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abstract - Download (doc, 140KB) 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - References Competing Interpretations and Loose Ends Moulthrop's digital oeuvre
is wide ranging. He first started with an adaptation of
Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths"
(which included a mass of original text in addition to
Borges' source story) using software he had programmed
himself for this purpose. He later transferred the text into
the brand new Story Space hypertext environment - the
work and its reception by a group of students is described
in Moulthrop's influential essay "Reading from the Map:
Metonymy and Metaphor and the Fiction of Forking Paths"
(Moulthrop1991). Victory Garden was published in
1991. After that he has done mainly Web-based works,
including The Colour of Television (1996; with Sean
Cohen), Hegirascope (1995/1997), and Reagan
Library (1999). Hegirascope effectively uses push
technology to produce a stream of narrative fragments
starting with the highly charged "What if the word would not
be still?" header. Reagan Library uses Quick Time VR
plug-in to add a three-dimensional panorama illustration to
the hypertext - the work can be navigated both through the
panorama or through the text links. Reagan Library
also uses random operators in selecting the text materials -
repeated visits to particular locations add information to
them, thus "reducing noise" and giving more coherent picture
of the text. One obvious difference
between Victory Garden and Afternoon or
Patchwork Girl is size: Victory Garden
includes 993 lexias, and more than 2804 links connecting
them (compared to 539 lexias in Afternoon with 951
links, and 323 lexias in Patchwork Girl with 462
links) . In Victory Garden there are also several
original features like a menu of preordered paths, and a map
of the "Victory Garden" - this map differs fundamentally
from the cognitive maps representing the hypertextual
structure employed in Patchwork Girl (and in the PC version
of Afternoon) (More about these maps and their differences,
see my PhD thesis, Chapter 5 "Visual Structuring of
Hyperfiction Narratives",
http://www.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis) Victory Garden
(Macintosh version) employs the most simple variant of
reader interfaces Story Space offers. The navigating
mainly happens through a toolbar with five functions: the
backtrack button (takes you back to the previously read
lexia), the link list button (opens a window listing all the
links leaving from the current lexia, each link is named and
the title of destination lexia is told), the yes/no button
(can be used to answer possible questions in the text), the
print button (makes a hardcopy of the lexia), and the
type-in field. Usually each lexia has a default link, that
is, simply by pressing the return key the reader can follow
a path provided by the author. Pressing the control keys
shows the anchor words / phrases by framing them (double
clicking these words activates links which may differ from
the default link). In short, the reader may move in the text
by pressing the return key after reading each lexia, double
clicking anchor words, opening the link list and selecting a
link from the list, by typing a word in the type-in box (an
alternative to double clicking anchor words), or,
back-tracking her way. From the title page on, the
reader has several options for going forward. She can go to
the map and choose one of the lexias presented there as her
starting point. She can also go to the page listing "Paths
to Explore", thirteen preordered pathways through the text
each concentrating on different aspects of the narrative
materials (some of them loosely organised around various
characters appearing in the text). From the "Paths to
Explore" there is a default link - which is easily left
unnoticed - leading to a lexia listing "Paths to Deplore",
offering seven more preordered paths (it should be noted
that even when choosing one of these paths, the reader may
always choose not to follow the default links and select an
alternative narrative strain). There is still the possibilty
of going to a lexia where you can build up a sentence by
repeatedly choosing a word from two alternatives offered.
This way several different sentences can be constructed,
each leading to different starting points (some of the
sentences coinciding with the starting of "Paths to Explore"
& "Paths to Deplore"). Once having started reading
the reader confronts fragments of narratives (usually
several clearly successive lexias developing a certain story
strand), letters, tv-report transcripts, citations from
books fictional and theoretical, song lyrics and other
various materials. Most of the materials are related to the
Gulf War in 1991 - either things happening in the Gulf area,
or, meanwhile in the home front. The Gulf War figures
heavily in all the story lines, if not concretely
influencing characters' lives, then at least as a background
force for larger changes in society affecting indirectly
(but not a bit more weakly) their lives. There are direct citations
from Jorge Luis Borges' short stories "Garden of Forking
Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", as well as
more or less implicit allusions to them. There are also
mentions to or citations from such novels as Don
Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegan's
Wake ("riverRerun"!). The theoretical materials include
citations from Donna Haraway, Neil Postman, Arthur C.
Kroker, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce
etc. Victory Garden, like
Afternoon, is dominated by plain alphanumeric text.
The map in the beginning is one obvious exception; there are
also a few lexias with crude graphics (see picture), the
signatures in letters are reproduced in handwriting, and
there is even one crossword-cum-concrete poetry style lexia.
The letters differ from other text by different font
type. Main story-lines
and characters The main characters in
Victory Garden are people from a University town
Tara, most of them teachers or students in the University.
