The Waste Land In, Not Of, the MOO: A Case Study


 
  1. Students in my course "Poesis: The Making of Literature," a lower-division introduction to poetry for English majors, are usually surprised to find that it meets in a networked computer classroom. They tend to be skeptical about the value of the technological setting for learning about poems, especially the students who come in with a poetry-writing background. By the end of the course, however, they almost unanimously agree in their course evaluations that the electronic component of the course added a great deal to their experience, and recommend that I continue to teach it in that setting. Over the semester, students in the course are engaged in a number of computerized assignments, including communications, Web-based message forums, and real-time electronic class discussions, in addition to submitting and peer-critiquing all their traditional writing assignments in electronic form. But the assignment that they all report enjoying the most, and wish they could have spent more time on, is a hypertext annotation project on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Through completing this assignment, they learn more about both poetry and electronic texts than they ever bargained for--which I consider a pedagogical success. In this essay, I will describe the nature and origins of this assignment, present a few examples of exemplary student work, and then consider the significance of this project not only in my course specifically but also for other courses whose instructors might find useful ways to adapt the assignment for their own purposes. I will also put forward some thoughts about how this assignment changes the way we think about hypertext as well as how hypertext changes the way we think about poetry and literature.
  2. The hypertext environment in which the Waste Land assignment is conducted is a Multi-User Domain, Object-Oriented--a MOO. 1 As the term "multi-user" indicates, the MOO facilitates online interaction because each class member can be logged into the MOO server simultaneously. However, a MOO differs from other kinds of real-time (or synchronous) multi-user discussions (such as internet relay chat [irc] or America Online's chat rooms) in two main ways: (1) the environment uses a conceptual metaphor of space and time--like real life--for its textual contents (unlike the more abstract discursive spaces of irc or chat rooms); and (2) the users of a MOO can modify the environment, which retains the modifications for future users. For the Waste Land project, these two differences (to paraphrase Gregory Bateson) make the difference.
  3. The first difference--the spatial metaphor--initially attracted me to the MOO as a medium for the Eliot hypertext assignment. The group of instructors who developed the Poesis course decided that we would include The Waste Land as well as Eliot's famous critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as prime examples of Modernism. To help students make sense out of these two works, we settled upon an annotation assignment as a suitable way of engaging them in researching and clarifying the myriad obscure allusions in the poem, as well as in working with a body of critical scholarship as preparation for upper-division literary study. Since Eliot himself provides notes to his own poem, and since the more popular anthologies that include the poem also add their own footnotes (often to the point where the notes, in miniscule type, take up more space on the page than the larger-type, lineated words of the poem), the poem explicitly invites exploration and annotation of its references. And indeed, as George Landow and others have observed, a footnote annotation is a kind of hypertext:
    The standard scholarly article in the humanities or physical sciences perfectly embodies the underlying notions of hypertext as multisequentially read text. For example, in reading an article on, say, James Joyce's Ulysses, one reads through what is conventionally known as the main text, encounters a number or symbol that indicates the presence of a foot- or endnote, and leaves the main text to read that note, which can contain a citation of passages in Ulysses that supposedly support the argument in question, or information about the scholarly author's indebtedness to other authors, disagreement with them, and so on. The note can also summon up information about sources, influences, and parallels in other literary texts. In each case, the reader can follow the link to another text indicated by the note and thus move outside the scholarly article itself. Having completed reading the note or having decided that it does not warrant a careful reading at the moment, one returns to the main text and continues reading until one encounters another note, at which point one again leaves the main text. (Landow 4)
    Viewing annotations in both criticism and literature as hypertextual, we thought it logical to ask our students in the computer classroom to present the annotations in a medium particularly suited to their hypertextual nature.
  4. My colleagues opted to set up Web pages allowing students to create hypertext links from the text of the poem in one frame to corresponding notes that would appear in another frame. However, this seemed to me to be only a more screen-friendly version of the kind of footnoting that college anthologies already provide. Indeed, the operative metaphor of the World Wide Web is one of linked pages, each page potentially containing content more rich than is possible in traditional printed pages bound in books. Aside from being able to add images and sounds as annotations, in a Web environment students would be writing essentially the same kinds of annotations as they were reading in their source texts. 2 While this exercise has obvious value for would-be literature scholars, it seemed to me to miss the opportunity provided by the networked classroom to revise (to re-see) this model of scholarly annotation. I opted instead to have my students write their annotations in MOO-space.
  5. As you might imagine, the students were a bit nervous about this prospect. Only a handful of them had ever heard of MOOs before entering the class, and fewer of them had used one. So it became important to frame the MOO for them in terms they could understand, to introduce them to the environment (in the literal sense of leading them into it), and then to let them experiment with the possibilities of MOO-space before giving them the annotation assignment itself. They were experiencing what students were experiencing several years ago when they learned to navigate the World Wide Web, and what students before them were experiencing when composing their essays using word processing software on a personal computer: they were noticing the medium more than the message; or, in the terms of Richard Lanham, at first they were looking at the medium instead of looking through it (Lanham 5). No use of technology is transparent at first, but with time and experience it may become much more transparent. Fortunately, they all had at least minimal experience with Web surfing, word processing, and before entering the class (even in 1998 for the first sections of the class, which would not have been true a mere two or three years earlier), and so it was easier to acclimate them to the MOO.

