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Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts

This unit was prepared by Pauline Byrne, M.A. Dip Ed.

About the author

Getting started

Nine different flavours

Narrative structures: monolinear and polylinear

Activities and writing tasks

About the author of Samplers

Deena Larsen is an American writer who was born in Denver, Colorado, and still lives in that state. She is known for her poetry and for her interest in history, as well as for writing and editing hypertexts. Larsen began writing hypertext when she was researching the lives of women in a Colorado mining town, and writing poems about them. Her text Marble Springs is not merely a hypertext, but a collaborative one where readers can add their own stories.

She spent some years in Japan (the poems and narrative of ‘Firewheel’ reflect this period). Her B.A. from the University of Colorado was in English and Logic, and she has worked for a software company. As her introductory notes reveal, she is interested in the theory as well as the practice of hypertext. Photographs and more information can be seen on the Deena Larsen section of the Eastgate Inc web site.

She says in her introduction to Samplers:

“Linear texts think in one dimension, quilts think in two, and hypertexts open their minds to a bazaar of practically infinite dimensions.”(p14)

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, in the booklet accompanying the Samplers disk, explains her ideas about creating a text which is both ‘free’ (for the responder to explore) and heavily patterned (by the author’s careful weaving of various types of texts and graphics together). She also provides strategies to help the reader navigate Samplers more effectively.

Getting started

Why are the Samplers called hypertexts?

Hypertext, n: computing a body of text, graphic material, etc., stored in a machine-readable form and structured in such a way that a reader can cross-refer between related items of information
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

When you load the Samplers disc into your computer, you notice that structures will be loaded as well as the story texts. The hypertext format means that as you browse each story, you are in control of the directions you will take. You have the choice at any moment to move on through clicking Enter, to visit History to see how far through the story you have moved, to find an alternative segment, through exploring Links, or to look at the map grid and choose another segment or story to investigate. Or, you can click Navigate, then Home to return to the Home page with its sampler quilt graphic. Each story begins with its sampler square on the Home page.

Some stories are provided with a Directions box, to suggest ways you can access the material. You may find it useful to print out the Directions box and refer to it as you browse the sampler. Because you will eventually be writing about Samplers in your written HSC examinations, you may want to bookmark certain pages which have sections you may need to quote in such written work. A Bookmark protocol lets you do this.

Your Samplers disc comes with a booklet which includes Larsen’s advice for Samplers readers. It also explains how to install the disc for Macintosh or Windows use, and how to read the text.

Begin by reading Larsen’s own advice, A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, beginning on page 13 of the booklet.

Note: the Internet itself is a form of hypertext; one hypertext theorist has called it a “docuverse”--meaning a world of documents.

Why are they called ‘samplers’?

The usual meaning of sampler is: a piece of embroidery showcasing different types of stitches. Children in past centuries often made samplers, embroidering the alphabet and their names on them. In this way, they showed what they could do. In quilting, a sampler is a piece incorporating a set of colours and shapes makers can later choose from to expand into a whole quilt. A sampler quilt (the form of the Home page of Samplers) is constructed to show a number of different samples-a demonstration of what is possible in the form.

So the point of Samplers is to showcase the narrative possibilities of the hypertext form, by providing a number of different patterns.

At least two of the names of Larsen’s samplers (‘Firewheel’ and ‘Devil’s Claws’) can be found in a current Australian book of quilt patterns. Thousands of such patterns have been developed across the world, so the remaining stories either have titles taken from quilting archives, or have been developed by Larsen as suitable metaphorical titles for her pieces, to suit the shapes the stories have taken.

The use of the word ‘sampler’ emphasises what is new and fresh about Larsen’s work: she creates new structures for contemporary fiction. It is also indicates they might be models others could choose to copy. This is recognised in a review of Samplers published in Hipertulia :

“Deena Larsen shows a mastery of very different styles through the nine short fictions and a remarkable ability to build characters and atmospheres, but the best of Samplers is the deep understanding of how to structure fiction.”

She herself says:

“How many dimensions could the patterns comfortably hold, I wondered, before the pattern, the author, and the reader travelled too far in the intertwingled maze?”

Why does Larsen call them ‘vicious’?

Although many begin in a deceptively simple way, some almost like a piece of popular fiction, others as poetic fables, each sampler develops in a way that makes a sad or sardonic comment on human life and the evil or unhappiness humans live with. What they are sampling is not just narrative structures, but human suffering. (In one of her Directions boxes, she calls them “sordid tales”.)

Larsen says her fictions are halfway between short stories and poems; some are illustrated with or accompanied by poems. (Locate these by clicking Links; they appear in a left-hand column). Others include embedded folk-tales and myths.

