yellowlees douglas

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What Interactive Narratives Do That Print

Narratives Cannot ] YELLOWLEES DO U G LAS

I only wish I could write with both hand s so as not to forget one thing while I am say

ing anothe r. - Saint Teresa, The Cumplete Worksof St Teresa of]esu.s

f written langua ge is its elf re lentl essly linear and sequential, 1 how canhypertext be nonsequentia l writing with reader-controlled links, as TedNelson, who both created tbe concept and co in ed the term, has argued? 2

How can we read or write nonsequentially, sinc e language , by definition,is sequential? Many definitions of hypertex t include this emphasis on nonsequentiality, as does the succinct definitio n put forward by George Landow and Paul Delany in their introduction to Hypermedia and it erary Stu,dies: Hypertext can be composed, and read, nonsequentially; it is a variab lestructure, composed of blocks of text and the electronic links that jointhem. 3 But these definitions are slightly misleading, since both hypertextfiction and digital narratives enable readers to experience their contents ina variety of sequences-as Nelson himself acknowledges in Literary Ma -chines.-+ s definitions go, those that emphasize nonsequentiality are alsorather resuictive, since they tend to set hypertex t and hypermedia off fromprint in a kind of binary opposition: if print is both lin ear and re lentless lysequential, it follows, then, tha t hypertext and hypermedia mu st be nonlinear and nonsequential.

The dilemma in most short, succinct definitions of hypertext lie s in thedefinition of the word seqmnce. s used in the foregoing definitions, sequenceand sequential denote a singular, fixed, continuous, and authorita tive orderof readi11g and writing. But sequencecan also mean a following of one thingafter another; success ion; arrangement; a related or continuous se ri es, according to the like s of the American Heritage DictiO Tlaty. n this context, itbecomes sign ificant that the Latin ro o t of sequence,sequi, means simply tofollow . All interactive narratives have sequences- some of them more disorienting than others, granted- making the medium, if anything, polysequential. The process of reading interactiv e n ar rativ es th emse lves is as

FROM ESSENTIALS OF THE THEORY OF FICTION

(3RD EDITION), ED. BY MICHAEL J. HOFFMAN

AND PATRICK D. MURPHY (DURHAM, NC: DUKE

UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005, PP. 443470


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hypertext theorist John Slatin has noted, discontinuous, nonlinear, andoften associative - but hardly nonsequential: His interpretation of hypertext accom modate s Nelson's definition of no nsequentia l writing by inferring that Nelson meant wr iting in that the logical connections betweenelements are primarily associative rather than syllogistic, as [they are] inconventional text, which closely corresponds to Bush's vision of the original Memex as well as the way in which most readers expe rience hypertext

fiction. 5Arriving at brief and succinct definitions of an entire medium in a single

sentence or even a mere phrase, at any rate, is more reductive than illuminatin g, a lit tl e like describing a book as pages containing text that follows a fixed, lin ear order. While that mig ht work perfec tly well in describing instructions on how to operate your vcR, it doesn't quite cut it when itcomes to nailing down the works ofWilliam Burr oughs, nor does it accountfor ti1 e chapters on whales in Moby-Dick or the likes of either Hopscotcb orBarthe s's Tbe Pleasu re of tbe Text Moreover, it is not likely that anyonecurrently attempting to describe hypertext fiction, a med ium that is onlybeginning t toddl e through its infancy, is going to hit on an illuminating ortime-resistant definition. Not only are the aesthetics and co nventions of themedium evolving, but the teclmology itself is also sti ll deve loping, as is itscont ent, which curr ently borrows from ge nre and avant-ga rd e print fiction,cinema, dventun and arcade games, and graphic novels like Nlaus.

Further, [ . . critics, blinded by the small number of early works, havemistaken the hallmar ks of a single type or genre of hypertext fiction for thedefining c haract er istics of a ll pr esent and future works w ithi n th e medium. 6

This acco un ts partly for Birker ts's and Miller's flat rejections of hypertextfiction's aesthetic possibilities- although both critiques were probably alsoinfluence d by flawed assumptions about digital narratives threatening torepla ce print stories and nove ls. But this tendency t o conflate ear ly work andth e aesthetic possibilities o f th e med ium also sheds light on th e puzz lingcritiques of hypertext fiction from otherwise insightful theorists like JanetMurray, who equates li terary hypertext wi th postmodem narratives thatrefu se t 'p rivileg e' any one order or readi ng or interpretive frameworkand end up privil eging co nfusi on itse lf 7 I f th e earliest exampl es of hype rtext fiction happen to represent the sop histicat ed play with chronology,completeness, and closure that draws many of its precedents from avantgarde print genres, it hardly follows that all hypertext fiction will resistprivil eg ing one readi ng of cha racter or one set of choices for navigatio nthrou gh its network of potential narratives, or even that au th ors wi ll plump

J. YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

for the conspicuously postmodem over, say, the hallmarks of the mystery,the hard-boiled detective story , or science fiction. Print fiction, after all, ishardl y a mo nolithi c entity : for every Great Expectat ions or Penuasion tha tBir kerts and Mi ller wish to defend from the onslaught of digital narratives, there are scores of Harlequin romances, John Grisham thrillers, andDani elle Steel paperbacks that read ers consume in a matter of hours andscarcely reca ll a week later. Print fiction means an abundance of genres a ndcategori e s The C1ying of Lot 49 existing alongside Princess Daisy TheBridges of Madison County outselling Middlemarcb just as cinema includesboth Tbe Magnificent Ambe1-sonsand DumiJ and Dumber for all it may paincritics to admit it. This much is certain: the examples we have before us areonly a begin ning , the early efforts of writers who grew up witl1 the singularity, linearity, and fixity of print. Imagine someone supplying an accurate definition of the content and aesthetic possibilities of all t elevisionprograms once and for all during the Milton Berl e era, when tel evisionborr owed heavi ly from vaudeville and thea te r, an.d you w ill have the rightid ea. For the purposes of nvestigating how readers experience and interpre tinteractive narratives in the here and now, it is far better for us to define justwhat hypertext fiction and digital narratives are, and what they can do, byexamining just what they do that print does n o t or can n o t do.

Interactive Narratives Have No Sipgular

Definitive eginnings and Endings

Beg in at the begi nnin g, the King s aid gravely, the n pr oceed straig ht throug h to the

end. Then stop . - Alice in Wonderland

Read ers of print narratives generally begin reading where print begins onthe first page of he book, story, or article and proceed stra ight th r ough thetext to the end . Althou gh reading print narra tives invo lves readers ' tlmmbing back through the pages t o clarify an impression or recall a name and acontinual looking forward or predicting what viii happen nel.. l, we nonetheless move more or less straightfo rwardly through Pride and Prejudice orHuckleberry Finn. 8 That is not to say tl1at it is imp ossible to begin read ingTbe Great Gatsby at the point w here Daisy and Gatsby are reunited for thefirst time in Nick's living room. But the rea der who begins reading a printnarrative in medias res is placed in a situation somewhat analogous to afilm goer w ho has arriv ed in the darken ed cin ema forty minutes into a feature. P laced in these circumstances, we snuggle mere ly to establish who is

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who and und ers tand just w hat is takin g place- and we bring to th e text

none of the opinions, expecta tions, conclusions, or, for that matt er, pleasures that wou ld otherwi se be available to us had we followed the nan-ative

from its beginning. The reader's gradua l progres sion from beginnin g toend follows a carefully scripted rout e that ensures the reader does ind eed

get from d1e beginning to the end in the way the writer wants him or her toget ther e. 9

Wllil e many digital narratives be gin with a scene or sequence that es tablishes both the iden tity of the user as part o f an intrigue or quest and theparameters for the plot, mos t hypertext narratives have no sin gle beginning.In Stuart Moulthrop's Victo1y Garde n, readers are confronted with , among amultitude of possible way s of entering th e hypertext, th r ee lists that seem torepre sent a so rt of table of co nt ents: Pl aces to B e, Paths to Expl ore,'' a ndPath s to Deplore. Unlike a tabl e of contents, ' h owever, these lists do not

repres ent a hierarchical map of the narrative, providin g readers with a pre

view of the topics they will explore during their read in g and the order inwhich they will experi ence them. 10 Th e first place or path in me list has nopriority over any of me othe rs - readers will not necessarily encounter itfirst in the course of their reading and need not encounter it at all. Each ofthe words or phrase s in stea d acts as a contact point for readers enterin g thenarrativ e . By choosing an intriguing word or particularl y interesting phr1:1seeven constructing a sentence out of a set of choices that Mou lmrop suppl iesreaders find memselves launched on one of the many pams through thetext. n print narrati ves, reading the table of conten t s if there i s o n isgenerally irre levant to O I.Jr experi ence of the narrati ve itself: our readingexperi e nce begins with the first word s of the narrati ve and is compl ete d bythe last words on the last page . n Victory Garden and most hypertext fiction,however, reade rs have to begin makin g cho ices about the ir interests and thedirecti ons in wh ich the y wish t o pursu e them right from square on e.

