Creative nonction in electronic media: new wine

in new bottles?
George P. Landow
Published online: 22 September 2009
Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, Hungary 2009
Abstract Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has
forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that
keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writingsomething nowhere more obvious
than in nonction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination,
including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual
textuality, this essay rst notes some nonctional genres and modes after which it looks the
relations between ction and nonction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of
argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay
then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the
hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.
Keywords Hypertext Hypermedia Paradigm Nonction Autobiography
Newspapers Horseless carriage
We look upon our scholars as so many swimmers, who, in the element which
threatened to swallow them, feel with astonishment that they are lighter, that it bears
and carries them forward: and so is with everything that man undertakes.
Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Travels, Chap. 14. (Thomas Carlyles translation)
Looking back at the development of electronic nonction over the last several decades,
one notices some wonderful successes and a good many failures and retreats, some of which
have had economic or other motivations but even more turn out to have been children of
timidity, failure of vision, and sheer inability to think outside the box created by that
wonderful machine, the printed book. We all must have observed how many current authors
of nonction remain so blinkered by the book paradigm that, unlike the scholars in Wilhelm
Meister, they show themselves children unwilling to immerse themselves in the new ele-
ment and therefore do not nd their texts aided, much less amplied, by the new technology.
G. P. Landow (&)
300 Grotto Avenue, Providence, RI 02906, USA
e-mail: george@landow.com
1 3
Neohelicon (2009) 36:439450
DOI 10.1007/s11059-009-0013-5
Two examples: Neo-Victorian Studies (http://www.neovictorianstudies.com), a journal
on whose editorial board I serve, well represents one common form of scholarly and
critical use of the internet: rst of all, it is an internet-only publication. So far so good, but
since it offers only downloadable PDFs, it takes advantages of only a very few charac-
teristics of digital text on the internet. Yes, it is virtual and therefore capable of being
innitely duplicated and sent around the world with great speed and therefore essentially
location independent, but it refuses some of the other most basic qualities of internet e-text,
including its obvious capacity for hypertextualization, a quality that derives from its
openness and networkability (Landow 2006, pp. 3539). This scholarly journal, in other
words, exemplies an all-too-common horseless carriage e-text: like those who rst
described automobiles as horseless carriages, those who conceived this journal hinder
themselves from noticing, much less using, some of the most valuable qualities that digital
textuality has to offer nonction. Such journals, in other words, do not link to cited and
quoted texts, even when these other texts are other essays in the same publication, and
because they fail to reify the interoperability of most scholarship and criticism, they
continue to promulgate print-based attitudes that suppress the amount of essential col-
laboration that characterizes all such academic nonction. As J. David Bolter and Robert
Grushin (2001) remind us, such remediation characterizes the rst reception of all new
media. Many of the rst practitioners of cinema thus envisaged it as merely a record of
stage plays, and even the inventors and early manufacturers of telephones rst saw them
through the lens of the telegraph, therefore assuming that, like telegraphs, telephones
would reside in some central ofce rather than in homes and ofces. Do we really have to
repeat this pattern?
For our second example of failure to make full use of e-text on the internet, permit to
prove the end of a narrative begun in Hypertext 3.0 (Landow 2006) when I discussed the
possible hypertextualization of journalism. As I explained in 2006, While in Singapore
when NATO began bombing Kosovo as a means of halting the ethnic cleansing in the
former Yugoslavia, I wanted to know what The Providence Journal, my local newspaper at
home, had to say, and so I opened my web browser and typed in http://www.projo.com. In
addition to encountering an expected standard journalistic account of the situation Kosovo,
I was surprised to nd not just the usual news from a wire service like the Associated
Press but also a dozen links to statements by the governments of concerned countries,
including Serbia, Russia, and the U S., thus presenting opposing interpretations of
events. Following another link labeled something like NATO starts bombing
campaign, I found myself in a document containing links to information about the
airplanes and weaponry of all parties. Additional links led to information about the
number, cost, development problems, and legislative history of each airplane plus
similarly detailed information about every kind of bomb, rocket, or other munitions
employed. (Landow 2006, p. 329)
And so on. This networked, reader-centered presentation of a true New Journalism
permitted readers to pursue their own curiosity, questions, and interests in a brilliant
multivocal instantiation of journalism that produced what anthropologists term thick
description of a complex, controversial event. Here was the print-based newspaper re-
conceived for the age of the internet!
