by

Kathryn Cramer

Copyright © 1995 by Kathryn Cramer. Originally presented as a a talk at the Midwestern Hypertext Conference sponsored by Eastgate Systems and the Shaman Drum Bookstore.

I. Introduction

In composing "Live on Stage!" for the world wide web, I kept the hypertext structure simple, pitching it to the comparatively short attention span of the net surfer. It begins in the second person with the line, "You're a sensitive guy," with than same reader, probably male, in mind.

"In Small & Large Pieces" is also centrally concerned with violence, in this case, violence between brothers and sisters. It is a brutal and nasty piece, great fun to read aloud. "Small & Large" began as a short story draft but is, I think, a much richer piece as a hypertext. "Small & Large" is very much a composition for the hard disk, that hybrid between cyberspace and ones own psychological landscape. It's violence is intimate, fantastic, and labyrinthine, and it was intended to occupy that space in which the inside of your head could overlap with the inside of mine, and for a moment, we could be indistinguishable, both caught in a web of complex relationships from which there can be no escape.

Subpoena Vacation does not feature explicit violence (although it does feature explicit, though unfortunate, sex). It is about a woman who goes on vacation to duck a subpoena. It is a story I would never have written as prose because my explanation of events would seem to me too socially unacceptable. Recently, a friend of mine said that we live in a time in which people have neither discretion nor tolerance. This, I think was a profound statement, worthy of contemplation. I can see evidence of both those tendencies in myself. For when we learn to speak, when we learn to write, we internalize a set of compromises with our audiences. During the apprenticeship of a writer with aspirations to publish commercially , lessons about craft and about the deals on makes with ones readers are blended together like coffee and cream. Most disagreements between groups of writers within a genre, in the end, boil down to differing perceptions of who the audience is and what they want.

In hypertext and in electronic publishing in general, there are few agreed-upon craft standards an there is even less agreement on the identity of the audience and on how to reach them and what they'll want from you once you have their attention. When I first began to write hypertext, I foolishly believed that there was no real audience and so I was totally free to do whatever I wanted without the constraints under which I had worked for five or ten years. I was wrong on both counts, but not unpleasantly so. And one respect in which we are liberated from these constraints is that the distribution system does not have already it its mind a detailed set of criteria on which to accept or reject "product" -- this is largely because there is no distribution system to speak of. That lack implies an economic burden on the writer of hypertext, because it limits how much you can expect for your work, but it provides freedom nonetheless.

Before discovering hypertext as a means of expression, my response to the unacceptability of my own feelings, my own explanations, my own narratives, was often silence. One becomes trapped in a wordless world in which there can be no nouns, no verbs because no explanation is possible. I wrote about this in Subpoena Vacation, and then cut those passages because they filled me with dread on re-reading. I recycled the excised passages into nodes in the Jacuzzi section of the Hypertext Hotel. The first node, entitled "I'm not anything," one reads:

A woman sitting on the lawn, wearing a black bathing suit and a yellow sunhat is saying:

I talked to Lynn at the faculty cocktail party. "You are David's what?" she asked. She'd known us for at least three years and we'd never been specific about our precise relationship. I said, "I'm not anything. He's going through a very nasty divorce, so there is no name for me." I was really upset afterwards, because what I'd said was so true!

She's saying:

I'm not his girlfriend. I'm not his fiancee. People treat me like I'm nothing and I don't exist. I suppose I'm treated that way because I let people do it. But habits of silence are hard to break and if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person, I'll get another lecture about what the goddamned judge will think! I'm treated like I'm nothing because I leave him responsible for how I'm treated. And he lets people treat me like I don't exist.

The lamp lifts its glowing light to the moon And I look up and see her only noticed when she is all here or not here at all She is a diffused reflection of the central light Thus she does not recognize her own power when all she would have to do is touch her finger to the still, glassy water to see the miracles she creates.

Lineage

My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.

My grandmothers are full of memories.
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay.
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands.
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?

