| Mon, 10/5
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Hypertext: Storyspace and Eastgate
<< Notes from today's class >>
As we continue to articulate the distinctive properties of "hypertext," we will consider the technical differences between StorySpace and HTML. The production environment of an Eastgate text differs from that of a web-based text, and there are corresponding differences in the formal properties of each, such as with the links and narrative structure.
Eastgate “guard fields” allow the writer to assign priorities to the various links and thereby, to some degree, guide the reader and control her access to the text. Guard fields are somewhat akin to hidden objects in a text-adventure game; in a certain sense readers have to "discover" certain parts of the text before they are cleared to pass through to the next level. These dynamic and conditional links allow the writer to shape the narrative and preserve the architecture and structure of the text.
J. Yellowlees Douglas's story "I Have Said Nothing" features repetition. Repetition and recurrence have a particular place, too, in a text concerned with two car crashes. There is a certain symmetry and asymmetry to these death-events. What is the relation, then, between repetition and the genre of hypertext?
"I Have Said Nothing" contains a number of statements that are arguably self-reflexive about hypertext itself. Note these examples, with the titles of the lexia in brackets:
[Get it down]: “By now you’ve got this down. You’ve got it down, big time.”
[What?]: “He can’t seem to get the narrative order of events quite right.”
[Squeaking]: “Beyond a certain level, we’re all infinitely interchangeable.”
Also note this line from Judy Malloy's l0ve 0ne: "the room appeared to have no exits."
What can we make of this self-reflexivity?
“like the codex it supercedes, hypertext is an incremental development in the technology of writing. But incremental developments (again as in the case of the codex) can sometimes have implications for our understanding of literary forms which are incommensurate with their novelty. Though hypertextual reading seems theoretically very similar to conventional reading, there are in fact substantial practical differences in the way readers of hypertext interpret fictional discourse, and these differences suggest that the fiction of forking paths may represent a significant departure from the fiction of the printed page”
- Stuart Moulthrop, "Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of 'Forking Paths,'" Hypermedia and Literary Studies, eds. George P. Landow & Paul Delany (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994): 125.
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