Hypertext Fiction: It’s natural for a reader to follow an associative path
Long have fiction readers succumbed to the imagery of settings, empathized with characters and thrilled along the plot line of introduction, climax and resolution. Absorbing words and turning pages, fiction readers followed a linear path that was carefully constructed by authors to fit the format of the printed book. This has been the way of the story since printing conventions were established–the author writes, the reader reads. Then there was light, and binary code and the transportability of text was discovered. Writers mixed storytelling with technology that made “possible nonsequential, fully electronic reading” called hyperfiction (Snyder). With hyperfiction, readers were woken from a long period of active reading in which they made mental connections, to find they had to make active decisions to move through a story, following trails set by authors in underlined words. Readers experienced frustration, elation and cast off their linear expectations of plot as they were gently guided into interactive reading. The role of the reader turned on a link and a new form of story was born; one which demanded more of the reader through discovery, interaction and a casting off of linear plot expectations.
Hyperfiction calls to the adventurous soul, tempting the reader to discover the unmapped organization of its structure. By clicking hypertext links, readers can choose to explore within the story or move out into other texts that are related in content. Unlike printed fiction, the hyperfiction expands and stretches its storylines in many directions offering the reader bridges to cross and fjords to leap. “The space we seem to be manoeuvring is “imaginational.” Like bugs in flatland, we momentarily extend the traditionally linear (i.e., 2-D) reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link” (Tolva). The reader, like a true adventurer, must often leap blindly for the links seldom denote where she will arrive. These transporters are not navigational buttons that follow an ordered categorization of content. The hyperlinked paths have been created by the author to enhance the effect of the text, just as a gardener creates a path to lead the stroller past the brightest rose, the trickling waterfall.
In M.D. Coverley’s hypertext, Califia, the reader must traverse multiple histories by exploring letters, pictures, deeds and journals. The text is rich in clues, secrets, puzzles and quests, but it is also of value to the reader as she learns to enjoy the content without resolution-oriented consumption of words. “The reader must ramble and be sidetracked in Califia because all narrative lines are visual, fragmentary and nonsequential–and yet all are interlinked associationally across time and geography by the constant of the quest for treasure” (EnGL32). The quest and the discovery hold the reader to this complex text, which could take days to traverse. We are “satisfied when we manage to resolve narrative tensions and to minimize ambiguities, to explain puzzles, and to incorporate as many of the narrative elements as possible into a coherent pattern” (Yellowlees). Unlike plot driven stories, the discovery in hypertext is often the journey, and the journey is powered by the reader’s willing interaction with the text.
In Hyperfiction there can be a plot, or multi-plots, so the reading path is not as obvious as in a printed book, therefore, the reader must consider the route.
Any individual path through hypertext is linear, of course: the reader is still reading or viewing or hearing items in sequence, which is to say, one after the other, linearly. What makes hypertext hypertext is not non-linearity but choice, the interaction of the reader to determine which of several or many paths through the available information is the one taken at a certain moment in time. (Deemer)
Reading through one page, the reader must decide whether to move to another or continue reading. The reader can open text in multiple windows, move off text into researching forays, and sometimes movement decisions are retracted through back and forward button clicking. The hypertext environment “… is characterised by fluidity, and enables an interactive relationship between writer and reader” (Snyder 3). Hypertext is not still, the reader must scroll the text up or down, load and refresh and move between lexias, and the movements begin to reveal the structure created by the author. How the text is ordered and filed on a server becomes more clear and with it, sometimes the intent of the author. As the reader journeys, the structure becomes distince, the reader is experiencing two texts: the story as written in hypertext and the structure as written in code.
Hypertext requires the reader to cast off the literary conventions built over centuries of reading linearly organized and categorized information. To truly enjoy and benefit from hypertext, the reader must not restrict the experience by comparing it to printed works. The flexibility offered by Web and software design frees the author to create outside of the traditional print structures. “…hypertext authors are able to fabricate texts that more closely resemble the freely flowing associations of the human mind” (English Study Guide 55). But, readers have been trained to read paragraph to paragraph, and may be frustrated to encounter different structures in text. “Hypertext disturbs our linear notion of texts by disrupting conventional structures and expectations associated with the medium of print” (Snyder 17). Lexias that refresh before the reader is finished reading or multiple links that lead back to the same lexia can be irritating to readers who expect the plot to plod ever-forward over climax and onto resolution from page one to twenty-one.
