Roberto Simanowski
The reader as
author as figure as text
1. Authorship
When people started to write about digital literature they took--as it was to be expected-- their keywords and perspectives from contemporary philosophy. In those days, philosophers talked a lot about death: the death of truth, the death of “grand narratives”, the death of identity, the death of the author. Hypertext seemed to fit perfectly into this way of thinking and feeling. We remember Robert Coover's proclamation to the audience of the New York Times Book Review in 1992: “hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author.”[1] George P. Landow proclaimed the same ideas at the same time in his book ”Hypertext. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology”.[2]
The title was programatic and caused momentous misreadings. When Barthes and Foucault were talking about the author's death or dismission, they meant the ownership of text in terms of creativity and originality, not in terms of combining its segments. In Landow's and Bolter's and many other's writings, the question was all about who puts the text together rather than what discources and social systems are behind the author and, therefore, are the actual author. In the hypertext discussion the author has lost sovereignty only regarding the reader, not in regards to
herself. It was back to the person-person-opposition again, a total betrayal of the discourse theory they claimed to embody.
However, even in the misread sense, the author, writing non-lineally, is not dead, nor does the reader, configuring the text, occupy the same level of writing as the author. "Even an actor", Espen
Aarseth reminded, "interpreting a dramatic role on the stage or on film is closer than the hypertext reader to the creator's position." The author in hypertext is not dead at all. On the contrary, one could even say that hypertext needs rather than dismisses a stronger author, since she is supposed to take into account all of the reader's navigation alternatives in order to set up a meaningful net of nodes. But there might be another death to be announced: The death of the reader.
I will discuss this with attention to
collaborative writing projects, one of the main types of digital literature,
which relied upon the arrival and existence of the Web. Of course, there are
many ways to engage this sort of collaboration, regarding the relation of
contributions to each other (linear story, tree-fiction, assemblage of
independent text segments), regarding multmediality, regarding the openness to
the public and regarding the role that the project leader as well as the
program plays in the setting. I want to discuss three examples from Germany,
which handle authorship, readership, and cooperation in totally different ways.
2. Beim Bäcker
As we know from the dictionary, to collaborate means either “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort” or “to cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupying one's country”.[3] When talking about collaborative writing we used to use the term solely in the first sense. In literature, people with whom we collaborate are anything but enemies. The following example shows to what extent collaborators are perceived as enemies occupying one's ‘country of text’.
One of the pioneers of German collaborative writing projects is "Beim Bäcker" (In the Bakery).[4]
Carola Heine started this project in 1996 when she wrote about a woman who
encounters three preschool girls in a bakery. The girls want to by lollipops,
but are short a quarter. The woman is touched by these lovely girls, gives them
the quarter, suddenly wishes for a baby, feels the need for a man and develops
a sexual fantasy towards a worker having coffee in the background. Instead of
talking to this man the woman buys herself a lollipop and leaves the bakery.
And so the author leaves the text, leaving it to the next author to carry the
story forward.
What we witness then is a fight for and with words. After the first author has introduced the female main character, another writer, a man, fills in some gaps. He turns the character in a direction the first author does not agree with at all. Now this author tries to rescue her figure and to retract the character the male author created. However, she can not just erase the former contribution: she has to take into account what has been said so far. This situation makes her both angry and inventive. It is interesting to see how she uses the information in the other author's contribution to get a different result, and how she implies some common prejudices about the male sex to get at her opponent. Here the cooperator is received as an enemy occupying one's own text.
It gets even more interesting when other readers turn into authors and
jump in. Soon we can find all kinds of characters, not so much within the text
as among the authors. There is the clumsy one, who does not really know how to
pull it off. There is the obsessed one, who tends to find sexual connotations
in everything. There is the inhibited one, who does not know how to deal with
this. There is the politically correct one, who brings up racism and argues for
solidarity. There is the social one, who complains about the mess and calls for
more cooperation, and there is the genius, who easily brings all the threads
together again.
In the end, we realize that a new author hardly takes into account the
legacy left by his predecessors. If they set up a meeting between two
characters, if they close a contribution with an unexplained incident, the
incident will not be solved, the characters will not meet, if the author who
opened this track does not bring it to completion. Thus it turns out that
collaborative writing projects are actually playgrounds for self-centered
people, except for a few who suffer from the solipcism
and nevertheless desire cooperation.
