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Eastgate Systems Inc

Interviewer: When I was reading your article at our friend's site at the University of California, Berkeley, you began to refer to a concept of circularity and repetition as a strategy for sustaining a narrative direction in place of the traditional beginning middle and end. That kind of narrative direction that assists the reader so that they don't feel like they go down a path like a person in a maze, a branching system that doesn't lead them to a kind of a satisfactory narrative experience.

Could you talk a little bit about this question? What are some of the things that you have done in terms of trying to develop aesthetic concepts that people could use in trying to develop their hypertext pieces.

Mark Bernstein: First, let me emphasize that I, while I write hypertexts, it is a very secondary and minor thing I do. I am not a particularly significant hypertext writer.

I wrote an early historical hypertext which has some merits but is now quite old. And I have written some hypertext essays
about hypertext writing and rhetoric. 'Chasing Our Tails' is one of those.


I think that my contribution as a publisher or an editor, occasionally as a critic, is more substantial than these fairly minor efforts in hypertext writing themselves.

The people who are really doing the work are the writers. We just labor in the mines trying to bring the writers and the readers together.

One of the questions that people who first hear about electronic media, especially the hypertextuality of new media, often ask is "won't this just degenerate into an endless tangle of stuff. " And, of course, occasionally endless tangles of stuff are what some artists are seeking. There is art that creates an endless tangle and whose message is contained in that tangle. So sometimes that is exactly the effect you want.

But that is often not the effect you want and the medium shouldn't be limited to that particular sort of art. How do we convey structure in the course of reading a hypertext or how do we perceive that structure when we sit down in front of a hypertext?

One way is through recurrence. Repetition. What I often call the cycle pattern. This is exactly the way we perceive structure in story telling and full story telling, poetry and music.

From time to time we recapitulate and repeat something we have already heard, either literally or with a chosen variation in order to both establish that we have reached some conclusion, some stopping point, at least temporarily, and to establish that this isn't a single continuous action. That this is a place where we might pause and make sense of what has happened.

There are other structures, too, that have proven to be very helpful. The task I set myself for the last year or so is finding names for the structures or patterns that we often observe in hypertext we have edited and are discussing with writers

For example, take counterpoint, the alternation of voices between odd different spaces in the writing. It is quite common for writers both on paper and especially in hypertext to tell a story in dialogue with several different voices who might literally be characters or might be attitudes. I am currently reading a science fiction novel called "Forever Peace", by a guy named Joe Haldeman. Fairly experimental writer. He does this by alternating passages, switching between first person
and third-person situated. You are always focused on the protagonist,but rather jarringly you may move from his account of what he is feeling to an over-the-shoulder account of what he is doing.

This is a cinematic technique, of course. It also occurs occasionally in surreal art. And has proved very effective in hypertext. So what we did is we noticed that and slapped a name on it and so it is easier to talk about once you and I can agree on calling it something.

Similarly, another structure that comes up fairly often is the mirrored world. A part of the hypertext which is a parody or satire or reflection of the main action. You see this in Shakespeare and the Greeks. Just as you see counterpoint in Shakespeare and the Greeks, you see mirrored worlds all the time in upstairs/downstairs dichotomies.

In hypertext they often are surreal, or just topical commentaries on a mundane action. So again having a name helps you think about them and helps you talk about the craft.

Interviewer: I can imagine those quite easily. I perfectly understand why the mirrored world would add to a narrative value - the Rashomon effect. In the literature of the 20th century, just as in the science of the 20th century, we have come to understand that there is no singular perspective.

Mark Bernstein: ExactlyBy simply identifying these patterns as tools that many people
might use (as opposed to featured of specific works) and slapping
names on them, we help people use new techniques and to avoid
inappropriate techniques.

You see this quite prominently in the early history of film. Imagine talking about film editing without having words for things like crossing the line or cross-cutting. The high flown ideas like montage are the ones everyone rushes to first.
But it is the workmanlike ideas that you simply have to have in order to make any progress sitting around a discussion how you can make the film better.

Interviewer: You were saying that you have found the audience for this work. Who are these people? I have sensed, in the larger literary community, that the hypertext community has developed its audience, but they are not tremendously visible.

Who are they? Where are you most likely to find them and what do we know about their interests that would suggest what we need to encourage or develop in people for more people to be enjoying hypertext as a literary form.

Mark Bernstein: Okay, I am going to take off my publisher's hat now and put on my booksellers hat.
These roles, by the way, used to be much less distinct in the book world than they are today. Where the roles of printer, bookmaker and publisher were much, were formerly much more closely connected than they are today. So in some ways we are recapitulating early history.

As a bookseller, first the important thing is every title has its own natural audience. Discussing a distinct audience for hypertext is a overly broad generalization. While there are a few people who might be interested in any published hypertext, most people will be far more interested some hypertext than others.

Interviewer: By genre or whatever?

Mark Bernstein: By genre, by subject, by style. By topic. We have had considerable success selling a hypertext called "Socrates in the Labyrinth" for example. This is a hypertext about the philosophy of argumentation. We did not expect this to sell very well because by and large you don't expect by philosophy professors on philosophy to be hot sellers. But it is a question that lots of people in new media are wondering about, how do you make an argument? How do you report an experience or explain a fact in a world where there are links and you can't predict which links readers will follow.