Among the subjects she illuminates in these short fictions are the repression and domination of the weak by the powerful, incest, rape, nuclear weapons, dysfunctional families, fear, and the break up of a relationship.

The tone is at times poetic, at other times matter-of-fact, merely reporting what is happening. Some samplers are told by subjective voices. Some offer wry viewpoints on human behaviour. Each has its own pattern, its own narrative pathway.

Nine different flavours

• ‘Crossed Ends’
• ‘Caught Out’
• ‘Seed Voices’
• ‘Interlocked’
• ‘Firewheel’
• ‘Conventions’
• ‘Century Cross’
• ‘Mystic Knot’
• ‘Devil’s Claws’

Each of the nine samplers offers the reader a distinctive atmosphere, a very specific setting, and a different structure. The underlying structures range from simple to very complex. You can judge this complexity if you click on to the map window. Within a rectangular box with the sampler’s title you will see smaller boxes, representing the segments of the narrative.

You can see in advance how many segments the narrative has by pressing the Chart View button at the top of the map window. This will give you a listing in hierarchical chart form of all the segments. In addition, some of the samplers (among them ‘Interlocked’ and ‘Firewheel’) have accompanying poems. These appear when you press the Links button and check the left-hand column of the opened page. Larsen calls this position “the interstices”. Some samplers are accompanied by a directions box, others by a dedication; some have both.

One of the achievements of Samplers is the evocation of different voices expressing different viewpoints, even opposing world views. Some of these are the simplest to begin studying (rather, experiencing). For, in the words of American theorist and hypertext software creator, Mark Bernstein :

“While much has been written about hypertext’s most superficial and incidental properties - the resolution of the screen, the use of illustration - we can expect to learn only by reading and studying hypertexts.”

‘Crossed Ends’

The simplest quilt pattern of them all is ‘Crossed Ends’, two intersecting lines, which give a central point and four spokes coming out from it. The central point represents the retirement party with a nautical theme at which Charles Goodwine, forced to take early retirement, reveals his plans to buy a boat to follow his dream of taking to the seas.

The four spokes reveal the voices, thoughts and life histories of Charles and his family, his wife, Patty, and his two daughters, Diane and Charlene (Cherry). Disparate voices and attitudes to an event are also revealed in ‘Seed Voices’.

Questions

1. What is the setting of this sampler? Through whose eyes is it revealed?
2. How does each member of Charles’s family react to his announcement of his retirement plans?
3. In what ways is this family revealed as a dysfunctional one? How has it appeared to the outside world?
4. How does the language of each member of the family seem appropriate to him or her and revealing of each individual’s values and goals?
5. In what ways could you call this narrative a ‘vicious’ one?

Hipertulia :

‘Caught Out’

This sampler typifies Larsen’s ability to take a standard American urban situation and inject into it a ‘what if?’. This moves it into a narrative area that includes both implied social criticism and an element of fantasy. (In terms of genre, ‘Caught Out’ may be compared with ‘Mystic Knot’.)

A child decides to celebrate her eighth birthday by catching a number eight bus which takes her into an unfamiliar, more upmarket area of the city. In this hostile environment, when the child inadvertently damages some property, she is labelled as having crawled out from under a rock; as an underclass person.

What she has damaged is an appealing holograph image of some kittens in a basket. Trying to investigate what makes the holograph work, she breaks it. The shop authorities lock her in a room, and try to extract her name and address from her, threatening to make her pay for the damage she has caused their expensive holograph.

Questions

1. How does the child fantasise when she is left alone in the carpeted room? How does this contrast with her earlier wonder and delight at the holograph?
2. How does Larsen’s use of language help readers see the incident from the child’s viewpoint?
3. What do you find “vicious” about this sampler?
4. How different would be the effect of this narrative if you departed from a linear following of the story (the one you will get if you keep pressing Enter)?

‘Seed Voices’

The sampler images here are of bean seeds whose shapes also manage to suggest foetuses. Clicking on the main colour you hear the inner voice of the protagonist, who is busy cutting up an avocado and reflecting on the delicacy of its colour. Meanwhile she has been telling her lover she is pregnant. Clicking on other parts of the sampler gives his angry, I-want-no-part-of-this reaction. The ending seems inevitable.

You can access this narrative of an argument by following the woman’s thoughts and words straight through, and reading the male’s response later. Or you can access their views alternately, like a conversation. (The Directions box explains how to do this).

