Hypertext Fictions as Ergodic Literature and Nonlinear Narrative (assignment 2)

For this week's assignment, we read the following 1990s web-based digital fictions:

• Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope
• Shelley Jackson's My Body
• Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls
• Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes

We were also asked to find time to visit the Media Archaeology Lab, a really cool part of the University of Colorado (CU) where they collect and restore/maintain all kinds of outdated technologies, from computers going back to the 1970s to cameras from the 1800s to video game consoles, cell phones, even PDAs. We visited and were given a tour during Tuesday's class, and then I went back later in the week to read/play/experience (I find that verbiage is complicated when discussing hypertexts) Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, which I had to use an early-2000s eMac to do. The idea with using the old computer was to experience the text in its original format, slow and halting as that sometimes was. (Interestingly, that page I linked to shows that apparently it's now available in a version compatible with modern computers, which is pretty cool.)

First, let me briefly describe the texts and my experiences of them for any interested readers (going in order of when I viewed/read/whatevered them):

Hegirascope -- I have to admit, this one really frustrated me. The concept is that once you start, the pages will automatically refresh every 30 seconds. You thus have 30 seconds to read the text on the page and (potentially) choose one of four links to go to what's next. If you're too slow, or if you don't want to click, the site will take you through pages seemingly at random (though I don't know if the code behind the page makes it so that it's actually random, or if, by choosing not to click, perhaps you see the pages in the order the author might have wanted you to see them). In any case, this frustrated me for a few reasons. One, 30 seconds was often not long enough for me to take everything in before the page switched. The good thing about this site was that I could have easily just hit the Back button and gotten back to the previous page, as every page had a unique URL associated with it. But I figured that wasn't in line with the spirit of the text, so I didn't. Two, at first I thought there was no narrative whatsoever among the pages, and I was content to be baffled the whole time, thinking the idea was that there was no narrative at all. But I came to realize, through the repetition of certain character names and the repetition of different background colors of the pages, that in fact, there were some narratives going on, and a few different ones at that, but I couldn't figure out how to stay within one narrative to only view that story, and of course I was also viewing everything out of order, which I think was the author's intent. It just made for a really frustrating experience where I felt that there was footing somewhere, but I wasn't able to find it. Three, I just kept wondering, what's the point? Why have the pages reload so fast, why have multiple narratives but not let the reader choose to follow them, why have some pages that are part of the narratives but then have others that seem completely disconnected and irrelevant? There were a few technical difficulties, which I assume are because this is from the 90s, like some pages not loading at all, and some links being broken. The technical difficulties actually didn't bother me all that much. Ultimately, I got so fed up with feeling lost and the pages reloading too quickly and everything seeming totally random that I just stopped reading this one.

My Body -- This one I loved. The concept is that you see an illustration of a woman's body, and you can click on different body parts to read little snippets about her life that relate to that body part. (Unclear if this is nonfiction or fiction.) Each page also includes hyperlinks to other pages, and there are quite a few pages that you can only get to by clicking through from other pages (i.e., you can't get to them from the main body illustration). It's unclear if this is intentional, or if this is a byproduct of it being from the 90s and maybe some linked bits of the body didn't transfer over -- but it seems intentional. By reading about the narrator's life via body parts, you end up getting her life story all out of order, but it just really works with this one. It's a cool way to think about how memory works. In the present, I'm sitting at a desk writing this blog post, but two minutes ago while writing about 90s technology I was in memory, in the 90s, learning HTML for the first time and making my own websites. A minute before that I was in memory, a few days ago, getting frustrated at reading Hegirascope. So, yeah: memories aren't very linear, and I thought it was so cool to have this represented so literally. Also, Shelley Jackson is just a really fantastic writer. Like I said, I don't know if this is nonfiction or fiction, but the moments of the narrator's life that we get let in on feel so intimate and personal. It's not an erotic story, but parts of it felt erotic, just by virtue of being so intimate, the kind of things most people would never say aloud.

