It's hard to avoid mazes on your computer monitor nowadays, from Quake and Doom to more retro games such as Pacman, not to mention the labyrinths of MUDs and MOOs, or the routes through a typical website. But the allure of mazes is, of course, far older than Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.
Mazes have been losing people in their corridors and paths for at least four millennia, and are steeped in ancient myths. The best known is the Greek story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur in a maze constructed by the talented inventor Daedalus on Crete island.
But other traditions do not have a monster in the middle of the maze. It can be the walled city of the cognoscenti, or a zone of initiation, or a fertility pattern, with its powerful sexual imagery of womb and seed. Even Ariadne's golden thread, used by Theseus to trace his way (the ancient Greek equivalent of bookmarks and the "Go" menu in a Web browser), is sometimes interpreted as an umbilical cord.
Traces of labyrinthine patterns reach back to prehistory, and it seems that labyrinths sprang up in different parts of the world independently of each other. They are to be found on clay tablets, coins, seals and ceramic work, in the basketwork of ancient Arizonan peoples, on rockfaces, the labyrinths in Finland and Sweden called Jungfrudanser (meaning virgin dances), or the swirling intricacies of the Book of Kells. The oldest datable labyrinth in these islands is the Hollywood Stone (circa AD 550) found near Glendalough and now in the National Museum.
Some mazes have no forking paths or dead ends. Strictly speaking, a labyrinth implies a single path. It is linear, often forming a ritual. But a maze has junctions and choices. It is, in computerspeak, a hypertext, a puzzle with several possible routes. Mazes can be constructed from diverse materials, such as turf, stone, hedge or marble. But they can also be built out of ideas. Marxist critic Walter Benjamin's celebrated Arcades Project has often been described as a labyrinthine affair. Though incomplete, it represents Benjamin's dazzling research of Paris arcades - the glass-covered passageways linking streets which restructured public movement in 19th-century Paris, providing an interior world of shops and luxury commodities and space for strolling and looking. His investigation pulls together fashion, advertisements, photography, the museum and dolls in its cultural blend. He presented a montage of disparate elements of 19th-century everyday life.
Benjamin's montage structure, with its quotations, juxtapositions, "lightning flashes" and fluid framework, shifts away from the traditional linear essay form and would lend itself easily to hypertext forms such as the Web. Here the possibility of superimpositions and links can generate an internal commentary and open up different routes through his non-linear enquiries.
Non-linear texts differ not only because of their interconnectivity but also because different meanings may emerge or merge depending on the context - contingent on the path chosen or not taken through the maze. The network of links provides the substance while the navigation and interpretation make the role of the reader more central again.
Metaphors are often deployed in introducing and adapting to new media and the maze metaphor is useful when thinking about hypertext. It embraces the digressions as well as the desire lines, the unkempt patches as well as the manicured hedges, just as Web links draw readers in different directions to different spaces.
Under the influence of new art forms, older forms are making lively adjustments to hypertextual literacy. For example, the recent film Memento is a complex configuration of film noir for this century with its compelling narrative loops and mazes.
Some modern physical mazes also push the mathematical and topological limits, or use synthetic rather than organic materials, and even change shape depending on their visitors' actions - clearly a measure of how interactivity is not confined to hypertext. The maze metaphor, with its ideas of pruning and puzzles, spills over into so many human activities, from reading to weeding both ways of shaping the world. As new media technologies shape th ways we communicate and create, maze models help recall the diverse skeins of narrative art, pointing out possible futures and giving more than of just one ending.
Stephanie McBride lectures in Film Studies at Dublin City University.
Conal Creedon's final Video Paradiso column appeared last week.
