"Holier Than Thou," the piece of fiction at the core of this project, did not begin as a hypertext. I began it in 1988, several years before I'd ever heard the term hypertext. I originally conceived it as a rather long story, in the 12,000 to 15,000 word range, told by multiple narrators about one central character, Nelson Tucker. There were to be about a dozen sections, each told by a different character, that took place throughout Nelson's life so that the reader would meet Nelson at various points from about age four up to age eighty or more (in some versions of the story we witness his death). Even though he was the central character, I never intended to have a section narrated by Nelson--the reader was not to witness him directly as it were, but only through the interpretation or mediation of other characters.
Originally, I intended to present the sections in chronological order. At various points in the writing I wavered in this decision. Sometimes I thought I would use a later section to frame the whole story. Thus, I at one point had the story opening with an episode late in Nelson's life in which a narrator reflects on Nelson's life. The story then would shift to the earliest episode, go through the other sections in chronological order, and in the end return to the narrator who began it. Nothing new of course-- it's a favorite movie device in particular, from at least as far back as Citizen Kane, probably farther. My thoughts were that this would orient the reader better about who the main character was, as some people had indicated to me they weren't certain who the main character was in the early episodes. But more about this in a moment.
When I'm writing a lot of fiction, as I was at that time, I normally have several stories going at once, and I worked on "Holier Than Thou" fairly often throughout 1988 and off and on for a couple of years thereafter. But I gradually dropped it as I got more involved with other stories, with teaching a writing class for a couple of years, and with other parts of my life that led me away from fiction writing for a number of years.
I never entirely stopped thinking about the story, but neither was I actively working on it. But in the last couple of years, after I began to read about hypertext fiction, I began to think more seriously about it again and whether it might benefit by a hypertextual presentation. And what made me think so was reflecting on its past readers. Or listeners I should say.
When I first began writing it I was participating in a writing group through Duke University's Office of Continuing Education (where I later taught). I read parts of the story aloud as I wrote them, so that listeners did not necessarily (indeed, probably did not) hear the story in the order in which I eventually intended to present it. Now, by intention, the story has a great disparity of tone from one narrator to the next. Some narrators are so young, or so peripherally acquainted with Nelson, that they can scarcely comprehend the significance of what they tell about him. Some are quite intelligent while some are not. Some are violent, some are kind; some are sober and serious, some are smart alecks. What I noticed as I read parts of this each week was that listeners' (readers') expectations were conditioned by what they had heard before. Someone was always absent, so on any given night the people present had not always heard the same section (or same version or fragment of that section) before. As it turned out, some of the first parts I wrote were the more humorous ones, so several expected to continue to hear funny things, and even tended to interpret as humorous events I hadn't meant that way. And once, on a night when a new member had joined our group, I read several sections which happened to begin with a couple of serious and, at times, violent episodes. This new person in class saw the whole story in a very serious light--even the humorous sections.
This bothered me a little at the time, because I didn't want to be restricted in the palette of tones and moods I wanted the story to contain, and I thought long and hard about my order of presentation, how to make all those changes seem less jarring, more plausible. And in reflecting on this in recent months it suddenly struck me--I don't care what order people read the story in. I don't care whether it's chronological, reverse chronological, or just random hopping around, and I don't care how many different opinions I get as to what sort of tone or mood readers feel like they're being led to anticipate from one section to the next. Nelson Tucker's life encompasses humor, pity, violence, kindness, love, and on and on, and the order in which a reader perceives this just doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter if they don't perceive it all. That, in a way, is the point, the point of the multiple narrators. The intention is a prismatic effect--every narrator sees only one or two facets of Nelson and mistakes that for the whole of him. Everyone, including most especially Nelson, has a holier than thou attitude because of passing judgement on the tiny little portion they see of a fellow human being.
This realization brought me to the verge of hypertext. A reader could start anywhere, finish anywhere, and follow any path in between including stepping off the path at any point. But there was more to come. There was the matter of all these characters' different interpretation of specific traits of Nelson's--motifs that recur in various forms throughout the story. What of those? Weren't they, in fact, another way of looking at Nelson, another structure to the story, threads woven into the whole cloth of the various sections?
Thus, I have constructed a number of clusters of motifs--images, actions, metaphors--that recur throughout the story. These clusters are linked to the rest of the web via both static and dynamic links. These latter are accomplished with Netscape's client pull extensions to HTML, which allow the writer to time the links. After x number of seconds, a new node is loaded. Thus when a reader enters one of these loops (and they are in fact loops), a second mode of reading is offered. One can either just sit there and be "pulled" along as if through a trail of free association (albeit free association arranged by the author) or one can click on a static link to get out of this loop and into--well, either a narrator's section or another dynamic loop. I'm not yet sure what I think of the effect of this kind of reading. When I read Stuart Moulthrop's "Hegirascope," which I mention in the introduction to this story, the client pull feature made me feel kind of edgy as I read. It was not an unpleasant sensation once I got used to it--just very very different from reading on the page. My story is a mixture of two methods--not all the nodes are timed, so there are "rest areas" where the text remains still on the screen until the reader causes it to move.
Probably the most interesting part of all this development is that it was my audience that led me to it. Noticing how sharply people's reactions and expectations are conditioned by what has gone before led me to explore what might happen if "what has gone before" was different for each reader.
Abstract | Future Directions | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: January 14, 1996
Last update: June 15, 1996