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Why Hyperfiction Didn't Work by John Miller

Every writer can with no trouble kill his hero in just two lines. To kill a reader, someone of flesh and blood, it suffices to turn him for a moment into the hero of the book, into the protagonist of the biography. The rest is simple . . . (Pavic 307) Hyperfiction, ironically, looked good on paper. In fact, in quality and possibly in quantity, the published body of criticism discussing hyperfiction has probably exceeded the corpus of major works in the genre itself. In the context of postmodern narrative theories and experiments, the advent of electronic hyperfiction stirred excitement among both authors and critics, who saw in electronic texts a medium that might allow the realization of a more interactive, reader-centered experience of narrative fiction. In 1991, J. David Bolter wrote that hypertext reifies the metaphor of reader response (158) and heralded its potential for liberating the text from the hierarchies with which print attempt[s] to impose order on verbal ideas that are always prone to subvert that order (21). Others variously trumpeted, tempered, or despaired of such claims. Sven Bickerts, for example, wrote in defense of the hierarchies whose overthrow Bolter celebrated: domination by the author, Bickerts insisted, has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading (163). Most critics - ever suspicious of the many subterfuges of authority - preserved a note of caution amid their general optimism about hypertexts potential to revolutionize reading. Michael Joyce, both a theorist of hypertext and a pioneering author of hyperfictions, nevertheless declared the wedding of fiction and machine as yet a marriage without issue (178). Underlying all of these positions was the presumption that hyperfiction allows readers a larger role in the construction of the fictional text than does print fiction. In describing the structure of hyperfictions, Bolter invoked the same metaphor Wolfgang Iser uses to describe the experience of reading print fiction. For Iser, the fundamental experience of the reader of fiction is that of a wandering viewpoint traversing a series of moments between what has been and what is yet to be read. According to Bolter, hyperfictions are organized topographically, and the reader moves through them as if exploring a multi-dimensional space. Rather than presenting itself as a journey from one point to another, a hyperfiction presents the reader with something more like an unmapped patch of countryside on which features are linked by a network of paths. Whereas a print text lays out a single route through its territory, a hypertext encourages the reader to explore in multiple directions. Where the text goes and when it ends become choices the reader gets to make. Thus J. Yellowlees Douglas

explains that she decided she had finished Joyces hyperfiction afternoon, a story when, after four different expeditions across the texts topography, she experienced a sense of having both literally and figuratively plumbed the depths of [its] narrative spaces (172). According to Iser, fictional texts make interpretation possible - in fact, necessary - by withholding information, thereby creating gaps the reader must fill. For Iser, texts are more or less literary to the extent that they provide readers with interesting and challenging opportunities to actively make meaning by filling in these gaps to construct a coherent whole, a process Iser calls consistencybuilding. Such gaps are the primary structural feature of hyperfictions. From most points in a hypertext the reader can choose any of several links to move on to or explore. At any point in a hyperfiction, then, the reader seems to have more choices to make and more, or at least more obvious, gaps to fill than in traditional print narratives. In reading such a linked text, the readers freedom to organize the reading of the text is in certain respects greater than that of a the reader of a print text because hyperfiction itself explicitly offers the reader - in fact, requires choices not offered in linear texts. In this freedom, however, may lie Pavics trap. Isers model of active reading requires the reader to decide when the text does or doesnt make sense, where to ask questions, what questions to ask, and how to answer those questions. This work, he argues, is the province of the reader (111). Hyperfictions, however, pose many of these questions for the reader. Consequently, they may actually discourage the reader from posing his or her own. As J. Hillis Miller suggests, hyperfictions appropriate from the reader a function and a responsibility which have hitherto been fundamental to the act of reading (37). By forcing them to make choices at certain points in the reading process, hyperfictions may discourage or distract readers from locating gaps of their own and of thus interacting with the text to make meaning. Furthermore, while asserting that the text needs the readers help to be made into a meaningful whole, Isers model of reading is predicated on the reader assuming that the text can be made whole. As theorists of the technologies of the word such as Walter Ong have noted, the very physical structure of a printed novel, its text stabilized securely between its covers, asserts narrative closure. Gaps can only exist within a structure which is presumed to be otherwise coherent: gaps have to be gaps-in-something. Thus, Isers reading process must begin with a presumption of - or willing suspension of disbelief in - the potential coherence of the text. The identification of gaps in a printed fiction, then, is an act of reading against the grain, of resisting the texts assertion of closure and authority. Unlike print fictions, however, hyperfictions make no

