Final Fridays (3 page)

He was right, of course. Indeed, I came to repeat this anecdote annually to each new crop of my graduate-student apprentices by way of cautioning them
against
fancy presentations of what is, after all, still work in process. No desktop publishing, please, I advise them: Just give us and your future editors tidy, well-copyedited pages, remarkable only for their author's brilliance, and let's leave publishing to the publishers.

That was in 1981. Thirteen years later, in 1994, we had our first ambassador from the vertiginous realm of Hypertext, a.k.a. “e-fiction”: interactive computer-fiction in which the “author” designs a matrix of “lexias” through which the “reader” navigates with clicks of the mouse or the keyboard, perhaps entering or exiting the narrative at any of many available doors and steering the plot along any of many optional way points.

The seminal work on the medium itself (
Hypertext
, authored by George Landow of Brown University, but published by our Johns
Hopkins Press in 1992) declares hypertext to be the third great technological advance in the art of writing, after the development of the alphabet and the invention of movable type. Some curmudgeons have grumbled that the whole thing is more hype than text, but my comrade Robert Coover, also at Brown, has become so involved in the medium that his official academic title these days is Professor of Electronic Fiction. In 1993, Coover published two landmark front-page essays on the subject in the
New York Times Book Review
, one called, provocatively, “The End of Books?” (it's important to hear that question mark at the end of his title), and the other called “Hypertext: Novels for the Computer.”

 

I INVITE ANY innocents still unfamiliar with hypertext to imagine a “text” (the word is already in quotes, the signal or symptom of virtuality), every word of which—at least many a key word of which—is a window or point of entry into a network of associated “texts” (or graphics, music, statistics, spoken language, whatever a computer can reproduce), these several networks themselves interconnected and infinitely modifiable—or
virtually
infinitely so—by “readers” who can enter the “story” at any point, trace any of a zillion paths through its associated networks, perhaps add or subtract material and modify the linkages as they please, and then exit at any point, in the process having been virtual co-authors or co-editors as well as “readers” of their virtual text. That's hypertext.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Imagine a “loaded” display of that innocent proposition on your computer screen, such that “clicking” on any item in it opens a window menu of associations available for exploring, from the relative nimbleness of temperate-zone quadrupeds, through the history of fox hunting and
its representation in painting, music, and literature, to soundtracks of hounds in full cry (with or without expert commentary) and disquisitions on animal rights—and every one of those associated “lexias” similarly loaded, another ring of keys with which one may open yet further doors, and on and on and on—no two routes through the maze ever likely to be the same, and every venturer thereinto not only a Theseus but a Daedalus, remodeling the labyrinth at will en route through it. That's hypertext, more or less, and as a potential medium of art it both intrigues and disquiets me. If the prophets of the
American Book Review
, not to mention the
New York Times Book Review
, are correct, as no doubt they are, we'll be hearing more and more about it as our weary century expires (it has already made the cover of
Time
). Indeed, a recent number of the
Authors Guild Bulletin
(Winter 1995), along with its now-standard cautionary piece on “Fair Use in the Electronic Age,” included its first-ever mention of hypertextual narrative: “Electronic Fiction,” by Sarah Smith (subtitled “The State of the Art”). An articulate practitioner of and apologist for her medium, Smith quotes a fellow hypertextualist's decription of their art as “designing golf courses with holes that can be played in any order by players with greater or lesser degrees of skill and commitment.” I like that metaphor—although I modestly submit that “ski slopes” would be an even better one, since, unlike golf courses, they have no prearranged sequence to be ignored or altered.

Back to my story. We welcomed our young graduate-student pioneer, Ho Lin—who had already worked with Coover and Landow in Brown University's vigorous hypertext program—into our Hopkins Seminars, as did our university library into the organizing of its burgeoning CD-ROM operation: a genial and knowledgeable harbinger, I reckoned, of things inevitably to come. Fortunately for us, who
had neither equipment nor expertise nor, for that matter, sufficient departmental enthusiasm to deal with this novel medium—it turned out that Mr. Lin's Hopkins project was a straightforward, engaging, traditionally linear print-novel (“p-fiction,” I guess we have to call it now) about young Chinese-Americans dreaming of Hong Kong and heisting computer chips to get there. At my urging, however, he obligingly arranged “e-fiction” demonstrations for us at the university's computing facility, and we did a certain amount of disk-and-software swapping.

Now, I'm a book-person myself, but I try to keep an open mind and a mindful eye on the parameters of the medium. I had already read Coover, Landow, and others on the subject of hypertext; if I were 25 instead of 65-plus, I daresay that I would be vigorously exploring its possibilities for my fictive purposes. I rather expected our roomful of talented Hopkins apprentices—who, after all, grew up with desktop computers—to take to hypertext fiction like grade-schoolers to Nintendo. Has it not been the job, after all, of each new artistic generation since the advent of Romanticism to render its senior mentors gently obsolete (what one sociologist has called “filiar-chy,” the rule of the young over their elders, and what others might call “parricide”)? To my surprise, however, I found that
I
was doing the prodding—“Better expose yourselves to the virus, if only to build up your antibodies,” et cetera—and that they, for the most part, were taking the skeptical Leonard Michaels role. Reading and writing literature in the normal way, most of them felt, is interactivity enough; when we're being writers, we'll plot the course for you; when we're being readers, leave us alone and steer the boat yourself. My feelings exactly—more or less exactly, anyhow—but I confess that it was a touch dismaying to hear them voiced by young apprentices.

