A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DThe Struggle of Writing against the Limitations of Print Culture Thesis for BA (Hons) Graphic Design, Coventry University, England by James Tarling, Spring 1995
Introduction One of the fundamental determining characteristics of our culture- the technology with which we write- is changing. The integration of computers into the praxis of everyone's life is a continuing process, an eventual consequence of which will be its supplantation of print as the primary medium of writing - this is coming to be accepted as a truism amongst both the mass media and the academic community [1] , and will soon have to be regarded as a self-evident premise to be accepted by the artists and designers that work in electronic media. One of the most difficult obstacles for these artists and designers to overcome is to be able to recognise the extent that the idea of the printed work has determined and delimited almost every aspect of Western culture since Gutenberg and that many of these influences and models become redundant when designing for computers. It is therefore necessary to question our assumptions about the whole concept of writing, including our ideas of creativity and rhetoric, and attempt to establish whether or not these ideas were originally determined by the technological constraints of the printed book. As artists and designers we will therefore be in a better position to realise the full potential of electronic media by discarding the superfluous cultural baggage of print. My thesis is not concerned with the computer hardware and software that makes these new media possible, since although these might differ considerably in their various technical specifications, they are similar in the regard that they are all capable of freeing writing from the "repression of pluri- dimensional thought" [2] that has been necessary in translating human expression into the model of linearity that is encouraged by and expected in a printed work. In his essay `The Ends of Print Culture', one of the pioneering theorists and practitioners of electronic literature, Michael Joyce, asserts that in looking forward to the future of the written word,
The issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. These are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media. [3]In this thesis then, I hope to identify some of these progenitors, antecedents, analogues and aesthetic criteria that can provide us with a theoretical foundation for electronic writing, and demonstrate that the "pluridimensionality" that has characterised recent revolutions in philosophy, art, science and literature [4] has at last found its medium in the computer. The idea of this convergence between progressive literary and cultural theories and technology has been explored skillfully by, amongst many others, Bolter (1991) and Landow (1992) and the subject is debated enthusiastically by the pragmatists and innovators of electronic writing in newsgroups and discussion groups on the global computer communication network, the Internet. It seems however that the discussion has not provoked much interest in the graphic design community, which is surprising. In design education, the challenges posed by new electronic media are commonly seen in terms of the need to adopt a new graphic style peculiar to the computer monitor, which usually involves abandoning written text wherever possible in favour of media such as sound, video, animation and iconic graphics. Many multimedia designers seem to think that, because of the capability of almost every personal computer to play sound, writing will be redundant on the computer screen, but this is failing to consider the extent to which nearly all writing will become a computer mediated activity; the computer will take its place after the papyrus scroll, the mediaeval codex and the printed book [5] as the next major writing technology. We will have to real ise that the whole concept and methodology of writing is beginning to change and that we will be better able to anticipate the needs of the new electronic media if we have an understanding of the history of the struggle of writing against the limitations of print-culture.
All writing is technology The profound influence that any writing technology exerts over the intellectual g rowth of a culture has been investigated by McLuhan (1962) and Ong (1982) in their studies of the differences between oral and literate societies. According to Donald Theall, critics that have addressed the orality/literacy dichotomy in terms of new elect ronic media have misinterpreted McLuhan's work as pointing towards a new age of orality, whereas he in fact sees the future of communication grounded in electronic mediation of "tactility, gesture, and CNS processes", a proposition that was first explored by Joyce in `Finnegans Wake', and which can obviously serve as inspiration for the designers of new Virtual Reality systems.1 This is not to deny though that many useful parallels may be drawn between oral cultures and the capabilities of electronic med ia, and the work of McLuhan, Ong and other cultural theorists are invaluable in their indication of how the interiorisation of writing technology affects the thought processes of the individual and the cultural values of a society. One of the most important proposals advanced by these theorists is that the means we use to communicate with other people often becomes a metaphor for the way we address our own thoughts, but that these technologies become interiorised