Published in LiP Magazine
[http://www.lipmagazine.org]

View the full version of this article on the LiP website

Hypertext Precursors:
From Barth and Burroughs to Nabokov and Borges

by Robert McClelland
07.30.01

IN 1968, JOHN BARTH TRIED TO BREAK OUT OF THE PRISON OF PRINT, where writers had dwelt since the age of Gutenberg. Barth, sick of his career as the straight novelist who had written The End of the Road and the Sot-Weed Factor, concocted Lost in the Funhouse, a literary carnival he subtitled "Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice." It included "Glossolalia," a story Barth insisted "will make no sense unless heard in live and recorded voices, male and female, or read as if so heard."

Barth wasn't the first writer to try to rescue fiction from plot, character, and narrative—that goes all the way back to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the early modernists—but Lost in the Funhouse suggested that technology might be the means of deliverance. It prefigured the use of sounds and pictures by hypertext authors to supplement their words. Had he been born a generation later, Barth might have published Lost in the Funhouse on CD-ROM or the Internet.

Barth posed for the cover photo in a recording studio, as though he were some sort of word engineer, and he opened the book by playing tricks with paper, the only medium then available to a novelist. "Frame-Tale" is meant to be cut out and twisted into a Möbius strip. So contorted, it reads, "Once upon a time there was a story that began," and then repeats itself, in an endless loop. Further on, his story "Title" is a Beckett-like dialogue between two nameless characters who are aware that they inhabit a work of fiction. Weary veterans of a thousand tales, they comment on the progress of the plot and disparage the "exhausted" literary conventions carrying them from beginning to end. But they hold out hope for a liberation:

"The demise of the novel and the short story needn't be the end of narrative art," one says. And then, later, "That some writers lack lead in their pencils does not make writing obsolete."

Author's Tangled Webs

There were other authors, both before and after Barth, whose work inspired the techniques now used in hypertext fiction. One of the earliest examples is The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. It's narrated by a Chinese man traveling through Britain as a spy for the Germans during World War I. The hero's great-grandfather, Ts'ui Pen, had retired from his post as governor of Yunnan to write a novel "with more characters than there are in the Hang Lou Meng, and to create a maze in which all men would lose themselves.... His novel had no sense to it, and nobody ever found his labyrinth."

The spy's mission takes him to a country house where the master, Stephen Albert, shows him an ivory writing cabinet.

"Here is the labyrinth," Albert proclaims.

The maze and the novel, it turns out, are one and the same. Inside the cabinet is the lost "garden of forking paths." To demonstrate this Albert reads an excerpt from Ts'ui Pen's writing; it describes two versions of the same battle. In one version an army marches to war through a mountain pass, whose harshness makes them feel "life is of little value." In another they attend a banquet and carry the memory of the splendid feast into battle. In both cases the army wins, but for a different reason.

Albert's description of Ts'ui Pen's labyrinthine work could apply to hypertext fiction. Here, Borges even anticipated the word "web" for a network of linked documents:

"In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times...this web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist."

There is not yet a hypertext work so vast, but Borges saw the possibilities of a story freed from the finite bounds of the book, a story that can be endlessly expanded. In the labyrinth of the World Wide Web, this could happen.

The Lure of "What If?"

The print work that best anticipated the multiple outcomes of a hypertext is The Baby Sitter, a short story by Robert Coover. This lewd exploration of the suburban mind starts off as an ordinary tale about a girl arriving to baby-sit for the Tuckers, a couple on their way to a party. But other characters have plans for the pretty girl, who's known only as "the baby-sitter." Mr. Tucker fantasizes about leaving the party, barging into his house in search of an aspirin, and surprising the baby-sitter in the bathtub. The little boy wants to bathe with her, too. The baby-sitter's boyfriend and his thuggish buddy want to drop by for a threesome after the kids go to sleep. It all happens, and by the end of the story, reality has been fractured so badly that the baby-sitter ends up watching an account of her own rape and murder (the boyfriend and his buddy did it) on the evening news.

Coover still publishes novels, but, as a professor at Brown University, he is teaching his students to compose hypertext novels for the computer. Recognizing that young people gather information by jumping from link to link on the World Wide Web, Coover is preparing the next generation of writers for a time when "we leave behind printed text, with its bound pages and its commitment to the line, and enter into this multi-directional, multi-linear space which is more vague in its outlines."

The Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five also see life as a set of events whose order is unimportant. That book is the story of Billy Pilgrim, who floats randomly among the events of his life. At one moment he's a World War II soldier, experiencing the bombing of Dresden. At another he's an optometry student on his honeymoon. Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, taken to their planet, and put on display in a zoo. He asks for something to read, so they show him one of their books, "brief clumps of symbols separated by stars."

"Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene," a Tralfamodorian explains. "We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen at one time."

Splintering the Doors of Perception

You would hardly describe any of the events in Naked Lunch as "marvelous moments." Often, we look back at a once-shocking book and comment, "But it's tame compared to what came later." Not so this seminal work in the development of nonnarrative fiction. William S. Burroughs's catalog of anal sex and intravenous drug use still holds its own as one of the more depraved novels in the English language. The mad wordsmith of the junk underground sliced up a Goya painting with the nib of a morphine-soaked pen and pasted it on the page to make a grotesque quilt.

