The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  However much the mind, on occasion and generally unprompted, may sense the nearness of distant moments, the closeness of remote places, thus challenging our normal experience of space and time, nevertheless it is evident that much of the pathos of our lives has to do with the stark simplicity of chronology: birth, youth, maturity, death. A novelist may choose to start in medias res or at the last gasp, every kind of mental resistance to the harsh facts of passing time may be recorded, but over the work’s trajectory the reader expects a chronology to be reconstructed. Indeed, such a reconstruction from the tangle of memory and imagination can be considered a conquest, synonymous with the achievement of a certain knowledge and central to the moment of ‘recognition’ which concedes to the author a valuable wisdom about the world we share. That achievement is there in Don Quixote as it is there in Ulysses, or even, though in a more problematic fashion, in Beckett’s trilogy. Borges, one of the writers whom hypertext practitioners most admire, once wrote an essay, ‘A New Refutation of Time’, which, having embarked on a most energetic denial of the reality of the combined enemies substance and time, concludes with a brutal volte-face: ‘The world unfortunately is real; I unfortunately am Borges.’7

  Our willing submission, then, to the convention that one reads a book from front to back, accepting whatever ordering of events the author chooses, partakes of an experience that we recognise from ordinary life: our inevitable submission to the unalterable succession of chronological events. The mind’s frequent yearning for a freedom from linearity (‘the tyranny of the line’8 Coover calls it), often expressed in the non-chronological ordering of events in the text, is thus held in fruitful tension with (indeed expressed through) the implacable forward movement of the numbered pages. A desire to be outside time, free from linearity, can only be expressed within time and the bounds of the line.

  Criticism of the hypertext, still at a promotional stage, resists this acceptance of a fixed order of experience and a fixed narrative line; it champions instead the idea of choice, the notion of the reader’s being involved, through interaction with the text links, in creating the story rather than submitting to it. A typical essay (‘Telewriting’ by Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen) concludes: ‘Though the network is shared, the course each individual follows is different. Thus, no hypertext is the product of a single author who is its creative origin or heroic architect. To the contrary, in the hyper-textual network, all authorship is joint authorship and all production is co-production. Every writer is a reader and all reading is writing.’9

  Two questions have to be asked here: is this really true of the hypertext? If it is true, is it desirable?

  The answer to the first question is no. The traditional text was always ‘interactive’ up to a point, as the comments and glosses on ancient manuscripts suggest. I can (and do!) write in the margin, express my objections or admiration. I can come back years later and wonder in disbelief that I ever thought that way. Or I can read someone else’s reactions and find that he has a totally different Leopold Bloom or Madame Bovary from mine, this despite the traditional form and the ‘single author’. I never think of this personal view of the story as joint authorship.

  In the hypertext, this simple form of engagement is denied me. I cannot scribble on the page. In compensation, when I have finished reading a page I can, or must, choose between a limited number of alternatives to proceed. Certainly it is unlikely that I will read the text in exactly the same order as anyone else. But to say that this makes me a co-writer, to the same extent as the author who prepared the texts and decided what links would be available to me, where and when, is nonsense. I have written nothing. As I choose where to click I have no more power and perhaps less intuition than the hapless tourist lost in Hampton Court maze.

  But even if we were to invent a medium that was truly ‘interactive’ – and there are hypertexts to which readers, or co-authors, can make contributions – a medium where there was (the political rhetoric behind the quotation above is clear enough) a ‘democratic’ equality between author and reader, or rather, between all those involved, would this be desirable? I have written ten novels to date. I have worked hard to keep them distinct. Yet I am bound to acknowledge that one way or another they tend to express the same preoccupations. When I read another’s work it is to confront a different vision from my own, not to steer what I am reading to all-too-familiar destinations. If every reading were my own writing, the world would become dangerously solipsistic.

  It is not hard to imagine Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl being presented as a printed novel. Something would certainly be lost, but a great deal could be gained. Other hypertext narratives, however, have committed themselves more deeply to the medium, seeking a greater distance from the printed book. Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope, or What If The Word Still Won’t Be Still presents a series of pages, most with about 100–200 words of text, and each containing a fragment of narrative, usually comic or grotesque, or some satirical comment on the world. Most pages have four links, two in the left margin and two in the right, often with ironic invitations: the link ‘Tired’ on one side of the page, for example, is balanced by a link ‘Wired’ on the other. If the reader fails to click on a link within thirty seconds, then the choice of the next page is taken out of his hands and the screen is ‘refreshed’ with a new text, often with no immediately evident relationship to what has come before. Since I am a slow reader, this frequently occurs before I have finished the page in front of me. Differently coloured texts and backgrounds link different themes and story lines. Here is an example:

  10

  Hegirascope isn’t without its fun. A labyrinth is created in which the reader seeks to orient himself. It becomes clear that if one of the challenges of narrative is not to appear contrived, but to reflect within the medium a fresh awareness of what is perceived as a meaningless and directionless world without, then the hypertext narrative is admirably equipped to do that. This is no doubt what the enthusiasts mean when they speak of having overcome the limitations of the traditional text.