such assertions. Unlike the book, they are mutable and in fact virtually immaterial. Their gaps are conventions of their form. Hyperfiction readers expect multiple, ephemeral narratives and a lack of coherence and consistency. Stuart Moulthrop argues that, in contrast to a print narrative, a hyperfiction is a system which is already present as a totality, but which invites the reader not to ratify its wholeness, but to deconstruct it (Reading From the Map 129). But such hyperfictions present themselves as already deconstructed, like predigested food. A hypertext, writes Joyce, yields at every link. Consequently, both Isers consistencybuilding and Moulthrops deconstruction appear equally pointless to the hyperfiction reader. The very centrality of gaps in hyperfiction diminishes their significance. As Espen Aarseth notes, in hyperfiction these devices are naturalized and therefore do not cause the subversion they might (86); in Joyces afternoon the reader becomes not so much lost as caught, imprisoned by the repeating, circular paths and his own impotent choices (91). Bolter and others saw in hypertext a critique of textual consistency. Moulthrop (again invoking the figure reading as journey) describes hyperfiction as an information highway where every lane is reserved for breakdowns, a demolition epic in which the vehicles continually come apart (though, in this essay too, Moulthrop cautions that hypertext does not represent quite the revolution some fear and others crave) (Traveling 74). Terence Harpold likewise sees the point of hypertext in its failure to cohere: rather than connecting strands into a non-linear, web-like coherence, hypertextual links represent dilatory spaces which disrupt narrative coherence, whether constructed by author or reader. Alluding to Iser, Harpold claims that hyperfiction greatly complicates metaphors of intentional movement that may be applied to the act of reading (129). But such complications are not only possible and common in print narratives, they have significance only in the context of the coherence asserted by print. By presupposing a lack of authority, hyperfiction deprives its readers of the opportunity to make that critique themselves. Ultimately, by foregrounding gaps, hyperfiction diminishes the significance readers assign to the words on the screen. The conventional reader response to puzzlement in a hyperfiction is not to read the words in front of you more carefully, but with a mouse click to exchange them for new ones. Because each piece of hypertext presents itself as a question to which the reader knows there is no answer, the reader soon becomes discouraged from doing the hard work of looking for answers. Hypertext thus participates in contemporary electronic medias general discouragement of careful, concentrated acts of reading by constantly offering viewers quick cuts to new texts. Like mass media, hypertext threatens to turn readers into mere viewers.

Because print promises - however often deceptively - to make coherent sense, it becomes the readers responsibility to try to hold it to that promise and catch it when it reneges. Moulthrop claims that [b]reakdowns always teach us something (Traveling 73). But hyperfictions dont break down: they are broken to begin with. Reading them is less like driving in the breakdown lane than wandering the wrecking yard. The argument that hyperfiction usefully reifies the interactivity of reading begs a question: if print narratives arent fixed to begin with, why break them?
Works Cited Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Bickerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994. Bolter, J. David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Douglas, J. Yellowlees. How Do I Stop This Thing?: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives. Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 159-88. Harpold, Terence. The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 126-38. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems Inc., 1987. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics . Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. Michigan Press, 1995. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Hypertext. Diacritics, 25.3 (1995): 27-39. Moulthrop, Stuart. Reading From the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Eds. Paul Delany and George P. Landow. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. 11932. Moulthrop, Stuart, Traveling in the Breakdown Lane: A Principle of Resistance for Hypertext.Mosaic. 28.4 (December 1995): 55-77. Ong,Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word . London: Routledge, 1982. Pavic, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Source:
http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1826

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