Part Three: The Possible Spiderweb

Aristotle says hypertext is evil, or would if he knew what it was. It has no sequence, no beginning or end, no size, no unity.

I disagree.

Hypertext fiction has all of those things, just not in the way the writer of this article is used to thinking about them. To a very closed-minded person, hypertext fiction may seem impossible. But how many things that we have today would seem impossible to societies past. For a long time the idea of a "play" with more than two or three actors was also impossible. Our ideas of what is literature and what is poetry change constantly over the centuries.

First, the idea of fixed sequence. Hypertext fiction does have a fixed sequence--a choice of fixed sequences. The fixed sequence is all possible combinations that can be made with the links the author provides at any given time. If every possible link can be found on the index page, then that is how the author meant it to be, and she is telling us that the fixed sequence is all. Not none, as the article implies, but all.

Conversely, if there is a single starting point with three or four links per page, which each link to three or four other pages in turn, that is a different sort of fixed sequence, where the author is telling us that our choices are not all but some.

In the event of Strings, which I also talk about here, there was a starting page, where we could select any of the links. Some were numbered, implying it would be useful to the reader to click on them in that order, but the choice was ultimately ours.

Second, definite beginning and ending. Of course there is a beginning: the first page we come to is the beginning.  The end also exists, whether it means getting bored and hitting the red X in the corner, finishing every page, or reaching the point that says THE END, if one exists. In Strings, the number of possible pages was smaller, so we felt a more concrete sense of completion than we did when we read other works. Whether or not a work of hypertext fiction is linear or not is irrelevant because we approach it in a linear fashion, and we experience it inside the stream of time.

Last, unity and wholeness. To an extent, the reader has to do some work here to find the unity in a story, whether it is the author's or their own. Hypertext is not lazy clicking on links until we get to the end. It requires some thought. With so few people wanting to put any thought into reading anymore, maybe hypertext fiction will never be the medium of choice for some people. Strings was such a simple work, but the simplicity is what gave us that feeling of wholeness when we finished reading.

I am slightly bemused by anyone who would call hypertext fiction a challenge to convention when it should instead be seen as a natural metamorphosis. If language is a living, changing thing, why can't books be the same? We already have so much: ebooks, blogs, email, text-based RPG's. We probably should have anticipated some kind of change. Declaring that books are "the end of the road" so to speak, is just as silly as that urban legend that states the US Department of Patents was shut down for a few years because it was thought there was "nothing left to invent."

Poetry and fiction equally require shape and limit to achieve form. The shape of a book is a line. The shape of hypertext is a spider web. Neither go on forever, because it's just physically impossible. Even though the shape is new, and somewhat unorthodox, hypertext fiction still has a shape.

Even if all my points are completely invalid, why should we discard hypertext just because we think Aristotle would tell us to if he was here? Aristotle wrote his points with a different sort of story in mind, and it is not his fault that his view was limited by the era he lived in.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. As life changes, so do the stories. Oral tradition becomes written, written becomes...what? Are we supposed to abandon storytelling because it no longer fits with our medium of choice?

Hypertext fiction is possible.

Otherwise we wouldn't have any.

Trackback