Another seemingly omnipresent characteristic of hypertext fictions is that they all make explicit reference to their authors. Unlike the majority of traditional fiction, which can be read without thought to the author (although some level of meaning may be lost), this new mode of writing seems to require that the author explain him or herself. To a large extent this may be due to reader unfamiliarity with the computer medium: while everyone is comfortable with the suspension of disbelief needed to enter a paper text's universe, the entry into a computer-generated world is not yet reflexive. However, it may also be true that the new medium is simply an effective medium with which to address issues of author-reader interaction. The fact that all three proto-hypertexts spend a great deal of time grappling with author presence and author absence makes me think that the latter is true, that one of the driving forces behind these author's development of proto-hypertext was the search for a way to adequately project an author presence into their works. Because a computer program can be interactive, it can fill in for the author as an active participant in the work. In a novel, where the entire material of the novel is already on paper and interactivity is more difficult, a number of other methods must be used to project the author into the work.
Slaughterhouse-Five deals with the problem of the presence of the author in two ways. Vonnegut is explicitly present in the novel; the first chapter is a biographical essay written from his viewpoint. In addition, a number of scenes set in World War Two actually feature Vonnegut as a participant:
The Americans arrived in Dresden at five in the afternoon. The boxcar doors were opened, and the doorways formed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.
Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, "Oz." That was I. That was me. The only other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana. (Vonnegut, 148)
Vonnegut's presence by name in the work establishes a feeling of interactivity, and helps to erode the facade of author infallibility. This is exactly the effect Vonnegut was seeking: because the novel is primarily a character study, he does not need to establish himself as omnipotent narrator, although that is one of his duties. By appearing in the book as an all-too-human character (he even comes down with diarrhea at one point), Vonnegut humanizes the work as a whole.
Vonnegut takes on a number of roles in Slaughterhouse-Five, and one of these is the virtual author-presence of Kilgore Trout. Trout, a failed hack science-fiction writer, serves as an iconic representation for Vonnegut the writer. Just as Vonnegut the character in Dresden represents the physical frailty of the author as a human, Trout represents the author the way he would like to imagine himself, as a witty, cynical wisecrack who has a lot of ideas and continually espouses him. By using two representations of himself in the novel, Vonnegut raises the questions of author presence discussed by Foucault and others. Vonnegut's is a double-pointer system -- the two characters represent the split between the author as human being and the author as the godlike creator of a logoverse. Vonnegut realized that people interacting with his logoverse might break out of the paralyzing effect of suspension of disbelief, and realize that they are interacting with an artifact of an actual human being's thought processes. This transition from textual reading to hypertextual reading can be disorienting, and so Vonnegut has placed these two guides in his text to assist the reader in their transition.
In contrast to the benign behavior of Vonnegut's icons, Thomas Pynchon's presence in The Crying of Lot 49 borders on the malefic. Pynchon is iconically represented by Pierce Inverarity, the author of the will whose execution leads the protagonist through all the lexias of the novel. Near the end of the work Oedipa realizes that her two main goals, administering Pierce's will and discovering the mystery behind Tristero, are in fact totally interrelated, and that Pierce, in authoring his will, is actually the author of her fate. Pynchon does not spend a great deal of space making himself present, a fact that perhaps reflects his reclusiveness in real life. Nevertheless, he does use an additional proxy as a mouthpiece, Driblette, the director of a play which Oedipa becomes obsessed, explicitly disputes what is perhaps the most important element of author presence in a work, the fact that the presence can continue even after the death of the author:
"You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're looking for, but -" a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head - "in here. . . If I were to dissolve in here," speculated the voice out of the drifting stream, be washed down the drain into the Pacific, what you saw tonight would vanish too. You, that part of you so concerned, God knows how, with that little world, would also vanish. . ." (Pynchon, 79).
Driblette gives voice to Pynchon's concern that the actual, physical author is too important to be replicatible in a text, since the text necessarily depends on its creator. Whether Pynchon's concerns are valid is an interesting question, but irrelevant for our purposes; it is clear that Pynchon is at least grappling with the question of how an author's presence should be used in a work.
Finally, Cortazar seems to have the most clearly developed author presence and author-reader interactions established. Just as Hopscotch has a formally nontraditional narrative, so does it make formal its author presence both within the events of the novel and in the text itself. Readers of the second path of Hopscotch will encounter various excerpts and quotations from the Italian writer Morelli, whose works Oliveira and his companions discuss in great length. These Morelliana seem to initially have no connection with the plot of the novel, instead focusing on various philosophical ideas. As the reader moves through the logoverse of Hopscotch, however, they encounter Morelli himself, an ailing old man in a hospital in Paris, who Oliveira encounters entirely by accident. Morelli serves of course as an obligatory mouthpiece for Cortazar, but only for a short time; more tantalizingly, Morelli entrusts Oliveira to organize the myriad scraps of his most recent manuscript into a coherent whole. The reader begins to realize that not only the physical character, nor the scraps of Morelliana, but the entire book itself, serves as proxy for Julio Cortazar, the absent author. Cortazar therefore appears as an invisible guide to the reader, not in the heavy-handed manner of the omniscient narrator, but rather as something equivalent to the Help button on a World Wide Web Browser, or as Buddy Newkirk is present in Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse.
