Interview:
Lance Olsen
The following interview is with Lance Olsen, novelist, short-story
writer, critic, reviewer and self-proclaimed most unread writer of the 20th and
21st centuries. He has earned a Ph.D. in Modern & Postmodern Literature,
from the University of Virginia, 1985, an M.A. in Literature, from the University of
Virginia, 1982, an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing, from the Writers' Workshop at the University
of Iowa, 1980, and a B.A. in English and Journalism (Honors), from the University of
Wisconsin, 1978.
He was an associate professor and professor at the University of
Idaho for ten years. Before that, he was an assistant professor at the University of
Kentucky, and, before that, he was an instructor at the University of Virginia and the
University of Idaho. He is the author of five novels, one writer’s textbook, six
works of critical studies, three collections of short stories, a poetry chapbook, over
seventy-five essays, and over a hundred reviews.
(Text taken from an email interview on 05/03/01)
1. How did you become involved or interested in hypermedia?
Shortly after I left graduate school at the University of Virginia
with my Ph.D. in 1985, I started hearing about this incredible novel I just had to read:
William Gibson's _Neuromancer_. In that, as everyone now knows, Gibson coined the term
"cyberspace" and imagined what would in many ways become the World Wide Web.
That book blew me away. (In fact, I'd end up writing a book about it and the rest of
Gibson's project.)
Not long after that, maybe 1988 or 1989, a buzz started on the edges
of the profession about Michael Joyce's so-called "hypertext," _Afternoon: A
Story_, which would go on to be "published" by Eastgate Systems in1990. And of
course I had to check that out, too.
At the nexus of those two texts was the spark that got the
hypermedia fire going in me, and it's been burning ever since.
2. Do you feel narrative naturally translates into hypermedia? Why
or why not?
My sense is that each technology (book, film, comics, etc.) limits
and defines the sort of narrative that can be told within it. Film lends itself to
narratives of externality and surface, for instance, novels to internality and depth, and
so on. (We can all cite exceptions, but they just prove the rule.) Hypermedia at this
point lend themselves to special-case narratives that tend to revolve around notions of
dislocation, faulty memory, fluid identity, and radical subjectivity--notions that
harmonize well with, for instance, post-structuralist theory. As a writer, you need to
know the playing field each technology demarcates, and what narrative you want to tell,
then wed the two.
3. What do you feel is the future of narrative hypermedia? Where
would you like to see it go?
First, all disparate art forms will collapse into one larger
hypermedia form we experience through a computer-like box that even now we can barely
imagine. Then, with the full advent of VR (say another 25 years), we'll be able to, as it
were, stick our heads THROUGH that box and fully enter a hypermedia world. Then, with the
full advent of the bio-chip (say yet another 25 years), that world will be able to enter
us. And THAT'S when things will start getting REALLY interesting.
4. What, if any, effect will narrative hypermedia have on
traditional media?
As I suggest in my last answer, it's effect will be omniphagic. It
will, in the next ten or twenty years at most, eat everything, collapse every media into
itself. For the short term books, film, etc. will coexist alongside hypertext, the World
Wide Web, etc., but when the omniphagic impulse commences in earnest, the older
technologies will simply be appropriated and dissolved into the new. That won't mean the
death of books, etc., but their extreme marginalization from the cultural mainstream (as,
of course, we're already beginning to see).
5. Ultimately, is the future of narrative hypermedia on the web
going to be a legitimate sanctuary for art or simply a bastion for pop-culture frivolity?
As with every outlet for the human imagination, it will be both.
There will always be horrible, horrible, superficial, crappy, pop dreck in cyberspace,
just as there is now in film, hard-copy publishing, and comics. But, as with those
technologies, you will also always be able to find extraordinarily powerful, fascinating,
and moving expressions of what it means to be us, here, now.
The only problem currently is that the new technology of hypermedia
has had fewer than ten years to realize its potential. I often remind cynics that ten
years after the invention of the alphabet, it was real hard to find a masterpiece of
western literature.
So settle back, keep your mouse clicking, and by the end of the next
decade we're going to start seeing stuff that will make us want to gnaw the legs of our
chairs. But this is only the beginning of the beginning, the first second after the
biggest narratological bang since the invention of writing.
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