Por ROBERT COOVER
(Published in the New York Times on July 21, 1992)
In the real world today, that is, in the world of video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks , and in particular there, in the digital seals purring hackers forefront of the cyberpunk and hyperspace freaks often hear that the print medium is a lost technology and outdated, a mere curiosity of bygone days, for soon to be reported for all those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries. Indeed, the very proliferation of books and other print media, so prevalent in this era of forest harvest and paper costs, it is held as a sign of its feverish condition dying last breath before futile way of life, before finally passes on, as dead as God.
Which would mean, of course, that the novel also, as we know it has come to an end. Not that those who are mourning his death announced. Since all its charm, the traditional novel, which took center stage at the same time came the commercial-industrial democracies and that Hegel called "the epic world of middle class"-is perceived by potential performers as the carrier Virulent patriarchal values, colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian past is no longer with us.
Much of the supposed power of the novel is embedded in the line, the compulsive movement led by the author, since the beginning of a sentence to your point, from the top of the page to bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through the long history of printing, there have been countless strategies to counter the power of the line, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not excluding the father of Thus, Cervantes himself. But true freedom against the tyranny of the line is perceived as possible only now, finally, with the advent of hypertext, written or read on the computer, where the line does not exist unless and one inventiveness and implant the text.
The "hypertext" is not a system but a generic term, established a quarter century ago a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in space nonlinear and nonsequential made possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike the printed text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments, now called "Lexi", taking pre-hypertext but prophetic Roland Barthes. With its network of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to unidirectional, fixed handling printed pages) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and Polivoces, favoring a plurality of speeches on a definitive statement, and freeing Reader domination of the author. The reader and the writer of hypertext is said to become co-learners and co-writers, travelers who are accompanied in the mapping and remapping of textual components (and visual, kinetic and aural), and that not all these are provided so we used to call the author.
Although initially was used primarily as a radically new teaching space for the mid-eighties was calling hyperspace fiction writers to their intricate webs infinitely seductive, infinitely expandable, green gardens of multiple pathways, for referring to another popular author among fans of hypertext Jorge Luis Borges.
Several systems support the configuration of this space for writing fiction. Some use simple links and random, like the shuffling of cards, others (such as Guide and HyperCard) offer a kind of toolkit to do it yourself, and still others (like Storyspace more elaborate systems, currently the favorite among writers software fiction in this country, and Intermedia, developed at Brown University) provide a complete package of sophisticated inventions for the structure and navigation.
Although hypertext champions often attacked the arrogance of the novel, his own claims are hardly modest. Many times you will hear proclaimed, quite seriously, there have been three major events in the history of literacy: the invention of writing, the invention of movable type and the invention of hypertext. As stated in the hyperspace George P. Walker Landlow in his recent book on the field, "Hypertext", "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology, after the development of the printed book. Promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly in our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as that produced the Gutenberg movable type. "
Noting that the" movement from the tactile to the digital lord of the contemporary world, "Landlow notes that, while most of the writings of critics working on technology forms are exhausted" models of academic solemnity, records of disappointment and brave sacrifice of human position, "the writers and Hypertext are "frankly celebratory ... Most poststructuralist writing from inside the threshold of expectation coming day, most writers of hypertext writing about many of the same things from the inside of the dawn."
And surely it dawn. The granddaddy of hypertext fictions in long-term is "Afternoon" by Michael Joyce, presented to the public on floppy disk in 1987 and passed to a "reader" Storyspace, partly developed by Joyce in 1990.Joyce, who is also author a printed novel, "The War Outside Ireland: A History of the Doyles in North America With an Account of Their Migrations," wrote online newspaper that hyperfiction Postmodern Culture "is the first instance of the first electronic text, which will come to conceive naturally as a true multimodal writing, multisensual," but fundamentally it remains difficult to ascertain what . There is no fixed center, for starters, neither banks nor limits. The traditional narrative timeline vanishes in a maze geographical or ends, with beginning, middle and end by ceasing to be part of the presentation immediately. Instead, branching options, menus, links or pointers mapped networks. No hierarchy in these networks without party higher (or lower) as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional textual divisions are replaced by blocks of text and graphics, the size of a window, also ephemeral, soon added sound, animation and film.
As Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry raised in the "addresses" entry in hypertext Izme Pass, "published (if" published "is the word) on a disk included in the Spring of 1991 in the Journal Writing On the Edge:
"This is a new type of fiction, and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, coiling on itself in patterns and folds accelerate gradually end, as well as the passage of time and events occur in our lives. When dealing with text links embedded within the work will bring together the narrative in new configurations, fluid constellations formed by the route of interest. Hyperfiction the difference between reading and reading traditional printed fiction may be the difference between sailing the islands and stay on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the other. "
I must confess at this point I am not an expert navigator of hyperspace, or-as I entered my seventh decade and therefore very committed, for better or for worse, with the obsolete-can printing technology arrogate to do more in hypertext fiction. But, as always interested in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and fiction that challenges the linearity, I felt something was going on out there (or in) and you should know what it was: if I was not going to surf Guyer Islands-Petry, you should at least get close to the shore with my field glasses. And what better learn to teach a course on the subject?
started That's how Hypertext Fiction Workshop at the University of Brown, [...] a course dedicated to both the changes in reading habits and the creation of new narratives. Students write
are notoriously conservative creatures. Write stubborn and hopefully in the tradition of what they read. Take them to try alternative and innovative ways is more difficult to convince chastity as a lifestyle. But confronted with hyperspace, they have no choice: all shaped structures have been deleted. This is to improvise or go home. Some frantically rebuilding these old structures, some just get lost and fade from view, the most daring leap without asking how deep it is (infinitely deep) and accept, even when kicking to save their skins, that this new area is effectively a half exciting and provocative, if not often frustrating for the creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, just as advertised, to transform the art of fiction itself, even now is still somewhat marginal, remote, isolated in these early days of the mainstream.
With hypertext we focus, as writers and as readers, in the structure as well as in prose, and suddenly we become aware of the forms of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that is put forward in the hypertext link is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine we are invited or required to create. Indeed, creative imagination is often more concerned with linkage, routing and mapping, that clause or style, or what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). We are always amazed to discover how much of the experience of reading and writing occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. That is, the text fragments are like stones in the road, are there for our safety, but the real power of narrative runs through them.
"What is very good," as a young writer, Alvin Lu, put it in an essay posted online class, is "the degree to which the narrative is completely destroyed in its constituent parts. The pieces of information convey knowledge, but the juxtaposition of the parts creates narrative. The emphasis of hypertext (narrative) must be the degree to which the reader is given power not to read, but to organize the texts that are available to it. Anyone can read, but not everyone has sophisticated methods of organization available to them. "
fictions developed in the workshop, all these" still in process, "are now geographically anchored narratives, similar to Our Town and stories of adventures variety of personal choices, to parody classical nested narratives, poems space, interactive comedy, dreams metamorphic unresolved mysteries detective, mobile comics and Chinese sex manuals.
In hypertext, the popular multi-vocal, graphic elements, both drawn and scanned, have been incorporated into the narratives, imaginative changes have been used in typography, to identify various voices or plot elements, and has also been a very effective use of formal documents that are not typically used in fiction, statistical tables, song lyrics, newspaper articles, film scripts, scribbles and pictures, baseball cards and box scores, dictionary entries, album rock, astrological forecasts, games and medical and police reports.
