Noted author and academic Gary R. Beer has been vilified for his criticism of yet another academic literary fad, this time something called “hypertext.” The most vicious reaction came recently from Professor Dion Gigo of the MIT Computer and Other Languages Department; Dr. Gigo is one of the nation’s foremost proponents of hypertext. Beer responds here to Gigo’s allegations.

Editor: We need first to exaggerate your importance as an intellectual, so tell us if the following information is true or not: “Gary R. Beer has published numerous important critical articles in first rank journals, not the least of which include: Semiotics Today, The Journal of Meaning, Interpretation Annual, and Deconstruction Quarterly. A noted semioticist, Professor Gary Beer has devoted his life to locating the texts and subtexts of the world’s great literature. He holds degrees from many well-known universities. He received the very well-known Cultural Arrogance Award in 1997, the renowned National Humanities Council Award for Excellence in Textual Demolitionism in 2002, and the impressively prestigious Edwin T. Jones Opacity Citation in 2006 for doing the most that year to discourage reading.”

Beer: All true.

Editor: Okay, now let’s try dropping a few names.

Beer: Such as?

Editor: Norman Cousins, Albert Shanker, Gary Lopez, Ann Zwinger, Wayne Booth, Peter Elbow, Scott Sanders, William Howarth.

Beer: Cousins wrote a letter to me once shortly before he died. Albert Shanker wrote the foreword for my anthology shortly before he died. Peter Elbow praised the anthology. He’s still alive. Gary Lopez wrote a couple of letters to me. Ann Zwinger wrote a letter to me. Scott Sanders helped me get published in Orion. Howarth wrote me a letter once.

Editor: You’re a man of letters.

Beer: A man with letters.

Editor: You didn’t mention Booth.

Beer: I insulted him once at a conference.

Editor: You also have a criminal record.

Beer: I was convicted once for felonious digression.

Editor: Your sentence?

Beer: The judge forced me to stand up in front of 400 horny freshman and women and lecture for 50 minutes on Poofrock without pause.

Editor: You failed.

Beer: I’m the worst kind of recidivist.

Editor: What happened.

Beer: I stopped to answer a question when a student raised her hand.

Editor: That was the job of the graduate student.

Beer: Yes. There were discussion sections.

Editor: Why was Gigo so angry?

Beer: Newly minted PhD.

Editor: The importance of being important.

Beer: Yes. She’s thirty years old and has spent all but five or so of those thirty working hard for parents or surrogate parents in a meritocracy. She’s jumped through all the hoops, gotten little awards, praise from her parents, praise from her dissertation advisor, attended conferences, written jargon-weighted papers with mention of Foocow, Derriere, and Barfes, done all the right things to gain social status, and now she actually has to do something with her life that may run the risk of someone telling her she’s less than brilliant.

Editor: Become an important writer.

Beer: No. Become a legend in her own mind. A pseudo-intellectual. But the best idea she can come up with is hypertext. And it’s not even her own idea.

Editor: Hyper what?

Beer: Hyper-bole. Hype about something that’s nothing new at all.

Editor: Another campus fad.

Beer: Yes.

Editor: And what exactly are your qualifications for making such a sweeping judgment on a most exciting development in literature?

Beer: Nicely done. Simultaneous interrogatory and insult.

Editor: Please don’t digress.

Beer: Yes ma’am.

Editor: And aren’t you simply envious of Gigo’s credentials?

Beer: Yes, of course. Credentials are everything in America. A very strong correlation exists between name degrees and success in life. That’s proven mythology. Look at Georgia Bush. Both of them. I hereby publicly confess my obvious inferiority. Gigo said I was not really smart enough, either, to understand her work.

Editor: Then your opinion carries no weight.

Beer: None, but I’ll answer anyway. 1) The term “hypertext” itself is disgusting. 2) Use of images with words or words as images is as old as Chinese wood block. I believe children’s lit is also illustrated, isn’t it? And don’t they make movies now? 3) Nonlinear narrative. Wow. What an idea. That’s only been around since, well, before written language.

Editor: Storytelling stays the same though the medium does not.

Beer: Yes. Believe it or not, narrative predates computer technology. Editors: Other examples? Beer: 4) Experimental prose. Click-a-story. Nothing new there. 5) eZines and eBooks and books on a disk. The small press goes electronic. Now that’s big news. Call the networks. Editors: Print is still print. Beer: Book on a disk. Editors: You’ve done that? Beer: Started in 1985 with a Leading Edge 386. Put my first novel on disk in 1985, and did all my writing with a computer from then on. Introduced university computer writing courses about the same time. Put my anthology on disk in 1994 and online in 1999.

Editor: So you knew about hypermedia?

Beer: Hyper, shmyper. The computer was just a tool. Some academic decided to call prose written with a computer “hypermedia” and then, as usual, reification and theorizing took its course. Editors: Re-inventing the wheel. Beer: The wheel exists, an academic analyzes the wheel, calls it round. Students take notes about the round and think they’re learning how to invent the wheel. Students graduate from college and work and work and work with the round and can never create another wheel.

Editor: What?

Beer: If writers follow critical theory for guidance on what to create and how to create, writers produce crap. 1) Nonlinear narrative is an oxymoron and nothing new at the same time. Writers have always known about point of view, about how to shift points of view, of how to change the structure of a story. 2) Storytellers have always known that a reader’s imagination contributes to the story because language evokes images but does not render them completely. Even a filmmaker knows that about images. Then the literary theorist comes along and pronounces “the text.” Another ugly term that creates an urge to spit when you say it. Use of that term is no more or less than another vain attempt by critics and so-called literary theorists to usurp the creative role of writers, to make the analyst more important that the creator.

Editor: So taking something apart and naming the parts is more important than the whole.

Beer: Yupe. But Aristotle was not Homer. And they’ve got a name for that sort of thing.

Editor: Reification.

Beer: Aka bullshit.

Editor: So Gigo suffers from reification.

Beer: God yes. Editors: How? Beer: She’s been sucked in by the idea that if readers create texts, then the writer has no obligation other than to throw words out there on the page or into Web files. Then it’s up to the clickable reader (those with sufficient academic qualifications of course) to locate “the text.”

Editor: Literature built for interpretation.

Beer: The Milton Bradley school of writing.

Editor: Literature as a game.

Beer: Generation Geek. Literature as a computer game.

Editor: Academic writing.

Beer: You’re pretty smart.

Editor: You’re a condescending pig.

Beer: Sorry. I forgot my place.

Editor: Wither Gigo? Beer: Wither or not. Four choices: 1) Become a writer, which means she has to cut herself loose from the intelligentsia and reject her parents. 2) Continue life as a pseudo-intellectual. 3) Go back to school and get another PhD. 4) Quit.

Editor: I thought writers were intellectuals? Isn’t that what literary fiction is all about?

Beer: Mary McCarthy said the words “intelligence” and intelligentsia” were not necessarily synonymous. To wit: writers are first and foremost storytellers. The term “literary fiction” has about as much credence as “text” or “hypertext.” The word “literary” means readable. The term “literary fiction” therefore implies that another category of fiction exists without language. The ultimate text. The critic creates her own novel with analysis.

Editor: Why is the term used?

Beer: Snoblit. Word games of, by, and for academics with no interest in reaching readers beyond campus. The only intent of such prose is to get published in all the right university journals to gain status on campus and promotion. Storytelling that is clever with language but says nothing.

Editor: Or to have your unsmiling face on the cover of Poets&Writers. Beer: Membership in the East Coast literati, a cult that forbids humor. Yes, and although history has proven that academics can become good storytellers, the opposite is more often true. Rita Mae Brown, in Starting From Scratch, advised writers to get off campus.

Editor: What about Malamud?

Beer: Read “The Only Good Writer is a Dead Writer” on the Papergraders.com site. And read A New Life, The Groves of Academe, The Graves of Academe, The Arrogance of Humanism, and Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America.

Editor: What about Bellow?

Beer: Fled grad school and wrote Herzog.

Editor: Elizabeth Bishop.

Beer: Fled to Brazil.

Editor: Toni Morrison.

Beer: When she was invited, after winning the big prizes, to teach at Princeton, she was asked to submit a CV.

Editor: What about–

Beer: We could go on all night.

Editor: Last question.

Beer: Okay.

Editor: Can I be in your next novel?

Beer: You were in my last.

Editor: Then you’ve been interviewed by a fictional character.

Beer: Online you’re as real as I am.

Editor: Like reading a book.

Beer: A text.

Editor: The end.