The End of Books—Or
Books Without End?
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| J. Yellowlees Douglas |
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"Much of the literature dedicated to codifying, evaluating, and criticizing interactive narratives tends to sift the wheat from the chaff entirely on the basis of a purely imaginary ideal. Even when addressing the experience of reading actual narratives, critics seems to focus less on the texts than on their own treasured memories of reading, fond recollections of live-action game-playing, or vague notions of what a marriage of digital fluidity and narrative fiction ought, ideally, to achieve" (3). Douglas's first few pages take issue with critics of hypertext and interactive narratives in a pretty direct way, faulting their methods and their motivations. Coming as it does after our reading of Bikerts and Miller, her response to them rings especially true. |
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| Unlike most of what we've read this semester, Jane Yellowlees Douglas isn't selling anything. That's not to say that she isn't invested in the genres she discusses, especially interactive narratives, but after the knee-jerk and hysterical phobias of hypertext's critics on one hand and the irrational and giddy utopian spiel of its proponents on the other, her rather matter of fact description and analysis is refreshing. Her claims are measured and, where speculative, careful. This is not to say that I agree with everything she has to say or even find most of it interesting or compelling, but she gains my respect in the first few pages and retains it through out. | |
| "If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology, a technology still at the icebox stage" (15). | |
| "The issue here is not whether the book and interactive narrative can exist comfortably together, so much as whether future readers will begin reading print works differently from the way they do now" (15). Landow would bellow "Yes, yes!!!"; Dobrin would smirk and shakes his head. Douglas does neither; rather she asks us how we might react to traditional print fiction if we had become accustomed to "seemingly inexhaustible" narratives. And she leaves the question stand, either assured that we can only answer it as she expects or willing to let us arrive at some other position. | |
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Douglas's particular focus--interactives narratives--is not mine, though I must admit that I'm inclined to look at them more carefully having read her. In a way I'm just glad that she has a focus, even one she wanders away from intermittently. One of my most significant objections to Landow, Birkerts, Dobrin, and to a lesser extent, Joyce, is to their lack of focus and their tendency to slide form one electronic genre to another as the mood strikes, making claims about "hypertext" when their fantasies/objections were actually to any text appearing on a screen and visa versa. Douglas goes to some pains to define and to distinguish; she draws lines between hypertext fictions, digital narratives, interactive narratives, etc. In places, these distinctions seems superficial, but I still find them useful. |
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| In the second, third, and fourth chapters, Douglas rather carefully walks us through issues on which we haven't spent much time so far: the act of reading (though we do have Bikerts on that as well), plot, causality and continuity, print precursors (others have used these as support for opposing positions, but Douglas analyzes instead of arguing), parallels with film, closure. Her accounts of student projects (though they went on a bit longer than they needed to) were particularly useful in grounding my reading. | |
| "No matter how you look at it, closure becomes a handful the moment you remove it from the category of strickly necessary things we cannot choose to do without, like death and digestion" (87). I love that sentence. | |
| The opening of chapter five--on closure--is interesting and compelling, especially as it plays the reading of print texts off of the reading of hypertext; however, the detailed and belabored account of her four readings of afternoon dragged; I admire the fact that she rode this horse until it stopped bucking and that she could recount the trip so carefully, but it was not a fun read. I was intrigued by the notions about time that she introduces on p. 97, but the chapter quickly turns into a moment-to-moment recounting of her experience with afternoon, and I could have done without most if it. The notion of closure reached not by arriving at a point on a page but by exhausting possibility is oddly disturbing and attractive at the same time. | |
| Light bulb over my head: In all the arguments about hypertext better approximating human cognition or mirroring human experience--both pro and con--flying around, this is the first consideration I've seen of the possibility that in that similarity (if we buy it) may lie hypertext's downfall: We read--we experience art of all kinds--in part because it imposes order, logic, closure, things we see too little of in life. Hypertext stands a perfectly good chance of becoming as popular as paper fictions by Faulkner, Burroughs, Pynchon, Gass, and Metcalf, but it may have little chance in the popular marketplace, where escape from life is more valued than capturing or mirroring it. | |
| Her notion of "scripted orality" and her vision of the future are both more exciting and more comforting than I've gotten from any of our other authors. My interest in and belief in hypertext had been waning; I'm feeling a little fortified now. | |
| Sidebar: Is this cover/dust jacket ugly (and inappropriate) or what? |
gr
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Mar 1 2002
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