Alex's Essay
From English 194 Wiki
A Hypertext Treasure Hunt
The Gold-Bug team project for Alan Liu’s English 194 class at UCSB takes Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Gold-Bug, and makes it the object of much critical attention. The team adapts the classic tale for the digital medium, introducing visual images, ambient music, an animated introduction and a hypertext structure. The resulting product is a work that maintains many critical elements from Poe’s original text and also expands the work for a modern audience. This is done through the various non-textual elements of the story (music, images etc.) as well as by extending some of the implications regarding gaming and fantasy that are inherent in Poe’s tale. The hypertext is both a helpful guide for young scholars unfamiliar with the story and a critical companion piece that situates the classic tale in the digital sphere.
Poe’s work is characterized by a number of distinctive features. One of the more salient characteristics of the story is the way it captures and sustains the attention of the reader. Poe makes use of a quick and even pace to carry the reader through the many developments of Legrand’s journey. If it were not for the gothic tone and steady speed of the story, the tehnical details and analysis might distance and disinterest some readers. Instead, the dark ambience mixes with the hope inherent in a treasure hunt to generate a very engaging work.
The Gold-Bug team does a number of things to retain these tonal qualities in their project. First, the simple black background rids the user of any serious risk of getting distracted from the story itself. A colorful background or one cluttered with images might redirect attention away from the language and plot and over to excessive visual stimulation. Second, the links work in a linear fashion instead of a branched or web-like structure. This again keeps the user engaged in one story and prohibits a high level of interactivity in which the user might choose their own paths or find hidden links. While these options are often quite fun, they seem less in tune with Poe’s straightforward unfolding of Legrand’s treasure hunt. Third, the images are all created using the same program, WordsEye, giving them a visual continuity that hints at a cohesive, imagined world, the kind that Poe himself creates. Last, the slightly dark and insidious ambient music contributes to the tone of the hypertext without being overly loud or busy.
Poe’s original work immediately thrusts the reader into the tale and captivates his audience with the distinctive and diverse voices of the three main characters. Jupiter’s broken speech and surprisingly solid reasoning present a nice foil for Legrand’s more eloquent diction and syntax and his questionable sanity. Meanwhile, the narrator, who inhabits a relatively static presence in contrast to Legrand, allows for the kind of fly-on-the-wall perspective that allows the reader to imagine they were on the journey themselves in his place. Even though each of the three characters has their own methods and opinions, Poe manages to weave these three sometimes conflicting voices into the story without completely turning the work into a psychological battle of wills.
In the adapted hypertext, the same situation is present. Each of the three voices play integral roles in referencing and developing the thematic concerns of Poe’s story. The narrator regularly questions Legrand’s detective work to generate the tension between Legrand’s logical mind and (what appear for a while to be) his quixotic ambitions. Jupiter retains his role as faithful servant, taking on the menial tasks that allow Legrand to pontificate on the whereabouts of the gold, and allow us to question whether Legrand has gone too far, since some of the situations he puts Jupiter into are somewhat dangerous. The hypertext does sacrifice some of the emotional attachment that the reader of Poe’s stories can build with Jupiter for example. This kind of sympathy and identification greatly benefits from a long story and the speed of the hypertext forces Jupiter and the narrator into static supporting roles. Still, the three voices are clearly present in the adapted project. They accurately represent the three conflicting perspectives and help introduce some of Poe’s thematic concerns.