  6. The MOO, after all, is basically a collection of electronic data stored on a server and accessed by a user's computer via a client software application. This quite general description applies equally well to Web pages and messages. Obviously, what differs is the type of data that is stored on the server and thus how the client presents that data to a user. Computer programmers have their own ways of describing these differences in technical terms, but such descriptions would most likely mean little to typical computer users. What we users notice is what Espen Aarseth calls the traversal function of the projected text (Aarseth "Nonlinearity" 61), and what I've called the operative metaphor of the medium. Aarseth's term refers to the sequential and relational conventions readers use in reading a text; in this way, he distinguishes between different kinds of texts and hypertexts (and a form he calls "cybertexts" ["Nonlinearity" 63]). In other words, he claims that the key to reading a text lies within the text itself, and he provides an elaborate taxonomy of the different qualities that determine the classification of all texts. I prefer to think of the reading situation as more dependent upon readers and their interactions with texts, since a reader may quite reasonably read a text according to conventions different from those the text itself seems to warrant, and thus arrive at a totally different but potentially valid reading. 3 The term "operative metaphor" suggests exactly this kind of readerly choice, since a metaphor necessitates interpretation by a reader; at the same time, it retains the sense of an action--an operation. Reading a metaphor means to observe the difference between the thing observed (the text) and the context which informs it (its relationships with things outside the text). 4 In this sense, all reading is at some level the observation of metaphor; at the most basic level, the metaphor becomes almost entirely transparent to us when we read. That is, we don't usually stop to notice that the words we use are really only stand-ins for the things we mean when we use them; we often notice this only when we don't know the meaning of a word or a formulation, as when we read difficult poetry or dense prose. In such cases, the metaphor becomes opaque and we notice it: we look at the text, while ordinarily we simply look through it. The choice of how to view a text is ours, although texts may reward some choices more than others.
  7. For a moment, let's look at the prevalent operative metaphors of some common electronic texts. Email clients present electronic data through the metaphor of letters or memos: they have To: and From: fields, subject headings, even attachments and fields such as Cc: and Bcc: which no longer have anything to do with carbon paper. Web pages, as noted earlier, use the metaphor of print pages as a way of presenting their contents--recalling a time before codex texts, readers can "scroll" to parts of the page not accommodated by the frame of the screen--although they now also include other media as well, which can appear in the form of tape players or video screens, both familiar forms. Alternatively, MOOs use the metaphor of space: data on the server appears in terms of "rooms" and "furniture," "things" and "characters." View the source of any of these documents--MOO,, HTML--and you will find only ASCII text (or electronic bits, at a more basic level of organization). What makes the difference in each case is the operative metaphor through which we usually perceive this text.
  8. Returning to the story of the Waste Land project: the term "metaphor" was the trigger for the "Aha!" moment. A poetry course is about nothing if not metaphor. We cover general terminology and figurative language early in the semester because it is so important to the study of the genre. Most literary scholars today subscribe to the insights deconstruction and semiotics have provided, including the concept suggested above that all language is metaphor, and without metaphor (and thus without language) we would be unable to know anything at all. Some of Eliot's obscure references in The Waste Land might be metaphors as well; and he used metaphor to describe the role of the poet in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." What better way to foreground metaphor than to introduce students to an environment in which the metaphor is not yet transparent to them? By thinking about Eliot's poem, as well as their own writing, in terms of metaphor, the students would have an opportunity to explore how changing the metaphor changes the text fundamentally. In other words, they would be examining the most poetic part of the texts, although it would hardly seem like it at first. Besides, I took perverse pleasure in taking at face value the widespread belief (at least among most teachers of literature) that the MOO is a vast waste land, and in situating The Waste Land in the MOO in order both to literalize and undermine that belief.
  9. The logistics of the assignment are fairly simple. For this class, each student selected a section of roughly 20 lines of the poem on which to become an expert; those who didn't express a preference were assigned a section at random. They were to conduct research to discover what the references were in their sections and if necessary to look up the sources of the references. For instance, the student who drew the first lines of the second section ("A Game of Chess") would not only need to know that the section echoes Antony and Cleopatra, but would also need to have a look at that work to determine what use Eliot was making of it. Of course, they would be reading the annotations and critical essays of other commentators and relying upon them to a degree. But as I suggested to them from the beginning, editors have only so much room for footnotes, and sometimes their interpretations disagree or simply miss something obvious. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for instance, offers no gloss on the poem's first line, "April is the cruelest month," when the reference to the opening of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (also anthologized by Norton in that edition) seems worth mentioning. Therefore, the students were not to rely solely upon the word of expert critics: they would have to introduce their own takes on the references (how could they not?).