"I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium," wrote Burroughs, a longtime drug addict. "I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch."

The vignettes are arranged in no narrative order, but most deal with addiction: to drugs, to teenage boys, to power. In the most notorious the sinister Dr. Benway, an expert in the terror tricks of the authoritarian state, describes his plan for demoralizing the citizens of Annexia, where much of the fragmentary novel takes place. Benway orders the cops to randomly burst into houses and perform strip searches and interrogations until "the citizens cower...in corners like neurotic cats."

Since Naked Lunch is a series of drug-inspired nightmares, the chapters could be scrambled without diminishing the book's power. Dreams come upon us randomly, illogically. As he evolved from junkie bard to iconoclastic crank, Burroughs's writing became even less linear. He began experimenting with a "cut-up technique" invented by his friend, painter Brion Gysin. The author dissected pages of prose with scissors and pasted the shards together at random. (To try this yourself go to the Cut-up Machine.) In two later novels, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, Burroughs used the "fold-in method," combining pages from different sections of the story. "The fold-in method extends to writing the flashback used in films, enabling the writer to move backwards and forwards on his time track," he explained. "For example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred—I insert the resulting composite as page ten—When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forwards in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one."

One of the hallmarks of hypertext is that it rarely deifies any particular event. Some hypertexts have beginnings and endings, but you will rarely encounter a climax. Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the French "new novelists" of the 1950s, took this disdain for story shape even further. Robbe-Grillet refused even to admit that one object was more important than another. In his work In the Labyrinth, he flatly describes the pattern of dust on a desk, a lamp, a woman's footsteps on a staircase, giving each the same emphasis. Point of view is unimportant, or at least unstable, in Robbe-Grillet's novel. At the beginning of the book, we find ourselves studying a framed painting of three soldiers drinking in a tavern; then we enter the painting and the soldiers come to life. The picture works as a hypertext link, taking us from one scene to the next.

Bringing Ephemera to the Forefront

Another proto-hypertext that plays with perspective is Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's structured as a 999-line poem by a New England pedant named John Shade and exhaustively footnoted by his neighbor, Charles Kinbote. The reader shifts back and forth between poem and "Commentary," as though skipping from link to link, expecting insights on Shade's life and work. But we learn much more about Kinbote: how he observed Shade with a Peeping Tom fascination during the months of the poem's composition, and his belief that he is Charles II, exiled king of Zembla, a European principality. Kinbote performs a scholarly hijacking of Shade's poem, finding in it references to his own escape from Zembla and his stalking by an emigre assassin in America. (We have no way of knowing whether this is real, or delusion and paranoia.) So the poem can be read two ways: straight through or with constant references to Kinbote's "notes," which give it a very different meaning indeed.

Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch also offers parallel journeys for its readers. The "normal fashion" takes us from page 1 to page 349, through the story of Horacio Oliviera, an art- and jazz-loving Argentinian who lives la vie bohème in Paris and Buenos Aires during the 1950s. But at the back of the book are 99 "expendable chapters" that Cortázar invites us to interweave with the main narrative. These are poems, quotations, lists, letters to the editor, intellectual conversations—all essential footnotes to Horacio's dilettantish life. Hopscotch is a metaphor not only for the hero's transatlantic wandering but also for the book's jumpy structure.

Horacio is obsessed with American jazz. There's always a record by Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton playing somewhere in Hopscotch. But Cortázar's writing has more in common with "free jazz," avant-garde musicians, like Ornette Coleman, whose attempts to free notes from melody resembles the hypertext movement's disentangling of words from narrative. (Avant-garde jazz arose at about the same time as the proto-hypertext movement—all but one of the books mentioned here was written between 1959 and 1969.) Hopscotch's references to Jackson Pollock are just right, though, since hypertext is a modernist movement. In an essay on Burroughs's cut-up technique, critic Jenny Skerl saw the link between the Naked Lunch author's work and "similar contemporary experiments in the arts, such as action painting, happenings, and aleatory [i.e., improvisational] music."

The gang of writers who began literature's escape from the printed page lived during a curious time in literary history. The year before he published Lost in the Funhouse, Barth wrote an essay called "The Literature of Exhaustion." He declared that the novel of Leo Tolstoy and Honore dé Balzac—the realistic 19th-century tale of middle-class manners—was played out and spoke of "intermedia" artists who were erasing the line between creator and audience. "Not only the 'omniscient' author of older fiction, but the very idea of the controlling artist, has been condemned as politically reactionary, even fascist," Barth wrote.

There was a sense, in that essay, that literature was lagging as a modern art form. Other avant-garde artists had new technologies to play with—musicians could preserve their improvisations on tape, pop painters could incorporate photographs on their canvases—but writers had nothing to work with besides pens, typewriters, and paper. (Or scissors and paste, which Burroughs used as a rudimentary word processor.) Back then, computers concerned themselves with numbers. Now they handle words as well and are nimble enough to allow readers to shape the stories they're receiving. The literary innovations of the 1960s seem more than prophetic—they seem inevitable.

[ L i P ]

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE TO A FRIEND. CLICK HERE.

Reproduction of material from any LiP pages without written permission is strictly prohibited | Copyright 2002 LiPmagazine.org | info@lipmagazine.org