|
The
Processual Page: Materiality and Consciousness in Print and Hypertext
Joseph
Tabbi
Sections of
this essay were presented in the spring of 1999 at "Spectatorship"
in Maastricht, summer of 2000 at "The Future of the Page"
in Saskatchewan, and fall 2000 at "Bookends" in Albany.
"The Last Archive" was read at the spring 2003 Electronic
Literature Organization conference on "Preserving, Archiving,
and Disseminating" in Santa Barbara. "We Have Never
Been Hypertextual" was my theme at the spring 2003 meeting
of the American Comparative Literature Association in San Marcos.
Ive also taken a leaf from "A Media Migration: Toward
a Potential Literature," the final chapter of Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota, 2002).
The Last
Archive
In the summer
of 2001, I spent several weeks at a Long Island City warehouse sorting
through the William Gaddis archive before the papers were purchased,
catalogued, and eventually housed with the American fiction collections
at the Washington University in St Louis. What I found there was
not too surprisingno substantial unpublished work apart from
a packet of early attempts at fiction (indicating a literary career
that was thankfully not to be, writing satirical pieces for The
New Yorker). Mainly there were boxes of letters, typescripts, manuscripts,
business and educational pamphlets written for money, bills, memorabilia,
and clippingsthousands of them, hoarded over half a century:
family photographs, paintings, innumerable books. Textual scholars
and biographers will have plenty of material with which to date,
contextualize, correlate, and otherwise situate the work in relation
to the authors life and times the New York Times in particular, but also copies of National Enquirer,
and pamphets by Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham, and others, saved
in their entirety. Still, I found almost no false starts, no abandoned
manuscriptsnothing that did not find its way into the four
novels Gaddis published in his lifetime or the posthumous fiction,
a monologue of 84 manuscript pages called Agapē Agape that
he entrusted to his family and literary agent. The author had largely
fulfilled his ambition, like Faulkner in a passage Gaddis
admired, to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided
from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save for the printed
books.
I imagine that
other archives from Gaddiss generation are organized similarlyfilled
with materials a writer had to have, what was rescued from the trash
heap and kept in offices, in file cabinets, in various places of
physical storage. Looking at so much printed matter gathered in
a vault gave me an insight into all those hermetic rooms occupied
in the fiction by so many Gaddis characters. The same room shows
up, in various ways, in work by Mary Caponegro, Don DeLillo, William
Gass, Joseph McElroy, David Markson, Harry Mathews, and Joy Williamssome
of the novelists who came out to the St Paul cathedral in Harlem
for the fall 1999 Gaddis memorial. There will never be such a purely
textual archive againnot in any of Gaddiss successors,
not among writers indifferent to, wary of, or even antagonistic
to the literary postmodernism Gaddis helped to inaugurate in the
United States.
In calling this
the last literary archive, I do not want to imply that there was
ever anything pristine about pre-digital writing spaces: the Ninety-Sixth
Street apartment in J R, which housed the clutter and some
of the same labeled cardboard boxes I discovered, in reality, in
Long Island City, was constantly open to the chaos, noise, and entropy
of a city environment. Nor does physical boundedness mean that the
archive is necessarily finite. In DeLillos Libra, what
is the character of Nicholas Branch about if not the hopelessness
of attempts to set boundaries, to delimit a topic and defeat conspiracy
theories by an exclusive focus on evidence? The mere gathering of
materials (unselectively, and without a framework or theory for
separating out elements in a meaningful narrative) will surely do
more to obscure than illuminate any topic, more to foment than confront
conspiracy thinking. A certain helplessness, even an immobility,
within accumulating detail is also the condition of David Marksons
late-modern Protagonist, the name of a character-in-progress first
seen poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray? Cartons
heaped and piled? (Reader’s Block 15) The immobility of the
literary artist in isolation, aptly termed a Readers
Block by Markson, similarly characterizes Lynne Tillmans
Paige Turner, Harry Mathewss journalist, William Gasss
man in the chair, McElroys Dom, Austers Quinn, Fanshawe,
Black, and Blueall figures who in their solitude create boundless
networks, exposing the limits of both identity construction and
historicism. After Gaddis, this recurrent figure in postmodern American
fiction can be understood as a central expression of the dream of
the literary archive as a material world apart. Concomitantly, the
passing of this figure may be understood elegiacally, as a farewell
to the New Historicist romance with the telling, the triumphant,
the untheorized detail.[1]
What I found
most fascinating, and what is perhaps the richest archival vein
for future Gaddis scholarship, is the manuscript page on which the
novels were composed. The pages for J R in particular, legal-sized,
boxed together with outlines and sets of notes, corrections, numbers,
and arrows, were not so much drafted, typed, and revised as they
were physically assembled, with lines frequently cut into strips
and pasted between the typed lines on a master. Any of those notes
or outlines, any lines transcribed from the pile of papers, might
at some point be excerpted, clipped, and taped onto the manuscript
page, as it made its way through numerous iterations to a final,
publishable form, all trace of the authors composing consequently
abolished and voided from history (Faulkner) except,
of course, for whats left in the archive. The boxes holding
more than 2500 manuscript pages also include newspaper clippings,
Commodity reports, Annual reports, stockholder letters, shareholder's
meeting notes, meeting notices, Newsletters on American Indian Affairs,
and a letter on how to buy naval surplus supplies. There are also
legal queries, lists of names, acquisitions (Why and How listed
in a special table), as well as handwritten calculations.[2] For Gaddis, the manuscript page and its desktop context was no less
capacious than the Internet; in fact, the visual presentation of
diverse materials on a single two-dimensional page may well be closer
to Ted Nelsons conception of hypertext than any hypertext
fiction composed since the advent of the Internet. The manuscript
page, in an author such as Gaddis, is certainly truer to Nelsons
concept of transclusion (where a specific command brings
a distant text or electronically accessible site in toto to the
readers screen) than the highlighted links dotting the current
(but surely not definitive) Web page, circa Y2K.
For the later
stages in the composition, Gaddis set up a large table in his Long
Island studio so that he could lay out entire sections (the book
is not broken up into chapters) presumably to better visualize recurrent
themes, motifs, phrases, and so forth. Photographs of the workroom
show pages posted to the wall also. The book is largely composed
of dialogue, meant to be experiencedwith minimal suspension
of disbeliefin real time. Yet clearly Gaddis had a spatial
sense of the wholehe needed to see connections, to be able
to trace patterns and constantly revise, reconnect, and alter the
patterns by inserting new textusually scripted dialogue among
characters but in a few places handwritten notes, drawings, and
photographs of non-literary text such as the want ads read by J
R and the Hyde boy on the bus on the way to one of their many school
trips. (The children, indeed, are bussed and badly supervised more
than they are schooled in the novel.)
Gaddiss
book, on its reception in 1975, was likened to notions then current
in literary theoryalthough the likeness was considered damaging
aesthetically. J R, according to George Steiner, perfectly
illustrated Roland Barthess concept of the unreadable text,
implying the death of the author not as a private individual
but as an operative cultural construction. In the context of current
reflections on the page, I cite this early and, in my view, misleading
take on Gaddis because it antedates and parallels a much broader,
and more deeply problematic, identification of hypertext and poststructuralist
theory. Steiner thought that the new emphasis on an authors
mediating function, his transformation into a medium
through whom text is processed as a tissue of quotations,
none of them original, obviated creativity and eliminated any distinctive
voice. Similarly, many prominent hypertext critics have argued that
electronic technologies so literally enact poststructuralist theory
as to make theory itself irrelevant. George P. Landow, most famously,
claimed in 1992 that hypertext would replace conceptual systems
founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity .
