Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
You too might be an artist, but your medium just hasn’t been invented yet. Luis Bunuel’s daughter once remarked that he would have been frustrated in his life if film hadn’t come along: he couldn’t draw, didn’t write prose, but with a camera in hand, he knew what to do.
Hypertext, non-linear, interactive fiction for your computer, seemed like the perfect medium for Shelley Jackson. Then in her early-30s, with a BA in Studio Art from Stanford and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown, Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl,” a CD-ROM released in 1995, was the first hypertext work to really find an audience. Its exquisite visual images and clever fairy tale-like storytelling, seemed to offer the promise of a new way of reading.. In MFA-speak, the “long reign of print has induced a kind of somnolence in literary and critical studies, a certain inattentiveness to the diverse forms in which ‘texts’ appear.”
Yet, ten years later most people don’t even know what Hypertext fiction is. As computer graphics advanced and modems were replaced with Ethernet hookups, users looked for connectivity, not the locked in world of CD-ROM entertainment. Plus, that interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” spirit already exists in literature like Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” and Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” — and you can take those with you on a plane.
Even without wide Internet deployment and high-speeds, hypertext would have floundered. Instead of an alternative to “inattentiveness,” it offered too many options, with little clear reward — in which case a user might just just give up and check email instead. A 1997 essay in Salon explained:
In hypertext fiction, too often, there’s no incentive to keep reading. We begin reading any new story in a state of confusion, sorting out the cast of characters, where they are and what they’re doing. In traditional fiction, a good author will dazzle us by creating a complex, carefully calibrated sequence of revelations to orient us and then sometimes disorient us again. In hypertext, the initial fog never lifts.
Like their companions in the computer-gaming world who have created story-games like “Myst” and “The Seventh Guest,” hypertext authors hide the hearts of their stories behind barriers and challenge us to pass through. But the best games at least deliver a satisfying resolution, and fun along the way for those who enjoy solving puzzles. Most hypertexts are so devoted to ambiguity that they fail to communicate much of anything at all. The hypertext author does this in the name of empowering readers: They’re free at last to construct texts of their own, to experience the joy of play. But we don’t perceive this activity as freedom; too often, it feels like work.
Recently, I saw Jane McGonigal speak, and much of her lecture emphasized the importance of real-wolrd integrated games. She compared the close world of MMORPG to using words only in books, not in signs, not in speech.
Wi-fi is slower than cable wires, and mobile broadband is slower than wi-fi, but we are willing to take these setbacks to detach ourselves from our workstations. The failure of hypertext fiction might have less to do with its nonlinear narrative, and everything to do a computer user’s disinterest in feeling constrained in place.
If hypertext fiction can move past it’s “po-mo” delusions, changing the device and environment might lead to a reemergence. I can see Kindle one day being used almost exclusively for hypertext fiction. Already, its designed for some interactive control, like hypertext links to dictionary and Wikipedia. You can take it with you and read under a tree. Thinking of how the iPod of five years ago compares to the one today, a sleeker looking, cheaper Kindle — one that embraces more social components like RSS feeds and better sharing capacity — could even lead to MMORP-hypertext (well, no, probably not.)
By the way, Shelley Jackson released a great novel two years ago, “Half Life”. Her newest project is “Skin,” a story written, word by word, as tattoos on a different individual’s body — interactive and off-the-grid.
Related links:
- Brian Eno’s zen-like Microsoft Windows 95 start-up theme. (Audio)
- “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
- “The future of the short story in a digital age,” by J.M. Tyree, The Smart Set
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