to the extent that it is difficult to r ealise how our thoughts are thus being determined. Literate cultures, because of the predominantly visual nature of their communicative process, are characterised by a dependence on a "high degree of visual shaping of spatio-temporal relations, without wh ich it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of causal relations so necessary to the order of our lives".2 The "uniform time and uniform continuous space" that is born of restricting our thoughts into a linear model of writing encourages our perce ption of a world where "things move and happen on single planes and in successive order"3 , and this model has decided the intellectual growth of literate man for thousands of years: in `Le geste et la parole'(1965), AndrÈ Leroi-Gourham asserts th at over several millennia, linear writing "constituted..by its unfolding in a single dimension, the instrument of analysis out of which grew philosophic and scientific thought"4 (see also Ong (1982)). A fundamental principle of electronic writing is, in the words of Jacques Derrida, "the access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearised temporality"5 , since the text is not fixed to a single spatio-temporal order. Electronic writing is stored in the computer in an abstracted form, since it has to b e to translated into a sequence of binary numbers that the hardware of the computer can translate into pulses of electricity. This data can then be manipulated and rearranged by the user of the computer, and therefore electronically stored writing ceases to have any absolute physical order, unlike the writing in a printed book which is fixed and unalterable. The possibilities of multi-sequential writing in electronic media were first understood by Theodor Holm Nelson who in 1965 coined the word "hypertext "6 to describe a computer database of text through which the user would plot their own sequence by following associative links- this has subsequently become the ideal on which virtually all electronic text-handling systems are modelled . The reader of a hypertext is encouraged to add their own text and links which become fully integrated into the overall structure of the database. The role of the reader therefore changes to reader-and-writer, since their decisions determine the form in which the text man ifests itself, and any contributions the user makes to the text will have the same status for the next reader as the original text. This democratisation of writing negates the prestige conferred upon the author by print culture, and can transform the indi vidual's perception of their role in the culture of their society from that of an autonomous, but passive, consumer to one of an actively creative participant. According to McLuhan and Ong, the very idea of the "autonomous individual" in society can be traced to the effect that writing has had on our consciousness. The evanescent nature of the spoken word means that the verbal self-expression of a non-literate person never exists long enough to be reflected upon. Jay Bolter, quoting the classicist Br uno Snell, indicates that Homer, living in an oral culture, had no single word at his disposal to signify the mind or the soul:
"A Homeric warrior did not have a mind: he had emotions, thoughts, plans, and preferences, but he did not unify all these mental states under a single name."The literate person, though, can make sense of his or her own thoughts through the act of writing, by organising their varying emotions, memories and drives into a coherent "identity". The oral p erson doesn't share this sense of their own individuality, but instead sees their role in society as that of "a rather insignificant part of a much larger organism".8 McLuhan (after Carothers) asserts that, in comparison to oral societies where "inner v erbalisation is effective social action"9 , the interiorisation of writing has made thought distinct from deed, and has therefore made literate man "schizophrenic"10 , since it gives rise to the idea that
"verbal thought is separable from a ction, and is, or can be, ineffective and contained within the man."11Any verbal expression, spoken or written is according to William Ivins, Jr., largely predetermined by the syntactic demands of language which analyses all events, however convoluted and simultaneous in terms of a linear-temporal model.12 Electronic writing, by abandoning the over-deterministic model of linearity in favour of a "fabric of relations"13 that is more appropriate as a metaphor for the human consciousness, be gins to bridge the gap between thought and the representation of thought. The function of writing at the time of the mediaeval codex could not go much further beyond the preservation of spoken words that were otherwise ephemeral, since the lack of spa cing between the handwritten words necessitated that texts were read aloud14 and therefore that its content was possible to articulate in speech. Reading at that time was thus a performance: in `The Love of Learning and the Desire for God', Dom Jean Lecl ercq describes the necessary method of meditating on a text as
