Category: literary hypertext

Little Emperor Syndrome is a hypertext that won an honorable mention, in 2019, from the Electronic Literature Organization’s Robert Coover prize: a piece contemporary with a great deal of Twine work, or with Liza Daly’s beautiful morphing text interfaces, but one that shows more of an affinity with the literary hypertext community of the 90s.

Specifically, this is something like a stretchtext, and one that starts out fully stretched. Each chapter starts out at full length on the page, weaving together events from different points in the viewpoint character’s life, reminiscence and present moment. As the reader, you can turn on or off the coloring scheme that distinguishes these segments from one another. You can elect not to view certain periods at all. Or you can shuffle the order in which they’re presented to you, going for something more chronological or more randomized.

In the same settings interface, you can change the font size.

This fact irked me, the way an obtrusive clothing tag or an insect bite might irk. It seemed to say that the affordance of changing font size — a question of accessibility and ease of reading — was equivalent to the affordances of turning on and off different aspects of the protagonist viewpoint.

More broadly, I felt that the creator of this piece hadn’t really thought through how he wanted or expected the reader to encounter those affordances; or else that he was operating from a tradition very distant from the traditions of hypertext reading in which I am most comfortable.

In theory, I actively like the idea of being able to turn on certain perspectives and mute others, or the idea of being able to explore how the present narration evokes past events in the protagonist’s life.

The practical experience of reading this particular piece, though, felt backward. Because all the text is visible at the outset, I felt encouraged — almost required — to read all the text through in its original order, before experimenting with its concealment; and this concealment, when it happened, could only ever be a brief toying with the portrayal of words I’d already read. This interactivity was appended to the linear text, a minimally-functional gloss.

By contrast, if the words had started out not fully stretched, I would have had to seek the meaning between meanings, gradually opening it out, exploring, and allowing my exploration to be guided by readerly interest, in an experience perhaps reminiscent of PRY or its ilk. I would have had the opportunity to be curious, and to satisfy that curiosity through interaction.

As for the content — again, there are things here to like, even to admire, and at the same time I find myself recoiling quite frequently. For instance: Chapter Two of the story concerns a westerner teaching English and Art History in China. He finds China affordable but repellent; he dislikes everything from the food to the manners. It rings true, as a depiction of a particular experience of alienation in a foreign country. At the same time, it wasn’t a mindset I really wanted to inhabit for very long; a perspective that was un-empathetic towards everyone, beginning with himself.

This is part of an ongoing series of posts looking back at literary hypertext of the 90s and early 2000s, considering both example texts and contemporary scholarship and theory. Here we look at the concept of spatial hypertext.

The move from document-centered hypertext systems to map-based hypertext systems had some unforeseen but far-reaching implications: relationships between nodes could be expressed in more than one way. Maps showed interconnectedness explicitly, usually in the form of a directed graph. But also node proximity came into play; relationships among different nodes or documents could be indicated simply on the basis of their relative location. The use of these map-based hypertext systems to author new information spaces uncovered an interesting phenomenon. Users avoided the explicit linking mechanisms in favor of the more implicit expression of relationships through spatial proximity and visual attributes…

Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links, Frank M. Shipman, III and Catherine C. Marshall, ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), 1999.

“Spatial hypertext,” in this context, does not refer to pieces that map sections of text to a physical geography. There’s a fair amount of that in modern interactive fiction, perhaps because of the cross-pollination of ideas with parser IF. Reed Underwood even wrote an article for Killscreen about spatial hypertext that does use that phrase to mean “hypertext that represents a concrete physical space.”

Here, however, we’re using the older sense: hypertext where the connections between sections are visually represented to the reader in a kind of mindmap construction. Sometimes that mindmap might happen to resemble an object or physical location, but it might just as easily have some entirely different shape, conveying an entirely different kind of relationship between elements. Clicking on different nodes of the map navigates the reader to new contents.

On the screen, spatial hypertext can look a little like a shape poem, except that the blocks themselves contain significant amounts of text, or additional block arrangements of their own. Here is Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, published in 1995:

Recently I’ve been including some coverage here of academic materials that might be of interest to industry or hobbyist readers. Some of that’s been focused on recent work in story generation or interactive narrative in some way.

Today’s example, by contrast, begins with a reading from a rather older paper: A Nonce Upon Some Times, by Michael Joyce in 1997. (If you want a proper citation: Modern Fiction Studies 43.3 (1997) 579-597.)

This article came to my attention because when I was responding to Mark Bernstein’s piece The Fellow Who Caught Fire, he called out that I was unfamiliar with something he considers to be essential reading in the field of literary hypertext.

“A Nonce Upon Some Times” raises questions about how we categorize hypertext structures, and what we understand from the meaning of these structures. Occasionally this is reminiscent of Sam Kabo Ashwell’s work or perhaps my own on small-scale structures in CYOA: what does it communicate when the author chooses a particular relationship between the available lexia?

Joyce, however, is overtly contemptuous of branching narrative:

The workshop exercise with which I began this essay seeks to isolate a set of primitive choices that both prompt the visual kinetic of rereading in hypertext and, at the same time, isolate the elements of what Douglas calls “a narrative of possibilities.”… It engages working writers with aesthetic and readerly questions about linking rather than encouraging a choose-your-own-adventure sort of drearily branching fiction.

…and what interests him is not the question of how one might project oneself into the role of a protagonist; not how one might experience agency, constraint, or non-agency through this pattern of links.

Joyce’s taxonomy is easier to diagram than to explain in words. He proposes that one start with a four part structure, linked linearly, which ends by going back to one of the earlier texts. I would diagram it like this:

Now: what happens next, after we have re-entered the second of the four texts? Where do we go from there, and is it different from where we might have gone the first time around, and what do these different arrangements mean?