THE LINK,THE SCREENER,THE HYPERTEXTUAL
Fundamental to writing on the web is the hyperlink. The most important
aspect of the hyperlink is that it is non-linear. Through the hyperlink any
piece of text can be juxtaposed with any other (either sequentially or
simultaneously). The hyperlink can also take us from text to image, image
to text, text to animation, and so on. The link can lead readers or ‘screen-
ers’ immediately from one text to a second text, which in linear terms might
be extremely distant from the first. When we press on a hyperlink, the text
we are reading is often replaced by another, but if the screen is divided into
a number of frames or sections, pressing on a hyperlink may cause an event
to occur in another frame, and consequently in another part of the screen.
One of the main forms of hyperlinking results in hypertext. Funda-
mental to the concept of the hypertext is the idea of branching and
interconnected pathways. These create a web-like structure, in which many
different chunks of text are interlinked. In such a structure any two pieces
of text can be joined: potentially any text can lead to any other. In a hyper-
text each individual text (usually known as a lexia) is likely to contain more
than one link. For example, there may be three links in a lexia (sometimes
detectable through underlined words) all of which take the reader to dif-
ferent destinations. If we click on one of the links, we will arrive at another
lexia which also has multiple links, and so on. Links do not always inter-
connect to a new text, but may take us back to one which we have visited
before, making the structure recursive. When we revisit this lexia we may
then take another pathway out of it, rather than revisit the one we took on
the previous occasion. There will therefore inevitably be many alternative
pathways through any hypertext, and each reading will take a unique route.
During the 1990s writers started to experiment with hypertext as a cre-
ative medium. This gave rise to a whole new genre called ‘hypertext fiction’.
One of the classics of hypertext fiction is a work by Michael Joyce called
Afternoon: A Story (1990) written in a program called Storyspace. Other
well-known works are Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995), and Sam-
plers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts by Deena Larsen (1996). The central
feature of such texts is alternative storylines produced by branching path-
ways. These pathways are created by multiple links, resulting in a textual
constellation. One reading of the novel may leave out huge chunks of text
which are predominant in another reading. As a consequence, in hypertext
fictions such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, the concepts of plot,
climax or narrator are radically reworked. These parameters are not so
much erased as displaced and multiplied, so that there are numerous plots,
climaxes and narrators. Hypertext fiction is extensively discussed in
George Landow’s Hyper/Text/Theory (1994).
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