J. Yellowlees Dougles,
Director of the William and Grace Dial Center for Written
and Oral Communication and Assistant Professor of English at
the University of Florida, has been researching and writing
on social construction of digital technologies and on
hypertext focusing on the the applicability of literary
theory, narratology and aesthetics to hypertext
environments. In her essay "How do I stop this thing" (1994)
she discusses the effect of hypertext's displacement of
closure on the act of reading with special regard to Michael
Joyce's "Afternoon".
Her recent book "End of
Books or Books without End" (2000) - "A classic of hypertext
theory and criticism" (Jay David Bolter) - examines how
interactive fiction works, takes a careful look at the state
of hypertext criticism today, and suggests how the future
development of interactive narratives relate to the New
Realism. (see 
extended
abstract, order from
Eastgate
Systems). Roberto
Simanowski talked with her about satisfactions and
limitations of hypertext, about its three paradoxes, and
about her hyperfiction "I Have Said Nothing".
dd:
Jane, you are the director of the "Center for Written and
Oral Communication" at the University of Florida and you are
teaching a course "Advanced Expository Writing", where
students learn what makes writing clear and concise and what
makes it confusing. You also have published essays about
writing and reading hypertext where the titles refer to
confusion, such as "Is There a Reader in this Labyrinth?"
(1992) or "How Do I Stop This Thing? Closure and
Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives" (1994). How do
traditional and electronic writing fit together?
YD: The main precepts
that give traditional forms of writing their power and
eloquence essentially hold true for electronic writing. The
basis of both, after all, is still the language, and English
has some interesting and unique pratfalls because it's a
hybrid of a Germanic language with a French/Latinate
overlay, so you'd naturally address details like that
regardless of the environment you're working in. And you
really should know intimately how the written word works in
a print environment to understand ways of playing
advantageously off features of electronic environments. It's
a bit like needing to understand speech and the differences
between speech and writing to write well. In some ways,
electronic writing can have aims antithetical to print, but
you really need to understand both environments to address
those instances.
dd:
In your well-known essay "How Do I Stop This Thing?" you
discuss that hypertext cheats the reader out of a happy
ending. This does not refer to the Hollywood-style happy
ending, but the happiness which comes from any ending as a
confirmation or negation of our assumptions, as a release of
tension. In hypertext there is sometimes no definite end.
You quote the famous node "Work in progress" from Michael
Joyce's hyperfiction "Afternoon": "Closure is, as in any
fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made
manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it
cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of
reading it ends." In the light of this, the end of a
hyperfiction is not the result of closure and release but of
exhaustion. Your new book alludes to the closing issue in
the title: "The End of Books? Or Books Without End? Reading
Hypertext Narratives." How shall we read hypertext
narratives? How can we enjoy them?
YD: Since computers
are above all plastic, I'm reminded of Joyce's "There is no
simple way to say this," line in Afternoon. Sometimes
hypertext means physical closure--but not closure itself--is
suspended indefinitely; sometimes, closure is strictly
reader-determined and, sometimes, it's author-determined;
and some narratives have a surfeit of closure. In Shannon
Gilligan's "Virtual Murder" series of interactive CD-ROMs,
readers are treated to not one ending to the traditional
detective story but three, mutually exclusive, satisfying
endings.
With hypertext, even that
most obsolescent of literary genres, the mystery, has a much
longer shelf-life than it does in print. When you find out
"whodunit" in a print mystery, you seldom want to pick up
the book and revisit its plot, since the ending removes the
need to reread it and few mystery stories are sufficiently
well written or populated with enough memorable characters
to make us want to reread them. But an interactive mystery's
possibilities and outcomes aren't exhausted after you
"solve" the murder for the first time: the next two times
you "solve" the case will be completely different and will
unfold differently.