Questions

1. Which version of the narrative do you find more effective, and why?
2. Would you consider this hypertext as “vicious”, or merely sad?
3. Does the woman show any surprise at her lover’s reaction? Does the narrative show him in an unrealistically harsh light? Whose side is Larsen on?

‘Interlocked’

The Directions box for ‘Interlocked’ calls this memory narrative “these sordid tales” and asks if the reader “feels up to it”. This is not an idle warning. There is no humour or delight or witty observation of the foibles of urban life here.

If these memories of an incestuous father-daughter relationship are not in reality Larsen’s own, they have been constructed to seem so. They are presented with a searing and convincing realism which appals the reader. Click the Links for Locked Images, and the prose poem beginning “Years later, a therapist” shows the persistence of such memories of dominance, pain and exploitation. Yet, mysteriously, the text also includes a heading which proclaims: “False Memories Turn into Reality”. In counterpoint, another heading indicates a legacy of self-hate:

“Anyone dumb enough to lead her life through a pack of assorted memories deserves what she gets.”

Questions

1. Is it possible that such specific images of tension and pain are not meant to accurately represent an event that is ‘true’, whether the narrative is fiction or reality? Could they instead recall a series of events existing in fantasised memories only? What was your reaction as you followed this sampler to its conclusion?
2. What has been the effect of these memories on the protagonist’s ability to form relationships in adult life? What is the evidence for your answer?
3. Does the narrative patterning of ‘Interlocked’ seem at first to be shielding the reader from the deeper horrors of the events revealed? If so, how could it do this?

‘Firewheel’

In complete contrast to ‘Interlocked’, this sampler is calm, serene and poetic as it presents images from the author’s years in Japan. Although the ‘Firewheel’ quilt pattern on the cover looks particularly intricate, this is a simple anthology of poems, and snapshots, in words, of the lifestyle which inspired them.

The author gives her reactions as an “outside person,” a gai-jin, living in a little Japanese village with its old shrine to the firegod. The descriptions of the English teacher’s daily life reveal the experience of not understanding and not being understood. Delicate poems such as Midnight Temples are revealed through the Links:

“.... a stone lion
who has never before
seen a foreigner”

Questions

1. Larsen has adapted some poems from her collection, The Spiral Path, dating from her time in Tajimi, Japan, to use in ‘Firewheel’. Read any two of these poems, and explain what they add to the fictional narrative of the sampler.
2. What is the firefox? And why does the old man want to photograph him?
3. The story and tone of this sampler is certainly not vicious. What adjectives would you use to describe its tone?

‘Conventions’

The title of this sampler is a three-way pun. The story is set in a convent, where Leah and Claire went to school and where, years later, a class reunion is taking place. A convention can mean a reunion or gathering; but conventions also can mean the expected ways of behaving in certain social situations.

Both girls were full of fun, mischief and rebellion at school, as their recollections show. The text shows in letter form what happened to them later. Claire follows the expected rules of behaviour and does what her family pressures her to do: becomes a nun, to become the family’s own saint. She seems to be in a convent of another time and place, where complete submission is exacted, and she must break the rules to communicate in any way with her former school friend. The implication is that this breaks her health. Meanwhile her friend grasps her freedom, but is oppressed as a woman, and does not find much happiness either.

Questions

1. How pre-programmed were these two friends? Did you find their fate a surprise, or as you expected? Had fate dealt them vicious blows?
2. Read again the epigraph to the sampler, from the poem Unveiling by Rita Keifer. How apt is it to this narrative?
3. “Fadings and fates and flowers and female, all the F words. Little ferris wheel friend, what did you know of fate...”

‘Century Cross’ (aka Century Crossing)

The most intricate, tantalising, puzzling and thought-provoking of the samplers is this one. The mysterious heading appears: “Centuries lie when they need to”. After that, a number of storylines are interwoven to form in the end a parable of modern life.

‘Century Cross’ uses a storyteller whose tale is of working late in a Federal office. As a consequence of the Oklahoma bomber scare, security is so tight she is locked in for the night when she stays back to do some urgent work. She is terrified by a suspected poltergeist as sounds are heard and pictures fall off the walls. The strutting Coyote is revealed as the culprit, proud of his work.

Stories adapted from American Indian mythologies, including a Hopi warning, Navajo creation myths, and the story of Coyote bring the past and the mundane present into interaction. Explorers of the sampler soon make a link. The pride and power of the Coyote comes from the Nothing pouch on his nose which he can never take off for fear of his own destruction:

“The Nothing in this pouch will devour your Everything!” he bragged again to the others, prancing about.” It is so bad that I simply cannot use it to prove how bad it is!”

