a nonlinear work, designed to take the reader through a text in several different ways. I want to say that it is pleasurable to click around with my mouse or hit my return key or click on different links or paths, but it is really more like work. Reading hypertext, as opposed to reading a novel or book or poetry, is more akin to being forced to read a textbook on how write a play or a poem instead of reading, say, Hamlet or Songs of Innocence. To play my own devil's advocate, I'm certain that fans (or authors or publishers) of hypertext will say that I am a neophyte or simply resistant to the beauty of the form. I admit there is a kernel of truth to both charges. But I am not condemning the form. In fact, I look forward to reading more hypertext and tracking its evolution as a literary medium. But form is not responsible for a work being less than exciting, or even, in the extreme, outlandish, juvenile, trite, annoying or poorly written. If the writing that is produced under the auspices of hypertext does not reach the intelligent, perceptive reader, then the form is not going to save it, no matter how cutting-edge.
Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Candace Moonshower is an army brat who taught herself to type the summer she turned eight, knowing even then she would write. Now a graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she studies English and writes both fiction and nonfiction. Candace's personal and ongoing work involves researching and writing about the cultural aftermath of the Vietnam War, especially with regard to the men and women that served and the families they left behind, in the hopes of promoting an understanding of our national consciousness before, during and since our involvement there. |
||||
