The following article first appeared beginning December, 1992 in LOCUS: THE NEWSPAPER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD, which is fact a monthly magazine published by Charles Brown. Its editorial address is 34 Ridgewood Lane, Oakland, CA 94611. You may distribute the text of these articles freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: I Sing The Text Electric, Part 2: Reading Hypertexts Tom Maddox Consider a story or novel or graphic novel or poem, or, more generally, any narrative or lyrical form you can imagine, but one shows you not only text but also pictures, and it plays and sings for you--literal music, literal song--and reveals itself only gradually as you explore its byways, and perhaps will never completely show itself, will always contain some hidden passage you never took, some reader's choice you never made. In short, consider hypertext as art, as artifact. The hypertext artifact as I've just described it is not the hypertext as gateway to vast repositories of information. As I discussed in a previous column, the gateway hypertext--Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" project, for instance--can be thought of as a Borgesian "Aleph," a point giving access to all other points, an Aleph-text that allows us to read all texts. The self-contained hypertext artifact, on the other hand, can be thought of as a labyrinth, to use another metaphor. It provides no gateway to other points but draws us in to itself. It is the literary work of art in electronic, or post-print, form. Discussions of hypertext tend to take a high theoretical tone, unless the speaker is trying to sell hypertext, in which case the tone is typically evangelical as well. However, like all literary art, hypertext is written for many different audiences, at many different levels of sophistication and complexity, and so there are hypertexts devoted to play. In fact, there are fascinating hypertexts for children. One of the first that emerged, a few years ago, is The Manhole, written in Macintosh Hypercard. Like most Hypercard products, The Manhole suffers from being big, slow, and somewhat clumsy; however, it is also imaginative, charming, and constantly delightful. To read The Manhole, the reader uses the Macintosh mouse to click on features of the landscape, a manhole prominently among them, and when he or she does, objects come to life, or the reader is transported. The trips, like Alice's through the looking glass, go strange places, such as a sunken ship where Things Happen. The Macintosh, which from its beginnings featured relatively easy inclusion of graphics and sound and a point-and-click interface, has worked well for children's hypertext and children's computing in general. In fact, programs and text written for it--for instance, a drawing program called Kid Pix, another hypertext, Cosmic Osmo, and The Manhole itself--can blur the distinction between programs for children and programs for adults. Also, Hypercard, which I mildly castigate above, has the virtue of being easy to work in; even a novice at programming can create a Hypercard "stack" that is interesting to explore. An early and influential foray into children's hypertext illustrates several of these points. In 1987, when Hypercard was new, its originator, Bill Atkinson, spent an evening with a colleague, Bob Goodenough, and his wife, Amanda. As a kind of thank you note to Atkinson for their evening, Amanda taught herself enough Hypercard programming to create a little, wordless story called "Inigo Gets Out," in which a black blob of a kitten, Inigo (pronounced eye- knee-go) has a series of adventures in a sparsely- drawn drawn landscape. "Inigo Gets Out" was followed by "Inigo Takes a Bath" and four other Inigo stories, then by several stories featuring "Your Faithful Camel." The stories I have seen are characterized by an artful simplicity that I find charming, and I believe children do as well. In fact, Amanda Goodenough's work has won several awards, including a shareware award from the Boston Computer Society, and is now available from The Voyager Company (1351 Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, CA 90401, phone 310-451- 1383). Also, the two first Inigo stories are generally available as shareware on BBSs and other online systems that have good Hypercard collections. (For the uninitiated, the fact they are "shareware" means you can acquire them and read them with no obligation, but if you decide to keep them, you are obligated to pay the requested amount to the author.) Hypertext has emerged, then, as a natural medium for children's fiction. Hypertext's greatest asset is that it allows, indeed demands, magical journeys: down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, into the clothes cupboard-- away to Wonderland or Narnia, or, more generally, to all those worlds that embody some of the most precious qualities of childhood. Another mode of hypertext, but one that has just begun to emerge, is hypertext poetry. I have not run across much of it but have found particularly interesting the "hyperpoems" of William Dickey. Dickey is currently Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He was a Yale Younger Poet and has published a considerable body of conventional poetry; he was awarded the Juniper Prize by the University of Massachusetts; his Selected Poems will be published by the University of Arkansas Press next year. Dickey first became concerned with what he calls "the relationship of text to visual field" when he was an undergraduate at Reed College, where he worked with Lloyd Reynolds and the Society for Italic Handwriting, an interest he continued at the University of Iowa, where he studied typography. He later started working with Hypercard because it seemed to provide interesting possibilities for people who were not computer experts. I am