4. Hyperfiction The oldest type of digital
literature is hypertext. This technology presents chunks of
text in a multilinear way. We know the advantage of this
concept from printed dictionaries and we are mostly familiar
with its use in the digital realm from the internet, which
itself could be called a hyper-hypertext. Using hypertext
for aesthetic purposes means first of all exploiting its
alternative form of navigation. We saw what this looks like
when I was introducing "Mass Transit". In earlier hypertext,
of course, there were no images. But no matter whether there
are images or not, the main objection against hyperfiction
is exactly this alternative form of navigation. There is no
definite way to read through it. There are several links and
it is up to the reader how to assemble the story. In this
light, hyperfiction reminds us of a cook who drops the
ingredients onto our table instead of devising a
well-planned meal using his grandmother's famous recipe. We
may ask ourselves why we should even go to the restaurant in
the first place if everything is such a mess. Laura Miller,
Senior Editor of the online magazine "Salon", formulates
these concerns in the following way: "Hypertext is sometimes
said to mimic real life, with its myriad opportunities and
surprising outcomes, but I already have a life, thank you
very much, and it is hard enough putting that in order
without the chore of organizing someone else's novel."
(March 15, 1998 in Whereas Miller insinuates
that hyperfiction authors are simply too lazy to finish
their job, the authors themselves claim to free readers and
to fulfill values of postmodern philosophy by staying away
from imposing a certain order on the reader. In 1992, Robert
Coover, who as a writer knows quite well how to organize
novels, published a famous article about hyperfiction in the
New York Times Book Review with the provoking title "The End
of Books". In this article he writes with an ironic smile
that the traditional novel "is perceived by its would-be
executioners as the virulent carrier of the patriarchal,
colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and
authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us."
(New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992: 1, 11, pp.
24-25) Coover continues, this time
more seriously: "hypertext presents a radically divergent
technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality
of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the
reader from domination by the author." Despite these
honorable aims to free readers from domination, Coover is
forced to admit that the writing students in his Electronic
Writing Seminars "are notoriously conservative creatures.
They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of
what they have read. Getting them to try out alternative or
innovative forms is harder than talking them into chastity
as a life style." If the disposition towards
chastity has decreased since then, the sensibility for
hyperfiction has hardly grown at all. Eight years later,
Coover has announced that the golden age of hypertext is
over. With respect to literary hypertext we find ourselves
in the silver age that is "characterized by a retreat from
radical visions and a return to major elements of the
preceding tradition (while retaining a fascination with
surface elements of the golden age innovations)." (Literary
Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age, in: According to Coover, one
reason may be that the Web, which arrived "almost
overnight", "has not been very hospitable" in terms of
serious hyperfiction but has rather supported suuperficial,
opportunistic events. "It tends to be a noisy, restless,
opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic
realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in
which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard
or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment
or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by
ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the
Net is shapeless." Another reason could be the
fact that hyperfiction does not really provide the most
important feature of narratives: suspense. Because of its
setup, hyperfiction does not force its audience to read from
a certain beginning through to a certain end. Hyperfiction
lacks the "nextness" of traditional stories. Therefore some
people consider non-linear narratives to be like a radio
without sound. (see Steven Johnsen, February 11, 2000, in
FEED Loop to Coover's Essay) These factors make it
difficult to establish tension which could then be released
at the finish. Hyperfiction cheats us out of our happy
ending. This does not refer to the Hollywood-style happy
ending but the happiness which comes with any ending. The
end shows us whether our assumptions were right; the end
answers all raised questions. Closure is a
release.**
On the contrary, Michael
Joyce, the author of the 'granddaddy' hyperfiction
Afternoon, writes in this hyperfiction: "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."***
The end of the reading process from this perspective, which
holds true for a lot of of other hyperfictions, is not the
result of closure and release but of exhaustion. A reply to this objection
might be that reading hyperfiction is itself a sleuthing
enterprise, since we do not know where we are in the text or
where we are going. This indeed might be the case from time
to time, however, one condition would then be that all
feasible paths through the text are carefully controlled by
the author. I do not want to get deeper into the question to
what extent this is even possible. Considering the fact that
the alternatives grow exponentially, one has to doubt it.
Smaller hyperfictions, on the other hand, of the type which
are common today, may provide this opportunity. In any event, this calls for
a powerful author rather than for the death of the author,
as it was announced in the early days. Today, this necessity
is widely acknowledged by authors and theorists of
hyperfiction. To come back to our lazy cook: Hyperfiction is
not, or rather should not be, a bunch of
miscellaneous pages. All ingredients should be set up in a
well-considered way and links should not be just connecting
paragraphs that could also have been written in a row. Links
should transfer a specific meaning.
***"Afternoon,"
Node "Work in progress". In order to prevent readers from
finishing reading too early Joyce adds: "Even so, there are
likely to be more opportunities than you think there are at
first. A word which doesn't yield the first time you read a
section may take you elsewhere if you choose it when you
encounter the section again, and sometimes what seems like a
loop, like memory, heads off again in another direction
[…]" [back] |