Patchwork Girl; Image from Wikimedia Commons

Patchwork Girl -- I actually didn't realize until I was writing this post that both Patchwork Girl (1995) and My Body (1997) were written by the same author. Patchwork Girl (PG) came first, but because I looked at it second, I immediately said aloud, "Oh, it looks a lot like My Body." Both include an illustration of a body (only the head is shown in the image above), and for both you can click on body parts to see things about the body. But that's about where the similarity ends. For starters, the part of PG with the body parts is only one tiny sliver of the story/game/experience (I don't know what to call it -- it felt more like a game to me than a book, because I had to click around and sit on a computer to read it, but there was no actual game element to it), whereas it was the whole of My Body. But also, when you click on body parts in PG, you're not getting the narrator's memories, you're getting the memories that came with her body parts -- so it's kind of the reverse of My Body. Let me explain: the idea behind PG is basically Frankenstein, if another "monster" had been made that was a female version. Like Frankenstein's monster, this female version was pieced together from corpses' body parts, and over the course of the story, she begins to remember bits of those people's memories. This one is almost like a fancy version of a choose-your-own-adventure, in parts, because there are multiple paths you can take, with different minor plot lines, though ultimately they all seem to end up in the same place regardless of which sub-paths you take. Anyway: really cool concept, fun to view it in its original context (software/hardware), but sadly I didn't have enough time to finish before the Media Archaeology Lab was closing for the day. This was the one that most felt to me like she was ahead of her time technology-wise -- I feel like, if she redid it with today's technology (perhaps as an app), it could be much more seamless and enjoyable to read. All the others were basically just websites, so they were kind of timeless, not as dependent on keeping up with technology.

Side note: I found this compelling post analyzing/comparing PG and My Body.

These Waves of Girls -- This one was basically the definition of intermedia. It's a story about a girl who is a lesbian, sort of her coming to terms with her own sexuality, in (I believe) the 1970s. There's a lot of secret trysts with friends as a preteen, camp flings, etc., and also her relationship to (not really with) boys and, later, men. The homepage commands you to listen, and when you click on the word listen, a handful of links pop up. (But, bafflingly, no audio. I thought that clicking on "listen" was going to make something play.) One of the first pages I clicked on ("Vanessa") had paragraphs interspersed with pictures, as well as a woman's voice talking in the background, layered on itself. At first, I thought it was an accident, something wrong with the site itself. (After all, it's from the 90s, I figured -- maybe something didn't translate correctly to newer browsers.) I clicked on a button that offered to let me hear the story instead of read it, and that took me to a page with nearly a dozen different audio clips, all playing at the same time, with the text "the story spills out of us; we scramble to tell you all at once." Ah, okay, so that explained it. I listened to the clips all together and then one by one, and interestingly, some of the clips are just her reading the same snippet again, nearly identical but subtly different. Why? I have no idea. But this layered audio technique was really interesting and lent a certain kind of weight or power to that page that the others didn't quite have, consequently. Other pages had audio clips of sound effects (feet walking, that kind of thing), though most pages had no audio component. All pages had accompanying images, sometimes beside the text, sometimes with the text written directly onto the image, so that text and image were one. This site was another one where some of the pages of text were only gettable via other pages of text, and not at all through the sidebars. It led to some frustrating scenarios, where, for example, I'd click on a bit of text that was hyperlinked, only to find myself on page 4 of something that I'd then have to backtrack through to get to part 1 in order to go through in order. Unlike all of the other sites, this one had one URL, and any pages within the URL didn't show up in the address bar. Meaning: if I wanted to go back to the page I was just on, I couldn't. The Back button wouldn't do anything for this site. I viewed the snippets of this character's life all out of order, and if there was an ending, I didn't find it. (Interestingly, with My Body I didn't feel a need for an ending, because it so clearly wasn't a linear story with a narrative arc. But with this one, it felt like it was building up to an ending that never came along.)

