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LIVING & TRAVEL

Douglas Cooper
interviewed by Harry Goldstein

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If World Wide Web home pages cooked up in internauts' homes constitute the 'zine portion of the Internet publishing world, novelist Douglas Cooper's serial novel, Delirium, distributed on the Web via Time Warner Electronic Publishing represents the first efforts of major corporate publishing to get into the business of "interactive" writing. Cooper, whose first novel "Amnesia" garnered a good deal of critical acclaim when it was published 1994, is a rare find on the Internet: a skilled writer who's genuinely interested in both the writing and the technology.

The narrator guides us through a labyrinth of a story that winds through the lives of architect Ariel Price, a satirical portrait of an ego large enough to engulf and violate public spaces from Toronto to Paris; Price's unauthorized biographer Theseus Crouch, an unrepentant vandal of the private sphere; and Evelyn, a waifish Mary Magdelan who Price may, or may not, fall for. As Delirium begins, Price is in Israel, trekking through the desert, considering the fate of his unauthorized biographer who has sent him the first chapter of his life's story. Price "decides with great regret that he will have to murder his biographer. He has spent some time in the desert with his memories. It is clear. The truth is not good. A reputation is a careful thing, built over the course of years by gradual accretion like a coral reef, and the truth, well, this biographer must die."

I spoke with Cooper at his favorite cafe in Soho, not far from where he lives.

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Tripod: Why did you get into electronic publishing?

DC: Brian Boygan in Toronto invited me to do a lecture at Culture Lab, which is his kind of alternative art symposium. He had some other cyber artists and theorists who would present papers in the back room of his bar in Toronto. It's quite great. He had everyone from Bruce Sterling to Roslyn Krause to Rem Koolhaus, these really important people talking about their ideas in an atmosphere of blues and smoke. I met some interesting people, like Alan Care/Roseanne Stone who used to be Jimi Hendrix's sound man and who is now a woman and runs the Cyberlab at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn't really buying the hype until I started talking to some of these people and recognized that actually the possibilities are there. There's a lot of garbage in cyberspace just as there is in any emerging medium but they convinced me of the possibilities of doing something rigorous. And also I became aware of the basic structure of most of these new media, which is labyrinthine and that's something I could use.

Tripod: You've talked in other interviews about being an architecture student, a student of jazz, and about how you first work within a structure and that once you figure out what that structure is, you improvise from there. How does writing on the Web relate to some of the structural concerns of the other media?

DC: To call myself a student of jazz, I mean student really is what I was. I learned something about creating within a rigorous structural format. If you just leave yourself to the structure presented to you by the Web, it's just growing anarchy, you know, linking into hell. I would rather set myself a more defined way of operating. So for instance, my novel has one ending not many, it is capable of being divided up into sections. I don't know if this will continue to be the case, but the model that I'm working on is like a 12-bar blues. The things expand into the labyrinth, then contract to what I call, what programmers call a choke point, where all the story strands come down to one strand and then expand out after that strand. It's a way of keeping the narrative in focus and maintaining a kind of linearity. It's not linear because it's hypertext, but it goes the way I want it to go.

Tripod: So in Delirium you've restricted the reader's choices in such a way that they will follow a particular line?

DC: Yes, that's right. And another thing these choke points do is allow you to define chapters or sections or divisions, bars if you want to continue the jazz metaphor, which is an important thing in story structure. You're working with a long, complex story; at least implicitly you want there to be divisions or you're dealing with a mess. There isn't a good undivided novel out there. And the Web doesn't necessarily lend itself well to moderate sized divisions. You get pages, and the links divide them, but I'm talking about divisions of maybe 20 page length or 10 page length, then you have to impose your own structure on the Web and that's what I did.

Tripod: How much freedom does the reader have to put things together, how much are you willing to let the reader take over?

