The End of Books

The End of Books

Date: June 21, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Byline: By Robert Coover

IN the real world nowadays, that is to say, in the world of video transmissions, cellular phones, fax

machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of

avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks, you will often hear it said that

the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined

soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries. Indeed, the

very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting,

paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital

form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God.

Which would mean of course that the novel, too, as we know it, has come to its end. Not that those

announcing its demise are grieving. For all its passing charm, the traditional novel, which took center

stage at the same time that industrial mercantile democracies arose -- and which Hegel called "the

epic of the middle-class world" -- 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.

Text:

Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed

movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom,

from the first page to the last. Of course, through print's long history, there have been countless

strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of

novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and

Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form's father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the

tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext,

written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and

implants it in the text.

"Hypertext" is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer

populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space

made possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths

between text segments, now often called "lexias" in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but

prescient Roland Barthes. With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as

opposed to print's fixed unidirectional page-turning) 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. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become

co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and

visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the

author.

THOUGH used at first primarily as a radically new teaching arena, by the mid-1980's hyperspace

was drawing fiction writers into its intricate and infinitely expandable, infinitely alluring webs, its

green-limned gardens of multiple forking paths, to allude to another author popular with hypertext

buffs, Jorge Luis Borges.

Several systems support the configuring of this space for fiction writing. Some use simple

randomized linking like the shuffling of cards, others (such as Guide and HyperCard) offer a kind of

do-it-yourself basic tool set, and still others (more elaborate systems like Storyspace, which is

currently the software of choice among fiction writers in this country, and Intermedia, developed at

Brown University) provide a complete package of sophisticated structuring and navigational

devices.

Although hypertext's champions often assail the arrogance of the novel, their own claims are hardly

modest. You will often hear them proclaim, quite seriously, that there have been three great events

in the history of literacy: the invention of writing, the invention of movable type and the invention of

hypertext. As hyperspace-walker George P. Landow puts it in his recent book surveying the field,

"Hypertext": "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after

the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture,

particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced

by Gutenberg's movable type."

Noting that the "movement from the tactile to the digital is the primary fact about the contemporary

world," Mr. Landow observes that, whereas most writings of print-bound critics working in an

exhausted technology are "models of scholarly solemnity, records of disillusionment and brave

sacrifice of humanistic positions," writers in and on hypertext "are downright celebratory. . . . Most

poststructuralists write from within the twilight of a wished-for coming day; most writers of hypertext

write of many of the same things from within the dawn."

Dawn it is, to be sure. The granddaddy of full-length hypertext fictions is Michael Joyce's landmark

"Afternoon," first released on floppy disk in 1987 and moved into a new Storyspace "reader," partly

developed by Mr. Joyce himself, in 1990.

Mr. Joyce, who is also the author of a printed novel, "The War Outside Ireland: A History of the

Doyles in North America With an Account of their Migrations," wrote in the on-line journal

Postmodern Culture that hyperfiction "is the first instance of the true electronic text, what we will

come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multisensual writing," but it is still so radically

new it is hard to be certain just what it is. No fixed center, for starters -- and no edges either, no

ends or boundaries. The traditional narrative time line vanishes into a geographical landscape or

exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display.

Instead: branching options, menus, link markers and mapped networks. There are no hierarchies in

these topless (and bottomless) networks, as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text

divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text

and graphics -- soon to be supplemented with sound, animation and film.

As Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry put it in the opening "directions" to their hypertext fiction "Izme

Pass," which was published (if "published" is the word) on a disk included in the spring 1991 issue

of the magazine Writing on the Edge:

"This is a new kind of fiction, and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, looping on

itself in patterns and layers that gradually accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events

does in one's lifetime. Trying the textlinks embedded within the work will bring the narrative together

in new configurations, fluid constellations formed by the path of your interest. The difference

between reading hyperfiction and reading traditional printed fiction may be the difference between

sailing the islands and standing on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the

other."

I must confess at this point that I am not myself an expert navigator of hyperspace, nor am I -- as I

am entering my seventh decade and thus rather committed, for better or for worse, to the

obsolescent print technology -- likely to engage in any major hypertext fictions of my own. But,

interested as ever in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge

linearity, I felt that something was happening out (or in) there and that I ought to know what it was: if

I were not going to sail the Guyer-Petry islands, I had at least better run to the shore with my field

glasses. And what better way to learn than to teach a course in the subject?

Thus began the Brown University Hypertext Fiction Workshop, two spring semesters (and already

as many software generations) old, a course devoted as much to the changing of reading habits as to

the creation of new narratives.

Writing students 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. But confronted with hyperspace, they have no choice:

all the comforting structures have been erased. It's improvise or go home. Some frantically rebuild

those old structures, some just get lost and drift out of sight, most leap in fearlessly without even

asking how deep it is ( infinitely deep) and admit, even as they paddle for dear life, that this new

arena is indeed an exciting, provocative if frequently frustrating medium for the creation of new

narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly as advertised, of transforming the very

art of fiction, even if it now remains somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days,

from the mainstream.

