Open-ended stories changed reality more than fiction
So let's use this novel Wellness to talk about hypertexts
When I picked up Wellness by Nathan Hill, I expected a contemporary story about marriage and “settling down.”
What I didn’t expect was a meditation on art, storytelling, literary theory, and postmodernism.
That might make it sound didactic and dull, but it’s not. I like it because it’s big, you really get into their world.
It’s a sharp, well-crafted work of contemporary literary fiction—hitting all the modern must-have touchpoints: gentrification, social media, political divisiveness, the complexities of anxious parenting, and then, somehow, a dive into postmodernism and hypertext.
Turns out, I studied hypertext theory in grad school, so that part especially grabbed my attention.
Hold on, what is hypertext?
Before going more into that, let’s define this a bit.
This definition is good and easy to understand:
“Hypertext fiction is a subset of electronic literature … that takes advantage of these [electronic computer capabilities] by connecting web pages through hyperlinked text to create nonlinear, exploratory narratives. Think if Wikipedia was a novel, or a Choose Your Own Adventure book existed online. You end up with a fragmented story where the narrative is connected more by associated ideas or themes than any sort of linear plot.”
Think if Wikipedia was a novel, or a Choose Your Own Adventure book existed online.
I like that visual. If you remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books, each chapter would end with a choice and then you flip over to your selected section.
You felt more in control. You were the author in some respect, constructing your own story.
If you want to know more, click that link above, it’s a good explainer.
Wellness the novel
Wellness offers an insightful take on how the concept of "hypertext" has evolved, with a few key quotes that explain it clearly. One conclusion, in particular, stands out: the idea that open-ended storytelling poses a greater threat to reality than it does to fiction.
The quotes below focus on 1 setup between 2 characters: Benjamin, is an older bohemian who explains hypertext and postmodernism to Jack, a younger photographer.
That’s all you really need to know—Benjamin sounds like he just finished reading Barthes at a coffee shop and is now explaining it to Jack.
I read it on Kindle, so I couldn’t grab the exact page numbers. In true postmodern fashion, I used the unstable location numbers in the footnotes—these numbers change depending on how your Kindle is set up and could disappear at any moment.
Below are quotes from Wellness, with apologies to Barthes/Baudrillard/Deleuze and of course Guattari:
Hypertext is a new way to experience stories…
What Benjamin ended up showing him, finally, was something called a hypertext.
“It’s a new way to read,” Benjamin said as he stared at the screen, waiting for something to load. “It’s a new way to experience stories, and probably even a new way to think: interactive, nonsequential, ergodic, polyvocal—”
“Stop using grad-school words.”1
Freed from "books” & the “author”…
“With hypertext, we’re finally freed from the hegemony of the book.”
“Hegemony? Ben, please, I’m begging you.”
“Consider the book—and I mean the technology of the book, the actual physical form of the traditional printed codex book. You really have no choice but to read it in the way that’s been prescribed to you, front to back, linearly, in order. You have no agency in that process. To access a book, you must submit to the tyranny of the author. Thus, readers of traditional books participate in their own oppression and subjugation.”2
So that we can follow whatever we want.
"Yes, but in a hypertext you get to follow links, whatever links interest you. There’s no gatekeeper. No overlord telling you what to do. You pick your own way through the story, navigating a sea of information, constructing personal meaning out of a big constellation of meanings…”3
Now the reader is the author…
"See, that's the beauty of hypertext. There is no beginning. You enter the network where you choose to enter it, and your path through the network is yours to make. The story isn’t created by me, the story is created by you. You are its coauthor. Cool, right?"4
And the story keeps going…
"You’re never really, quote unquote, ‘done.’ The story has no ending, no dramatic arc, no rising action, none of those manipulative book shenanigans. No edges, no boundaries, just branches, totally unconstrained, a map of meanings
…
In an anti-authoritarianism sort of way…
"A book is a real object, sure, but the form of the book is artifice, a product of industrial mercantile nations nurturing good little middle-class consumers, sheep who learned to do what they were told: turn the page, turn the page, turn the page. Hypertext, on the other hand, presents an antiauthoritarian alternative. Readers of hypertext aren’t passive consumers. They’re creators."
"And what do they create?"
"Meaning. People can do what they want in a hypertext. There isn’t an overbearing author telling them what to think. They have the freedom to think what they will.5
Which is liberating or something.
“Print books are authoritarian and fascist. Hypertexts are liberating and empowering. I’m telling you, dude, traditional storytelling is dying. In the future, all the important literature will be hypertext.”6
Of course, truth is totally like…a social construct
It was the newest new thing, and he began writing papers that were digital compilations of disassembled thought, collages of image and text, ephemeral bits all linked together via hypertext markup language in a vast map of meanings that, conveniently, the professors did not quite know how to read or evaluate or grade. He argued that the professors’ traditional mode of thinking—and he relished the ability to call his avant-garde professors “traditional,” which is the special privilege of youth—that their favored style of making arguments in linear, chronological, hierarchical ways, was itself a social construct, probably authoritarian, maybe fascist, whereas hypertexts located their truth in diffusion and dispersal: the emergent democratic revelations of the network.”7
But having no “truth” is a bit disruptive…
"Benjamin Quince had once told him that the hyperlink was the most important invention since the printing press, that the hypertext would someday disrupt all literature. In the future, Benjamin had said, readers would navigate a story themselves, without the rigid interference of an author telling them what to do or what to think. They would have the freedom to wade into a sea of information, constructing personal meaning out of a constellation of many possible meanings, creating their own stories, and Jack has begun to think that Benjamin was half right. That is, indeed, exactly what people do now, people like this farmer, the Heartland Patriot, people like his own dad.
But they’re not doing it in literature. Because it turned out that hypertext didn’t disrupt literature. No, it disrupted reality.
…
The actual world has become one big hypertext, and nobody knows how to read it. It’s a free-for-all where people build whatever story they want out of the world’s innumerable available scraps."8
And the bots are the best at hypertext and with an open-ended reality.
And immediately following any new post, literally seconds later, there’s a storm of activity on both Facebook and Twitter when millions of other people all seem to simultaneously like and share and retweet and express their support or ridicule, such that the posts fly up newsfeeds on Facebook and trend on Twitter and attract even more attention, each post quickly developing long strings of anger and rage and insults and threats, usually hundreds of comments deep.
The people who are doing this are, mostly, not people at all. They are self-improving long short-term memory recurrent neural networks, more commonly known as bots. These bots are designed to mimic natural language by recombining the words of existing posts and comments just slightly, just enough that the bots seem like they are real thinking people and not, in fact, machines. They do this not by understanding language or syntax in any real way, but rather by taking a training set of a billion words written by real people on social media and assigning each of those words a point in a fifty-dimensional space, then extrapolating the rules of language and predicting new language in basically the same way a weather forecast predicts the weather based on past weather data. And, like a weather forecast, a bot can learn from its mistakes.9
I realized while reading this book that I’d finished all my literary theory classes by 2010, and since then, I haven’t really kept up with trends in social media theory or literary disruption, aside from the occasional popular essay.
What I think the early hypertext experiments didn’t account for was the sheer volume of information we’d be dealing with—and how hard it would be for our brains to make sense of it in such an open-ended way.
It’s overwhelming. We can’t process it all.
We crave meaning. At first, it feels freeing to make all these connections, but eventually, it’s exhausting.
People like structure. Conflict, rising action, climax, resolution.
They like the good guys to win, the cat to be saved.
We’re still watching movies, though TV shows are much longer. A few of us are still reading books, fiction even.
Sure, stories a social construct—but it’s one we’ve been well-conditioned for.
Keep going-
Josh Spilker