LINKS

Eastgate Systems Inc

In general, the core hypertext audience is the audience that is interested in new forms of writing. A variance of written expression. I emphasize writing in part because of the accident that Eastgate is the textiest and ugliest of the new media publishers. We, for various reasons, have tended to gravitate towards very literary work and as a result we tend to be richer in people who are interested in word craft and less rich in people who are interested in the visual arts.

Much, though by no means all, of the hypertext fiction we publish is experimental. Some of it might be described as postmodern. Some of the more discussed exemplars are postmodern or at least aggressively modern and as a result, we are enriched in people who are particularly interested in the post-modern movement. And in writing, for example, the group of Gass, Pynchome, Barthelme, Coover. James Joyce. Naturally, all have a core audience. And this group naturally gravitates towards some of the contemporary hypertext authors.

Interviewer: That would make sense.

Mark Bernstein: I should also emphasize that, at least in terms of the hypertext
fiction we publish, we are talking about an audience that is quite
gratifying on the scale of literary fiction.The literary audience is important and influential and gratifying, but it is not the audience for film or television or music. That doesn't necessarily matter terribly. You can't make art for everybody. But I do an annual interview with The Wall Street Journal where I am asked when is this going to take off? And one answer is that it cannot take off if, by taking off, you mean an audience of the size of popular movies. It has been a long time since a book commanded the attention of the same percentage of the reading public that a movie routinely commands. And no book has ever commanded the kind of numbers that hit movies command.

That is okay. You respond to the popular press that box office isn't everything and the goal of all art isn't the same as box office and after all lots of writers can have very successful books that make them lots of money, if that is what you are interested in. They will still have much smaller numbers compared to even so-so popular movies.

Interviewer: So you you know from your audience that it is not an academic pursuit any more. The people that are buying your books aren't kind of looking at them as interesting artifacts. There is a pleasure principle that that would extend to any other literature that they might pick up. They are reading them as pleasure, as opposed to reading them as awareness of a new form or as an experimental experience.

Mark Bernstein: Yes....

Interviewer: I have read a small number of hypertexts. I tend to be so conscious of the structural pursuit, of the intellect behind the design, that I find it difficult to find pleasure in the narrative, to be caught up emotionally in the narrative. I do not experience the transparency of the construction of the artifact that I would if I am listening to a teller tell me a tale or an author getting me into a place where I am in reverie and I suspend a certain amount of my attention to the fact that my eyes are really going across words on a page. I am in that place.

This is what I am trying to understand about the audience for hypertext, are they seeing or experiencing the author’s voice in ways that I am not. What are your own feelings about when you have been moved by hypertext? Is it simply effective writing, or is there something else there that is unique to this form that can be transformative.

Mark Bernstein: That, that's a very big question. Of course, to some extent that is The Question. But that is a question that can really only be answered by an individual at a particular moment. You can answer it for yourself now, but you can't really answer it for yourself ten years from now and you can't really answer it for someone else.

Interviewer: Alright. So let me ask you the question. You, an editor, a publisher, a reader and to a lesser extent, a writer, when has it worked... When and how... Can you articulate when and how it has worked, worked being a big word, you know, I am using that as a meta concept. When has it worked for you?

Mark Bernstein: Well there are a couple of anecdotes that I think make sense. One is the, what I call the recruitment of the reader to something that they would never think of doing. Sarah Smith in "King of Space," introduces a science fiction scenario with a first person protagonist. Especially in the early days of new media, first person protagonists were very common, so all of this seemed very familiar at the time.

And she leads you to what is obviously an introductory path &endash; what David Siegel calls an entrance tunnel &endash; into a branch point where you are faced with three alternative actions for the character. And they all seem fairly innocuous. We are faced with a derelict space ship, occupied by one naked lady in suspended animation. We have got to figure out what we are going to do next.

And all of the choices seem plausible and innocuous. And they, in fact, ramify in dramatically different ways and one casual and slightly, oh, less than fully proper response, the sort of thing that you might try just for fun, that only on further examination seems to be inconsiderate, leads you down a path in which you will choose to be a rapist.

And it is very cleverly done to entice you into just a small transgression and then just a little more and then just a little bit more over the edge. And before you know it, your protagonist is being absolutely god awful beastly. And you have made these choices. And there wasn't a point where you said, oh, I am going to have fun being an evil character.

Well that is something that is very difficult. It can be done in books. It has been done in books. But it is a new effect. And that, that was very powerful.

There is a pair of moments in Steuart Moulthrop's, "Victory Garden," that are extremely touching "Victory Garden" is a big, sprawling, Dickensian landscape. It clearly has episodes. Things are happening and they cross many screens and many links. But link following in Victory Garden is, well, a dangerous adventure.

If you get caught up in one part of the story -- engaged by one character you really care about, you might tend to pick links that will lead you to more about that character, or that will resolve whatever crisis that character is facing. At times, Victory Garden cooperates; at other times, it uses punning, ironic links to yank you out of one scene and into another part of the story.

In Dickens, this is called the end of the chapter.

And so you are shaping a story that is unfolding though you are not writing

it and you never chose what anyone does......
And so as a result you gain a certain responsibility for looking, for what you are looking at and what you are following.

And there is a wonderful moment where we intrude in the lives of Boris Urquhardt, who is the graduate advisor to both of our central characters. One is a grad student. One is a grad student who has been drafted and is serving in the Gulf War. And we have the suspicion at this point that the one in the Gulf War may have been killed by a SCUD missile.

But in this reading, at least, I didn't know. It was just, people were really worried. People were shaking their heads. And we cut from these two talking in a bar and consoling each other really and getting to know each other. And then we, somehow arrive at a scene in his house and she has just come out of the bathroom and she is wearing a wig, the student's hair color. And suddenly he thinks this affair may be a really, really rotten idea. And she says, no. It is not. That is a wonderful moment.

And it is made more wonderful by the fact that somehow you have chosen to be here. You haven't been invited in the way that conventional print would invite you. And so there is more ambiguity here about whether this is something that you want to be present for. It is really hard to do in conventional print because in conventional print it is right there on the table. You are hearing this because I told you and so did everyone else who got the mass produced book you have before you.