In our weekly workshops, the writers have selected in a projector, its narrative structures developing after normal face criticism for their work, design, character development, emotional impact, attention to detail and so on, as appropriate. But also engage in ongoing dialogue online, exchanging criticism, enthusiasm, doubts, speculations, theories, hoaxes. This is so funny, so irresistible that experience "completely celebratory" as Landlow you wanted, that's creative output so far has been much greater than that of college writing workshops, and certainly of the same quality.
addition to the individual fictions, which are more or less protected from alteration by the old ways, we in the workshop have also played freely and often quite anarchic in a fictional group called "Hotel." In it, writers have register free, open new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or to create new links to intervene in or subvert the texts of others, alter the trajectories of the frames, manipulate time and space, conducting dialogue through invented characters, then kill their characters or even sabotage the hotel plumbing. Thus one day we can find a man and a woman were found in the hotel bar, creating a kind of sexual encounter, only to return days later to find that one or both changed their sex. During one of my workshops of hypertext, is causing some tension in reading when they discover that there were more than a bartender at our hotel: was this the same bar or not? One of the students-again, "said Alvin Lu linking all the bartenders to Room 666, which he called the" Center of Production, " where an alien monster prisoner bartenders giving birth to low demand. Fragments
This space is essentially anonymous online, and each new set of students in the workshop are invited to register and continue the story of the Hypertext Hotel. I would like to see if it stays open for a century or two.
However, like all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext can be with us for centuries to come, perhaps equally durable book technology, hardware and software seems to be fragile and short-term, new entire generations of computer and software come before we can read the above instructions. Even as I write, the highly sophisticated Intermediate Brown University, where we have been writing our hypertext fiction is being deprecated because it is too expensive and incompatible with the new Apple operating system, System 7.0. A good portion of our second half was kept carrying our Storyspace Intermedia documents (which Brown is taking) and adjusting to new surroundings.
This problem of standard operating systems is being urgently addressed and discussed now, writers of hypertext, if the interaction is the hallmark of the new technology, all players must have a common language and consistent and all must be equally empowered in their use. There are other problems. Navigation procedures, how you move on to infinity without getting lost? The structure of space can be as dramatic and confusing, which can absorb and neutralize the narrator literally and exhaust the reader. And then there is the problem associated with filtration. With an unstable text that can be introduced by other authors, readers, how can you, trapped in the maze, you can avoid the process? How elusive the trash? The venerable novelistic values \u200b\u200blike unity, integrity, coherence, vision and voice, seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. The "Text" has lost its canonical certainty. How can one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice?
What about the narrative flow? There continues to move, but the dimensionless infinite hyperspace, is more like an endless expansion, runs the risk of being so relaxed and loosely driven, it can lose its centripetal force, giving rise to some sort of lyricism low static charge: that sense of dreamy weightlessness of the first science fiction films. How do you resolve a conflict between the desire for consistency and close reader and the text's desire for continuity, the fear of death? Indeed, What is the closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when finished, as a reader or writer? If the author is free to make a story where at any time and in many directions like, "this does not become an obligation to do so?
No doubt this will be a major issue for narrative artists of the future, including those locked in the old printing technologies. And that's nothing new. The problem of finding was a major issue - what was he not? "The epic of" Gilgamesh "as was sculpted in clay at the dawn of literacy, and the Homeric rhapsodies were taken while the papyrus by Greek letters technologically innovative, some 26 centuries ago. There is continuity, after all, through the eras driven by changing technologies.
Much of this could have guessed, and in fact, he guessed, before entering hyperspace, rather than lift a mouse, and my thoughts have been tempered only slightly by the online experience. What I had not seen clearly, however, was that this is a technology that moves while absorbed completely. Printed documents can be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate well in print. It's not like the movies, actually, is just the dead end of linear narrative, and twelve-tone music is the dead end of the music staff.
Hypertext is truly a new and unique. Artists who work in it should be read there. And probably be tried there, too: the critic, like fiction, is moving off the page and line, and is itself subject to constant changes of mind and text. The fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the words of the day and seem to have grown rapidly in the beginning, in the same way that relativity not long ago moved to the apple falling.
Original source: http://artecontempo.blogspot.com/2009/01/robert-coover.html