But it did not last very long: When some months later I checked the online version of
this same newspaper, I discovered that it had retreated to a simple web translation of the
print version. I have yet to learn either the date at which this change took place or the
reasons for it, though they are easy to guess. Whereas the typical online scholarly journal
440 G. P. Landow
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exemplies a failure of imagination and an inability to think beyond a familiar, long useful
paradigm, the situation in the newspaper, one suspects, resulted more from economic and
legal factors: newspapers want interested readers certainly but not ones so active that they
leave the bounds of the website, thereby escaping both editorial control (which includes
standards of authentication of material provided) and the newspapers advertising. Fur-
thermore, at a time when intellectual property laws have only begun to cope with new
information technologies, the online newspaper that links to other sources exposes itself to
lawsuits brought both by the owners of these other sources and by readers who object to
material they nd at the end of a link.
Nonetheless, we should not become discouraged, for while recognizing that moving text
into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, changes in the
internet and its use since the 1970s reveal that everything has had to be invented a dozen or
more times before it becomes widely accepted. The brave new world of digital media will
take a little longer to arrive. Such repeated reinvention not only provides grounds for
optimism but also suggests that arguing over who invented any particular technology is a
bit silly: after taking part in panel discussions at conferences in which proponents of rst
blogs and then wikis revealed that they had never encountered either the writings of
hypertext pioneers or the copious computer science and critical theory literature about new
media, I once again realized the truth of George Santyanas warning that those who remain
ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat itsomething nowhere more apparent than in
the computer science literature where one observes WWW and Web 2.0 researchers
repeating failed approaches from hypertext experiments made decades ago.
Therefore, let us look at both some pioneering and some recent projects in order that
valuable pioneering work is not entirely forgotten and does not have to be reinvented. But
before discussing further the nature of cybernonction, let us take a brief look at the
relations among various forms of nonction and information technology(ies), then make an
equally cursory glance at the very notions of ction, nonction, and poesis before
examining the characteristics of the electronic text. Finally, I shall present some of those
promised examples of the theory and practice of nonction in e-space.
Genre, mode, and information technology
We can usefully divide print-based nonction into four categories: (1) reference works,
which include dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopedias, directories, and (if one wants to be
inclusive) train schedules, parts catalogues, and so on; (2) academic prose, which includes
the essay, book review, the scholarly monograph, and other book-length studies, and (3)
short-form journalism found in newspapers; and (4) so-called creative nonction, a
grouping that comprises travel writing (Chatwin, Lawrence, McPhee), nature writing
(Dillard, Thoreau), wisdom writing (Cioran, Emerson, Johnson, La Rochefoucauld), and
sage-writing or secular prophecy (Carlyle, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Didion), and the experi-
mental essay, a true assay or test and exploration (Montaigne).
Nonction, or what is increasingly termed creative nonction, appears on the scene
of discourse rather late in the day, in fact arriving millennia after poetry, which an oral
culture requires as a means of creating group or community memory, of recording and then
passing on ideas and feelings someone considers central to a group and its survival as a
community. Writing, as Ong and McLuhan reminded us long ago, enabled recordingand
therefore developing the habit of conceivingforms of thought impossible to convey
orally, or at least impossible to convey unchanged and uncorrupted beyond the rst speaker
Creative nonction in electronic media 441
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to his or her listeners. Nonetheless, long after the invention of writing produces a new kind
of discourse, Lucretius writes On the Nature of Things in poetry, just as did countless
authors who followed him, including, Erasmus Darwin, Charless grandfather, who set
down his ideas about the nature of things in Zoonomias rhymed couplets.
Even though certain major forms of nonction, such as autobiography, rst took form
amidst the chirographic culture of manuscripts, they did not come to fruition until the age
of print.
1
Thus, St. Augustine, certainly one of the most inuential gures in the history of
Western culture, writes something close to the modern conception of autobiography as
early as the rst decades of the fth century. Nonetheless, unlike memoirs, this prose genre
that nds public use for private experience, does not ourish until the nineteenth century.
(Earlier autobiographies, as Paul Delany (1969) has shown in his study of seventeenth-
century life-writing, generally take the form of the authors aligning his or her life to
biblical pregurations.)
Fiction, nonction, and poesis
When teaching classes on Anglo-American nonction during these past four decades, I
begin by asking students to describe the techniques that characterize ction, and, as
expected, they always mention plot, narrative structure, point of view, imagery, dialogue,
setting, and description. When we begin to look at nonction, they quickly recognize that
virtually all the techniques they listed also appear in nonction. The explanation for that
convergence appears in the root words for poetry and ction. When Aristotle, discovering
nothing suitable at hand, groped around for a word to describe his subject in what even-
tually became the Poetics, he coined poesis, which means. This Greek expression parallels
the Latin-derived ction: ngo, ctus means made by being shaped or formed.
2
Nonction,
like ction, in other words, shapes experience, is shaped experience. Fiction and nonction
therefore appropriately employ many of the same techniques of shaping, though, to be sure,
narrative often (though not always) functions differently in ction than in nonction: plot
drives almost all ction, but although narrative pervades nonction, it often takes the form
of numerous small narratives rather than one overarching one. Equally important, an
interpretative or argumentative axis holds together these stories, structuring the overall
discourse.
Forms of cybernonction
Our rst question must therefore be, What new kinds of shaping or poesis appear with
writing in e-space? If print relates so crucially to so many forms of nonction, such as
journalism, the essay, and autobiography, what effect will moving nonction into e-space
have (or already has begun to have)? To answer this central question, lets begin by
looking at some nonctional modes in electronic environments in order to see how they
relate to their print-based antecedents: forms of nonction instantiated (one really cannot
1
There are of course two ages of print, that of the age of Gutenberg and the far different one involving
high-speed printing, which made the nineteenth century the second great Renaissance as reading and writing
spread virally through an enormously larger number of people than it had been possible to infect in the
preceding ages of hand-writing and hand-set printing.
2
I would like to thank Peter Hajdu for pointing out the derivation of the word ction from the Latin ngere.
442 G. P. Landow
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write embodied) in digital media, such the experimental essay in the manner of Mon-
taigne, new forms, such as the blog, wiki, and Ulmerian mystory.
Before thus examining nonctional modes in digital form, I should point out the far
greater role in argumentation of the visual that e-text makes possible and perhaps even
inevitable. Whether residing on a stand-alone computer or on the internet, alphanumeric text
and visual information (including moving images), both take essentially the same form,
though, to be sure, text takes up far less memory than do sound, images, and animation. The
chief point, however, is that images, particularly moving images, permit new forms of
explanation, argumentation, and proof. Since I have elsewhere discussed this point at length
and with screenshots as illustrations (Landow 1997, pp. 159163), I shall cite a single
examplethe proof of a claim about Nicholas Poussins reuse of compositions in the
Microsoft Art Gallery (which, despite its title, is an electronic catalogue of the National
Gallery, London). After encountering a statement that a supposedly identical group of
gures appears in The Adoration of the Golden Calf and A Bacchanalian Revel, the user
nds discerning similarities quite difcult, but upon pressing a button labeled Animation,
all becomes clear: a group of four gures stands out visually as the rest of one painting
appears in lower contrast. The group of gures then ips 180, enlarges, and superimposes
itself on the scene from Exodus, instantly proving something that might otherwise not only
take a long passage to explain but which, even then, might not appear convincing.
Admitting that visual information of all kinds will appear in cybernonction more than
that created for dissemination in print, the key question still is how will writing change?
Blogs, a new digital genre that has garnered much attention and enthusiasm, might suggest
that nothing will change very much: Blogs, after all, generally t quite comfortably into the
genre of the old-fashioned journal. By journal or diary I mean a kind of text in which
authors record and reect upon events in their lives in a series of discrete entries that, taken
together, form a linear text that employs a chronological organization. One quality chiey
distinguishes the autobiography from the journal: the autobiography has an overarching
organization that produces something very similar to the plot in ctional narrative and that
depends upon reectivenessthat is, whereas one records events in a journal, and the
meaning of these events do not change, in an autobiography every event, experience, and
thought becomes refracted by the authors present experience. Which is why some authors
can write more than one autobiography: as one lives in and through time, one understands
the meaning of past experiences differently. The autobiographer discovers or imposes new
understanding of old events. Autobiography, in other words, exemplies the fully shaped
(or ctionalized) form of nonction, whereas the journal simply records events that seemed
interesting or important at some time in the past, autobiography presents those events
through the lens of the present.
