The Hypertext Process
Introduction
The following project is both creative and investigative and represents an exploration into the possibilities of memoir/autobiography in a hypertext environment. The particular piece I've chosen for this investigation was originally written with the expectation that it would be read in the traditional form of the book.
"Tomfoolery," the story of how a family copes with the murder of a brother, naturally developed into an experimental fragmented form that seemed to be limited by linearity of the traditional text. The linearity of a traditional text tends to set the reader up to expect closure when he/she turns the last page. "Tomfoolery," a story of disruption and fragmentation, does not offer a resolution. A hypertext environment offers alternative conventions of narrative space, structure, movement and time, thus expectations in linearity. This allows the story the space to more accurately reflect "the dislocation and the fragmentation of the modern age…and the very nature of post modern existence" as represented in this fragmented memoir.
Many other elements figure into the investigation, which reflect on the inherent problems in writing creative non-fiction such as truth, use of artifacts and photographs, and memory. The main focus of these elements will be how they are affected by cyberspace or how they may or may not become more effective in a hypertext environment. Other aspects of the investigation include how hyperlinks and hypermedia such as sound and images might function as both subtext and context, adding layers rather than length. Metaphorically, it could be seen as adding flesh.
Tomfoolery: Realist vs. Postmodernist Tale
"Tomfoolery" is a memoir that begins on realist terrain. It presents a problem, the murder of a brother. The story evolves as four siblings cruise up and down the boulevard in their dead brother's car, trying to get up the nerve to go to the funeral home to view his mutilated body. Violence is a subtext-the violence of his murder, the autopsy, the subsequent cremation and the family violence of his childhood no one wants to talk about. The familiar, safe landscape they pass through has become a strange and fearful place. Parallel to that, the façade of their lives, the "good and loving family" is beginning to crack. The tragedy of a murdered brother, instead of bringing them together, drives them each further into isolation. They "can no longer trust anyone because signs, people, objects, words-no longer have the obvious meaning they had before the event ."
Unlike the realist novel where the story "must inevitably move towards closure," the protagonist realizes murder can never be fixed, reversed or undone. There is never an opportunity to say good-bye, to apologize, to comfort, or to forgive or be forgiven. Even the Church turns its back, regardless of its validity, reflecting society's demand that a sin, no matter the circumstances, be paid for in full. For the characters of "Tomfoolery," the world as they know it has been forever disrupted, and nothing will ever be the same.
The text version of "Tomfoolery" fell naturally into a mosaic form. Chronology in memoir tends to bog the story down whereas mosaic, montage, collage, vignette, episode and segment more accurately represent the way memory and imagination operate (Root, Steinberg 358.) Thus in using mosaic, linearity is replaced by sequenciality, the power of the segments derived from their "juxtaposition with one another and the effect of their accumulation at the end (Root, Steinberg 361.)"
In text, "Tomfoolery" was arranged into twelve numbered and subtitled sections. Six sections, which are all titled "Pimp Car", represent the frame, which anchors the story, bringing the reader back to the scene in the car that never seems to reach the funeral home. The others represent a sort of collage, numbered and individually subtitled, offering details of the story, shifts in time, both forwards and backwards, as well as other styles of writing including journalism, a quiz, and other points of view. Since the four main characters essentially never get out of the car, the effect of the form is actually circular. Because of the collage effect, the disrupted narrative and no clear sense of closure or resolution, "Tomfoolery" moves from a realist tale to a postmodern one.
Structure & Navigation
A hypertext version of "Tomfoolery" offers two primary structural options, traditional and random. The traditional option begins with page one of the first chapter and follows a pre-determined (linear) narrative flow selected by the author. Most traditional literature that has already been published in book form would normally follow this option if translated into hypertext. The structure and authority of the text remains intact but annotations, footnotes, and criticism can be added. Examples are hypertext versions of Ezra Pound's "Canto 81" and "Calypso," a section of James Joyce's Ulysses.
The random option, such as demonstrated by Adrienne Eisen's "What Fits" and Edward Falco's "Charmin' Cleary" allows a section of the story to be accessed in any order, depending on the navigation options, and the whim of the reader. Another text widely hailed by hypertext patrons is Michael Joyce's Afternoon, which ironically, is not freely available for viewing on the web. Like "Tomfoolery," Afternoon deals with the traumatic death of a loved one using the similar effect of returning again and again to a traumatic scene.
"The scene of the car wreck which may have claimed the lives of the narrator's son and wife is also the scene of writing, the point to which it compulsively returns in order to go forward. These deaths exceed the bounds of the text and thus, like a wound that won't heal, continuously rip it open in order that it may begin again. In one node, entitled "fenceline," the narrator arrives/returns to the scene of the accident."
Joyce uses randomness and repetition to give a sense of chaos and lack of resolution. According to Joyce, "The story exists at several levels and changes according to decisions you make. A text you have seen previously may be followed by something new, according to a choice you make or have made at any given reading." So the selection of the random option is largely influenced by whether or not the author intends the story to make sense in any order or intends it to make sense at all. Essentially this minimizes the importance of the author and offers a larger range of meanings for the reader, inviting a more a "writerly" reading of the text. This option seems to best serve the purpose of authors who choose hypertext over text as it "allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths."