. .with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks (Landow)
thereby, as Lance Olsen comments, enacting the deconstructive
turn in the very mechanics of structure ("Narrative Amphibiousness," electronic book
review). That is Olsens extension of Landows
claim probably beyond its provenance, but the slippage from conceptual
systems to mechanics, so common even now after
a full human generation of hypertext experimentation (and many,
many generations of software), is typical of the way that hypertext
theory continues to literalize post-structuralist thought.[3]
Gaddiss
compositional technique may strike us today as an unbelievably laborious
process that could have been avoided, even in the early seventies,
had he used a word processor. Likewise, in S/Z when Barthes imagines
the text, in its mass, as comparable to a sky,
at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks,
(Barthes, S/Z 14)
our first thought, understandably, may be of the LCD screen. This
literalism, what might be called a reduction of theory to code,
is problematic not only because it produces misreadings of either
Gaddis, literary hypertext, or for that matter the autonomous development
of code by computer programmers and database designers. The technological
reduction stems from a deeper misunderstanding of what poststructuralist
theory was about in the first place. In removing the author, and
in announcing the equally momentous transition from work to text,
from a print-bound unity to an open network, Barthes does seem to
anticipate the transition from page to screen, if only metaphorically.
But I would insist that Barthess conceptual distinctions,
while suggestive, are in fact largely independent of materiality,
whether print or electronic. In Barthes and (as we shall see) his
near contemporary Ted Nelson, the lexia, or unit of attention, does
not depend on how the page is instantiated by either the author
during composition or the publisher during presentation. Lexia are
defined rather by a cognitive act whose connections and significations
the reader alone can make: they are chunked together as units capable
of re-integration at another level, without reference to the words,
sentences, and paragraphs they contain. What both Steiner and the
hypertext critics tend to forget, is that any breakdown of text
into a field of interconnecting lexia depends not primarily on the
author, but rather on the reader, who is capable of further text
processing precisely because the verbal content of words, sentences,
and paragraphs may be forgotten; and attention is then paid to how
the page itself circulates in new contexts. (And to the extent that
even Gaddis in composing J R worked with a revisable, mechanically
extendable manuscript page, he is himself as much a reader as an
author of his own work.) By bringing ones own concerns to
the text, the reader creates associations and links whose linearity
or non-linearity is largely independent of the texts material
qualities, however much these linearities are exploited or ignored
by an authors own pagework.
Let us look
again at that open sky passage in Barthess S/Z. His conception
of textuality as something flat, unending, deep, and infinitely
connectable, a textuality in anticipation of the computer screen,
nonetheless requires delineation by a reader; specifically, a reader
who is capable of acting as an observer or commentator:
like the soothsayer
drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle
wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight
of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones
of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings
. . .the passage of citations (14).
An imaginary
rectangle in which to observe the migration of meanings:
this might serve as a working definition of the page, more conceptual
than material in its existence, more readerly than writerly, and
general enough to include both hypertext lexia and codex leaves.
Whats important is not the shape of the pagethe soothsayer
might as well draw a circle, an oval, or a squiggle, so long as
its a two-dimensional figure capable of distinguishing whats
outsideclear sky or noise, both amount to the same thingfrom
whats brought or allowed insidenamely, meaning. Key
to Barthess conceptand the pages definitionis
the separation of meaning from authorial intention as the text,
physically separate from the author, finds its way to readers, who
in turn realize connections with other lexia, found in other books.
Considered thus, from the perspective of citation and commentary,
the larger migration from print to electronic media can be understood
as a continuous process, the two media not fundamentally different
from one another in terms of what can be stimulated, conceptually,
in the minds of readers: the most one can say is that the selections
made by readers and authors might be better preserved and more readily
made available in hypertext than in print. But even this practical
difference, consequential as it could be (in terms of making explicit
themes, symbols, and conceptual consistencies hitherto kept implicit),
has yet to be realized in most literary hypertexts.
The death of
the author is a condition, as Barthes announces at the end of his
signature essay, of the birth of the readerbut
a reader whose function is not so much interpretation as organization,
the selection of meaningful text elements from noise and their arrangement
within textual space. This shift, from the author as romantic genius,
literary outlaw, or cultural outsider to the author-reader who makes
selections, is a transition that hypertext and the Web environment
definitely accelerate. Whether such selections produce linear or
nonlinear structures will depend not so much on the mediumtwo
decades into the era of electronic writing, the most we can say
is that the literal nonlinearities in hypertext stimulated literary
theorists to rediscover nonlinearity as the rule, rather than the
exception, in print narratives. Neither the opposition linearity/nonlinearity
nor the literalization of intertextuality provide reliable ways
of distinguishing print from hypertext. Where then, if at all, is
the difference?
Rather than
look at what takes place on the hypertext page (which at most enables
intensifications and literalizations of poststructuralist concepts
that have been on the table for decades), we might instead look
at the page itself, its inherent dynamism and changing topography,
as a material basis for what is authentically new about the digital
text. Unlike Barthess two-dimensional rectangle, definitive
for pagination in print and most other material carriers, the screen-space
has been considered three-dimensional: Confronted with the
surface of the computer screen [itself immaterial and made up purely
of light and electricity] one started thinking in spatial terms
of in front of and behind rather than in
more temporal terms such as before or after
(chaos|control: complexity 29).
So writes Hanjo Berresem, introducing a collection of conference
papers, chaos|control: complexity [chaos theory & cultural
production], that is itself a combination of book and cd/rom.
Berressem distinguishes between texts whose signifieds are dynamic
(facilitating the distinctively literary sequencings common to print
and hypertext) and texts whose signifiers are also dynamic, a property
unique to digital carriers. Whats distinctive in this newly
dynamic page is the ability not so much to stack texts one on top
of another, but to enfold various texts into one another. More topological
than Cartesian, a datamobile more than a stack of objects,
digital text becomes, for Berressem, a site for data assembly, selection,
and performance. What is performed, however, is not the interpretation
of static works that a classic hermeneutics can comfortably
work with(40). In digital carriers, there is no longer a stable
textual basis for such interpretive activity and sustained
close reading: not only is every reading|path different, the
text that is read is different as well (40).
Berressems
analysis makes evident the extent to which literary activity, with
all its devotion to the generation of complexity, consciousness,
and reflexive understanding at the level of the signified, has depended
on a stable, simplified, largely forgotten page as a material carrier
capable of fixing language at the level of the signifier. But when
the signifiers themselves are immaterialwhen what we see at
any moment is only one of many possible ways that a text might
appear, only one of the many faces the text can have, only one of
the many texts the text can be, we have reached a point where
it may no longer be meaningful to speak of a page at
all. What we have is instead a potential object described at the
level of code: There is no site prior to its description.
There is no page the source code refers to. There is no page in
itself (48-49). No page, only descriptions of possible
pages whose realization is up to the reader. The page we are reading
at any moment is only stable if we, while reading, actively make
it so. No larger cultural or publishing concern is going to preserve
the text for us.
It is not easy
to say what kind of subject and what kind of culture...digitaltexts
imply, and what form of narratology can be envisioned for
a processual text (42). Berressem notes that digital processuality
is bound to differ significantly from that of the theater and of
performance arts. In the absence of interpretation and without a
single text that different readers (or the same reader at a different
time) can go back to, the differences from a literary-critical performance
in print might be just as great. All print narratives, because of
their structural stability, are bound to be grand narratives even
when they are in themselves polyphonic [Bakhtin] or writerly [Barthes]
(40). This inevitability helps to explain why so many critics mistook
hypertext for the material culmination of the grand narratives of
post-modern fiction and theory. Yet there remain certain features
of contemporary narrative that do in fact anticipate the singularized
reading movements constituting the many small narratives likely
to emerge in electronic environments. Berressem points to Douglas
Couplands practice of denarrating: a response to the
deluge of electronic and information media into our lives
and the consequent loss of all the components essential for
the forging of identity. ... family, ideology, class strata, a geography,
politics and a sense of living within a historic continuum
(Polaroids from the Dead 189).
When the page
itself no longer supports a sense of narrative continuity, we are
placed, as authors and readers, in the curious position of having
to create our own context or framework within which selections,
citations, and emergent narratives can be recognized and preserved.
