First Post
What’s my thesis on? I studied a thing called hypertext literature. One day I sat down and decided to start on thesis. I concluded that it must be interesting to me, and involve as much of my education as possible. I am a writing and communications major with a philosophy minor, and so I wrote an aesthetics for non-linear literature. The premise behind hypertext literature is that storytelling does not need to happen in a this-then-that order.
Think of the old bard. He has come to a particular village, and there is a festival tonight. The noble’ daughter is getting married. Tonight would be a perfect night to tell a part of THE STORY, the part about when the hero comes home finally after all that time, and defeats all the other suitors, and is reunited with his long-lost son, and they all live happily after. But let’s not forget that there is a drunken heckler in this village, as there often is, and the heckler cries “bullshit! There’s no way he could defeat all those suitors”? and the bard knows that this heckler is bored with this bland little story, so he tells the one, also, by way of explanation, that the hero is a crafty man, who can outsmart a giant man-eater with one eye, and there are guts and there is gore, and still the wedding story has been told. That’s the nice thing about THE STORY. It has a clear beginning and a clear end, with plenty of possible beginnings and possible ends in the middle, and it is malleable.
Then, some monk or other showed up a long time later and thought, well, this sure is a cool story, I think I will write it down, and so he wrote it down. Think of it like this: your homework assignment is to write down the story of “star trek”? which is an old show and is only available in syndication. So, you sit down and you watch each episode. Which episode is the first and which is the last, these are obvious. The rest are just episodes. The hero(es) always land on the planet, (or the island) at the beginning, and at the end, they sail off again, so that the stories can come in any order. It doesn’t actually matter at all which one comes when in sequence. This is how syndication works, or episodes, or perhaps even stories in general. And yet, when you write something down in a book, you must have a this-then-that kind of sequence because it is paper, and one page comes before the next.
I argued, in my thesis that thing like hypertext provide us with a new way to write, one which might allow us to write down this aspect of a story, one which might make reading novels more the experience that heckler had, or like the experience of a child hearing a bed time story. I think it is so refreshing and delightful the way children interact with a story. I volunteered for a children’s library one summer, and those kids were merciless with their demands upon a story, and it was great. “this story needs a robot.”? “yeah, a robot named Steve”? “And pirates!”? “And a beautiful maiden”? I could throw up my hands and say “but this is a story about bears!”? or, I could have a whole hell of a lot of fun and try to make everybody happy, and this is how I earned my reputation as a storyteller with the children, as the one and only person that would allow them to heckle. How are they ever going to learn to vote, if they can’t heckle!