The e-translation or instantiation of the journal is the blog.
3
Since the blog resides in
e-space, it always has the potential to partake of or to employ at least two features of
3
We tend to think of the weblog or blog, like the wiki, as requiring particular kinds of software that
strongly differentiate them from standard html websites. In fact, large websites can either include blogs or
wikis or function as moderated versions of them. For instance, the Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org),
an academic site containing at the time of writing 41,000 documents and images, which functions in part as a
testbed for theories of new media, includes a heavily linked Whats New page that works as a blog: I as
the webmaster list new contributions, including photographs of architecture and sculpture, essays about
them, and book reviews by our contributing editors in the UK and Canada plus similar work by other
scholars. Whats New also includes announcements of student contributions, conferences, museum
exhibitions, and corrections sent in by readers.
The Victorian Web also functions very like a wiki, something the computer science community recog-
nized when I was invited to deliver the opening keynote address at WikiSym2008 in Porto, Portugal
Creative nonction in electronic media 443
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electronic text. First, it can make use of the dening feature of hypertext, the link; for
authors can provide a kind of double consciousness or self-reexiveness by linking current
and past entries.
4
In fact, few bloggers, most of whom consciously or unconsciously rely
upon the journal paradigm, take advantage of this feature, so that the overwhelming
majority of blogs have the aws of the old-fashioned discussion list in which reader-
contributors who enter the ow of text late in the game have no idea that subjects or
insights that interest them have already been discussed at length, the common result being
that they receive somewhat irritated comments from earlier and more continuous readers.
Which brings up the second characteristic of e-text that blogs employ, or at least can
employ: the ability of readers to act as reader-contributors and create a kind of social text that
takes the form of a cloud of commentaries surrounding individual entries or hanging of from
them. Although some rare blogs, such as Slashdot, have multiple main contributors, most
take the form of a one individuals text stream to which comments by others serve as
annotations. This kind of e-journal, one can observe, thus repeats the paradigm of the
scholarly edition in which one central text acts as a core or axis to which comments by others,
usually scholarly researchers, link their comments or observations on a range of topics from
textual variants and identication of people or events mentioned to explanatory interpreta-
tion. This kind of e-journal also repeats the academic multi-authored text in hypertext.
When reader-contributors add enough comments or annotations, particularly when their
comments refer to one anothers text as well as to the main or axial text, we encounter a
richly networked text that has most of the attributes, if not the software, of the wiki.
Even though the much-touted Web 2.0 is just Hypertext 0.5, Wikis and other forms are
nonetheless very welcome, if still very partial, instantiations of the ideas of the hypertext
pioneers, Bush, Nelson, and Englebart, all of whom envisaged hypertext as a read/write
medium, one in which readers could add links and text to what quickly becomes a multi-
authored work, thereby instantly redening our conceptions and experiences of author
(ship) and text(uality).
The essay
The essay in electronic form that descends from Montaigne can takeand, as we shall see,
has already takenforms that draw upon the capacities and characteristics of digital
textuality. The academic, autobiographical, travel, and other essays can employ not only
Footnote 3 continued
(September 2008): When a Wiki is not a Wiki: Twenty Years of the Victorian Web. Although contrib-
utors cannot directly modify lexias by others, thy can qualify, contradict, or supplement them by linking new
documents to pre-existing ones. On admittedly much rarer occasions, readers, usually through the inter-
mediary of the webmaster, can convince rst authors to accept changes as additions, something exemplied
by an essay on Arminianism (http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/armin.html) in the religion section
that David Cody, now Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College, wrote in 1988 when a graduate
research assistant in the Brown IRIS Intermedia Project (Hypertext). A decade after the brief essays
inclusion in the materials that later became the Victorian Web, Kevin Williams, a member of the Department
of Religion and Theology at Rhodes University (South Africa) added a considerably longer section and with
the permission of Professor Cody became the lead author.