"to attach oneself closely to the sentence being recited and weigh all its words in order to sound the depths of their full meaning. It means assimilating the content of a text by a means of mastication which releases its full flavour."15Writing was at this time composed with the performer in mind and so made use of all the effects at the disposal of the orator, such as rhyme, rhythm, pun, point and alliteration , and the style of reasoning tended to the aphoristic rather than the methodical, since, as Francis Bacon insisted, there is "nothing to fill the Aphorism but some good quantity of observation".16 Writers did not feel the need to maintain a coherent pre sence or style, and there was a "heterogeneity of tone and attitude"17 that would gradually disappear as the print ideals of visual conformity and repeatability began to infiltrate the psyche of the author- ideals which face obvious challenges in the abs tracted and pluri-dimensional model of hypertext. Print encouraged the writer to have a fixed point of view and introduced one of the most important tenets of Western culture- the idea of discrete authorship. The technology of manuscript culture nece ssitated that a written text could only be duplicated and distributed by being hand-copied, and much of the time of the mediaeval scholar was therefore spent in faithfully reproducing the works of others and then embellishing the text with their own annot ative and explanatory glosses. This text would then be bound in a codex alongside work by other authors/copyists, and so would be seen to be contributing to a body of knowledge rather than asserting itself as an individual work of creation. The introducti on of print technology , influenced by the belief of the "prestige of the individual" traditional since the emergence of English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation18 , transformed the book into a monument that testifi ed to the unique artistic vision of the author, which because the book is a saleable commodity, eventually led to the idea of intellectual property. The process of reading is therefore demoted from one of active interpretation to "nothing more than a refe rendum"19 upon the writings of a person who, by merit of their publication, is evidently a genius. The printed book, by depriving the reader of any form of interlocutory presence in the text, has fulfilled the fears of the mythical king of Egypt, Th amus, as recounted in Plato's `Phaedrus', that writing does not present the reader with truth
"but only the semblance of truth: they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will ge nerally know nothing.."20The book became a monologue by the author which the reader is powerless to interrupt or call into question, and since only a comparatively limited number of readers have the means to publish their own texts then print can be seen as an undemocratic technology that deprives the majority of individuals of the means of participating in the culture of a society, and that transforms a few prevailing ideas into a closed system of belief. Electronic writing, in comparison , is based on an anti-hierarchical ideal which depends on the reader having the same power as the writer, and therefore precludes the establishment of any closed system. The Internet is an example of an electronic writing system that acts as an agent of d emocratisation. It is a means for people all over the world who share the same interests and concerns to exchange their ideas, and to gain access to ways of thinking that would otherwise be suppressed by a print-orientated academic community with a vested interest in maintaining the credibility of its current practices . It is possible for the user to create a hypertextual associative link between any information resources made available on the network; and so one is able to integrate, for example, an art icle by one writer into your own critique of that article, and then make this new text available for others to read and write into in a form that shares the same physical manifestation as the original, and therefore not so easily seen as subordinate. This is analogous to the texts created by the mediaeval copyists, who would integrate traditional and innovative thought into a new work where the distinction between the margins and the centre would eventually become confused "as glosses from readers made th eir way into the text itself".21 The ease of electronic self-publication, while depriving the text of the obvious benefits of objective editing, has the potential to rapidly increase the infiltration of new ideas into academic disciplines and to accel erate the rate of social change. The participant in an electronic writing environment can see their position in society, similar to that of the oral man, as one part of a larger organism.
The textual network The idea of the textual network, implicit in hypertext and made actual in the Internet, is an important theme of modern critical theories that are concerned with the nature of a literary work. Whatever we write is, according to Roland Barthes,
"woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony."1 According to this theory, every text has to be interpreted with regard to the other texts that it, perhaps unconsciously, cites and refers to, and that these texts, in turn, refer to other texts, and so on, creating an indefinite network of te xtual interrelations called "intertextuality".The theorists that first posited this concept are known as post-Structuralists, since their ideas contradict Sassure's theories of Structural linguistics. Sassure had developed a theory of language based around the idea of the distinction between the word (the signifier) and what the word was understood to represent (the signified), and he regarded the relationship between the two as "stable and predictable".2 The post-Structuralists argued that words a re only explainable through other words - their meanings are dispersed throughout a