...you are in a maze
of twisty passages...

You are sitting at your computer. "What's this labyrinth on the left?" you ask yourself. "Am I suppose to click it?" You are about to click, but you are afraid that you'll get lost. Who or what is Donavan Hall anyway? Sounds like the name of a college dormatory. If he's a who, then is he real or a character invented by a novelist also named Donavan Hall? You'll worry about that later.

Of course, you've heard of Donavan Hall before. He's that guy that writes about craft beer. "Didn't he used to have a blog?" you ask. Someone told you that he is now writing novels (or novellas or novellettes or something like that). You think these novels might have something to do with something called hypertext. You also heard that he publishes a magazine, what was it called? You are about to give up and do another Google search, when you decide to...

  1. go back to the beginning,
  2. find out what's else is here,
  3. read a story in the angler,
  4. hoist a few pints in the beer hall,
  5. consult the long island beer guide,
  6. look inside donavan's brain,
  7. start following donavan on twitter,
  8. check out donavan's facebook page,
  9. enter into the labyrinth, or
  10. just keep reading, thereby delaying the inevitable.

Metaphor

The labyrinth is an appropriate and satisfying metaphor for a writer of hypertexts. The web is a huge labyrinthine text. The vision of Jorge Luis Borges, where all authors are really one author all working on the same text, has come true. I write a text and post it to my website. Someone else reads it. Maybe they write something in response to what I've written and put it on their site. Extended conversations of textual commentary thread through the Internet in complex patterns.

I stole the title for this document collection from Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel, Dans le labyrinthe. The literary model was that of James Joyce. I see now that I was really following after Borges, but I hadn't read any Borges when I began this collection. Of course, Borges was aware of (certainly influenced by) Joyce's metaphor.

Joyce's name for himself in his fiction is Stephen Dedalus, an obvious reference to the designer and builder of the Cretan Labyrinth that housed the Minotaur. Joyce himself is the engineer (author) of a literary labyrinth; I think of his life's work as the elaborate construction of a single text, much like Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temp perdu.

Image

The image of the labyrinth is on the verge of being overused; however, it is worth making a few points explicit. First, a labyrinth is not a maze. A labyrinth is a delineation of space to facilitate wandering around some object placed at the center. Second, there is more than one way to get into and out of a labyrinth. One can enter and leave by several doors or openings.

Anthony Burgess describes James Joyce's Ulysses with the labyrinthian metaphor.

Ulysses, then, is a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose. [ReJoyce, p. 178]

If a novel or a hypertext is described as a labyrinth, this does not mean that the reader will wander the text in the state of being lost or in the dark. In a labyrinth the central object is (often) visible and contemplated during the act of wandering. The wandering should be meditative and slow.

Just prior to asserting that Ulysses is a labyrinth, Burgess characterizes a

... new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia -- something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. [ibid, p. 178]

Notice that Burgess describes the structure, not the content, of this new kind of novel. The fashion in late twentieth century novel is to cram loads of information between its covers. These novels of information make for interesting reading if you are interested in the information. Burgess's point is that the novel can be browsed; it need not be read from beginning to end. The previso to this browsing is that the reader must first understand the "general plan and purpose" of the novel. This would suggest that any novelist writing a labyrinthian text should provide a map at the entrance as a courtsey to the reader so that they do not become lost and frustrated. The map should be generally correct, though it need not show every detail.

The Foreword to Lolita provides just this sort of plan and purpose. The Foreword is sufficient to get the reader started; however, the reader will begin to realize that John Ray (the purported author of the Foreword) didn't understand the nature of H.H.'s confession.

A hypertext needs some kind of foreword to prepare the reader for what they will find when they enter the text. If the reader has a general plan and purpose of the text in mind, then they will feel more free to browse and follow threads without attempting an exhaustive reading.

Burgess's comparison of Ulysses to a space to be moved around in is the same as Alfred Appel's description of Lolita. This kind of novel is like a gameboard or a chessboard. The reader (and writer during the act of creation) must maintain "a spatial view of the book." [The Annotated Lolita p. lxv] The landscape as a gameboard may be derived from or inspired by Lewis Carroll (an appropriate connection for Lolita given Carroll's well-known interest in young girls).

In my own novel Into the Labyrinth as you fly to New York City, from the window you can see farmland; it looks to you like a patchwork or a gameboard. This vision of the landscape as gameboard prefigures the game you will find your caught up in when you get to Manhattan.

Under the Sun

That's the problem with repeating the opinions of others or of quoting authorities. You will often find that neat sayings or assertions fall apart under closer inspection. Or maybe it's just a deficiency in the act of quotation. When you remove a quote from the text in which it is embedded, you annihilate the meaning. If meaning is derived from context, then quotation devolves into a form of deconstruction, like removing one brick from a dam. If you remove an important brick, the significance of the original structure is lost, and on top of that the dam begins to leak.

My theory is that the next major advance in the novel (as an artform) will come from scientists and mathematicians. Being a scientist by profession and a physicist by training, I am naturally interested in art that makes use of technology. In an abstract way I am fascinated by hypertext -- text that is displayed on a computer screen with clickable links for navigation to other texts. The reason my fascination is abstract is that I've never seen a work of hypertext fiction. I know they exist.

One day I tell David that fiction in the future will be read on a computer screen and that most new novels will be hypertextual. Hyper-novelists will work in a different way than their more linear (comparitively) predecessors. Hypertextual novels defy linearity with multiple branching options for the reader. The reader browses a collection of texts (or lexias) rather than reading in a predetermined order. The reader becomes a browser who is led by whim and curiousity rather than by the direction of the writer.

David tells me that anyone can put together a body of text and pepper it with hyperlinks. The hard, slow work of the author is the deliberate selection and ordering of texts for presentation to the reader.

"The point of the hypertextual novel is to pass some of that labor along to the reader,'' I say. "The reader becomes a coauthor through their choice of which material to read next or which parts of the text to ignore. Instead of the author making all the choices, the reader makes them. It may be that the author and the reader have different ideas about what is interesting. Haven't you ever read a story that heads off in a direction that disappoints you or follows some character that you just aren't interested in? In a hypertext novel, the reader can focus on those parts of the author's text that are of interest and ignore the rest.''

David's response: "So why don't you just buy a domain name and start putting up your collection of texts on the web as you write them?''

Actually, even though David intends his response to be flipant, I think it's a pretty good idea. Why not write a novel online? Why not just start writing lexias and linking them together? A reader could start reading whenever they like and stop whenever they like. They could come back a year later and find new things in the text that wouldn't have been there before. This novel would be dynamic and evolving rather than static and fixed. Why not? The only problem is that people don't read fiction sitting at their computers.

I've noticed that when I'm online, when I have my web browser fired up, I click on a link and go to a page. If I get a longish block of text that I have to scroll down to read, I tend to ignore it. When I'm online I want a small chunk of text. A text-bite. Anything more than a few sentances is tedious and off-putting. This attitude is a result of the medium. The web broswer is all about clicking links. It's not about reading long colmns of text. Each page exists for the sake of the link. A page without a link is dead, stale, stifling, suffocating.