Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer

HYPERFICTION: Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer

Date: August 29, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Byline: By Robert Coover

JUDE BUSCH, an aggressive undergraduate student with something of a crazy past, is ferociously

seducing a reluctant graduate student named -- in Stuart Moulthrop's fiction entitled "Victory

Garden" -- Victor Gardner. It is the winter of 1991, and Victor, we have learned, has just received

a "Dear John" letter from the woman he loves, a former student and friend of Jude's named Emily

Runbird, who is now serving with the American forces in the gulf war. Emily has made it clear in a

letter from the front that her true love is Victor's middle-aging and possibly deranged thesis adviser,

Boris Urquhart. Now Jude, determined, as she says, to add pain to pleasure, seems to be using

Victor's thwarted passion for Emily as part of her seduction. "Like all great desires this one was

neither plain nor simple," she knows, "it was radically perverse."

This perversity "thematizes" her conquest, as she might have put it in a Boris Urquhart seminar. She

strips lugubrious Victor, dons a blond wig (Emily is a blonde), sets up a mirror in her black

bedroom so she and Victor can watch themselves, and makes him tell her how Emily smells.

Text:

After their peculiar out-of-body climax ("Yes folks, love is strange," the author muses wryly), Jude

makes Victor admit that he still loves Emily, and she confesses (all this in the present tense) that she

does, too. Suddenly -- poof! -- the narrative ends.

Or. . . .

(What is it like to read fiction on a computer screen in hypertext? Is it even possible to describe this

nonlinear interactive art here in the implacably linear medium of printed text? As the pioneer

hypertexter Michael Joyce puts it in his landmark hyperfiction "Afternoon, a Story": "There is no

simple way to say this. . . ." Still, let us try, perhaps by imagining that the above route through this

little corner of "Victory Garden" has not been taken, and that we have followed another.)

In a brief digression from the principal story (which has to do with university curricular reform,

Desert Storm as media event and the concomitant nervous breakdown of Boris Urquhart), Jude

Busch, whose history of mental problems has made her a sympathetic friend of men suffering crises,

is attempting a therapeutic seduction (it is the same set of narrative elements, but we have come here

by a different electronic path) of the grieving Victor Gardner, whose lover Emily Runbird has

recently been killed by an incoming missile in the gulf war (a shocking moment; we have read her

final thoughts, and then the text screen shattered, as though it were printed on glass).

What Jude is trying to do (she recognizes her desire as both "deeply symbolic" and "radically

perverse") is "to create a link that would unite all three of them, a symbolic link outside of bodies

and time," a desire shared in some respects by Mr. Moulthrop and exhibited in his multidirectional,

atemporally linked hypertext structure. Jude's three-way link is in some manner made -- with the

help of set, costumes, wig and mirror; the late Emily Runbird invades the lovemaking (love is

strange) of Jude and Victor; later both confess that they loved Emily (the verb is now past tense),

and their last candle goes dark.

Clicking the mouse, we wake up elsewhere, perhaps in the bedroom of Thea Agnew, a professor

who is about to be visited by her rebellious son; or perhaps at the front lines, where Emily, not yet

killed, is telling her mates about her love affairs back home; or in a flashback (as though postcoital

Victor might be dreaming) to Victor and Emily in bed in the good old days. Or perhaps, always

ready for a party, we click into the provost's wild all-campus masquerade ball, organized on the

theme of Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces," where most of the 4,500 revelers turn

up in camouflage desert fatigues, Emily (we soon gather) having been called up to war but

presumably stationed safely to the rear, sorting the mail. The provost takes the occasion of his party

to call an impromptu faculty meeting to discuss the person we have come to see, but in this reading

only, as the main character of this narrative, Boris Urquhart, who, the provost believes, has "just

plain gone round the bend."

