Critical Essay on "Unnatural Habitats," by Astrid Ensslin
"'Into an alien ocean:' The Lore of Kathy Mac’s 'Unnatural Habitats'"
by Astrid Ensslin
In her poetic hypertext pastiche, “Unnatural Habitats”, Canadian writer and scholar Kathleen McConnell, alias Kathy Mac, explores the spatial affordances of Storyspace hypertext both formally and thematically. It engages with the ways in which modernity’s phallogocentric strife for teleological technological progress and masculine dominance has created numerous subjugating, alienating and potentially fatal spaces for humans and other animals. In my ethnographic research into the lore of early, pre-web hypertext (Ensslin 2020; 2021), I had the opportunity to interview Kathy about some of the processes and ideas underlying her work, as well as to access some of the written correspondence she had at the time with Eastgate’s Chief Scientist, Mark Bernstein, who published her work in the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (issue 1:3) in 1994.
Unnatural Habitats (UH) is an intricately interlinked cycle of poems, divided into twelve individual paths (see fig. 1), the first six of which represent habitats that are physically and physiologically unnatural for humans, like space, the deep sea and the desert. The second tier, comprising four poems, revolves around conceptual unnatural habitats like religious and other types of cultural differences. The two poems in the third tier remix elements of the two top tiers. Strikingly, the individual paths arranged in the form of a visual cycle around the contents space, do not directly map onto twelve independent habitats. For example, the two across the top (“Apollo 13: Reentry” and “Apollo 13: Interface”) quite literally interface and leave the reader looping between them whilst revolving around the same poetic material, the failed Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Similarly, the two paths across the bottom are composed of individual fragments of other paths, thus generating a summative intertextual quilt representing a “blanket made out of pieces”.
Unnatural Habitats (UH) is an intricately interlinked cycle of poems, divided into twelve individual paths (see fig. 1), the first six of which represent habitats that are physically and physiologically unnatural for humans, like space, the deep sea and the desert. The second tier, comprising four poems, revolves around conceptual unnatural habitats like religious and other types of cultural differences. The two poems in the third tier remix elements of the two top tiers. Strikingly, the individual paths arranged in the form of a visual cycle around the contents space, do not directly map onto twelve independent habitats. For example, the two across the top (“Apollo 13: Reentry” and “Apollo 13: Interface”) quite literally interface and leave the reader looping between them whilst revolving around the same poetic material, the failed Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Similarly, the two paths across the bottom are composed of individual fragments of other paths, thus generating a summative intertextual quilt representing a “blanket made out of pieces”.
A painting dolphin is the protagonist in the “Signifier, sign, sold” path. Its plight is to be imprisoned “in a pool somewhere on the prairies” whilst not being able to exist in the wild, “alien ocean”. The text’s focus on animal rights is an important addition to the “women and men” whose physically and socially unnatural habitats are exemplified by notions of outer space, air travel (“Alberto Santos Dumont”), “Submarine Patrol”, modern warfare (“Testimonial Kuwait, April 1991”), Islamic marital laws (viewed from a Western, feminist perspective in “Endowered”), and even the virtual spaces mediated by computer screens (“Living vicariously: a basement oblivion”). Thus, whilst the specific unnatural habitats chosen by Mac may seem “eclectic” (Mac’s letter to Mark Bernstein, early June 1993), they jointly contribute to the text’s critique of capitalist exploitation and UH’s significance as an early digital work of literary ecofeminism.
Following in the footsteps of visual and concrete poetry, UH exploits the spatial constraints of a lexia window for textual positioning and perceived movement. It places short poetic segments, or stanzas, in various places on the screen, forming either upward or downward movements when read according to the default paths. For example, the “Alberto Santos Dumont” section describes an ascending and subsequently descending movement in the default reading path, thus depicting the take-off and landing of an aeroplane or, on a more abstract level, the rise and fall of Dumont’s health and achievements as an early 20th century aeronautic pioneer. By contrast, the “Submarine Patrol 1915” path describes an overall downward movement, but it also suggests, via Storyspace’s “Navigation” functionality, that readers move to the Dumont pathway after finishing the final lexia, “Sub: border”.
Mac’s primary goal with UH was to explore how the digital medium might help writers subvert analog traditions of beginning, middle, and end, as well as move beyond words on a page:
A lot of “Unnatural Habitats'' is not about the words themselves, but about weaving the lines between the textblocks together in different shapes – the negative spaces of the stories.... I don’t know of any other hypertext that concerned itself with that, and that concern was really only possible with Storyspace. (Interview)
Her emphasis on the spaces and links between individual words and lexias led to a variety of linking structures in and between individual pathways in UH, and different visualizations of these structures and their connections to thematic issues of the poems in each segment’s map view. The “Signifier, sign, sold” path, for example, outlines a zigzag pattern to represent the waves engulfing a dolphin in natural waters; “Testimonial Kuwait” displays a star of the American flag; and the “Weftfork” in the third, remix tier describes the movement of shuttle in a loom.
The weaving metaphor runs through the entire work, reflecting Mac’s concern with the relationship between text and textile. Mac’s PhD was about textile metaphors in the literature of the Industrial Revolution, and Storyspace allowed her to combine and entextualize formal elements of weaving, such as interlacing, repetition, patterning and cyclicality. Cyclicality is also found in the parallelism between the unidirectional loop of the two Apollo 13 paths and the second tier of the work, where readers cycle unidirectionally between “Living vicariously, “Endowered” and “Quilt”. Although this moves them between seemingly disconnected storyworlds such as that of a dolphin in a show aquarium, a computer addict in a basement, situations of domestic abuse in Islamic culture, and the repatching of an army uniform into an AIDS quilt, the cycle has internal cohesion afforded by the theme of unnatural lived and textual spaces. The final and bottom section of UH then picks up the theme of text as an interwoven structure. “The texture of falling” begins with a definition of “TEXT” as “woven; also fabric, structure, from ‘texere,’ to weave”, exposing textuality as “Just a blanket made out of pieces”. This path again dissipates into fragments of lexias visited in other sections of the work and ends with the final lexia from “Apollo 13: Reentry”, thus adding a sense of closure to the work. The final lexia in this path (“13-Reentry/Fall”) reiterates the material ambivalence between outer space and represented, textual space, and underscores the liminality of spaces between natural and unnatural habitats, perceived as both “noise” and “silence” (fig. 2). The spatially separated period following the tapering end stanza further materializes and visualizes the end of this path and the text as a whole.
In her 1993 correspondence with Bernstein, Mac details the challenges facing her in creating dynamic links and guard fields for UH. Dynamic, unidirectional links are “a distinctive feature of Storyspace … that can be activated or deactivated by … guard field[s]” (Bernstein 2016: 2). Guard fields are Boolean expressions that change a reader’s path according to lexias they have or haven’t visited before, thus “prov[ing] invaluable for breaking cycles” (ibid), or infinite loops, in a hypertext reading. In an email to Bernstein of early June, 1993, Mac describes her “technical frustrations” in trying to create links between paths:
This hypertext consists of several discreet paths, and two paths (named ‘mingle’ and ‘gravity’) which cross the other paths at will. My main problem is that some of my text spaces are common to two paths. I haven’t figured out yet how to tell Storyspace that when a reader comes from box A which is on path 1, the default path is path 1, but if the reader comes from box z along path 2, the default path is path 2. I’m hoping that there is some magic way of scripting this in the guard fields, but as yet, the best I can manage is to bring the reading process to a dead halt at the intersecting box, and force the reader to look up the links and choose one.
This “dead halts” between intersecting paths happen throughout UH. Although they were Mac’s “hardly elegant” (letter to Bernstein, 27 July 1993) response to not being able to modify guard fields as she intended, the dead halts can be considered a key aesthetic feature of the reading experience - one that draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which individual paths are interconnected and form various types of movement - undulating, cyclical, and dissipating.
Another question Mac sought help with in her 1993 correspondence with Bernstein was in relation to the “Endowered” path, which focuses on Islamic law and the rights of women as set forth in the Quran. Concerned about her status as non-Islamic author critiquing Islamic law, Mac worried that “[t]he path I have taken is somewhat inflammatory, especially considering that I am not a Moslem ... injustice is injustice. On the other other hand, the situation in the former Yugoslavia is divided along Christian/Moslem lines, and I don’t want to sound like a cultural elitist.” In a later letter, Mac responds to undocumented advice she received from Bernstein shortly afterwards, both on “Endowered” and the guard field issue:
[T]hank you for your advice re: the Endowered path; you’ve helped me pinpoint the problems that I felt were there, but which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I had thought that it was too inflammatory, but perhaps the real problem was that it was too boring. … Thanks for your advice about guard fields. I do have a copy of Getting Started with Storyspace, but find that the directions are sometimes a bit obtuse.
At the time Kathy worked with us on her public traversal of UH in spring 2021, she had revoked the “Endowered” path completely and excluded it from her public performance of the work.
In the same 1993 correspondence with Bernstein, Kathy also mentions the SuperPaint file (an early graphics editing software developed by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC) in which the title screen was designed (fig 3). The design is not printed on the folio and has thus been concealed from public and scholarly view. The screen is a collage of pixelated, flowery shapes on the left, set against a woven, cross-hatching texture. Both images were photocopies of scarves, arranged in such a way as to show the contrasts between the curvilinear, spiral shapes of the flowers on the left with the woven pattern on the right. The title text is formatted so as to change from italics to sans serif bold and back. These conceptual and aesthetic clashes echo the theme of the work, foregrounding alienation and experimental textuality. They also reflect the fact that Mac was working with 19th century movable type in a typography course she took at the same time as writing UH.
According to her correspondence with Bernstein, Kathy intended to incorporate “more visual bells-and-whistles” in the Storyspace work, yet finally gave in to Storyspace’s limited capacity for visual graphics and other non-textual features.
References
Bernstein, Mark (2016) “Storyspace 3”, HT '16: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 2016, pp. 201-2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2914586.2914624.
Ensslin, Astrid (2020), “'Completing the circle'? The curious counter-canonical case of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995)”, in Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture, ed. Bertrand Gervais & Sophie Marcotte, Les Presses the l'Écureuil, pp. 511-524.
Ensslin, Astrid (2022) Pre-Web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature, Cambridge: C.U.P.