-Margaret Walker

I experience writing hypertext as a liberation, a liberation from the necessity of tidy, fair explanations, in which somehow someone else always comes out on top and in which I must concede something vital. I stand before you now, almost 33, as a woman who carries a computer with the same force of habit previously reserved for my purse. This is a change for me, and a change for the better, I think. It signifies a taking charge of the nature of the genre in which I work, a taking charge of my own biography, and that I have changed my relationship with computers to my own advantage.

When I was fourteen, my father bought a home computer, a 64K Compucolor with a lovely 16 color monitor. We were the first family I knew to own such a thing. After we unpacked it, I spent three weeks making pretty color pictures on the screen. Then I became bored with it. Instead I read and reread John Fowles' The Magus (a book in which the explanation of events shifts with every plot twist), using the computer only to play 3-D tic-tac-toe and as a pretext to lure fourteen year-old boys over to our house.

When I had just turned nineteen I married a man named Viktor who had been my boyfriend in Germany when I was an exchange student. He was a committed young communist who was fond of lecturing me about what Marx had to say on most every topic. He seemed to have an explanation for everything. We were in love, we didn't wish to be parted, and he was about to be inducted into the Bundeswehr for a year and a half, which seemed like forever to us, so he flew to the US and three weeks later we were married. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was a freshman physics major at the University of Washington, and I was taking a required computer science course, beginning Fortran as I recall. I hated it. I'd spend five or ten hours writing a little program that was supposed to sort a list of numbers or do something else really trivial, and it still wouldn't be working properly by the time it was due. I got a C. Viktor, a high school drop-out who was nonetheless very bright, used my university computer account when I was doing other, more productive things. He liked it. He was good at it - much better than I was.

In time, I changed my major to mathematics and took no more computer science courses, and Viktor got a job at a printing company, and later a job at a small computer company in Redmond. I took a course in the Philosophy of Marxism and discovered that once I could hold up my end of the conversation, Viktor was no longer interested in talking about Marx.

Viktor's new topic was the worthlessness of a college degree, particularly the one I was working toward. He applied for and got a job at Microsoft. His leftist politics evaporated like the morning dew, to be replaced by a bland apolitical republicanism. I spontaneously took up quilt-making and withdrew into complex textile projects somewhat beyond my skill-level.

I was trying to write short stories and was finding the experience quite unsatisfying. A short story is a short story the way a car is a car: missing any of the really important parts, it doesn't go anywhere. I confessed this dislike to feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ, who was then one of my professors at the University of Washington in Seattle. She explained that I shouldn't worry too much about it, that stories didn't really need a definite and tidy ending. She also mentioned, in passing, that there are stories structured like M. C. Esher castles. I latched onto this idea and treasured it. At about that time, I interviewed Benoit Mandelbrot for the UW Daily. I conceived of the idea of a novel structured like a fractal, an enterprise considerably beyond my capabilities. In its five sections, its five characters would each take on one of five different roles. I will never write the novel, but vestiges of its narrative strategies inform the link structure of "In Small & Large Pieces."

A year and several promotions later, he was supervising people with Ph. D.s. I retaliated by becoming completely uninterested in computers, deciding to become a science fiction writer instead, an ambition that he thought even more impractical than any of my previous ones. Eventually, I left him.

I moved to New York, transferred to Columbia, and began working in science fiction publishing. As an independent study while pursing my math degree, I attempted to use a branch of mathematics called category theory to describe literary metaphor. I think I was getting somewhere, but after a while I realized that there was no audience for lit crit written in mathematical notation no matter how well-explained.

In the late 80s, my father got a new computer and gave me his old Mac Plus, which lead fairly directly to the founding of The New York Review of Science Fiction, made possible by desktop publishing. Before I discovered hypertext, the two things I most wanted to do with a computer (other than use it like a typewriter the way everyone else does, plus some desktop publishing) were use it to write palindromes and to draw new Esheresque tilings of the plane. To my dismay my computer-assisted palindromes were not as good as the ones I knit by hand, so I gave up on that project.

I was introduced to hypertext by Sarah Smith and Mark Bernstein in the summer of 1992. Excited and somewhat bewildered, I went right home and installed Storyspace on my hard disk and began to type. Aside from an extremely brief piece called "The Unusual Breadslicer" written at Eastgate, my first attempt at hypertext was based on my dreams. The idea was this: I would wake up every morning, switch on the computer, and download everything I'd dreamt the night before into a space in a hypertext. When I had enough dreams in there, I could begin constructing links; there would be many natural links among a collection of dreams.

