Very welclass="underline" But if that is the case, where, then, are the Charles Dickenses and the Mark Twains of our postmodern era; our novelists at once popular and excellent, acclaimed widely in their own time by critics and lay readers alike and likely to be so by generations to come? If the genre’s Golden Age extended some 100-plus years, from Fielding to Flaubert, let’s say, Tom Jones to Madame Bovary, and its more self-conscious Silver age through the big Modernists — certainly excellent, though scarcely popular — from Proust and Joyce to Nabokov and Beckett, aren’t we by comparison Bronze-Agers at best, maybe even (biodegradable) plastic? My reply is that I don’t know, really, although several considerations come to mind. Alternative media really have altered the audience for printed fiction, not only since Dickens and Twain, who didn’t have movies to compete with, but since Hemingway and Faulkner as well, who weren’t in the ring with television, really, not to mention with VCRs and the Internet. And we ought to remember, e.g., that while Twain was indeed a popular success, the novel of his that we most treasure nowadays had a rough critical lift-off indeed, and is still found offensive by distressingly many Americans. We should remember too that the likes of Cervantes and Dickens and Tolstoy and Twain are not common in any era — pre-modern, modern, or postmodern. And that in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (even in translation), we have after all at least three classics from the past half-century that meet our criteria: a not-inconsiderable number, to which other novel-aficionados will certainly rush to make additions or substitutions. So maybe things are just fine, anyhow quite okay, though less so than formerly?
I half-suspect that to be the case; but an abiding sense of malaise’round about our subject resists dispelling. What will the effect on print-lit be of hypertext, for example, whose evangels have called it “the third great advance in the technology of writing, after the alphabet and the printing press,” but whose nature precludes the fixative of print? And how about e-fiction, those ingenious interactive hypertextual computer-novels that effectively redefine the job-descriptions of Author and Reader? This is the medium that prompted Robert Coover’s landmark 1993 essay “The End of Books?” in the New York Times Book Review, which prompted in turn a little essay of mine called “The State of the Art”—to which I refer any who thirst for my extended take on the subject of e-fiction. For now let’s merely ask, “Aren’t e-novels the coup de grace for the old-fashioned p-variety? Don’t Hypertext & Co. render all print-lit more or less obsolete — The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It?”
After much and deep consideration, I reply: Nah. It’s a fascinating medium indeed, is hypertext; and electronic fiction is an intriguing genre for sure. Just a few years ago, when one couldn’t take for granted that everybody in the room understood what hypertext is, I used to illustrate it by asking my auditors to imagine on their computer-screens the innocent old test-proposition The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, its key elements “loaded” in such a way that
“clicking” on any of them opens a window menu of associations available for exploring, from the relative nimbleness of temperate-zone quadrupeds, through the history of fox hunting and its representation in painting, music, and literature, to soundtracks of hounds in full cry (with or without expert commentary) and disquisitions on animal rights — and every one of those associated “lexias” similarly loaded, another ring of keys with which one may open yet further doors, and on and on and on — no two routes through the maze ever likely to be the same, and every venturer thereinto not only a Theseus but a Daedalus, remodeling the labyrinth at will en route through it.
End of quote from that aforementioned “State of the Art” essay. A recent communication from my aforementioned fellow print-novelist Robert Coover informs me that one of the “writers,” if that’s the correct term, in his Electronic Fiction seminar at Brown University has in fact taken that Quick Brown Fox of mine and run with it: An electronic multimedia QBF is now several years into its elaborate gestation, Coover reports, and not finished yet. Stay tuned.
But aside from a general curiosity about all Edges of the Envelope of the art I practice, my own interest in the medium of e-fiction is mainly metaphorical. Hypertext, like the World Wide Web itself, reminds us of the real interconnectedness of things, and the many-layeredness of our experience of life: It reminds us that to “click,” figuratively speaking, on anything we pause to consider — the waterglass on this lectern, the pattern of that fellow’s necktie, the earrings that his companion chose to wear this evening — is to open stories within stories, “hot-linked” to further stories, et cetera literally ad infinitum: what I’ve called elsewhere the Hypertextuality of Everyday Life. I like that sense of narrative depth, that vertiginous dimension of nonlinearity; so too, I believe, would my muse like it, the all-but-inexhaustible Ms. Scheherazade. And so, in the same way that those earlier digressions of mine on Calypso and the hills of Úbeda could be said to have been an awkward linear approximation of hypertext, I have sportingly included in a forthcoming novel [Coming Soon!!!] some faux-electronic menus and option-buttons, for example, the way my Modernist forebears incorporated faux-newspaper headlines and such into their novels.3
HOWEVER (AS I’VE remarked elsewhere), while much of our life-experience is inarguably of a non-linear character — all our senses operating at once — it happens that on the other hand much of our experience is decidedly linear: this apparently leading to this, evidently followed by that. It is an aspect of our living ineluctably in linear time, which is the basis of all narrative no matter how we might diddle its linearity for effect. 2000 years ago the Roman poet Horace4 was already recommending, in his Epistle on the Art of Poetry, that storytellers would do well to hit the ground running by starting their stories in medias res, “in the middle of things” rather than way back at Square One. But even when we heed that sage advice, as more often than not most storytellers do, we still necessarily proceed sequentially from unit to unit of action, event to event in time, as language proceeds linearly word by word and our lives proceed linearly from birth to death. For rendering or at least suggesting simultaneity, film is unquestionably a better medium than either printed or pixelated language: Onscreen, several people can talk at the same time, as they often do in life but can’t on the page; what’s more, they can do so as we see their car moving through city streets, with attendant urban sights and sounds and a musical score to enhance the effect. But even the camera can “narrate” only one scene at a time (split-screen or multiple-screen effects can show simultaneously occurring though spatially separated segments of action, but our minds can’t simultaneously follow them unless they’re radically simplified and abbreviated). In film-narrative as well as print-narrative, it’s usually “Meanwhile, back at the ranch. .”—and in print we have to read, one word at a time, While Myrtle fiddled with the fancy new microwave and tried once more to tell Fred about that afternoon’s scary phone call, her loser of a husband unfridged and deflowered yet another St. Pauli Girl beer, wondering dully which lie he would tell his wife this time….