reviews


 
 

 

 

Book Reviews 201 

gress, 1947), and a complement to the ex­
quisite coffee-table book American Trea­
sures of the Library of Congress (Abrams, 
1997).—Plummer Alston Jones Jr., Catawba 
College. 

Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books— 
Or Books without End?: Reading Interac­
tive Narratives. Ann Arbor: Univ. of 
Michigan Pr., 2000. 205p. $34.50, alk. 
paper (ISBN 0-472-11114-0). LC 
99-6689. 

I think it was a combination of the dooms­
day title, the breathless, schoolgirl-
with-a-crush tone in the acknowledg­
ments to this book, and the first of several 
grammatical errors that initially put me 
off J. Yellowlees Douglas’s The End of 
Books. The “Interactive Narrative 
Timeline” prefacing the text challenged me 
in a different way: Did I agree with Dou­
glas that Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 
(1759), Joyce’s Ulysses (1914), and Ford 
Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) were 
interactive narratives in the same family 
as Michael Joyce’s afternoon (1990) and 
Geoff Ryman’s 253 (1996)? If all of these 
were interactive narratives, what kind of 
narratives weren’t “interactive?” Could a 
lyric poem be interactive? What about 
plays published in print, but not acted 
upon the stage? Was Douglas (University 
of Florida) confusing the experimental 
(and author-determined) fictions of Sterne 
with the supposedly reader-driven choices 
offered in hypertext fiction? Douglas’s 

Index to advertisers
 
AIAA 108, 154 
Archival Products 163 
BIOSIS 179 
CHOICE 172, 195 
EBSCO cover 4 
Faxon/RoweCom cover 2 
Gwathmey Siegel & Assocs. 164 
Haworth Press 107 
Library Technologies 146 
netLibrary 114-115 
OCLC 111 
Primary Source Microfilm cover 3 

book is an attempt to answer these sorts 
of questions, to provide a theory of how 
interactive narratives work for both author 
and reader. 

In the introductory chapter, Douglas 
offers a review of the recent publishing 
and critical history of hypertext narra­
tives, citing both the continuities and the 
disjunctions between publishing on the 
Web and publishing in print. Canonical 
works such as Jane Austen’s Emma are 
available “free” online, whereas Joyce’s 
afternoon and Douglas’ s own short 
hypertext fiction “I Have Said Nothing” 
achieve near-canonicity by appearing in 
a Norton anthology, Postmodern American 
Fiction (1997). She defines interactive texts 
as “those that contain episodes in the form 
of chunked text and a range of action ac­
companying a single decision” and 
“joined together by links.” She further 
subdivides interactive narratives into two 
types: hypertext fictions, which are text 
based, and “digital narratives,” which are 
image based. These slippery definitions 
allow for a wide range of authorial prod­
uct, from computer games to novels; the 
terms seem to be used interchangeably 
throughout the book. 

In the remainder of her book, Douglas 
presents her theories on the connections 
between avant-garde fiction (the earliest 
interactive fictions?) and hypertext, on 
how readers piece together discrete pieces 
of text to form stories. She wishes to ex­
plore in particular the “aesthetic, cogni­
tive, and physical aspects of reading … 
when narratives have no singular, physi­
cal ending.” We, like Scheherazade’s lis­
tener, have a desire for the inexhaustible 
story—a desire that interactive stories 
fulfill. But instead of “saying the same 
thing” every time you read it (as Douglas 
claims print forms of narrative do), in­
teractive narratives remove stories from 
the confines of the static, linear, printed 
page. In a reversal of the print revolution 
Elizabeth Eisenstein posited, hypertext 
allows the reader to return to a 
preindustrial fluidity and freedom from 
the austerity of print. Interactive narra­
tives have no definite beginnings and 



202 College & Research Libraries 

endings; the printed book, on the other 
hand, reminds us, in all its physicality, 
that it has a beginning and ending. The 
sequential page numbering, the blank 
leaves and covers enfolding the text, the 
plot or organizational structure of the 
text—all support beginning at the begin­
ning and finishing at the end. Interactive 
narratives can be read coherently in many 
orders; the author of hypertexts, unlike 
experimental writers such as Sterne and 
Borges, is freed from the printed page and 
is not obliged to write, as Douglas puts 
it, “against the medium.” With its pleni­
tude of choices, hypertext makes explicit 
both the restrictions of print and the mul­
tiplicity of possibility of the printed word. 
Reading interactive narratives also re­
minds us of the complexities of reading, 
complexities that we have forgotten as we 
have graduated from knowing our ABCs 
to reading storybooks to digesting liter­
ary theory. 

In a chapter on how the medium of 
print determines our reading of narra­
tives, Douglas argues (with some empiri­
cal documentation) that humans impose 
order and connectedness on what might 
be disconnected sets of images, words, 
and events. We tend to view the world as 
ordered by cause and effect, by event and 
aftermath. In an experiment with one of 
her college classes, Douglas literally cut 
up a short story into fragments in order 
to “liberate” all the alternative connec­
tions that print eliminates. Groups of stu­
dents were asked to reconstruct the plot; 
each group did so, but with different re­
sults. Douglas uses this anecdote to theo­
rize that all narratives have gaps, are frag­
mented, and are open to multiple inter­
pretations. Hypertext serves only to em­
phasize and uncover the implicit assump­
tions we make when we read, and the 
author and the printed page make con­
nections for us. 

Just as hypertexts redefine narrativity 
for us, they also redefine closure. There 
is no way for the reader of a printed book 
to reconfigure an unsatisfactory ending 
(unless one counts author/readers such 
as Alexandra Ripley who got Scarlett and 

March 2001 

Rhett back together). Readers of interac­
tive narratives can keep reading till they 
are satisfied. Closure becomes the pre­
rogative of the reader, not the author, and 
those prerogatives broaden rather than 
restrict options during the experience of 
reading. The reader, then, not the author, 
bears the burden of determining when 
and what closure is. Douglas argues that 
a “resolution of tensions” and of the great­
est number of ambiguities in the story 
provide the most plausible sort of conclu­
sion. Such “open works” also invite re­
reading, because closure can be attained 
by pursuing linking texts to different end­
ings. 

The chapter entitled “The Intentional 
Network” discusses some of the 
practicalities of authoring hypertext nar­
ratives. Authoring programs such as 
Storyspace allows authors to restrict or free 
up options for their readers; interactive 
narratives pile hypertext on top of autho­
rial language on top of “codes written by 
programmers.” Both reader and author 
must attend to structure as well as con­
tent. Does this interjection of the reader 
into the writing/reading process confirm 
the “death of the author?” On the con­
trary, says Douglas. Rather like the clock­
work universe crafted by an Enlighten­
ment God, this new sort of author creates 
a universe that he or she has intended. 
Douglas does raise some question about 
the intentional power of the author when 
she discusses copyright. Copyright may 
be a notion peculiarly tied to print because 
online readers can, of course, download 
and rework the author’s intentions and 
universe as they please. 

Douglas concludes with a discussion 
of the generic possibilities and future of 
hypertext. Although they retain the tra­
ditional features of print narratives 
(goal-seeking, conflict and uncertainty, 
and the anticipation of outcomes), they 
require more scripting, more writing, 
more dialogue, more work—all in order 
to free the reader to explore possibilities 
as they cannot in print. 

What implications does Douglas’s 
theorizing have for academic libraries and 



Book Reviews 203 

academic librarians? The interactive fic­
tions Douglas cites are buried in the very 
substantial bibliography she provides, 
but one wonders whether English bibli­
ographers are going to check these against 
the local online catalog, order them, and 
then have them marked and parked, ei­
ther literally or virtually. The real value 
of Douglas’s book for academics, sup­
posed experts in books and reading, is the 
opportunity it gives us to review our own 
assumptions about how and why people 
use the contents of our libraries, how and 
why people read. Perhaps a considered 
examination of these questions will move 
us to create collections that are more valu­
able and serviceable to our users.—Cecile 
M. Jagodzinski, Illinois State University. 

Svenonius, Elaine. The Intellectual Foun­
dations of Information Organization. 
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr. (Digital Li­
braries and Electronic Publishing), 
2000. 255p. $37, alk. paper (ISBN 0-262­
19433-3). LC 99-41301. 

In this book, information organization 
means bibliographic organization. The 
first half of the book discusses the objec­
tives of organization, the character of the 
objects to be organized, the main devices 
used to organize, and the principles gov­
erning the selection and application of 
organizing devices. The objects to be or­
ganized are bibliographic entities: works 
and their appearances as documents. The 
primary organizing device is description 
using special bibliographic languages, 
which can be analyzed in terms of vo­
cabulary, semantics, syntax, and pragmat­
ics (terms, meanings, combinations of 
terms, language application rules). The 
second half discusses the languages used 
for organization: work languages, docu­
ment languages, and subject languages. 
Work and document languages get a 
chapter each, subject languages get three 
chapters (vocabulary, semantics, syntax, 
but, strikingly, no pragmatics). The aim 
of the work is to synthesize a body of 
knowledge that has been developed in the 
(largely) Anglo-American tradition of li­
brary cataloging over the past 150 years: 

not a summary or outline of codes and 
thesauri and classification schemes but, 
rather, a survey of problems to be solved 
and alternative means of solution. For 
instance, half of chapter nine concerns the 
problem of multiple meaning in subject 
description languages and reviews the 
alternative ways of disambiguation (e.g., 
domain specification, parenthetical quali­
fiers, scope notes, hierarchical displays). 
This is the kind of information that is of 
interest far beyond the library, and the 
book aims to be of interest and use not 
only to the theorist of bibliographic orga­
nization, but also to the designers of in­
formation systems generally. 

Posing the organizational problem as 
a linguistic one of devising and applying 
special languages for describing works, 
authors, and subjects has great concep­
tual advantages. It makes it easy to see 
that descriptive cataloging is as centrally 
concerned with vocabulary control as is 
subject cataloging, while also providing 
a striking way of insisting on the logical 
and practical differences between descrip­
tion of works and description of docu­
ments, by calling for different descriptive 
languages. It has the interesting conse­
quence of repositioning classification by 
viewing it in terms of syntax and seman­
tics of linguistic description rather than, 
say, as mainly a matter of marking for 
physical placement or assigning abstract 
locations in a universal classification of 
knowledge, thus bringing subject catalog­
ing and classification closer together. (It 
is less successful in integrating indexing 
with cataloging, for reasons to be seen). 
By making vocabulary control the heart 
of the matter, it sharply focuses attention 
on the contrast between searching in 
unregimented free text and searching in 
bibliographically regimented files. It 
highlights the question of whether or to 
what extent the expensive intellectual la­
bor of cataloging and indexing can be 
automated, while at the same time rais­
ing questions about the applicability of 
originally book-oriented practices to a 
world of new kinds of information-bear­
ing objects. The chapter on document lan­