Teaching the Writers Conference: Link Spot Link – Electronic Literature Made Easy

Deena Larsen, Writer

Deena Larsen has written over 30 elit pieces. You can find out more about elit—and get writing exercises to try this out on your own—from her textbook introduction, Fundamentals. She will speak about elit Tuesday March 23 at 4 pm in the Memorial Union. This is the second in a series of posts designed to suggest ways to incorporate The 41st Annual Writers Conference into classes on campus. Check out Crystal Albert’s introduction to this series of posts and check back on Thursday for the next installment.

Electronic literature (elit) depends on features in digital media to add meaning to the words themselves.

Links

Unlike a paper book, where you turn pages, in elit you have to create a way to get from one piece of text to another. (Pieces of text are called “nodes.”) So we make links, which function as doors to these nodes. A link has three parts:

1. The origin node (or room where the door is)
2. The link itself, which is usually a phrase or a word in the origin node (the door itself)
3. The destination node (or room where you end up after you go through the door)

If you have a room without a door, then you can not go anywhere. If you have too many doors in a room, you could be confused. If you have doors that don’t lead where you think they will or are not indicated well, you could end up in a closet when you wanted the kitchen. So a mark of a good elit piece is links that help you walk through the piece.

Just as doors add décor to a room, links add meaning to an elit piece. Each of the parts of the link has a meaning that is influenced now by the other parts of the link. So when you have a node with a link, you no longer just have that node to consider—you have the added meanings of the linked word or phrase and the connection with the destination node.

Deena Larsen’s Ferris Wheels shows how links can change the meaning of the piece. On the node, Against Tides, the last line reads: “Why do I think I can swim against the tides of fate yet once more?” “Fate” links to the node “Turn” which shows a happy old couple—showing that the narrator thinks that the tides of fate could be happy. How would the story be different if that word “fate” had actually gone to the node “Black,” which talks about the narrator’s fantasies of suicide?

Susan Gibb uses links to emphasize the confusion of the narrator in Blueberries. In the node “Time,” she writes: “It’s because I’ve lost my hold on reality. Time has been sliding around between present and past, past and future. Things happen that I recall having happened before.” The link on “future” goes to voices from the narrator’s distant past and the link on “past” goes to a present moment (called “Present”). These disconnect” further underscore the blurring between present and past, past and future. If the links had been what we normally expect—that is had linked to an event in the past on “past” or an event in the future on “future,” then the narrator’s confusion would not be so clearcut.

Images

Imagery can also add tone and emotional meaning. Images in elit can be colored text, a montage of pictures, a navigational image (where you click on parts of the image to reach other parts of the work), video, etc. These images work in a similar way to Art Spiegelman’s comics. Robert S. Leventhal, in Responses to the Holocaust: A Hypermedia Sourcebook for the Humanities said of Art Spiegelman’s Maus : “the image is never left to stand alone, but is always caught up in the differential between narrative, image, dialogue and reflection.”

Rob Kendall’s Study in Shades shows the silhouettes of a father and daughter, who are telling their sides of the story. Watch how the images change—the father gets darker as the daughter realizes she is losing him to Alzheimer’s, and the daughter gets lighter as the father realizes he can no longer remember who she is. The images here create the progress of the story.

In Stuart Moulthrop’s Pax, readers have to click on moving images to get text to appear in the right column—creating a video game effect.

Deena Larsen’s I’m Simply Saying has moving texts that play with the main part of the piece to make new meanings. This screenshot captures words in the third line changing between “connections,” “projections,” and “conjectures.”

Sound

Sounds provide tone, rhythm, meter, and tension and are an integral part of meaning in elit. Even before IPods, sounds permeated our lives. Elit uses sound to convey emotional tone, provide a sense of place, and to overlay meaning onto the text. Sound may be spoken words (which may or may not mirror the text), music (which may emphasize the mood or suggest other possible underlying moods), sound effects (which may emphasize the action or hint at other actions), etc.

Stuart Moulthrop’s Under Language uses sound to provide other “voices” than just the written text, as he explains in his instructions on reading the text: “When you call up a line, you should encounter an accompanying audible text, read to you by an unreal person, supplying the voice of the poem. . . These audible readings do not echo the visible lines. Rather, they express a second sense or esoteric meaning: an under-language.” Comics artist Alan Moore coined the term “under-language” in comics as “neither the ‘visuals’ nor the ‘verbals,’ but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two.” Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics. Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette eds. (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993), Interview with Alan Moore, pp. 162-63

Deena Larsen’s I’m Simply Saying uses sound to accompany each text’s movements, adding a different pace and emotion.

Jim Andrew’s Nio lets the reader play with sounds and letters, creating new meanings.

Secrets

Elit writers are a tricky bunch. Some use invisible links so that the reader has to hunt for the next doorway into the text. Some hide text in the html coding of a web page. Some hide nodes so that readers can only find them if the readers are “in the know” or work very hard. These secret nodes tantalize the reader, providing more interest in the piece. Elit writers are just working within a general trend. DVDs often provide “easter eggs”—those hidden little extra bits. Video games only reveal secrets to players who have reached a certain level and attained enlightenment. Movies make a big deal of not giving away the central secret (for example, The Crying Game or the Sixth Sense).

Stuart Moulthrop relates that a reader informed him of an easter egg in “Pax,” and confesses that he had no clear memory of including it “proving Ambrose Bierce was wrong about secrets ‘two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.’”

You can find secret parts of Deena Larsen’s I’m Simply Saying by poking around the corners of the main text.

One of the secret parts adds “secrets lie in lily cool faces, in rose warm blood, in orchid dry bruises, punctured by the realities of fast cars and faster modems.”

For more information: Deena Larsen’s webshelf lists electronic literature organized by the time it takes to read that work (from simple to complex).

Electronic Literature Organization and click on Directory for a comprehensive list of electronic works.