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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
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Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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I always get dismayed when the sweeping metonyms of precious metals are used to mark evolution – in literature, the arts, or society – as if cultural and artistic progression knows boundaries as clear as those evidenced by the elements. Golden Age/Silver Age? I prefer the circular children's game of succession and mercurial dominance: rock, paper, scissors. So to say that the Golden Age of hypertext has passed, as Robert Coover maintained in his address at Digital Arts and Culture '99 Conference, is to introduce a separation into a field so new many members of the reading public haven't even experienced it as literature yet.
Early hypertext did rely, moreso than the hypertext being constructed today, on the manipulation of segments of text, which Coover made clear in his presentation by showing examples of Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, in which the metaphor of a monster/body created from segmented parts is used to introduce a wide variety of protagonists to a primarily text-based narrative. Coover seems concerned that what he calls the "Silver Age" of hyperliterature, one in which the primacy of text is supplanted by image and sound links, dhtml and javascript effects, ignores the true beauty of pure text. A proponent of early hypertext literature who has done much to promote and legitimize the medium, Coover is a novelist, and a very talented one, and as such can't really be faulted for demonstrating a novelist's concern for text-based hyperliterature.
But it is hard to say if the choice to predominantly use text was purely creative for all early hypertext authors, or a reaction to the technology available in the mid-‘80s when Michael Joyce wrote the "granddaddy of hypertexts" – afternoon, a story. If the only metal available in a writer's crucible is gold, we shouldn't be surprised to find no silverware, no tea services or pewter candlesticks in the cupboard. But since the early ‘90s the field of personal computing has exploded, giving us much more variety in terms of the elements we can heat and blend in the digital crucible. Text commands have been replaced by point and click icons and windows. Our machines show us pictures, talk to us, play songs and movie clips. Today's hypertext authors are able to use this technology. (Jackson's more recent work, my body & A Wunderkammer utilizes Web-based html and a thoughtfully sketched visual body image map as a table of contents. Jackson's background is in the arts as well as literature, something she shares with many of the newer hypertext authors; she received an AB in studio art from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from Brown.)
To see two distinct directions in which the medium is headed, one needs to look no further than the winners of the AltX/trAce hypertext competition last year. The Unknown, by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquardt, is in many ways, a classic, text-based hypertext, a coming of age road-show turned non-linear quest where the spirit of Jack Kerouac meets Hunter S. Thompson.
In contrast, geniwate's Rice is an interactive "poem" of image and linked text, where text becomes a spring board to moving image/sounds/and texturized travelogue. The look of Rice is artistic and visual – sounds erupt at unlikely times, a floating section of transparent graph paper strives to hold us in place. The two pieces could not be more different. Each in its own way is compelling and takes us beneath the surface of mere narrative. One could say that The Unknown, in its reliance on text, harks back to Coover's Golden Age, before the "bells and whistles" controversy introduced by the more visually oriented new media practitioners (or as I like to call them the "imagists"). But as early as 1992, scholars like George P. Landow weren't making this distinction. Consider this passage from The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a Concept:
Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers also to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication. "By 'hypertext,' " Nelson explains, "I mean non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." Hypertext, as the term is used in this work, denotes text composed of blocks of text – what Barthes terms a lexia – and the electronic links that join them. Hypermedia simply extends the notion of the text in hypertext by including visual information, sound, animation, and other forms of data. Since hypertext, which links one passage of verbal discourse to images, maps, diagrams, and sound as easily as to another verbal passage, expands the notion of text beyond the solely verbal, I do not distinguish between hypertext and hypermedia. Hypertext denotes an information medium that links verbal and nonverbal information.
Today, in the year 2000, we swim in a hyper-alloyed digital world of image links, text links, dynamic links, streaming audio and video, auctions, and shopping links on a daily basis. So what are we to make of this literary form, the hypertext? What does it have to say to us? Should we even continue to call it hypertext, when text is not necessarily its main mode of formulation?
In order to answer some of these questions, I need to go back to the early authors of hypertext. These are the people who first defined the medium, who wrote the software to make it possible. This is no small thing. Imagine if Shakespeare had had to invent the mechanism of acting and staging dynamics in his spare time in order to conceptualize King Lear as a play? With the Web so ubiquitous, it may be hard to remember a time when it was not, when the tools to program a presentation of text and text (or text and image) interactively – in a manner more complex than linear word processing – was available to only the better interactive game designers.