  10. But even if it were possible to avoid "subjective" commentary in presenting the raw information they discovered, they would need to adapt that information to MOO-space for the final product. "How do we do that?" they asked. As any seasoned instructor of writing would respond, I told them, "I don't know how you should do it. Finding out what works for you is part of the project." While it was easy enough for students to find educational MOOs and browse them to see what kinds of things others have built in them, and although they were getting used to interacting in our MOO for simple class discussions, they didn't really have any models for this kind of project--and neither did I. So I asked them to think about the medium itself and its operative metaphor. If the annotation of, say, lines 1.43-59 (Madame Sosostris's hut) included Eliot's gloss on the Tarot deck and perhaps some additional notes, how could a spatial medium incorporate information on this psychic medium? One possibility would be to create a fairly blank room, in which is a note (a MOO object of class $note, on which text can be written) containing that information. Thus, a reader in the MOO would enter the room, see the note, read it, and get the same information that would be provided by a traditional print or even Web hypertext annotation. The reader's virtual experience would be quite similar to that reader's real-life experience of the printed annotation--the only change is the once-removed quality of the reading experience. But is this is the most effective or interesting way to convey this information? In some cases, maybe so. But in this case, the spatial, object-oriented medium facilitates at least one obvious alternative. The room could be the fortune-teller's hut itself, in which a reader might find the Tarot cards from the poem (MOO objects of class $thing). Each card has a description, which might be the picture on it ("The card is the One-Eyed Merchant, whom you see in profile . . .") and might also include esoterica about that card ("Looking at the staves, you are reminded of the discussion of the Fisher King in Weston's From Ritual to Romance . . ."). Thus readers would gain the same raw information in a quite different form, and thus the valence of that information also would be quite different.
  11. The MOO shows in dramatic fashion the rhetorical implications of formal and stylistic choices. To keep with our example: by presenting the background of Tarot cards on individual cards in a fortune-teller's hut, the annotator can provide a level of context and detail that is much more difficult to achieve in print on a sheet of real or even virtual paper. Traditional footnotes are, by and large, boring, for the same reason that people tend to drowse off when attending a large academic lecture. It is surely possible to liven up the lecture, but it takes a tremendous amount of expertise and energy to do so. Otherwise, speakers depend on the good will and interest of their audiences. One easy way to keep the audience's interest is to provide a picture: a projected image will do, but it is better to pass around some actual Tarot cards and let the audience spend time intimately with the objects being discussed. The same can be said of scholarly footnotes: readers appreciate the information they contain, but when that information is obscure (as Eliot's references mostly are) and presented dryly (as traditional Waste Land notes have to be, to conserve page space), they have trouble reading them. It would be better if readers could interact more directly with the text; one way to allow that is to create objects out of text. These objects are responsive to readers in ways that traditional texts appear not to be. For example: when entering the fortune-teller's hut, the first thing a reader will see is a description of the space. In order to enter the hut and cause its description to appear, a reader has to type the name of the entrance to that space from somewhere else in the MOO (for instance, "fth" for "Fortune Teller's Hut"). Thus the reader takes a more active role in the reading process. Certainly, moving one's eyes to the bottom of a page to read a footnote is an action, but it is so automatic (or as is the case with some of my students, so not automatic) that readers can easily miss the annotation's gist unless they are quite careful about it. On the other hand, by deliberately asking for the information and being rewarded with it--indeed, getting nothing if the room is not entered--readers unavoidably become explorers of a text. The MOO's spatial metaphor demands it, a metaphor not yet transparent to most readers.
  12. To provide the feel of how this works, I will leave my theoretical example and excerpt some projects created by students in my class. 5 These samples are transcripts of a character's interactions with spaces and objects, each of which necessarily represents only one of many possible paths of navigation through that space. I ask students to submit such transcripts as part of their final portfolio for evaluation in the course: they allow me to see what an ideal reader (as imagined by the student) might experience in that space, and they also save me the difficulties involved with deciphering what to do next in virtual worlds that have been created by people with some expertise in poetry and reading but not necessarily any experience in object-oriented programming.  One assumption all of the spaces make, by the way, is that the reader has access to the text of The Waste Land outside the MOO. It is of course quite feasible to reproduce the poem inside the MOO in various ways; but to simplify things, the assignment does not require it.
  13. This first example is an annotation of the Unreal City section of section 1, lines 60-76:

    Unreal City,
    Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
    A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
    I had not thought death had undone so many.
    Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
    And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
    Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
    To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
    With a dead sound on the stroke of nine.
    There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying:"Stetson!
    You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
    That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
    Has it begun to sprout?Will it bloom this year?
    Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
    Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
    Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
    You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable!--mon frère!"

    And here is a transcript of a visit to this space:

    look here

     

    Unreal City

    You find yourself in the depths of this ancient London city, where once only small settlements covered the banks of the Thames. Now you sit amongst large concrete structures, and growing modernism. The London Bridge is before you, shadows and outlines of scurrying forms dancing over it. A brown fog rolls around you. Charles Baudelaire hovers in the fog.

    Obvious exits: London Bridge...<bridge>

    You say, "Hello, Monsieur Baudelaire."

    <<puppet>> Charles Baudelaire says: Bonjour.

    You say, "Do you speak English?"

    <<puppet>> Charles Baudelaire says:

      Yes, of course. American. This is a

      Swarming city, city full of dreams,

      Where the spector in full daylight accosts the passerby.

    You say, "Is that from a poem?"

    <<puppet>> Charles Baudelaire says: Oui -- 'Les Sept Viellards.'

    You say, "What about that line about the hypocrite lecteur?"

    <<puppet>> Charles Baudelaire says: Oui! Hypocrite reader! --my double, --my brother!

    London Bridge

    London Bridge stands firm with five stone arches supporting its weight above the Thames. Across it flows an endless crowd of nondescript people, dressed in grays and blacks. Each stares at the ground before them, never looking up, always fixated on their feet. A sign hangs loosely from the concrete. The crowd continues over the bridge.

    Obvious exits: Unreal City...<south> and King William Street...<north>

    read sign

    -----

    An aged sign sits in the concrete wall -- one should perhaps read it.

    SIGN

    ====

    Please do not JUMP.

    (You finish reading.)

    jump

     

    The Vestibule of Hell

    After plummeting an immeasurable distance through fog and mist you have landed on hardened rock within the Gate of Hell. Cries of anguish coil and recoil on the starless air -- tongues and monstrous accents toiling in pain and anger. Dante stands here -- alone, watching with grief.

    Obvious exits: Return to Earth...<up> and Circle One...<down>

    You say, "Hello, Dante."

    <<puppet>> Dante says: Ciao. Are you from the crowds above?

    You say, "Yes."

    You say, "What is this place?"

    <<puppet>> Dante says:

      This is Hell.

     

      Here, you must gather your soul against the cowardice.  

      Here, you shall pass among the fallen people, souls who have lost the good of intellect.

    You say, "Like the ones in the crowd?"

    <<puppet>> Dante says:

      Such a long train of spirits, I should ne'er

      Have thought, that death so many had despoil'd.

    You say, "Why do you sigh?"

    <<puppet>> Dante says: Sighs? Descend with me further if you wish to hear sighs...

    down

     

    The First Circle of Hell - Limbo

    Dante has led you across Acheron, and you now stand on the brink of Hell itself. A desolate chasm is below you, thunder rolling up from the depths. There seems to be no bottom to this pit. Dante looks at you expectantly.

    Obvious exits: Vestibule...<up>

    ...sounds of passive breath rise from all around.

    You say, "Tell me about the first circle."

    <<puppet>> Dante says: This is the First Circle of Hell. Here lies the Virtuous Pagans -- they were born without the light of Christ's revelation, and so cannot come into the light of God. But, they are not tormented -- they simply have no hope.

    ...sounds of passive breath rise from all around.

    You say, "Who is sighing?"

    <<puppet>> Dante says:

      Here, as mine ear could note, no plaint was heard

      Except of sighs, that made th' eternal air

      Tremble.

    ...sounds of passive breath rise from all around.

    You say, "Can we go down further?"

    <<puppet>> Dante says: I'm afraid you mustn't go further.

    up

     

    The Vestibule of Hell

    After plummeting an immeasurable distance through fog and mist you have landed on hardened rock within the Gate of Hell. Cries of anguish coil and recoil on the starless air -- tongues and monstrous accents toiling in pain and anger. Dante stands here -- alone, watching with grief.

    Obvious exits: Return to Earth...<up> and Circle One...<down>

    up

     

    London Bridge

    London Bridge stands firm with five stone arches supporting its weight above the Thames. Across it flows an endless crowd of nondescript people, dressed in grays and blacks. Each stares at the ground before them, never looking up, always fixated on their feet. A sign hangs loosely from the concrete. The crowd continues over the bridge.

    Obvious exits: Unreal City...<south> and King William Street...<north>

    north

     

    King William Street

    The crowd flows down King William Street, heading into the financial district of London. A church stands on the corner of King William and Lombard Streets, facing the offices of Lloyd's Bank.   A man with a Stetson atop his head looks as though you've spoken to him. A dog stares wistfully at the ground beneath the man's feet.

    Obvious exits:

    Enter the Church...<church>        Enter the Bank...<bank>

    London Bridge...<bridge>         A Game of Love...<AGoL>

    ...the church bells ring nine times.

    You say, "Hello."

    <<puppet>> Stetson says: Is it I?

    <<puppet>> Dog says: Woof.

    <<puppet>> Stetson says:

      This dog?

      But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,

      For with his nails he'll dig them again.

    <<puppet>> Stetson says:

     

      At least that is what Cornelia sings in the fifth act of Webster's _White Devil_. Or you may wish to look to the stars. As for me, I again point back to the Bible -- read your Philippians.

    ...the church bells ring nine times.

    church

     

    Inside the Church -- St. Mary Woolnoth

    St. Mary Woolnoth is a notable City church of the Georgian style -- enfronting double towers, a simple rectangular form.   A plaque sits on the wall. A worn Bible sits upon a stand.