Mo r e str iking ly in t eractive narra tiv es have no single ending. Victory Gar-

den has six different points of closur e whi le Michael Joyce's afternoon hasfive or more - depending on the order in whi ch the reader exp lores thenarrati ve space- since the sequenc e in w hich plac es are read determi neswheth er or not read ers ca n move beyond certain d ec ision points in thenarrati ve. And mo u gh the plot's pu zzles, twists, and challenges in bothGadget and Douglas Adams Starship Titanic cul min ate in a single endga mesequen ce d1at ratifi es the reader's success in havin g solved me story's cen

tral puzz le, Obsidian challenges read ers to allow th e Conductor to l iveresultin g in me world as we know it being remad e o r to de stroy the

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Condu ctor and the Ceres Project and save the world. Afte r making one lastdecision in Obsidian reade rs still have opportunities to view me outcome s of

the alternative scenario. More satisfyin g sti ll are Myst s three distin ct endings mat accompany readers' deci s ion s to believe Achenar's, Sirrus's, orAtrus's vers io n of events, and the eight potential endings to Titan ic Adven-ture out of Time. Deciding when the narrative has finished become s a function of readers deciding when th ey have had enough, or of under stand ingthe story as a strUcture that, as Jay Bolt er notes, can embrace contradictoryoutcomes. 11 Or , as one stude nt reader of in t eracti ve narratives realized, ashe completed a series of readings of afternoon:

We have spent our whole lives reading stories for some kind of end, somesort of co mpletion or goa l that is reached by the characters in the story . . . Ireali zed this goal is not actua lly reached by the characte r, rathe r it is reachedby our own selves . . . . [It] occurs when we have decided for ourselves thatwe can put down th e s tory and be co ntent with our interpretation of it.When we feel satisfi ed that we have go tten enough fr om the story, we are

complete. 12

Th i s particular sense of an endin g is, however , by no means uniqu e tointera ct ive narrative s. Although print narratives ph ys ically end, li teraryconvention s dictate that endings satisfy or in some way reply to expe cta tionsraised during th e course of the narr ative. As psych o lin gu ists studying printstories have noted: e pisodes end w h ere the desired state of chan ge occu rsor clearl y fails. In most sto ries, goals are satisfied and when goal satisfactionoccur s th e protagonist engages in n o further action. 13 n Stuart Moulthrop's interactive fanta sy Forking P aths, based on the Jorge Lui s Borgesshort story The Garden of Forkin g Paths,'' readers can experience nofewer than twe lve separate instance s of what we mi ght ca ll points of closure - places where th e projected goals of the protagonist inv olved in a

particular narrative strand are satisfied, or where th e tensions or conflic tsthat have give n rise to the narrative s tr and a re resolved.

Th e multiplicity of narrative strands, me pleth ora of points of closure,the in crease d difficulty of reading in t eractiv e narrativ e s as we shall discover in dte next chapt ers - can combin e to stretch the time r equired toread an int eractive nov ella like Victory Garden with nea rly a thou sand segmen ts of text and more than twenty-eight hund red links, to seventy hours.Compare mis with th e time requir ed for the average reader to co.nsum e a

three-hundred-page nov e l generally anywhere from s ix to twelve h o urs. 14

Even a hyp ertext ficti o n as brief as J oyce's Twelve B lue, with ninety-six

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segme nts of ext bound by 269 lin ks , conta ins multiple sequen ces that feedinto other st rands, crisscross them, loop end lessly, or arriv e at points ofclosure, with n o single reading exhausting the branching and combina torypossibili ties of the text. Un like print narrati ves, wh ere eac h chapter builds

upon the pr eced ing one and lead s to a single, determinate conclusion , th e

narrative stra n ds in hypertexts can lead to numerous points of closure without satisfyin g t he reader. Or the reader can be satisfi ed wi thout reaching anypoint of clo sure at al l.

Readers of Interactive Narr atives Can Proceed n lyon

th e asis of Cho ices They Make

As noted in the previ ous chapter, in the past twenty yea rs th e co ncept ofreadi ng as a pass ive activity has become theore tic ally passe, an untenables t n c ~held strictly by the unenlightened . Readers are now seen as breathinglife into texts, reifyin g, or concretizing th eir poss ibilities- even receivin gthe text by crea ting it , in an effort nearly tantamo unt to that exerted by theauthor. As Barthes argues in The Death of the Author,"

[A) text is made of multip le writin gs, drawn from man y culture s and enteringinto murual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, bur there is one placewhere this multip licity is focused and th at place is the reader, not . the

author. [T]o give wri ting its future the birth of the reader must b e atthe cost of the death of the Author."

Yet reading print narrati ves is far fro m bein g a literally interactiv e activity, ifwe examine existi ng definitions of in terac tivity . Media theorist Andy Li p pman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media L ab has succinctly defin ed intera ctivity as "mutua . and simultan eo us acti vi ty on th epart of two participants, usual ly working toward some goal, but not ne cessari ly - a definition that can be met admirably thu s far o nly by so methi ng

as technologi cally unremarkable as human conversation. 6 For thi s "mutualand simul taneous activity" to be truly interactive, however, it must also,Lippman believes, contain a few other components.

Inwruptibility: parti cipants should be theoretically ab le to trade rol esduring th e in teraction, as speakers do in conversa ti on, and not simp ly take

turns in occupying the mor e active or more pass ive roles in the interaction.Fine granularity: actors should not hav e to wait for the '' end" o f some

thing to interact, with true interactivity being interruptible at the granularity level of a single word.

448 ] J. YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

Graceful degradation: the parti es inv olved can sti ll continue the int eract ion without interruption , even if non seq uitur s or unanswerable queries

or requests ent er in t o it.Limited look-ahead: goa ls and outcom es in the int eraction cannot be com

pletely predetermined at the ou tset of the activity by either of the twoparties, with the interaction create d on the fly, or coming into being onlyat the mom ent gestures, words, o r action s are expressed.

Absenceo a single clear-cut default path or action: parties in the in teractioncanno t have definite recourse to a single or "default" path, one available toth em throu ghout th e interaction without their having to make any activ edecisions for intera ctio n.

The impression o an infinite database: acto rs in an interaction need to beable to mak e decisi ons and tak e action from a wide ran ge of seeming lyend less possibilities.

When we converse, we stop or talk across each other (interrup tibili t y )ofte n in the midst of a word or phras e (line granularity) - and ask eachot h er questions to whic h our parmer may not have answers o r even introduce n on sequi tu r s in t o th e conversation (graceful degradation). We can

refuse to b e cast in the ro le of cynic or id ealist as we engage in an informal ,conversationa l debate (no default), change sub jects ab ruptl y or follow anunfo reseen shift in the direction of th e conve rsation (limit ed look-ahead).U nless w e find ours elves in th e company of a true ve teran b ore, we seldomopera te under the impression that our "database," the s tor e of subjects andmate rial from which we draw the shared opi nion s, emo tion s, and id eas thatfo rm the ba sis of the co nversation, is anything but unlimited.

