Open “Lexia to Perplexia” by Talan Memmott
This celebrated work of e-literature is not only hard to label— poetry, fiction, theory, essay, English, code— it is also hard to read. This is not a criticism of the text: it is merely an observation on its ontological reality.
When Memmott wrote it in 2000, DHTML was a new thing, without established standards, and a key player in the browser wars. Aware of the difficulties in maintaining compatibility over time, he engaged its obsolescence thematically in the work. Nowadays, DHTML has come a long way towards becoming a new open standard, but the code in “Lexia to Perplexia” barely functions in modern browsers.
What can an interested reader do to experience more than the tip of the iceberg that is still functional in this text?
- Get an old browser: any Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x will do… if you can get it to work in your current operating system.
- Access the source code (a right click should give you the option) and read its linguistic texts, open its links to images, and try to reconstruct a functioning version in your head (understanding JavaScript helps).
- Read about it: N. Katherine Hayles performs a deft reading of it in EBR, highlighting how this work interpellates us as cyborgs. (For more about how we are all cyborg readers of electronic literature, read the section “The Cyborg Reader” in my dissertation (pgs. 67-71).)
One could say “Lexia to Perplexia” is the mirror opposite of William Gibson’s “Agrippa”— an e-poem by designed to erase itself after running once which got hacked and distributed over the Internet. (Its artifactual remains are being studied in The Agrippa Files.) Both works engage their evanescence in their design yet take completely different approaches: “Agrippa” is heavily encrypted to protect that authorial intent while the programming codes to “Lexia to Perplexia” are available for anyone to access and read. Unfortunately, porting the javascript from 1.2 to 1.8.5 is not as alluring a challenge as hacking a high profile work by the bestselling novelist who coined the word “cyberspace.”
Hopefully someone will be up to the challenge sooner rather than later.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
