Greg Ulmer

Department of English
University of Florida
gulmer@english.ufl.edu

 

Michael Joyce is well known as a theorist, teacher, and creator of hypertext fiction. His most recent composition, authored in StorySpace for presentation on the World Wide Web, may be found at http://www.eastgate.com/TwelveBlue. Twelve Blue thus demonstrates the strengths (but also some of the limitations) of StorySpace as an authoring environment for the Web. Its great evocative power also shows off the craft of Joyce as a creative writer.

 

The epigraph makes explicit the intertextual relationship between Joyce’s hypertext and On Being Blue by William Gass, a tour de force of poetic prose. I have long admired Gass’s meditative essay, for which Twelve Blue provides a narrative counterpart. Gass’s text demonstrates what I now call writing with the choral word (derived from a strategy often used by Jacques Derrida)–the inventio and dispositio are governed by the principle of blue (every possible usage) rather than by a thesis statement or a story (although the text both argues and narrates). I anticipated then that Joyce would continue this experiment, testing its applicability as a way to design a hypertext (and I was not disappointed). The introduction explains that the hypertext includes 269 links in 96 spaces. The reader is offered a definition that turns out to be a phrase from the work: “12 Blue isn’t anything. Think of lilacs when they are gone.” It so happens that I have never stopped thinking of the lilacs that grew in the backyard of my childhood home, the very scarcity of flowering bushes in Montana making their brief but fragrant appearance all the more impressive. I am hooked.

 

The layout includes two frames–a narrow column on the left displaying a field of colored threads or yarn, spread horizontally from the top to the bottom of the frame. We are given to understand that these threads, mostly of a dark color except for one line of yellow, represent the StorySpace network. Indeed, each thread is a link to a document in the web; running the cursor over the frame shows the range of URLs available. Clicking on these threads moves the reader through the web in digital jumps. Since the URLs are numbered in sequence the reader might be tempted to move through the hypertext in a linear fashion by entering the document addresses in consecutive order. This effort will not produce a linear path, however, for the work is nonlinear in both conception and execution. The large righthand frame displays the prose segments printed in light blue on a dark blue background. Each cell offers at least one link within the prose, motivated this time by formal or aesthetic motifs derived from the attributes or properties of objects, places, events, persons.

 

The effect of spending a couple of hours browsing Twelve Blue is the literary equivalent of seeing an interlaced gif assemble itself, passing from an unintelligible array of diffuse shapes into a fully coherent representation. This experience of initial disorientation and confusion that modernist fiction labored so hard to produce is more or less inherent in the nonlinear linking of hypertext. Some of John Cage’s experiments anticipate the potential of a different mode altogether of reading and writing, such as those in which he attempted to produce in prose the effect of working the tuners of numerous radios to pass in and out between noise and speech. Part of the craft of authoring in hypertext masterfully manifested in Twelve Blue is this gradual passage in and out of focus of the diegesis or imaginary space and time of the narrative world. As the reader moves through the cells of prose in a random order of selection, a recognizable world emerges–even a world of verisimilitude reflecting qualities of realist fiction (psychologically deep characters with complex inner lives)–but assembles itself fully only in the reader’s imagination.

 

The style of the prose is mostly indirect, with the actions, thoughts, and speeches of characters being reported for the most part rather than dramatized. We meet a group of characters entangled in melodramatic domestic stories of sex, fatal accidents, and murder. We are not expected to identify with these characters, as we might do if we encountered them in their original soap operatic genres. We learn who they are, what their relationship is to one another, but, as one of the women explains to her illegitimate daughter, their stories only have beginnings, but no middles or endings. A number of the lives do end, but the point concerns the form of the work more than its themes: its non-Aristotelian quality.

 

Twelve Blue is a brilliant probe of the direction in which on-line writing must inevitably evolve. The counterparting with Gass calls attention to the qualities of the hybrid writing that takes fullest advantage of the hyperlink effect. On Being Blue and Twelve Blue converge on a lyrical order from the sides respectively of the essay and the story. In the era of print, as Scholes and Kellogg long ago argued, prose writing was divided into two functions associated with two styles: the plain style of the essay was assigned the representation of fact, and the narrative story was assigned the expression of fiction. The making of patterns by means of association fell to lyric poetry, and was subordinated culturally to the report and the novel. Science, meanwhile, abolished style altogether to rely solely on experimental proof. These conventions have been dissolving throughout the new age of media. Long anticipated in the experimental arts, the technology to support a new arrangement among functions and styles is finally reaching the general public in the form of desktop interactive authoring. What remains to be invented (as I keep saying) is the practice that fully exploits the features of the new apparatus (electracy).

