Writing does not take place in a vacuum but within a number of overlapping contexts. The vocation occurs within the writer's life, but both are part of larger artistic communities. Readers, other writers, editors, and various corporate entities such as publishers and distributors all form part of what sociologist Howard Becker has called an "art world." The art world of hypertext fiction, though still quite new, is growing rapidly, especially since the introduction of graphical browsers began luring a massive new audience to the World Wide Web in the last two or three years. Here I look briefly at the development of that world prior to the Web; what has happened on the Web in the last couple of years; and connections between writers and readers in the networked world.
In summarizing his article "A New Art Form: Hypertext Fiction," Howard Becker looks back on the short history of the field and notes that since "not very long ago that there were no computer programs to make the composition of multi-linked hypertexts a practical possibility," there were thus
no authors, no body of works to constitute the beginning of a "canon.[sic]" no publishing companies to manufacture and distribute those works, no readers who had acquired the skills necessary to read them and who had read a number of them and therefore were prepared to be a "public" for them, no critical writing about that body of work to inform the public about their existence and virtues--in short, no world of hypertext fiction (Becker).
Among other things, Becker's article provides an excellent introduction to the history of the development of that art world prior to the explosive growth in popularity of the World Wide Web over the last couple of years. By "art world" Becker refers to the whole institutional structure that not only enables an art work to be created but to find a public. "All art works," he says,
involve the cooperation of everyone whose activity has anything to do with the end result. That includes the people who make materials, instruments, and tools; the people who create the financial arrangements that make the work possible; the people who see to distributing the works that are made; the people who produced the tradition of forms, genres, and styles the artist works with and against; and the audience. For symphonic music, the list of cooperating people might include composers, players, conductors, instrument makers and repairers, copyists, managers and fundraisers, designers of symphony halls, music publishers, booking agents, and audiences of various kinds. For contemporary painting, an equivalent list would include painters, makers and purveryors of canvases, paints, and similar materials, collectors, art historians, critics, curators, dealers, managers and agents, such auxiliary personnel as, say, lithographic printers, and so on (Becker).Becker briefly describes some of the key events in the creation of hypertext fiction's art world during the last decade, from Michael Joyce's original idea to "create fictions that would not be the same for any two readers," to his collaboration with Jay Bolter to write the Storyspace hypertext system, to their eventual work with Mark Bernstein, found of Eastgate Systems, to publish and distribute their new system and the piece of fiction Joyce wrote using it, afternoon. Another important piece of the development of an art world is the development of a critical literature to bring the new art to the attention of the public. While such literature had been being written for several years by the above-mentioned authors as well as other writers connected with Eastgate such as Stuart Moulthrop and J. Yellowlees Douglas, Becker notes that probably the crucial piece of criticism was Robert Coover's 1992 article, "The End of Books," in The New York Times Book Review (Coover, 1992). This reached a much wider audience than any publication in more specialized journals. Currently, Eastgate Systems remains by far the most important publisher of hypertext fiction, although some other publishers are entering the field (cf. Kendall)
In his recent book, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850, Lee Erickson has pointed out the close connection between the growth of publishing in early 19th century England and the industrialization of textile manufacturing.
"Since paper for books was made from cotton and linen rags during the early nineteenth century, the expansion of readership and of book production during the period depended upon the industrialization of textile manufacturing in the late eighteenth century and the availability of cheap clothes for all of England's and Europe's population. There had to be an industrialization of cloth manufacturing before books could be similarly mass produced from recycled cotton and linen rags, and then sold at an affordable price to a large reading public...The new mountain of rags on rubbish heaps thus allowed for an exponential growth in publishing and increased the availability of books and periodicals to the English common reader" (Erickson, 6-7)In retrospect, this is perfectly understandable, but it would have been hard to predict. I mention this example because in the case of electronic media, publishing has once again been very opportunistic. The World Wide Web and, before it, the Internet itself, were certainly not created with the intent of becoming the outlet for millions of personal and commercial home pages. Among all the commercials and lists of favorite bookmarks and pictures of people's cats are also a growing number of literary sites: "e-zines," online counterparts of existing print journals, and many individuals self-publishing in their Web space they've received from their educational institution, purchased from a commercial vendor, or set up on their own Web server. Most of this fiction is not hypertextual (some would argue that there is virtually no true hypertext fiction on the Web): it's simply print fiction on a screen with electronic page-turning devices--"click here for Chapter 3" and so on--rather than fiction intended to be read multisequentially.