But accordi ng to this model o f in t eractio n , the average reader poringover Jane Eyre or Ulysses is pla ced in th e positio n of so meon e listening to amonologu e . We can interrupt only b y closing the book or allowin g ou rat ten tion to wander, so the gra n ularity to our interruption is the entire bookitself. There is only one path through all but th e most expe rimen tal ofprint narrativ es (the se exceptions includ e The Pleasure o he Text or JulioCo rcizar 's Hopscotch as we shall see). And if I try t focus o nly on thereferences to material wealth in The Great Gao-fry- leapin g fro m D aisy'svoice sounding "lik e money" t o a stre et vendor' s a bsurd r esemblan ce toJohn D. Rockefe lle r - m y interaction with the novel will not simp ly degrade decided ly ungr ace full y, it will very likely collapse into mere in comprehe nsion. My look-ahead is also completely de t er minate and limit ed. H Ibecome impatient with the unfolding of Agatha Christie's na rra tive TbeMurder o Roger Ackroyd I can simply skip forwa rd to th e e nd and find out

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who bump ed off Rog er Ackroyd, and no matter where I pause to skipahead-wh ether I stop ~ chapter 4 or 24 th e murderer will always b e thenarrator. And, of course, m y da tabase will l w ~ y sbe confined to the words

in print enclosed between two cove rs, even if he signifi cance of he text andthe reper toire of nterpr etive s trategie s available to m e were to embrace theentire existing lit erary canon.

Conversely, whe n read ers ope n mo st in t eractive narratives, they can b egin makin g dec isio ns about where to move and what to r ead right from theoutse t , even, as in Victory Gttrden right from the text' s title. Most segmentsfeature text that has indi vidua l wo rd s or phrases linked t o o ther plac es o ricons that act as navigational tools: arrow s representing forwa rd and backward mov ement, a featur e of many hypertext narrativ es; the map of theUn ited Stat es and highwa y ico ns in Trip ; a schematic map that recall s th eLondon Undergro und journey planner and a map of the passen gers in eachcar in 2S]; the map of the shi p in Titanic; a Mood BarTM in MidnightStranger that invites users to respond to characte rs by indicating gr een,ambe r or red hues - presumably repre se nting repart ee that will push theconversati on alo ng, shift it into idle , or halt it in its tracks. 17 Unless segments are chai ned in a sequence with no options for navi gation within eachsegment, reades can interrupt most interactive narrative s with in each segment - clicking on a word in afternoon or one of the brightly colored thread sin Twelve Blue, wand ering up and down the seemingly endl ess corrid orsof Trtanic, twisting do orkn obs at random. The words, paths, and actionsavailable as interruption s, how ever, are chose n in advance by the authorof the int eractive narrati ve and not by th e reader - an aspect of hyp ertext

fiction that Espen Aarseth claims mitigat es the medium' s possibilitie s forbona fide interactivity, classifying it, inst ead, [ as parti cipation , pla y oreven use. 18

Furth e rm ore, interacti ve narratives typically repr esent a spectrum ofdia logues b etwee n reader and au thor anticipated in advance by the author,

e liminatin g any possibility of grace ful degradatio n. f ponder the relationship between the unfaithful husbands and wives in afternoon and those inWOE neit her narrative can answer my query. Even the bots in StarsbipTitanic- ostensibly armed witl1 thousands ofli nes of dial ogue that should, atthe very lea st, e nable them to respo nd to th e words and sentences typed in byusers- respond to Unes within highl y confined sc ripts. Insult Nobby, theelevato r bot, and he cries, Wo t? Wot? - the same respo nse h e' ll also

supply to a doze n other qu e ries and stat ements. P ose a question to thesnip py deskbot, and sh e rep lies tar tly I'll ask the que s tions here, befor e

450 ) J. YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

proce eding with queri es that you must an swe r according to a script; r efuse toanswer them o r supply an answe r differe nt from thos e she obvious ly seeks ,

and you are doomed to listening to tl1em repeated ov er and over again, adnauseam. For all th e deve lopers of Stm;bip Titani c may have labor ed forweeks over the bots ' scrip ts, the main interaction re mains between user andthe tool s necessary to defuse the bomb aboard the ship, replace Titania'shead, and route the ship successfully home again, with the hots remainingintermediaries, obstacl es, or h elpmat es in each of these tasks. And co ntrary to Murray's beli ef that devices like Midnight Stranger s Mood Barmake for less-o btrusiv e interfaces for int eraction , it ca n feel downrighteerie to hav e a traveling businesswoman come on to you merely becauseyou answ ered a seemingly innocuous qu ery with a tap on the green end ofthe spe ctru m, particularl y when yo u, the reader, ar e stra ight , femal e andmerel y trying to locat e the whereab outs of a mysteri ous intergalactic object.19 Whenever intera ctio ns have been designed, the methods and consequenc es of nterrupting them can feel mor e than a littl e limited or contrived.

Still, r eaders can meander around an interactiv e narrative in a mannernot possible in print or cinema : in both Titanic narratives, I can wanderaround the transatlantic liner or the in tergalactic spaceship at my leisure,examinin g objec ts, ridin g tl1e elevators , making small ta lk with staff. As youamble around exp lorin g, however, you eve ntually become aware that youractions have become decoupled from all aspects of th e plot. Unlike a trainjnn1pin g th e tracks, howeve r, your actions do not bring all po tentia l forinteracti o n with the text to a screeching halt. Your aimless exploration s do,howev er, contai n you within a temp ora l and plotl ess limbo, where timestands sti ll and your interactions with bots, crew m em bers, or passenge rs

becom e severely restri cted, if not impossible. 20

While interactive narrati ves do not genera lly reward random explorations of the text- except when tl1ey happen to int erse ct with th e plot'schallen ges and conundrums by pu r e chance - th ey offer readers a series of

options for exp eriencin g the plot , rather than the singu lar skein that connects print novels and stories. 21 On the no-default continu um , in t eractivenarrativ es fall so mewhere between th e n o- default abso lut e of conv ersatio n,where conve rsationali sts may gamely ny to answer you or listen even whenyou sudd enly shunt the topic un d er discussion to some thing completelydifferent, and th e default-only m ode o f films - eve n on DVD or videodisc - where viewing segme nts of narrative in random orde rs mak es a hash

equally of plot, charact ers ' motivations, ca uses , and effec ts.n Web- and disk-ba sed hyp ertext fiction, default s ge nerall y take th e

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form of arrow keys and represent the strongest links between one segment

and another, usually tied toge the r causalJy. In one scene in Carolyn Guyer'sQuibbling clicking on the Storyspace path key, an arrow takes the readerfrom the segment where one character pries open a cigar box to the nextsegment in d1e sequence, where he hesitates as he opens it, and on to thenext segment, where he peers inside. These links are caUed defaults inStoryspace terminology because they represent t he action taken when readers choose to explore what may come next, instead of choosing namedpaths to other segments from a menu or foUowing links between segmentsconnected by word s in the text. Web-based hypertexts like Trip sometimes use default links to tie to geth er narrative sequences that run to two or

three segments so that readers experience and enjoy se t pieces and vignettesas unbroken st r ings. Disk-based hypertexts, depending on the author's particu lar designs for potential interactions, may feature default links to andfrom virtually every segme nt of ext, so that when readers reach the p lace Icall Lolly in n.ftemoon or The End in I Have Said Nothing, the absenceof a default can signal a potentia l ending of the narrative or a spo t at whichthe reader s must pause, reconno ,iter, and decide whe th e r and how - to

continue reading.Even the presence of clear-cut links between causal sequences- or a

single, clear-cut path d1rough an entire narrative - does not provide a sin

gular, authoritative version of the text d1at maintains priority over others.Defaults in afternoon WOE, and Victory Gardm do not provide a masterversion of dle text. 2 Often, defaults deliberately play off readers' e:-.:pectations, as in WO E , where readers using defaults shuttle between places describing passionate lovemaking between two couples. Because dle defaultseems like dle simplest and, therefore, most d irect lin k between places, weassume that the stroking and groaning taking place between an unnamedcouple in dle first place we encounter belong to the same couple engagingin postc oital talk and smoking in the second . Since default connections donot invol ve us in the overt, more obtrusive acts of inding links in the text orchoosing paths from a menu, hypertext readers ma y be tempted to seedefaults as equ iva lents to the linear and singu lar connections characteristicof print. We djscover this assumption with a jolt when we find that thecoup le in the fir st place consists of husband and wife, and, n th e second, ofilie same husba nd and his wife's best friend . Default connections can jarreaders , leap between narrative strands, and overturn predictions just asoften as iliey can seamless ly move readers from one place to the n ext .