In any case, their sentiments are sound, I believe, if unadventurous. Note that their reservations were not to the tiresome business (as many of us find it) of reading for pleasure off a video display terminal rather than curled in a comfortable chair; we agreed that by this century's turn, the hardware for hypertexts will likely be as portable and maybe even no harder on the eyes than that jim-dandy item of low-energy, high-density information technology, the printed book. Nor had they anything against hypertext as a high-tech mode of reference browsing. What they objected to, and in this I'm much more with them than not, was mucking around with the traditional job-descriptions of Author and Reader. “You don't like the restaurant? Then dine elsewhere—but stay out of my kitchen while I'm cooking for you, please, and I'll return the favor.” (You ought, however, to
try
the hypertextual broccoli before making up your mind.)

I mention these two instances, from fifteen and two years ago, as straws in the potentially much bigger wind of Electronic Virtual Reality, which I won't attempt to consider more than briefly here. My point is that although a few of us still prefer to compose our sentences in longhand before turning them into pixels on a computer monitor en route to their returning into print on a page, and a few more prefer still to eschew computers altogether, the super-convenient word-processor has become, in only a dozen-plus years, the production mode of choice for most writers of most kinds of writing, whether or not it affects the quality of the product. Interactive computer fiction (especially as it comes to include whole repertories of graphic, cinematic, and auditory effects) is too fascinating not to become yet another competitor for audience attention, but one doubts that it will have nearly the market-share effect on “straight” fiction-reading that movies and television—and, more recently, surfing the Internet—have had
already. Those of us who still read literature for pleasure at all (no more than 10 percent of the adult U.S. population, says the
New York Times
) are likely to go on preferring, most of the time, the customary division of labor between Teller and Told. The Authors Guild's justified concern with the protection of authorial electronic rights down the Infobahn is more commercial than aesthetic: a concern more about copyright than about readership. E-fiction versus p-fiction is apples versus oranges, really. In the case of either of those versus Electronic Virtual Reality, however, the difference is so enormous as to be a matter not of apples and oranges but rather of lotuses and rhinoceri, or perhaps hawks and handsaws.

 

MORE PRECISELY, IT is the difference between virtual reality, which deals in
real virtualities
, and the purely virtual virtuality of literary texts, especially printed texts. The sights and sounds and feels of EVR, from pilot-training flight simulators to the wraparound fantasy-worlds of high-tech amusement parks, are literal physical sensations generated by artificial stimuli. The printed page, on the other hand—except for illustrated texts and things like scratch-and-sniff kiddie books—is strictly anesthetic, however incidentally appealing to the eye and hand may be its typeface, paper stock, and binding. Even in the greatest, most spirit-stirring novels there are no literal sights/ sounds/feels/tastes/smells, only their names, artfully invoked in silent language. The virtual worlds of literature are unencumbered by literality. It is both their great limitation and their indispensable virtue that their virtuality is virtual; that they exist not in our nerve-endings but in the pure hyperspace of our imaginations.

I will make my way back shortly to that distinction between the hyperspace of hypertext (not to mention the cyberspace of virtual
reality) and the “meditative space” afforded by the silent, privileged transactions of the human mind and spirit with the fixed, anesthetic medium of the printed page. Before I do, though, I want to back off again, this time by 30 years or so, to explain why the electronic-fiction and virtual-reality phenomena give me a strong but rather comforting sense of déjà vu. In the late 1960s I was living in Buffalo, New York, at the very edge of our troubled republic, and teaching at the state university there while the USA appeared to be more or less auto-destructing. I vividly recall flying cross-country on a lecture tour in 1968, just after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, and seeing the smoke of protest rise from one burning American inner city after another, sea to smoke-obscured sea, as in a World War II newsreel; frequently the campuses that I visited, like the one that I came home to, were occupied either by Vietnam-war-protesting students and faculty members or by tear-gas-firing riot police and National Guardsmen. I quite remember one of my graduate students, late in the war—when the exasperated riot police moved in on us for the how-manyeth time with their gas grenades—sniffing the campus air calmly and observing, like a wine-connoisseur, “Pepper-gas, Berkeley, '66 or '67.” All about the city, between campus strikes and trashings, pop art was popping, happenings were happening, street theater and new electronic music were ubiquitous, young American men were fleeing across the Peace Bridge to seek refuge in Canada from the draft—and back across the polluted Niagara River from Toronto came the siren-song of Professor Marshall MacLuhan, author of
The Gutenberg Galaxy
, that the medium is the message, and that we “print-oriented bastards” had better
get
the message that the electronic global village had rendered our hopelessly linear medium obsolete.

It was in this apocalyptic, Death-of-the-Novel, death-of-the-print-medium ambience that in 1968 I published a book called
Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice
. Its title says it all, or enough anyhow for my purpose in these pages. My own attitude was that, whether or not the world ends, if enough thoughtful, intelligent people
suspect
that it's ending, then that shared apprehension becomes a significant cultural-historical datum, which an artist in any medium, even poor old print, might well take note of and even turn to good account. The threat to p-fiction back then was not hypertext and EVR; we didn't yet even have desktop personal computers. It was movies and television: the movies increasingly since the end of WWI, television increasingly since the end of WWII. The “Death of the Novel” was one of the classical riffs of Modernism, that regnant aesthetic of the first half of the 20th century. The se-mioticist Robert Scholes quotes a mid-1960s colleague's description of the novel as “a moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance,” and I remember my Buffalo colleague Leslie Fiedler's
⁵
predicting at about the same time that if there's any future for narrative at all, it's up there on the big screen, not down here on the page (this was before VCRs and DVDs, when people still went out to the movies). Indeed, one of Fiedler's later books is titled
What Was Literature?
—the same Modernist riff, rescored for full orchestra.

But I also remember a little book from that period by Ron Sukenick, founding editor of the
American Book Review
, teasingly titled
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories
; and I myself used to like to say that inasmuch as I hadn't been born in time to write the
first
novel, maybe it would be fun to write the last one. In short, one didn't have to be a weatherman back then to see which way the wind was blowing.