4
This kind of double-consciousness or self-referentiality that emphasizes opposing ones ideas at two
different times also exists on occasion in print. John Ruskin, for example, often added notes to later editions
of some of his works, such as Modern Painters, pointing out that he had changed his mind on several issues,
or even that he had been ignorant or even insane, this last after he had recovered from a metal breakdown,
which he willingly discussed in his works. Ruskin, Englands most important and most inuential critic of
art, architecture, and society, is, however, quite unusual.
444 G. P. Landow
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many more images than print essays but they also can use moving text and images to prove
their points. And, obviously, they can also link to other documents as well.
Before turning to examine the Ulmerian Mystory, a form developed specically for new
media, I would like to look at a single e-essay that explores the limits of a link-based,
associative argumentSteve Cooks Inf(l)ections: Writing as Virus, Hypertext as
Meme (1996) (http://cyberartsweb.org/cpace/infotech/cook/centre.html). Unlike many
such web-essays that begin with orthodox title pages (or I suppose we should say title
screens), Cooks, which functions as an implicit sitemap, plunges one immediately into a
world of networked texts. The rst link, which appears in the title, Inf(l)ections, con-
nects to a dictionary denition of inection, which itself contains links from infective
agent, pathogen, and communication of emotions or qualities. Returning to the
opening screen (which we can do by hitting the web browsers back button or the footer
icon at the lower left, brings one to more choices: the phrase that constitutes the rst half of
the subtitle, Writing as Virus, links solely to Cooks brief discussion of the Common
Cold, which contains a link on the sentence, Virii are amazingly successful at doing the
only thing they do, which is generate exact duplicates of themselves. Returning to the title
screen and choosing the second phrase in the subtitle, Hypertext as Meme, brings us to a
heavily linked essay, entitled Screaming Meme, which discusses the term meme
invented by Richard Dawkins, pointing out, among other things, that Memes compete
against one another in a Darwinian struggle for replication; spreading quickly or elimi-
nating competitors help a meme to survive. Examples of memes might include evangelical
Christianity, the Roman alphabet, the English language, or Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles.
This essay, which has eleven links (plus four linked footer icons), ends on a riddling kind
of example: To quote a.sig Ive seen on alt.memetics: I didnt know what a meme was,
so I asked ve friends. They didnt know what a meme was, so they asked ve friends
(ellipses in original). This last phrase links to a denition of replication.
Creative nonction in electronic media 445
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Returning again to the title screen, we nd that the phrase with lexias by a diverse
cast of authors leads to a list of credited authors: Steven Cook, the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary, Omar Am, William S. Burroughs, Bruce Sterling, Richard Dawkins, Michel
Foucault, George Landow, Michael Heim, Jacques Derrida, and a link in this lexia takes
one to a bibliography. Back again to the title page: the words viral and memetic in the
phrase on topics of infections both VIRAL and MEMETIC take one to an extensive
(linked) dictionary denition of virus and a long quoted passage from Dawkins, which
itself contains links.
Since the essay-for-print that I am currently composing demands the kind of limits
electronic ones do not, I have to restrict myself to a few examples, and the one I have
chosen constitutes the entire text of Cooks On Lexias:
In a world of hypertext, a world with blurred boundaries, a lexia can survive based on
its usefulness, its wit, its clarity of thought regardless of the author. If as a writer, I
have one great idea in a mountain of dross, other writers can link themselves to the
lexia that reects that one great idea; Landows notion of the self as centerless
network is useful hereentire schools of thought can be constructed out of indi-
vidual ideas by separate authors, even if they themselves did not see the connection.
More importantly, entire textsentire authorscan be constructed out of lexias by
separate authors, and then read by the world at large. The lexia, in a sense, is
removed from the parenting author, to succeed or fail on its own merits. The suc-
cessful lexia propagates itself memetically, by ensuring that those who encounter it
will repeat, recite, transmit, transmute, mutate, and otherwise make it their own. The
failed lexia does none of this, and is soon forgotten.