DC: You have freedom to wander until you arrive at a choke point, and then you're invited to pick up some of the strands that you've missed, but you have to go through that point in order to go further. So it's as if everything funnels outwards and then funnels inwards again. The labyrinth is a very good metaphor. You can wander any which way you want, but there's only one way out, or if the end point of the labyrinth is the center, there's only one final way to enter. The Web allows you to set up strands simultaneously and leave it to the reader which strand he will explore and what the order of the exploration will be.

Tripod: We've talked conceptually about funneling in and funneling out and I didn't really get a sense of that. I actually ended up mapping it out by hand, which gave me more of a sense of being in a labyrinth rather than a sense of going through a choke point and coming out into a space with a lot of text and then going through another choke point.

DC: Well, good. I told that to you, but that's giving away a programming secret. That isn't what was supposed to be the feeling of the text at all. I'd much rather have you feel like you were in a labyrinth, lost in a city of sorts.

Tripod: How has writing for the Web affected your writing process? It seems that if you were already heading in that direction with Amnesia, it might not have.

DC: It's a natural extension of what I was already doing. It does affect things, because frankly I didn't think in terms of links and detours. Now I know that a certain word can be a highlighted link that can take me a certain way and you start loading words in different ways. You can use link words as metaphors, you can give them double, triple meanings. And you can also work with headlines in a way that you used to be able to with chapter headings, but again it's more complicated. The Web allows you to have title at the top of every single Web page. The URL, the actual Web address could have interesting features and puns and whatever, there are all sorts of interesting things you can do now that you couldn't necessarily do with linear book technology.

Tripod: So do you feel like you're ruined for print now, in terms of a regular novel?

DC: No, no. Delirium will be published as a regular novel. I have contracts with Random House in Canada and Hyperion in the States. I'm using the Web as a way of coming up with a new kind of narrative structure. But ultimately I have an allegiance to the book. It is still the best technology for reading lengthy projects that we've come up with. So in that sense I just see this as a new way in, in the way that James Joyce used radio for instance. He was quite interested in the technology, but he didn't write Finnegan's Wake as a radio play.

Tripod: So are you writing the book form of Delirium simultaneously as you're doing the Web site, or are you just going to wait until all that material is out, to put it together for print?

DC: I wrote some of it in book form before I was aware that the Web was the medium it was going to ultimately assume. Now I'm writing it for the Web and I don't intend to return to book form for some time. That would destroy the experiment. Once I have to squeeze it between two covers I'll go back and look at what I've put on the Web and reinterpret how I can put that into a novel. I may have to enlist the aide of an architect or a designer. I'm working with a fabulous cyber designer, a guy whose work is really intelligent and that's very helpful.

Tripod: Deck.

DC: Barry Deck. He is possibly the world's most innovative font designer and now he's getting involved in new media. His work's phenomenal.

Tripod: I think his graphics add a really great visual texture. What's your collaborative process like with him?

DC: Astonishingly involved. Most visual artists of Barry's stature tend to have a hard time working with other people. But Barry and I have this weird relationship that we've worked out over the course of a couple of projects now, where I will literally sit at his shoulder, and he'll do this and I'll say no, no, no, try green! It doesn't seem to irritate him, I think partially because he knows that I come from a bit of a design background and I rarely ask him to do stupid things. And when I do ask him to do something that he thinks is wrong, he'll say no, no, look at this. That's good! End of conversation. But for the most part he is really quite open to my suggestions. The map for instance was designed with me sitting there. He gave me a map and I said, no, this is not the best thing you've done and we sat down and reworked it over a period of a few hours and came up with some really interesting things. It's all his design work, but it's much closer to the way a set designer would work with a director for a theater piece. Or a costume designer with a film director. It's necessarily a collaborative process.

Tripod: With art or literary CD ROMs, people tend to look at it a few times and not come back. In terms of serializing Delirium, are you trying to pace it a certain way? What's the time frame on it?