Stuart Moulthrop’s “Hegirascope” is a hypertext to bring a reader’s frustrations to the fore as the document moves on without waiting for the physical cue from the reader. Just like a beach wind that ruffles the pages in a printed book, the lexia will refresh on the reader moving her to another page of content. Yet unlike a bound book, each page is populated with one to four links and the choices lead into multiple stories. The reader must open her mind to the multiple “threads” and realize that she is traversing a new structure and therefore, new experiences. “… hypertext fiction helps underscore the limitations of traditional forms of closure and elicits new forms of pleasure, pleasure not from the inevitability of an ending, but from the multiplicity of openings” (Closure). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to a “networked root” as a metaphor for the structure of hypertexts (ENGL 29). The root or rhizome structure offers the author the option of writing multiple storylines, which increases the opportunity for multiple points of view. Where a print novel may relate the story based on a first-person narrator, a hypertext fiction could allow the reader to jump back and forth between multiple narrators, experiencing the perspective of many characters. “Electronic fiction … privileges a multiplicity of voices and information over plot … The reader is doused in a babble of voices and must separate the threaded points of view to assign order and intent to events in the text” (Engl475 29). The multiple voices cry out that there is more than one truth and the reader must actively absorb all perspectives of the event, juggling them in his or her mind in order to make sense of the reading. This active consideration of multiple narration draws the reader ever-closer to the author and the creative process (Murray 40).
The reader is also drawn into the creative process by the multiform story, as the reader must consider multiple possibilities in plot. According to Janet Murray, the multiform story “presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions” (30). Reading a multiform story reminds the reader of the author as reader is pulled out of the immersive state that a single plot line might incur. “When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role…”( 38). The reader may wonder at the author’s choices, or lack of a choice in sticking to one plotline, and the reader must keep all plotline options organized in his or her mind while reading.
Readers of scrolls, manuscripts and books have always read in an active manner, absorbing the story, making predictions, and making connections. Hyperfiction extends this active reading to an interactive participation in the structure of narrative as the reader makes choices about the paths of the reading. As the reader manipulates the computer, windows and pages the experience of the hyperfiction moves past the need to find resolution in plot to an enjoyment in discovery. The exploration of structure reveals the hidden text–the author’s intent in the code and the creative process comes to mind of the reader to grow with the fictional experience. Hyperfiction, through the use of link travel, can send the reader into a new experience where she takes on the role of discoverer. The reader is reborn as she casts off the design to follow the linear thread and opens her mind to the associative thinking that is natural. Her role changes, turning on the click of a link.
Written 2008 by Cheryl R Cowtan for York U Hypertext Course
Works Cited
Coverley, M.D. Califia. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 2000. (CD-ROM for PC).
Deemer, Charles. “What is Hypertext?“ (1994). 6 Jul.2008. Online. <http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/hypertxt.htm>
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. “‘How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives.” Hyper/Text/Theory. George Landow, ed. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1994.
Guertin, Carolyn, Tschofen, Monique and Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. English 475: Literature and Hypertext. Alberta: Athabasca University 2002.
Jackson, Shelley. “My Body – a Wunderkammer”. My Body – a Wunderkammer. N.p., 1997. Web. 27 July 2016. <http://www.altx.com/thebody/>
Keep, Christopher,Tim McLaughlin and Robin Parmar. “Closure.” The Electronic Labyrinth. Online. <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0286.html>
Moulthrop, Stuart. “Hegirascope” Version 2. New River Vol 3 (October 1997). 5 Jul. 2008. Online. <http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/hgs/>
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Snyder, Ilana. Hyperfiction: its possibilities in English. 5 Jul. 2008. Online. <http://www.schools.ash.org.au/litweb/ilana.html>
Tolva, John. Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word (1994). 3 Jul. 2008. Online. <http://www.dilip.info/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>