The impression of an unlimited database is not as impossible to convey

452 ] . YELLOW LEES DOUGLAS

as it may at first appear. The interactiv e narrativ e and simulation created by

Mark Bernstein and Erin Sweeney, The Election of 1 9 1 2 has r69 nodescontaining information on the people, issues, and contexts surro unding theelection, connected by an average of 4 3 lin ks per node. Because this nwnber of nodes can be comprehensively explored in one or two reading sessions, dle database can seem co nsp icuously limited to readers. Ye t wheniliese links and nodes are explored in the course of the decision making andplanning involved in the simulated election of 191 where readers manage T eddy Roose velt's third -party campaign and enjoy a shot at changinghistory- the database seems considerably larger dlan a book of a comparable number of words. Because the inf ormation in each node appears in adramatically different context, depending on the uses that th e actor in thesimulation finds for it, the database can appear to be double or trip le its

actual size .The size of a database, th e amount of information you have to potentially

interactwiili, a lso depends on the number of pad1ways yo u can take throughit. f you need to resort to me back option every time you want to exploremore of a We b -based fiction, for examp le, your se nse of the database canseem every bit as limit ed as it seems in Gndget a hi ghly atmospheric digita lnarrative d1at involves a comet hurtlin g toward the earth, a clutch of scientists creating retro machines straight out of Brn zi l, and a narrati ve d1atseems to lead almost inevitably to train stations regardless of the latest nvistin plot. In Gadget the master narrative steers your experience eve r forward,seamlessly, in visibly, through a world of train statio ns that recall the Garedu Nord and Waterloo Station- mammoth spaces that dwarf footbaU fieldsin which you sometimes discover your only navigational option involvesstrolli ng over to a phone booth where your alter ego's detective superior,Slowslop, just happens to be waiting on the other end of the line. f thetrain pauses at the station before your assigned stop and you do not deign tostep down from the car and stroll over to a bystander on the platformwho, not coincidentally , has a tidbit of informati o n about the scientist youare stalking - th e narrative stops dead. Most digital narratives are builtaround a quest, whed 1er for the identity of a killer or artifacts collected on agrown-up version of a treasW'e hunt, providing a se t of purposes that informthe narrative, propelling both it and d1e read er forward. The guest also,conven iently and not merely incidentall y enabl es designers to limit d1echaracters, spaces, and scenarios popula ting the narrative.

Grail-less Gadget which requires its readers merely to keep going throughthe narrative, is, however, m ore immersive than Mystor Obsidian because its

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readers seldom need to pause and think purposively about the plot , plansome strat eg ic swordp lay, or collect the ob liga tory artifacts that li tter somany digita l narratives. Ironically, Gadget derives its ability to lur e readersinto the externally oblivious, trancelike state of ludic reading precisely be

cause its database is seve rely limited : you do not need to poke around thehotel for a map that wiiJ let you locate the train stati on . n fact, if you do not

pause for a word with the clerk hovering over the reception desk, youcannot leave the hotel, let alone get to the train station, because the clerk

conveniently has your ticket. Pick up the ticket, and the entire scene dissolves gen tly to the train station, segueing to the spot where a ticket agentretrieves the ticket from you . Likewise, if you attempt to leave the cavernous Muse um train station without a second conversation wi th th e di stinctlyodd-looking character lingering by the steps, your cursor will not nrm intothe directional arrow ena bling you to na vigate down the stairs and out of hebuildin g . Occasionally, the participatory and immer sive aspects of int eractivity can becol)1e mutua lly exclus ive , one reaso n a nar rative with a sma lldatab ase a nd virtua lly illu sory choices for navigation should nonethelessseem peculiarly compe llin g, evef entranci ng.

'What is .st r ikin g about narra tives lik e Gadget is that too much participation, too many gadgets to co llec t and assignations to keep and bad guys tosock, detracts from the immersiveness of digital environments, the veryfeature that Murray believes represents their single most valuable aspect.Constant demands for input or inputs that are frustra te as when, forexample, players thrash around lVfyst s landscape , clicking wildly and randomly in the fervent hope the sha pe of heir cursors will change and per mitthem to move forward in the narrative - can remind readers that they ar egrappling with a narrative designed by others, disrupting their suspensionof disbelief in the same way that difficult texts do: requiring frequent pauses,

reflection, even regressing over pages already read.Paradoxi ca lly, genre fiction and interactive narratives like Gadget that are

not terribly int eractive 611 readers' cognitive capacitie s more comp lete ly

th an difficult texts; familiar plot conventions and character s considerablyspeed th e pace of reading and absor ption , placing a far h eavier continuousload on readers' attentio n. 21 Authors may use default option s to privilege

some link.ings in the text over others, saving the fates, for examp le, ofcharacters until readers know them sufficiently well for their victories ordeaths to matter. Authors may use defaults to remov e readers' concernsabout actions and paths taken , tl1ereby deepening their immersion in tl1e

narrative. And sometimes tl1eyuse defaults to limit the amount of sheer data


any interactive narrative mu st includ e to produce even a small simulacrum

of a mere wedge of he world.F inall y, interacti ve narrative s offer a very tangible sense of limited look

ahead, because navi gational choices always depe nd on where you are and

where you have already been. Occasionall y, since connections betweenplaces can crisscross each other in a truly tangled skein, readers attemptingto re-create an earlie r reading exactly, by usi ng, say, the back option ontheir Web browser , can find it well-nigh impossible without following a list

of their previous navigational choices. You cannot be entire ly certain, either, that your carefully considered choice has not triggered a connectionrandomly as i t can in Storyspace narrati ves when th e auth or creates morethan one default branching out from a single place so that the same answe r to the sam e question does not yie ld the same reply . This makes yourreading of hypertext fiction a far less predictabl e matter than conversationwi th most people, even tho se you know on ly slende rly, s inc e most of usexchange words according to hig hly structured conve ntions that extendfrom gripes about the weather to a confession of the strang ers-on-a -trainvariety made aboard the Twentieth Century Limited. Th at means that

whi le our look-ah ead in conversation is limi ted eve n i f I have alreadyag reed with my partn er not to mention the Clintons, tl1e stock market, orwhethe r the Rollin g Stones should throw in tl1e towe l and retire - I also

canno t begin to see what is coming next when, for example, you star t talkingabout the War of]enk.ins' Ea r . When I r ead afternoon though, I have no wayof knowing where the narrativ e may branch next, where any of the connections I choose may take me, or how long my reading of the text will take(which can last as lon g as my eyes hold up). s far as the limited look-aheadco rollary goes, whe r e interactive narratives are co ncerned, yo u can have toomuch of a good thing .

On the other hand, some hypertext fiction provides readers wit h the kindof overview impossibl e in a face-to-fa ce exchange, via functions like the

cognjtive maps in Story space that act as schematic drawings of all possibleversions of he text you might experience if you persevere long e nough. s Ipursue a narrati ve strand in WO concerning the co uplin gs and uncoupling s of the adu lterou s foursom e, I discover that all are connected by asingle path named Relic and that, by selecting Relic from the Path

menu each time it appear s, I can watch tl1e four come togethe r in variouscombinations throughout th eir dai ly Jive s. 'When I encounter the placecalled We, I stumble across a concluding sente nc e that reads a happy

ending, something that seems entirely at odds with th e heavy sense of

WHAT I NT E RACT I VE NARRATIVES DO [ 455


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foreboding tha t seems to hang over the characte rs. When my desperatesearch for any further places on the Relic strand proves fruitless andsubsequent browsing t hrough a succession of nod es yields no furtl1 er traceof the Relic four some, I quickly switch to me Storyspace cognitive mapand find Relic at last: a chain of places tidily laid out within a single,confining space and connected by path arrows labeled a s tory that endswith the place We. The happy ending, it turns out in this version, reallywas an endi ng, which makes me reconsider if ilie adjective, ilien, should be

read ironkaUy after al l - an interpretation possible only through my usingilie map o f the text to gain an Olympian perspective over the entire thing,what Jay Bolter has called a structure of possible structures . 24 Like atopographic map of an unfamiliar island, me cognitive map of WO easesthe limit ations of my look-a head , providing me with vague suggestionsabout which directions migh t prove ilie most fruitful for further, dedicatedexploration.

