FRAMING A TEXT (Space-Time) from a Talk/Show West Georgia International Conference Despair and Desire, Atlanta, ll/1/96
by Christy Sheffield Sanford

The basic question I want to address is how literature, that is, a body of creative work with emotional depth and intensity, can survive and flourish on the Internet.

The Internet has many implications for writers and artists. The language, conventions and community spawned by the World Wide Web affect society at large and inevitably creative writers and their products. Although I see the importance of bulletin boards, documentation and information transfer, work done specifically for the Web environment interests me most.

There are dozens of literary "e-zines" and numerous sites honoring literary figures. Whole books are now available on line. You can download the Princesse de Clèves in French or English, and, at Light and Dust an entire contemporary poetry collection. I currently maintain The Madame de Lafayette Book of Hours Project site dedicated to the work of Madame de Lafayette. At this site is a translation of La Comtesse de Tende, a bibliography of Madame de Lafayette's work, links to sites related to her life, time or work and some of my own creative output and that of others.

Before the Princesse de Clèves, novels tended to be serialized or episodic. Madame de Lafayette provided the novel with a more compact and elegant form and characters with psychological depth. The conflict-crisis-resolution model that she refined has proved satisfying for centuries and is still in favor today.

For fiction to enter the life of the next generation, it will have to be faster and more compact. It must, however, maintain its dramatic intensity and emotional depth. While I revere Madame de Lafayette, I feel that the novel, in particular, is due for a change. One way to do this is to rely on the shorthand now possible due to exposure to visual mediums such as movies and television and now the World Wide Web.

I have regained my footing after initially being bowled over by the ability to use images and theatrical techniques. I've been combining images and text, letting them inspire each other. That seems to work best for poetry and heuristic writing. Fiction requires a sustained narrative. Of course, it can be broken at intervals. Looking at the history of literature, I would argue that formal breaks have always existed. Still, the weight is on the narrative and this textual line requires concentration. Images work best operating at intervals or tangentially. I would argue when the image becomes equal or superior the work will veer toward poetry. Unless, of course, the image is simply an illustration, a pantomime of action. There may be exceptions-elegant ones-to my idea on weight. I do believe the Web can serve as a new medium to explore and develop literary forms such as fiction and poetry and new genres.

A concrete example of how the Web might influence or more boldly revitalize literature comes from the convention of frames. Frames offer many interesting alternatives for literature and, especially, I believe, fiction. Frames are potentially dynamic. There's a remote control aspect. Click on a button in frame A and something can happen in frame B. It can be a dialogic experience or like dueling banjos. Most Internet innovations have been developed to present information-to organize and control it-typically for business, science or education. These efforts must be subverted at all costs! I say this half in jest, some Dadaesque humor, but also in seriousness. I've taken a good stab at several Web conventions, notably frames. Tables and forms are two other examples. Many other Internet innovations play a role in affecting how material is perceived and valued: blinking lights, bullets/arrows and "threads" are only a few.

Little has been done thus far to kill Web conventions. Artists and writers have used them beautifully, but most are using them for what they were intended, that is, to order information. They should be used to disorder information, to throw you into heaven or Dante's Inferno. Frames can present multiple worlds or even the same world from a number of angles. Points of view can be scrolled, combined and linked and can provide endless moving combinations. These can be emotionally thrilling and satisfying-depending, of course, on the skill of those who take them up. The quality of the text and image still matters as does the mentality and ideas underpinning the work.

For me, a successful experiment opens new doors, is formally replicable and provides a model. It must be aesthetically and emotionally satisfying. Not much has been done to fulfill these criteria with respect to fiction and space-time. Let me rephrase that. A lot has been done with content indicating passage of time, being told we're in one century and then another, as in Orlando. But less in terms of presenting work that plays spatially with time or that controls the delivery of text temporally. Not to the extent it has been done in poetry from Mallarmé coming down through, say, Leslie Scalapino or another track, the whole of concrete poetry.

Marguerite Duras in the first section of India Song, a mixed genre piece, has over sixty instructions to pause or be silent. In my work, I have played with the temporal delivery of text using spatio-visual elements. I have been especially interested in the creation of meditative spaces, best realized, I think, in Georgette's Revenge.

Fiction has a thrust, a narrative imperative to move forward in space-time, but I feel the creation of chaotic eddies, meditative rooms along the way, places that resonate in the night, are desirable and aesthetically satisfying. Instead of slowing the action, they actually speed it. Like a water break in a marathon. They're refreshing. They can also be like closets where bombs are built. Or one last metaphor, the phone booth, with the emerging superman or superwoman.

These areas of intensity, of concentration, are weighted toward poetry. In my own work, the "Desert Songs" in Bigamy in the Desert and the ellipsed Bible quotations and natural history descriptions in Safara in the Beginning are examples. The fusion of poetry and fiction has been my primary interest. Fusion is highly possible at this juncture in history. First, because the rigidity of the genres has been softened by visual mediums like movies and TV. And second, because the boundaries have been further blurred by the computer. There are other reasons as well. I'm not suggesting the genres of fiction and poetry, which have proved satisfying, will or should be replaced, only that other forms will be created.

Christy Sheffield Sanford, Copyright © 1996