So, like print, hypertext
isn't a monolithic thing: in print fiction, you have Stephen
King and you have James Joyce--two dramatically different
writers with entirely different audiences of readers seeking
totally different kinds of experiences from reading their
work. And with hypertext, you have writers like Michael
Joyce who eschew conventional closure and neatly bound
resolutions and writers like Jordan Mechner with a few dozen
resolutions to a narrative that seems half a thirties film
noir and half a Rebecca West novel. One of the most
satisfying resolutions to Mechner's Last Express occurs
half-way on the main character's journey to Istanbul: he
gets off the train in Vienna with a cache of money and
escapes a score of trials that had been lying in wait. Some
days, you want to take the money and take a breather from
the adventure mode. Some days, you want to tackle things
using the boldest and most heroic means possible.
Hypertext has the virtue of
being able to give us all the satisfactions that print gives
us with very few of its limitations. But, like any medium,
hypertext has its limitations: you can't interact with a
text on zombie, auto-pilot mode--this isn't something you
want to tackle after you've been thoroughly trounced in the
office. And interactive texts take a hell of a lot longer to
enjoy, work with, explore, and resolve than convention texts
do. Sometimes, you want to zone out, watch TV, and think as
little as possible. Sometimes, you'd rather read than watch
television; sometimes, you'd far rather see a film than read
a novel; sometimes, you want to read something interactive.
dd:
That means, hyperfiction, book and television can peacefully
coexist?
We're talking about niches
here--the theatre is still going strong after a couple of
millennia, as well as the onslaughts of novel-reading,
Hollywood, and television, so all this fuss about hypertext
replacing print is idiotic. The only examples we currently
have of killer technologies--those that wiped out the forms
that preceded them--are the automobile and electric light.
Everything else is about proliferating niches. As I said in
an essay on reading and hypertext, we ought to be thinking
in terms of and/and/and, NOT either/or.
dd:
One of your essays is entitled "The Three Paradoxes of
Hypertext: How Theories of Textuality Shape Interface
Design" (1996). What are the other two paradoxes?
YD: The three
paradoxes that seemed to be thrown up by different writers
on hypertext were:
- Is hypertext "born" or
"made"?
Is the primary capacity of hypertext a singular thing,
unchanged across environments and cultures, with certain
fundamental properties that distinguish the technology
and transcend the interests and intents of its users? Or
is hypertext an evolving technology that exists in a
variety of forms that are shaped by its designers, users,
and researchers who adapt its capabilities to suit their
disparate needs?
- Can technical capacity
determine or limit utility?
Is hypertext a new tool that comes to us free of any
already existing conventions? Or is hypertext a
relatively new tool with a built-in agenda that limits
the types of activities it can support?
- Does hypertext make
readers into sovereigns or slaves?
Does hypertext provide its readers with far greater
autonomy in their use of words than readers currently
enjoy with print? Or does hypertext provide writers with
tools for greater control over the way in which readers
use their texts than authors currently enjoy in
print?
*
dd:
You not only research electronic narratives, but you also
have written a hyperfiction yourself. This piece has the
symbolic title "I Have Said Nothing". It describes a car
accident and tries to come to terms with death and the loss
of a very close person. In one node ("You sit, you think")
you write: "You sit and think for a while, maybe forty-five
minutes solid, about the ugliness of your primary urge-which
is to write all of this down." Another node ("What?") says:
"For a long time afterwards, whenever you two don't quite
meet up on the phone, he can't seem to get the narrative
order of events quite right. He keeps shuffling it around,
until you realize neither of you know what it was anymore."
Finally, a third node recalls St. Augustine: "if I have
spoken, I have not said what I wished to say." Is the chosen
hypertext structure the most appropriate to do the doubtful,
to describe the incomprehensible?
YD: I'd tried writing
this story for a long time--ten years--and it simply didn't
work as a print story. I wanted to talk about the way you
can't really say anything that touches on death, and I
wanted to explore all the scenarios that could emerge from
one character, Luke, struggling with his girlfriend's death,
as well as all the scenarios that might occur at the moment
when his girlfriend dies. It never worked as a print story:
it's too perverse for print, using thousands of words to
arrive at the conclusion that you can't say anything about
death and, moreover, that everything you've just said is not
only contingent on all sorts of circumstances but is also
deeply suspect, perhaps null.