 

In electracy (the practices that are to multimedia computing what literacy is to print) essayistic exposition and narrative story still exist, but they are incorporated into and subordinated under poetic patterning. Twelve Blue is an excellent example of this inversion of the literate hierarchy among the basic modes and styles, in that all the features of the diegetic world are put in service of the figurative creation of an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling, in the manner of a poem. The events, characters, places, and objects have their own interest, of course: incomplete in themselves, they accumulate into an evocation of something beyond themselves–an image, a figure. The various scenes and anecdotes converge around the experience of drowning. The beautiful, athletic wife of a prominent scientist, skin-diving off Malibu, becomes entangled in weeds and drowns. Her daughter, obsessively compelled to reenact the event, is said to have become a strong swimmer out of grief. A deaf boy drowns in a creek. The repetitions signal unmistakably that something more and unstated is motivating these events.

 

These drownings described as events return as metaphors and analogies for the experience of the characters. A daughter tells her father, who is learning to date again, that women prefer men with a story–stories of blues songs and lost loves, or of shipwreck and drowning. Javier, the scientist, is a man figuratively drowning for having fallen in love too late in life. The assembling pattern triggers in the reader the realization that an allegory is in the making, or at least, in modernist style, an allegorical effect in which the microcosm and macrocosm come into correspondence but without grounding in any particular metaphysical system. The diegetic plane of events evokes parallel worlds at the level of the fluids of the body–especially the secretions and processes of sexual functioning–and the fluids of nature (water within and without, mediated by the human organism). The philosopher Voltaire used the image of a shipwrecked man who realizes that the ocean in which he swims has no shores, to convey the feeling of utter hopelessness. A similar mood is evoked in Twelve Blue.

 

Roland Barthes’s theory of narrative offers a frame within which to appreciate the implications of Joyce’s example:

 

The logic to which the narrative refers is nothing other than a logic of the already-read: the stereotype (proceeding from a culture many centuries old) is the veritable ground of the narrative world, built altogether on the traces which experience (much more bookish than practical) has left in the reader's memory and which constitutes it. Hence we can say that the perfect sequence, the one which affords the reader the strongest logical certainty, is the most cultural sequence, in which are immediately recognized a whole summa of readings and conversations. (144)

 

Twelve Blue shows how the stereotypes of melodrama may become an asset rather than a liability; Joyce relies on the predictability of all that he leaves unsaid in order to elaborate more fully the background details that conventional narrative confines to the function of furthering the action or expanding the character.

 

The act of reading Twelve Blue then is organized less by the enigma of action or the revelations of character and more by the gradual formation of an image. The readers become their own “Henry James,” receiving from the hypertext the germ of a story, in the manner James described as his creative process in The Spoils of Poynton. Dining with some friends, James heard a fragment of an anecdote during the conversation, something to do with “a good lady in the north, always well looked on, who was at daggers drawn with her only son, ever hitherto exemplary, over the ownership of the valuable furniture of a fine old house just accruing to the young man by his father’s death” (121). The reader of Twelve Blue overhears a number of such germs or seeds; even a garden plot salted with them.

 

These “germs” of stories James welcomed as “precious particles”:

 

Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the novelist's imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point; its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. (119)

 

The needle point might be reduced to one word: blue. James of course developed these germs into what for me now (having paid my dues in graduate school) are unreadable novels, as archaic from the point of view of electracy as Homer was from the point of view of literacy. Joyce, judging the nature of digital art, leaves the narrative seeds largely in their concentrated state. The image James used to convey the effect of hearing such partial situations extracted from reality (reported in the press or distilled from local gossip) may be recognized as the same one Barthes used to name the effect of “third meanings”–the punctum created by the details noticed in photographs that makes them unforgettable. The punctum is to electracy what the eidos is to literacy. If literate thinking organized itself around recognizable shapes or forms that evolved into conceptual classification systems, electrate thinking is coming into existence around felt moods or atmospheres.

 

The reason for emphasizing this effect in Joyce’s prose may have more to do with my concerns than his, but it is why I consider his work to be exemplary. Reading Joyce in the context of contemporary theory and media, not to mention the context of the World Wide Web, calls attention to the challenge confronting those of us working on the invention of electracy (the practices of both specialized and quotidian reading and writing for a society becoming committed to interactive multimedia), among whom I count Michael Joyce. Information in an electrate civilization is organized fundamentally in the mode of the image: enigma and enthymeme both are now at the service of the figurative. Again it is Barthes who provides an account of how the image functions. In image culture predominance is given to the semic code, organizing the attributes associated with the props and setting that constitute the environment within which the characters perform their actions. The semes, properties, or indices accumulate to create a certain atmosphere or mood. “The signifiers of the object are of course material units, like all the signifiers of any system of signs, i.e., colors, shapes, attributes, accessories” (The Semiotic Challenge 185). In narrative and argument these semes are subordinated to the purposes of proof or story, but in image discourse made possible by photography (the way the conceptual discourse was made possible by the alphabetic recording of sound), they emerge to function autonomously. Patterns of similarity, contiguity, and other aesthetic matches organize the inference path, the logic of hypermedia.