As current readers, we ourselves need to describe the page
that future readers will see and work with. The archive, as Gaddis
seems to have understood within his own medial ecology, needs to
be constructed at the moment of composition: in the absence of any
single overriding cultural organization, the authors own organization
is all that makes possible the continued circulation of meanings
within particular structures established when writing. From this
understanding authors, readers, and more often authors-as-readers,
can address themselves meaningfully to a future page.
Instead of an object, the page is to become a description of a possible
object, reflecting only what the author makes of materials that
the reader can, in turn, cast into further potentials.
Turning
and Returning
In such fictions
as Microserfs and Generation X, Couplands narrator handles
the loss of cultural identity and narrative continuity by aligning
himself with other individuals in loose groupuscles;
his books are small narratives of affinities rather than identities.
Gaddiss massive, but never grand, narratives,
are hypertextual in that they create connections through actual
texts and plausible speech and they facilate transitions, from scene
to scene, exclusively through telephones, moving cars and trains,
and other media of communication and transportation. These are useable
models for a potential narrative in digital text. In what follows
I consider some additional models in contemporary fiction and designwriting,
distinctive in that their narrative innovations go all the way down,
to the material look of the page itself. Harry Mathews, a longtime
American member of the Oulipo or workshop for potential literature
(my emphasis), explicitly considers what happens when an individual
writer, The Journalist of his book title, attempts to note down
everything that happens to him, as it happens. The encycolpedic
experiment turns nightmarish, but no less so than the literal nightmare
experienced by Lynn Tillmans character, Paige Turner, who
dreams of words as tiny objects that move on the page. Image/narratives
by Raymond Federman in collaboration with Anne Burdick in the electronic
book review, along with my own work with Burdick and Ewan Branda
on the page design of the journal itself, will also be discussed.
In Mathews,
the loss of continuity and identity is expressed in terms that are
not so much cultural as contextual - in contexts that become richly
embedded and capable of infinite expansion. Mathews is an author
of what I have termed elsewhere cognitive fictions, works that denarrate
in Berressems terms, but in such a way that new forms of consciousness
can be seen to emerge out of the denarrating media and technologies.
As mind is to its material supports in the brain, so are cognitive
fictions in relation to the contemporary media ecology. These works
do not oppose themselves to other, faster and more powerful media
of communication; rather, they take full advantage of the slower,
marginal condition of literature in order to bring experiences shaped
by these media into consciousness. In a sense, the literary shadows
other media - much as literary hypertexts, so far, have tended to
shadow the three-dimensional works and media they cite and comment
on, creating a contour, a path for consciousness, rather
than a full-fledged cognitive environment.[4]
The Journalist opens in media res, a device that never waited on hypertextit
was in fact originally an epic convention that got carried over
from orality into print. Similarly, the conflation of beginnings
and endings within a single print paragraph can make the newfound
ability to start anywhere and then jump from one passage to another
seem arbitrary by comparison. It is easy to cite examples in printed
texts when one thinks one has reached an endsay, after a treacherous
stretch of driving in bad weatheronly to find that one is
in fact just beginning:
The rain had
stopped. I could forget about the curved warning signs; the gently
winding road, which conformed so gratifyingly to my map, would
dry fast. I settled back in the drivers seat and accelerated.
The steering wheel came off in my hand (Mathews 2).
The mention
of a map, in these fine opening lines, raises many questions relevant
to the cognitive mapping that one seeks when reading pages and viewing
screens. Conformity to a map is a gratifying, precise, but necessarily
false, illusion, because one-to-one correspondenceswhether
lexical or topographicalfail to describe the ongoing mental
activity that actually generates much of our perception of a text
or a passing landscape. Given enough rules of mapping, anything
can be mapped onto anything; but one never knows all the mappings
that are going on in ones own mind and through ones
own body. For practical aesthetic purposes, the fewer the rules,
the betterhence the gratifications in reading minimal fictions
by, for example, Jorge Luis Borges. The power of a minimal mapping
is precisely that it makes a world (if not the world)
knowable against the background of multiple unknown mappings in
the unconscious. Mapping generates order from noise; but noise is
precisely what Mathewss driver is forced to confront, in all
its unknowability, at the moment the steering wheel comes off in
his hand. No longer able to distinguish between what is inside and
outside, his sense of a personal identity is revealed to have been,
at every moment and without his knowing it, a cognitive fictionwhich
is to say, the fiction that consciousness is very closely connected
to what our minds and bodies are actually doing at any moment:
The possibility
had always been real. You never had to remind yourself of it.
And it remains real. At such a moment, who are you? Where are
you? You cannot dismiss the question by observing that you
have become a mere object manipulated by the indifferent laws
of physics. One part of you says that; another part listens. What
and where are they? What and where is your identity? (Mathews 3)
A part of us
speaks and another part listens, as if our very sense of a stable
and continuous self were nothing but a narrative that we tell ourselves,
a world fiction that under normal circumstances seems continuous
enough and linear, but which is more likely a set of multiple narratives
variously linked in concatenations that the brain can search through
and recall in a moment. These links are decidedly non-linear, accompanied
by analogies, puns, metaphors, rhymes, and associations that generally
remain unconsciousexcept in literature, art, or more immediately
defamiliarizing experiences such as can result from a sudden change
in our environment, the disengagement of self and world at the moment
the steering wheel comes off in our hands. Then our sense of self
can be revealed as fundamentally fragmented and permeablea
webwork of signs and divergent discourses vying for attention (and
continuing to jostle with one another in our minds, after they have
receded from consciousness).
That is how
narrative is imagined by the visual artist Anne Burdick in a series
of graphic imagesalso based on travel by carintroducing
an ongoing collection of critical writing titled image + narrative.
  
  
On first looking
into image + narrative, readers are presented with
a series of animated graphic image files. Through a frame that
recalls a TV screen, scenes from a road tripa staple of
narrative continuityappear as discreet elements in a digital
field. White lines passing underneath a car and a variety of signals
in a rearview mirror all vie for attention in a field of competing
discourses.
In the first
sequence, broken white lines move beneath the cars wheels
like a needle through a textile; in the next sequence, a suburban
street seen through a windscreen and a rear-view mirror settles
on a homemade road sign, reading: Youve got our attention.
The journey remains the mythic reference for all narrative, an embodied
metaphor for the linguistic construction of goal-oriented action
in the world. Except that now the illusion of continuity is broken
up, for Burdick as for Mathews, by the medium of representation.
Through a frame that recalls a TV screen, we see the lines and the
reflected images as discreet elements in a digital fieldaspects
of the woven thREADs, or inscribed reading pathways,
that define Burdicks site design.
 
The threading,
loom-like texture of hypertextuality is suggested in the abstract
design that Burdick prepared for a later installment of image
+ narrative.
Burdicks
imagery, metaphorically in her work for image + narrative
but increasingly literally in pages devised for the new ebr interface
(in collaboration with Site Architect Ewan Branda and myself), confirms
both a poststructuralist and a vernacular understanding of electronic
textuality as a field of many lines crossing and recrossing to form
a complex intertextual weave. This imagery is further developed,
in the current ebr, by embedding literal threads into
the page itselfa family of small icons off in the margins
presenting not only conventional bibliographical data (footnotes,
authors and editors notes, and so forth) but also taking
readers to affiliated essays within and outside the journal, facilitating
readers glosses, and eventually allowing readers to bring other texts
from elsewhere in the Web, in whole or in part. In this way a page
generated at another cite will become (after obtaining permissions)
a part of ebr. With such activity there is certainly the suggestion
of openness, that the connections and potential readerly associations
are infinite. Authors are made aware, explicitly, that their production
will undergo continued threading, weaving, and glossing at the hands
of readers, and this activity will be made visible, cumulative,
and public over time with the authors own text (a fabric of
quotations, none of them original, in Barthess
terms).
Hence some of
the postructuralist terms will be literalized, even in the new ebr.