It is impossible to miss the references to the awesome power of nuclear weapons and the dangerous confidence of those who have them.

The delight in following this sampler comes from the many narrative strands from diverse sources, all in the end making coherent emotional sense to the reader. One unexpected strand is a poem addressed to the publishers of the hypertext, complaining about the intrusions of Coyote, who is blamed whenever the computer has a glitch.

So much is happening in this sampler that it takes time for the navigator to feel in control of it. Moving from the Chart View to the History dialogue box will indicate how far a reader has gone on the journey.

Note: Larsen has planted some clues as to the total meaning of this sampler. Read the two following quotations, the first from Coyote 10, the second from the Directions. Then write your own analysis of the concerns of this narrative.

“What I do cannot be undone. But perhaps the world is too old to care.”

“What has been done or known, cannot be undone, unknown. The only question is, how then shall we live (or die) with the knowledge of the deed? This story does not answer that.”

Questions

1. What faults of character does the Coyote show?
2. How do the creation stories connect with the main narrative thread of this text?

‘Mystic Knot’

The ‘Mystic Knot’ sampler interweaves three story-telling voices, and also provides through the Links an account of how the author came to compose it.

It is a highly imaginative and poetic story of a granite traffic barrier dumped in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, behind the Japanese Tea Garden. The piece of granite is treated in an anthropomorphic way (as if it has human reactions and thought processes). At the same time, Larsen provides a hilarious narrative of the rise of a new age cult. A down and out guru reinvents himself with the granite pillar as his True Father and himself as its prophet (and source of great profit). Inevitably, the crowds of worshippers attracted to the gardens displease the city authorities, and television programs report on the cult’s clash with the law.

In the interstices (reached through the Links) Larsen gives an account of the origins of the story.

Questions

1. What makes ‘Mystic Knot’ an entertaining story?
2. Is this a sampler that in any way deserves to be called “vicious”? Who or what is being sent up?

‘Devil’s Claws’

In this sampler, Larsen again injects a wildly improbable world of imaginative fantasy into a prosaic suburban environment. The inheritance of the devil’s masks from her European ancestors at first pressures the girl into perfect behaviour. When they erupt and begin to devour items in the environment, she, as their owner, is blamed by neighbours and the police, and charged with manslaughter.

The humour in the narrative comes from the juxtaposition of the masks’ fantasy and horror actions with the everyday reactions of the girl’s mother and neighbours. Against the incredible happenings of the story people interpose their insurance policies, the courts and the D.A.’s office. Finally in hospital the masks still dominate their owner as the psychiatrist probes her mind.

Questions

1. Is this just an entertaining account of the feelings of a victim of paranoia? Or do you find it is something more?
2. What is Larsen saying about the structures of society in this story?
3. Hamlet comments after seeing his father’s ghost:

“There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

Does this story raise the possibility that powers exist beyond the rationally explainable? Or does it just show the imaginative power of fantasy? What is your view?

Narrative structures: monolinear and polylinear

Conventional narrative structures

The most basic and simple way to structure a narrative is a chronological, monolinear one. The story starts at the beginning and moves forward till the end is reached. A simple fairytale or a children’s book for pre-schoolers is usually chronological, following the time sequence. We call it monolinear because there is only one path, set by the storyteller, to be followed by the responder. The creator of the story remains in control of the narrative throughout the story.

Thousands of years ago storytellers found that a story might have a more interesting structure if it began in the middle of exciting happenings, backtracked to an earlier period in the hero’s life, and then followed the story to its conclusion. Flashbacks and flashforwards were used, time-shifts which added interest and variety to the storytelling. Responders are used to finding these narrative structures in both film and written texts.

Such stories were most often told by a detached narrator, using third person grammatical structures: “She then recognised her brother”; “the volcano erupted”, “the ship was wrecked on the reef.” First person (I, we) was used for dialogue: “I wish you a life of perfect happiness”.

Other stories, still monolinear, and sometimes chronological, are told subjectively by the narrator: “I never knew my father, but grew up in a poor household with my grandparents.” Often nowadays a number of voices tell the story, giving parts of it in turn. This device can add suspense and interest to the story-line.

Who controls the storyline?

With all of these narrative structures, the storyteller remains in control, in a position of power and authority in relation to the reader. “The author is dead” theory first proclaimed by some postmodern theorists about fifty years ago implies that each responder “reads” a story in his or her own individual way, bringing to it contextual knowledge and assumptions which are personal and different. The author can’t do a thing about it. The text has a life of its own once it leaves the author’s hands. It is a different text to every reader, at least to some extent.

