Abstract

When writers use hypertext - the technology that makes possible nonsequential, fully electronic reading and writing - to produce a fictional narrative, the result is interactive hyperfiction. This article charts what we know about electronic nonlinear narrative: its origins, literary precursors and distinctive features. It also explores the potential of hyperfiction in the English classroom. Finally, it examines some of the difficulties associated with the use of hyperfiction as well as the hype that has surrounded its introduction into educational settings.

Number of words: approximately 4,700

Key words: hypertext, hyperfiction, electronic technologies, computers, narrative, writing, interactivity

When the American writer, Robert Coover, published an article in the New York Times Book Review titled The end of books (1992, pp. 1, 23-25), not many people outside of multimedia business organisations and academia knew much about hypertext, let alone the use of hypertext to create interactive fiction. Coover announced the arrival of hyperfiction, a new narrative art form, readable only on a computer, and made possible by the developing technology of hypertext and hypermedia. He also explained how users 'read' these new forms of text and the nature of the experience. The consternation aroused in readers of the New York Times, reinforced by the bold headline, centred on the fear that the birth of hyperfiction necessarily signalled the death of the printed book.

Extreme responses to discussions of the changes to literacy practices and narrative form associated with the use of hypertext are not unusual. It seems that belief in the intrinsic value of the printed book is so deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness and memory that any challenge to its five hundred-year reign is greeted with hostility, even outrage. However, debating whether or not books will disappear with the advent of hypertext seems to be a rather pointless exercise. The relentless hype about the Internet, the World Wide Web and hypertext may lead people to fear otherwise, but the growing presence of the computer and electronic text does not necessarily signal the death of the printed book. The introduction of a new technology of writing does not automatically render older ones obsolete, mainly because no technology has ever proven adequate for all needs. For example, even though printing completely replaced handwriting in book production, it did not spell the end for handwriting. Rather, the boundaries between the two writing technologies blurred. It seems that typesetting, electronic writing and handwriting will continue to coexist and complement each other, at least for the immediate future (Snyder, 1996).

What is hyperfiction?

Hyperfiction depends on hypertext technology - a structure composed of blocks of text connected by electronic links that offers different pathways to users. Hypertext provides a means of arranging information in a nonlinear manner with the computer automating the process of connecting one piece of information to another. If the structure accommodates not only printed texts but also digitised sound, graphics, animation, video and virtual reality, it is sometimes referred to as 'hypermedia' or 'multimedia'.

When writers use hypertext to produce a fictional narrative, the result is interactive hyperfiction. A significant distinction between traditional print narratives and hyperfiction lies in how we approach them. Readers of print narratives usually begin on the first page and, even though they may move backwards or forwards, generally proceed through the text to the end. Their gradual progression follows a carefully scripted route which ensures that they get from the beginning to the end in the way the author wants them to. By contrast, most hyperfictions have no single beginning or end. A further distinction is based on the tangibility of the text. Whereas the length of a work of fiction can be gauged just by holding it, readers of a hyperfiction do not know what the hypertext contains till they load it into their computer, and even then they may never experience its full magnitude. The possibilities for readers to create their own stories are considerably greater in hyperfiction than when reading a print narrative or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, both of which have highly visible beginnings and endings, as well as other structural limitations.

Literary and electronic precursors

Although books are a poor medium for participatory discourse, since the beginnings of modern fiction authors have attempted 'to jar or cajole readers out of passivity' (Kaplan & Moulthrop, 1991, p. 11). Literary precursors of hyperfiction include Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and more recent fiction such as Cortazar's Hopscotch (1966). Sterne and Cortazar are self-consciously absorbed in both the act of writing itself and the difficult relationships between narrator, text and reader. Both work strenuously against the medium in which their books are produced. Any reader familiar with hypertext will look at such texts anew, and observe that in their resistance to linear narrative they have much in common with hyperfiction. By attacking the convention that a novel is a coherent narrative of events, such texts simultaneously invite and confirm reader-interaction.

But whereas Sterne and Cortazar can only pretend to offer their readers the opportunity to take part in the construction of their books, hypertext can demand that the reader participate. In a hyperfiction, no text appears on the screen until a reader summons it with a keystroke or the click of a mouse. Furthermore, the electronic environment gives a stronger sense than does the printed page of the author 'being there'. 'The author is present in the electronic network of episodes that he or she creates and through which the reader moves along associative paths' (Bolter, 1991, p. 134).