On the subject of thematic concerns, Poe takes special care to repeatedly ask, is there not an element of madness in Legrand’s extremely logical problem solving? By interjecting the user into the story, the Gold-Bug team expands this question to a larger audience. The hypertext refers to the user in second person as if he or she were actually the one conducting the treasure hunt. Of course, the user has no choice in the matter. They are forced to simply click “NEXT” and proceed with the story as the creators saw fit. At a certain point, the narrator and Jupiter begin to insist that the user has gone mad in taking them on this extensive journey. Thus, the user’s logical way of continuing with the story, clicking from node to node, becomes questioned by the supporting characters in the same way that Legrand’s problem solving is continually questioned. By putting the user in Legrand’s place, the Gold-Bug team is extending the logic of Poe’s theme by asking the user, and by extension, humanity, whether there is not a bit of madness in their logic as well. Further, the team asks this question via the hypertext, which does not allow the user an opportunity to respond or take responsibility for their choices because they do not make any. This is the same position that Poe puts his readers in as well. It seems as if Poe implores his readers to ask challenging psychological questions of themselves, and yet his means of conveying such questions derive completely from the choices and actions of the characters who he creates and controls. The reader and the user are both idle, helpless victims undergoing tacit psychological interrogations led by imagined characters in imagined worlds.
From this specific and somewhat abstract analysis, let us move to some more general, structural suggestions that can be drawn from the Gold-Bug team’s project. The most obvious topic must be the translation of a print text to a hypertext. What is lost and what is gained from this adaptation? The use of nodes and links creates a literal, visual representation of the step-by-step logic exhibited by Legrand. In this same vein, the hypertext retains the linear direction of Poe’s story, that is, both plots, from the very beginning, are aimed directly for the treasure chest. On the other hand, the story of the hypertext is chronologically linear while Poe’s tale is not. The hypertext version, consequently, becomes much easier to follow, and acts as a nice companion piece to the original for anyone who might have gotten confused by the temporal discontinuity of Poe’s work. Unfortunately, this also results in a drastic break from that which is one of the more interesting elements of the original.
The simple chronological retelling of the story apparent in the hypertext is interesting with respect to our contemporary moment. The temporal jumps of Poe’s work are prophetically characteristic of many postmodern works of recent history. While the hypertext is also a staple of the same contemporary literary moment, the Gold-Bug team chooses not to adopt the same technique, and instead chooses to have narrative time move smoothly, even though the text is broken into individual pages. This might give the hypertext a somewhat antiquated feel. While the medium is clearly modern, fragmented, and fast-paced (relative to the original work), the narrative time is contrastingly classical, ordered, and slow. This blend between the classical and the modern closely relates to another general question that must be asked of the work. Why Poe?
Poe is an author with canonical authority and influence who remains prevalent not only in contemporary academic discourse but in popular discourse as well. The novelist, Paul Auster comes immediately to mind as someone who shows strong traces of Poe in his recent work, especially City of Glass. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jorge Luis Borges are also said to have been great admirers of Poe’s work and their influence is present in Thomas Pynchon, Orhan Pamuk and Jean Baudrillard, to name just a few contemporary writers. Accordingly, there is also a great wealth of attention devoted to Poe on the web. He clearly has many modern admirers familiar with web design and web content. The prevalence of sites dedicated to Poe and his literature strongly suggests that people are able and anxious to benefit from digital representations of his work. As we see online reading and publishing become more popular in the future, the possibilities of moving classical works to the Internet may elicit many more interpretations similar to the one done by the Gold-Bug team. But Poe’s work is appropriate for this sort of project for more reasons than simply being popular on the web.
When talking about interactivity and the Internet, one cannot go long without discussing gaming. Poe loved to solve cryptograms and the style of puzzle features heavily in The Gold-Bug. Legrand’s process of solving the cryptogram makes the story perfect for a medium that would allow users to take his place. Poe puts such an emphasis not only on cryptography and ciphers themselves but on the logical process of solving them as well. Initially, the Gold-Bug team had wanted to make cryptography a much larger part of their hypertext, but due primarily to time constraints, they had to move the cryptogram away from being an interactive exercise. Even still, fragments of the puzzle appear as solved once the user gets beyond the beginning of the hypertext. Users are not given explicit opportunities to do any work in solving the puzzle themselves, but they are presented with the cryptogram in its entirety so that if one were so inclined, they could try to work it out. The same option is present in Poe’s story.
