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Operations of writing
Interview with Stuart Moulthrop
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Operations of writing Interview with Stuart Moulthrop
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SM: Victory
Garden concerns various fronts of the 1990-91 Persian
Gulf War, but chiefly those located within the U.S.,
particularly a certain imaginary sunbelt state called Tara.
Hypertext seemed the right choice--indeed the only
choice--to capture the bewildering complexity of such a
massively convoluted, hyper-mediated experience. Or to put
it another way: I was reeling my way through 1990 trying to
make some sense of the previous decade, when suddenly George
Bush pere declared war, first on Iraq, then somewhat
incongruously, on me. I refer to the cultural war that
accompanied the bombing and shooting... the other war of the
other Gulf that is still smoldering in contemporary America.
Victory Garden was my own sort of declaration, not of
war or (I hope) surrender, but of principles. dd:
When Robert Coover introduced Victory Garden on
the front page of New York Times Book Review (29. 8.
1993, Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer) to
readers who mostly are not used to click and decide the
proceeding of a story, he was rhetorically asking: "what's
so great about "interactivity" anyway? What's wrong with
surrendering deferentially to the implacable linear flow of
an author's creative thought, her own particular
page-by-page artistic and narrative decisions?" Let's pick
up the question. What's so great about the one, what's wrong
with the other? SM: I have nothing
against sequentiality, or indeed against traditional forms
of literature. Grateful as I am for that terrific review, I
regret the way it has tended to stick some of us into a
binary (or bipolar) opposition. As if there is some kind of
exclusive choice to be made between hypertext and the novel.
As if you could write literary hypertext without the novel,
or cinema, or comics, or collage, or oral epic, or any of a
dozen elder genres; or--and this point really bothers me--as
if hypertext would make all those things go away. Not
so. Hypertext makes a difference, and I think it is a
difference most Americans have been slow to understand. It
does not obliterate differences or nullify the art of the
line. I was very conscious of this fact all through the
writing of Victory Garden. dd:
In the same essay Coover made the word or into his
keyword: One can read the story this way or that way, and
this actually means first of all, one can navigate it this
way or that way. Is or the deeper meaning of
hypertext, corresponding to the or in postmodern
philosophy and nowadays point of view and life? SM: Or... not. I
affiliate with the school of "and" instead of "or," even
though the masters of that college (folks like the poet Jim
Rosenberg) often despair of my progress. Owing somewhat to
the nature of its medium (node/link hypertext) and more to
the way I used it (eschewing the structure-mapping
facilities in Storyspace), Victory Garden can easily
be taken as an exercise in displacement, as on one level it
surely is. This allows readers like the American critic
Laura Palmer to accuse me of simple randomness, a basic
refusal of form. Often we get the readers we deserve, rather
than the ones we invent. The reader of my dreams picks up
the challenge of articulation and intuitively supplies the
landscape that lies between any two interwoven points. As
I've said on several occasions, node/link is an impoverished
model: we need to think at least of node, link, and
space, the third term being where intuition of the
unseen or unexpressed comes into the picture, in at least a
virtual sense. But as some readers will always say: in
your dreams, old man. dd:
In Victory Garden you quote from Borges' story "The
Garden of Forking Paths": "In all fictional works, each time
a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses
one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen,
he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He creates, in
this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves
also proliferate and fork." … Miles MacArthur, a
figure of Victory Garden, then discusses the point of
Borges' story with his students: "Try for a minute to see
beyond necessity, beyond determinism. Who says there's only
one way? Who says it only happens once? If we use our
imaginations we can learn to see the world differently, and
with that vision we can create systems that aren't
constrained to singularity. Multiple values, multiple
horizons. That's what the shift to virtuality is all about -
creating new worlds that make room for difference. Why,
someday we might even be able to bend time
itself......" Whereas
Hypertext sometime is considered to mirror life because it
calls the reader to make decisions, this passage makes clear
that to the contrary Hypertext is all but life. Decisions in
life are rather irreversible, one can not simply go back,
return to try another way this time. With Hypertext you can
check out each alternative, your decision is no real