Interac ti v Narrative Seg ments xist in a Network of

Interc onn ec tions Mapped in Virtual h i me n s i o n lSpa ce

It is not necessary to pore over cognitive maps, or any map at all to encount er interactive narratives as structure s susp ende d in virtual, ilireedimensional space. In a look at me interpretive strategies used by readers ofhis own Forking Paths, Moulilirop discovered that maps are not essentialt navigation through hyper text space, but that readers of hypertext fictionseldom read wiiliout an awareness of ilie virtual, iliree-dimensional arrang ement of ilie places iliey read. Back when he was still adapting iliehypertext to ilie fledgling Storyspace interface, Moulthrop casually provided me a copy of Forking Paths - which I took straight into a freshman

expository writi ng workshop I was ilien teaching at New York University.Dividin g the class in half, I asked stu dents to r ete J what iliey ilioughthappened in me texrs mey read, men handed out photocopies of Borges'sshort story The Garden of Forking Paths, and diskettes with copies ofMoulthrop's hypertext. Still unpublished, Forking Pailis is a hypertextfanta sy built around a skeletal arrangement of the Borges short story, wiilifully fledged narrativ es branching off from each of ilie episodes and scenarios depicted in the original print fiction. Intending to invite readersto become coauiliors of Forkin g Paths, Moulthrop had omitted defaultconnections and relied entire ly on links, joining places through words or

phra ses in ilie text of each place. Th i s he explains, seemed logical to him,

456 ) YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

because stories are a dialectic of continuity and closure, each fragmentaryunit of the text (word, sentence, page, sce ne) yielding to ilie next in a chainof subs titutions or metonymies t hat builds toward a final realization of thenarrative as a whole, or a metaph or. 25 Aliliough he acknowledges that thereaders may have been somewhat disabled by the lack of nstructions (whichwere still being written for Forking Pams ), when he read ilieir writtenresponses to his hypertext, he discovered ili e antithesis of what he hadanticipated. Instead of engaging tl1e text at ilie lo ca l level and reaching whatcritic Pete r Brooks has described as a metaphor for ilie text ilirough following a chain of metonymies, my students gave up attempting to discovermatches between ilieir choices of words t o form likely links between placesand ilie words Moulthrop used to link iliem. 26 Amid all ilie comp laints,however, one enterprising read er hit on navigation buttons mat enab ledhim to move up, down, left . or right from ilie place he was smck in Othersfollowed suit, exploring me hypertext outside ilie connections Moulthrophad mapped for iliem. s a result , their discussion s of ilie narrati ve strandsand ilie narrative as a structural whole reflected ilieir awareness of movingilirough this virtual space, much as Greek and Roman rhetoricians once

mentally strolled ilirough ilieir elaborate memory palaces. Inverting ilie relati onship between metonymy and met aphor implicit in conventional printnarratives, my students

were plotting their own readings through a cartographic space, hoping todiscover a design which, though it was in no way promised,'' might prove tobe buried or scattered in the text. The map, which represents the text astota lity or metaphor, was not something to be reached through the deviouspaths of discursive metonymy, rather it was a primary conceptual framework,providing the essential categories of right, left, up, a n d down by

which these readers oriented themselves.7

s ] ay Bolter argues, topographic writers in pr int- Sterne, oyce,Borges, and Cortaz.ar, who have created narratives iliat explore, exploit, andchafe at the confines of printed space- are difficult writers. 8 What makesiliem difficult is ilieir self-co nscious absorption wiili ilie act of writing itselfand ilie problematic relationship among narrator, text, and reader, sinceilieir print texts work strenuously- and ultimately unsuccessf ully- againstthe medium in which they were conceived . This is largely because spatialrelations in print narratives- or ilie spatial form lauded by Joseph Frankand his critical successors - are very muc h like spatia l relation s in the cin

ema, where we see iliree dimensions represented and proj ected on a flat,

WH AT INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES DO ( 457


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two-dimensio nal plane. 9 We understand that the placement of the objects,characters, and events represen ted in print narratives has significance interms of our w1derstanding of the entire work, but this understanding is notnecessary t o our ability to proceed th r ough the text itself (although, uponseeing his first film, an ac tor once reported, he and the othe r chil dre nwatc hing it in the humid island cinema ran out into th e alleyway behi nd t hescreen in search of the police car that had raced from one side of the screento the other). Our awareness of print space, containing two potential dimen

sions, and of cinema, three dimensio ns projecte d onto two, is intrinsic to ourreading experiences o f both media. 3o In hypertext narratives, however, thisawa reness is ine xtricab ly wedded to our reading of the text i tse lf, becausethe bur den of interactivity and the continual necessity to choose directionsfor movement never allows us to forget th at we are reading by navigatingthrough virtua l, three -dimensiona l space.

Interactive Narratives Have Many Orders in

Which They Can e Read Coherently

As Richar d Lanham has observed, digital media-such as digi tized filmsand interactive narratives- have no fina l cut. H This means they have nosingular, definitive beginn in gs, middles, or endings, but also that no single,definite order of reading is given prior ity over th e others tha t exist alongsideit. Th ere is a lso no single story, and contrary to our expectations based o nreading pr in t narratives, readings do not simply provide vary ing versio ns ofthis story o r collection of stories. As Jay Bol ter has argued, each readinggenerates or determines the story as it proceeds: [T]here is no story at all;the re are only readings . [T] he story is the sum of all its rea dingsEach reading is a d ifferen t tunling within a universe of paths set up by

the au th or . 32In aftemoon some readings represent alternative voices or pers pectives

on the narrative, with the changes in narrative perspective made separateand d iscrete by electronic space. The narrative strands in Vict01y Gardeninvolve political developments during th e Nixon, Reagan, and Bush eras,paralleling and crisscrossing eac h other as they follow a few weeks in thelives of n ine characters. n Tw elve Blue, n r r ~ t i v estrands represent theperspectives and experience of eac h character, each st rand corresponding tothe brightly colored threads that cross, arch, and dip across a blue field, avisua l corollary to the voices an d stories contained in the narrative that

touch each other when stories meet or fray at the ends as stories begin


to wind dow n. n some ins tances, the readings themse lves may constitutemutually exclusive representations of tile same set o f cireumstances withradicall y different outcomes, as reade rs can discover in both after7UJon and

I H ave Said Nothing . Like these hypertext writers, Faulkner once attempted in pr int to separa te tile different pe rspectives in The Sound and theFury wi cl something mor e than tile conventio nal op ti ons of white space ordiscrete chap ters. Wh e n , however, he indicated to his publisher tl1at hewanted each represented by different co lors of ink, Random House shu d

dered at the cost and refused. 33When you read hyp ert ex t narrati ves, you a lso have d1e option of limiting

your experi ence of the text to the pursui t of narrative strands that you findparticularly intriguing. If I want to trot after the romance burgeoning between Nick Carraway and Jorda n Baker in The Great Gatsby I h ave to read,or browse throu g h , or skim the enti re novel in order to pursue the romancethat mirro rs Gats by's involvem ent with Da isy. And, of course, this narrativestrand , like the episode narrated by Jord an, is but a fragment of tile totalnovel - a particle th at is comprehensible and mean ingful on ly in tile contextof th e nove l as a whole. Yet I can simp ly pursue the tortuous relationships

between th e unfaithful wives and husbands of WO or focus my readings ontile re latio nshi ps between Emily, Victor, a nd Jude as I make my way throughVictory Garden. In some instances , focusing on the stories and strands ofparticular interest may be relatively easy with the options for naviga tionthrough tile nar r ative made accessible through lists, as in Victory Gardenor by way of cognitive maps that enab le readers to arrive at a place bypointing at it with a cursor. A t other times, however, followi ng a singlenarrative strand can invo lve a complicated process of se lecting paths by trialand error, or determining which path or place names docum ent certainnarrative episodes and strands: Regardless of whether th e process of fol low

ing the chosen narrative strand is easy or incredibly difficult, readers ofhypertext narratives can co herently experience these texts in a variety ofdifferent orders and sequences without do ing violence to the narratives,stories, or meaning of he hyp ertext as a whole .