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we

are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most

radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often

labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often

becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with

what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in

jeopardy). We are always astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience

occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. That is to say, the text fragments

are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between

them.

"The great thing," as one young writer, Alvin Lu, put it in an on-line class essay, is "the degree to

which narrative is completely destructed into its constituent bits. Bits of information convey

knowledge, but the juxtaposition of bits creates narrative. The emphasis of a hypertext (narrative)

should be the degree to which the reader is given power, not to read, but to organize the texts made

available to her. Anyone can read, but not everyone has sophisticated methods of organization

made available to them."

The fictions developed in the workshop, all of which are "still in progress," have ranged from

geographically anchored narratives similar to "Our Town" and choose-your-own-adventure stories

to parodies of the classics, nested narratives, spatial poems, interactive comedy, metamorphic

dreams, irresolvable murder mysteries, moving comic books and Chinese sex manuals.

IN hypertext, multivocalism is popular, graphic elements, both drawn and scanned, have been

incorporated into the narratives, imaginative font changes have been employed to identify various

voices or plot elements, and there has also been a very effective use of formal documents not

typically used in fictions -- statistical charts, song lyrics, newspaper articles, film scripts, doodles and

photographs, baseball cards and box scores, dictionary entries, rock music album covers,

astrological forecasts, board games and medical and police reports.

At our weekly workshops, selected writers display, on an overhead projector, their developing

narrative structures, then face the usual critique of their writing, design, development of character,

emotional impact, attention to detail and so on, as appropriate. But they also engage in continuous

on-line dialogue with one another, exchanging criticism, enthusiasm, doubts, speculations, theorizing,

wisecracks. So much fun is all of this, so compelling this "downright celebratory" experience, as Mr.

Landow would have it, that the creative output, so far anyway, has been much greater than that of

ordinary undergraduate writing workshops, and certainly of as high a quality.

In addition to the individual fictions, which are more or less protected from tampering in the old

proprietary way, we in the workshop have also played freely and often quite anarchically in a group

fiction space called "Hotel." Here, writers are free to check in, to open up new rooms, new

corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of

others, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented

characters, then kill off one another's characters or even to sabotage the hotel's plumbing. Thus one

day we might find a man and woman encountering each other in the hotel bar, working up some

kind of sexual liaison, only to return a few days later and discover that one or both had sex changes.

During one of my hypertext workshops, a certain reading tension was caused when we found that

there was more than one bartender in our hotel: was this the same bar or not? One of the students

-- Alvin Lu again -- responded by linking all the bartenders to Room 666, which he called the

"Production Center," where some imprisoned alien monster was giving birth to full-grown

bartenders on demand.

This space of essentially anonymous text fragments remains on line and each new set of workshop

students is invited to check in there and continue the story of the Hypertext Hotel. I would like to

see it stay open for a century or two.

However, as all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with

us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and

software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs

arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old. Even as I write, Brown University's

highly sophisticated Intermedia system, on which we have been writing our hypertext fictions, is

being phased out because it is too expensive to maintain and incompatible with Apple's new

operating-system software, System 7.0. A good portion of our last semester was spent transporting

our documents from Intermedia to Storyspace (which Brown is now adopting) and adjusting to the

new environment.

ered in its use. There are other problems too. Navigational procedures: how do you move around in

infinity without getting lost? The structuring of the space can be so compelling and confusing as to

utterly absorb and neutralize the narrator and to exhaust the reader. And there is the related

problem of filtering. With an unstable text that can be intruded upon by other author-readers, how

do you, caught in the maze, avoid the trivial? How do you duck the garbage? Venerable novelistic

values like unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being

redefined. "Text" has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work

that never reads the same way twice?

And what of narrative flow? There is still movement, but in hyperspace's dimensionless infinity, it is

more like endless expansion ; it runs the risk of being so distended and slackly driven as to lose its

centripetal force, to give way to a kind of static low-charged lyricism -- that dreamy gravityless

lost-in-space feeling of the early sci-fi films. How does one resolve the conflict between the reader's

desire for coherence and closure and the text's desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed,

what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are

done, either as reader or writer? If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as

many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?

No doubt, this will be a major theme for narrative artists of the future, even those locked into the old

print technologies. And that's nothing new. The problem of closure was a major theme -- was it

not? -- of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" as it was chopped out in clay at the dawn of literacy, and of the

Homeric rhapsodies as they were committed to papyrus by technologically innovative Greek literati

some 26 centuries ago. There is continuity, after all, across the ages riven by shifting technologies.

Much of this I might have guessed -- and in fact did guess -- before entering hyperspace, before I

ever picked up a mouse, and my thoughts have been tempered only slightly by on-line experience.

What I had not clearly foreseen, however, was that this is a technology that both absorbs and totally

displaces. Print documents may be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate into print. It

is not like film, which is really just the dead end of linear narrative, just as 12-tone music is the dead

end of music by the stave.