    Obvious exits: King William Street...<street>

    read plaque

    -----

    There seems to be some historical information of some sort -- perhaps you should read it...

    PLAQUE

    ======

    Thankfully, St. Mary Woolnoth was not one of nineteen City churches proposed for demolition in 1920. Designed and built in the early 1700s by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, it is considered one of the least conventional churches at the time.

    (You finish reading.)

    look Bible

    Tattered and worn, seeing years upon years of use, only a small section remains legible: 'Luke 23:44 - And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.   And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.   And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.'

    ...the church bells ring nine times.

    street

     

    King William Street

    The crowd flows down King William Street, heading into the financial district of London. A church stands on the corner of King William and Lombard Streets, facing the offices of Lloyd's Bank.   A man with a Stetson atop his head looks as though you've spoken to him. A dog stares wistfully at the ground beneath the man's feet.

    Obvious exits:

    Enter the Church...<church>        Enter the Bank...<bank>

    London Bridge...<bridge>         A Game of Love...<AGoL>

    bank

     

    Lloyds Bank

    A typical London financial institution -- men in daily suits fussing about the desks and papers.   A desk sits in the corner, empty except for a nameplate. A bold, large sign hangs on the wall.

    Obvious exits: King William Street...<street>

    read sign

    -----

    There appears to be some writing on the note ...

    SIGN

    ====

    The work day begins promptly at 9am -- tardiness unacceptable

    (You finish reading.)

    ...the church bells ring nine times.

    look desk

    You see no "desk" here.

    look nameplate

    The nameplate sits atop an empty desk: 'T.S. Eliot (1917-1925).'

  14. Several things are noteworthy about this transcript, aside from the wealth of information about the poem that it contains (although it might have contained still more). Most obvious is the use of puppets, a type of MOO object that can be "trained" (programmed) to respond to text that is spoken in its space. 6 In this section of the poem, several characters appear, and it makes sense to give them voice in an annotation of the section. Actually, though, of the four characters only one appears in the poem, Stetson, and then only through indirect address. But by exploring this section of the MOO, we get the sense that there are people, historical and fictional, behind much of the poem, and the MOO helps clarify in what ways they appear. Baudelaire and Dante are their own explanations for references that might otherwise go unnoticed. Ironically, Eliot himself is absent from this part of the poem and thus is left out of the space (although he appears in other project spaces as a puppet).
  15. The virtuous heathen, the doubles of those crossing London Bridge to their London City desk jobs, appear en masse in the form of another type of MOO object, the household event. Household events are bits of text that repeat after a given interval. In the transcript, "...sounds of passive breath rise from all around." and "...the church bells ring nine times." are both of this type, and they have a dynamic effect, since they require nothing to trigger them. In this way, a MOO space can have action in it, even if the reader decides not to interact with anything. And here the student has included note objects, as well as ordinary MOO objects of type $thing, whose descriptions and text provide background for some of the lines of the section. They are cleverly integrated as appurtenances of the places in which they reside: a street sign, a wall plaque, a book on a stand. The combination of some of these elements can have happy outcomes, as with the Bible above: as the description of the Bible is being read, the household event with the tolling of the bells occurs, reinforcing both allusion and illusion--the reference Eliot wishes to make, and the general sense that the world of the poem at this point resembles the passion and death of Christ, and the reader needs to feel the resemblance in order to know the hopelessness of this part of the poem. It's one thing to tell readers what they should know; it's another thing to make them feel it, too.
  16. Another student project that does things a bit differently annotates the last lines of the poem, 5.396-434:
    Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
    Waited for rain, while the black clouds
    Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
    The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
    Then spoke the thunder
    DA
    Datta: what have we given?
    My friend, blood shaking my heart
    The awful daring of a moment's surrender
    Which an age of prudence can never retract
    By this, and this only, we have existed
    Which is not to be found in our obituaries
    Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
    Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
    In our empty rooms
    DA
    Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
    Turn in the door once and turn once only
    We think of the key, each in his prison
    Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
    Only at nightfall, ethereal rumors
    Revive for a broken Coriolanus
    DA
    Damyata: The boat responded
    Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
    The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
    Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
    To controlling hands
         I sat upon the shore
    Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
    Shall I at least set my lands in order?
    London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
    Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
    Quando fiam uti chelidon--O swallow swallow
    Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
    These fragments I have shored against my ruins
    Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
    Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
       Shantih shantih shantih
    Here is a transcript of one path through this project space:

    look here

     

    Ganga

    A usually fertile Indian valley that is awaiting rain. The nearby dry jungle watches the approaching dark clouds hungrily. The mighty Himalayas loom in the distance. A strong scent of incense hangs in the air. You're standing near the Ganges river. You decide to follow the drying river and walk towards the once snowy mountain peak, Himavent. In your journey, you hear the omnipresent Thunder speak. You see 3 stones up ahead that catch your attention.

    You see a Datta, a Dayadhvam, and a Damyata here.