system that we cannot get outside. A signifier then can only be explained in terms of another signifier, which can in turn only be explained in terms of a signifier, and s o on. Therefore, if text seems to refer beyond itself, it is always to other texts. Barthes distinguishes between "work" and "text" thus: the work is the physical presence of the book that can be held in the hand, whereas the text is the methodologi cal field of the work, that is "held in language" and which is part of the larger field of intertextuality. The work closes on the signified, whereas the text always leads us to another text, and to the "infinite deferment" of the signifier "a ccording to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations."3 The "work" is a closed system whose limits of interpretation are decided by the presence of the author- traditional criticism had focused on the personality and bio graphical details of the author as the key to understanding the intentions behind a literary work. The prestige of writing as a monument to the creative genius of one person is nullified however when it is realised that the author can in fact only "imitat e a gesture that is always anterior":"We now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single `theological' meaning (the `message' of the Author-God), but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original , blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."4 The meanings found in the text are not established by the author but by their "systematic mark"5 , and so reading and writing are unified into the single "practice of the symbol itself"6 : in "S/Z", Barthes describes the ideal text as "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds...we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one."7 For Barthes and Derrida8 , intertextuality signals the death of the "author", and the transformation of the role of the reader from one of passive consumption to active interpretation, since the text is experienced only in an "activity of production".9 The reader confronts the text, and negotiates their way around the network of potential readings. To interpret a text is to realise its plurality, to recognise that it isn't closed off by one particular system of interpr etation- post-Structuralist writers are rejecting the linearist concept of writing fundamental to Sassure's theory of structural linguistics, since, as Derrida notes in "Of Grammatology", "The `line' represents only a particular model, whateve r might be its privilege. This model has become a model, and, as a model, it remains inaccessible."10 The opposition to fixed models or systems is one of the defining characteristics of "postmodernism", an intellectual and artistic movement which is greatly influenced by the philosophy of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche. According to the postmodern commentator Madun Sarup, Nietzsche argued that a system is dependent on "premises that cannot be questioned within the framework of that syste m"11 , and is therefore unsound since all premises must be questioned. Systems transform themselves into instruments of domination and oppression because their integrity depends on the exclusion of that which does not conform to the system. "Modernism" is characterised by its endeavour to rationalise nature through these objective analytical systems of description (or "metanarratives"), a form of discourse which is well suited to the monologic one-dimensional narrative encouraged by print technology. Pos tmodernists, on the other hand, hold with Nietzsche in that"No one system reveals the entire truth; at best each adopts one point of view or perspective. We must consider many perspectives and not imprison our thoughts in one system."12 Postmodern writers are faced with a problem, since their pluri-dimensional and multisequential texts do not fit comfortably into the form of the book: Derrida maintains that"What is thought today cannot be written according to the line and the book except by imitating the operation implicit in teaching modern mathematics with an abacus."13 Electronic hypertext, with its capacity to abandon the line in favour of the network, can provide these new modes of thinking with a mo re adequate means of discourse- it has been described by Jane Yellowlees Douglas as"the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great 'either/or' and embracing, instead, the 'and/and/and'."14 Hy pertext is the realisation of Barthes's strategy for writing, in which there is no fixed structure, no "single `theological' meaning", no pretence of autonomy -nothing but the "practice of the symbol itself". Electronic texts can written as networks of p otential readings, which can be multivocal, contradictory and pluri-dimensional; they are born out of an "activity of production" since the reader decides the manifestation of the virtual text in the process of reading- and so shares in its writing; they acknowledge themselves as part of the greater field of intertextuality since they incorporate the texts that they cite and refer to- the hypertextual database of all the world's writing, planned by Ted Nelson since the 1960's15 , would be Barthes's "inter text". The entire postmodern ideal of the "text" as the celebration of the language rather than of the "owner" of the language is made explicit in electronic writing- what might appeared to have been inscrutable, idealistic or inoperable when in describe d in print becomes self-evident and almost redundant when writing on the computer.
The discrete material nature of the book reinforces the idea of the author as the creator of their work and maintains a distance between the author and reader- this "pitiless divorce"2 , is exemplified in the tradition of the realist novel, whose "clear and cogent rhythm of events"3 is well suited to the otherwise over-deterministic linear-temporal model of print, but does not reflect the immediacy and simultaneity of most common experience. Therefore, Jay Bolter asserts that "to attack the form of the (realist) novel was also to attack the technology of print."4 According to Brian McHale, the realist novel denies itself the opportunity to let the physical properties of the book "interact" with the content, but instead confined the text to solid blocks of print, and was thus "conventionalising space right out of existence".5 Postmodern writer Ronald Sukenick recognises that: "We badly need a new way of thinking about books that acknowledge their own technological reality....We have to learn to think about the novel as a concrete structure, rather than as an allegory, existing in the realms of experience rather than of discursive meaning."6 Lawrence St erne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", completed in 1767, was amongst the first novels to make the materiality of the book explicit by experimenting with narrative style; as the critic Victor Shklovsky indicates, for Sterne "the awareness of the form through the violation of the novel constitutes the content of the novel."7 Unlike the narrator of the realist novel, whose objectivity usually manifested itself as anonymity, Tristram is constantly interrupt ing the flow of the twisting narrative- "dropping the curtain" over the scene8 - to remind us of his presence; he spends less time narrating the story, which in itself is uneventful, than he does in narrating his own narration, and in doing so, draws atte ntion to the artifice of Sterne's writing. He is unable to drive on his history "as a muleteer drives on his mule,- straight forward"- "For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with th is or that party as he goes along, which he can by no means avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various Book, according to Jeri Johnson22, is the word that James Joyce finally settled on to describe his `Ulysses'- after abandoning "novel", "epic", and "encyclopaedia"- and it is, without doubt, the safest. `Ulysses' is one of the major nodes in the intertext: it is a textual field in which previous literatures intersect, coalesce, exhaust themselves, are anticipated: it is a novel, it is an epic, it is encyclopaedic and moreover, it is hypertextual, albeit a hypertext that was conceived of and published in a book. Like Sterne's `Tristram Shandy', the story of Joyce's book is uneventful- it is an episodic account tracing the movements of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin, on a single day, 16 June 1904- but unl ike Sterne's book, the events of the story unfold in linear order with successive pages: `Ulysses' is, in this regard, much like the realist novels of the previous century, but it relates the story with such a "fanatic naturalism"23 , by recording every s ingle detail however mundane or squalid, that Joyce is considered by some critics to have exhausted realism as a genre. A proper understanding of `Ulysees' depends on the reader abandoning the idea of reading a book simply from beginning to end and instea d, as Brian McHale has argued, being prepared to reconstruct "a pattern in space, drawing on elements widely separated in the [physical] text."24 The allusions and references that always disturb the linear experience of reading ov erwhelm `Ulysses', impeding our progress from one word to the next, and sending us flicking through the pages to reinterpret passages in the light of new understandings. Joyce's book is characterised by its frequent use of monologue intÈrieur25 whe re the events are related through the unmediated thoughts of the characters, which may be flowing or staccato in nature. Because these thoughts are unmediated, we are not told anything that the characters themselves wouldn't need to know or would take for granted- as Jeri Johnson indicates, nothing is explained to us, "we get no narratorial preface".26 When, as is common, a character's consciousness jumps abruptly between trains of thought, the reader has to make a choice between which direction the mean ing of the narrative should turn- as Wendy Faris argues in her study of `Labyrinths of Language', "the reader seems to be given nodes and to be forced to construct connecting paths between them, to decide how to join two words or phrases, for the discourse often suggest alternative versions of the story."27 Joyce therefore makes a labyrinth out of both the linear path of the sentence and- by reworking and elaborating the thematic and allusive motifs of the text- out of the whole b ook. `Ulysses' is a complex mesh of symbolic patterns and references to other cultural and literary texts, the strands of which can be traced as they crisscross the pages of the book. The underlying structure of correspondence is Homer's epic poem `The Od yssey': according to Joyce's elaborate schemata28 , the character of Bloom represents Ulysses, and Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, while each episode corresponds to a different stage of Ulysses' adventures. Joyce's detailed tables of correspondences includ ed many other themes that are dispersed through his book: each episode is identified with a particular colour, science, narrative technic and bodily organ, as well as having its own peculiar symbolic system, and the reader is again invited to construct th eir own paths between these recurring thematic nodes. The word, theme and symbolic structure are brought to the foreground of the text at the expense of any hidden meaning- the reading and corollary reconstruction of `Ulysses' is, to