After repeatedly cycling through the almost four dozen lexias that constitute
Inf(l)ections, the reader realizes that Cook, who employs the capacities of digital text
to make a textual collage characterized by appropriation and border and genre crossing,
has produced a kind of meditative essay whose jumps and landings embody much of
his argument. We also encounter a sensibility applied to a very creative nonction
analogous to Calvinos (1981) narrator in If on a Winters Night a Traveler, who
explains:
Im producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around
the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who
knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that
perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space,
always nding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told rst, and so,
setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of
material to be told. (p. 109)
The difference here of course being that Cook immerses us, not in layers or clouds of
narrative but patches and bits of discursive nonction, thereby creating an electronic
version of a Montaignean exploratory essay such as Of Cannibals. Cook, whose
pioneering essay strikes me as far more intellectually and formally intriguing than any
blog I have encountered, is one of the early discoverers of a key principle in this kind of
electronic writingnamely, that by scrupulously selecting a small number of lexias and
then creating ways for readers to encounter them repeatedly in their readings, often
arriving at them from unexpected places, one creates an intense and intensive form of
reading.
446 G. P. Landow
1 3
The mystory
Having discussed examples of hypertextual, multi-path autobiographies and texts with
extensive autobiographical elements elsewhere, I propose to concentrate on one of the most
interesting new forms possible, perhaps inevitable, in electronic environmentsthe my-
story, a new genre Gregory Ulmer (1989) proposed two decades ago in Teletheory. The
mystory, according to its inventor, is an attempt to nd a kind of discourse suited to an age
of New Media that combines personal experience, public history, and communal myth. In
the last chapter of his book, Ulmer, who spent his boyhood near the site of Custers Last
Stand and later studied with Derrida for two years, offered an example he called Derrida
at Little Big Horn, a print version of the mystory that takes the form of discrete sections
that speak to one another across the gaps created by time and space. The reader has to make
provisional connectionswhat are essentially proto-hypertextual links.
5
When teaching my seminars in hyperction, hypermedia and critical theory, and cre-
ative nonction in electronic environments, I offer students the chance to attempt such
mystories, a few of which have taken the form of translating Ulmers Derrida at Little Big
Horn into electronic authoring environments, such as Storyspace and the various web
editors (Dreamweaver, BBedit, and so on). Most of their mystories, however, take some
core personal experience and use it as a lens through which to investigate its connections to
broader social practices. All of them fulll Ulmers explanation that the mystory con-
tinues to include narrative knowledge, but prefers to work with forms such as the anecdote
and joke in order to expose the way the grand metanarratives position the subject in a
particular ideology (p. 86). All also test his intriguing claim that the anecdote is a more
appropriate form in which to investigate the future of academic discourse (p. 86). A few
examples: since I have discussed Taro Ikais Electronic Zen (1992) elsewhere (Landow
2006, pp. 307308), Ill just explain that it creates two parallel narratives each comprising
sets of anecdotes that tell of a summer when the author studied Zen while working as a
security guard in Japan. Ikais links interweave the individual segments of the two nar-
rative streams, so that the most prosaic events, one nally realizes, exist in conversation
with Zen teachings.
Another early mystory, Jonathan Greens (1993) Message in a Bottle is, according to the
author,
a hypertextual and deconstructivist reading of a bottle of Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, in
which images of the bottle are linked to bits of history, theory, and textual analysis. If
I had to place it into any of the prescribed categories I would say that it is more a
laboratory for Derridian, and also Ulmerian, critical techniques. The links I make
5
The term hypertext, particularly when used lauditorily, is applied rather loosely to writings in the analogue
print environment, since upon closer inspection, we discover that the work praised as hypertextual may
appear to have one of the qualities of hypertextparticularly a structure of discrete sections more or less
equivalent to hypertext lexiasbut which nonetheless only permits reading in a straightforward linear
fashions. Critics, for example, have described Robert Coovers famous short story The Babysitter as
hypertextual, but Coover himself insists that it certainly is not because he gives readers have no choice of the
path they make their way through events. In fact although one can observe the presence a fair number of
what we may term proto-hypertextal works in literary history, the only analogue print hypertext of which I
am aware is Cortazars Hopscotch; and I describe it as fully hypertextual because it suggests specic
multiple paths of reading.
Having urged caution in applying the term hypertext to texts that took form in the print regime, I
nonetheless can still urge that certain printed works, such as Montaignes seminal essays and Ulmers
Derrida at Little Bighorn, suggest how we might create the electronic essay.