    The Thunder says DA.

    look datta

    A small, dry stone. It's so smooth and round that you want to toss Stone_1...

    toss stone_1

     

    Graveyard

    An old, dreary graveyard. Most of the tombstones seem quite normal, but one in particular catches your eye. There is a spider on top of it, carefully making a web across the blank tombstone. It seems to have some objects laying near it too. You move in for a closer look, though this place has an empty feel to it that gives you the creeps.

    You see a Grave, a keychain, a Will, an Obituaries, and a spider here.

    Obvious exits: Ganga

    Datta; to give alms.

    look grave

    Empty. Very Empty.

    look will

    The will is empty. The deceased has obviously thought little of his/her life and felt he/she had nothing to leave anyone.

    look obituaries

    The obituaries are blank. The person who has died seems to have accomplished little in their lifetime, as we all have.

    look spider

    As you move in to look closer at the insect, you are reminded of the image in Webster's The White Devil of a spider creating a curtain of spiderwebs over the epitaph, in an effort to hide the memories of the deceased.

    look keychain

    A large old-fashioned brass key. It looks warm and glows in the light. You have an unexplainable urge to hold it. . .

    hold key

     

    Prison

    A crowded prison room. The people here seem quite discontent, as if they have been here for quite some time. Their clothes are tattered and their faces have little to no gleam left in them. Though they form a massive crowd, you might try conversing with some of them. You might learn something about this strange place. What makes you the most upset is that you know you've locked yourself into this room with the key. However, it does seem to be connected to a tower. Perhaps there will be a way out of there, yet.

    You see a picture, an Arnaut Daniel, a Venus, and a Nerval here.

    Obvious exits: tower and Ganga

    Dayadhvam; to have compassion.

    look Arnaut Daniel

    Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal poet in Dante's Purgatorio. Daniel has been hanging around the Wasteland recently, after a brief stint through the refining fires of Dante's HELL.

    Arnaut Daniel is currently on.

    You say, "Hello."

    <<puppet>> Arnaut Daniel says: Nevermind introductions. I'm in hell here. Now I pray you, by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain. Go ahead ask me, "Then what?"

    You say, "Then what?"

    <<puppet>> Arnaut Daniel says: Poi s'acose nel foco che gli affina. I know, you're going to ask me "what do you mean?"

    You say, "What do you mean?"

    <<puppet>> Arnaut Daniel says: I mean, "then I dove into the fire that refines them."

    look Venus

    Dayadhvam; to have compassion.

    woman who recites the Vigil of Venus in Latin. The Vigil is a hymn to Venus with a description of spring. She wonders, Who are you? You have the same thought.

    Venus is currently on.

    You say, "Who are you?"

    <<puppet>> Venus says: I'm Venus. Quando fiam uti chelidon--O swallow swallow.   "When shall I be as the swallow." You know, similar to the story of Philomela, the nightingale who sings so beautifully.

    look Nerval

    cellmate who shares a similar name with Gerald de Nerval, an author who wrote El Desdichado or The Disinherited. You say, excuse me as you walk past him.

    Nerval is currently on.

    You say, "Excuse me."

    <<puppet>> Nerval says: Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie. I know what you're going to say. "Can you help me with the French?"

    You say, "Can you help me with the French?"

    <<puppet>> Nerval says: Sure, what I said was, "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower." That's me. I am the dark man, the disconsolate widower,/ the prince of Aquitania whose tower has been torn down:/ My sole star is dead, and my constellated lute/Bears the black sun of melancholia.

    look picture

    A sea-like setting that reminds you of a story you read once. Its abstraction lures you in. Yet, the painting is crooked. If you fix it, you will be able to get a better view.

    fix painting

     

    Pier

    You find yourself on a boat, rocking gently. The sea seems to be under your control. As you row, you get the sensation that you are controlling nature; but, in turn, it controls your boat. The feeling of oneness with your surroundings and nature overwhelms you as you dock upon the shore. You begin fishing and notice that there is a very arid plain behind you.

    You see a Bible, a King_Hezekiah, and a From_Ritual_to_Romance here.

    Obvious exits: enlightenment and Ganga

    Damyata; to practice self-control.

    read Bible

    -----

    There appears to be some writing on the note ...

    BIBLE

    =====

    The Fisher King story

    (You finish reading.)

    look King_Hezekiah

    dying, old guy who was actually saved from his illness by the grace of God.

    King_Hezekiah is currently on.

    You say, "Hello."

    <<puppet>> King_Hezekiah says: After coming down with an illness, I bid Isaiah to set thine house in order, to prepare for my death. But do you want to know what I did? Please say yes.

    You say, "Yes."

    <<puppet>> King_Hezekiah says: I prayed to God and I said, "I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in thy sight."

    Damyata; to practice self-control.

    look From_Ritual_to_Romance

    chapter in Weston's book describing the origins of the fisher king myth. In the Celtic Fertility Myth, virility of the land depends upon the well being of the king...

    enlightenment

     

    Shantih

    A calm, serene setting. After the terrible things you have experienced, this comes as a reward. You feel as if you've been down a path of enlightenment, learning the three fundamentals of the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad. Enjoy your stay, for you have survived the Waste Land!

    You see a Hieronymo and a last_page here.