But there are alsoin my view just as importantways of
bringing in readers conceptually. There is for example a filmic
dimension to the imagery (recall the enframing TV screen), and also
a sound dimension (a database that enables sorting and selections
modeled after the disk jockeys remix). More than
mere literalizations and something other than metaphors, these filmic
and sound-like functionalities implicitly locate us,
the journals readers. As in Barthes, the developing ebr page
grants power to readers, not authors, in defining what gets included,
and what left out of the page.
The threading
activity, presented metaphorically in the preceding sequence of
animated graphic images, has been installed literally on the page
itself in the current database version of ebr (version 4.0, completed
Winter 2003-4). Because readers are free either to operate or ignore
this functionality, the potential for connectivity is enhanced
rather than obviated by the technology.
The Most
Linear Hypertext in the Universe
To further emphasize
the independence of the readers experience from the texts
mediality, whether that experience is primarily linear, reflexive,
distributed, serial, or (more likely) some combination of all these
modes, I want to consider briefly an unusual hypertext, Eating
Books, which was written by Raymond Federman and then designed
out of Burdicks offices. This work is remarkable, technically,
not for its interactivity but for its self-containment. In fact,
it uses no links at all but instead enforces a linearity more strenuously
than any print book I know. If Moby has written the loudest song
in the universe, Federman and Burdick have produced the most linear
hypertext.

We are told,
at the start of Federmans narrative, that the book to be eaten
is a telephone book, the most strictly lexical of narratives and,
in Federmans words, the only book in your library which
came free. Except, of course, for the books you stole. Further
along, after scrolling lengthwise through the narrative, we encounter
a self-consciously old-fashioned typeface in French, Federmans
first language, indicating something Voltaire once said, or
was it Diderot who said that, Andre Gide said it too, but I know
he stole that saying from someone else: Voler un Livre . . .
A digression on Voltaires anti-semitism momentarily suspends
the narrative linebut not the literal line of text, whose
material form, like the material arrangement of modules and neural
networks in the brain, enables but hardly corresponds to the cognitive
processes enacted by the narration. Largely, these are processes
of memory, and of textual citationall of which interrupt the
line of thought and put into question the origin of the quotation.
Even the language of its actual utterance is in questionsince
Voltaire supposedly said it to Isaac Newton, on a chance meeting
in the streets of London. Finally, after these digressions have
run their course, the narrative ends with the full transcription
of the saying: To Steal a Book is not a crime as long as one
reads the book.
This literary
hypertext features not a single link and only one technical feature
associated with the electronic medium. The single distinguishing
feature is this: unlike the printed line, the line in hypertext,
once read, cannot be gone back to and reread. It has been swallowed,
literally: as ephemeral as any spoken utterance (unless of course
the entire sequence is reloaded and run again). In this narrative,
linearity in itself is no assurance against inattention or loss
of memory. For that, we need a different conception of what constitutes
stability within the new mediaa conception involving the reader
in the act of observation and selection. Stability in electronic
environments, I want to suggest, comes from the literal construction
of the object of study rather than its interpretationfor that
is what we are doing, constructing the page (and forgetting past
pages, the pages weve passed over) as we move selectively
through the developing Web archive.
Normally in
hypertext we are given not a single line of text but a multiplicity
of sources and texts for browsing, so that image and narrative,
the verbal and the visual, all exist on the same plane; even the
near and the far, as hypertext poet Stephanie Strickland has written,
are equally present, and equally speedily present
("Poetry in the Electronic Environment").
Where a book or a spoken utterance can only refer to the texts and
images that it cites, directing readers toward a plane of meaning
that is not identical with the plane of the printed page, a Web
page can, in theory, actually present its electronic citations directly,
through the clickable link or mouseover view that brings the environment
into the screen space. (Federman, had he wanted to, presumably could
have accessed an online archive containing the actual words attributed
to Voltaire, Diderot, Gide, and so on.) The screen and the environment
exist potentially on the same plane, as a set of overlapping pages
with continually shifting margins. Once read, the words of Federmans
text dont really disappear; they instead become a potential
in the mind of the reader, one that we can imagine being activated
at any time in a hypertext that lets the reader select elements
from within the discourse environment. The promise of hypertext
(purposely withheld by Federman) is its creation of a pattern that
readers, or the author at a later time, can return to, but differently,
when encountering similar events and patterns later on. Through
direct citation, and not through hearsay, the outside is thus ready
at any moment to match up with the inside, and this permeability,
more than the actuality of any particular link or set of links,
seems to me to be definitive of reading in electronic environments,
where all texts are virtually present.[5]
Words that
Yield: to Frames that Form
To the extent
that we have hypertext only through a series of mediationsour
screen that brings the environment in, our browsing software, the
electronic desktop that lets us customize image and text for further
processing, and so onwe are likely to be that much more aware
of our collaborative activity while reading. Far from confirming
readers in a central and author-like authority, the hypertext composition
literally opens up the space in which the reader co-exists
with the materials being read. Strickland describes this readerly
disorientation in an essay published concurrently with her hypertext
poem sequence, True North:
Released from
the printed page into this floating space, readers are often uneasy.
What is the poem? Is it the sum of every possible way to proceed,
the sequence of such journeys, or one particular path privileged
as a saved reading? Only slowly does one assimilate the truth
that one may return each time differently
(Poetry in the Electronic Environment).
Narrative is
again imagined as a journey, but a journey whose meaning does not
await us in some future fulfilment at a determined endpoint; rather,
once enough materials have been assembled on the screen or within
the writing space and a direction through them or set of relations
among them has been established, meaning can then be reconstructed
along multiple pathways by which readers may return. This sort of
retrospective constructionknown as multifinality
in evolutionary theorycreates a situation in which meaning
is largely produced not moment by moment during unicursal reading,
but when the set of completed observations can be grouped together
as a unity, a bundle of achieved pathways that can then be introduced
as a working element in other readings, and other constructions.
With that release
from a future-orientation, and the environmental interruption of
cognitive illusions of continuity, comes a relocation of meaning-making
in the hands and eyes and ears of the reader, who now seeks to be
simultaneously in touch and in control of both the hypertext
and its environment (to cite the title of another Strickland essay).
For this to happen, the evolving hypertext must create its environment
even as the hypertext reader draws material from the environmenta
floating space that lacks all distinction until a selection
is made. Instead of a uniform surround, this created environment
is then a product of selections that determine which, out of all
possible, objects and Web sites will be significant within the readers
own writing space. In this respect (and not in naive equations of
two very different associative mechanisms), hypertext is mind-like
because the mind, too, like any organism, admits only those aspects
of the environment that it is structurally able to process. A successful
hypertext construction will be, therefore, not an accumulation of
objects and texts defined indexically as some sort of pre-existing
information network; it will be, rather, a set of dovetailing or
complementary structures, which have cognitive meaning to the extent
that these structures are brought out, sequentially and associatively,
in the process of linking.
It could well
be that a perceived lack of a true cognitive dimension in hypertext
is behind critical calls for a rhetoric or stylistics of departure
and arrival (van Looy) oriented
toward aspects of the target text that are structurally and thematically
relevant to the source text currently on the screen. As Jan van
Looy writes in his Conclusion: Toward a Hyperfiction Poetics,
the notion of words that yield has to be elaborated
[by the author]. . . In the same way as a full stop and a capital
letter signal the beginning of the next sentence, links should inform
the reader of their presence and their aim, and suggest a destination.
The link, then, is not so much a mode of neutral connectivity as
an active device that enframes; it is the bounded place where readers
create a literary and visual system that would otherwise exist as
an indistinguishable mass or unknown domain of automatic functioning.
Indeed, Burdick allegorizes the permeability of inside and outside
and their mutual self-creation with her framing device in Youve
Got Our Attention. Because the animated graphic image file
puts us in the position of the driver, an observer of the changing
scene behind and in front of the car, were doubly mediated.