  The downside of this development is that the form cannot deliver any sense of a satisfying ending. Indeed the very desirability of endings is questioned. One is not easily sure whether one has finished Hegirascope or not, so that the biggest decision the reader finally makes is not which links to click, but when to stop reading and clicking altogether. There comes a point, that is, where you begin to doubt whether tracking down what fragments may remain will add a great deal to the overall experience. At this point you appreciate that one of the most important things the standard book declares about itself, from the moment we pick it up, and then throughout our dealings with it, is its length. The reader can pace himself. The introduction to Hegirascope tells us that there are ‘175 pages traversed by 700 links’, but I soon lost count of how many I had read. Moulthrop has already updated the work once, adding new pages, and he may well do so again.

  While the earlier hypertexts still contained a large volume of words and possible stories, more recent productions tend to be shorter, with a more ambitious mixing of sound, image and text. Talan Memmott introduces his work Lolli’s Apartment thus:

  Lolli’s Apartment is an experiment in the ruination of contexts and the reconstruction of this ruin; or, the gathering of its fragments. The piece brings together a selective yet varied set of resources. The first operation in such a project is the construction of something that can be ruined. In this case, the initial construction is an analect of texts and contexts.

  Minoan Architecture and cult practices, Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, Friedrich Nietzsche’s critiques of women and the Dionysian, Orphic hymns … All of these are touched upon in the piece.

  Some references are obvious – such as, the use of an excerpt from the floor plan of the Knossos Labyrinth as an architectural model for the navigation through Lolli’s Apartment, and the hero’s name being Fredrick Nietzsche (an impostor professor).11

  Readers, or users, of this hyper
text will judge for themselves, as they click about the rather primitive maze Memmott has created, deciphering texts that mix the portentous and the deflationary, whether there isn’t a serious gap here between the promise of all this cultural reference and the effect achieved. A typical fragment reads thus:

  The pie-in-the-sky must die … Its fumes, its rays, its parts and pieces can no longer be taken seriously … I can’t submit to hope. We, the hopeless abandon future-progress for technologies closer to the dirt … A tectonic model that limits Institutions to the elemental, to their integration with the matter that surrounds them. The false, rather, the pretend futures of the Sophomore well-up and wither. The faith in ends, a graduation, a certified future, erode into disarray, depart and open, forming legions of xenologically ordered systems. This is where our association begins.12

  In the end (the expression still seems to have its uses), however short the written texts in the overall production, and however ingeniously those texts are mixed with other elements, still the quality of the writing and of whatever the author has to say through it remains of vital importance to our enjoyment of the whole. For all his moments of playfulness, Memmott does not score highly here.

  In line with the notion that hypertext narrative is a collective rather than individual effort, many texts are presented anonymously. The illustrated text Berceuse, for example, offers painterly images, New Age music and snatches of lyrical text within which links are indicated by differently coloured words. Float the cursor over the link and, even before you click, a landscape within the landscape comes into view, while the music and text change. ‘A lilac dusk stretched across a summer sky’ announces one text. ‘We ate golden plums, collecting their stones in the grass beneath our naked feet.’ Above an orange hillside dominated by a giant, Dalí-like plum, a banner, or perhaps caption, moves from right to left announcing: ‘I choked on an Olive in the kitchen there was Honey in a geometric jar.’13 Meantime the screen glows, the music keens.

  Of such and similar exercises, the critic Stephanie Strickland remarks that they push ‘at the edges of awareness by explicitly incorporating peripheral attention into the act of reading’.14 This is an idea that requires consideration. The time has come to ask why all these hypertexts, even when intriguing and entertaining, ultimately disappoint. Perhaps in the end their most precious function will turn out to be that of inviting us to consider why the convention of the traditional narrative in linear form has held for so long and will most likely continue to do so.

  Towards the end of the Odyssey, when Helen and Menelaus are safely, scandalously, back home, they are surprised one evening by the arrival of Telemachus. All three are eager to talk about Troy. It is the one great experience of their lives. But it is too painful. The young man’s father, Odysseus, is missing presumed dead. Helen and Menelaus would have to reflect on her betrayals, his weakness. So Helen leaves the room and returns with some drugged wine. This is a drug, Homer tells us, that would allow you to talk of your brother’s death with a smile on your face. The threesome drink and spend a happy evening recovering all that was most awful and exciting in their lives, to wake the following morning refreshed.