Just as transcripts of real conversations seldom make good dialog, real dreams seldom make good fiction. The demise of this experiment went like this: for four or five days, I dutifully typed in my dreams at whatever length seemed necessary. They seemed either dreadfully dull (so dull that no one ought to want to read them) or too embarrassing ever to see print, electronic or not. I began to forget to type in my dreams, and later, when I came up with clever schemes to remind myself, I began to dread recording my dreams and soon came to the realization that I didn't really want to know what I'd dreamt the night before. I don't recall whether this draft of a hypertext perished with a hard disk failure, or whether I simply deleted it.

I began again in January of 1993, this time working on "In Small & Large Pieces." In the fall of 1993, I acquired a PowerBook, and which had a large impact both on my work habits -- I could make links for two hours a day on commuter trains -- and on my identity as a woman. The Kathryn Cramer who carries a computer everywhere is a different person than her predecessor. In January, when I was back in Seattle, Viktor took me out to lunch. He is now the Group Manager of the Chicago International Group, responsible for the international versions of Windows 95. He showed me Windows 95, which a few years earlier I would not have felt comfortable taking an interest in, and I showed him my hypertext "In Small & Large Pieces" which he viewed with a mixture of bafflement and, oddly enough, respect.

After certain experiences in graduate school it is difficult for me to feel comfortable speaking to an audience on the topic of women and violence in literature, for I already know I will not say the right thing. What I should want to tell you is that violence in literature titillates young men and victimizes women and that it's very like pornography and that writers who write gross, gory things should stop it right now or they'll have to be held responsible for the terrible results... Except that's not what I want to tell you. I have edited a number of horror anthologies, and horror fiction is a genre of which I am quite fond, a genre that occasionally produces profound and deeply meaningful works of literature. And while in broad outline one can distinguish between the high and low culture manifestations of horror, at its very core, horror is a blend of both and by its nature subverts those boundaries just as it subverts the boundary between sleepy suburbia and Transylvania.

Commercially, it has two distinct audiences: an adult audience which is 60% female, and a teenage audience that is largely male. Stories for the teenage male audience, when not censored in a more socially acceptable direction, go something like this: a woman gets into the back seat with the wrong guy who cuts her bra off with a knife, murders her, dismembers her, burns her with a flame thrower and then just as he tries to leave, the pieces of her smoldering corpse reassemble themselves into a horrible mutilated monster who comes after him and, you guessed it, castrates him, and may even kill him is she's a particularly strict disciplinarian. This is, of course a trope from Splatter movies, and it is in the context of this form that much of the discussion of violence and genre fiction takes place.

But what of the women readers. Are they simply masochists? After some research into the matter, I determined that the mass market horror genre (the grocery store horror novels with covers of black and foil) emerged in the mid seventies. While the writers (mostly male) came from the horror small presses and from other genres like science fiction and mysteries, its audience (mostly female) came significantly from the audience for the women's Gothic, a now mostly extinct form of adventure fiction featuring passive female protagonists. Of course, many of that genres readers now read romances instead, but the birth of the horror genre occurs at a peak moment for feminism, and I believe that many of the women readers of horror read horror because it speaks to their condition, it reveals the violence inherent in the system, if only metaphorically.

The fragmentation and dismemberment which is a structural feature of hypertext in itself raises the issue of violence. There is a real connection between violent speech and violent action, and it is physically dangerous for a woman of my physical stature to raise the issue or discuss it directly in public. Don't you feel a little tenser than you were before I started taking about it? A little more likely to want to punch the cab driver on the way to the airport? And yet, although I am not and never have been an abused woman, the possibility of violence contours my actions and my various forms of expression. I do not want to write about terribly victimized women whose suffering titillate teenage boys, nor do I wish to remain silent. Hypertext allows me to say true things that I could not or would not express in narrative prose. Other women, and other men seem to share that piece of the hypertext writing experience, and for this reason, I think hypertext literature has a bright future.