HYPERTEXT FICTION
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mutable
internal and external
perception non-linear
context genre
mutable
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Richard L. Pryll Jr’s Lies exemplifies the influence of context despite its off-putting presentation. With two links per page, "Truth" or "Lies", it plays with the user’s understanding, offering new information that make pages one has already seen mean something entirely different, as one unravels the lies that the characters tell each other, and the lies the author tells. The use of personal pronouns keeps the identity of the characters hidden: when I discovered they each had a 'summer lover', I had to reconsider to whom all those pronouns referred. While I was trying to unravel this new twist, however, another ‘lie’ emerged: those ‘summer lovers’ were only their journals. Thus it went on, until - unexpectedly - I found a page which declared itself "The End", but offered me the option of returning to the beginning. For a moment I dismissed the idea - I’d already read that stuff - and then reconsidered.
The mutability to which Moulthrop refers is one of the central reasons that alchemical symbolism is such a useful model. For one thing, it takes us beyond the "truth or lies" mentality: in alchemy, symbols do not have just one meaning, and frequently the meanings clustering around one symbol contradict each other. One cannot say which is the true, or better, meaning. As Schwartz-Salant writes, "it is not possible truly to understand alchemy if one requires the pinning-down of notions such as the prima materia to distinct things or processes. It is not alchemy, and it is not Jung’s way." (30) Jung links this mutability to the nature of the unconscious: the archetypes of which it is composed are not ideas in the collective unconscious, such as nurture, wisdom, destruction, rebirth, and so forth, but motifs around which ideas cluster.
This relationship between the ‘empty’ symbol (Barthes would say the empty signifier) and the conscious content (or signified) with which it is filled out confirms Hassan’s explanation for postmodernism’s "Performance, Participation". He writes,
Indeterminacy elicits participation; gaps must be filled. The postmodern text, verbal or nonverbal, invites performance: it wants to be written, revised, answered, acted out. (507)
The participation that hypertext requires is two-fold: not only the perception of the user; but also the process of selecting links. The end of a book, or movie, can allow one to see the artwork as separate from one’s experience of it. It is a thing that exists: however much postmodern and post-structural theory one reads, these commonsensical views can still linger. However, a hypertext such as Lies disrupts that assumption. Although the two relevant pages are labelled "beginning", and "end", one is not reading over old ground by returning to the beginning, or reaching any kind of finality at the end (which does not necessarily come after reading all the pages). The site encourages the user to regard it as a process, a becoming, an experience, rather than a quantifiable object. Urban Diary uses a similar ‘detective’ structure, but is more opaque: it consists of six diary pages with beautiful, apocalyptic photgraphs and snatches of enigmatic text. The front page advises the user,
Think of Urban Diary as something that has come into your hands accidentally; something lost or perhaps abandoned. You may have picked it up off a wet sidewalk, or found it lying on the seat of a downtown bus.
After a few navigational tips (bitmap-links can be confusing for the uninitiated), one is offered an entrance link to download the first page. Rather than beginning with a (false) understanding, as in Lies, Urban Diary remains determinedly opaque in the beginning and painstaking, patient exploration are required before any themes emerge. The meaning of the images and fragmented words depend heavily on the connections the user makes. Johnson sees this aspect of hypertext fictions as isolating:
After I finished with Afternoon, I rang a few friends who had also meandered through it... but the second we turned to the content of the story, the conversation grew stilted and uneven... Each reading had produced an individual, private experience. At these moments, struggling for common ground over the telephone, hypertext felt less like an exercise in literary democracy and more like an isolation booth. (126-7)
A conventional reading or film experience allows us the assumption that we are having the same experience as others reading or watching the same text: hypertext throws a cold bucket of postmodern theory over that illusion. This variability and uncertainty is an anathema to traditional Western forms of knowledge, which rely on precise definitions, Cartesian logic, and arguments that move towards resolution. This traditional reliance on certainty, knowing things as definite, one thing and not another, still dominates our understanding. Already, however, we can smile indulgently at the nineteenth century obsession with order and certainty, and be scandalised at their attempts to hiearchically classify racial groups. Postmodernism is emerging into our consciousness, not as just another fun theory to play with (although it provides this too) but as a profound disruption of the categories through which we organise our reality. Uncertainty has political value: the most pervasive determinants of human identity in our culture - race, class, and gender - are increasingly argued as unreliable, not only as means of identification, but within the words themselves. Racial and nationalist dogma, if they are commonsensically seen as mutable opinions generated in a specific context, lose their totalitarian strength. I do not claim that hypertext will bring world peace, but that as part of a general shift in our thinking it has the potential to help consolidate the emerging process of transformation.
internal and external perception non-linear context genre mutable
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation