An Essay on Hypertext

Large claims have been made for hypertext. To leapfrog around a body of writing by clicking on links is certainly a different experience from reading a piece sequentially from start to finish. Yet it's notable that the most popular hypertext documents so far have been encyclopaedias, where the reader can follow a train of thought or whimsy from one summarised and superficial document to another. Encarta and its brothers have breadth, no argument - but they are not notable for their depth.

Yet writers from the Oulipians onward have been fascinated by the literary potential of hypertext. One senses the possibility of a whole new relationship with the reader - the reader as explorer; the reader as game-player; the reader as co-author. One senses the possibility of a whole new type of poem. The poem as infinitude of choices; the poem liberated of the tyranny of sequence; the poem as a matrix of possibilities.

So far it's easier to feel the potential of the medium than to point to wholly successful achievements. Texts that I have seen tend to have the limitations of one or other of two genres - the Fighting Fantasy or the imagist gallimaufry.

Prose hypertext has famously found a market in printed books, in the Fighting Fantasy series for children. These books (like the computer games to which they bear a close resemblance) show the possibility of interactive fiction, while cruelly showing its limitations. The reader pursues her fate avidly, because the text is event-driven, one damn thing after another. Puzzles may be momentarily intriguing, incidental details may be delightful, or striking or amusing, but story is all. One hardly notices the dearth of deeper drama. Characters slot into three simple roles - protagonist, helper or enemy. Subtlety or development might theoretically be possible, but the genre seems to be working against it.

Verse hypertext has tended to go an opposite way, away from games- playing and puzzles, towards imagism. Most hyper-verse that I have come across lets you jump from one short piece to another by clicking on keywords. A universe of images lies there before the explorer, yet without narrative thrust the process can become tedious. One clicks to the next screen because it is there, not because one has an urgent desire to see what comes next. My own experience is that after a while I stop clicking, say "That was quite nice," and feel no regret that I haven't reached the end of the text, if end there is.

The poets, I suggest, have something to learn from the fighting fantasists. A page of hypertext verse should not be an end in itself, but should be clearly part of a greater whole. But the whole is a different kind of unity from that which poets are used to.

The hypertext poet needs new ways of thinking about his work. No longer is he like a composer, with a right to expect his audience to remain attentive from the opening bars of a sonata to the last. Rather he is like an architect. Entering his building will be different for each visitor. Few will systematically explore the entire edifice from servants quarters to wine cellar. One may enter the main hallway, and then see nothing but the main reception rooms and the conservatory. Another may sneak through a side door, passing the kitchens and the billiard-room, and head through the secret passage to the master bedroom. their experiences will hardly coincide - yet both follow routes made possible by the architect. The visitor feels free and unconstrained, yet the architect has constructed her experience, determining the nature of entrances and exits, and designing juxtapositions of rooms and passageways that are appropriate, or impressive, or surprising. A house should be more than just a place where one can wander aimlessly, though; it should also be a place where one can walk with purpose.

What kinds of purpose suit a hypertext poem? maybe we can try to answer this by thinking of poems of the past that have some affinity with hypertext.

Someone (I forget who) has suggested that Eliot's Waste Land is already almost a hypertext poem, with its leaps of subject, tone and register. It exploits the poetic value of links - from present to past, sublime to grotesque, text to notes. Yet in other respects it is not hypertextual. Its succession of voices come in a strictly controlled and artistically necessary order. It moves from beginning to determined end.

Pound's Cantos might be a better example of a poem that verges on hypertext. Here surely is a poem that nobody has ever sat down and read through sequentially from start to finish. It leaps from thought to thought with all the quirkiness of Old Ezra's busy mind. Yet the difficulty many readers have with the Cantos shows a danger of hypertext. How does such a work avoid the impression of formlessness - of local glories but a distinct possibility that readers will lose their sense of direction and purpose as elliptical leap follows leap follows leap?

A poem that I have sometimes had in mind whilst creating my literary monstrosity with Ken Payne is Browning's Childe Roland. Its hero crosses the dreadful landscape, and whichever way he goes finds nothing but despair. Had Browning had the technology, mightn't his ludic mind have enjoyed letting the reader choose her own optimistic alternatives, whilst making sure that every road led to the Dark Tower?

Ken and I have followed the Fighting Fantasists in having a "you" as the protagonist (in fact we have made that "you" and its self-concept the focus of the poem). We have used narrative devices to swing the reader from page to page. On the other hand, we have set ourselves the constraint of a strict verse form (ottava rima) that we hope will give the poem a unity as we switch from genre to genre and mood to mood. We have tried to give the reader the feeling of complete freedom of choice (though a re-reading may show the limitations of that freedom).

Ours are certainly not the only choices; they are probably rather conservative ones. What we have tried to do though, is to produce a poem as environment, in which every visitor can find his or her own reading, from a huge possibility of permutated choices. Some journeys through the poem will be richer than others; readings will vary hugely in length. Some will seem like quick romps through the action; others will be leisurely strolls through peripheral material. It has occasionally bothered us to think that some of our favourite lines and images are hidden away in distant rooms that the average visitor is unlikely to find.

What else could we have done?

Hypertext does not have to be narrative. If it is, then the genre need not be Gothic, and the central character need not be "you". Our choice of a set verse form is very much the product of our own prejudices and preferences. There is room for all sorts of experiment - mixing prose with verse; setting narrative interludes against meditative ones; finding new ways of letting the reader discover the motifs that can be developed within the work. I am particularly interested in linking hypertextual techniques with those of computer-generated text. That could produce something genuinely new.

George Simmers

If you've any thoughts on hypertext, or any hypertext poems that you think we should see, George Simmers would be pleased to hear from you.
-->