familiar with four of his hyperpoems; like The Manhole and the "Inigo" stories, they are written in Hypercard. We will look at two. The Throats of Birds begins with a passage from Yeats' "Comforting Cuchulain" about a group of the dead, "convicted cowards all," who no longer have human voices but "the throats of birds." Unlike almost all hypertexts, this one offers no alternative narrative lines, but nonetheless is hypertext by virtue of its inclusion of graphic effects and music. Screen by screen, the reader moves through the text; each screen has one "button"--a hot spot that allows the reader to move to the next screen to the accompaniment of a more-or-less complex series of dissolves and fade-ins, even a few animations, and a simple melody programmed using Hypercard's sound capabilities. One screen can serve as an example. Four Buddha masks, rendered in varying shadings of black and white and different cross-hatchings float above a background of fractal-like tendrils or waves reaching over a black abyss. To the right of the Buddha masks, moderately large type (Hiroshige Bold) in white boxes reads: a bullet asks forgiveness: rites of the animals Though sometimes the transitional music reveals all too clearly the limitations of Hypercard, or the dissolves seem overelaborate, the overall effect is haunting, archaic. Dickey's other hyperpoems allow a more sophisticated set of choices. Dick & Jane & Spot & the Inspector-General, for example, quickly splits into four, sometimes five, narrative lines, chosen by clicking on the name or iconic image of the character--Dick, Jane, Spot, the Inspector- General--or an unnamed image, a shadowed outline of a strolling figure. Dick is represented by a partial image of what seems to be a Japanese man, perhaps something out of Hiroshige; Jane initially by a somewhat demure and conventional face; Spot by an unshaven figure with a cigarette in his mouth, whom I read as a hard-boiled detective; the Inspector-General by no single image. All are also associated with other images--Jane with a bare-breasted houri, Dick with a space-suited man, etcetera. The poem allows the reader to explore the character's lines without getting lost; clicking on a Buddha head takes the reader back to the primary narrative line to the accompaniment of a distinctive tom-tom sound. I find Dick & Jane the most interesting of the Dickey hyperpoems I have seen, both as a poem and as a hypertext. Its words and combinations of words and images and music are most evocative, its use of hypertext links natural and unconfusing. In general, William Dickey's hyperpoems provide a good introduction to hypertext, poetry or not, because they are readily accessible and entertaining. They will be published this coming year in a hypertext magazine called Eastgate Quarterly, which will be available from Eastgate Systems, Inc. (P. O. Box 1307, Cambridge, MA 02238, phone 800-562-1638). Eastgate Systems is where much of the action is in hypertext these days. In addition to Dickey's poems, Eastgate Quarterly will also publish works by Rob Swigart and Jim Rosenberg. According to Mark Bernstein at Eastgate, the quarterly is intended to provide a venue for shorter works, which have had difficulty finding distribution. Bernstein says that $19.95 is a reasonable price for a hypertext book but is too low a price for software distributors. More to the point, however, Eastgate has published several of the most interesting hypertext narratives, such as Michael Joyce's Afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Sarah Smith's King of Space, and also has produced and distributed Storyspace, currently the most sophisticated hypertext development program I have worked with or seen--according to Robert Coover, "currently the software of choice among fiction writers in this country." Jay David Bolter, one of the theorists of hypertext and author of Writing Space, and Michael Joyce, author of Afternoon, were primary developers of Storyspace, which Bernstein has contributed to in recent versions, so Eastgate is tightly locked into the emergence of hypertext in several ways. Mark Bernstein has picked up the phone whenever I have called Eastgate; he is Chief Scientist there--a wonderfully grandiloquent title that Bernstein says was invented by Danny Hillis, designer of the Connection Machine. Bernstein appears bemused at times as he discusses the ever-widening circles created by hypertext and his and Eastgate's role in their spread. Eastgate is not primarily a marketing enterprise, he points out, but one devoted to research: specifically, to hypertext systems and the rhetoric of hypertext. So he is as much interested in delivering papers to international conferences on hypertext--a very competitive milieu these days--as he is in hustling Storyspace or any one of Eastgate's hypertext publications. He says, "We have made money publishing hypertext. That is a bit of a surprise." Nonetheless, Bernstein takes Eastgate's commercial ventures very seriously. He says that Eastgate's experience in hypertext has shown it is possible to have a new technology taken seriously by the literary community: "We have moved from being extremely techno-fringe to being only avant-garde." He also says, "If we had greater editorial resources and there were more people writing, we could publish more of it than we do." And with regard to Storyspace itself-- which I consider an ongoing laboratory environment for hypertext--he says it is like "a new kind of paint." In order to understand why this is so, we have to consider the general nature of what is in some ways the most serious and complex mode of hypertext artifact: the extended prose narrative. The print text has a beginning and end, easy to locate and understand. We start here, we end there. Robert Coover, in an excellent article about hypertext in The New York Times