 

The cumulative effect created by the semes of Twelve Blue is this aesthetic experience of drowning, accompanied by the strong awareness that this image of drowning in its totality is the signifier for some unstated, abstract, perhaps inarticulable signification. Such is the effect a literate person expects from poetry or poetic prose. But what about in electracy? As W. J. T. Mitchell explains in Picture Theory, our moment has absorbed the linguistic turn of modern epistemology, to move now into a pictorial turn. The challenge he poses is that of learning how to think text and picture together, not only as image, a term ambiguous enough to include both pictures and words, but as a hybrid or syncretic practice in which the graphic dimension is liberated from domination by the textual. Barthes himself, one of the great theorists of the linguistic turn, assumed that language mediated the systematicity of every other code. But this assumption may have had more to do with the apparatus of literacy than with any limitation inherent in the pictorial. Indeed, late in his career, in his writings about photography and music, Barthes himself took the pictorial turn. The point is that an electrate practice will use the atmosphere of drowning (or any other atmosphere selected by a user) as a way to classify a great quantity of other kinds of information.

 

The challenge to the disciplines of Arts and Letters is to invent or design the practice of this syncretic writing. Teachers at many universities and colleges are introducing general education students to writing now in environments that require as much attention to graphic tools as to textual ones. Unfortunately, the limitations of StorySpace (in the examples I have seen) as an authoring tool and Twelve Blue as a model are apparent in relation to this new situation. The basic reality of the pictorial turn is that the site of invention of the next stage in the evolution of writing is taking place within the institution of entertainment, in the form of advertising. The discourse emerging within advertising, whose operating structure has been analyzed and refined within the experimental arts, may be applied to the needs of the other institutions of society, especially including education. Unfortunately the media literacy movement still formulates this moment almost exclusively in terms of literacy, wanting to make citizens more critical of what they consume in the media. This approach could be compared to that of warning students learning a foreign language to be sure to translate it always back into their native language in order to avoid experiencing those mental states different from what is familiar. The movement instead should promote the making of imagetexts in the schools, including learning the basic skills of photography and punning. Mitchell’s point that schools exclude (or enslave) the visual or pictorial could be expanded to note that they also exclude a complete dimension of language that the theorists call the remainder. Schools need to add to their function the forming of electrate citizens.

 

In short, I am not interested in hypertext fiction as such (no matter how much I might enjoy it) because I need models or relays that show me how to include pictures and nonfiction. O. B. Hardison’s description of an on-line version of The Tempest summarizes the sort of bricolage that comes naturally to hypermedia:

 

There would certainly be discussion of the date of The Tempest, relating its theme to the beginning of English colonization of the New World. The texts of two narratives of the shipwreck of a boat called the Sea Adventure in 1609 in Bermuda and the letter by William Strachey describing the shipwreck should also be available because one or more of them was a source for the play. A map of the New World showing where the Sea Adventure was wrecked would be useful. Another source that should be included is the essay "Of Cannibals," by Michel de Montaigne, in the English translation published by John Florio in 1603....Magic is important in Tempest, and there is an elaborate masque featuring classical deities. Hypertext should include an explanation of the Renaissance idea of magic, including the distinction between white and black magic, and an explanation of what a masque is....If you imagine a reader using hypertext, you have to imagine a constant movement from text to glossary to grammatical comment to classical dictionary to Bermuda map to textual variants to drawing of Ariel to text to Sea Adventure narrative... (263)

 

Hardison laments the effect on the experience of reading of the process he describes, and it may be the case that the representation of Shakespeare in hypertext does as much damage to the original experience of theater as the printing of The Iliad did to the singing of the epics. My concern is with the rhetoric, logic, and poetics needed to guide the composition of new works specific to electracy that such tools make possible. The present condition of hypermedia that Hardison, Coover, and others describe is indeed a state of chaos in which the complex organizing forms and practices created to manage the print apparatus have fallen apart into a mass of simple or basic forms–some oral, some literate, some specific to electronic technology. On the internet all these different parts are piled together in a blizzard of clickable items. The division into truth-exposition and fiction-narrative that emerged in literacy with the invention of the essay and the novel is not particularly helpful in this new environment that is perhaps best named by the theoretical term simulacrum. To try to sort out the true from the false prior to acting in a world in which superstructure is base (in which the distance intrinsic to representation has collapsed upon itself) is a luxury of the old rhetoric, a luxury denied to the rhetoric of electracy. Michael Joyce takes me some way toward understanding electracy, and for that I am grateful, beyond my admiration for what he has achieved in his own terms (rather than mine). The invention process we inherited from the creators of literacy must be taken up again in the apparatus of our time. There remains plenty of work to be done.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
• Gass, William. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Boston: David Godine, 1976.
• Hardison, O.B., Jr. Disappearing Through the Skylight. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1962.
• Joyce, Michael. Twelve Blue. http://www.eastgate.com/TwelveBlue.