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Entity and Event: Electronic Literature in Context

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Entity and Event: Electronic Literature in Context [This is Chapter 1 of Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing, by Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar, MIT Press, 2017] Entity and Event: Electronic Literature in Context Stuart Moulthrop At this historiCal junCture where time has been deClared the most important resource for the eConomy, teChnology, and art, we should not pay so muCh attention to how muCh or how little time we have. Rather, we should take heed of who or what has power of disposal over our time and the time of others, and in what way. The only effiCaCious remedy for a melanCholy and resigned attitude toward the world is to appropriate, or reappropriate, the power of disposal over the time that life and art need. Only then is the future conceivable at all—as a permanent thing of impossibility. —Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media Dial-Up Dial for a taxi on your mobile phone and pay the driver in cash. This Curious sentenCe might belong to sCienCe fiCtion, marking the speaker as a time-traveling invader failing to pass as Contemporary. Or it Could read as a plainer kind of realism with the speaker simply part of an older generation shipwrecked on the reefs of history. Either way, the sentence displays creeping lexical rot. The first word has already collapsed and the rest have been seriously undermined. Telephone dials are as quaint and perhaps as poorly understood as sundials. With the advent of Internet-mediated ride serviCes, taxi has joined the extinCtion Queue. A Case Can be made that mobile phone poorly desCribes today’s handheld information deviCes, whiCh are so muCh more than telephones and may not be handheld too muCh longer. The self-driving Cars of the next few deCades seem ready to turn driver into an archaism, and of course cash has been on the purge list for a while now. Whether pay will join it seems open to debate. Page 1 of 47 Bruce Sterling once opined that his generation, to which the writers of this book belong, was the first to live in a truly sCience-fictional universe, surrounded by teChnologies, experienCes, and problems unimaginable to their elders (1986, xi). The elders might plausibly deny this Claim, noting nearly two centuries of rapid change across various registers—soCiety, eConomiCs, politiCs, and teChniCs—though, in Sterling’s defense, the pace arguably has increased in our lifetimes. Time is indeed at the heart of the matter as Zielinski says, but it is notoriously hard to talk about its effects. Whether or not we have ever been truly modern, muCh of the world has experienCed an effeCt Called modernity, a visitation whose symptoms inClude a Certain diffiCulty in naming. Here is a name partiCularly steeped in temporal anxiety: electronic literature. In asking what that phrase Could mean, we are really wondering to what moments it might belong, future and/or past. Those who use the name familiarly do not seem to find it problematiC—or, if we do, we are flummoxed by our inability to find something better. The phrase has been used to designate at least two aCademiC enterprises, a professional assoCiation Called the EleCtroniC Literature Organization (ELO), and, in Europe, a research project called Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP). ELO has published three volumes of its Electronic Literature Collection, and ELMCIP and other international initiatives (e.g., Hermeneia in Spain, NT2 in Canada) have sponsored editions and Compilations of researCh on eleCtroniC literature in numerous languages. The ConCept of eleCtroniC literature is generally aCCepted, with varying degrees of skeptiCism, among a number of parallel and allied efforts suCh as the E-Poetry Center at the University at Buffalo, various international branches of the interactive-fiCtion Community, and at least some praCtitioners of Twine gaming.1 The phrase “electronic literature” aChieved formal status with the foundation of ELO by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe in 1999 (Walker Rettberg, 2012). A longer lineage of literary works produced by eleCtro-meChaniCal means might be traCed to Christopher Strachey’s love-letter generator, designed in 1952 for the Manchester Mark I (Wardrip-Fruin 2015). Other historiCal landmarks inClude Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA sCript of 1965, famously imitating the disCourse of Rogerian therapy, and Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure of 1975, the digital ancestor of interactive fictions. Especially in its Page 2 of 47 later permutations, Crowther’s program probably represents the first use of Computers to produCe writing of more than aCademiC interest. His work led to the heyday of text- adventure publishing in the 1980s and, through various permutations, to narrative adventure games in Current CommerCial markets (see Montfort 2005 and Salter 2014). Further inflections of electronic literature include Malloy’s groundbreaking “narrabases” (among these