Hyperfiction develops from a twentieth-century tradition of experimental literature. Dadaism, for example, aimed at destroying the structures of established art and literature, and 'in that breakdown the Dadaists worked in the same spirit as writers now work in the electronic medium' (Bolter, 1991, p. 131). Dadaists often attacked the conventions of the realistic novel that tells its story with a clear and cogent rhythm of events, and in doing so found themselves straining at the limitations of the printed page. Because the linear-hierarchical presentation of the printed book was so well suited to the conventions of plot and character in the realistic novel, 'to attack the form of the novel was also to attack the technology of print' (p. 131).

Many other twentieth-century novels, plays and films also critique narrative conventions. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Fowles gives the book two endings (or three, if you count the one that occurs three-quarters of the way through, which supplies a conventional Victorian outcome). Fowles here highlights the spurious meaningfulness of the fictional world he has created and the indeterminacy of the real one. In Reisz's and Pinter's 1981 film of the novel, the two endings are translated into a film-within-a-film.

Because interactive fiction already existed in print and film, the technological challenge for creators of electronic interactive fiction was 'to find a way of turning imaginary worlds lodged in the writer's head into virtual worlds lodged in the computer's memory' (Woolley, 1992, p. 155). The precedent was Adventure, developed in the 1960s at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). The program was conceived of as an experimental game. A computerised version of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure comprises a series of descriptions of fictional locations inspired by Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954). It maps an imaginary environment into electronic memory and allows its player-readers to explore that space by issuing simple commands. In giving these commands, the reader attempts to negotiate a series of spatial and narrative obstacles to reach some hidden goal. Adventure became a diversion of programmers and computer scientists, 'who built ever more intricate and challenging versions of the game' (Kaplan and Moulthrop, 1991, p. 12).

Adventure and its descendants continued to evolve through the late 1970s, when interactive text games migrated from academic and corporate mainframes to micro-computers. There the form was married with popular fiction and role-playing games to produce a second generation of text adventures that retained the problem-solving design of the original Adventure. These games were not networks of possibilities to be explored but arrangements of obstacles to be overcome in the progress to a determined goal. Later in the 1980s there emerged a third generation of interactive fiction in which the influence of game scenarios has been less noticeable. The multiple fictions of this third generation are narrative networks capable of differing significantly on every reading.

Afternoon, the first hyperfiction

Joyce's hyperfiction, Afternoon (1991a), is an intricate web of narratives, places, paths and 'yields', that is, words and phrases whose evocative resonances readers can pursue by using a mouse to highlight them on the computer screen. Afternoon is a fiction that changes every time it is read. It invites the reader to circulate digressively among a matrix of characters and events that are never quite what they seemed on first presentation. 'I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning', an anonymous speaker confides, disclosing a rich field of narrative possibility. However, none of the stories produced by interacting with Afternoon will validate or disprove either the desire or the perception of the speaker.

Afternoon is a text scattered with verbal associations. If you select the word 'son' in the first sentence of the story, for example, the text on the screen shifts to a description of the scene in which the narrator, who appears to be male, finds his son's school paper on the 'The Sun King'. The word 'die' in the initial sentence serves as the cue for a different narrative departure. But there is also a third possibility - a default condition. These default transitions, however, do not simply reinstate the fixed page-order of a bound volume. Afternoon is structured in such a way that its elements are assembled in a different order every time you call up a new screen.

Hyperfiction fosters both passive and active reading: 'looking at and looking through' the text (Bolter, 1992, p. 40). When reading an episode, you may succeed in looking through the text to an imagined world. Formal structures are both visible and operative in hyperfiction because they are embodied in the links between episodes. At each link the text offers a series of possibilities that you can activate, moving backwards and forwards between the verbal text and the structure as you read. In Afternoon you may get lost in Peter's engaging story of his search for his son. But the need to make choices never lets you forget that you are participating in the making of a fiction.

There is no plot as such in Afternoon. Because it is not built on causal sequences, it does not present parallel story-lines. Events are ambiguous, and the story focuses on how the characters might react to such ambiguities. There appears to be a mystery: the narrator's son may or may not have been in an automobile accident. Readers are compelled to follow the father as he tries to establish the fate of his son: in this respect, the father's quest becomes the reader's. The particular episodes you call up will determine the answer you receive. In other words, '[t]he reader's own participation in the story becomes the story' (Bolter, 1992, p. 29).