DC: While we were figuring out the first section, the technology's come down the wire for the project I initially hoped to do which was a sonic novel. Suddenly there's a piece of software that you can download from the Web, which allows you to listen to, it's 8-bit sound files in real time, so it's radio on the Web, if you like. So it's quite possible that the next part of the novel will be mostly spoken files. It was originally going to be a sonic novel in hypertext, which is unlike anything anybody's ever done before. I haven't tested this new technology and my worry is that it won't be up to scratch, but if it is, it means that things are going to take a radically new direction. The first section will exist as it is, written, it will get people involved and aware of who the characters are and what the style of the narrative is, so that it will be easier to take that step into paperless text.

All that said, I have no idea what the time frame is going to be like. If anything it'll be easier to put together sound clips and graphics clips, so I might be able to add to it every week. I'd like to put stuff up on a really regular basis. A week would be pushing it. Probably every two weeks.

Serialization itself is an interesting process, because you have a sense of the project as you're going into it. Most novels you have wait until it's out there, and the critics have weighed in and the audience has responded. Whereas with an interactive serial you can feel it out every step of the way. I'm very happy with the beginnings of this. I really feel that people are reading it in the way that I want it to be read, they're grasping what Barry and I are trying to do, they're interested in the project. Now there's all this pressure on us to not fuck up. This is a book that I've been working on in some ways for four or five years. And I've thrown away hundreds and hundreds of pages. It's a project that I go from being obsessed with to being entirely bored by. And I'm obsessed with it again, which is nice.

Tripod: And the whole experience of surfing the net is fragmentary and ephemeral. I see one thing, hit the link, go on to the next thing, see where that takes me, hit another link. And you've got to grab people, draw people in, and it's the same skill that serialized writers have used for years. To hook someone and then leave them hanging.

DC: I hope we've done that. What I'm doing in certain respects, is very antagonist to the whole thought of cyberspace. Nobody makes large projects out there, they make small things, because the attention span is assumed to be so short. It isn't sci-fi, it isn't cyberpunk, it goes against the grain in almost every conceivable way. I'm out there fishing for a legitimate literary audience. I don't even know if they exist on the Web yet, at least in huge numbers, but I'm doing something that very much goes against the grain. It's very subversive and it could fail for that reason. It isn't going to be the nerds who create something interesting, the guys who say hey, I've been programming for 20 years and maybe now I'll write a novel. Unless one of them is lucky enough to be Pynchon. It's possible. You never know where good writing will come from. But chances are it will be writers who make the transition over rather than people who are already there who pick up a pen for the first time. There's no reason that someone who didn't know anything about computers couldn't produce an extremely, interesting, worthwhile piece of art on the Web. Just have to hook up with a couple of good programmers. But I can talk enough geek talk so that I'm not embarrassed. But it's fairly clear that I'm not a hacker. And I don't intend to become one.

Tripod: So do your characters drive the situations or do the situations drive the characters? And where do your concerns about structure fit into that?

DC: Whenever I talk to a film producer, he asks me whether my stories are character driven or plot driven. I just don't think that way at all. I try to create a unified passage. That involves every element of that passage somehow being appropriate. And I don't consciously divide things in that way. If I find that structurally something is not going in the right direction, I'll correct it. Or if I find that I'm stepping out of character or out of voice in a way that I disapprove of in a way that makes no sense or contradicts what I'm trying to do, then I'll correct that. But it's not....

Tripod: I guess I was more trying to get at when you're sitting down and writing, do you have everything planned out from point A to Point B, or do you have point A and point B, and how you get from one to the other is the imaginative process?

DC: Some novelist came up with a lovely metaphor about the process of writing novels. You're on a road, at night, and you know your destination and you know where you are, but you can only see ten feet in front of you. I know a little bit more than that. I generally know the over arching concept that is going to get me from point A to point B. And often that gives you a pretty explicit sense of what the structure's going to be, because concepts break down in parts and there are numerous aspects of this idea that you want to illustrate, etcetera. I don't mean that I have something to say. I like to think I do, but the novel wouldn't be any the worse if I had nothing to say. What constitutes an idea for me is probably a little bit different than what is generally considered an idea in the history of the novel of ideas. It certainly isn't a political statement or anything as vulgar as that.

Tripod: Well go on. . . .

DC: An interesting idea would be I'm going to take the abyss and represent it as a great white whale. I'm going to take the nihilistic experience and represent it as a one legged man's obsession with the abyss as personified by the great white whale. And Melville wrote a pretty good novel. So what that idea is in Delirium is a structural notion. It has to do with ideas about public and private space. It has to do with the dance of modernity and what that's conceived to be. What is modernism. What does it look like if you try to put it in a narrative framework.

And it seems to me appropriate to embrace the new technology with this theme, because the new technology is democratic and is in a sense anti-modernist. It's very nature is to deny a central planning impulse. You cannot plan the Web, you couldn't, there is no there there, that is a modernist statement actually, Gertrude Stein. But it's impossible to have an authoritarian center on the Internet, it can't be controlled.

Tripod: You don't think access is limited to a techno-elite? It is now, obviously, even people who have decent technical knowledge have problems getting access.

DC: That's not a great concern of mine. The book was limited for centuries to the literate community. The techno-elite is growing so rapidly it's absurd. A lot of third world countries have this technology. It's just a matter of education. Very soon every kid's going to be up and wired. If you start kids dealing with computers at an early age, they become techno-literate very quickly. It's not that hard. Once you're up on the Web, it's point and click. Anyone can do it. I don't think it's going to be the savior of mankind. I think any tool is being capable of being used in as many negative as positive ways. Most new technology is used first for defense reasons, the Net included of course, then for pornography, and then for things useful and interesting. Something a little more elevated. New technologies have always given rise to new and interesting art forms. The history of the century is in many ways the history of precisely that. People taking new materials and using them in interesting ways. You have to grapple with the parameters of your material. In this case the material happens to be electrons and I'm trying to produce something that's appropriate to an electrical landscape.

Tripod: So how far do you have the novel planned out?

DC: About a quarter of it's written. I certainly know what the ending's going to be. I have a strong idea of certain things that are going to happen and then god knows. We'll see. Certainly there'll be change. I think Ariel's character's going to get rewritten. I'm having a little trouble right now with creating a cartoon Nazi, which is what I've done with Ariel Price. It's a problem. The notion of treating that era of history satirically at all is a real problem. As Libescon says, "these people did not die ironically," and the last thing you want to do is create a cartoon Nazi like Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. There's something wrong with that. So I don't know. Rethinking Ariel Price as a Nazi, I may have to make him a slightly less comic creature and that will affect the journey.

Tripod: What else are you watching out for? What do you see ahead of you that might be a stumbling block?

DC: Clearly I'm somebody who's interested in complexity as opposed to modernist simplicity. I mean I have my simple moments, but when you're interested in complex structure there's always the danger that you're going to create a mess. That's always a danger, that it's going to get out of control and I'm going to create this flabby monster. And I don't think I will, because I'm aware of it all the time, but it's kind of scary.

Tripod: That's interesting, because over-complexity seems to be a pitfall that many hypertext writers have fallen victim to so far, they're so enamored of the technology that they put on every bell and whistle and they throw in loads of random links. Not only do you get lost, you become alienated from it. Even when they have incredibly complex mapping structures that you can access to find your way around. I think the best of the lot put the writing and the fiction ahead of everything else.

DC: This is a problem in the new media. This is crucial, if they're going to make art in the new media as opposed to games, it's crucial that they approach it as artists. I have to approach the Web as a writer. If I approach the web as a kind of technological voyeur, I'm going to create a big technological mess. Very interesting to those who are interested in the Web simply as a phenomenon, but it will be of no interest to anyone who reads. I'd much rather do something quite muted and restrained and concentrate on the writing. And take advantage of this medium that happens to exist.