Theoretical Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia
By Ramona Litwinowich
Critical responses to the implications of hypertext often rely on perceptions of a division between a traditional print narrative and a new kind of narrative, a division which often excludes intersections between the two forms. This vision relies on a worn binary between old and new, primitive and civilized knowledge, and many critics and authors discuss this in terms of a ‘remediation’ of print fiction. Others, however, see an interplay between rather than an opposition of forms. Richard Lanham regards this dialectic as one that “plays with the distinction between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking through’” (Bolter 137). Looking through requires an acknowledgement of gaps in experience and reading, and hyperfiction often insists on these spaces. Rather than as a remodelled form of fiction, hyperfiction can be understood as a tool with which to analyze alternative forms, an intertextual device that seeks out the connections between the literary and the physical, the city and the outskirts, the local and the universal.
If hyperfiction appears to celebrate a selective reading, it does so in order to raise questions for the reader regarding choices in navigation and exploration of specific episodes. This may result in an extremely self-aware reading, which some critics prefer to understand as the ‘interactive’ function of the text. Authors such as M.D. Coverley take advantage of the reader’s sense of interaction to create a Meta discourse in their text, one that references its own technological space in the literary imagination. The text does not simply exist, but engages with the printed form, disassembles and reassembles conventions of narrative structure with a critical focus.
The absence of a discernable linearity in hyper narratives is often worked out through a metaphor of the body. For example, Lars Wikstrom explores the relationship between the visual and the tactile in his online ‘exhibition’ of Braille poetry. Both senses are obscured by the medium, a disablement implied by the contradiction of ‘reading’ Braille through a visual medium, the computer. Elements are dislocated or lost in this gap. The demand for a grammatical standard, for instance, becomes irrelevant. An author’s choice to disable a particular sense or function of the body in a hypertext emphasizes their own work with Lanham’s dialectic; in Coverley’s case, gaps in memory worry a potential linearity in plot, and complicate ‘looking through’ the links. In Califia, Alzheimer’s disease represents the reader’s struggle to sequence events and memories, the magnitude of which at times overwhelms the reader. The Alzheimer’s patients at Paradise Home share with the reader the dubious freedom “to walk around, go into any of the rooms, watch TV, or stroll outside in the well-fenced patio” (Augusta’s path, journey south). However, the reader remains within the fence, or narrative, while those presumably in control, the “techs and aides”, suffer the inconvenience of “answering plaintive questions” (Augusta’s path, journey south) concerning place and time. The character Calvin responds to this tension between reader and author, or patient and aid, by seeking connections between hyper and lived reality.
Moments of metanarrative occur on Calvin’s ‘path’. He chooses the laptop as his method of communication with spirits, a very self-referential moment in the text. He is in direct dialogue with the reader, disregarding conventions of distance between reader and characters. Not only are the characters of hyperfiction (as well as avatars in game narratives) in direct dialogue with the reader or player, but in this case they are concerned with their own meaning or place in the text, their own fleeting instances of reality. Calvin posts a photograph of himself and Kaye, citing the image with the claim, “Real live people. Flesh and blood” (Calvin’s path, journey west). This reads as a challenge or insecurity on Calvin’s part as he contemplates his own potential unreality.
This is not necessarily a new concept. Novelists also consider the place of fictional figures when the book is closed. There is such a moment in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion:
In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere.
(Ondaatje 143)
This instance of mise en abyme, in which the fictional character in a sense contemplates his own fictionality, is expanded into a Meta discourse in Coverley that treats the technology itself as a method of contemplation, an extension of lived experience. These Meta moments interrupt Augusta’s attempt at a chronological narrative because they disrupt the reader’s journey through an artificial time zone of plot. Ironically, they locate the virtual component of the text in the present, in the real. Califia becomes a literary device rather than a text, a way to visualize conceptions of time and plot. If “life is lived looking forward, but [in literature] is told looking backward” (Ryan 78), the implications of the telling for hypertext are not merely theoretical, as in Borges’ multiform short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths”, but experienced in the present, as people interact through and with the medium in layers of real time and retroactive time, with an implicit vision of the future.