    Obvious exits: Tower...<Twr>, Ganga, and Waste Land...<WL>

    look Hieronymo

    Survivor of the Spanish Tragedy. He is Mad Againe and seeks revenge for the murder of his son.

    Hieronymo is currently on.

    You say, "Hello."

    <<puppet>> Hieronymo says: hello back! Would you like to hear about the play I wrote? Come on, say yes!

    You say, "Yes."

    <<puppet>> Hieronymo says: I wrote a play for entertainment of the court, made up of fragments of poetry in many languages. The actors chosen were my sons murderers. And in the midst of the action and confusion in the play, they get killed!...Of course, I planned it that way!

    read last_page

    -----

    There appears to be some writing on the note ...

    LAST_PAGE

    =========

    Shantih: The peace which passeth understanding.

    (You finish reading.)

  17. There are puppets in this section as well, but this time they are triggered by non-obvious prompts which the puppet itself must provide, which is a less elegant way to handle puppets. Nevertheless, they offer important information about the poem, especially about the foreign-language phrases. The main technique of this MOO-space, however, is to get the reader to move between several disjointed spaces, each of which offers a different relevant perspective on the poem section. The effect of tossing the stone (which can be done with any of the three stones, by the way) and then appearing in a new room suggests magic or divine power, appropriate for this part of the poem. 7 And instead of giving details in the space descriptions, the student here uses object descriptions to do the bulk of the work. This method emphasizes the thing-ness of the poem: there's a lot of stuff here to look at, and when we read the poem alone we may miss that quality. Since many of the things are so obscure, we might want to read it all as a jumble of nonsense, whereas if only one or two items were unknown, we might think we should try to figure them out. When everything appears to be nonsense, we might not bother. This MOO-space does a nice job of giving readers something to hold onto while making their way through the poem's jumbled fragments. It provides a ground where Eliot tries to remove one, yet it still captures that groundlessness by making the connections between spaces as jarring as Eliot's.
  18. As a whole, the MOO annotations give students both a deep understanding of a small section of the poem as well as a new context from which to read the entire poem. As disconnected as The Waste Land appears at a first, second, or even later reading, the poem contains many recurring images and ideas, and knowing what one section contains often explains seemingly unrelated sections. Further, the MOO annotation project is the only writing assignment I've found in which students seem truly interested in reading each other's work. They actually enjoy seeing alternate visions of the poem as well as the resonances such visions have with their own. Since The Waste Land is so polyvocal (its original title was to be "He Do the Police in Different Voices"), the competing yet strangely consistent visions found in the MOO annotations are consistent with Eliot's poem. And the MOO project really emphasizes qualities inherent in the poem but easily overlooked in the process of merely decoding the obscurities: its narrative trajectories and its rich tapestry of people, places, and things. Whereas traditional print annotations tend to make the references seem ponderous and weighty--as scholars are wont to do, and as Eliot imagined they would--through the operative metaphor of books and intertextuality, the MOO annotations tend to favor aspects of the poem resonant with a spatial, object-oriented metaphor. The Waste Land has a great many things in it, and these things make wonderful MOO objects. Navigating these objects in the MOO is a sequential operation that generates a narrative (such as those offered in the transcripts above). Simultaneously generating and reading this narrative--made by moving among spaces, looking at objects, and listening to the words of characters--MOO users become acutely aware of the elements inherent in Eliot's poem that give rise to the narrative. Then they notice that the poem also has a narrative; they simply hadn't been able to see it before.
  19. This effect of making the poem more coherent by shifting the operative metaphor from print to space-time has other, more surprising effects. We realize that the poem depends not only on the words of the text as printed, but also on how readers encounter and process those words. Readers actively choose how they will do this. What is opaque in the MOO becomes opaque in literature because readers begin to see it differently as a result of seeing things in the MOO. Eliot's text hasn't changed; but we have. Jay David Bolter describes this effect as "remediation":
    In about the 8th century B.C., the Greeks began to refashion the space of oral mythology and heroic legend into the more precise and linear space of the papyrus roll (and stone or wooden inscription), a process that, according to Eric Havelock (1982), lasted hundreds of years. In late antiquity the shift from papyrus roll to codex refashioned the space again, making more effective use of the two-dimensional surface to deploy text. In Western Europe the shift from handwritten codex to printed book was another such refashioning, and the shift to electronic writing is yet another. We might call each such shift a "remediation," in the sense that a newer medium takes the place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space. . . . Remediation involves both homage and rivalry, for the new medium imitates some features of the older medium, but also makes an implicit or explicit claim to improve on the older one. (Bolter 23)
    In other words, MOO-space not only appropriates some features of print media and combines them with other features such as object orientation and the capacity for multi-user synchronous modifications, it fundamentally changes (remediates) the medium of print itself. Creating literary annotations in a MOO changes the way readers view annotations in books; it also changes the way we think about MOOs, since most commentators on MOO culture focus almost exclusively on its role-playing elements. The new medium supports older forms of text after all, such as narrative and exegesis, even though those forms in the MOO are not, and cannot be, the same as their print counterparts.
  20. None of this should be taken to mean that MOO annotations will replace traditional scholarly footnotes or glosses in academic journals; far from it. As with the decision to use any medium, writers must consider their audience and their purpose in writing. Many readers of The Waste Land, particularly experienced ones, might prefer short, easily navigable footnotes so they can be reminded of only certain obscure facts without having to immerse themselves in a virtual world to get a tidbit or two of useful information. Professional scholars would do well to practice writing such notes. But in an introductory course for undergraduates, such an exercise has dubious value. The richness of the MOO annotations as a kind of companion text to The Waste Land provides insights not easily discovered otherwise, and interested and capable novices will gain a great deal from both reading and writing them. Perhaps upper-division or graduate students would produce different kinds of MOO-spaces when writing about the poem: they could "translate" the poem into the MOO, which is different from merely annotating it; or they might log their classroom discussions of the poem and use the logs as the basis for a conference paper. The assignment would depend upon the goals of the course and the level of the students (and, of course, the discipline under study in the course, which need not be literature or composition). In each case, however, the medium's operative metaphor must be adapted to the purpose and audience for the assignment. With a traditional academic essay, the metaphor is transparent (or we imagine that it is), so we already know how to make it fit our purpose and audience (or we imagine we do). In order to do the same with MOO writing, we need to be able to look through the medium as well as look at it, and the ability to switch back and forth between these two modes comes only with experience. It is a path laid down in walking.
  21. In my courses, students found that even while they were grappling with details of in-depth literary research and simple object-oriented programming, they were really engaging in the best kind of literary study: the recognition that reader and text are involved in a kind of mutually implicating interaction that depends on both text and context, demanding a continually refined knowledge of texts, contexts, and oneself as a reader, oneself as the medium for all these things. At its heart, the project makes readers aware of their own presence in reading through making them aware of themselves as writers through their writing--a form of deep self-reference. While any unfamiliar medium would suffice to create this effect, the MOO seems ideal for the purposes of literary study because it is not only easily accessible and inexpensive, but also thoroughly textual and unusually flexible. The MOO deserves to be better known and utilized as a complement to, and remediation of, traditional and canonical literary studies.
  22. For further information on using MOOs, please consultHigh Wired andMOOniversity , two excellent sources for practical guidance in using and teaching with educational MOOs (both are listed in the Works Cited). Several fine Web sites also provide help for new users; see the MOO resources posted on the site of the University of Texas's Computer Writing and Research Lab at <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu> for tutorials and links to additional references.