Considering the two primary structural options, the traditional option made the most sense for "Tomfoolery." Very much like Johanna Drucker's untitled re-photographed collage posted on ubuweb, "Tomfoolery," despite its experimental leanings, was still composed with a traditional text in mind. Similar to Drucker's pieces, which could be viewed in a gallery, a book or cyberspace, "Tomfoolery" stands on its own with or without electronic space.
That is not to say there are not endless possibilities for the story should it be turned loose in a hypertext environment and subjected to the whim of the reader. What if the reader could begin anywhere or was allowed to participate in its composition? But for the purposes of this project, the simplest and most manageable approach is the traditional option. This means the structure will be a more controlled progression through the story, similar to its present state. But the de-centering process of placing the text in a hypertext environment will still serve to expand the story greatly.
Decentering the Text: Context & Subtext
Decentering is "a breaking of hierarchies and privelege." Some elements of a decentered text are:
"Footnotes and other secondary comments are read as nodes visually equivalent to the body text. References and quoted text are implemented by linking to the original, where they can be read as part of that different context. Reader contributions appear alongside those of the original author(s) instead of being scribbled in the margin."
For "Tomfoolery," de-centering expanded the story to include more context and also subtext. In terms of context, the addition of images, definitions, music, website links and commentary have fleshed out the scenes and details from the '70s to the early '80s. Some examples are colloquial/era terms such as "balling bag," or rock stars long since faded into obscurity like Peter Frampton, or songs that now only make the retro list on the radio.
As the story evolved in a hypertext environment, a stronger subtext of violence emerged. This happened when expanding the story by adding links to information about the process of cremation and autopsy. Both processes are violent in terms of how the body is treated, even though the person is dead. When elements of child abuse were added to the fact that the brother had been violently murdered, the story began to take a different shape.
The length of the story stayed the same because no additional explanations were actually added to the primary narrative. Indeed, links give electronic space a sense of layering-a thickness or depth rather than linearity. In hypertext, not only do the links share equal privilege with the main text but also adhere to a multi-layered hierarchy that allows them to act as a subtext or even be considered as subplot.
This effect is a function of space. In "The Computer and Literary Criticism" the author notes that electronic space offers new ways to combine "narrative and spatial structures."
" Robert Coover notes that 'there is a tension in narrative, as in life, between the sensation of time as a linear experience, one thing following sequentially (causally or not) upon another, and time as a patterning of interrelated experiences reflected upon as though it had a geography and could be mapped.' Because hypertext has an extra 'dimension,' compared to the printed page, it can make explicit those spatial forms that the reader is vaguely conscious of when reading a novel. This extra dimension may also be used to make the printed text into a libretto, accompanied at suitable points by musical or visual elements. Finally, hypertext offers possibilities for collaboration that altogether explode the idea of the work as 'object,' and turn it into an environment. The 'Multi User Dungeons' (MUDs) that are now popular on computer networks are gigantic narrative fields where hundreds of players can assume characters and construct episodes; a MUD is thus inhabited rather than read, and the only possible criticism of it would be to enter this imaginative space and try to modify it."
Thus the added dimension of space in the hypertext environment expands and deepens the possibilities of a story as it has in "Tomfoolery." In terms of composing, visualizing a story as layered rather than linear also opens many new possibilities for exploring and developing a narrative.
The last element of de-centering, where the reader's comment shares the same space as the text can be accomplished in a limited manner via a discussion board posted on the Internet which is accessible from every node/page of the project.
The Network
The next step to placing "Tomfoolery" in a hypertext environment was to conceptualize it in terms of "blocks, nodes, or lexias joined by a network of links and paths." In "Identifying Hierarchies," Kathy Dang noted that the first step has two parts; identifying the first root and then identifying the hierarchical and cross-reference links. This is important in order to help the reader avoid becoming disoriented by providing a retraceable path back to the beginning.
"The fundamental property of a root is that from the root every node in the hyper document must be reachable. Also, the distance from the root to any other node should not be too large. If the distance from the root to a node is very large, the user will have to go through a long and maybe tedious path before reaching the desired information. The root should also have a "reasonable" number of children."
Her navigation diagrams resemble a connect-the-dots exercise and operate in much the same way. What is apparent is that if a random hierarchical structure is used, there may be too great a distance between some of the nodes, meaning that it is more difficult to connect them efficiently. In her first diagram, for instance, the distance between node "h" and node "m" is too great.
A traditional hierarchy representing a more linear structure, where either a homepage or a table of contents is the primary root and connects directly to each of the other root nodes makes sense. A good example is Electronic Labyrinth. The entrance page is the primary root node and offers a menu that is available from every root and cluster node. The reader can return at any time to the homepage or to the "Table of Contents." However, the reader cannot move from a selected cluster node to another root node. The reader must backtrack to the root node or select the menu option back to the "Table of Contents." Though the menu makes it impossible to get lost, it is sometimes hard to remember which root node contains which cluster node. For instance if the reader wanted to reread the page on postmodernism, he/she would have to remember that of the five root chapters or essays listed in the "Table of Contents," the definition of postmodernism is a cluster node belonging to "Re-thinking the Book."