Book Review (June 21, 1992) remarks: "Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line [my emphasis], that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last." Thus, "Have you read it?" has a simple meaning: have you traversed the "line"? Some print texts inflict a kind of hyper- structure on us. Coover goes on to say, "[T]here have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cort‡zar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic." Such texts may pose riddles or repetitions that drive us to hunt through what we've already read; they may assume peculiar non-linear forms (dictionaries or encyclopedias, for example); they may contradict themselves or appear to do so; they may even connect their ends to their beginnings in an attempt to defy linear form. Finnegans Wake, Dhalgren, and Gravity's Rainbow, to give three notable examples, do such things. However, the physical facts remain: there is the book, and if I turn its pages from beginning to end, reading each in its turn, I say, "I've read that; I've finished it"--never mind what I do or do not understand about what I've read. However, the hypertext artifact won't allow us such delusions. "Have you read [Michael Joyce's] Afternoon?" Bernstein asked during one of our conversations, and I just laughed. Hypertext has no necessary beginning and end, hence no unitary completeness: it will not allow us to finish--we are reading it, or we have stopped reading it; we have never read it. We have never completed "the line" because we cannot: as Coover says, "[T]rue freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." Storyspace, written for the Macintosh, allows the writer to invent an extraordinary number of lines and to connect them in weird and multifarious ways. One word or phrase or graphical element can lead to any number of others; one "space"--a kind of window in the text that is to Storyspace what the paragraph is to print text--can lead to any number of others. The reader's choices are both enabled and circumscribed as the author chooses: I might allow only one connection between spaces, I might force you to choose among many; I might not allow you to see certain spaces until you have read others (this is done through a cute piece of technique called a "guard field" that allows access to a given space only when specified criteria have been met). I can present you a two-dimensional map of all spaces and allow you to choose among them at your whim. A sample of the complexities of a specific hypertext narrative should help clarify these odd properties. Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden is a narrative that takes place during the Gulf War and ranges from the United States to Arabia. Victory Garden contains 993 "places" and 2804 "links," so it is a hypertext of considerable complexity. When the reader loads the program, the first choice he or she is required to make is whether to begin a new reading or continue a previous one--a choice with considerable significance in the reader's "construction" of the text. If the reader begins at the beginning, he or she is offered a set of instructions that include the following: You move through the text by pressing the Return key to progress from one moment to another, as you would turn the pages of a book. Click the Back arrow (on the bar below) to review the previous moment, or to move back through the story as you've seen it so far. If you read in this way the story will generally keep within certain discrete lines or pathways-- though the pathways themselves may shift or change. At most moments you can double-click certain words ("words that yield") which will carry you to a different story line. Though yield-words often create discontinuities, they also map connections. Also, from select points within the narrative, the reader can access a map of all the writing spaces, which looks rather like an idealized picture of a printed circuit. Clicking on a section of the map reveals more detail, in the form of individually-named writing spaces, any of which can itself be clicked on to take the reader to that actual space and its part of the narrative. As is often the case when one attempts to describe operations (whether with regard to using a computer or to a procedure as apparently simple as tying one's shoes), the description makes the operation sound much more difficult than it is. In fact, moving around in Victory Garden is easy. Accepting a decentered narrative is, however, not so easy. As readers, most of us have a model of a text, and that model demands that there be ultimately one story, Coover's "line," that even if we cannot immediately grasp, could be grasped by some all-seeing observer--we believe in a Newtonian cosmos of fiction, in other words, not an Einsteinian or, more radically, quantum mechanical one. Coover comments: "Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple." So, to enjoy hypertexts such as Victory Garden or Afternoon, we have to repress the desire to know "what really happened"; otherwise we get mightily irritated at our inability to resolve this question, which is to say at the author's (or text's) perversity in preventing us from doing so. We have to accept ourselves as co-constructors of the narrative, and the narrative as radically unstable. However, as with many aspects of reading fiction, one's judgments about hypertext are a matter of taste and interest. I enjoy the immersion in "contingency, indeterminacy" and so forth cited by Coover. I am also confident both as writer and reader of fiction that hypertext expands my sense of possibilities in fiction. In short, I believe that hypertext fiction both amuses and instructs and thus can take its place in the long line of literary art forms that stretches back to the birth of written language. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .