Essay on Deena Larsen's "Samplers"
Structure = Meaning
by Dene Grigar, PhD
DRAFT!!!!“The pattern dreamed about the whole, and the whole dreamed about the pattern.” –Deena Larsen, “Notes about Samplers”
Deena Larsen's Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts was made with Storyspace 1.2C and requires 5.5 MB of space. The idea for an anthology of numerous small hypertexts woven together was sparked in 1993 when Larsen and Kathryn Cramer talked together at the ACM Hypertext 1993 conference, held in Seattle, WA. A year later Larsen sent an early version of Samplers to Eastgate Systems, Inc. [1] and in 1995 presented it at ACM Hypertext 95. [2] That same year “Century Cross,” one of the nine hypertexts planned for Samplers, was published in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1995. Larsen continued to work on Samplers in 1996 and finally saw it published in 1997 on 3.5-inch on floppy disk, first for Macintosh and, then, for PC. Later that same year the CD-ROM version compatible on both platforms was released. [3] Larsen reports that she produced the work on her Macintosh computer and did not see the PC version until years later ("Interview"). Unlike the PC version, the Macintosh version provides for certain functionality that Larsen liked: The Return key made multiple links possible as default paths, for example; other features relating to content and the interface also made this version robust. [4] Thus, the Macintosh version is, according to the artist, the authorized one. Samplers is the second major work by Larsen and follows four years after the success of her opus, Marble Springs (1993). Larsen gave readings and talks about this work after its publication, most notably, “hyper_text: Explorations in electronic literature presented in collaboration with the Electronic Literature Organization,” on Friday, February 27, 2004 at the UCLA Hammer Museum where she shared the stage with Geniwate.
Quilts as Patterns & Structure
In her interview for this book, Larsen reiterated that “structure = meaning” (“Interview”). This concept is emphasized in the book cover design as much as in the work itself. The cover art for both the folio and the interface Larsen created shows a quilt with nine pieces stitched together. Each piece of the quilt, when clicked, launches a work of short fiction with a different structure but tied together linguistically and conceptually. Each involves a pun; all are tales of fantasy.
Larsen's personal notes for Samplers shows a page divided into nine sections, each featuring a title, a description, and many times a hand-drawn image. This early planning document still identifies one of the hypertexts as “Conventions,” which she later changes to “Conversations.” Pages she copied out of her notebook provides “short descriptions” the work. Of interest are her comments about the “Quilting Structure,” which she states:
“[C]onsists of a pieced top of nodes set in a geometric pattern. Pressing <return> throughout the work will take you through these nodes in an orderly fashion. Note—this isn’t the only or even the sanctioned way through the Sampler. I just had to pick one way out of many. . . . Quilts are much more than pieced setup. The stitching itself holds a quilt together and lays down a pattern over the pieces. Samplers uses links to quilt the work. Click on the open book in the toolbar to see all of the links from a node. Then read the names of the links in sequence to unravel the pattern.” (Larsen, “Short Description”)
Structure is further emphasized in comments Larsen scribbled in her notebook. One such note states, “When you piece your own story together, stitch it tight against . . . other who force their own visions into yours.” Another page of the notebook shows Seed Voices named “seedy voices,” and Conventions missing from the list. In its place is a hypertext called “July 7.”
Larsen wrote about her structure in several essays, but the one included in the manual for Samplers, “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: An Introduction,” connects the software directly to her conceptual framework and process. She tells the reader, for example, that she “examined Storyspace boxes as quilting pieces and links as stitches.” Later in the essay she states that “[l]inear texts think in one dimension, quilts think in two, and hypertexts open their minds to a bazaar of practically infinite dimensions. . . .“ She finishes the essay with this comment:
“Keeping my questions firmly basted to the texts, I pieced the patterns of nodes together, quilting them with double ands triple layers to produced three-dimensional texts. When I finished, I found that the white king paradox had proliferated into nine very different, inextricable creations. The pattern dreamed about the whole, and the whole dreamed about the pattern.”
The nine hypertexts include:
1. "Mystic Knot:" A story in which "a traffic barrier in Golden Gate Park wakes up and finds itself" (Eastgate Systems, Inc.)
2. "Crossed Ends:" The story of Charles Goodwine's retirement part, which "begins the unraveling of his family. The hypertext pieces together the family story, as the family itself is torn apart” (Eastgate Systems, Inc.)
3. "Seed Voices:" Originally called “Conversations” but changed by Larsen because the title was too close to “Conventions.” It is a conversation between two characters who don´t listen to each other. The woman (her text-spaces are green) is pregnant and tells the father (whose text-spaces are black) too late to take care of it. The reader can listen to them together or separate, life´s voice and selfishness´ voice are not likely to meet" (Hipertula)
4. "Century Cross:" As previously mentioned, though intended to be part of this anthology, it was published two years earlier in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext Volume 2, Number 2 Winter 1995. The story "is a story about creation and about telling, drinking from the deep well of Indian myths (Hopi, Navajo and others). A government employee is faced with ancient traditions that force her to reconsider the meaning and reason for her own writing, to understand that telling stories saves us from the Nothing" (Hipertula)
5. "Firewheel:" This is a story about "a foreigner in a small Japanese town at the turn of the millennium." The themes here are again isolation, this time because of the strange language, and what it means to be a foreigner. The style is also "Japanese", as few words carry much meaning and need calm thought to be understood. Interlocked This is a story of incest from the past locking up the present" (Hipertula)
6. “Interlocked:" This story "explores how sexuality and fear connect through the years” (Eastgate Systems, Inc.)