The pleasure of a collaborative writing project therefore is not as much
the story itself as what the text reveals away about its authors. There is a
text beyond the text in which the authors are the characters. Part of this text
is for example the fact that Caroline Heine, the first author, runs a women
emancipation website which pops up with the slogan: “If she is too
strong, you are too weak” (www.melody.de/emanze). The second author,
on the other hand, runs a “Man-Site”, “where a man still can
be a man”, as the slogan spells here (www.maennerseiten.de). No wonder, that both start
to fight and that they abuse each other as 'incorrigible macho' or 'frustrated
aggressive women'. The real story of this project, we can say, is the dynamic
between the authors.
3. 23:40
Whereas In the Bakery is a project where several authors write one
linear story step by step, my next example insists upon the assemblage of
independent texts. "23:40" or: "11:40 pm" was initiated by
Guido Grigat in October 1997.[5]
This work's backbone is the 1,440 minutes of a day. Every minute of one
abstract day is to be filled with a text that should somehow apply to this
minute, either describing something that happened in this minute or describing
something remembered in just this minute. The text can only be as long as what
can be read within a minute, since after 60 seconds the current text
automatically gives way to the next. Every text has its minute, and every
minute has its time.
This setup marries features of written with oral communication. If
spoken language frees our knowledge of an event from time and place, written
language frees us from having to be present at the time and place this event is
reported. However, in 23:40 we are tied to a certain time again: the reporter
appears during his minute, if we are late we will miss the story. A consequence
of this setting is, for instance, that a description of a sunset can only be
read in the evening or, for whatever reasons, only in the morning.
Another consequence is the following: At 9:18 a.m. a person describes
downloading and reading her emails. This is one of the most common sorts of
texts in 23:40 mere descriptions of what the author happens to be doing. The
person then encaunters the message that his best friend from school has died.
The next minute consists only of one sentence from the same writer, which
translates: Real life sucks. The point behind this rather slangy phrase is that
this is all we can read in minute 9:19. That means that the reader has to wait
almost 60 seconds for the next text. And this means the author has his readers
observe a minute's silence for his dead friend.
It is the setting rather than the text that is intriguing her. The
attraction of this project lies in its program. One could even say, the program
is the author, not because of the described minute of silence, that in the end
was organized by the author using the technical setting, but because the
program is the author in the sense that John Cage is still the author of his
piano piece “4' 33'”. As silent as Cage is, sitting in front of the
piano, as empty each ‘minute-page’ steps in front of the reader.
The only text the empty page offers is: Unfortunately the programm can not
remember anything in this moment. Could you please help it.[6]
The minute calls upon the reader to write, just as the silent piano piece by
John Cage calls the audience to fill it with noise. Who is the author: Cage or
the audience, the writer or the empty minute?
Although the reader may contribute her text and ‘fill up’
the minute, this wreader nevertheless won't be acknowledged as the
author. 23:40 does not show the names of its contributors. At where are
normally looks for the author's name, one will find the name of this particular
minute. Which makes, as I just argued, perfect sense. Just as it makes sense
that the only name one finds is the project-leader's on the first page.
There are other interesting aspects we could discuss in this project.
For instance the development toward a prefixed end. The project offers its
readers exactly 1 440 opportunities to became an author and to put in their
'two cents'. The number of free pages decreases with each new contribution, and
the best time is largely occupied, that is between 8pm and 10pm.
Surprisingly, only a third of these opportunities is taken, which might prove
that the best time of collaborative writing projects already is over. However,
imagine the day, when there are only 10 minutes left, to became part of this
project. And you don't know which minutes these are! - The attraction of this
like many other collaborative writing project lies in the setting more than in
the contributed texts. As the setting can be considered conceptual art one can
say: What fails as Netliterature has a second chance as Netart.