But the narrative line in most texts is still in the author’s control. Now writers of hypertext like Deena Larsen have given up some - but not all - of that control.

The polylinear narrative: storytelling for the 21st century

“Recurrence is not a defect: repetition provides a powerful structural force, a motif which helps readers synthesise the experience of the reading. Rhythms of Recurrence announce patterns of meaning.”

Mark Bernstein, David Levine, Michael Joyce, “Contours of Constructive Hypertext, Proceedings of the 1992 European Conference on Hypertext”, ACM, New York. pp 161-170.

Modern technology has now made it easier for polylinear narratives to be created. The simplest examples are children’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, with alternative pathways provided in a print format. Video games which involve decision-making by the players and DVD movies with alternative endings and the restoration of scenes that were cut from the original screened version give the responder a greater chance to choose and to be interactive.

Mono means one, whereas poly means many. When a story is provided with many possible narrative pathways, from which a responder can choose, it is labelled polylinear.

The hypertext software used by Deena Larsen and other authors enable them to provide us with polylinear narratives. Anyone with 2MB free RAM and a hard disk drive can access this text. The publishers, Eastgate Systems, call their productions, which include poetry, history and philosophy as well as fiction, “serious hypertext”. This is serious work, designed to challenge the imagination, not just for games playing.

Deena Larsen is an experimenter with hypertext. She as the author, as she explains in A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, has certainly not given up all control over the text of Samplers; she has instead created a series of experiments, creating in this hypertext a number of possible pathways, themselves based loosely on the patterns used in quilt-making. She explains:

“Amidst all the talk of nonlinearity and chaos, of closure bowing to the whims of both the reader and the author, I fell to wondering: what would happen if you twisted the links and spaces of a hypertext into a formalised pattern? Could different patterns force the reader (and the author) into different sorts of closures - a definite end, several dead ends, or a twisting back in a never-ending Mobius* strip?”

Samplers is the result of Larsen’s experiments with form. They have to be experienced, not merely explained. Larsen’s own comments on their polylinear form make most sense when they accompany hours of experimenting with her text.

Her comments are found in the booklet accompanying the disk.

* Mobius strip, named after a German mathematician, is “a surface having only one side and one edge, formed by twisting one end of a rectangular strip through 180 degrees and joining it to the other end.”
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Activities and writing tasks

1. Responding to hypertext is a very different reading experience from reading a printed narrative from cover to cover.
   
   From the day you first begin to study Samplers, keep a response journal. Add to it each day you open the hypertext. Note down:
   
   
   • features that appeal to you
   • frustrating aspects of the experience
   • segments you particularly enjoy
   • any comments on the settings, credibility, linkages and style of each narrative
   
   
2. People have very different responses to hypertext fictions. Consider these two examples:
    
   “Deena Larsen shows mastery of very different styles through the nine short fictions and a remarkable ability to build characters and atmospheres, but the best of Samplers is the deep understanding of how to structure fiction”
   Hipertulia, quoted by Larsen’s publisher, Eastgate Systems Inc.
   
   “The story could, in theory, have gone in many different directions. But in practice the options are as limited as they are in computerised, apparently open-ended works of interactive fiction. The imagination fails to supply the necessary freedom. It loops back on itself, it repeats itself, it returns to its own obsessions, it provides dull solutions, for it too is a creature of habit, it really cannot initiate, its routes are determined.”
   Margaret Drabble, The Peppered Moth, Viking, p.214. (Drabble, an English novelist, is referring to her own efforts to fictionalise the story of her mother’s life.)
   
   Which response to hypertext narrative is closer to your own? Give reasons for your answer. Support your answer with relevant brief quotations.
    
3. Imagine you have the opportunity to discuss Samplers with the author, Deena Larsen, either in person or on the internet.
   
   Write the transcript of the conversation, asking her the questions most often raised in your own mind, or in class discussions, and giving the answers you think she would be likely to make. Focus particularly on the reasons she has chosen to present her fictions in this form.
    
4. When you tell your grandparents you need to access their computer to do your ‘reading’ for HSC English, they ask you to explain. Give them a clear explanation of how you ‘read’ a hypertext, and how it is different from other ways of narrating stories and responding to them.
    
5. Larsen tells nine very different tales in her samplers. Which one most appealed to you, and why?
    
6. Create your own mini-sampler hypertext. Start by choosing a simple graphic: perhaps an outline sketch or chart of a house, a landscape or a car. Create a short narrative for each of three or four segments. Try to relate the nature of each short narrative to the visual symbols you start with. If you have access to Storyspace software, you can proceed to set up pathways for responders to choose to follow?