"When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." As annoying as cliches can be, they sometimes ring true. As I sit here at 2 AM in Honey's All-Night Restaurant, trying to assemble a final draft from stacks of scrap paper covered in scrawls from blunt pencils, I am acutely aware of the influence of medium on message. For the last few months I have heard time and again about the ways in which contemporary print discourse controls and defines the ways in which we think about our world, and how (at least according to the rather wild-eyed Landow) hypertext and multimedia technologies are our saviors come to deliver us out of our defunct paradigm. Frankly, I am nonplussed. If it truly took a total paradigm shift to break out of the text-based worldview in which we are firmly ensconced, hypertext could have never been invented in the first place. How can one create the tools to break out of a paradigm, when one must have already left the paradigm to construct those tools in the first place?

Any paradigm is first and foremost a mental construct, and so is not literally brought about through the use of physical tools. The transition from monolithic, linear textual discourse to decentralized nonlinear hypertextual discourse first occurred in someone's mind, not on a computer screen; these new technologies are only ways of making the new worldview easily communicable. Since no person can "talk out" a web of multiply linked contextual lexias (although I have been known to try while intoxicated), it seems that the only way to make the new paradigm of hypertext transferable is to plug it into a suitably designed piece of software.

Or is it? Choose-Your -Own-Adventure books, The Sound and the Fury, and almost anything by James Joyce seem to suggest otherwise. Just as it is possible to draw an image of a three-dimensional object in two dimensions, it is possible to "squash" a hypertext web of lexias (henceforth referred to as a "logoverse") to fit within the confines of a piece of paper. Just as the Mercator projection of the globe distorts the geographic size of various continents, though, so will this mapping of a logoverse onto a physical page involve distortions and omissions.

One logical question remains: what is the recourse for a writer with a logoverse full of ideas in his or her head to do if they have access only to conventional writing tools? Certainly, nonlinearity and bifurcation of narrative are not unique to the postmodern age. Writers who wished to tell their tales without pruning the bifurcate stems of narrative, yet still needed to produce a product accessible as a novel, adopted idiosyncratic methods to convert their works to novel forms. In some cases, the conversion protocol was so radical that few to no intimations of the work's "original" structure remains; as a result, any attempt to guess what a text's structure would have been like had it been written natively as a hypertext is pure conjecture.

In some works, however, the glimpse of the novel as a precursor form of hypertext can still be seen. It is these works I wish to discuss. I contend that some writers in the modern age attempted to maintain the hypertext character of their thought constructs in their final work. As a result, these authors developed uniquely interesting conversion methods. In the three texts I have chosen -- Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch -- I feel I have found the early indications of the need for a proper navigation vehicle through an uncompressed logoverse. I believe that these texts are intentionally composed of "proto-hypertext," and that they use the physical space of the book form as an interface to the ideas contained in the work. These works indicate that their authors were beginning to realize the need for movement out of the conventional text-based paradigm and on to something more flexible. Their shared and defining characteristics -- nonconventional narrative flow, explicit author presence at all levels of the work -- flow naturally into what are currently the shared and defining characteristics of most hypertext fiction. But which body of work has brought about the other is open for debate. To a large extent, hypertext fiction has come into being because proto-hypertext indicated what technological progress was needed to properly interact with a logoverse. But conversely, these proto-hypertexts have themselves been important influences on the ways in which true hypertext has developed, because they "set the stage" and defined ways to use the new forms of discourse.