quote Barthes again, "the practice of the symbol itself". Joyce brought this practice to a stylistic impasse with `Finnegans Wake', in which Brian McHale sees the "vertigo-inducing collapse of world into word".29 This is text which refers to no single identifiable reality beyond its own textuality; it is a celebration of textuality, written according to Donald Theall in response to the challenge posed to the "relationship between speech, script and print" by the proliferation of new media30 - it is Joyce's reappraisal of t he role of the book. The underlying structure of `Finnegans Wake' is a cycle- the last line of the book ends mid-sentence but is continued by means of "a commodius vicus of recirculation"31 in the first line of the first page- and Joyce based this cyc le on the philosophy of history set out by Giambattista Vico in his eighteenth century work,'The New Science'. Vico suggested that all human societies pass through a pattern of three historical stages (theocratic, feudal and democratic) which repeats inde finitely: the critic Matthew Hodgart suggests that Joyce didn't much care that this theory of history is contended by most modern historians, but chose it simply because it was a useful framework around which to weave his text. Vico's pattern, of three st ages plus the return, can be found at many levels in the `Wake'- the division into four books, their division into four or twice four chapters, and also the division of some paragraphs and sentences into four.32 The formal qualities of the text draw our attention to the artificiality of the book: similarly it never escapes our attention that, as McHale maintains, the text is "a sequence of printed letters and (sub-vocalised) sounds"33 since reading Joyce is a ongoing act of interpretation and extrap olation. The language of `Finnegans Wake' is a dense muddle of word play which carries allusions to countless other literary, musical, mythological, religious, legendary, and historical texts34, and therefore requires a great deal of effort and esoteric k nowledge to understand. These allusions are made still more obscure by Joyce's appropriating word-forms from several dozen foreign languages- only a few of which he was actually conversant with- and which, according to Hodgart, were added in at a late sta ge of revision, sprinkled recklessly over the text "as if using a pepper pot".35 The `Wake' is, on one level, the narration of a dream and as such is written in the flowing insensible ramble of sleep: in this regard Joyce studied Freud's `Interpretation o f Dreams', and also his `Psychopathology of Everyday Life'36 which discusses the way the unconscious mind influences our speaking- together, these works gave Joyce a means for weaving an enormous amount of allusive threads through his text which create, a s in `Ulysses', a multitude of potential associative structures that support the text and that branch out into the intertext. An understanding of Joyce's book depends then on the reader moving out of the text and off on a reconnaissance journey into the furthest and most obscure reaches of the intertextual field since, in the dream world of `Finnegans Wake', there is no real meaning for the reader to grasp hold of- as Brian McHale explains: "Every expression belongs simultaneously to se veral frames of reference, none of them identifiable as the basic world of the text relative to which the other frames are metaphorical..."37 `Finnegans Wake' is, according to McHale, a "vertical collage"38 where several discourses are super imposed along the length of the text, enabling the reader to follow the different narrative threads simultaneously rather than, for example, contiguously. It thereby moves beyond the simultaneous reading of verbal and spatial components of text- recognise d by the critic Joseph Frank as a quality of `Ulysses'39- and towards (or also perhaps beyond?) what McHale terms the "postmodern split text"40 in which two or more discrete texts are arranged in parallel and read simultaneously, or at least with referenc e to each other. A way to run several texts in parallel in one book is, as McHale indicates, to split the page into vertical columns and/or horizontal blocks in the manner of a newspaper page, a device that has been explored in various configurations b y Jacques Derrida in `Living on: border lines', `The Double Session', and `Tympan'41 , but most notably in `Glas', in which he juxtaposes commentaries on Hegel and Genet in a two column text. The abdication of authorial control that is a corollary of all writing is made explicit in `Glas' since the reader has to decide for themself how to approach these parallel texts: whether to read each text separately in turn, or page for page, or line for line; whether the texts illuminate or contradict each other- i f any correspondences are noticed then what do they signify? are they intentional? Derrida absents himself from the text and leaves the reader and the text to look for the meaning amongst themselves: "Let us space. The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than by demonstrating, by coupling and uncoupling, gluing and ungluing rather than by exhibi ting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric."42 This text is explicitly left open to interpretation: by juxtaposing the two discourses in this manner Derrida is leaving gaps in the text an d forcing the reader to fill them in, to write in the margins, and therefore to question their own authorial role in relation to Derrida, Hegel and Genet. The questions surrounding the function of the author are confronted in a different context by Vladi mir Nabokov in `Pale Fire', in which the unreliability of the narrator compels the reader to choose, with no great degree of certainty, between several possible fictional truths. Nabokov's book is fiction disguising itself as non-fiction: it is ostensi bly a critical edition of a poem called `Pale Fire' by one