Hypertext is truly a new and unique environment. Artists who work there must be read there. And

they will probably be judged there as well: criticism, like fiction, is moving off the page and on line,

and it is itself susceptible to continuous changes of mind and text. Fluidity, contingency,

indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be

fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.

FINDING YOUR WAY IN HYPERTEXT: A GUIDE TO THE SOFTWARE

Hypertext fiction software, including Storyspace, Guide and HyperCard, as well as Expanded

Books (which are print texts converted to an electronic medium and thus not true multilinked

hypertext), are generally available in computer stores.

For information about Guide (MS-DOS and Macintosh), write to Owl International Inc., 2800

156th Avenue Southeast, Bellevue, Wash. 98007.

For information about HyperCard, an Apple product, write to the Claris Corporation, 5201 Patrick

Henry Drive, P.O. Box 58168, Santa Clara, Calif. 95052.

For information about Expanded Books, write to the Voyager Company, 1351 Pacific Coast

Highway, Santa Monica, Calif. 90401.

For information about Storyspace, write to Eastgate Systems, P.O. Box 1307, Cambridge, Mass.

02238. Eastgate Systems not only manufactures Storyspace software but publishes, in computer

disk form, hypertext fictions and poetry, including "Afternoon," by Michael Joyce, "King of Space,"

by Sarah Smith, "Victory Garden," by Stuart Moulthrop, "The Perfect Couple," by Clark

Humphrey, and "Sucker in Spades," by Robert DiChiara, and will soon bring out "Uncle Buddy's

Phantom Funhouse," by John McDaid, "Quibbling," by Carolyn Guyer, and "Its Name Was

Penelope," by Judy Malloy. Eastgate is also planning to publish an on-line hypertext journal for short

fiction, poetry and criticism, with new work by Rob Swigart, William Dickey and Jim Rosenberg

scheduled for early issues.

For fictions written in Judy Malloy's Narrabase format (a random shuffle of grouped lexias), write to

Narrabase Press, Box 2340, 2140 Shattuck, Berkeley, Calif. 94704.

The Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) puts out

such experimental computer text pieces as "Diagram Series," by Jim Rosenberg, "The Heart of the

Machine," by Ian Ferrier, and "The First Meeting of the Satie Society," by John Cage. For more

information, write to the Well, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, Calif. 94965.

Another hypertext network, similar to ACEN though more like an on-line art movement (its

founder, Nancy Kaplan, explains that it was originally "a small group of people who stumbled

across each other in the predawn of interactive fiction time . . . in my kitchen in Ithaca, N.Y., in

November of 1988"), is TINAC (Textuality, Intertextuality, Narrative and Consciousness, and/or

This Is Not a Conference). For more information, write to Nancy Kaplan, University of Texas at

Dallas, School of Arts and Humanities, Richardson, Tex. 75083-0688.

The three major on-line electronic journals publishing information about interactive writings are

Postmodern Culture, EJournal and Leonardo Electronic News. For more information about

Postmodern Culture, write to the co-editors, John Unsworth and Eyal Amiran, Box 8105, Raleigh,

N.C. 27695. For information on EJournal, write to the editor, Ted Jennings, EJournal, State

University of New York, Albany, N.Y. 12222. For Leonardo Electronic News, write to Leonardo,

the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), 672 South Van Ness

Avenue, San Francisco, Calif. 94110.

Several print journals have published or plan to publish articles on hypertext fiction and a few are

beginning to add disks of fiction and nonfiction in hypertext format. The spring 1991 issue of Writing

on the Edge (published at the Campus Writing Center, University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616)

featured eight printed articles and two hypertext fictions on disk ("WOE" by Michael Joyce and

"Izme Pass" by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry). The magazine Perforations is publishing a special

issue on hypertext, entitled "After the Book." For information, write to Richard Gess, Cataloging

Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. 30322-2870. (This issue may turn

up in the Storyspace catalogue as well.)

There are also a number of books on hypertext Among them are George Landow's "Hypertext"

(Johns Hopkins University Press); "Hypermedia and Literary Studies," edited by Mr. Landow and

Paul Delany (MIT Press); Ted Nelson's "Literary Machines" (Mindful Press, Sausalito, Calif.); and

Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing"

(Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Fairlawn, N.J.).

Hypertext is now being used in literature and writing courses in Austria, Denmark, England,

Scotland, Japan and Norway. In this country, hypertext workshops and seminars have been or are

being conducted at New York University, Illinois Wesleyan, Brown, Cornell, Syracuse, Yale,

George Mason, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan Tech, San Francisco State and San Jose State, the

University of Rochester, the Universities of Oregon, North Carolina and Texas (Austin and Dallas

campuses), Georgia Tech (where the hypertext fiction pioneers Stuart Moulthrop and Jay David

Bolter now teach) and, not least, Jackson Community College in Michigan, the home base of

Michael Joyce, one of Storyspace's co-developers (along with Mr. Bolter and John B. Smith) and

the author of the landmark 1987 hypertext fiction "Afternoon."