Afternoon differs from printed fiction by not offering any 'single story of which each reading is a version, because each reading determines the story as it goes'; as a result, 'there is no story at all; there are only readings' (Bolter, 1991, p. 124). We could also say that the story of Afternoon is the sum of all its readings, in so far as the story is a structure that can embrace contradictory outcomes. Afternoon is an infinite text which never offers the same page to any reader more than once.

Afternoon demonstrates that it is possible to create a text which does not force its readers down one particular route. A corollary is that readers risk becoming lost, partly because the textual landscape is unfamiliar and partly because the narrative is the means by which readers orient themselves. Joyce recognises such difficulties and seeks to overcome them by placing limits on narrative freedom, although in Afternoon he does not provide his readers with a map. In his hyperfiction, WOE, however, Joyce (1991b) includes a map of the text's overall structure and of places still awaiting discovery. It records previous paths and suggests which directions might prove fruitful for exploration.

Afternoon is not a random fiction because its author exercises control over the choices his reader can make. Afternoon can be (and sometimes is) a linear story, because occasionally only one path leads from an episode. At other times, it gives its reader dozens of choices, although they are far from random. As a text that changes before our eyes, Afternoon challenges our assumptions about the nature of literature: it represents a new kind of writing. But because it also comes out of a literary tradition, we recognise it as a coherent act of imagination, as a story with characters who interact and conflict.

Unlike interactive print fiction, hyperfiction abandons such conventions as chapters and the illusion of a seamless continuity between paragraphs. The virtual text exists only in electronic space or in our memories. As the text re-forms with successive readings, no two readings are alike. By presenting a chameleon text-like surface, hyperfiction is textually subversive. Its structure is 'effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, perspective, or personal performance' (Eco, 1979, p. 63). But hyperfiction also arouses unease if not antagonism in some users. It presents 'an electronic environment alien and inimical to our habitual reading patterns' (Douglas, 1989, p. 94)

Extemporising with narrative form

We love a good story, told by a skilled narrator, and dictated by the authoritative voice of an accomplished author. Hypertext invites us 'to find an analogue in the electronic medium for narrative line and authorial control in the traditional medium of print' (Bolter, 1993, p. 9). The most effective techniques for achieving a strong story-line in the print medium are linearity, plot, characterisation, textual coherence, resolution and closure. Experiments in hyperfiction, however, diminish these qualities in varying degrees by exploiting the electronic medium's capacity to create open-ended fictions with multiple narrative strands. Any discussion of the changes to narrative form brought about by hyperfiction necessarily involves a consideration of the ways in which writers using hypertext technology have played with these integral elements, and found alternative strategies and techniques for engaging readers' attention.

In one sense, each reading of a hyperfiction is a linear experience: confronted with one frame after another, you are still aware of a narrative, however confused it may be. At the same time, a hyperfiction seems to contain more than one voice and to change direction abruptly. Each hyperfiction handles in its own way the conflict between the linearity of the reading experience and the multiplicity of hyperfiction. In Joyce's Afternoon, for instance, some readings represent alternative voices or perspectives on the narrative, with each discrete change kept separate by electronic space. The web of intersecting narrative strands in Moulthrop's (1991) hyperfiction, Victory Garden, offers a mixture of voices and genres: first- and third-person narrative fiction, excerpts from other books, fiction and non-fiction, and quotations from televised broadcasts. Joyce's (1991) WOE is a narrative experiment in which some readings are metafictional commentaries on the narrative and its origins in Joyce's experience.

In hyperfictions such as these, a lack of linearity does not destroy the narrative. In fact, since readers always fabricate their own structures, sequences and meanings - and particularly so in hypertext conditions - they have surprisingly little trouble constructing a story as they make their way through the web. Reading hyperfiction, however, can be a very different experience from reading a printed novel or a short story. What hyperfiction forces us to recognise is that an active author-reader fabricates not only meanings but also a text from the kit supplied by the author.

Rethinking plot and story

Hyperfiction calls into question some of the most basic points about plot and story in the Aristotelian tradition. Hyperfiction interrogates not only Aristotle's notions of beginning and end, but also his assumptions about the sequence of parts and the unity of the finished work (Aristotle, 1959).

Hyperfiction apparently dispenses with linear organisation. Although the experience of linearity does not disappear altogether with hyperfiction, narrative chunks do not follow one another in a page-turning, forward direction. Hyperfiction space is multi-dimensional and theoretically infinite: its set of possible network links are fixed, variable or random. Readers can contribute by choosing their own route through the labyrinth; the more active may introduce new elements, open new paths, and interact with the characters or even with the author(s).