John Shade, with a foreword, commentary and index by the scholar Dr Charles Kinbote, who we learn was a close friend of Shade that managed to appropriate the poem's manuscript at the time of Shade 's murder. Kinbote's ability as a critic is called into question from the first page of the Foreword, in which he interrupts his already meandering commentary with the excuse that the noise from an nearby amusement park is distracting his writing43 ; he a lso causes us to doubt his own integrity since, a few pages further into the Foreword, he casually reveals that his acquisition of the rights to the poem were called "`a fantastic farrago of evil'" by the poet's former lawyer.44 Kinbote reveals himse lf to be the antithesis of the objective commentator typical in literary criticism: he explains Shade's poem in terms of what he knows it is not about, thereby using the book as a vehicle to write his own autobiography (or fantasy-it is not clear), the c ompelling story of Charles the Beloved, exiled King of Zembla. Kinbote is superimposing his own text upon that of the poem, an action he makes explicit in the Foreword, where he suggests a Shandyesque violation of the book: "I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back and forth leafings by...cutting out and clipping together the pages [of annotation] with the text of the [poem]."45 Nabokov, in `Pale Fire', is drawing our attention to the authority of th e writer and the materiality of the book: by making the subjectivity of the writer explicit, by inverting the hierarchy of the text and its commentary, by disguising fiction in another form, and by forcing the reader to manipulate the book as a physica l object by encouraging cross-reference between the texts- `Pale Fire', like `Tristram Shandy', is exploiting its "technological reality". Milorad Pavic's `Dictionary of the Khazars' is another work of fiction masquerading as fact, this time in the for m of a historical lexicon. According to Pavic's fictional anthologist, it is a reconstruction of the original `Khazar Dictionary', published in 1691, which was the only surviving authority on the lost tribe of the Khazars who disappeared from European hi story towards the end of the Dark Ages. All but two of the five hundred copies of this original dictionary were destroyed by the Inquisition, and of the remaining copies, one - with a gold lock- was printed with poisoned ink which assert the book's mater iality in no uncertain fashion: "[T]he reader would die at the ninth page at the words Verbo caro factum est(`The Word became flesh')."46 According to folklore, an hourglass had been built into the binding of each of these books , and so to reveal the "secret meaning" of the dictionary, the reader had to listen for the trickle of sand to stop before turning the book over and continuing to read from back to front (p.7). In his preliminary notes, the anthologist indicates that the reconstructed dictionary cannot reproduce the entries in their proper order, since the original dictionary was arranged according to the three alphabets of its three languages:"All these shortcomings need not be considered a major drawback: th e reader capable of deciphering the hidden meaning of a book from the order of its entries has long since vanished from the face of the earth, for today's reading audience believes that the matter of imagination lies exclusively within the realm of the wr iter and does not concern them in the least...This type of reader does not even need a sandglass in the book to remind him when to change his manner of reading: he never changes his manner of reading in any case."47 This anthologist offer s the reader an "infinite number of ways" to read the reconstructed dictionary, and in doing so tries to coax the modern reader out of their protracted dormancy. The lexicon is divided into a Red, a Green and a Yellow Book, which contain Christian, Islami c and Jewish sources on the Khazar question. The entries throughout are cross-referenced to entries in the other books, whose annotative symbols are a cross, a crescent and a Star of David respectively. These referential connections between different node s in the same text, which have been termed "intratextual" links by Landow48 , form an innumerable network of possible pathways by which the reader can wander through all of the entries: if he should get lost among the words "the reader has no other choice than to begin in the middle of any given page and forge his own path. Then he may move through the book as through a forest, from one marker to the next, orientating himself by observing the stars, the moon, and the cross."49 Th e reader is encouraged to traverse the pages of the book as they wish, to dip into this dictionary as they would any other since it "need never be read in its entirety"50 ; it makes no pretence at closure since "just as it has its own former and present l exicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers and continuers".51 We are reminded that the book is a physical object that we must manipulate, that the pages don't turn themselves, and we are thus invited to regain control of what we read. Robert Coover, writing in the `New York Times Book Review', described `Dictionary of the Khazars' as a hypertext novel52, although like `Tristram Shandy', it is one that was conceived in print, and that draws our attentions to the advantages and limitations of that medium. The explicit multisequentiality that is a feature of Pavic's novel, and which is the fundamental quality of hypertext, has also been explored by other writers such as Raymond Queneau, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cort⋅zar53 , and is t he selling point of the series of childrens' books, Choose Your Own Adventure®, which offer the reader "not one, but many incredibly daring experiences" by making different choices on successive readings.54 Multisequential reading is an operation impl icit in a