These Waves of Girls
These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella by Caitlin Fisher. The novella is "composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections and meditations from the point of view of a four year old, a ten-year old, a twenty year old" and explores "memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality."[1] These Waves of Girls was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization's Fiction Award for 2001.[1]
| These Waves of Girls | |
|---|---|
| |
| Artist | Caitlin Fisher |
| Medium | hypertext fiction |
| Date | 2001 |
| URL | http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/ |
Description
Text
Through fragments of memory, the first-person narrative of These Waves of Girls tells the story of the childhood and youth of a woman named Tracey. It is highly personal and told in vivid detail. The exploration of "cruelty" can be incredibly graphic:
"We find this boy. Pursue. Slowly, in unison, not speaking, we circle and stop him. And make him take down his pants, because he doesn't want to. And we pull away his bicycle and this sandpit is huge and there are no adults anywhere in the world and one girl kicks sand. And then we are all kicking, kicking wild like every time you've been told not to kick sand has been stored up tight in our bodies waiting for this frenzy and, yes, the sand does get in our eyes and I can't even remember seeing us doing it just breathing and tearing. As the sand clears, he's crumbling and sobbing and we seem so much bigger than he is, there, like a shell-less thing, his penis coated with gravel. And he wasn't supposed to be that small."[2]
The theme of exploring "sexuality" is pervasive throughout the text. Sometimes it is a subtle undercurrent, but often it is described in intense and intimate detail:
"Her fingers inside me feel like spiders, she rides my body and there is no weight, only breeze; I roll over and over her screaming that I want her and she snaps like twigs and her body is a bonfire and I am coming because she burns as hot as a match, even if she only weighs 90 pounds, even if she'll never lick chocolate from my thighs, even if I know she only fucked me 'cause it was way too cold outside, even if she thinks that if I see her she's way too big; even if she's already at the mirror."[3]
Because of it's nonlinear nature, the story is impossible to synopsize without simply listing it's major themes. This means that even after spending some time with the text, it is difficult to understand the work as a whole (Zach Tomaszewski writes that "hypertexts are the most ergodic of literary texts."[4]). This contributes to its pull on the reader, however. The combination of confronting the text in media res, the voyeuristic reading experience, and the challenge which it presents to the reader, are the key devices which attract and sustain the reader's interest.
Architecture
These Waves of Girls "is organized into a number of story threads," and these "threads are grouped into eight subsites."[5] The text begins with a main menu, which links to the subsites: "kissing girls," "school tales," "I want her," "city," "country," "she was warned," "dare," and "her collections."[6] Each subsite has "an associated navigation frame;" the text of each story thread is shown alongside a menu with links to the other main threads in the subsite. The subsites are not entirely separate stories, but rather collections of threads, each of which frames the story differently.
Form
The novella is a visual cacophony. It is full of bright colours, and "relies heavily on the combination of text and visuals."[7] It also features some interactive elements, such as images which react as if stretched or squeezed, when the cursor is moved over them.[8] Some pages feature sound effects, and narrated versions are available for some pages.[7]
These Waves of Girls is a distinctly Internet creation. The context of it's creation — the early-2000s Internet — is clearly visible in its form. It uses HTML frames, Flash, QuickTime, and the <marquee> tag, all of which are hallmarks of that context, and all of which, like the visual style, now appear dated. Its Internet-based existence is more important, however, for the way in which it influences the text. This goes beyond the effects of hyperlinking within a document. The page layout, which is afforded by the (seemingly) limitless canvas of the browser, shapes the effect of the text; "the lay-out of the novella is based on the tension between the horizontal and vertical dimensions. This tension, the constant shifts between the horizontal and vertical dominating the lay-out, is very effectively played to heighten the central tendencies in the textual content."[7] The fact that it is an Internet-based work also affects the reader's experience simply through the reader's perception of the Internet as a medium; "it situates itself in the huge docuverse of the Internet," meaning that the reader confronts it as webpage first, and only secondarily as novella.[7]
Critical Response
These Waves of Girls has generally been well received. George Dillon praised the work, saying that while "most of the action described is reassuringly ordinary: attending school, riding bicycles, going to camp, hanging out with friends, playing party games," the effect, "filtered through the interface, ... is not boring or mundane but exciting and universal."[9] The work was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization's Fiction Prize for 2001.[1] This was the "first recipient of a prize that [was] set up to become an annual event," and, "(at least in the eyes of the ELO representatives)," "the highpoint of over 15 years of digital fiction."[10]
Nevertheless, "there has been some critique towards These Waves."[7] Anja Rau's criticism is especially severe. She claims that the work is not as innovative as others have claimed,[7] that it "does not meet the technological standards of current internet or CD-ROM productions,"[10], covers "an outdated topic," and "completely ignores its predecessors in both print and the digital medium."[11] These Waves of Girls has received more reserved criticisms as well; as Paola Trimarco recounts, "Landow (2006) refers to These Waves of Girls as a 'link intensive hyperfiction' (p. 200), which at the same time has a 'limited hypertextuality' because it has 'an organisational superstructure, a top-level branching structure that leads to multiple relatively isolated linear narratives' (p. 265). Similarly, Pope (2009) describes the reading experience as suffering from having too many explicit links to choose from 'and the perception in my reader-participants that there was no story at all.'[12] Trimarco concludes that "while the 'intensive' hyperlinking might not suit some readers, this award-winning hypertext is highly regarded for its innovative use of images and sounds alongside written text."[12]
External Links
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Electronic Literature Organization, "2001 Fiction Award Winner!", accessed 9 Noveber 2014.
- ↑ Fisher, "Vanessa."
- ↑ Fisher, "Watching."
- ↑ Tomaszewski, "Introduction."
- ↑ Tomaszewski, "Imageability."
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Raine Koskimaa, "These Waves of Memories: A hyperfiction by Caitlin Fisher", March 2004.
- ↑ Fisher, "Mr. Anderson."
- ↑ Dillon, 13.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Rau, 1.
- ↑ Rau, 2.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Trimarco, 510.
References
- George Dillon in "Anti-Laokoön: Mixed and Merged Modes of Imagetext on the Web", The Writer's Craft, the Culture's Technology, edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Michael J. Toolan, 2005.
- Caitlin Fisher, These Waves of Girls, 2001.
- Anja Rau, "A brief beta-test of this year's winner of the ELO Awards, Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls", 31 October 2001.
- Zach Tomaszewski, "Navigating a Hypertext :: These Waves of Girls, 22 March 2006.
- Paulo Trimarco in "Stylistics and Hypertext Fiction", The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Michael Burke, 2014.