Many twentieth-century works of fiction explore the tension between linearity and a more spatial sensation of time. Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot (1961) and Janette Turner Hospital's The Last Magician (1992), for example, question the status of sequence in narrative and so too does David Malouf's Fly Away Peter (1982). The protagonists of all three novels are suspicious of chronology and sequence: what they experience is something more akin to simultaneity. The difference between their novels and hyperfictions is that hypertext confers greater freedom and power on the reader. Malouf decides at what point his protagonist's narrative is to branch out; in Joyce's Afternoon, the reader makes that kind of decision.

Reconceptualising beginnings and endings

The problems posed by hyperfiction for traditional understandings of narrative are particularly apparent in the case of beginning and ending stories. In their brief history, hyperfictions seem to have taken 'an essentially cautious approach' (Landow, 1992, p. 109) to the problem of beginnings by offering the reader a block of text - labelled with something like 'start here' - that combines the functions of title page, introduction and opening paragraph. There are various reasons for this. One is convenience: the disk has to be self-contained so that it can be used on stand-alone machines. Another is the reluctance of some writers to disorient readers at the point of their first contact with the narrative. A further reason is that some believe hyperfiction should change our experiences of the middle but not the beginning of narrative fiction. The rival view is that because hyperfiction uniquely enables us to begin with any one of its parts, we should take advantage of this fact. In order to achieve this end, each chunk of text must be sufficiently independent to generate meanings that can be followed in other chunks of hyperfiction.

Although they use familiar narrative strategies to make beginnings easier, hyperfictions challenge readers by avoiding the corresponding devices for achieving closure. It is up to readers to decide how, when and why the narrative finishes. In Afternoon, Joyce makes closure the responsibility of the reader. In a section entitled 'work in progress' we are advised: 'Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends'. Hyperfictions always end because readings always end - either with a sense of satisfying closure, or from sheer fatigue.

Of course, we are not entirely naive about unresolved texts. Print and cinematic narratives provide instances of multiple closure and also a combination of closure linked to new beginnings. Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers whose novels were serialised in periodicals mastered the art of partial closure in each episode. Furthermore, sequences of novels like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet 'suggest that writers of fiction have long encountered problems very similar to those faced by writers of hypertext fiction and have developed an array of formal and thematic solutions to them' (Landow, 1992, p. 112). However, culturally familiar though we are with the absence or denial of closure, we may still find the consequences disturbing.

The potential of hyperfiction in English

Articles discussing the possibilities for the use of hyperfiction in the English classroom are beginning to appear in the literature. Kaplan and Moulthrop (1991), for example, describe a course in which they used hypertext. They found that the writing of interactive fiction, by raising the possibility of alternative constructions, heightened the sensitivity of their students to narrative features such as point of view, the authority of the narrator and causal sequence. Interactive fiction also seems to help integrate an enriched experience of literature with the practice of writing as a social activity, and enables students to become not merely more perceptive interpreters of fiction, but also creators of it. Interactive hyperfiction, Kaplan and Moulthrop argue (1991, p. 21), has considerable potential for those who teach 'writing through literature, or literature through writing'.

The introduction of hypertext into literature classrooms raises a number of pedagogical issues. To treat Afternoon as a literary text, for instance, involves redefining what is meant by the terms 'literature' and 'text'. Such a reconceptualisation entails not only fundamental alterations in the roles of author, reader and text, but also changes in the role of the teacher and in the activities of teaching and learning about literature.

The use of hypertext in the English classroom provides another medium for the promotion of collaborative work. The technology offers the option of interactive or collaborative writing. Students can create texts in all manner of collaborative ways: 'trading lines, writing parallel texts that merge, moving independently created sets of characters in and out of communal fictional space' (Birkerts, 1994, p. 160). In his New York Times essay, Coover (1992, p. 24) described how he and his students established a 'hypertext hotel' a place where the writers were free to 'check in, to open new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of others, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented characters, then kill off one another's characters or even sabotage the hotel's plumbing'.

Working with hyperfiction in the English classroom, however, raises new problems. One identified by many critics is that of getting lost. A hyperfiction can be at one and the same time compelling and confusing. The text is no longer static and stable; the reader may get lost in the maze and not enjoy the experience. All the characteristics of the novel to which we have become accustomed and which we teach our students - 'unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice, seem to be in danger' (Coover, 1992, p. 24). Further, how do we assess and evaluate and respond to a work that is different every time we read it?