Notes

1. This acronym contains another acronym:   MOO stands for MUD, Object- Oriented, since a MUD is a common related kind of virtual multi-user environment.   Since it becomes unwieldy to discuss MUDs/MOOs in those terms, and since there are other kinds of multi-user environments such as MUSHes and MUCKs, all of these environments are sometimes labeled MU*s and the differences between them ignored.   For my purposes, however, object orientation is a key feature of the environment; therefore I will refer to it herein as a MOO.

2. For examples of excellent scholarly hypertext annotations on the Web, see Rickard A. Parker's "Exploring The Waste Land" at <http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html> and Arwin van Arum's "The Waste Land Annotated" at < http://members1.chello.nl/~a.vanarum8/EliotProject/Waste_notes/Waste_A.htm >, both accessible as of 22 November 2004.

3. Aarseth describes the difference between reading that requires trivial effort ("non-ergodic") and nontrivial effort ("ergodic") in order to show the importance of the reader in the reading situation ( Cybertext 1-2).   While I agree that we can make such a distinction, it appears to be one of degree and not of kind, whereas "operative metaphor" suggests differences of kind within essentially the same activity.   Constructing a text is, to use another metaphor, "laying down a path in walking" (Varela et al. 237), and what differs from reading to reading is the path we lay down, regardless of the type of texts that confront us as we do so.   Only in this way can we explain the phenomenon of re-reading a static, linear text and coming away from it with a meaning different from a previous reading of the same text.

4. This view of reading as observation is derived from Luhmannian systems theory, the discussion of which is outside the scope of this essay.   For a thorough discussion of systems theory's relevance to literature and art, see Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA:   Stanford UP, 2000).

5. Unfortunately, Cheshire MOOn has been deleted, and these spaces no longer exist.

For quick practical help on navigating MOOs, please see Jorge R. Barrios and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs, "How to MOO without Making a Sound:   A Guide to the Virtual Communities Known as MOOs," in High Wired:   On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, 2 nd ed., ed. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001), pages 45-87; and Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes, MOOniversity:   A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000).

6. There are many infamous stories of puppets, also known as bots, who were trained to respond in such a sophisticated way that their interlocutors believed for quite some time that they were interacting with a human character.   In Cheshire MOOn, as in most educational MOOs, puppets announce themselves as such so that this kind of deception will not confuse inexperienced readers.

7. This effect is not obvious to implement:   it involves programming a verb on an invisible exit that then causes the character to move through the exit from that space into another one.   For details, see my Web tutorial on this at <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~barndollar/courses/spring00/teapot.html>.