Thea Agnew is a professor of rhetorics (or something like
that), sisters Veronica and Emily Runbird are her pupils,
although Emily is currently in military service in the Gulf
War, handling mail in the head quarters. Thea is also the
head of a Curriculum Revision Committee (for studies in
Western Culture). An eccentric scholar Boris Urquhart is
supposedly an expert in Virtual Reality technologies,
employed in a top secret project, and also in the Curriculum
Revision Committee. Harley Morgan is a television journalist
who has refused to go to the Gulf Area, and is spending his
"stress-leave" in Tara with his girl friend Veronica Runbird
(several years older than Veronica, he has earlier had an
affair with Thea, too). Emily Runbird, on the other hand,
has an affair with Boris Urquhart, but his former boy friend
Victor Gardner (!) is still desperately in love with her.
Leroy is Thea's teenage son, who has left his school to make
his "On the Road" tour a la Jack Kerouac. Gerard Madden is
an F.B.I. agent on a minor job in Tara, and is an old
acquitance of Harley. Miles MacArthur, Boris' colleague,
provost Tate, and Thea's adversary in the Committee,
professor Heidel, as well as Victor's student friend Jude
Busch all have their parts in the stories
too. There are several scenes
which occur in most of the preordered paths, identically or
with little variation. The order in which these scenes are
related differs quite a lot from one path to another, but
mostly they can be arranged in a chronological order. As
Jill Walker has finely showed in her paper "Piecing together
and Tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon",
Gérard Genette's narratological concepts dealing with
the temporal order of narratives can be employed with
hypertext narratives too - even though the narration in
Victory Garden is anachronical (events are narrated
in a different order from which they happened), and even
though there are differences in this anachronical order in
different paths, there are still indexes or markers enough
to help the reader put them in a particular order (Walker
1999; Genette 1980). That is, we really are dealing with
anachronical, not achronical narration (where no definite
order for events can be found). This does not hold for the
whole of Victory Garden, to be exact, but we can take
it as a starting point. There is a sequence in which
Thea, Veronica, Harley, and Miles are swimming in the
Whitman Creek natural park area, when they learn that the
area has been sold to a company planning to build a golf
course up stream, effectively ruining the whole creek.
Immediately after hearing about these plans, their swimming
is further disturbed by a protest against the plans, ending
with a scene where one of the protesters declares himself to
be Uqbari the Prophet, condemns the plans to ruin the creek,
and finally, symbolically, urinates into the creek in front
of a tv-crew in a helicopter. Later the same evening, there
is a big costume party hosted by provost Tate. After quite a
carnevalesque party scene the provost invites Thea, Harley,
and Veronica to his office to discuss Boris, wondering if he
is in his mind (after the Uqbari the Prophet
scandal). One of the key scenes is
another party, this time a much smaller one, in Thea's
house, which is disturbed by another appearance of Uqbari -
this time he comes up in an army style camouflage outfit,
and with a gun which he fires a couple of times in Thea's
back yard and flees. Then Urquhart goes to the garage, meets
agent Madden there, who asks him a few questions about the
security of the University computer network, also inquiring
Urquhart's opinion of Jude Busch, possibly in liaison to
assumed security violations. Urquhart leaves in Harley's
car, and when he sees Madden tailing him, he tries to get
rid of him, nearly crashing with a truck, and finally ending
up at the student bar Just Say No Cafe where he meets
Harley, takes him along and continues running. Finally, they
are stopped by the police, who, in a very Rodney King
affairesque scene, start beating Harley (who is black). But
then the police see Harley's press id, realising he is a CNN
reporter - agent Madden rushes to the scene at the same
time, and Urquhart uses the occassion to flee once again. He
runs to the old observatory, where he was going all along,
to meet provost Tate who works there. From that point on the
story branches to several variations which I shall be
dealing in more detail below. There is also a scene
happening in Saudi Arabia, describing Emily's experiences
during the first air raid after the War has finally started.
It includes Emily's and her sergeant's discussion about
Emily's loves, as well as various stories told by other G.
I.s. The overall lenght of this episode differs from one
path to another. One of the paths ends in a black screen
with no default links suggesting that Emily and her group
are victims of an Iraqi missile. There are several such quite
clear-cut sequences like these, one describing a long and
serious discussion between Thea and her son Leroy; a
telephone discussion between Thea and Heidel, where the
latter informs Thea that he has used fraud means to force
Thea to leave her position as the Commision Head;
description of the first war evening when Thea and Veronica
are watching the television coverage not quite believing the
war has really broke out, when their evening is disturbed by
Omega-fraternity boys who have come to protest outside
"leftist radical" Thea Agnew's house; an intimate scene
between Jude and Victor where Jude acts up as Emily
etc. The sequences listed above
are not told in succession like this - they are intertwined
with each other so that the reader can follow one scene for
some lexia's length, then the focus shifts to another scene,
then possibly to a third one, before returning to the first
one. This is pretty much like any old modern fiction, where
several story lines are intertwined, but usually easy enough
to follow. Even though the different
paths give different weight to different scenes and
characters, most of them include at least something of all
the central scenes. There are exceptions though: in the
"NORMAN - The Path of Glory", for example, Victor (and
scenes related to him) is not mentioned at all. After the
first readings of Victory Garden one can easily
accept Robert Coover's description of it as quite a typical
academic novel, after all. But there is much more to it
actually.
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