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Forepaper
by Lawrence
James Clark
for Messenger Morphs the Media
99
After several years of writing, reading, and introducing
college students to hypertext fiction and poetry, I have
found one of my biggest challenges to be trying to convince
students that I am not punishing them by assigning hypertext
works as course readings, and that they can indeed find some
sort of aesthetic pleasure in reading these works. I
have found three major hindrances to readers' enjoyment of
hypertext fiction: the (typical) lack of closure,
frustration with non-linear narrative, and navigational
issues.
- Closure (or lack thereof)
Although a Gallup poll would probably find that the
majority of the public is not even aware of the existence of
hypertext fiction, those of us in the field know that it is
far from new. Michael Joyce's seminal work,
afternoon, a story was first published over ten years
ago, and since that time hundreds of works have been
produced and released on disk, CD-ROM, and on the World Wide
Web. With the number of people using computers on a
daily basis at home and work growing exponentially, and with
the number of entertainment-oriented software products that
currently grace the market, why has hypertext fiction not
won the hearts and pocketbooks of millions? Why is the
major publisher of hypertext fiction still a small software
company in Massachussetts rather than a major player such as
W.W. Norton or Simon and Schuster? Jay Bolter, in his
1993 keynote address to the 9th Conference on Computers and
Writing, proposed a simple answer. People need
closure; we (the reading public) are brought up with the
idea that every story has a beginning, middle and end.
Even though (or perhaps because) real life doesn't work that
way, we search for and have been ingrained with tidy
solutions from the time we are toddlers listening to fairy
tales or grownups reading popular novels or watching
situation comedies in which everything is solved in a span
of 26 minutes. While the typical reader of a hypertext
work is perhaps more sophisticated and more willing to
"play" or take risks with the narrative structure, the size
of that audience is unlikely to reach that of, say, the
latest John Grisham novel. Even those of us who hold a
valid academic interest in reading and writing about these
works often grumble amongst ourselves about the lack of
pleasure often associated with "reading" them. Jane
Yellowlees Douglass, for example, took 2 years to read
afternoon and finally found the "key" writing space
which gave her a sense closure and a feeling that she
understood the work--is it realistic to expect the average
(or ven above average) reader to devote this amount of time
to a single work?
- Non-linear narrative: can it be
satisfying?
One of the chief characteristics of a hypertext work is
its non-linear narrative structure. This "problem," of
course, is not unique to hypertext fiction, and has been a
common complaint of unititiated readers who are first
introduced to many forms of experimental fiction, such as
the postmodern works of Thomas Pynchon. This problem
seems to be exhasperated, though, by the advent of hypertext
authoring programs and those authors who experiment with the
myriad possibilities they afford for providing
multivocality, multiple plot "paths", etc. Michael
Joyce, in Of Two Minds and other writings, says that
the answer to this problem is to educate readers so that
they look to be satisfied by achieving a "sense of the
whole" rather than simply a feeling that one has read all of
the writing spaces (nodes) in a work. This also
provides a solution to the problem of having to spend months
or years trying to read every single node of a work before
reaching a point of "satisfaction."
- Navigation: "Lost in Cyberspace"
I was first alerted to the problem of navigation for the
user when I wrote a review of Bolter's Writing Space
in 1992; the text came with a companion disk for
Macintosh (written in Storyspace) in 1992. Although
this was a work of non-fiction, Bolter took advantage of
hypertext linking to create several "layers" of information
beneath the surface of the original work. Although I
found it fascinating and useful to have this information
available only a few mouseclicks away, I became frustrated
when I couldn't find my way back to the section of the
original I was reading. I find that most hypertext
fiction works I read today still have the same problem; this
is one of the major complaints of my students who are being
introduced to hypertext fiction for the first time. Of
course, those works which are published on the Internet can
make use of the "back" and temporary history features, but
if one strays too far from the original node even these
tools can't help. At the 1998 conference of the Modern
Language Association, Margie Lusebrink (M.D. Coverly)
"performed" and also discussed the creation of her
soon-to-be-published work, Califia, which is written
in ToolBook for Windows. In Califia,
Lusebrink has recognized the problem of user navigation and
has attempted to orient the reader with the use of a
"toolbox" that allows the following of paths which are
accessible by such means as theme or character.
In my own work, I have tried to keep all of the above
issues under consideration. Although I admit that I am
not targeting my works at such a wide audience as Grisham,
Clancey, or other current popular writers seek, I am making
an attempt to allow my works to be accessible to readers,
and thus help to increase the possibility that they will
derive some aesthetic pleasure from them. For example,
both Fly and WeR1 have a finite number of
links, and take the reader back to the opening screen when
he or she has finished reading through the work. Also,
Fly has no incidental paths for the reader to get
"lost" on; WeR1 does have paths which the reader can
choose, but they all lead back to the original path which in
turn leads to the end of the work. I set up the
narrative structure of these works in this manner precisely
to allow readers to introduce themselves to the idea of
linking as a poetic device, of fragmented text eventually
becoming "whole," and of a theme being presented through
multiple voices and points of view. I am in now way
suggesting that either Fly or WeR1 alleviates
all of the "problems" I have discussed here, or that these
problems necessarily need to be "solved." I am,
however, suggesting that these issues remain a matter of
discussion, and that hypertext authors, as well as those who
design the software used to construct these works, keep them
in mind as they continue forging ahead in this new literary
genre.
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