After the Book: Writing Literature Writing Technology

Perforations vol. 1 no. 3 Summer 1992

Richard Gess

The Book I meant to be After was made out of straw, some book nobody ever read anyway. In January I was utopianist: hypertext was to be the demise of commercial literature in America, perhaps not of the most highly marketed and profitable work but the end of the worst kind, the endless emptiness of the writing programs as marketed by the university presses. "That's the bloody Novel," says the Singing Detective, "He said, she said, and descriptions of the sky--"1 How exactly hypertext was going to prevent such work I can't remember now; there couldn't have been much more to it than feeling, quite indefensibly, that people would simply cease to read boring writing because hyperfiction would be so much cooler. Why would you want to read some dumb man trying to lock up tenure writing softhearted poems about his third-grade baseball glove when you could open a hypertext and blow your mind? Hypertext, morally elevated above mass marketing, would grow its own distribution: disk swapping in gradually branching networks, a few individuals turning publisher for pure love of the cause, a little pond where all the frogs were the same size and no one was ever silenced by money. When Robert wanted a theme for the issue I was deep in this set of beliefs and that's why I told him, over the phone, to call it "After the Book." (The subtitle, better description, was his.). The magazine was going to be the triumphal catalog of the new world, and my manifesto inside it was going to savage the old world and bury it in trash bags.

Now it's the middle of June, manifesto never written, and I feel another way. Maybe it's the case that electronic writing (which comes, I found out, in several flavors besides the currently hegemonic2 hypertext) is just more writing. Linking things connects them but cannot change them, cannot make them made of something other than words, cannot transfigure a sentence into more than a sentence. Utopianists feeling otherwise seem less heard from lately; the rising voices, in my ears, are the ones saying wait. It's not what we thought. I listen to them--Carolyn Guyer and Martin Rosenberg in this journal, Stuart Moulthrop's "You Say You Want a Revolution" elsewhere3--after much time spent reading more electronic writing than things about electronic writing4. The actual work is almost always intriguing, frequently fascinating, often powerfully written and assembled, a sophisticated alternative lifestyle. But like some other alternative lifestyles, real and virtual, it's barely visible in the daylight. As difficult reading, dangerously seeming to undermine the comfort of the Verities, it is as unmarketable, and so voiceless, as any other difficult reading. Beyond the Eastgate catalog5 (itself something people may acquire more often through referral), you still have to connect for this stuff, the way you might have to for drugs or group transvestism. You can't yet buy it at Dalton's. When you can, it won't erase a single word of any book in the store.

So how should we feel? Does a fair wind blow against the empire, or is it almost, like almost always, dead calm? As we go to press the movement's received the imprimatur, complete with consumer guide, of the New York Times Book Review: will this be unwitting eulogy or the beginning of the wonderful End? Despite rising dread beforehand on the TechNoCulture list over the first ominous signs of hierarchy (selective publishing, selective networking, the silencing of the lurkers by the Authorities), almost everybody still got their name in the paper. Before that happened electronic writing was a small circle of friends, a cozy virtual neighborhood of backfence schmoozing, favors done and returned, mutual admiration and common cause, a subworld mixing great ambition with interpersonal benignity in a way sufficiently different from the old vindictive business of Literature as to seem, to some new initiates, like the flowering of the dreamed-of Revolution. The phenomenon was too kind, in intent and execution, to be truly insurrectionary, but unlike the Revolution electronic writing does live, surviving its dangerous infancy vindicated. After the Book is all over and the Book begins again; choose a page and turn it.

This issue is dedicated to Glenn Gould, Sept. 23, 1932-October 4, 1982. Unseen hand: Michael Joyce.

1 Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. 140.

2 Here as elsewhere.

3 Moulthrop, Stuart. "You Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and the Laws of Media." Postmodern Culture 1:3 (1991).

4 Hard to do, given the ratio of critiques to texts. Terence Harpold's "Hypertext and Hypermedia" bibliography in Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991) lists around 300 citations in the field; at this writing a fair estimate of published (i.e. for sale) American hyperfictions might be something under 20.

51-800-562-1638, or Eastgate Systems, PO Box 307, Cambridge MA 02238.