The Language in Interactive Narra tives ppears Less Detenninate

than the Language Present in Print Pages

Most obvious ly interactive narratives embrace a far wider and less determjnate spectrum of meanings than print narratives because few readers will

experience identical readings of texts that can have tl10usands of connec-

WHAT INTERACTIVE NARRAT I VES DO ( 459


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tions between thousand s of segments of text, which can be as bri ef as a

single word or as long as pages of print text. Th e n1ore links, or decisionpoints, each reader must co nfro n t in the course of naviga ting through thenarrativ e, the less singular and determinate the meanin g of the hyp ertextnarrative as a whole, because no single path through the te>.. t has priorityover all others .

Yet the indeterminac y of interactiv e narratives also exists in a far morefundam enta l sense than this. In most hyp ertex ts, a majority of the nod es willappear in mor than one context as a point along two, three, or mor paths.The metaphor for hyp ertext is, after all, not a flowchart but a web thatacknowledges the myriad of associative, syllogistic, sequen tial, and metatextual connectio ns betwe en words, phra ses , paragraphs, and episod es. Tobe compr ehensib le, print paragraphs need only to build off the pa1agraphsthat have preceded them and prepare the reader for what is yet to come.Print narratives can use paragraphs and transitions coward creating a sequence that both direct s the e d e r ~experience of he material forward andseems lik e the most authoritative, and even the only possible, sequence forstructuring the material. 34 But hypertext fiction seems to work in the op

posite direction. Ideall y, print paragraphs and transitions close off alternative directions and work tO eliminate any suggestion of other potentialsequences that might ha ve been created from the same material-s o thatreaders do not end up stopping in the midd le of a paragraph like this one toreflect on all the other ways these same details might be construed. Butnodes or windows in hypertext fiction must, by their very namre, provecomprehensible in mo r e than one sequence or order. Instead of closing offany suggestion of alternative orders or perspectives, the text contained ineach segment must appear sufficiently open-ended to provide links t othersegments in the narrative. This de facto, fosters an additional level of in

determinacy generally rare in ptint narratives - although it does appear inavant-gard e and experimental forms of print narrative s like The AlexandtinQuartet , Hopscotch, and The Pleam1e of he Text.

Print recurs o rs nd Hypertext iction

At present, existi ng hypertext fiction resembles two of cl1e divergent modes

explor ed in avant-garde or experimental fiction: wha t we migh t call narratives of multiplicity'' and mosaic narratives. Mosaic print narratives,such as Lawrence Durrell' s Alexandria Quartet, Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch,

46o ) YELLOW LEES DOUGLAS

and Barthes's The Pleasure of he Text consist of narrative fragments, conflicting perspectives, intern1ptions, and ellip ses that imp el readers to painstak

ing ly piece toge ther a se nse of the narrative , wicl1 it s fu ll meaning apparentonly when viewed as an assembled mosaic, a structure embracing all its

fragments.At a local level, a mosaic narrativ e such as Tbe Alexandria Qua1tet pres

ents its readers with more determinacy than Tbe Pleasure of he TeJ.' t. That is,Durrell' s novel consi sts of a set of four novels, each of which can stand as adiscrete , independent text on its own , and each seems perfectly conventional and self-co ntain ed when read separately . Unlike trilogies or tetralogies that merely featur e the same bit of geogra phic territory or the same castof characters, The Alexandria Quartet novels re late th e same set of eve ntsfrom the perspective of the different players involv ed. Even reader s of u -

tine, the version of events narrated b y the naive Darl ey, can feel their experience of the novel is perfectly complete when they reach the ending. Yet asyou mov e from Justin e to the last of the novels, Ciea, your view of eve ntsbegins to burrow beneath the skin of the world according to Darley and tl1eworlds known by Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, the most informed ofthe four narrators. By the time you reach the end of Clea, the observationsmade by Darley in Justine that had seemed so straightforward and reliablecan end up seeming a little like Benjy' s in The Sound and the Fury. What hadappeared perfectly accurate in even Balthazar and l'v .o1mtolive, when read

against Clea's supplementary version of events, brims with ambiguities,ellipses, and unanswer ed questions, making you wonder how you had everaccepted it as a fully fledged account in the first place. Bal thazar' s storypoints up how hopel ess ly uninformed Darley's grasp of reality is and positions itself as an authoritative suppl ement to it. Balth azar's representation ofNessim's proposal to Justine, mea nt to provide us with insight into theirrelation shi p, insists that Nessim is hop eless ly infatuated and Justin e mth

lessly pra gmatic :

After a long moment of thought, he picked up the polished telephone anddialled Capodistria s number. Da Capo , he said quietly. You remember myplans for marrying justine? All is well. He replaced the receiver slowly, as if tweighed a ton, and sat sta ring at his own reflection in the polished desk.l S

Hundr eds of pages late r, in Motmtoli ve, you may find yonrself wonderingjust how penetrating Balthazar's insight was when you enco unter the same

scene again:

WHAT IN TE RA C TIV E NARRATIVES DO ( 461


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[A]fter a long moment of thought, [he] picked up the polished telephone and

dialled Capodistria's number. Da Capo, he said q ~ i e t l yyou rememb er

my plans for marrying Justine? ll is well. W. have a new ally. I wan t you

to be the first to announce it to the committee. I think now they will show

no more reservation about my not being a Jew s ince I am co be marriedto one. 36

Plainl y, Balth azar's story about the personal relationship between Nes

sim and Justin e cannot do full justice to the complexity of their passionatepolitical and strategic alliance, and our understanding of the entire world of

Tbe Alexandria Quartet shifts dramatically from the inclusion of a merethree sentences. Our faith in the accuracy and authenticity of Balthazar's ac

count, which presented itself as more comple te than Darley's, is tattered

well before the close of Mountolive just as the value of the Mountolive section declines seriously the further we proceed through Clea's. You could

not, however, save yourself he effort of reading al l four novels simp ly by be

ginni ng with C lea's account - that would be rather like chippi ng a diamond

apart so you could admire the slender s live r of ts face and lose the pleasure

of peering beyond it into depths emphasized by preci sely cut facets.The pleasure of reading Durr ell's tetralogy is not unlike the pleasure in

listening to Bach's Goldberg Variatious where you are dazzled by just howrichly evocative a few seeming ly simple phrases can be - here sequence is

every thin g. In Barthes's Tbe Pleaszwe o he Text sequenc e apparently meansnothing: the book itself s a succession of fragments, ordered alphabetically.

While the segments are tagged with titles in the book's table of contents the

reader in the throes of absorbin g the text has no such assistance, only a

scat tering of typographical marks and white space to indi cate the division

between fragment s. Together tl1ese pieces represent Barthe s's erotics of he

text, yet no single frag m en t maintain s priority over the others, and even themost vigilant readers will not find any transitions to transport them easilyand painlessly into me next segment. s Barthes notes in one such segment,

[A]ll the logical small change is in the interstices . . . . [T]he narrative isdismantled yet the story is still readable. 7

The Pleasure o he Text offers me same lack of definitive be ginnings,middles, and en d in gs, and singular, definitive patl1s ilirough the narrative,

you would discover in hypertext narratives. Likewi se, Durrell's Alexan-d17a Quartet presents readers with me discrete, separate, and e ntirel y selfcontained narrative perspectives that you could encounter in the likes

of Moulthrop's Victory Garden or Joyce's WOE or afternoon Yet each of


Barth es's segme nts and D u r r e l l ~chapters builds off the others in a highlydeterminate way impossible in hypertext fiction. Read in a rand om, reverse

alphabetic order, Barth es's meditations on the act of reading do not bearup on one another any differently than they might if you were to explore the

text from fro n t to back, or to weave your own path through the book. f

there are alternative ways of assembling Barthes's erotics of text, otherorders awaiting liber ation from the linearity of conventional print, they

do not crowd the surface of the text or shout at you from its pages, which

are, after all, still relentl essly linear. Similarly, Durrell's pr esenta tion of

four se quentia l narrative s traces and retrace s the same event s in a chrono

logical order that removes any ambiguity from yo ur immediate expe rienceof the narrative. s you ponder the entire construction in retrospect in lightof what you have learned by the end of Clea what is striking is not howambiguous or incomplete events seem (since the version presented in Cleafills in any last vestiges of ambiguity or openness) but how obtuse or slen

der a grasp any of th e observers has on th e comp lexity of the whole. At nopoint in the throes of peering over Darley' s s houlder, though , or reading

Balthazar's notes, are you invited to mull over what might be missing fromtheir depictions of events: ambiguity h ere is something yo u are free to

realize had been present only after a fully informed, detailed account hasbani shed it forever.