7. "Caught Out:" This story, one of Larsen's favorites, is about a child caught up by too much technology. The story structure locks you in or out.
8. "Conventions:" This story "shows the intertwined lives of two very different women: a catholic young girl who becomes a nun, and her Jewish school-friend who wants to be "a wanderer". Larsen contrasts the women´s opposite longings for freedom and security, with voices that need each other and envy each other. They will meet after years of separation. Which form of life has been better?" (Hipertula)
9. "Devil’s Claws:" This story is about "responsibility and what happens when you forget about it. A family has a terrible legacy: two strange masks who have watched over the family for years, ready to destroy everything should responsibility be forgotten" (Hipertula)
Larsen reports in an interview for Dichtung Digital (2000) that “I don't think it affects the topic as much as it affects how material is written. There are things that you can do in Storyspace, for example, that you can't do on the web (names of links, mulitiple links from one word, programmable links, levels of nodes). In Samplers, I took advantage of StorySpace to put shadow stories in the names of the links. I can't do that on the web, but in Disappearing Rain, I linked to other websites, drawing them into the work.
The Anatomy of Anchors in Sigweb (2004): Samplers [37] uses the structure of nodes to reflect the spatial relationships of plot.”
Critical Reception
Eastgate Systems, Inc. promoted the work as, “Nine richly imagined works make up this sampler quilt of hypertext. Stories of spirits returned to haunt the living, of memories that stubbornly refuse to fade, and of children far wiser than their parents.” Susana Tosca at Hipertula says that it is a "surprising achievement in hypertext fiction....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." Leo Flores says in his essay published in Hyperrhiz 11, “Deena Larsen’s Metaphorical Interfaces,” that “[e]ach story in this collection is its own little hypertext pattern, its own design block, and each design block offers her a writing constraint (see figure 3). The map of just one of Larsen's stories show how much attention she dedicates to developing the structure of her hypertext works. An as you might imagine, reading the stories in Samplers will lead you to discover links between the stories that stitch the blocks into a coherent narrative sampler quilt.” Lori Emerson reminds us in her book, Reading Writing Interfaces, that Larsen “exploit[ed] a bug in Storyspace 1.2C that produces a screen requiring the reader to choose between two writing spaces after they hit Enter.” This allowed readers to both follow a default story line and “be forced to choose at key ventures” in the story (Larsen, qtd in Emerson). In her essay for BeeHive, "Honeycomb Patterns: Interweaving Texts, Bodies, Voices," Carolyn Guertin, classifies the work as feminist for the way it "privileg[es] subjectivity and mak[es] explicit its own ruptures." Tosca, returning to the work for her essay, "The Lyrical Quality of Links," says that:
“Samplers is also an example of the use of structures with an aesthetic end, as the patterns (that we can see with the Storyspace map) give clues about the meaning that each story explores. Another interesting feature of this hypertext is the poetic use of the “Links” dialogue box, as it contains path descriptions for each link that form poems on their own. This ‘independent’ lyrical quality of links (considered apart from the departure/arrival texts) could also be exploited in the kind of link-destination preview mechanism described in Zelleger et al.” 217-8
The work remains one of the only anthologies of hypertextual writing for the Storyspace environment.
Notes
[1] The Deena Larsen Collection managed by the Electronic Literature Organization has a letter Larsen sent Eastgate Systems, Inc. on October 30, 1994 that verifies that she is submitting “nine short hypertext as part of the serial publication started with Marble Springs, published 11/15/94.” The title Samplers is not mentioned. Also of note is the idea that the idea grew out of Marble Springs and that she cites the publication date of that work to be 1994.
[2] A photograph of objects representing the objects in Samplers contains on the backside in Larsen’s hand the caption, “Deena poster for HT 95 . . . the whole thing said structure forms navigation and meaning, showed Samplers for the 1st time.”
[3] A second letter that accompanied the one dated October 30, 1994, mentioned above, shows that Kathryn Cramer served as the first editor of Samplers. The letter dated May 29, 1997 from Diane Greco verifies that she had taken over the editorial work by the time Samplers was released. The list of changes Greco suggested to the work, amounting to three pages, shows the detailed approach and care she put into her position..
[4] The letter of October 30, 1994, alludes to an early version Larsen produced in Storyspace 1.3, a version of the program was lacking a “default text bug” that made it possible for readers “to choose where to go next,” which she wanted to see put back into the program.
The letter dated June 28, 1994 from Bernstein to Larsen acknowledges Bernstein’s acceptance of “Firewheel,” one of the nine hypertexts. He gives her advice for adding guard fields and reminds her that there are only eight colors for Storyspace boxes.