The "Tomfoolery" project has three root nodes in the "Table of Contents," consisting of the memoir and two essays. A frame/menu remains constant, offering three other root nodes from any point in the network: "Home," "Table of Contents," and "Discussion Board." This should allow the reader the ability to move through the site relatively easily from any node, including cluster nodes. It is also designed to encourage the reader to jump to the discussion board from any point.
However, each root node listed in the "Table of Contents" is not networked to the others. To access any of the essays from the memoir for instance, the reader must go back to the "Table of Contents." Cluster nodes are only available through their individual root nodes and are viewed through pop-up screens. This network is small and relatively uncomplicated in regards to the essays as they consist of one root node and a group of cluster nodes, also called reference nodes, but the actual memoir has an additional twelve root nodes, each containing its own set of cluster nodes that include not only reference nodes but also hypermedia and images.
Other Design Considerations
Other concerns in design involve the ability of the site to be viewed easily and intact on the many web browsers. Font can be a concern if the reader's hardware does not support the same font. The entire site uses ether "Verdana," "Tahoma," or "Arial," the three most common fonts.
In order to make reading more pleasant, the font size is "1" which can be enlarged with the "View" option on the Internet toolbar. The frames were sized to accommodate enlarging the text with the view option.
A scroll down bar was also installed that allows the menu to be visible at all times. The pages are simple as far as the use of color and design, to enhance readability.
Pop-up screens serve as access to many of the images and text in the cluster nodes of the memoir. This allows the cluster nodes in the memoir to share the same privilege as the primary text. A reader can also continue to read as the pop-up screen is downloading. The essays utilize reference cluster nodes, which are links to cited sources.
The site was built in a simple html program called "Ace Expert."
Truth & Memory in Hypertext
Electronic space makes a sensory connection to the reader as opposed to traditional text. Marshall McLuhan described this space as acoustic and tactile, offering the reader a more personal involvement with the text. This aspect of electronic space can function in supplying the reader a larger context of the story. This can give meaning to obscure references of colloquial/era terms and characters via audio clips such as MP3 and images. Interestingly, this resurrects a debate that has plagued "Tomfoolery" from the beginning.
When it was originally written and submitted as part of my thesis, it had photographs included. Because memory is unreliable, my motive in including photographs was to show a documentable truth. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida had claimed that a photograph could only certainly say, "what is no longer (Barthes 85.)" Writing on the other hand, he says, does not offer this certainty. "It is the misfortune of language not to be able to authenticate itself (Barthes 85.)"
This certainly may be why my thesis committee felt that the photographs made "Tomfoolery" seem less true. The photographs were a disappointment in comparison to the scenes and characters I had created. Essentially, when sharing the same privilege in the text, they invalidated each other.
But, photographs have been used in memoir. Norma Cantu, who paired photographs with text in her memoir, Canicula, discusses the how they can cause time to blur. "The story emerges from photographs, the dead return; the stories mirror how we live life in our memories, with our past and our present juxtaposed and bleeding, seeping back and forth, one to the other in a recursive dance (Cantu xii.)" Interestingly, her photographs and narrative do not mirror each other, a trope on the trick of memory and the blurring between fiction and non-fiction. This may point to the nature of memory as expressed in written language versus memory captured as an image.
In text, photographs in the memoir seemed to have made the narrative incongruent. What I am expecting to happen in hypertext is that since text is viewed as image, that images will be experienced as intertextual and thus more congruent with the story.
Another irony in truth stems from two recent critiques of "Tomfoolery." One of the sections of the memoir is a note (word for word) written by my father. It describes a photograph that my father had framed of my brother and mailed to me. It detailed some of my brother's illegal activities. The effect on one reader was to lose sympathy for the murder victim. He suggested I leave out the fact that my brother had been dealing drugs. Both readers felt the "note" from my father was contrived and not believable. One said the writing was too similar to my own. One reader suggested I rewrite it so it sounded more authentic. One reader suggests I make the whole story fiction. So, what they meant was that an invented note was more believable than a documentable artifact and the truth was easier to read if the reader can believe it's not true. Certainly the task of any writer is to make it all believable. Cyberspace offers me the option of making the actual note an image. This may solve the question over its authenticity.
The ability to add images into cyberspace also helped me in the characterization of my brother. Since the prevailing belief in society, also shared by some of my readers, that a person deserves what he gets if he is dealing drugs, I wanted to make him more human and accessible. A photo gallery has been included.
The last question-why I chose to write this story as non-fiction? My answer is that "Tomfoolery" has been more than a memoir. It has been a journey. I see great value in working with personal stories. I see it as a way of bringing dignity to our lives and as Patricia Hampl says, to making our stories a world that can be inhabited and experienced by our readers. The importance I see in placing it in a hypertext environment is the possibilities of making and expanding meaning. Whether or not it is successful as a story in this environment is yet to be determined.
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