Creative nonction in electronic media 447
1 3
between theory, history, and so on, are intended to be playful, but not arbitrary or
random. Thus I juxtapose the ideas of Derrida, Baudrillard, and Ong (primarily) and
play with ideas of reading as consumption and drinking as consumption,
alcohol as a pharmakon, the technology of written language and the technology
of blown glass, and other such semi-tongue-in-cheek associations. (From project
description in my possessionGPL.)
Beginning with an empty bottle whose four sides incongruously juxtapose both positive
and negative images of American Indians, Green went on to examine attitudes towards
native Americans, the history of American glassmaking, the consumption of whiskey,
ale and ink in the old American West, and so on.
6
As Greens Message in a Bottle makes clear, mystories easily employ grotesque objects
or events as narrative kernels and hypertext points of departure, usually revealing a con-
geries of unexpected connections between personal, social, historical, and political phe-
nomena. John Ruskin (18901900), the great Victorian critic of art and society, gave us a
term for this kind of device, which he called the Symbolical Grotesque: a discovered or
invented set piece that provides the occasion for multiple virtuoso acts of interpretation.
Sometimes Ruskin and contemporary authors of nonction begin with apparently trivial
things, such as the decoration of a pub railing in Ruskins The Crown of Wild Olive or the
advertisements for top hats in Carlyles Past and Present; other times they employ
obviously horric but apparently local events. For example, in Past and Present Thomas
Carlyle (18961899) points to an example of child murder for money as a Sign of the
Times that sums up the spiritual state of the modern world:
At Stockport Assizesand this too has no reference to the present state of trade,
being of date prior to thata Mother and a Father are arraigned and found guilty of
poisoning three of their children, to defraud a burial-society of some 3 8s. due on
the death of each child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the ofcial authorities,
it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better
not probe farther into that department of things It is an incident worth lingering
6
Greens (1993) mystory exists only in Eastgate Systems Storyspace, and it was created so early in the
history of commercial computer displaysbefore gray scale black-and-white, much less color was avail-
ablethat its nine images of the bottle appear in only stark monochrome. Green explains in the preface to
his hyperdocument that
This piece (therefore) links elements of history, literature, anthropology, popular culture, and theory
not only to, but through, a 40 ounce bottle of Crazy Horse Malt Liquor. The bottle functions as the
center of the text the unifying object of analysis. However, the structure allows for a great deal of
cross-linking among the various off-shoots from the bottle.
A single lexia, which I here quote in full, gives an idea of his method:
Bearing in mind the message written so prominently on the front of the bottle reminding us that it is a
PRODUCT OF AMERICA we should consider the spirit that is America as the pivitol pun in our
reading of this text, a pun so obvious that even those sticklers for authorial intention would likely
indulge some analysis.
Above all, we must realize that the spirit that is America is precisely a product, which, like the
spirit contained within this bottle, is designed to be consumed. Product and Spirit are, therefore,
two sides of the same coin, or of the same bottle in this case. But if the transparency of the glass
opens up a space for this subversion, we should remind ourselves that it is a permission granted only
ex post facto, only after the bottle has been emptied of its contents: consumed.
But if the product that is for sale here undergoes a sort of split at the word spirit, (a latent two for
the price of one advertising campaign) then we must likewise decipher the double meaning of the
word consume.
448 G. P. Landow
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on Such instances are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view; under
which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged. [Works 10.4]
As I argued two decades ago in Elegant Jeremiahs (1986), Carlyles citation of the
Stockport murder, Arnolds mention of similar crimes a decade later, and similar exam-
inations of crime by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Kate Millett all
force the reader to confront hideous evil and attempt to determine if these horrors are truly
Signs of the Times (p. 83). This technique, so central to that form of polemical Victorian
and modern prose known as sage-writing or secular prophecy turns out to work especially
well in hypertext nonction, where it provides an extremely effective way of organizing a
mystory.