Carolyn Guertin references a scheme of disablement when she observes, “hypertext’s function—the dynamic link—is wonderfully ‘unspeakable’” (8). Yet Janet Murray describes a potentially intimate involvement with the hyper environment, a bodily connection that does not exclude anything, where one is “constantly threatened but also continuously enclosed” (Murray 133). Despite Guertin’s understanding of the ‘unspeakable’ link, and Murray’s sense of threat in the conflicting directions offered by the link, both of these readings are triumphant. Hypertextual politics participate in the postmodern celebration of uncertainty. Coverley is in dialogue with the print tradition as she plays with narrative convention, converging three alternate narratives without privileging one over the other. Augusta is involved with the chronology of text, Calvin with the archive of image, maps, and letters, and Kaye with the collective mythology. Murray argues that this refusal to privilege is “privileging confusion itself” (133).
Murray’s observation of the threatened yet safe reader is informed by a concept of liminality, where computers are “located on the threshold between external reality and our own minds” (99). Liminality is also manifest in the space between links, the moments when a reader may lose his or her place on the imagined map. Metaphors of space and geography litter the texts of and about hyperfiction, where uncharted territory—the gaps—provides access to those exclusions in literature. In terms of knowledge or access to information, though, there are no gaps in Califia. The reader has access to peripheral information not always available in a print narrative. Photographs, biographies, time lines, and family trees infuse the text; the dead readily communicate their secrets to living characters. Although organized as a mystery, Califia in fact keeps nothing hidden. Rather, it is the process of finding this information and searching the archives of the text that is prioritized. The link represents an infinite source of information, a relatively uninterrupted stream of search. Although the link represents a gap in linearity where paths potentially diverge, there is no gap in response. Even if the computer crashes, the network still resounds in a collectively understood cyber ‘space’, a geographically imagined system.
Ryan discusses the legacy of a “conceptualization of hypertext narrative in terms of spatial metaphors” (141). The theme of Alzheimer’s in Califia also traces the building of Los Angeles, the consequent deterioration of the city, and the cultural debris which resides in its inhabitants’ collective imagination, the senility which cultural change can induce. The architectural transformations by fire and renovation that map the plot of Califia are rooted in memory. The city becomes a macrocosm of the mind, and as Violet’s mind becomes “crippled with snarled traffic and broken intersections” (Augusta’s path, journey south), the three narrative paths become littered and tangled with the debris of memory. Augusta reflects that in her own as well as human history, “place mattered”, although her city is “a place of eternal impermanence” (Augusta’s path, journey south). Tensions in the city between simultaneous aspects of the concrete and the intangible relate to a meditation in the narrative on relationships between reader and author, fiction and reality, mind and technology, detail and the abstract.
It is not until the last leg of the journey that Calvin’s album opens with the comment, “Hyperfiction is not about the little details. It’s all about the big picture!” Coverley here seems to preclude a close reading of her text, to subvert the intentions of any literary critic. But Coverley implicitly asks the reader, what is the big picture? As an answer, the chronological narrative ends with the words, “Granted we did not find the riches of which we had been told, we found a place in which to search for them.” (Augusta’s path, journey west). This relates again to the relationship between looking at and looking through. The story of Califia looks through memories, time, and the narrative itself, to meditate on the nature of its own medium of telling. Not only are technical conventions of grammar, punctuation and style more fluid in hypertext, but this flexibility lengthens into a discourse where genre becomes obscured. Coverley is not as interested in hyper and print fiction as divisive categories as she is in understanding one through the other, and Califia becomes a navigational tool in the map of hyper theory. In the print tradition, there is usually a clear separation of the text and critical response to the text. Hyperfiction works with theory to reflect seriously on its own function.
Copyright 2006, Ramona Litwinowich
Works Cited
Bolter, David Jay. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
Guertin, Carolyn. “Gesturing Toward the Visual: Virtual Reality, Hypertext, and Embodied Feminist Criticism.” Surfaces. VIII.101 (30/06/99) 1-18.
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2006.