Then someone I knew asked if
I would write a piece of interactive fiction for a project
she was putting together, and I did a light, humorous piece
that worked well. I felt a bit guilty that writing it had
been so easy and that the interactive story was going to
work really well in terms of the spec for the project, so I
sat down to grapple with this darker piece of fiction that
had been evading me for over a decade. And I stopped
struggling against what novelist Robert Coover has called
"the line" of print. Hypertext just seemed like the most
congenial environment for it, since the story had a whole
raft of endings that were fairly definitive: three
characters die in endings. And it also had endings that
weren't endings, more like resting places. And endings that
undid other endings. It was a story I could never have told
in print.
*
dd:
In the same hyperfiction, the node "Random sweepings"
displays a quote of Heraclitus: "The fairest order in the
world is a heap of random sweepings." That's a strong claim
which seems to be confirmed by your essay "Abandoning the
Either/Or for the And/And/And: Hypertext and the Art of
Argumentative Writing" (1996). To what extent is it true? Is
hypertext the appropriate form of thinking and ordering the
world?
YD: The Heraclitus
quote seemed appropriate to the narrator's trying to
understand the deaths in "I Have Said Nothing," but I
wouldn't say that necessarily about argumentation generally.
I'm a relativist, however, so I find print frustrating
because print evolved during an era when the Church used the
written word to enlarge and maintain its power in the West.
So one way of looking at the singularity of print, its
linearity and fixity, is as a response to just how far-flung
the Church's territory was during the medieval era. Print
evolved as a means of extending the range of one's voice,
opinions, and control beyond the range of either voice or
physical control. You WANT fixity and linearity from a
medium that evolved to do that task.
But we live in a far more
complex world than the one either Plato or Gutenberg
inhabited. Thomas Kuhn's work on dominant paradigms in
science, for example, makes perfect sense if you're
describing the shift from Newtonian physics to quantum
physics or from the Ptolemic view of astronomy to the
Copernican view or from the Lamarckian view of geology and
evolution to the Darwinian. But Kuhn's theory doesn't
satisfactorily account for shifts in biology or medicine.
The accuracy and utility of
most knowledge depends an awful lot on where you happen to
be standing when you ask questions. And you can't very
successfully buck a thousand years of convention that
governed the written word in representing relativism in
print--editors and other readers will just think you're
dicing with bad rhetoric. Or you end up writing like an
objectivist to come up with something that sounds like a
conclusion, which every piece of print is supposed to have.
So you might end up like sociologist Steve Woolgar, a very
inventive reflexive relativist, by saying that the work
you're critiquing is insufficiently relativistic.
But you have to face the
irony that your ultimate position, in saying that, has just
become objectivist. And I find it ironic that, with Western
culture really tilting toward relativism, we're still stuck
with the ultimate objectivist medium, print. David Kolb,
who's written a terrific hypertext work, "Socrates in the
Labyrinth" has some really eye-opening insights about what
hypertext has to offer argument and philosophy alike.
dd:
What is your next research project?
YD: I'm working on a
book about the way that so much thinking about technology in
the humanities and education assumes that technology's
effects are totally determined by technical
capacity--thinking that's descending from writings by people
like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong who assume that
technologies have timeless, changeless, immutable features
that dictate how it can be used.
That's a really simple,
mechanical model of causation that just isn't borne out by
the history of how other technologies have developed--or
even how orality and literacy function in societies that
aren't part of the Western mainstream. The biggest irony I
note in "Strange Bedfellows: Luddites, Technophiles, and the
Myth of Endless Progress" is that the technophiles and the
rabid Luddites share the same theories about how
technologies supposedly work--and those theories are pretty
narrowly informed and may ultimately prove dangerous if they
continue to inform how and why we use technology in
education and our daily lives.
dd: I
look forward to learn more about this objection to the
media-is-the-message position. For now thank you very much
for the interview.
your
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