http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html

Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last.

…unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments… With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print’s fixed unidirectional page-turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.

No fixed center, for starters — and no edges either, no ends or boundaries. The traditional narrative time line vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display. Instead: branching options, menus, link markers and mapped networks. There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks, as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics — soon to be supplemented with sound, animation and film.

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). We are always astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. That is to say, the text fragments are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between them.

This problem of operating-system standards is being urgently addressed and debated now by hypertext writers; if interaction is to be a hallmark of the new technology, all its players must have a common and consistent language and all must be equally empowered in its use. There are other problems too. Navigational procedures: how do you move around in infinity without getting lost? The structuring of the space can be so compelling and confusing as to utterly absorb and neutralize the narrator and to exhaust the reader. And there is the related problem of filtering. With an unstable text that can be intruded upon by other author-readers, how do you, caught in the maze, avoid the trivial? How do you duck the garbage? Venerable novelistic values like unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. “Text” has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice?

How does one resolve the conflict between the reader’s desire for coherence and closure and the text’s desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed, what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer? If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?

Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.

Noir is a term intrinsic to film; a subject you previously explored in your story collection A Night At The Movies, or, You Must Remember This, as well as the legendary The Adventures of Lucky Pierre; a book structured in nine reels and set in Cinecity. Why has this medium so influenced your fiction making process?

As the novel was the distinctive narrative form of the 19th century, cinema became the distinctive mode of the 20th. Lucky Pierre in fact attempts, behind the scenes, a kind of history of the filmic century as seen via the differing techniques and notions of the nine women filmmakers, an idea underlined by the book’s dedication to three great filmmakers from three different cinematic eras. Film is a powerful mythmaking tool. Taking on the tribal myths in the late 20th century (whatever the “tribe” was by then) meant taking on the movies as well. And again the same principle: on their own turf.

Also, there is a fascinating crossover between the grammars of fiction and film, something I began to play with in my very earliest short narratives back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, in a group I was then calling “sentient lens” stories. All subsequent engagements with this form have their roots in those early experiments.

You spoke earlier about disrupting myth at its core. Why do you think we are so captivated or ensnared by these primeval tales? Do you think that rewriting and exploding these myths have the potential to create new genres that are then open for interpretation, i.e. the surrealist western or postmodern detective story?

I have essayed frequently on this topic, distinguishing between myth and tale as between the sacred and the profane — sky-writing and earth-writing — but judging them both to be conservative forms, content to remain close to the comforting mental habits of the past. People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.
[via bookslut interview with Coover]