Ju st as yo u are not aware, tl1e first time you happen upon Nessim's te le

phon e conversation, that you are not getting the whole picture (nor that you

are going to see it epla yed again so me what differently), you probably wouldnot find one particular passage in afternoon remarkable the first t ime you runacross it. n it, the protagonist and sometime narrator, Peter, shares lunch

with his e m p l o y ~ rWert. There is a bit of badinage, some se:>.:ual innuendo

reserved for the waitress, and then Wert springs a question on Peter:

He asks slowly, savoring me question, dragging it Out devilishly, meeti ng myeyes.

How would you feel i i slept wirn your ex-wife?It is foolish. She detests young men. 8

The seco nd time you read this, however, you m ight be convinced that you

had read a different passage, and by the third or fourth time, you might find

yourself trying desperately to locate these different spots that sound awfully

similar but seem to mean entirely different things. n one narr ative strand,tl1is segment crops up amid Wert's clownin g around over lunch, em p hasiz

ing hi s immaturity around women . In anotl1er, Wert poses the question to

WHAT INTERA CT IVE NARRATIVJ;S DO ( 463


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Peter playfully, to distract im from his concern over the whereabouts of hismissing son and estranged wife, who he believes rriay have been injured in acar accide nt earlier that day. Encount ered in yet anothe r context, the passage occurs in th e context of P eter's fling with a fellow employee, Nausica a,and Peter sees Wert's question as evide nce of his boss's jealousy over theirinvolvement . Later, the lunch date and conversation reappear after a narrative strand couched in Na usicaa' s own perspectiv e, which reveals that s he issleeping with both We rt and P eter, making Wert's query something of agame of cat's -paw. I 'm s leeping with your lover, Wert seems to be thinking , so he follows the line of thou ght to a position he perceiv es as moredaring: What if I were s leepin g with yo ur ex-wife? But if you reac h asegm ent called whi te afternoon, having visited a fairly detail ed se ri es ofplaces, you will discover that Wert and Peter's ex-wife, L isa, have been see ntogether by Peter himself, although Peter cannot be certain that they areinvolved with each othe r. When , the lunchtime conversation reappears, after this last revelation, Wer t's que ry is a very real que stion ind eed.

What is s trikin g abo ut the way afternoon works is that there is on ly onepassage involved here-and the language within it is as fixed as on any

printed page. Although the contexts may a lter its meaning dra stically wi theach new appearanc e, the langua ge itself stays the same , unlike Durrell'squar tet of nove ls, where he can m anipulate our perspective on even ts onlyby a combina tion of ellipsis and supp lement. Yet the language itself is notindet erminate: reader s seeking a precedent for the he, my, and shethat occur in th e text need look no further than the preceding or succeedi ngsegments. n all the cont exts in which this p lace appears, it is cle ar that th ehe posing the question is Wert, the ex-wi fe or she in question is Li sa,

and the you who thinks the qu estion is foolish is Peter .n WO J oyce further capitalizes on the indeterminacy of hypertext

narr atives to induc e a reading experience that approximates a trompe l'o e il,where your interpr etatio n of what is happening in a narrativ e seq uencedisint egra tes just as you finjsh reading it. It would not normall y occur to youto wonder if he he you have been reading about is the selfsam e he a fewpara grap hs later , but WO springs its surprises on you by switching theidentities of pronoun precedents in midstream. You can never be ce rtai nwho the he and she are in a particular passage - to brilliant effect, s inceseveral of the narrative strands in WO involve romantic attac hments between two couples closely allied by both friendship and infidelity.

The o ther fonn of print nar rative that thriv es on indet ermin acy, thenarrativ e o f multipli city, is produ ced by writers who have chafed at the way


confines of printed space preclud e multiple, muru aHy exclusive representations of a single set of event s. Robert Coover' s Babys it t er, and Th eElevato r from Pricksongs and Descants Borg es's T he Gard en of ForkingPath s, and Fowl es's French eutenant s Woman all engaging and entire lysuccessful works of fiction when r ead at face value, are also as much aboutthe experie nce of multiplicity and simul tanei ty and the way these are represented in print as they a re about thei r ostensible subjects.

Fow les's Fren ch i e u t e n a n t ~Woman for exampl e, features three endin gs:a parody of the tidy-but-breathless tying up of loose ends so characteristicof the Victorian novel; a happy but conventional resolution of the torturedrelationshi p betw een Charles a n d Sara h; and a more comp lex, modernreso lution that serves to decon struct th e pat erna listic per spective o f th etraditional Victorian novel of love and marriag e. Not surprisingly, none ofth e three endings is co mpatibl e with another. Tellingly, the modem, deconstructive episode comes last in print - which can be said to provide thislast endi ng with priority over those preced ing i t just as th e e ndingthat occurs midway through the book has its authori tativeness somew hatundermined by th e bulging stack of unread pages remaining after it.

More radically, Coover's The Babysitter fearures 105 narrative segments that begin as nine separate and distinct narrative stra nd s framed fromnin e different perspectives, bec oming less distin gu ishab le fr om one ano th eras the narrative proceeds. Mutuall y excl usive versions of events begin unfolding one after the other, sometimes feeding clearly into each othe r. Th epassages depicting husband H arry's first sexual musings on the babysitterand wife Dolly' s bitter thoughts abo ut marria ge occ ur sequentially in time,united by Doll y s que stio n What do you thin k of our babysitter? which appears in both segments. By the time the reader has reached a section wherethe babysitter screams after discover ing herself watched from a window,howeve r, it is not clear w heth er th e perspective origina tes in her boyfrien d sfantasies about her or in Ha r ry's idylls of seducing her. n th e segme nt thatimm ed iately follows it, the babysitter's scream metamor p hoses into an indignant shriek as the children she is s upposed to be supervising whisk thebath towel away from her wet body after s he leaves the bathtub to answer aph one call. Th e phrase she screams is identical in both passages, but thecontext and narrativ e stra nd s in which it is emb edded are muruall y e xclusiver epresenta tion s of a single moment in time. I n the narrative universe of

The Babysitter, all possibilities are realized, with actions, thoughts, idylls,and snatc hes of televis ion progr ams offe ring an eq ual, textual tangib ility. Inth e end, however, a ll this burg eo ning and splintering of persp ectives con-

WHAT I NT E RACT I VE NARRATIVES 0 0 ( 465


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otes

Bracketed e llipses indicate de letio n of nte rn al cross-references th a t ap p eared i n the

ori gin a l.

1. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizingof he Word (London: Methuen, 1981), 102-3.

2. Jay David Bolter, Topographic Writing: Hypertext and the Electronic Writing

Sp ace, in Hypermedia nud Litermy St: tdies, ed. Paul Dela n y an d Ge o rg e P. Landow(Cam br idge: M T P r ess, 1991), ros .

3 George P. La n dow, Hyperte xt, H ypermedia, and L iterary Studies: The State ofthe Art, in Delany and Landow, Hypermedia and Literary Smdies, 3

4 Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines (Bellevue , Wash.: OWL Systems,1987), I.

s .Jobn M. Slatin, R eadi n g Hyp er text: O rd er and Co h erence in a Ne w Med ium,C()l/egeE11glish sz no . 8 (I990): 87 6 . More recent defin itions of hype rtext also emphasizethe medium's multilinear and multisequential aspects. See George P. Landow, Hypertext:The C()nvergmce of Contemporary Critical Theory and 7ecbnlJiogy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 4

6 I use th e term medium in away anal og o us to it s use in pa inti ng w he r e artists wo rkwith o il, paste ls, watercolors, or etchings, the differ ent too ls caus ing th e m to re nder

vastly differe n t effects. At the same time, painting generally is also a medium, as the term

is used to refer to media like radio, television, and film. Similarly, as used here , themedium for hypertext fiction is diffe ren t from tha t used in creating and reading digitalnarr ativ e s and digi t al enviro nm en ts ar e a lso th e medium in wh ich w ri ters l ike Joyce

and Moul th r o p crea te interac tive n a rr a tives.

7 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: Tbe Future of Narrative in Cyberspace(New York: Free Press, 1997), 133.

