front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page i The End of Books—or Books without End? front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page ii front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page iii The End of Books—Or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives J. Yellowlees Douglas Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page iv Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2000 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2003 2002 2001 2000 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0-472-11114-0 (cloth: alk. paper) front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page v Acknowledgments In 1986 John McDaid, then a fellow graduate student at New York University, suggested I meet Jay Bolter, who arrived bearing a 1.0 beta copy of Storyspace. When he opened the Storyspace demo document to show McDaid and I a cognitive map of the Iliad represented as a hypertext, my fate was clinched in under sixty seconds. I had seen the future, and it consisted of places, paths, links, cognitive maps, and a copy of afternoon, a story, which Jay also gave us. Within a week, I had upgraded my Macintosh, changed disci- plines, and begun work on a dissertation proposal using the same 1.0 beta version of Storyspace, the equivalent of volunteering as a crash- test dummy to check the safety of cars during head-on collision. After weeks of alternately immersing myself in afternoon and los- ing data to system crashes every ten minutes, I admitted I needed some direction and began frantically trying to locate Michael Joyce, listed on the Storyspace startup dialogue box along with Bolter and William Smith as the authors and developers of Storyspace. The third Michael Joyce in the Jackson, Michigan, white pages answered the phone with a deep, resonant voice. “I’m looking for the Michael Joyce who wrote afternoon,” I said quickly. “Yes, but you can’t know that,” he said, ‹rst, not realizing I had a copy of afternoon, then: “And who are you?” The rest, as they say, is history—and also the beginning of this book. Even the most haphazard reader of this book will recognize that, with- out Jay Bolter, Michael Joyce, and Stuart Moulthrop, my work would not exist. Their ideas, interactive texts, critical writings, and work on interface design have long provided me with both rich fodder for my research and an abundance of ideas, methods, and critical and theoret- front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page vi Acknowledgments ical approaches to interactivity in general. Together they have inspired me in every sense of the word. To Gordon Pradl I also owe several debts: for his insights on the distinctions between “inner-” versus “other-directed,” for introduc- tions to many of the sources that have informed my entire outlook on reading and interactivity, and for giving me the right shove at exactly the right time. vi front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page vii Contents An Interactive Narrative Timeline viii 1. Introduction: The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book! 1 2. Books without Pages—Novels without Endings 11 3. What Interactive Narratives Do That Print Narratives Cannot 37 4. Charting Maps and Raising the Dead: Readers’ Encounters with Hypertext Fiction 63 5. Just Tell Me When to Stop: Hypertext and the Displacement of Closure 89 6. The Intentional Network 123 7. Millennium Stories: Interactive Narratives and the New Realism 149 Notes 173 Bibliography 185 Index 199 front.qxd 11/15/1999 9:04 AM Page viii An Interactive Narrative Timeline 1759 Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ‹rst appears in print. 1776 Samuel Johnson declares, “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” 1914 James Joyce’s Ulysses ‹rst appears in print. 1915 Ford Madox Ford publishes The Good Soldier: A Tale of Pas- sion. 1938 Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration argues for the importance of the transactions between readers and texts. 1939 Roosevelt’s science adviser, Vannevar Bush, describes a hyper- text-like device, the Memex, in “Mechanization and the Record.” 1949 Jean Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? introduces readers to the central tenets of what later becomes known as reader-response theory or reader-centered criticism. 1960 Marc Saporta publishes Composition No. 1, a novel on cards. 1962 Douglas Engelbart’s paper “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” describes the document libraries, multiple windows, and links between texts that later become parts of the AUGMENT system. 1963 Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) includes alternative orders for reading its segmented text. 1965 Ted Nelson coins the term hypertext. 