This analysis of the literary and the artistic, significance and affect, meaning and emotion, has interesting repercussions for classical hypertext. This sort of hypertext cherished the networked structure, where each bit of text contains many associative connections to other bits of text, without a definite hierarchy or order to control them. The so-called "Golden Age of Hypertext" (or "Eastgate School", after their publisher) saw a flowering of stories, which at the time were considered to be the body of a new literary movement. With hindsight it appears that their aims were far more artistic than literary.
Classical hypertext demonstrates the effect that a literary system can have on the writing of the authors that inhabit it. The Eastgate School valued the exuberant use of hypertextual linking as a means to fulfill the poststructuralist ideas of text as a multi-linked, non-ordered, rhizome-like structure; and as a way to lessen the influence of the author for the sake of the agency of the reader. What they did not seem to anticipate was the fact that hypertext, used willy-nilly, is the enemy of narrative, and moreover the enemy of literature. If there is no beginning or end to a story, and no definite order (as hypertext theory would like to you read), then it becomes more difficult for a hypothetical reader to understand the series of definite meanings that the work contains, because each possible path through the text will present a different result to the mind of the reader. The precision of the writing and the precision of the ideas that it intends to convey are dealt a blow with each additional possible path through the story.
However, this criticism has much less import for the artistic aspect of the work. Classical hypertext excels at providing the reader with a world of words through which to roam — the reader accumulates impression after impression, which may leave her with an intense and definite feeling. Networked hypertexts often approach the poetic.
Afternoon, a Story, perhaps the most famous hypertext of the Golden Age, is more of an epic poem, and less of a story than its title would lead you to believe. Classical hypertext focused more on the atmosphere and feeling of the story than on the rational progression of thoughts in the reader's mind.
Afternoon itself
gives up this secret, revealing itself when the author writes:
"These are not versions, but the story itself in long lines. Otherwise, however, the center is all — Thoreau or Brer Rabbit, each preferred the bramble. I've discovered more there too, and the real interaction, if that is possible, is in pursuit of texture." (node 124)
Shelley Jackson's
Patchwork Girl is a potent hybrid of hypertexual and traditional forms, a patchwork which happens to suit its central theme. She composed a beautiful, intricately woven networked hypertext as a kind of poetic mood-setter or gatekeeper to the literary, hiding a truly linear novella-length story behind it. The reader gets lost in the hypertext at the beginning, begins to feel the character of the protagonist and the weight of the themes, and then tumbles through into the story, where plot happens, leading on to a definite conclusion.
Every hypertext that aspires to narrative must make concessions to the linear.