The presence of the puzzle in the story and the hypertext shows a blending of knowledge paradigms. Poe chooses to have Legrand play a game in order to present his extremely logical thinking. Of course, the solution to the game is something unlikely and quite irrational in many respects, which is why Jupiter and the narrator are so skeptical of Legrand. In contemporary gaming we often have a similar dynamic at hand, although it is one that does not usually offer such a nice reward for winning. Many popular computer and console games have elements of fantasy and irrationality built into them, but they often require or elicit very logical problem solving strategies. Programs are constructed from logical commands and structures. Games that rely heavily on artificial intelligence often demand a great deal of logical from the user to counteract the moves of computer players. At the same time, the user might be competing against aliens, dragons, monsters, or other fantastic creatures. So here we see games representing the same kind of mixture of logic and madness that we see as Legrand solves the cryptogram in Poe’s tale.
Poe had a certain affinity for cryptograms that would not seem out of place in modern times. The prevalence of digital art that makes use of source code would be one example of how puzzles are still closely related to our understanding of reading, communicating and interpreting. Broadly conceived, reading a literary work calls for a kind of linguistic code breaking. Anything from picking out allusions to analyzing form to constructing a critical essay using selected quotes from a text requires some thoughtful decoding. Even a close reading of a single sentence might bring out an in-depth study of a single word’s meaning that necessitates a certain scientific rigor of analysis. While the text of the Gold-Bug hypertext probably does not demand this sort of high-level interpretive analysis, it does maintain a discussion of gaming and code breaking at the surface. This is in keeping with Poe’s love for cryptography, which is certainly a staple of our current national defense organizations, but in a more related manner, also resides in the back of our linguistic understanding.
Poe’s ardent scientific thinking also correlates to his theories of writing. Poe imagined ideal literary works as ones that completely absorb the attention of the reader. This is achieved, he thought, by successfully presenting a single spiritual or psychological effect. This effect is largely a product of the tone and pace of the work. In keeping with this theory, Poe envisioned his stories as tightly sealed imaginative worlds. That is, one begins the story, becomes completely immersed in its mood and then clearly finishes the story. This relegates the plot of the story and many of its thematic details to mere supporting positions, taking them out of the reader’s direct focus, leaving that instead tuned solely to the mood and desired effect of the work. I think it is safe to say, he would have been opposed to works that seemed to blend somehow into the reader’s everyday life or that clearly stemmed from an author’s personal biases.
The extent to which the Gold-Bug team’s project mimics Poe’s desired effect or achieves one of its own is up for question. By using multiple excerpts of actual text from Poe’s original work, the team aims to salvage (as opposed to recreate) as much of Poe’s desired effect as possible. Of course, much of the story has been eliminated, the plot has been realigned in chronological order, and new narration is introduced. All of these alterations result in substantial breaks from the original. Nevertheless, the music, links, and images transplant the story into a new and forgiving medium. These elements are employed to subsume the spiritual and psychological effect into something similar to a gothic film or fantasy game. The feel of Poe’s story is not unlike many gothic films and the cryptogram and adventurous plot would be at home in a fantasy game. The tone and game-like qualities of The Gold-Bug make it an ideal choice for this kind of interactive computer experience that the hypertext seeks. Furthermore, the broad sensory experience that results makes the story feel less dated for a modern audience and more exciting for young users.
The hypertext could have benefited from being more dynamic and interactive. The Flash introduction provides a peek at how the user might have become more involved in the treasure hunt and unfolding of the story, and given more time, the Gold-Bug team would have created the whole project in such a manner. But as far as the text goes, much more could have been done with the cryptogram. While not everyone may enjoy the arduous process of solving substitution ciphers, something could have been done to reflect the detailed how-to explanation that Poe provides and that is such a memorable aspect of the work. Despite its shortcomings, we feel the hypertext is a provocative and novel exploration of Poe’s short story for the digital age.
