"The idea is to make the word visible," explains avant-pop writer Mark Amerika of his ambitious hypertext narrative project Grammatron. Involving more than 1,000 pages of audio, animations, images, and text, Grammatron, released Thursday, is a lot more than a simple interactive novel. As hypertext publishing finally begins to actualize its potential on the Web, Amerika's work exemplifies how online literary creations are developing into an entire multimedia experience.
"Hypertext has become hypermedia now," explains Bobby Arellano, instructor of the six-year-old Hypertext Fiction Workshop at Brown University. "Authors have to either themselves be multi-talented or be amenable to the idea of team production."
Amerika, who also maintains the acclaimed Alt-X alternative publishing network, began working on Grammatron in 1993, his third literary creation after The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood. A far-ranging tale about the avatar Abe Golam, who is "in search of meaning in a world dominated by information overload," Grammatron is revealed through innumerable pages containing paragraphs, sentence fragments, and single words. Crossing between cyberpunk fiction and free-form ruminations, the narrative that emerges is in part a commentary on the meaning of words and letters themselves in the digital age.
"A lot of people write novels and criticism about this culture, but just do them as books," explains Amerika. "I was writing the narrative for my so-called "third novel," but the issues were so intimately tied to the so-called networked culture that I thought it was kind of a cop-out to write it as a book. So I thought I'd do it as multimedia. "
As a multimedia project, the software and technology that drive the site are as integral to the narrative as the words themselves, he explains. After an abstract introductory sequence of 80 server-pushed screens, the tale that is served up varies depending on the path taken through the site, monitored by JavaScript, cookies, and randomly generated links, and accompanied by a RealAudio soundtrack and a range of descriptive animations and still images.
"When I first envisioned this story world, Netscape wasn't even invented, let alone Java or RealAudio. I've had to adapt my story to the invention of software for the Web, incorporate it into the narrative structure," explains Amerika. "Letters create words create consciousness create man. If the story is self-aware of the importance of letters in culture, then if the HTML standards change [the story] is going to have to change as well."
Nonlinear literature as a concept has existed for centuries, its first digital genesis in the '80s with hypertext novels on disks and CD-ROMs from companies like Eastgate. But the advent of the Web and its distribution potential created more widespread interest in the concept, Arellano explains, and with the support of literary pundits like Robert Coover in recent years, the avant-garde publishing community has taken hypertext authors in "as kindred spirits."
Although there are numerous literary hypertext creations online, most are either small projects or repurposed linear novels which were never published. A few serious authors have tackled hypertext literature, including Arellano's Sunshine69, which ran on SonicNet last year under the moniker Bobby Rabyd (readers were also allowed to contribute to the narrative), and Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue. But hefty hypertext works like the Grammatron are still few and far between.
"There's been a lot of talk about the potential of the Web to distribute literature, but not many people are practicing what they preach. There aren't as many people ... who have earned respect in the print world who are willing to move to this medium and take a risk," says Amerika. "The nature of the medium is information gathering - click and move on. Who wants to invest time into a complex narrative world?"
Perhaps another reason for the lack of top-notch hypertext fiction is simply the lack of a revenue model. With micropayments and digicash still just a twinkle in the eyes of online economists, Amerika has counted on grants, guest lecturing, and sponsorships to support Grammatron and Alt-X. So far, he's done just fine, but if a new burgeoning group of digi-literati emerges, the novelty of being one of the few could potentially disappear - along with those endowments.
And even as hypertext creators like Amerika work to define a new form of interactive literature, a new form of literary consumption has to rise with it. Without a linear narrative, defining the beginning and end of the work is irrelevant, and with online attention spans as short as they are, odds are that many will read only bits and pieces of the entire work.
"The creative process was much more challenging to create thousands of screen shots so that no matter how you navigated there from whatever part of the story, it's still going to resonate with meaning," Amerika explains. "You have to write much more discrete and abstract."
Regardless of the challenges of working in hypertext, Amerika views the Web as offering a potential renaissance for those who haven't been able to find commercial outlets for their work.
As he puts it, "The impulse to create literature is alive and well, and the impulse to find distribution is alive and well. The problem is that there's been a corporate conglomerate of the publishing industry. Can this new medium change that scene? That's where the potential is."
