Once more amid a new spat of sleepless nights the specter of Roland Barthes appears above my bed and draws me back within my hummingbird satin robe to shuffle off to first the kitchen where I brew a cup of coffee–no, that is not what intimidates restful sleep–and then to settle upon the couch and press that button that brings life to both my laptop and to me.
Whew. That was a longie.
What I wrote about here, and read about here, are mixed together with a sudden urge to abandon all semblance of necessity and practical productive life in search instead of interactive play with text that rises far beyond the borders of that which hasn’t even been invented yet.
I visualize hyperfiction not as a maze–even one that allows more than a single path and single entry and exit–but more like a thousand-acre ranch or farm where cows are let out to pasture over a series of fields separate yet connected by fencing. Still restrictive, yet what each pasture holds as far as space to roam, greenery to chew to cud, pools to drink from, mud to settle into to cool one’s hide, are all randomly laid out. But in hyperfiction, a cow doesn’t have the overall view of the fields, so even if allowed to select, can’t do so without it being a "leave here to go someplace else" choice. The grass is always greener…
Barthes, despite his insistence that the reader is the cowherder or head cow, may have led us to the idea of reader choice, and Vannevar Bush may have given us the plot plan, and others have taken us further through technology, but there are still restrictions made up by the writer–even if he gives us a thousand choices. Book format story itself allows reader freedom of sorts by infusing story with reader experience that may change the story drastically from what is written down and locked onto paper pages. Simple example: If a character is named Mitch, I’m going to imagine my kindergarten boyfriend no matter what description of appearance and personality I’m given. That may be tempered of course by what I’m reading, and my image of any future "Mitch" I encounter in my readings will also have changed in my experience.
But back to choice, and truly creating with some sort of path in mind; after all, you don’t clear a trail by swinging your machete behind you. I don’t have a total understanding yet of what this offers, nor its limitations, but it looks mighty interesting to this cow. Armed with machete, of course.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology