The Decade of Literary Hypermedia?

Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv's Text Rain (1999)

I’m always so shocked when I ask writers what they think about digital poetics and they either say: “I don’t know what that is” or “That’s for young people” or “It has nothing to do with me.”

Will writers be in for a rude awakening now that that the iPad will inevitably revolutionize the way we read and write? For the first time, everyone will be reading (and writing) on a screen. It seems unavoidable that our current definition of “electronic writing” will soon apply to everyone.

Currently, electronic writing is defined as any writing that is “digitally born,” or writing that is meant to be read on a screen, or something other than paper. Electronic writing can also refer to any writing that seeks to address how technology has impacted our lives and our relationship to language, such as twitter poems, wiki novels, GPS blog books.

Tan Lin's "Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk"

The first generation of electronic writers included experimental novelist Robert Coover, who helped found the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) in 1999. The founders of ELO recognized early on that digital media was going to allow literature to grow in a completely new direction. While Coover was teaching in Brown’s Literary Arts Program, he taught writers like Shelley Jackson, who eventually went on to write what may be the most famous electronic writing piece today, her autobiographical hyperfiction work “My Body” (1997).

What is distinctive about “My Body” is not so much its language, but its fragmentation. Similar to what B.S. Johnson’s boxed book The Unfortunates did, and what David Foster Wallace’s footnotes did in Infinite Jest which came out only a year before, the participatory “clickual” demands of “My Body” forces the reader to jump back and forth from page to page, a choose-your-own-adventure-type version of reader self-empowerment. “My Body” is perhaps the first attempt to address the modern dilemma of how best are we to locate ourselves in hyperspace, and how people negotiate their bodies to discover boundaries, destinations, and whether or not there is a “bodied here.” Mark Amerika, another early practitioner of hyperfiction, believed electronic writing could “liberate” and “democratize” literature (whatever that is supposed to mean.) In his piece “Grammatron,” the first internet art to be presented at the Whitney Biennial (2000), the cyborg narrator declares that he will no longer “feel bound by the self-contained artifact of book media.”

Still from Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries' "Bust Down the Door!"

See Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ “Dakota,” a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

See “The Sea”

Starting in the late 90s however, many readers who had initially been excited by hyperfiction slowly became bored. Hyperlink was becoming “uncool.” This fellow reader of e-lit describes the boredom perfectly:

“That feeling, however, quickly gave way to the loneliness of a reader in a maze of hyperlinks: Trying to make sense of what then felt like ‘postmodern’ writing in digital form, I was simply annoyed at the impossibility of arriving at a mental model of the digital rhizome that was spreading wider and wider before my eyes with each click…If a book consists of materially sedimented social antagonisms, unchangeable but contradictory, the problem with hypertext is that simply stays fluid.  In other words, my reading became socially meaningless in that it was only one among many; I was equally distanced from the text as I was from my fellow readers.” (1)

(Tweeted by Jurgen Habermas 1/29/2010: But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics)

Electronic writers moved away from hyperlink and became more interested in exploring what you could do visually on a screen that you could not do on paper. Many began learning Flash to create writing that was more like cinema poetry, or words roving around on a blank screen. In Brian Kim Stefan’s “A Car Drives to Rome” (1996), selected words beep and honk to catch your attention and also simulate the effect of being in traffic.

Still from "A Car Drives to Rome" (1996)

See Brian Kim Stefans’ “A Car Drives to Rome.”

Other works can be found on UbuWeb, a website founded by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

For almost two decades, there were few knowing consumers of e-lit and fewer organized platforms distributing it. Eastgate was one of the first to publish and collect hypertext pieces all in one place. Yet E-lit didn’t receive the spate of young digital readers that had originally been anticipated.  It was presumed that part of the problem was that people didn’t read on computers.  “Are people going to bring their Apple Powerbook to the beach? Into the bathtub? No.” It was also over-specialized and insular:  Anyone who wished to read it often had to really search for it, and then download a special program at a price. Many complained that Eastgate’s Storyspace, a hypertext editing platform, was too expensive and the “books” that got “published” were heavy and inaccessible.

See the hypertext version of The Sorge Spy Ring.

The iPad "Bookstore"

But now, it seems that people might very well be bringing their iPad to the beach. And maybe even into the tub. In any case they will be reading on an electronic gadget. And if newspapers already have front pages that are interactive, with video and sound capabilities, why shouldn’t books? Writers will soon have to explain why they aren’t incorporating such elements, instead of why they are.

It should also be noted that despite the dearth of academic jobs there are more open positions than ever for digital scholars.

“Since so few people are familiar with it, every new work is so new and radically different,” says Ara Karpinska, a former student of Brown’s hypertext program (Reported in Boldtype). “So many jobs and practices require verbal communication in the digital space,” concludes Karpinska. “In a way, we’re all electronic writers.”

Will this finally be the decade of the E-lit Renaissance?

Upcoming: A discussion of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an e-text in book form.