Later, choosing one path among many, we find ourselves at one of Urquhart's seminars. He is

missing, but we have been following the 34-year-old professor's antics, including his "swarming"

hallucinations, his correspondence in several different drafts with Emily, with whom he is "stone in

love," his spectacular appearance as a mad prophet, Uqbar, and his wild flight, on foot and in a

"borrowed" car, pursued by cops and an F.B.I. agent -- a scene intercut, if you choose to read it

this way (and the choice, as always in hypertext, is yours), with the night of Emily's death. At the

seminar, during a discussion of "The Garden of Forking Paths," by Jorge Luis Borges, Jude calls the

Argentine writer "a pervert" whose alleged magic was done "with mirrors," thereby adding a touch

of melancholic irony to the earlier bedroom scene, which in turn undermines her present classroom

argument and softens its tone. (Mr. Moulthrop had acknowledged in his introduction that Borges is

a primary inspiration behind his own garden-titled fiction.)

Or. . . .

It is 1992 in California as we enter the story, long after the gulf war and far from the dramatic events

of the year before, some comic, some terrible, but none as yet known to us in detail. The unnamed

narrator, who would seem to be the author himself, is collaborating on a book and sleeping

companionably with Thea Agnew, a bold, quick-witted scholar some years his senior, whose move

west (her son, a virtual reality enthusiast who wants to be a "reality artist," is with her) may have

been forced on her by what happened the year before: "I've never met anyone," the author explains

in one variation, "for whom academic culture seemed so much like a blood sport." They are

mourning the loss of a friend named Emily, about whom, so far, we know nothing. . . .

Or. . . .

The routes through Stuart Moulthrop's new hyperfiction "Victory Garden" are almost literally

countless. Altogether there are nearly a thousand text spaces and over 2,800 electronic links

between them. One is invited to "come in" by way of a sentence constructed by the reader, word by

word, out of a set of choices that will yield as many as 56 different such sentences on the themes of

beginnings, labyrinths, time, America, words, dreams, truth. When completed, these opening

sentences link to at least 47 different starting points in the narrative proper, from which there are no

fewer than 194 separate links to other text spaces, each in turn with branching options.

If one prefers a more carefully mapped trajectory (to each reader his or her own), the author has

supplied a "map" of "Victory Garden" as a kind of schematic overview, a visual guide through the

labyrinth of his text. In the garden there are 39 labeled "nodes" (on the map they look like garden

benches or flower patches) that present entry points into major story elements, providing among

other things a simple means (just click on a node) for moving directly into areas of the text

unexplored in previous readings.

There are other ways to enter this hypertext, too, some more or less at random, others more

consciously ordered: by way of the acknowledgments "page," for example, with its 12 relevant text

links, or by way of lists of "Paths to Explore" and "Paths to Deplore" (there are several crisscrossing

designated "paths"), or through the "Welcome" space, which explains hypertext and how to read it,

leading directly to "The Place of the Big Wind," which describes this project:

"Perhaps, hypermediated and post-modernized, we now live in a universe that looks suspiciously

like a Garden of Forking Paths. Or perhaps the old ways of understanding our lives -- struggle,

question, commitment, love, loss, mourning -- can't really be pushed aside. I didn't set out to resolve

that issue. I set out to put some stories in motion, hoping they'd take me somewhere. Here's where

they led."

Where this leads in particular is to seven other places in the text. As one moves about in the story,

clicking from window to window, one encounters newscasts, correspondence, quotations, other

fictions, poems, curious dream sequences in the second person, which may or may not be part of a

professor's research, text (or its absence) used as graphic elements, historical fables, parodies and

self-parodies -- a great contextual enrichment as the story itself, whole and immutable but always

partially hidden, slowly unfolds.

And yet "Victory Garden" is, essentially, a very conventional academic novel, easy to follow, easy

to read, about a group of professors and students at a Southern university at the time of the gulf war

in 1991. There are the usual intellectual affairs and passionate disputes, the parties, the politics, the

familiar bedroom and campus tavern scenes, along with protests and counterprotests about the war,

curriculum reform and other hot topics. It is all stitched together with the customary epigraphic

gathering of the author's favorite quotations, a kind of "interanthology," as Michael Joyce calls a

similar device in his own "Afternoon."