When I first begin looking for hypertext fiction on the Web, in the summer of 1994, the only useful resource I found was a bibliography called "The Search For Some Hypertext Fiction," begun in early 1994 by Prentiss Riddle, a systems programmer at Rice University. According to Riddle, he did not find much hyperfiction at first, but slowly began to accumulate some links after posting an announcement to several Usenet groups. I don't recall seeing more than a dozen or so titles on Rice's list when I first discovered it several months later. His list gradually grew over the next several months; meanwhile I began compiling and writing my own index to hypertext fiction, Hyperizons, with a somewhat different focus. I did not intend to list everything I could find, but to provide an annotated citation for everything I read. I also wanted to find pertinent critical literature and list citations for works on standalone systems and print works cited as precursors of hypertext fiction. My idea was to situate hypertext fiction in a larger context, to describe what I read and note interesting critical, technical, and historical relationships I (and others) saw. In Becker's terms, my thought was to begin documenting this art world as it was coming into existence. Towards the end of 1995 Riddle decided to quit maintaining The Search for Some Hypertext Fiction and I agreed to take over his list and merge it with mine. Although there was much overlap between the lists as well as different emphases, I've tried to maintain the best of both sites by offering a simple list of authors and titles with links to longer annotations if I've written a mini-review of the work or found secondary literature about it. Currently Hyperizons lists some eighty works I consider to be hypertext fiction or some close relative of it. I'm behind on indexing new sites because of work on this thesis, but when I work through my backlog of titles there will be well over 100 hundred works listed. There are also many student works not listed at all, some of which I know, including the large Storyspace cluster at Brown University, but most of which I'm sure I do not. Counting those, I expect there must be well over 200 narratives on the Web that are hypertextual on some level. Most of these citations are works on the Web and, because of the current limitations of Web browsers and HTML specifications, fairly conservative hypertexts considered technically. They are generally exploratory rather than constructive (although there are some exceptions); and much of the writing would do well to be scoured by both an insightful editor and a sharp-eyed copy editor and proofreader. Some, though, contain very good writing. While I will not single out individual works here (see "Readings and Reviews" in Hyperizons for some of my recommendations) I will say that the important point is that, good writing or bad, these works are out there being read. In an article on Web design Jay Bolter has made somewhat the same point about heterogeneity on the Web: " Large corporations can hire highly skilled designers, but their designs may lack the daring that may be found on an individual's home page. Amateur and even unattractive design should be allowed to flourish on the net." (Bolter, "Some Thoughts on Web Design").
The question is, what to make of this method of publication and distribution? More than one person has called the Web the world's largest vanity press, and there is more than a little truth to that. I've worked for a dozen years in a major research library, including several years in acquisitions. As part of my job there I saw many gift books donated to the library, much of it stuff we did not want, including quite a few self-published books. Generally I (and virtually any other staff member) looked at them with disdain or sardonic amusement. I doubt that attitude is uncommon--there's something about a piece of writing having to jump over an editor's hurdle before being broadcast to the world that inclines one to think it might be worth more attention. Obviously this is a problematic rule-of-thumb (and also ignores the history of publishing and self-publishing by canonical writers, especially prior to the 20th century): many editors publish junk, and there is likely worthwhile writing in the vanity press rubbish heap. Yet it's perfectly understandable--one can't, after all, read everything, and it's helpful to find someone else with trustworthy opinions and tastes.
Many, if not all, proponents of hypertext and hypermedia as artistic tools at some point tout their potential for collaboration among artists. Not only can artists in the same field collaborate, but forms can be combined to make something entirely new: novels with music, or paintings a viewer can navigate. Just as important, what were formerly "readers" can be involved in this collaboration and become co-authors of malleable texts. It sometimes seems that there is an implicit assumption that all artists, deep down and maybe even unbeknownst to themselves, seek this capacity to collaborate, that all readers want to participate in the shaping and even writing of the text.