Having looked at some pioneering early examples of this genre, Id now like to close
with a few more recent ones, such as Lisa Blunts (2007) The Curtain Rises: Thoughts on
My Grandfathers Funeral (2007), which begins with her aged grandfathers various
physical ailments, most notably a mild case of something called kyphosis, a curvature of
the spine. Because of the kyphosis, Grandpa had to be strapped down in his casket. This
was to keep from looking as if he were lifting his head and shoulders, trying to look over
his feet for a better view of the afterlife (Kyphosis) Immediately after the preacher
ofciating at the open casket funeral made the mistake of calling the deceased James
instead of his real name, William, a link takes us to the following lexia,
I suppose Grandpa, too, was upset over this misnomer. Right at that moment, a sound
like rubber bands breaking lled the small, formaldehyde-scented room. Just as if he
were getting out of bed, ready to start the day, Grandpa popped up to say hello one
last time. My heart jumped out of my chest. The pastor jumped out of the pulpit. My
cousin leapt behind the pew upon which we sat. Several women screamed. Grandma
clutched her breast, eyes wide in fearperhaps hope? Daddy simply looked shocked
and confused. Some of the smaller children cried, permanently scarred for life. You
just knew they were never, ever going to another funeral again. [Grand Finale]
This grotesque happening provides the center of an investigation of African American
funeral practices, the funeral industry, and so on.
Other recent subjects of recent mystories include Brianna Barzolas (2007) Americas
Sweet Sixteen: The Reincarnation of the American Dream, which combines comments
upon the excesses of both Anglo and Hispanic versions of such parties for teenage girls:
Creative nonction in electronic media 449
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Sweet Sixteen Parties and Quinceaneras; Kathryn Esbaughs Snowmakers, a heavily
illustrated piece that that combines long-form journalism and memoir; Peter Pengs
(1996) The Cupertino Burbs: Stimulation, Simulation, and Shelter; and Planting trees out
of the griefIn Memoriam Robert Creeley, a mystory by Patricia Tomaszek, a visiting
postgraduate student at my institution from Siegen University (2007), which the intro-
duction explains has two parts, the rst a lyrical essay about mourning, the second a ction
that traverses the psychological processes of coping with mourning.
A tentative conclusion
In conclusion, at the same time that blogs, wikis, and various forms of social networking
have introduced new potentials for nonction, hypertext-based e-genres, such as the essay,
autobiography and mystory offerand have offered for more than two decadesfar more
interesting possibilities for the new creative nonction that primarily takes the form of
writing, with or without the wonders of images, sound, and moving images.
References
Barzola, B. (2007). Americas sweet sixteen: The reincarnation of the American dream [ofine]. Student
project at Brown University in two hypermedia environments (HTML and Eastgate Systems
Storyspace).
Blunt, L. (2007). The curtain rises: Thoughts on my grandfathers funeral. Viewed 3 April 2009 from
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/nonction/genre/mystories/blunt/TheCurtainRises.html.
Bolter, J. D., & Grushin, R. (2001). Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Calvino, I. (1981). If on a winters night a traveler (W. Weaver, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Carlyle, T. (18961899). In H. D. Traill (Ed.), The works (Centenary ed., 30 vols.). London: Chapman and
Hall.
Cook, S. (1996). Inf(l)ections: Writing as virus: Hypertext as meme. Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical
Theory Web. Viewed 30 March 2009 from http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/infotech/cook/centre.
html.
Cook, S. On lexias. http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/infotech/cook/lexias.html.
Delany, P. (1969). British autobiography in the seventeenth century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Esbaugh, K. The snowmakers. Viewed 3 April 2009 from http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/nonction/
genre/mystories/snowmakers/index.html.
Green, J. (1993). Message in a bottle. Hypermedia environment: Eastgate Systems Storyspace.
Landow, G. P. (1986). Elegant Jeremiahs: The sage from Carlyle to Mailer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Landow, G. P. (1997). Hypertext 2.0; being a revised, expanded edition of hypertext: The convergence of
contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Landow, G. P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: New media and critical theory in an era of globalization. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press. [Hipertexto 3.0: Teoria critica y nuevos medios en la era de la
globalization (A. Jose & A. Fernandez, Trans.). Ediciones Paidos, 2009].
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Toronto Press.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.
Peng, P. The Cupertino Burbs: Stimulation, simulation, and shelter. Viewed 3 April 2009 from
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/nonction/genre/mystories/peng/home.html.
Tomaszek, P. (2007). Planting trees out of the grief in memoriam Robert Creeley. Viewed 3 April 2009 from
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/nonction/genre/mystories/plantingtrees/home.html.
Ulmer, G. L. (1989). Teletheory: Grammatology in the age of video. London: Routledge.
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