decision. Hypertext thus bends time. To some extent it's
blasphemy, considered that time is property of God, and is
not to be bent by human. This holds, one could add, as much
as the imperative that the genetic code is not to be
manipulated by human beings. Does Hypertext follows a
general tendency of the time? SM: Again, I
want to answer with "and," not "or". If humans did not wish
to bend time we would not have stories; and if the radical
inconsistency of hypertext narrative offends God, I think it
does so by intensifying an effect already present in any
non-Providential narrative; as Walter Benjamin famously
observed, what is a story but a way to run past the ending
which (to a secular humanist anyway) seems all too absolute
and unknowable for each of us? dd:
Lets move to the ‘absolut’ author. When it comes
to hyper-literature, one always hears theorists point out
the high level of reader control. The link to this view is
the link of Hypertext, i.e. that to choose is in the hand of
the reader. The link may fail as proof, because it is placed
by the author, who at least determines the encountered
alternatives. Nevertheless, the author gives up control
about reading, since she can't predict which alternative
finally will be chosen. This produces a conflict between two
principles of order, namely the development of dramatic
tension as construed by the author, on the one hand, and the
freedom of choice enjoyed (or suffered?) by the reader, on
the other hand. How do you experience this issue as author
and (academic) reader of Hypertext ? Is randomness a
valuable quality of digital aesthetics? Do we need new
conventions for traditional properties like plot and
character in Hypertext? And what role the author is likely
to play in the future? SM: These are very
hard questions that seem to require a book-length response,
for instance Hamlet on the Holodeck (Janet Murray) or
The End of Books or Books Without End (J.Y.
Douglas)--books with very different opinions on the question
of randomness. Murray is interested in "immersive" media
like the aptly named holodeck of Star Trek fantasy,
inventions which would be tightly bound to determinate
structures, while Douglas develops a more complex scheme in
which browsing and searching, random play and goal-driven
pursuit, alternate to produce narrative pleasure. Both agree that the role of
the author in multidimensional fictions must change
radically from what it has been in traditional narrative,
and when they say that, I always feel myself somewhat in the
cross-hairs. Despite their theoretical differences, I think
both Douglas and Murray would agree that the lone-wolf
post-Romantic AUTHOR is destined to be replaced by the
DESIGNER, a creator of conditions who must be more of an
ensemble (if not a team) player even if s/he works alone,
because of the role of the reader/player in the active
reception of the work. So yes, we do need fresh ways to
understand the constituents of fiction: character as
function, plot as possibility, author as architect. Of
course, these developments have been thoroughly foreseen in
all the narrative genres for at least the last century. I
have a favorite soundbite of Michael Joyce intoning, "This
is not new," which I play in my head whenever these ideas
come to mind. dd:
In your hyperfiction SM: The guitarist for
R.E.M. once described the core of their hit song,
Stand, as "a big, dumb riff." Ditto for
Hegirascope, if I may mix the famous with the
obscure. In the spring of 1995, I was browsing through the
new design features introduced in Netscape Navigator 1.1 and
it struck me that automatic page refresh, or "client
pull"--the HTTP equivalent of a "big, dumb riff"--would be
great fun to play with. A week or so later, a couple of Gulf
War vets blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, and
this got my attention in a different way, as had Mr.
Gingrich's infamous Contract and the right-wing insurgency
of 1994. Add the ongoing irruption of the World Wide Web as
a cultural phenomenon, and you have the ingredients of
Hegirascope. I've had two wonderful
responses to this text. One came from Michael Joyce, who the
first time he saw it said, "it's the hypertext that reads
itself." The other is in Espen Aarseth's Cybertext,
where he notes with characteristic intelligence that
Hegirascope parodies the World Wide Web. I've always
been concerned with the way many people look at the Web
(even now) and see Greater Television. While much of what I
was doing in "Hegirascope" was indeed just playing, there
was at least a shadow of serious purpose behind it. If you
realize that there's at least one very scary story unfolding
in the midst of all that channel-surfing, this claim may
seem a bit more plausible. dd:
Node 047 starts with the words "This is the dream of
remote control. In this dream you can press a button
whenever you like and totally reconceive the world around
you. Click, you are two hundred feet tall looking down on
sleeping suburbia [ …]" Having read
approximately to this line, the node disappears, turns into
a black screen with a single word in the middle - 'click'.