Perhaps I'm a cynic, but this promotion of a collaborative utopia often calls to mind a passage in one of my favorite books, Mark Twain's Roughing it. Like the new information technologies of today, the American West of Twain's time was the frontier, the place freedom could be found and fortunes could be made. The Virginia City he reports on is a boom town, and one sign that these were "flush times," he tells us, is the appearance of a "literary" paper. All the literary artists in Virginia City get together to produce this paper and decide first of all that they must run a novel, a chapter in each week's edition to be written by a different author. All goes well the first two or three weeks, and the writers introduce a varied assortment of romantic characters such as a lovely blonde heroine, a young French duke, and a Rosicrucian who transmutes metals and consorts with the devil. But after a few weeks a new writer shows up in town and duly takes his turn. Unfortunately he has a weakness for drink, "and with all the confidence that whisky inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work." He marries the Duke off to the blonde's stepmother and then later reveals her to be his own mother, after which they both commit suicide together; has the blonde drown herself; gets the Rosicrucian on the wrong side of the devil, who then opens up the earth lets him fall through; and finally promises the reader that next week he'll go on to tell what became of the only surviving character--the devil. This chapter, of course, causes an uproar among the other novelists. He promises to rewrite it, but then gets drunk again, sends the Duke and blonde off on a whaling ship in the North Atlantic, has them meet up with a lawyer who's in love with the blonde, has the lawyer fall off the ship and get picked up by another whaling ship which promptly takes off for the North Pacific; has the lawyer become an expert harpoonist until he one day falls off that ship and is swallowed by a whale; has the whale swim back to the North Atlantic in five days flat and spit the lawyer up on the very ship the Duke and blonde are on; and ends with an explanatory footnote to the reader that if a preacher (meaning Jonah) could stay in a whale's stomach for three days, surely a lawyer could stay in for five.This chapter of course is unacceptable too, and because it is then too late to get a chapter ready for that week's edition, it brings not only the novel to an end, but also the paper, which "died as peacefully as an infant."
As in Virginia City, it is "flush times" on the World Wide Web: the literati have arrived, and many of their hopeful endeavors will die peacefully in their infancy. There is no reason to believe that the Web will not have many ghost towns along its digital frontiers and hinterlands (my current favorite is a collaborative novel, dead in its tracks for some months now as far as I can tell, which more than once wanders into the point of view of a chipmunk). Yet some of these efforts will be serious, and will succeed. What does this mean for a writer like myself (and many others I suspect) who has thus far been quite happy with the solitude of writing and finds Walter Ong's description of it to the point:
Yet words are alone in a text. Moreover, in composing a text, in 'writing' something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation. I am writing a book which I hope will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, so I must be isolated from everyone. While writing the present book, I have left word that I am 'out' for hours and days-- so that no one, including persons who will presumably read the book, can interrupt my solitude (Ong, 101).I think one thing to bear in mind is the broad spectrum of connectivity that electronic tools enable between writers and between writers and readers. It is not simply a matter of everyone becoming everyone else's co-author. As I describe in a section about writing "Holier Than Thou," the "collaboration" may be something as routine as my reading a work in the afternoon that uses an HTML trick that strikes me as intriguing, my thinking about it overnight, then employing some variation of it the next day in my own work and publishing it immediately. The collaboration may be simply e-mail from readers who find my fiction by way of Hyperizons. In recent months the site receives about 3000 accesses per month. Although it's difficult to interpret Web statistics, partly due to the number of indexing programs (robots, knowbots, etc.) that search the Web constantly, I'm sure I've heard from well over 200 people in the past year or so. Often they write to tell me about their own hypertext fiction and ask me to add a link, but they also write just to tell me what a great resource I've compiled, tell my my fiction looks interesting, or, in about a half-dozen cases, ask for an e-mail or telephone interview for an article they are writing about online fiction. This generally doesn't amount to critical feedback so much as cheerleading (or booing in one case), but sometimes it's more substantial and useful. And, by any measure, it's more interactivity between artist and audience than I would expect to receive through publication in small literary journals and, what's more, I enjoy it. It's helpful to know you aren't sending things out into a vacuum but that there is actually an audience out there. It helps give one a sense of the art world that Becker describes coming full circle. And, too, I think it has the potential for the depth and range of effect on my writing that the audience for early versions of "Holier Than Thou" had on its conversion into a hypertext.
A further step along this continuum of interactivity is described by Bolter in Writing Space. Here he is speaking of hypertext systems that are more dynamically interactive than the Web is at present--for example, what he describes may include Storyspace's capacity to "save" a reading, a particular path a reader has followed; or it may refer to "volatile" hypertexts that reconfigure their links based on readers' decisions (see Bernstein et al.). According to Bolter:
The computer now extends the role of performer or interpreter to all forms of writing. In the electronic writing space all texts are like dramas or musical scores. The reader performs the text, perhaps only for himself or herself, perhaps for another reader, who may then choose to perform the first reader's text for others. In this way electronic writing defines a new level of creativity, indeed a myriad of new levels that fall between the apparent originality of the Romantic artist and apparent passivity of the traditional reader (Bolter 1991, 158-9).
Abstract | Future Directions | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: May 1, 1996
Last update: August 4, 1996