Six Sex Scenes -- This one was the simplest, in terms of user experience: a series of pages of text, connected by hyperlinks at the bottom to other specific sections. Some pages could only be accessed through one of the other pages, and I had to start over multiple times to be sure I saw all of the pages. (And even then, I wish there was an index so I could be sure I saw all the pages. After cycling through a dozen times, I decided to give up and just hope that I saw everything.) This was another one where I felt the lack of an ending. The story basically seems to be about a woman's failing relationship with her boyfriend, interspersed with scenes of her childhood in which we see the incestuous relationship she had with her father. This was a really interesting kind of nonlinear tension, which I think is why I felt the lack of an ending so keenly.

Image by LearningLark on Flickr

We were also asked to take a look at the structure (not the content) of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is a book I've heard is amazing but have never read before. I ended up reading the introduction (which is part of the novel) and then skimming through the rest of the book, which was a more helpful way to understand what was going on structure-wise, I think, than if I hadn't read the introduction and had been completely lost. What's interesting about its structure is that the majority of the book is written as if it's a kind of academic article, with footnotes interspersed throughout, with some of those footnotes having footnotes and also containing more of the narrative of the actual story within them. It also has a bunch of pages with only a few lines or even a few words of text, sometimes arranged to mirror the thing the text is talking about -- for example, there's a page where the characters are walking down a narrow hallway, so the text is bunched together in just a few words per line down the center of the page, to look like a narrow hallway. Really, really cool.

I was so intrigued by House of Leaves that I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Wiki told me that it's "a prime example of ergodic literature." Which, of course, next led me to ask: what is ergodic literature? In a nutshell, it's literature in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text." In other words, everything we had to read for this week's assignment is ergodic literature, because none of it was "passive" reading like a book, where the story is laid out for you and all you do is turn a page. For all of these, I had to actively click forward, backwards, sideways, sometimes restarting, etc., in order to get to the meat of the stories.

These are all also examples of hypertexts, which are ergodic stories told using hyperlinks -- but they're not the same as cybertexts, which (from what I understand) have their own rules and the outcome can change based on what choices you make. So if I understand it correctly, all of these examples I'm talking about today are hypertext examples of ergodic literature; conversely, a recent well-known example of a cybertext might be the Black Mirror choose-your-own-adventure "Bandersnatch" episode/movie/game/experience (which, if you haven't seen it yet, you're seriously missing out).

Apparently a common theme among hypertexts is this nonlinear narrative structure that I came up against again and again for this week's reading, which I think is so interesting. Is there something about the format or presentation of hypertexts that lends itself particularly well to nonlinear narratives? Or is it the reverse, and nonlinear narratives are just easiest to present as hypertexts? I wonder if there's some element of how our brains are programmed to work online nowadays, too, that factors into it. In the same way that we're used to, say, a Wikipedia article that leads us to another Wikipedia article (the Wikipedia rabbit hole), perhaps our brains are already primed to accept hypertexts in a way that we're not primed to accept the same thing in a physical book.

And yet.

I had this feeling as I was reading through most of these that, while the hyperlinks were cool, the story could have functioned roughly the same way as a printed book. There would have to be some indication that the pages didn't necessarily follow one another and that there was no linear structure, but since they were basically just text blocks on pages, it could basically work. Especially Six Sex Scenes, which would have made a really interesting short story as alternating flashes of present and past (and would require very little change to make that happen). The only one where I really felt that the technology was vital to the experience and the way it was viewed was These Waves of Girls, with all that cool audio stuff going on, combined with text and images and text-images and sound effects.

But then again, even for the ones where it didn't feel as vital, the technology certainly did shape my experience of the texts. I couldn't, for example, easily flip back to one vignette if I wanted to reread it, like I could if it was a physical book. I had to actively engage with each story by clicking on links, etc. I also had to stare at my screen for hours at a time, leaned forward over my laptop, which is a much more uncomfortable but active way of engaging than just reclining on the couch. But when I say it shaped my experience, I'm not necessarily saying it improved it. I think for some of them it did: My Body and These Waves of Girls, in particular. I've already talked about the ways in which Hegirascope frustrated me to the point of not wanting to continue, and even These Waves of Girls, the one that seemed the most necessary as a hypertext, frustrated me at times for its lack of clear navigation structure. But did I gain anything, really, by clicking through most of these?

I guess the bigger question is: do we need to gain anything to make the medium worth pursuing?