Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks

Style, Summer, 1999 by Stuart Moulthrop

I. Scary New Networks

On her way to the Pulitzer Prize for book reviewing, the New York Times

critic Michiko Kakutani took a memorable swipe at hypertext fiction, decreeing that the best things in this line amount to "Myst and Warcraft II as re-imagined by Robbe-Grillet" (40). Given the generally dismissive context of the article, her remark seems intended as a desultory putdown: hypertext fictions are not really literary but belong to a lower order, the computer games. Having jumped up from their cultural station, these things seem not even to deserve proper mention:

One well known hyperfiction concerns a man who fears that his ex-wife and son have been killed in a car accident; another traces the adventures of a cyberpunk hero battling an evil kingdom. (40)

The first text so efficiently summarized here is Michael Joyce's afternoon; the second might be the adventure game Zork, though that featureless description could fit many other titles as well. The lack of specific reference is no doubt meaningful: since Kakutani believes that hypertexts defer too much to readers and thus abrogate the high mystery of authorship, the people who make such things might as well be nameless. Their work is all the same, or at least equally contemptible.

To test the dubiousness of this conceit, imagine the following, written a few decades from now by some scion of the house of Gates for a freshmen seminar at harvardOnline:

In the 20th century the novel was still a marginally popular form. One famous novel concerns a man obsessed with a woman who is socially above him. Another traces the struggles of a young person against an unjust society.

This lampoon is no doubt too hard on novelists, who generally do not deserve resentment. There might in fact be common cause here. After all, Kakutani' s write-off damns by association Alain Robbe-Grillet, arguably a very important (if suspiciously "new") novelist. One might wonder about this targeting. Who's afraid of Robbe-Grillet, and why? Recent reports point to serious trouble in the market for books, especially mainstream fiction. The rate of growth in book sales has been falling steadily over the last seven years and the most recent figures available at this writing reflect not growth but decline (Carvajal). Have the prospects for commercial publishing become so dire lately that any departure from time-tested practices seems threatening?

Even if accurate, that view seems too narrow. Kakutani's dislike of unruly or experimental fiction in fact belongs to a larger cultural process whose implications touch more than a single industry. As Donna Haraway observed more than a decade ago:

we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. [...--] from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks [...] (Simians 161)

To be sure, Haraway's concern about the "new networks" differs notably from Kakutani's distaste for networked or polylinear writing. Here and in later essays Haraway worries cogently about the implications of an "informatics of domination" for social justice, even as she warily takes on hypertext as a metaphor (Modest Witness 125). Kakutani's concerns seem parochial or tribal, invested more in the unutterable Joyce (of all names) than the eponymous Intel or Microsoft. Both critics, however, express deep skepticism about the conjunction of networked information systems with systematic simulation or gaming; both find the notion of promiscuous sign-play inimical or "deadly," Kakutani to the aims of literature, Haraway to certain forms of liberal society.

Each may be right in her way, at least in some measure. Thirteen years after Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" first appeared, the informatics of domination has engendered rampant globalization of trade, obscene concentration of wealth, and lately an orgy of absurd stock speculation. Meanwhile in the narrower sphere of popular culture, game makers have brought forth a steady stream of sadistic kill-toys, from Doom and Quake to Duke Nukem and Mortal Kombat, products tagged as moral menaces in the wake of high school shooting sprees. The new networks are undeniably scary and our games look deadly indeed. It seems hard, especially for those who grew up in that comfortable, old "organic" society and now find themselves sunk well into middle age, to avoid an impulse toward maintenance or containment, a fundamentally conservative desire to uphold the past, interrogate the present, and fend off an onrushing future.

While it is useful to distinguish between traditional and emergent strains of culture (as I will do here, up to a point), that practice entails all the risks of generalization. It is important to remember differences, particulars, and even in this age of deconstruction, proper names. Such details reveal gaps and fissures in what might otherwise seem a monolithic Other. They may also suggest unexplored complexities within the traditional, and even paradoxical lines of affiliation between old and new. By exploring some of these cultural interstices--beginning with the apparent gap between fiction and game--I will try to describe a less ominous interface between "organic" and "information" culture, or at least suggest that something important and interesting may be taking place on that site.