4. Assoziationsblaster
The third example I want to show you offers absolute freedom to the reader
as author. Whereas in the former examples the project leader herself includes
each new contribution to the project, here the program does the job and is,
therefore, the only one who definitely ‘knows’ all segments in the
text pool.[7]
The program also creates the links, which here are called associations. The
links are established between texts which use the same words from a special
list. If for example one sentence reads: “to be or not to be” and
another sentence starts “she has been in the city”, there will be a
link between them because of the word be, provided this word
is on the list of keywords, to which each reader who already has contributed at
least three times can add a new word. In order to create ever new associations,
the link from sentence A is not directly addressed to sentence B but to a
program that knows about all texts entailing the word be. The link
now will be randomly created each time one clicks on the underlined be in one of
those texts. Click be in sentence A, and you get sentence B, go
back and click be in A again, you will get C or D or G.
As one can imagine, the resulting associations are not always very
meaningful, if words like be or I are on the list and
if the linking is based only on morphological similarities. This type of
association therefore differs from the concept of wit, where different words
are linked together to show what different things actually have in common. In
the Assoziationblaster similar words are linked together with almost no
relation between the texts linked.
However, we don't have to take this project too seriously. It only
pretends to be looking for truth by investigating how things in world are
connected. Actually, it makes fun of the idea to find truth in random,
mechanical, and intentionally silly associations, much in the fashion of a
nursery rhyme. What really matters in this project is to blast open the
connections of both texts and its
writers. What really matters is interaction and interconnetiveness in a much
more literal sense than we know from traditional hypertext, with its precooked
links and doubtful interaction. One can say, the Assoziationblaster exchanges
deliberate linking for liberate linking.
5. Collaborative writing's pay off
We have seen three very different ways of collaborative writing. In the first example collaboration took place between contributors and finally failed because of their inability to work together. In the second example the author collaborates with the program: it instructs the reader to become an author, it occupies the author's name, and it creates, together with the author, the deeper meaning of the text. The third example shows collaboration almost solely at the program level. The program sets the links and develops the structure of the whole independently from the authors. How shall we read this shift from contributed text to the program, to screen-surface result depending on the hidden text of programming? Let's go back one step.
If in collaborative writing and interactive stories the reader becomes the writer the question raises whether then quality will be compromised in favor of interactivity. Marie-Laure Ryan has an convincing answer to this concern: “a plot that would not be very interesting for a pure spectator may become fascinating-just as playing a tennis game not worthy of televising may be a richly rewarding experience for the player. We are certainly not as critical of the scenarios that we generate as participants in games of make-believe as we are of the plots of classically staged drama.”[8]
I have great sympathy with this argument and want to conclude, that collaborative writing is more about the process of collaboration as about its outcome. Someone not in the game might not enjoy the story, unless he or she approaches for other reasons like researching the dynamic of the group, the 'social aesthetics' behind the text itself.
My conclusion is: As the text itself becomes more and more part of a technical setting, as the program moves more and more into the center, the project of collaborative writing increasingly dismisses the reader. To a user who accidentally stops by and starts to read, the text itself doesn't say all that much. She has to become a writer, she has to join the authors, including their discussion group, in order to understand what's going on and to enjoy the project. The best example of this is the Assoziationblaster, where the texts are more or less meaningless, but not for the contributors who play with the program, creating strange keywords, having the program link between them, communicating their success to each other in the project's discussion group. One has to take part on this group, one has to read this ‘text’ to enjoy the other, ‘official’ text. One has to be part of the game instead of just watching it. Quality of text, in the way critics use to approach this issue, doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the event of which one is part. The reader is dead; long live the author.
[1] Robert Coover, The End of Books, New York Times Book Review (21. 6. 1992: 1, 11, S. 24-25).
[2] George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0., Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 91: “hypertext embodies many of the ideas and attitudes proposed by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and others.”
[3] American Dictionary of the English Language.
[4] http://home.snafu.de/klinger/baecker/, review: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2000/Simanowski/15-Feb, interview with the project leader: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Interviews/Klinger-3-Mai-00.
[5] http://www.dreiundzwanzigvierzig.de/cgi-bin/2340index.pl, review: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Simanowski/30-Dez-99/23-40.htm
[6] "Leider kann sich 23:40 zu diesem Zeitpunkt an nichts erinnern. Können Sie dem kollektiven Gedächtnis auf die Sprünge helfen?"
[7] http://www.assoziations-blaster.de/, review: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Simanowski/27-Okt-99, interview with the authors: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Interviews/Espenschied-Freude-6-Nov-00
[8] http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Interviews/Ryan-29-Maerz-00/index2.htm