Uncle Roger, the subject of chapter 2) and Joyce’s afternoon, a story, the first instance of self-identified hypertext fiCtion. EleCtroniC poetry has similarly been around on an experimental basis sinCe the beginning of digital Computing (see Funkhouser 2007) and has flourished with the advent of the World Wide Web. As Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff have noted, access to the Internet has given new power and purpose to various poetic practices, notably proCedural, ConCrete, and ConCeptual poetry (Goldsmith 2011, 157; Perloff 2010, 50). Within aCademia, the idea of digital literature has been addressed by a diverse group of theorists, beginning with Theodor Holm Nelson (1993), the first to propose the idea of an electronic literature per se. Others include Johanna Drucker, Lévy, Bolter, Landow, Hayles, Liu, Aarseth, and lately Perloff. These figures have framed approaChes to language and Culture that draw signifiCantly on ideas and examples from digital writing. Like aesthetiCally ambitious literature generally, electronic writing has been better known among sCholars than the broader publiC, though there are exceptions to this rule. With initial sales in the range of 350,000, Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky’s 1984 release Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an interaCtive fiCtion based on Adams’ novels, set CommerCial reCords and ranks among the most suCCessful Computer games in history (BBC). If we add Continuing online enCounters numbering in the millions, the game probably qualifies as the best-known example of eleCtroniC literature, though a case could be made for the landmark video game MYST, or, for that matter, almost any suCCessful, aesthetically ambitious game produCed sinCe. MuCh depends, as we will see, on how we choose to define literature, along with its means, modes, and praCtiCes of Composition, Circulation, and reception—or if we dispense with that word and try something else. Having Come to this point, we have probably gone beyond the Context in whiCh “electronic Page 3 of 47 literature” Can be aCCepted without inQuiry or Controversy. It is time to address the term more CritiCally. Nothing and Everything Long before eleCtroniC literature beCame as we say these days, a thing, another science fiCtion writer, Stanlislaw Lem, glimpsed something like it on the far horizon. In an introduCtion to an imaginary book of the next century, he outlined the “History of Bitic Literature,” an art Comprising works of “nonhuman origin”—though apparently humans would still study this literature Composed by maChines (Lem 1984, 41). Strictly speaking Lem’s prediCtion has not yet Come true: eleCtroniC literature retains human origins, though the terms of that engagement are Controversial. However fantastiC, Lem’s futurism frames some important historiCal Questions. Where does electronic literature fit into the time stream? WhiCh is to ask, why fixate on eleCtrons? In most Cases the name invokes a Cultural regime (or “episteme,” in Lévy’s term) rather than a physiCal substrate. So perhaps we can follow Lévy in speaking of “molar” alternatives (1997, 51), forms of writing informed by material rather than immaterial operations. If there is an electronic literature now, was there onCe a literature of bronze, steel, or steam? This Question might point toward the maChine in Leo Marx’s garden (1964) and, from another angle, to the Difference Engine of Gibson and Sterling (1990), not to mention Babbage and Lovelace. But these examples are not really to the point because, as history and counter-history, they are retrospective. It is one thing to CharaCterize a moment after the faCt but something else to name it on the fly. For some, eleCtroniC writing represents a ConjunCtion of opposites. “Print stays the same,” Joyce notes, but “electronic text replaces itself” (1995, 232). In most forms of digital mediation, words are not insCribed or imprinted but rendered as pixel mosaiCs on a light- emitting surfaCe through a proCess repeated thousands of times per seCond. The page-like structures of e-mail, word proCessing, and the Web (those veritable antiques) trick older, book-adapted brains into an assumption of earlier Contexts. Contrast any of these with the newer idioms of instant and evanesCent messaging (e.g., Twitter and Snapchat), and the impaCt of teChnologiCal differenCe beComes apparent. EleCtrons are fast as light, or near enough. Literature, by contrast, has generally been associated with stability and long Page 4 of 47 duration, qualities to which Borges’s fantastic “Book of Sand” (2007) testifies as affirmative exception. Now books of sand—whiCh is to say, silicon—are CommonplaCe. “I wanted to write a story that would Change eaCh time you read it,” JoyCe offers, explaining the genesis of afternoon (Joyce 1990; see also Barnet 2013, 117). JoyCe’s invention may fall short of his desire in absolute terms—the work is more given to loops and iterations than to absolute novelties—but its operational instability certainly finds the flick in flickering signifiers (Hayles 1993).
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