Foote must think the pod people have taken over. The scrupulous, skeptical John Updike worries that he writes worse on the computer, but has succumbed to its convenience. “In the old days you were always forgetting what occurred 200 pages before,” he says. “Now you can change a character’s name everywhere with a single keystroke.” Harold Brodkey says he tried going back to a typewriter, “and it’s hell. Nobody’s mind works that way.” Crime novelist George V. Higgins says he writes more carefully, poet Rita Dove feels liberated from “the tyranny of the page”–and so on. Over and over you hear that the computer is simply a better tool for manipulating conventional text. Even detective novelist Walter Mosley, who once worked as a programmer, thinks “it’s the written word that’s important; how we get to that word isn’t that important.”
Holdouts like Foote have a better sense of the implications. Some writers and editors blame the computer’s complaisance for a new plague of Tolstoy-long novels by Tom Robbins-deep novelists: “It sits there and says I love what you say, " says sometime New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier. This bloat is a blip compared to what the future might hold. Hypertext–related texts opening onto each other without beginning, middle or end–is now familiar to us from electronic refrence works. But it could be the biggest upheaval in narrative form–if “narrative” or “form” still applysince written language itself.
Some modernist touchstones–Proust’s digressive “Remembrance of Things Past,” Joyce’s circular “Finnegans Wake” –now seem almost hypertextual. Dickens wrote two endings for “Great Expectations”; a Hyper-Pip could lose Estella and marry her. But bypertext trashes the writer’s dearest beliefs: that writing is a series of choices, that a work is a single shapely whole, that the writer guides the reader. Equally worrisome for novelist William Gass –who uses a computer–is the screen’s remoteness from the oral roots of language, “where the emotional quality is the deepest.” Letting the reader determine sequence and duration will suit post-structuralist critics, who say we each read a different “Great Expectations” anyway. But will it suit writers and what’s left of their public? How can we judge–much less take to heart–a text that won’t stay still and can’t be seen whole?
Michael Joyce, author of the pioneering hypertext fiction “Afternoon,” says literature’s cutting edge is collaborative work by “communes of textual people around Web sites”; novelist Thomas Disch, who’s written interactive fiction, foresees hypertext itself being outglitzed by multimedia melanges of sound, spectacle and virtual reality. But cybermedia guru Richard Lanham thinks books will survive-if only because they’re easier to produce. Linear narrative echoes the birth-to-death trajectory of our lives; hypertext reflects the associative memories and stray thoughts that flicke and babble along with our real-time words and deeds. Proust and Joyce found the tension between sequential narrative and nonlinear experience-between time and the self-esthetically productive. If computer writing sidesteps this human paradox, we will have a new literature that ain’t our kind. Though a new “we,” mutated by years of pointing-and-clicking, may find it, for a few minutes, totally excellent.