8. See Slatin, Reading Hypertext, 871. See also F rank Smith , Understn11ding Rending: A PsycboliuguisticAnalysis of Rending and Lenming to Read, 3rd ed . ( N ew Yo rk: Ho lt,Rin eh a rt and Wi n s to n , 1982), 76-77 .

9 Slatin, Reading Hypertext, 871.

10. Bolter discusses tables of contents as print examples of hierarchical maps inWritiug Space: Tbe Computer, Hypm .ext, and tbe History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawre nce Erlbaum Associa tes, 1991), 22 .

II Bo lte r, WritingSpace, 124 .12 Stude nt Andrew Sussma n , quoted in Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy K.1plan,

Something to Imagine: Literature, Composition, and Interactive Fiction, Crrmputmm1dCompositio119, no . 1 (1991): 16.

13. Tom Trabasso, Tom Secco, an d Paul Van Den Br oek, Causal Cohesion ndStory Co he re n ce , in Lenming and Comp ehensirm of Text, ed. He i nz M andl , Na n ty L .Stein, and To m T rabasso (H illsdale, N .J.: Lawrence E rlbaum Associates, 1984), 87.

14. Ric hard Ziegfeld, lmcractive Fiction: A New Literary Genre? New LiteraryHistory 20 (1989) : 363.

15. Ro land Barthes, Death o f the Author, in Image-Music-Text, tr ans. Ste p he n

Hea th (New Yo rk : H ill and Wang, 1977 ) , 148.

) . Y ELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

16. Lippman is quoted in Stewart Brand, The Medin Lnb: ltwt11tingthe Fuutrt at MIT(New York: Viking, 1987), 46-49 .

17. I d isc u ss th e Mood Ba rTM as interface mo re full y i n Vi rtual lntimacyTM an d

tl1e Ma le Gaze C ubed: Inte rac tin g with Na r rati ves o n C.O-ROM, Leonardo 29, no. 3(1996): 207-I3 .

r8. Espen] . Aarseth, Cybertext: Perrp ectroes on Ergodic Liternmre (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1997), 49

r 9 Murray a rgu es, If we ask th e interactor to pick f ro m a me nu of things to say welim it age ncy a nd remind th em o f tl1e fourth wa ll . Some CD-ROM st o r ies give t he interac

tor the task of deciding the mood or tone of a spoken response r ather than picking astatement from a list of possible things to say. This is a more promising route because itseems less mechanical, although the mood selecror is often a menu o n a slider bar that soutside the story (Hamlet 011 tbe Holodeck, 190-9 1) .

20. Titanic s n ar ra tives sugg est that you h ave ju mp ed t racks by for examp le, ba rr ingaccess tO the First Class lounge or Cafe Parisien through your steward's telling you

repeatedly that both rooms are closed and sho,ving you the door. Narratives like Gndgetbar your exit from the story's railway stations and museums until you milk all there q uisite clues f rom each sce ne. O th e rs, such as Miduigbt Stmnger, shu t tle the reade rin t o em pty co med y cl ubs a nd res taur an ts w h ere there is n obo dy to in t eract wit h , w hil e

narratives l ike Who Killed Taylor Frencb? hustle you along with ge nt l e prods from yourassistant , chewings out by a police superior, and a loudly ticking clock sign.ifying how

little time remains before you need to swear our a warrant for your suspect's arrest.z I. In The Last Exp,ess, discussed at length in c h apter 7 howeve r, there is no dead

zo n e : an y wh e re yo u wande r o n th e uain at an y tim e p rovi d es op p o rtuni ties for in teractions with othe r characters. If , for example, you d o not choose to sleep du ri ng the

small hours, you can still interact with characters on board the Orient Express - if theyare also awake - and suffer the repercussions of sleep deprivation the follow ing day.

2 2 . Michael J oyce, Selfis h In teractions: Subversive Texts and the Multip le Novel,''

in Of Two M inds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbo r : U niv e rsity of M ichi ganP ress, 1995), 1 44

2 3 B. K Britton, A. Piha, ] . D avis, and E. Wehausen, Reading and CognitiveCapacity Usage: Adjunct Question Effects, Memory and Cognition6 (1978): 266-73.

24- Bolter, Writing Space, 144 .25 . Stuar t M oul th rop, Re adin g f rom th e Map: Metonymy a nd Metap hor in th e

Fi ction of Fo r kin g Pa th s, in D e lan y a nd Landow, Hypmnedin mzdLiterary Smdies, r 27 .26. Peter Brooks, Reading fur tbe Piot: Design a d /mention in Nm..,.ative (New York:

Vintage, t985), 23.27. Moulthrop, Reading from the Map, t28 .28 . Bolter, Whting Spnce, 14 3 29. Josep h F rank , Spat ial Fo rm in Modern Li te rature, in Essentials oftbr Tbemy of

Fiction, 3rd ed., Mi c hael]. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham: Duke UniversityPress , zoos . 61-73.

30. See W.]. T. Mitchell, Spatial Form in Literarure: Toward a Genera l Theory, inTbe Lmzguage of mages, eel W ] T. Mitchell (C hicago: University of C h icago Press,

1980), 284. See a lso J eff reyR

S rnitt en , Spatia l Fo r m and Na r rative T h eory, in Spatial

WHAT INTERACTIVE NARRAT I VES DO


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Form in Narrative, ed. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Dagh.is tany (Ithaca: Cornell U niver-sity Press, 198r), 9-20. -

3 Richard Lanham, T he Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolu -tion, New Literary Hist01y 20 (r989): 269.

32. Bolter , Writing Space 124-25.

33 Ziegfeld, Int eracti ve Fiction, 352 34- Slatin, Reading Hypert ext, 872.

35 Lawrence Durrell, TheA/exand1ia Quartet (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 249.36. Durre ll , The Alexandria Quartet, 555-37 Ro land Barrhes, Tbe Pleasure o he Text, trans. Ric hard Miller (New York: ill

and Wang, 19 75), 9-

38- Michael Joyce , afternoon , a story (Cambridge, Mass.: Eastg ate Systems, 1990 ,asks.

39 Robert Coover, The Babysitter, in ?1-icksongsand Descants (New York: Plume,1969 . 239

40. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, in Fictio1zs trans. AnthonyKerrigan (London: John Ca lder, 1985), 91. ,

41. Moulthrop, Reading from the Map, I 24.42. Bo lter, Writing Space I43

470 ) J. Y:ELLOWLEES DO UGLAS

- [29] -

A Media Migration: Toward a Potential Literature

JOSEPH TABBI

A central argument in this book [Cognitive Fictions] has been that, at the turnof a century when literature has been engaged in an ongoing intennedialstruggle for representationa l primacy, the new media can help us to see theolder, printed boo k in fresh ways. Throughout the exposition, I have triedto avoid the notion, which has unfortunate ly polarized much of t he debate,that hypertext and hypermedia imply the demise of the printed book. Instead I want to suggest that even if the inscription , storage, and dissemination of information increasingl y happ ens in electronic writing spaces (atransformation that is by now well under way), and even if reading itself is

done on screens rather than on the printed page, that will not mean the endof the book so much as a return t its beginnings, when print was not yet a

dominant medium and when textual authority, even the identity of authorsand the s tability of the bound text, was not so firmly established.

From an aesth etic standpoint, the idea of a migration toward the virtual(with nomadic meanderings back and forth across a boundary rather d1anone medium replacing an earlier medium) has th e advantage of letting usrecognize t he centrality of certain narrative features that have long beenmarginalized or forgotten- so secure is our faith in the book's fixity and th esingular authority of its author. Features that tend to be assoc iated with

avant-garde or experimental texts - reflexive i dentity formations, inter textual collaborations, nonlinear or multilinear narrative action, concretism,

and the involvement of readers in the act of creation - can again be seen tohav e been always present in print texts of any lit erary interest. Moreover(and this is what initially go t me interested, in the summer of r 995 in thehands -on construction of a literary Web site) the new media have for ced areconsideration of exactly how narrative, whether in print or on the screen,

represents thought and constructs subjectivity . Because hyp ertext and hypermedia turn cognitive theorizing into concrete practice - to the pointthat many of their early promoters tri ed, too hastil y t equate computer

networks with neural networks in the bra inth e introduction of com -

yellowlees douglas

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