Moreover, in spite of all the overt play (there are, for example, elaborate dream sequences in which

"you" may be the dreamer, abrupt cul-de-sacs and closed loops, several self-reflective and

self-parodying spaces, occasional playful graphics and a number of alternative "endings," even a

"happy ending" in which Emily is not killed but returns to a big homecoming party, though to believe

it you have to believe, virtually, that the gulf war never happened), there is really only one story here,

as whole and singular -- and ultimately linear, even chronological -- as that of any ordinary print

novel -- the only difference being that the reader moves about in the story as though trying to

remember it, the narrative having lost its temporality by slipping whole into the past, becoming there

a kind of obscure geography to be explored.

This is one way of doing it. Another is the lyrical indeterminacy of a Michael Joyce hyperfiction, in

which links work in a more free-associative way, as in dreams from which (there are loops, byways,

drifting reflections) it is difficult to awaken. Mary-Kim Arnold's "Lust," a soon-to-be-published

short-short hyperfiction (infinite expansion may be a risk here, but it is not a rule), is a miniature

gem in this mode. Or there is the exploration of evolving human relationships as in a Carolyn Guyer

hypernarrative, the sheer pleasure of play as in John McDaid's many-roomed fun house, the

revelation of character by randomly linked fragments as in a Judy Malloy hypertext; the possibilities

are no doubt as rich and varied as in any other art form.

Indeed, the potential of this fascinating new reading and writing medium has scarcely been glimpsed.

The conventional nature of most of the fictions so far written in it probably reflects the apprehension

felt in adjusting to a new medium (it took a century and a half after the Gutenberg revolution before

Don Quixote first sallied forth, did it not?), but this transitional time will soon pass. Hyperfictions of

the future will not necessarily have printbound analogues. With each foray into hyperspace

something new is added to the craft, the orbits widen, the technical manuals expand.

Not everyone, of course, wants to read a story sitting at a computer keyboard. Many readers

regard this medium with a kind of queasy skepticism, fearful of getting helplessly entangled in the

gadgetry, of starting something that cannot be finished, of losing their way and missing everything

important. "The desire for a comprehensive reading is not so easily relinquished," Nancy Princenthal

says in a recent essay in The American Book Review on Judy Malloy's fiction "Its Name Was

Penelope." Ms. Princenthal compares bopping about in hypertext to "late-night channel surfing:

empowering, perhaps, but not altogether satisfying."

AND, one may well ask, 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? All these yields, links, buttons, nets, maps:

not only are they vexing novelties, sometimes they seem more compelling than the text itself, as

though the ancillas of book culture -- the tables of contents, the indexes and appendixes, the designs

and jackets and headers -- might have swallowed up the stuff inside. If it takes so much effort just

to struggle with procedures, how can one find time to appreciate style, voice, eloquence, character,

story? And what do you mean, you can't take it to bed with you?

Well, it's true, hyperfiction is probably not for readers who fall asleep on four or five books a year.

But it is more fun, more engaging, than one might suppose before trying it. Readers who surrender

to novels as a way of going on holiday from themselves fear losing that dreamlike experience of

being swept along by the story, but in fact there is something very dreamlike about reading

hyperfiction, for it is a strange place, hyperspace, much more like inner space than outer, a space

not of coordinates but of the volumeless imagination.

As one moves through a hypertext, making one's choices, one has the sensation that just below the

surface of the text there is an almost inexhaustible reservoir of half-hidden story material waiting to

be explored. That is not unlike the feeling one has in dreams that there are vast peripheral seas of

imagery into which the dream sometimes slips, sometimes returning to the center, sometimes moving

through parallel stories at the same time. Hypertext also shares with dreams the spatializing or

dissolving of time, to which John McDaid refers in his "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" as the

"way that time perception changes in dreams; the objects of perception suddenly pulsing with

Undifferentiated Meaning, luring the mind down thoughtmoments too tangential for the waking eye.

Only when the analytic of consciousness can be suspended can the truly New emerge."

WHERE TO FIND HYPERFICTION

Eastgate Systems, 134 Main Street, Watertown, Mass. 02172.

Electronic Hollywood, Box 448, Prince Street Station, New York, N.Y. 10012.

Fait Divers, 1630 Boylston Avenue, Seattle, Wash. 98122.

Hyperbole Studios, 1756 114th Avenue Southeast, Bellevue, Wash. 98004.

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

The Voyager Company, 478 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012.