There is still an enormous amount that we don't know about hypertext. Hyperfiction's alleged potential to transform the teaching of writing 'whether by supporting familiar goals in fresh ways or by suggesting a whole new approach to reading and writing remains for the most part unexplored' (DiPardo & DiPardo, 1990, p.7). Moreover, early advocates have tempered their initial enthusiasm with some important questions. McDaid (1991), the author of a number of hyperfictions, asks whether hypertext actually facilitates the teaching of writing; whether its effects are good or bad; and whether we can overcome the problem of inequality of access.

Recognising the difficulties

When hypertext first arrived on the education scene, and with it the possibility of creating hyperfiction, enthusiasts endowed it with utopian promise. They believed that hypertext had replaced linear writing in an evolutionary step towards perfect communication technology. They believed that the mere act of linking multiple interpretations and voices resulted automatically in better communication. Moreover, they believed that hypertext would transform society and education systems, democratise the academy and promote the breakdown of the artificial divisions between the disciplines.

By contrast, detractors argued that hypertext portended dark consequences for our culture. They implored people not to submit to a technocratic force and a totalitarian nightmare. They dismissed promoters of hypertext as fetishising novelty. They also argued most vehemently that hypertext offered nothing but confusion and cognitive overload to users. They reminded people that the book was central to culture and consciousness and that they must not give in to the oppression of technology.

However, what seems a better alternative to polarised debates about hypertext is to approach the use of this technology in our classrooms, both critically and intelligently.

Eco (1995) reminds us that it's not an 'either/or' situation; we do not have to choose between books and the new electronic technologies. He points out that literacy comprises many media. 'An enlightened policy on literacy must take into account the possibilities of all these media' (p. 91). Eco implores us to not fight against false enemies: 'Even if it were true that today visual communication has overwhelmed written communication, the problem is not one of opposing written to visual communication. The problem is rather how to improve both' (p. 91).

Facing an electronic future

The historical record shows that many English teachers have tended to resist using the new electronic technologies in their teaching. Of course, there are teachers who have either no, or limited, access to the technology. And even if there are computers available for their students' use, they may not as yet have software such as Storyspace (Bolter, Joyce & Smith, 1990) to make the creation of hyperfiction an option. But there are also English teachers who work in environments that have computer facilities who remain reluctant to use them (Snyder, 1995). They are wary of the use of the technology despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we face a future dominated by computer culture.

However, if the influence of electronic text is to be as pervasive as many are predicting, then English teachers need to think about its consequences for teaching and learning. As Lanham points out, 'it is hard not to conclude that what we are doing now is not preparing our students for the world they will live in, and the lives they will live out, but training them, instead, to be the "clerks of a forgotten mood"' (1993, p. 136). Addressing teachers of writing and literary studies, Lanham poses the question: 'What business are we really in?' (1989, p. 285). His answer is unequivocal:

If our business is general literacy, as some of us think, then electronic instructional systems offer the only hope for the radically leveraged mass instruction the problems of general literacy pose. If we are in any respect to pretend that 'majoring in English,' or any other literature, and all that it implies, teaches our students how to manipulate words in the world of work, then we must accommodate literary study to the electronic word in which that world will increasingly deal. (p. 285)

But at the same time, we should remain sceptical of the probably unrealistic early claims made about hyperfiction's radical potential. We must address in systematic ways the difficulties that readers have identified when trying to navigate hypertext or that writers have identified when authoring hyperfictions (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran & Selfe, 1996). We should take note of Michael Joyce's (1988, p. 11) concern:

It is likely that the potential benefits outweigh nearly all the short run perils, save perhaps the most crucial one. The peril of overpromising threatens not just to sap the resilience of educators, who must wade through the dross and justify the costs. It also threatens the credibility and creativity of innovators, who find themselves having to disaffiliate and differentiate before they can discover.

In this article, I have not presented many examples of what teachers are doing with hyperfiction in their classrooms. Although I know that readers of this journal are interested in creative and imaginative ways in which to use the electronic technologies, my aim has been somewhat different. I have set out to chart some of what we know about this new nonlinear narrative form: its origins, literary precursors and characteristics. By considering how hyperfiction differs from the more familiar print literary forms, until now the staple diet of the English curriculum, we may be prompted to re-examine our notions and understandings of narrative. But I also recognise that it's all very well to explore the theoretical potential of hyperfiction, but 'making it work with real readers and writers, in real classrooms taught by real teachers' (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran & Selfe, 1996, p. 208) is just as important. However, we'll have to leave the exploration of that task for another article.

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