How do we express the irreparable loss of life with appropriate solemnity within a shape-shifting world? How can we have catharsis in a medium that resist closure? Since no hypertext story or simulation narrative in this early stage of genre development offers a satisfyingly tragic story, we can only imagine them. (175)Although Murray's idea of a tragic electronic narrative seemed to be a perfect belated description of this hypertext, (because Start at the End had already been finished when Hamlet on the Holodeck crossed its virtual path) it is not intended to fulfill Murray's vision of a "mature" (175) electronic narrative. Her terminology in describing hypertextual architecture (stressing the "center" of the text with "a meaningful plot" and "hot links" that lead "outward" to "the satellite files" (135, 136)) appears to be inadequate and almost reactionary considering the opportunity for multilinear, decentered writing that computer technologies offer. When Espen Aarseth discusses the main problems in contemporary computer-generated poetics in his book Cybertext he stresses that "[o]ne is the use of traditional literary genres and formats as the ideals of the new literature, thus setting up unrealistic (and irrelevant) goals" (141). This seems to be exactly the mistakes that Murray makes when she adopts Aristotle's poetics to hypertextual fiction writing. And still there's an eerie connection between Murray's 'Philosophy of Composition' and the events that have been brought to the machine in Start at the End: because what Murray envisions is
[...] a story of a single worthy individual's fall from worthy life to a desperate ending through some choice or flaw of his own [...] Let us consider the representation in electronic form of the tragic event of a young man's suicide. I want to propose three possible suicide stories, each about the same fictional character, whom I'll call Rob. (175)This does in a strange way correspond to what is described in this hypertext: the death of a young man, named Rob, by an ironic incident and a flaw of his own: A fatal heart failure literally days before an already planned (but always deferred) operation would have saved his life.
But as argued above Murray's description and vision of hypertextual architectures remain unsatisfactory. For the topic which is predominant in Start at the End, - namely that of memory and remembering - a structure such as Hanjo Berressem has described in an article on "Memory in the Age of Virtualization" seemed to be more suitable. Describing Freud's neuron model he concludes with reference to Saussure that "memory has to be thought of as a structural organization rather than a material reservoir" (4). This structural organization is what has been put much emphasis on during the creation of this hypertext.
It is because the drive - the realm of the real machine - remains related to unconscious representations through fixations that they come to function as strange attractors around which conscious representation revolve. (9)On the structural level the organization of the text plateaus with the help of "strange attractors" (link pools created from dominant signifiers that the machine randomly chooses from) is based on this idea.
Memorizing [...] means 'creating a new connectivity' - a new attractor […] The neural environment, then, is a space of many plateaus of (various forms of) attractors, and moving in it means to shift attractors, to create new ones and to abolish old ones. (22)The creation of new connectivity is partly done by the machine, allowing the reader/user to follow a certain attractor or to switch into another one. But the text also contains fixed connections between two texts and totally random links that lead to just any other text possible. The attractors are situated between these two extremes.
Another image of memorization has influenced the structure of Start at the End: the Memory Palace, a medieval practice to store large amounts of data by creating a virtual palace in which every room and every object represent a certain idea or line of argument. In his article "Agents in the Memory Palace" Hanjo Berressem links this practice of creating and wandering through a memory place with reading/exploring a hypertext: "Navigating a hypermedial environment […] is in many ways like strolling through a memory palace." (no page numbers given)
Thus the concept of attractors, the image of the memory palace and the possibilities of hypertextual connections between texts and between texts, music and images have influenced what - to come back to Murray's demand for a tragic electronic narrative - might in the end even be a 'tragic' story: Let's suppose the young man "whom I'll call Rob" (Murray 175) had an almost boyish fascination for Disney: maybe he loved Toy Story, and maybe he even bought speaking Toy Story action figures which he then let talk onto the answering machines of his friends. Maybe he went to Eurodisney at least once a year. Wouldn't it be ironic and - in Murray's terms - 'tragic' if he died on the way to visit the castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, the role model, the primary signifier for Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland? And how would this disneyfied memory palace structure what is remembered of him?
This hypertext is not intended to give an answer to this. As mentioned above Murray's claims were encountered when the textual composition had already been finished, and they certainly had no influence on the structural organization of the text. But they come as a welcomed belated justification for the time that has been invested in the writing of the text and they might as well function as an excuse for the – as some might find – nauseating sentimentality of parts of Start at the End.
Berressem, Hanjo. "'We can remember it for you wholesale:' Memory in the Age of Virtualization."
Berressem, Hanjo. "Agents in the Memory Palace". Die Nerven enden an den Fingerspitzen. Köln: Salon, 1997.
Jane H. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.