  What is the drug that narrative offers which allows us to pass through the burning Troy and escape unscathed? For this is the quality of the great and important narrative, that we can take pleasure in confronting all that in the normal way provokes the greatest unease. The Indians of the Vedic period believed that metre could provide the necessary protection: ‘So as not to be hurt’, says the Taittiriya Samhita of the priest, ‘before coming near the fire he wraps himself in the metres.’15 The advice is more practical than it may appear. How did Dante pass through the inferno after all, if not with ancient Rome’s most able poet as his guide and the fiercely regular chime of the terza rima to keep things moving? ‘The many people and their ghastly wounds did so intoxicate my eyes that I was moved to linger there and weep’16 says the pilgrim in the inferno. But Virgil, master of the rhythmic word, hurries the traveller on: ‘What are you staring at … the time we are allotted soon expires and there is more to see.’17

  By mixing the rhythmic word with other distracting effects, is the hypertext intensifying or diluting the artist’s capacity to enchant, to allow us access to the most powerful experiences while safely wrapped in his metres, in the propulsive forward movement of his narrative? Our engagement with the written word, during which the eye becomes a conduit for sound and rhythm, activating other senses beyond the visual, dulling external apprehensions, inviting immersion, is not likely to be enhanced by elements that ‘explicitly incorporat[e] peripheral attention’. Substituting our immediate environment with an imagined world, the written text repels intrusion. During our most intense reading we are hardly aware of turning the pages, or of the sounds in distant rooms. The situation is difficult to recreate when the mind is halted by a troubled choice between four links. Perhaps not for nothing, most hypertexts are either diffusely oneiric, or corrosively satirical.

  Within a couple of decades of its invention the motion picture had achieved heights it would never surpass. Less remarkable conceptually than the word, the sequence of silent images in a darkened room nevertheless very rapidly reproduced the antique combination of narrative content within a rhythmic frame. Those who have seen Murnau’s Sunrise, Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, as those who have read the Iliad, will be aware that there is no progress in art. The hypertext by contrast, though it has been around for perhaps twenty years now and has enjoyed the benefit of very rapid technical developments, and much attention from the more avant-garde universities, has not enjoyed the same flowering.

  Intriguingly, however, there are practitioners who have now dropped the rhetoric of choice that grew up around the use of the hyperlink and are following a different line. Felix Jung’s hypertext poems are curious in this respect. A sonnet appears on the screen at a slow, measured speed imposed by the writer and with an abrupt, even aggressive use of images. The frame around the text is headed with a traditional menu bar, so that the space looks exactly like any screen we are used to working on. Yet try as we might, we find it impossible to introduce the cursor into the text space or in any way interact with it. Rather, the cursor is taken out of our control, as if someone had taken the pen from your hand, and begins to move of its own accord, clicking and changing and generating the text and its images before our eyes.

  At this point we are even more passive than before the printed page. I quote below a poem entitled ‘Cruelty’. The reader will not, I think, find it difficult to imagine the graphics Felix Jung uses to reinforce his point, which, it has to be said, is clear enough when the poem appears on its own, bereft of illustrations. Indeed, it can be read like any sonnet written on any page 400 or 500 years ago. To date it is the best criticism I have seen of the aesthetics of the hypertext narrative.

  Cruelty

  I need to draw the line for you and me:

  a poem is not Democracy. You are

  my hands, you serve and wait. You’re something I

  manipulate. Let me be clear on this.

  I paint a tree and, on the ground, a white

  and perfect egg that’s fallen (now you

  cry). I paint a snake (and here you cringe).

  But now that I am painting you, you flinch

  because you know this room. Your father (whom

  you never knew) is here as well, despite

  his gravestone and the years. You try to kiss

  his hand, but I erase your lips, his eyes –

  I leave the rest. Get mad. Get in your car

  and leave. All poems, at heart, are tyranny.18

  fn1 It is curious that Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, which deals mainly with the ‘materiality’ (p.6), as she puts it, of the written text, seems unaware of the many writers across the centuries who have offered profound meditations on the physical aspects of text and language: Shakespeare, Swift (exhaustively), Browning, Joyce and Beckett, to name but an Anglo
-Irish few. The omission of their reflections is emblematic of what we might call ‘the provincialism of the contemporary’ that dogs a great deal of criticism in the field. Though the range of sources may be geographically wide, it is chronologically restricted. ‘My title, Writing Machines,’ Hayles tells us, ‘plays with the multiple ways in which writing and materiality come together’ (p.26). She goes on to express her admiration for Milorad Pavic, Ursula Le Guin, Paul Zimmerman and Robert Coover, but seems unaware of Gulliver’s encounter, almost 300 years ago, with the professor who invented the word machine on the fantastical island of Lagado. ‘Roland Barthes’, she tells us, ‘uncannily anticipated electronic hypertext by associating text with dispersion, multiple authorship and RHIZOMATIC structure’ (p.30). Published in 1704, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub covered the same ground. If one wishes to disturb chronology, much of it could be read as a satire of recent literary enthusiasms. Hayles’s demand at the opening of her second chapter, ‘Why have we not heard more about materiality?’ (p.19) thus rings hollow.

  Real Dreams

  * * *

  [Émile Zola]

  THE NAME ÉMILE Zola raises certain expectations. So central and well established is his position in the history of the novel that we cannot open a work of his without bracing ourselves for the shock of grim and sordid reality, be it the brothels of Paris or the coal-mining communities of Valenciennes. This, after all, is the author who insisted on the application of two ‘scientific’ principles to narrative art: the notion that character is entirely determined by inherited traits and environment; and that description should proceed by the objective recording of precise detail, preferably witnessed at first hand. The result would be ‘naturalism’, an even more meticulous and comprehensive representation of reality than Stendhal or Balzac had achieved. How strange then to find a work of his entitled The Dream.