1967 The Atlantic Monthly prints John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which suggests that “intellectual and literary his- tory . has pretty well exhausted the possibilities of novelty.” 1990 Michael Joyce publishes afternoon, a story, the ‹rst hypertext novel. 1992 Robert Coover introduces mainstream readers to the possibili- ties of hypertext ‹ction in the provocatively titled essay “The End of Books,” in the New York Times Review of Books. 1997 W. W. Norton Company includes two hypertext ‹ctions in its Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology alongside works by Barth, Burroughs, Gass, and Pynchon. 1998 Flamingo, a British imprint of HarperCollins, publishes Geoff Ryman’s 253: The Print Remix, a print version of the hypertext narrative 253, ‹rst published two years earlier on the World Wide Web. ch1.qxd 11/15/1999 9:08 AM Page 1 1 Introduction: The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book! In early 1998, some dedicated bibliophiles were discovering they could download the Jane Austen novel Emma from the World Wide Web to their printers at no cost—if you did not count the price of a ream of paper and a couple of hours of local telephone charges and connect time, which amounted to slightly more than the price of a softcover compendium edition of Jane Austen’s works. At the same time, Flamingo, a British imprint of HarperCollins, published science ‹ction writer Geoff Ryman’s 253: The Print Remix, a paperback ver- sion of a hypertext narrative anyone could view on the World Wide Web, theoretically, for free. Less than six months before Ryman’s hypertext novel appeared in print, W. W. Norton, the publisher whose anthologies have created the fodder for English literature courses and curricula across America, rolled out its latest anthology, Postmodern American Fiction. Its table of contents listed innovators in American ‹ction between 1945 and 1997, including William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pyn- chon, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, and the authors of two hyper- text narratives, Michael Joyce, author of the ‹rst hypertext novel, afternoon, and J. Yellowlees Douglas, author of the hypertext short story “I Have Said Nothing.” On the book’s inside back cover the pub- lishers had also af‹xed a white sticker listing the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of the anthology’s accompanying website and a sin- gle-user password, enabling readers to sample Web-based versions of the two hypertexts, also represented in brief printed extracts within the anthology itself. HarperCollins and W. W. Norton have acknowledged hypertext ‹ction, ironically, by trotting out versions of it in print—exciting a brief ›urry of critical applause and a few tut-tuts in online compan- ions to print periodicals including Atlantic Unbound, AP Online, and The Cybertimes, while earning a jeremiad in the New York Times Book Review from, all of things, the editor of a Web-based magazine 1 ch1.qxd 11/15/1999 9:08 AM Page 2 The End of Books named for the literary salons once frequented by the giants of nine- teenth- and early-twentieth-century print ‹ction. Welcome to the world of interactive narratives: the Book is dead; long live the Book. A mere fourteen years ago, Norman Holland and Anthony Niesz noted that “interactive ‹ction is mostly a ‹ction”—great concept, a shame about the demo models.1 Today, we have hypertext novels, novellas, and short stories on disk, CD-ROM, and the World Wide Web, journals both in print and online publishing special hypertext issues, academic treatises mulling over the possibilities for computers and storytelling, clusters of websites listing interactive narratives and criticism, under- graduate and graduate courses exploring the poetics and aesthetics of interactive narratives. Interactive narratives have been the subject of articles on National Public Radio, as well as in Spin, Details, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Cybertimes, and the Guardian—Britain’s only left-leaning daily—plus no fewer than two documentaries by the BBC. But if interactive narratives seem as omnipresent these days as the World Wide Web, examples of them are still nearly as thin on the ground, proportionately speaking, as they were ten years ago, when Internet use was mostly still restricted to academics, hard-core researchers, techies, and geeks. Some of this avalanche of attention comes from interactive narra- tives representing something distinctly new in an era when newness, in fashion, in ‹lm, and in our cultural mainstream, is restricted mostly to revived artifacts that have been sitting out the past few decades: bell-bottoms and platforms, Volkswagen Beetles, hip-hop retreads of Herb Alpert and Joni Mitchell, cinematic remakes of Mis- sion Impossible, The Saint, and The Avengers, postmodern pastiches, borrowings accompanied with a wink and a nudge.