This seems to be the practice of remote control and of
course, this is a false link. Nothing happens. One has to go
backwards in order to finish reading the dream. One must
hurry in doing this, since the screen changes again and
again. So not only does the reader not get the promised
feeling of remote controls, but rather he feels as though he
himself is being controlled remotely. The irony of
the promise of remote control lies totally in the linkage.
The link is a deconstruction of the text. However, there is
even more. There is a deconstruction of the deconstruction.
Browsing the black screen, the reader will encounter many
hidden links, twice as many as are provided on regular
nodes. The occurrence of these links modifies the meaning
once more by saying: you will not find remote control if you
just click on where it is promised, you have to be
skeptical, you have to look around. I have always referred
to this node as a good example of how the setting up of a
link conveys a message which complements, or more exactly,
modifies the meaning of the letters. Do you
agree? SM: In our teaching
practice, my partner Nancy Kaplan and I like to refer to the
text that signals a hypertext link as a "cue." We explain
this in terms of a direct analogy with theatre: a stage cue
means one thing to the audience and another to the fellow
playing Polonius, waiting in the wings to make his entrance.
This is a trivial reduction of your very elegant point about
the deconstruction of deconstruction, but it bears out your
observation. Hypertext isn't just a disordered or deficient
deployment of type (even though in Hegirascope I very
deliberately ruled out images). It brings a new way of
understanding the operations of writing. dd:
In contrast to Hegirascope your more recent
work SM: As Jay Bolter
observed 10 years ago, digital technologies like bitmapped
displays remind us that the line between word and image has
always been arbitrary. On the bitmapped screen (indeed on
any screen), the word is an image. I follow Jay in refusing
to distinguish word and image in any absolute way. It may
have been important, once upon a time, for Eastgate writers
to concentrate on type to the exclusion of graphics--though
I do want to point out that there are a number of graphics
in Victory Garden, including a set of maps. We needed
to claim some attention for what Mark Bernstein still calls
"serious hypertext," in distinction to games and other
entertainments. As I've confessed more recently, this move
now seems somewhat petulant and narrow-minded. As games like
Myst, Riven, or The Sims demonstrate,
the category of serious play is far from empty--and indeed
this was true even back in the 1980s, when interactive
fictions like Mindwheel and A Mind Forever
Voyaging, and Portal were in circulation. (Alas,
they fell out of circulation pretty quickly, and it was
partly our desire to avoid that fate that motivated our
timidity toward images.) My thinking about word and
image has advanced a great deal since 1994, when I came to
my present academic home at the University of Baltimore,
where I work in a program that requires students to become
proficient both as writers and as visual designers.