Looking through both the windshield or mirror and the enframing
TV screen, we find ourselves in the position of an observer observing
herself. This second-order observation, I want to suggest, is at
the heart of any narrative transit through electronic landscapes;
and the renewed centrality of such reflexive, second-order positioning
has little to do with the specific meansthe browser and its
clickable linkof moving around in that environment. Rather,
reflexivity and meta-observatoin in narrative is simply consistent
with an environment where all language is meta-languageso
that everything one sees on the screen is the result of a description
at the level of code (html, xml, and so forth).
Hypertext links?
Links are easy; trustworthy links, hard:
The words
lie there and they may be lies. They lie on the page. They are
little worms. Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading
she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny
objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly
and turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.
Funny fear of the blank page. Didnt she recently explain
that writing was erasure, because the words were already there,
already in the world, that the page wasnt blank
(Tillman, To Find Words 22).
The proto-hypertextual
quality of Lynne Tillmans conception of language, the psychological
block that the blank page inspires, and a lost objectivity that
has separated the word from the world, are not uncommon features
in contemporary experimental fiction in the United States. There
are many literary anticipations of hypertext blocksa
newly literalized, potentially infinite network no less intimidating,
in its plenitude, than the blank page. In Cognitive Fictions, I
considered how a number of authorsTillman, Markson, Auster,
and Mathews in particularfound ways of opening the block using
a variety of self-referential strategies. Confronted by structures
impossible to grasp cognitivelya hypertext in which everything
is connected, the blank page where nothing is connected to anythingthe
author names that impossibility and so re-enters the structure at
another level, the level of language, the level of observation.
Of course, references, plot developments, and other narrative material
need to accumulate un-selfconsciously before such self-conscious,
self-referential re-entry is possible. Re-entry cannot be done by
force of will. (The assertion of self-consciousness prior to achieving
narrative momentum is a frequent failing in American metafictions
of the sixties and seventies.) Once however the proliferating connections
make possible a new perspective, the blocked authornow a readercan
establish a fresh relation to words that lose their referential
power; they become Tillmans tiny objects endlessly
recombining, entering a new realm, the realm of the virtual. What
distinguishes the aesthetic use of such objects is the artists
ability not simply to create from them a passive memory or record,
but a transformation, away from their initial context into other
contexts rich in potential. The aesthetic organization cannot simply
be embodied materially, encoded and preserved independently of the
reading activity. Requiring recognition and re-ordering by the reader,
the pattern stands a chance actually of being remembered (which
of course means that much in the original, author-created text will
necessarily be forgotten).
In To
Find Words, which opens the collection, The Madame Realism
Complex, Tillmans protagonist is a young author named, improbably,
Paige Turner, who cannot pretend to believe in words and in
the power of stories and so determines to write instead about
writing itself. Her narrative alternates between third-person views
of Paige, direct presentations out of the literal pages in her notebook,
and first-person commentaries by a narrator with access to Paiges
thoughts. To herself, Paige defines her ambitions as an author in
the barest material terms: to find words and place them in
sentences in a certain order. Syntax (17). Thats what
Paige thinks; the sentence she goes on to write has to do with a
sin tax in the U.S. on liquor and cigarettes. . . (17). This
happens throughout the narrative, as the words found by the narrator
are continually taken over and re-appropriated by the character,
and vice versa. At issue is the relation between the thought-track
that runs through every one of Tillmans essay-narratives (whether
presented as fiction or non-fiction) and the texts that her protagonists
are working onor, when the protagonists are non-writers, between
the self and the voices and human visitors who become phrases
in [the] body (To Find Words 33). In one formulation,
this is said to be the relation between conscious and unconscious
thought:
It is
in the unconscious [Paige writes] that fantasy, moments of the day,
and memory live, a reservoir for the poetry of the world. Is everything
else prose? Is whats conscious ordinary prose, the prose of
the world? (25-26)
But the formulation
is rejected, as the narrator, ever ready to turn on a pun, responds:
Or, I tease,
the pose of the world. She is separating much too neatly the world
she knowsI nearly wrote word for worldfrom the world
she doesnt know, the one that owns her and to which she
is a slave. She is a slave to what she cant remember and
doesnt know and she is a slave to what she remembers and
what she thinks she knows. Her education has damaged her in ways
she does not even know (26).
Paige does not
know what she does not know; an eye does not see what it does not
see; and the world is what one does not perceive when one
perceives it (Luhmann): such truisms characterize all systems.
But the narrator, Paiges creator who exists at a later stage
in her literary career and cognitive development, presumably does
know. Between the various narrative levels, first- and third-person
narration, early and later development, the author who writes a
draft and the same author (now a reader) who revises, we can perceive
what the character wishing to be an author cannot see: for example,
the educational system and ready-made fund of cultural memories
that enslave her because she knows no other possibilities. The words
she knows are her world.
Like all writers,
Paige longs to find a voice and a styleto make music with
words. Yet the words she succeeds in finding are consistently turned
into other words by the narrator, or the same word is given a different
meaning. Syntax becomes sin tax; prose is unmasked as a mere pose,
so that the limitations inherent in the words Paige uses can be,
not overcome, but reinscribed within a new perspective. She
imagines the inside is the outside. She is greedy for everything,
and so she will eventually transform the boundary between herself
and her environment into a division within herself: She opens
her mouth wide. If words could make wishes come true. If wishes
were horses shed ride away (18). Paige of course knows
that words are not wishes, as Oedipa Maas discovers that a sign
is not what it is: unlike a digital tape whose meaning and function
is identical with its coding, or a complexity that is
its own bestshortestdescription (True North,
Figures of Speech 13), neither spoken words nor material
signs have the power to do what they say; they can only create alternate
worlds inside the speaker or writer. Each world Paige might inhabit
or Oedipa project is a different constellation of words with its
own articulation and its own blindspots that can only be displaced
by finding other words and (not finding) other blind spots.
To be sure,
most print fiction tries to suppress narrative self-consciousness
in the interest of immersing readers more fully in a story. Similarly,
enormous sums of money have been spent in making virtual reality
environments as transparent and immersive as possible,
so that we might move through them with a feeling of verisimilitude.
It was not always so in the computer business, as changes in the
meaning assigned to the word transparency might indicate. At first,
the word was used to mean that a user was close to the operating
system (such that one tells the machine to do things in ways that
it really does do things). Today, transparency more often means
that the operating system is invisible, and so whats transparent
is the machine itselfa window manufactured out of opacity
(hence Microsofts Windows). A steam locomotive displays its
power in its massive levers and wheels; the transparent case of
an iMac displays nothing operative. But consider the way a computer
scientist actually involved in making decisions at the level of
operations speaks of transparency:
Lentz did
a good job of making the hardware transparent to me. He hooked
up topologies the culmination of a decade or more of tinkering.
He explained every link in the process. . . . The gist consisted
of vectors. A stimulus vector, converted by the nets self-reorganization
into a response vector. We started with a three-deep array of
neurodes, enough for a test start. Each field was the size of
the net that had learned to pronounce English. Implementation
A would be spared this task. Lentz wired it to a canned speech
synthesis routine. We worked at the level not of phonemes but
of whole words (Powers, Galatea 71-72).
Which is to
say that the task had been modularized, such that with each move
to the next level, from phonemes to whole words to sentences to
entire texts, the previous level would be absorbed into a more comprehensive
operation.
By actually
imagining those aspects of a cognitive system that have sunk below
the level of operational awareness, a small number of contemporary
novelists and poets are creating a new order of realism in fiction
and poetry, akin to functionalism in technological design and operational-minimalism
in painting, that makes a frank admission of its own materiality
and so establishes a ground on which authors and readers can meet
as equals and communicate without untested illusions. Mathews works within
this neomaterialist climate, as do most of the Oulipo members with
whom he is associated. Georges Perec had written a novel, La Disparition,
without using the letter e (the novel has been translated into English,
a language where not even the article the is allowed,
under the punning title, A Void); Italo Calvino arranged the chapters
for Invisible Cities according to a mathematical formula in which
the chapters, like cities, build themselves up by numbers, 1, 21,
321, 4321, and then erase themselves in inverse order: 54321, 543,
54, 5; Raymond Queneau proposed ten sonnets, each of whose 14 lines
could be arranged in any order, producing 1014 or Cent mille milliards
de poems (one hundred thousand billion poems). This is not automatic
writing; rather it is writing under constraint. Such work does not
give over the creative process to either the unconscious or mathematical
formalisms but rather forces the co-conscious, language-based, composing
mind to put itself into contact with formal and procedural conditions
that are always present, always constra, supporting, tweaking, and
unconsciously controlling the creative process. Such writing is
procedural rather than programmatican important distinction
since procedures remain closer to composition than to publication,
circulation, or the need to find applications. Another difference
from programming is that the Oulipian follows self-set rules, constraints
of ones own making. And so the author learns how autonomy
produces results that are not entirely under authorial control.
From a cognitive perspective, such writing is significant in that
it recognizes the thousands of ways that conscious experience is
constantly influencing and being influenced by many unconscious
processes involving perception and action, thought and emotion,
as well as the computational and recursive routines that support
the construction of even the simplest sentence (Edelman and Tononi).
Although for
more than thirty years this group has devoted themselves, ostensibly,
to researching past literary forms and making them available to
the public, few of these forms have ever been used beyond the moment
of their discovery and this is possibly the best
thing about the Oulipo and what distinguishes their art from mere
formalism. For what signifies is the cognitive and combinatorial
potential that is held in the forms, not the form itself, which
can go back on the shelf with all the other dusty books and dusty
bottles the moment it is perceived or identified as a form. (The
same is true of invented forms and self-imposed constraints: Mathews,
for example, has never found it necessary to reveal the constraint
under which he wrote his most Oulipian novel, Cigarettes.)
The Journal
of the Journal
That we know
the world only through particular frameworks, categorizations, and
pre-established expectations is brought home to readers by the very
look of The Journalist, in which paragraphs are numbered, and then
renumbered and subdivided in an elaborate and doomed attempt to
match the language to the atomistic world of facts and perceptions.
The project is doomed because, unlike the semiotic model of a network
of signifiers linked with each other and their signifieds, the identity
of the world is a composite of attributes that only come into existence
as they are observed. Even the shoes that the journalists
colleagues wear to work or the sunlight falling across a secretarys
telephone become distinct (and thus capable of relating to one another)
only as they are newly noted in the journal; only then do they emerge
from the strangeness of systems outside the journalists
control, as the clarity of his own evolving system plunges endlessly
into the obscurity of these systems outside (9).
As noted attributes
take form in clusters shaped in a network of coded relations, Mathewss
novel spirals away from any notion of journal writing as the objective
reporting of some pre-existing world; only in the notation are objects
and events naturalized (9). At the same time, the novel
also avoids attributing purposeful creation to the writer-observer.
Instead, as the narrator discovers to his surprise, the journal
has a life of its own, its purpose the mere reflection and reproduction
of the categories with which he approaches the world. This narrator,
the journalist of the title, has been advised by his
doctor to jot down everything that happens to him (8),
from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he
eats (dustjacket). But everything, he soon discovers,
is already caught up in its own networks of relations, and each
item can belong to more than one category and can operate at several
different levels. Initially he tries to distinguish between
fact and speculation, between what is external and verifiable and
what is subjective, but this does not prevent the one from
mingling into the other (20). Indeed, as distinctions noted down
in the journal continue to proliferate and the act of recording
makes ever greater demands on his time, lived experience and the
record of the experience converge and the notation system itself
expands to the point where it ceases to be meaningful to speak of
a life outside the system. So logical and poised are
the notes that, although readers are given plenty of indications
as to the journalists deteriorating state, we are as surprised
as he is when he breaks from his obsession long enough to observe
himself: when I heard a dry noise above my head, like a cracking
in the ceiling boards: I saw myself as if through an eye in the
ceiling, fidgeting and sweating like a demented inmate, a disgrace.
I calmed down (129).
This is an astonishing
momentnot because, while reading, we are unaware of the narrators
growing obsessiveness and mental stress. His literary decorum matches
an imperturbable poise typical of Mathews, even as his protagonist
steals into a closet in order to toss rolls of toilet paper down
the airshaft of his office building, and later neglects to change
out of his soiled white suit, after a fall and lapse of consciousness
during a night-time prowl. He does allow himself to make a mental
note: I must get back early in the morning and straighten
up (173). But of course he does no such thing. In the morning
he will be writing in the journal, and recording these very actions.
The journalist is interested in the illusion of control, never the
actual manipulation of reality, which is the worlds,
not mine (154). In this he is true to those psychoses in which
the patient, while perfectly capable of reality testing,
evidences no inclination to it (a condition noted by the clinical
psychologist Louis Sass). At no time does the journalist apply any
of his numerous and detailed acts of self-observation to the improvement
of his condition. For no sooner does he reflect back on himself
than he retreats from the self-observation, into the security of
the note-taking system. Because such acts are recorded entirely
from within this system, however, we accept his state as natural.
To the extent that we enter the fiction, we accommodate ourselves
to it, like a live fish adjusting its body temperature to a surrounding
fluid, not noticing that it is slowly boiling or becoming frozen.
In essence, by accepting the terms of Mathewss fiction, we
enter something very like the floating space that Strickland
speaks of in electronic environments, before that environment is
articulated and made active by the readers selective engagements
and disengagements. For the journalist, and for us,
the journals reader, the outside world does not existexcept
as it conforms to the selections and identifications that the journalists
mental state disposes him to make.
The protagonist
of Harry Mathewss novel, The Journalist, produces a print
hypertext when he tries to note down everything that
happens to him, as it happens. Like print, e-text is a framing
medium within which readers and writers become category makers,
builders of systems, and self-conscious observers of their own
observations.
Even more significant
for the narrative structure than this (quickly suppressed) moment
of self-consciousness, is the decision that can be felt pulling
at him from the start, to replace the proliferating petty differences
noted down in his journal with a single global distinction: he will
move the system one level up, applying the idea of the journal to
itself. Here is how he explains his decision to write a journal
of the journal: What I discovered is this: all the care
I have brought to organizing this journal has been misspent; my
laborious classifications have proved worthless; my efforts at competence
are an illusion. Why? Because I have left out the chief activity
of my life and the chief fact of my project: the keeping of this
journal (190-91). From here, it is only one small step to
the next and final logical level at which we as readers experience
a book titled The Journalist, when Mathewss narrator admits
to a closeted vision, that of writing a novela novel
about someone whose passion is keeping a journal (209).
In numerous
essays and interviews, Mathews has held that the role of the author
is to provide materials that readers can then use as a means of
creation (Harry Mathews by Lynne Tillman 29). In literary
studies, such a position has been made to seem marginal and exceptional.
To contain the self-consciousness and radical contingency that must
pervade the creative act at every moment, mainstream writing programs
tend to regard a fundamental condition as a technique, and novels
explicitly concerned with reflexive identity-making are most often
filed away (and largely forgotten) under the sub-category, Metafiction.
That literature has thus largely marginalized its own reflexivity
(in favour of some liberal humanist ideal of authorial self-possession)
is all the more surprising given that it is a field whose subject
is homogeneous with its object, in that both literature and criticism
(that is, writing about writing) are conducted in the same medium.
This point is brought home to Mathewss journalist when he
discovers the necessity of keeping a Journal of the Journal.
In all he has been doing up to that point, he has left out his own
controlling presence, and only now, when he is in fact losing his
grip, does he accord the writing itself, the making of each
page, the making itself, its supreme place. The
system that uses meaning is not the mind of the journalist himself,
but the communicative network that he deploysa network whose
growing complexity cannot be internalized, cannot be made available
for introspection. Yet the journalist acts as if, by bringing that
complexity to the page itself, he will master everything
in life that impinges on consciousness. And this delusion, that
the operations of consciousness and textuality can be brought to
the page, is the material counterpart, if not the cause, of his
progress toward insanity.
And so it is,
by the novels end, that Mathewss journalist breaks down
and falls silent. Now a patient in a mental hospital, he resumes
speaking only when his wife reads him a childrens story, which
opens: Once upon a time and a very good time, monkey chew
tobacco and spit white lime, once upon a time there was a young
boy named Michael (236). Hearing these lines and the opening
scene (in which Michael, leaving home at the age of nine, gets off
an express train), the journalist then begins to interrupt with
words of his own, adding characters, objects, and events as his
wife goes on reading. With this small and mutually distanced dialogue,
a modest hypertextual collaboration, the novel reaches a kind of
closure impossible from within the journalists earlier elaborate
system of notation and classification. The system gives way to a
more properly narrative apparatus, reflexivity and circularity turn
into forward movement, and the act of turning inward is replaced
by the turning of pages in a book. The journalist is now poised
for re-entry into his environment at another levelin a wholeness
of interiority and exteriority and a dialogue that is not so much
a communication between two people as a creation of a new narrative
object outside either one of them, and outside any inscription in
the book they are reading. This is something the journalist recognizes,
in an especially lucid moment:
My work is
not for the world (by that I mean anybody else) or
for me (I hardly have time to read what Ive written). Its
for It. Its fugitive name does not matter.
Ive called it truth, and before that reality; since it is
never to be completely obtained, it may be beyond naming altogether.
(200) (Mathewss
journalist, appropriately, is himself never named in the novel.)
Paul Harris
nonetheless suggests a name that is appropriate not only for Mathewss
novel but for all constraint-driven narrative: The potential
of constrained writing, Harris notes, is that it ends
up an autopoietic writing machine. Autopoiesisliterally,
self-makingdescribes a form of system organization where
the system as a whole produces and replaces its own components and
differentiates itself from its surrounding environment on a continual
basis (Slayton and Wittig). In Mathewss
case, the it that is both self and not-self, a unity
that consists of reciprocal perturbations between system and environment,
is a kind of machine for generating linguistic distinctions
in a linguistic domain (Slayton and Wittig).
Such a process, though arbitrary and capable of referring only to
other elementsthe expanding network of signifiersin
the linguistic domain, will eventually shut down in paradox unless
something in the structure answers to real elements in the environment
(which, in turn, have their own domain-specific structure of distinctions).
Nonetheless, from the systems point of view, there is no environment:
like Mathewss journalist in the throes of a literary obsession,
the autopoietic system, for all it knows, is only following
its own rules in maintaining a set of self-reinforcing, homeostatic
relations. The map is the territory, and there is no outside of
the systemexcept, and this is the crucial formal feature that
I have been pointing to throughout this essay, when the connections
within the system reach sufficient density that it becomes possible
to recognize this very circularity, and deparadoxize the constitutive
distinction through a second-order observation. This recognitionthe
bootstrapping into consciousness itselfis what shifts the
system (and Mathewss narrative) to a level of self-consciousness
beyond solipsism and paradox.
The discovery
that the main story of the journal is the journal itself
(191) is the trigger point, in Mathews, of narrative applied to
itself. A new level of sustainability emerges when a referential
notion (the journal) becomes an object in itself, an element that
is made to migrate from outside to inside
the journal. Only through such a reversal of target and source can
the journals system differentiate internally, and so eliminate
its border with the outside, lived, world. The price
that Mathewss narrator pays for this recognition is, not surprisingly,
silence. At the books end, he is literally speechless, and
his account of the final hours in his deterioration must be collected
and presented (without interpretation) by a clinical psychiatrist
at the place where he has been institutionalized. Who, then, has
provided those journal entries up to the point where the journalist
gave up control over his production? No answer is forthcoming, either
from within the fiction or the more general structure of autopoietic
systems. Because the movement from level to meta-level is a difference
that can have no actual equivalent in reality (the narrator cannot
be both a character and the author of the book at the same time),
the self-generated difference functions at a wholly mental level.
But it is no less real for that, because this is how
the human mind works, its neurobiological construction based largely
on self-perception and on self-established differences that
have no actual equivalent in reality (Schwanitz 140). The Journalist emerges as a cognitive fiction because cognition
is itself fictive in nature.
We Have Never
Been Hypertextual
The insanity
that in Mathewss Journalist derives from so many sources both
personal and emotional can be displayed in moving detail only by
being transformed to an equivalentcall it a textualinsanity
in the very form of a writers journal. This is the insanity
of thinking that any author, or any single reading mind, can bring
thoughts content and conceptual categories fully onto the
page; that contexts can be elaborated indefinitely, and independently
of social or cultural supports; that thoughts complexity can
be imparted to the complexity of the page itself. The Journalists connundrum, I want to suggest, is structurally similar to problems
inherent in all dreams of expansive archiving, including the dream
of hypertext as put forward by Nelson and others.
If Bruno Latour
has made the case that "We Have Never Been Modern," it
is only fair, a full human generation after the introduction of
hypertext, to ask whether writers on the Web have ever been hypertextual
or whether the proliferation of platforms, commercial interfaces,
and non-standard pages have not in fact constricted the vast potential
of the Web. Such media, possessing their own categories and sorting
mechanisms, certainly make parts of the Web manageable mostly to
consumers but for the most part these media can only get in the
way of the readers own ability to make selections and organize
materials. More generally according to Latour, the mis-application
of rational categories to a field that is perhaps organized but
not, in itself, rational, is the reason why the project of modernity
has remained, and likely will remain, unfulfilled. Modernity, Latour
argues, tries to establish clear categories separating subject and
object, knowledge of things from power politics, but the attempt
to organize experience through these categories can only produce
pages and pages that document interfering and contradictory events.
The documentary history of modernity is thus no less confused than
the pages composed by Mathewss journalistwitness for
example any page of any major newspaper where all of nature
and all of culture get churned up every day (Latour, 2).
If by hypertext
we mean what its framers envisioned, we have certainly not begun
to be hypertextual. Initially, in 1963 when Ted Nelson defined the
terms, hypertext and hypermedia had little to do with linking as
such; connectivity was not about the maximization of research efforts,
and the Internet was not meant to be a global archive of everything,
ever. Nelson, it is true, imagined a medium to end all media, where
everything said becomes a kind of footnote to everything else. But
he also, more interestingly and more basically, proposed that a
text or media object, once established in a database, could be cited
in its entiretytaken wholly, collaboratively and freshly,
into a new composition. Each individual work then might be regarded
not so much as an entry in an encyclopedia as a sample in a DJ's
mixexcept that what is sampled is the whole. A page capable
of enacting the Internet's recombinant potential, a page that begins
life only in circulation, takes other pages into its own data space,
and goes on living only as long as it is cited by othersthis
is as yet unknown in the contemporary Web. Which is another way
of saying, simply, that the pages we have are already, for the most
part, unknown because individual texts are too often experienced
in isolation. Using the Internet not only to access individual pages
but also to organize various pages in various media, is one way
to make known what contemporary art and literature have already
achieved. The work we have needs to combine together, clash, and
separate out into meaningful clusters. Rather than another new form
or radical movement, we need instead a more robust hypertext collectivity,
whose principles of selection, organization, and internal arrangement
are themselves significant and their use subject to widespread agreement.
One can read
Nelson's initial formulations, incidentally, by pointing a Web browser
to http://www.xanado.com. That's all it takes to enact a "basic
or chunk style hypertext", one that comes on the screen when
you reference a Web address. But Nelson also talks about "collateral
hypertext", "stretchtext" that changes continuously
through annotation and so forth, as well as an "anthological"
hypertext in which materials from all over come together, into an
electronic book with a table of contents that can be revised. What
I would wish for in a future Web page is a deeply referential practice
in which all of these modes work together: that convergence would
help create a digital archive adequate for the widespread nostalgia
that arguably drives the whole project of Web constructiona
nostalgia less for the past than for a present that is incompletely
experienced. As Nelson said, we build new and more reliable forms
of digital storage because "thoughts and minds do not last."
And neither do pagesunless they keep on circulating within
the media where thoughts and minds find expression.
Ever since its
commercial introduction in the mid-'90s, much has been made of the
Internet's mind-like qualitiesits capacities, as a distributed
network, for linking widely separated sub-networks together and
doing associative work. The Web, it was claimed, was capable of
remembering everything (for us); its storage capacities were essentially
limitless, and information could be gotten in a moment by those
who most needed it. What has been missing from the cognitive analogy
is an appreciation of an actual, human mind's incredible powers
of selection and attention, its capacity not only to remember but
(much more often and more actively) to ignore and to forgetthat
is, to repress information not relevant to the project at hand,
to filter out unwanted demands on our attention, and to fit what
is remembered to new circumstances. Along with distributed memory,
the mind has the serial ability to focus, moment by moment, on a
continuing and extended present. The mind takes from past experience
only what's needed (and it's never enough) to make sense of the
present, to correlate what's seen, heard, felt, and read with patterns
and schema that have been experienced before. However this process
works (and whether the mind's work can even be known is itself a
subject for debate), cognition clearly involves much more than information
storage and retrieval. The information that a mind calls up changes
what's experienced, and is itself changed by iteven as an
artist's sketch is often less an external aid to memory than a means
of creation. The sketch itself can always become an active element
in the emerging composition, a transformation no less than a record
of the artist's thought.
Likewise, past
achievements in art and literature, instead of remaining static
sources for citation, can be, and need to be, brought to the page
as active elements in current compositions. "Making it new,"
in Ezra Pound's well-known dictate, but with an emphasis on the
readers making. Too much hypertext, and too much postmodern
fiction and poetry has been characterized by an ironic "citing"
of past styles, treating established art forms apart from enabling
life forms: an endlessly expanding context without culture. Collages
without content, patchwork personalities, bricolage absent of constructive
purpose, and corporate compilations are poor models for the present.
When a skyscraper roof models the pattern of a Victorian chair;
or when once-powerful, clashing symbols appear together as neutral
hybrids (the relief decorating a Mosque, a Christian cross), we
have visible evidence that we are living too much in the mode of
information. The past, in such art, is called on too freely, without
any commitment to everyday life practice or overall world views
embodied by the work. A literature, however, that takes responsibility
for what it selects, that cites works whole, not piecemealsuch
a literature goes beyond the exchange of information and makes a
kind of intersubjectivity possible. Such a literature opens the
chance (in Ted Nelson's words) once again to "become a community
of common access to a shared heritage" (Ted Nelson 161).
This is, for me, a worthwhile conception for a future page. Realizing
its potential would be less a matter of inventing forms than of
more fully experiencing what we have, in the present moment when
we have it (and not in some future archive).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974.
---. "Death
of the Author" in Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana Press,
1977.
Berresem, Hanjo. Introducing chaos|control: complexity [chaos
theory & cultural production] Edited|designed by Philipp
Hofman. Lit Verlag. Hamburg: 2002.
Coupland, Douglas. Polaroids from the Dead. London: Flamingo, 1997.
Edelman, Gerald
M., and Giulio Tononi. A Universe of Consciousness: How
Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Federman, Raymond.
"Eating Books." electronic book review (summer 1998).
Gaddis, William. J R. New York: Knopf, 1975.
---. Agapē Agape.
New York: Penguin, 2002.
Harris, Paul.
"Harry Mathews's Al Gore Rhythms." electronic book review (spring 1999).
"Harry Mathews by Lynne Tillman." BOMB 13, Winter 1988/89. rpt BOMB
Interviews, ed. Betsy Sussler. San Francisco, City Lights Books: 29-44.
Olsen, Lance.
"Narrative Amphibiousness, or: Invitation to the Covert History
of Possibility." electronic book review http://www.altx.com/ebr Posted 04-24-03.
Landow, George, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Catherin Porter, Translator. Boston:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Liu, Alan. "Local
Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism
of Detail." Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 75-113.
Looy, Jan van.
"Authoring as architecture: toward a hyperfiction poetics"
(http://www.jan.vanlooy.net).
Markson, David. Reader's Block. Normal, Ill. Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.
Mathews, Harry. The Journalist (1994). Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1997.
Moulthrop, Stuart. "The Shadow of an Informand: A Rhetorical
Experiment in Hypertext." http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/shadow_of_info.html.
Nelson, Ted. Literary Machines. Theodor H. Nelson, 1984.
Nelson, Ted. Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974). Excerpts given in
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Ed. Randall Packer & Ken
Jordan. New York: Norton, 2001.
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1998.
Sass, Louis
A. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art,
Literature, and Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Schwanitz, Dietrich.
"Systems Theory According to Niklas Luhman - Its Environment
and Conceptual Strategies." Cultural Critique (spring
1995): 137-70.
Slayton, Joel
and Geri Wittig. "Ontology of Organization as System."
Paper presented in conjunction with the release of the C5 SoftSub
data mining freeware application at Ars Electronica" OpenX.
http://www.c5corp.com/softsub.
Strickland,
Stephanie. True North. South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University
Press, 1997. (Hypertext published by Eastgate Systems.)
---. Dalí
Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia." electronic book review (winter 2000/2001).
---. Poetry
in the Electronc Enviornment." electronic book review (spring
1999).
---. To Be Both
in Touch and in Control" electronic book review (spring 1999).
Steiner, George."Crossed
Lines." (A Review of William Gaddis's J R). The
New Yorker 26 Jan. 1975: 106-109.
Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002.
Tilman, Lynne. The Madame Realism Complex. New York: Semiotext(e), 1992:
7-37.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1].
Alan Liu, in Romanticism of the Detail, describes a contemporary fascination with the richly
embedded, infinitely contextual detail that allows us to model
the scenes of human experience with more felt significance - more
reality, more practicality, more aesthetic impact - than appears
anywhere but on the postmodern version of romantic nature:
a screen. A loss of cultural continuity produces a compensating
fascination with context: this essay explores the consequences of
such imaginary compensations in contemporary fiction and hypertext.
[2].
For this itemizaton of materials, I am indebted to Crystal Albert,
a doctoral candidate working with the archive at the University
of Washington, Saint Louis.
[3].
In a dissertation currently in progress, Dave Ciccoricco usefully
gathers together claims by numerous critics identifying hypertext
and poststructuralist theory, starting with another Landow claim,
that "when designers of computer software examine the pages
of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual
Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines,
they encounter a deconstructionist or post-structuralist Nelson
(2). More recently, Ciccoricco continues,
the
literalist view gains support from theorists such as Ilana Snyder
(1997) who claims that because hypertext embodies postmodern
theories of the text, it makes it easier to study them [her emphasis]
(EL 119), and Marie-Laure Ryan, who suggests that the aspects
of contemporary literary theory that find their fulfilment in
hypertext hardly need explanation at all. All of these perspectives
resonate with [Richard] Lanham's contention that "it is hard
not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will
seem the natural fulfilment of much current literary theory, and
resolve many of its questions" (Lanham 130). Greco echoes
these claims when she describes hypertext as "a literal embodiment
not only of postmodern fragmentation but also its possible resolution"
(IV). In short, such a view posits that hypertext not only asks
the same questions as contemporary critical theory, but also holds
an unprecedented promise to answer them.
What in this
essay Im calling the reduction of theory to code is clearly
broad-based.
[4].
In The Shadow of an Informand, Stuart Moulthrop calls
for a literary practice that would escape its shadow status
and take on the full three-plus dimensions of hypertextual discourse
(31). This is another, earlier (but still unrealized) version of
the processual and performative hypertext Berressem anticipates
in chaos|control: complexity. I, however, doubt that
literature can take on such multi-dimensionality and performativity
and retain its cognitive richness. The danger is that complexity
in performative media is all on the page itself, a medial complexity
that obviates, rather than facilitates, verbal and conceptual complexity
in the work of literature.
[5].
I am endebted to Jan Baetans for his extended analysis of the Federman/Burdick
collaborationforthcoming in the collection, Close Reading (University of Leuven Press).
|
|