Team-teaching with a typographer and a master graphic
designer has helped me shed my earlier, print-dominated
misconceptions about text. (And to be sure, the massive dose
of poststructuralism I received in graduate school also
plays a part.) Turning from diskette to Web distribution and
gearing up to teach fledgling Web designers has confirmed my
belief that writing is now inextricably linked to
design--though that term means considerably more for the Web
than it does for print. dd:
Let's talk about the "literary field" of Internet. The
author's freedom to publish on the web, bypassing the
constraints of the traditional book market, sometimes turns
out to be the burden on readers. There are tons of mediocre
writing. You once suggested establishing "reviewing
agencies" to evaluate self-published work. (Pushing Back:
Living and Writing in Broken Space, S. 659) This charges
literary theory with the duty of providing criteria by which
to judge. And as we know now this theory cannot only be
focused on words even if they appear nonlinear. Images,
sound, video, animation, and all the software beneath it are
to be taken into account. Do you see any good attempts to go
this way? Could you recommend some critics or reviews the
expected "reviewing agencies" should learn from? SM: We're still a
long way from even a first cut at a practical criticism of
"interactive" or (as I prefer) ergodic fiction, but
since I've just used Espen Aarseth's term let me nominate
him for any virtual academy to which the task of creating
such a criticism might fall. Aarseth's book
(Cybertext) provides a very useful taxonomic and
descriptive base for understanding narrative in a
multi-media context. I think it's considerably more catholic
in its approach than Murray's Holodeck (which is
nonetheless an important book). Aarseth makes connections to
games, films, and earlier experimental literary traditions
which I've found very useful. I'd also like to mention the
work of the American comics creator Scott McCloud
(Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics)
which help considerably in approaching problems of mediation
and sequence. All that said, though, we do
not yet have a community of critical response for ergodic
work to match what exists for film, theater, or print
literature; and there must be a community before we can have
any sense of common standards. This is why I think literary
awards for hypertext and multimedia fiction make good sense
right now. Having taken part in the judging for one of these
competitions--and more important, having finished out of
contention for another--it's clear to me that only by trying
to articulate publically our notions of excellence in new
media can we move toward the sort of useful, sustained
dialogue that constitutes good criticism. The German
Pegasus award and the British dd:
Hypertext is often seen as fulfillment of deconstruction.
You yourself point out, that hypertext "is already present
as a totality, but which invites the reader not to ratify
its wholeness, but to deconstruct it." Three years later one
of your articles is entitled Rhizome and Resistance.
However, you are skeptical about the dream of a new culture,
as you point out three more years later, concerning the
development of the Web: "If certain people have their way,
tomorrow's links will be as numerous and important as
today's 'postcards and telegrams' – that is, they will
dwindle into obscurity." You predict "television, albeit in
new boxes". What do you think three years later? SM: Actually, as I
remember it, I've been pretty skeptical all the way along.
Ten years ago this winter, I started working on an essay
called "You Say You Want a Revolution," which takes up
McLuhan's semi-mystical "laws of media," the last of which
asks what a technology becomes at the point of "reversal,"
when it is carried up to and beyond its logical limits. For
some reason, I wanted to know in 1990 what hypertext would
look like at reversal. Have we reached that point now?
Maybe. Certainly the merger of America Online with Time
Warner could portend a gigantic attempt to transform the
Internet into a conventional, entirely passive mass
medium--television in one inescapable box. That is one kind
of "reversal," though probably not the one McLuhan had in
mind. Yet the same year that brought us the AOL/TW merger
and the wholesale meltdown of the so-called new economy also
produced the Napster phenomenon and its truly
revolutionary variant, Gnutella. It's easy to feel
"otherminded," as Joyce says, about these developments. On
the one hand, Napster has shacked up with Bertelsmann
AG; and yet Gnutella lives, and it will be very, very
interesting to see how the intellectual property barons
attempt to deal with a genuinely headless, peer-to-peer
circulation system. If the one big box of television ends up
wired to a headless network, my earlier concerns diminish...
or rather, they shift in other directions. I'm tempted to
describe our moment as a phase transition from mass culture
to culture at critical mass: a state in which the exchange
of energy and information has accelerated to such a degree
that major and explosive transformations may
ensue. Such an outlook may not
appear hopeful. Just as ergodic fiction challenges literary
people to articulate and defend their common notions of
value, so the reversal of the mass media might force us to
reconstruct civil society--hardly an easy task to
contemplate, but one that seems incumbent upon my country
this week, as we try to figure out how we managed not to
elect a president, and what our electoral dysfunction says
about the state of our society. Whatever happens, I think
the period of experimentation and rapid change in media that
began at the end of the 1970s is likely to continue. So at
the very least, we won't be bored. dd:
Much enough. However, I wish you a president soon and thank
you for this interview. |