large proportion of all books, in which an index suggests alternative arrangements of the text according to, for example, name or subject, and this device is elaborated on by Barthes in his book, `S/Z'. `S/Z' is Barthes's critical dissection of HonorÈ de Balzac's short story `Sarrasine', which he separates into 561 "blocks of signification" (or lexias) which are otherwise "imperceptibly soldered by...the flowing discourse of narration".55 His commentary then meanders through the lexias of the analysed text, and is itself divided into 93 fragments; different paths through the lexias and his own "divagations"56 are suggested in an appendix, based on subjects of enquiry that are suggested throughout the text, which offer alternative entrances into the textual network. In his introduction, he argues "If we want to remain attentive to the plural of a text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring the text in large masses...:no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure."57 The technology of the book will always impose an "ultimate structure" on a text, since the words will remain secured on particular pages in a particular order which can, at best, only hint towards the "plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages".58
Conclusion: writing with the computer In `The Gutenberg Galaxy', McLuhan shows the correspondence between the fixed point of observation in print and in the visual arts, and quotes Gyorgy Kepes who explains that before the emergen ce of linear perspective, "Early mediaeval painters often repeated the main figure many times in the same picture. Their purpose was to represent all possible relationships that affected him, and they recognised that this could only be done by a simultaneous description of various actions. This connectedness in meaning, rather than the mechanistic logic of geometrical optics, is the essential task of representation."1 Obvious analogies can be drawn between the mediaeval painter a nd the postmodern writer, both struggling to illustrate the "infinite play of the world"2 , but within the constraints of a single static representation. The linear writing of the book encourages "connectedness in meaning" only within the confines of the single line- what Derrida in `Glas' called "the continuous...suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric". Several years before `Glas', in `Of Grammatology', Derrida maintained that"The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within the form of the book that new writings- literary or theoretical- allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased."3 Today however, the "new writings" have found a new technology in the computer. The innovations in literary theory and practice outlined above can (and have) prove invaluable to the development of a rhetoric of computer hypertext, since they are all efforts to assert the integrity of writing from within the "profoundly alien"4 technology of print, and as such have drawn our attention to what functions the book has failed to perform, or can only simulate. The rules (or guidelines perhaps, since we should try and avoid speaking of systems) for one method cannot however simply be extrapola ted from the failings of another: hypertext, when properly implemented, is an entirely different methodology of writing from that encouraged by print culture, and there may well be factors that we have yet to consider. We are now, according to various media commentators, in the transitional phase between print and electronic cultures5 , and it is still difficult for the theoreticians of electronic writing to find an appropriate voice. The pragmatics of a print-orientated academic community often dictat e that theoretical studies of hypertext, which might necessarily be multivocal and multisequential in nature, will only gain recognition if published in print. On the other hand, many of the academic hypertexts that have been published in electronic form are simply redactions of works that were originally conceived and published in print, and that therefore do not take advantage of the rhetorical apparatus of hypertext which, as Stuart Moulthrop has shown in `The Shadow of an Informand', are fundamentally different from those of linear writing.6 The development of these new rhetorical apparatus has so far remained the concern of literary theory since, as has been discussed, hypertext can be seen as a corollary of many of the most radical devel opments in the history of literary criticism and practice- it is a means of expressing ideas which before, in print, could only be suggested. In their study of media philosophy, "Imagologies", Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen pose the fundamental question : "If an electronic text can be published in printed form, is it really electronic?"7 An awareness of the prejudices encouraged by print technology is not by itself a sufficient foundation for a new methodology of electronic wr iting, but is nevertheless essential to understanding why we should be using hypertext at all.
Bibliography Books, Articles and journals, Miscellaneous Books Barthes, Roland Image, music, text, Fontana, 1977 Articles and Journals Items marked with * are available on the World Wide Web, and can be accessed, at the time of writing at least, via the page Hypertext and Literary Things at http://www.eng.carleton.ca/~kmennie Barger, Jon and Eliot Kimber 'Hypert ext and the Finnegans Wake drafts'* Miscellaneous `Story space:the future of writing" promotional material from Eastgate Systems,Inc. October, 1994 Eastgate Systems, Inc., 134 Main Street, Watertown, MA 02172 USA The electronic mailing list `ht_lit', where many of the leading figures in hypertext theory and literature (including Stuart Moulthrop, Kathryn Kramer, Jim Rosenburg and, every so often, Michael Joyce) discuss their projects and hypotheses in an open forum. This list is maintained by Kia Mennie of Carleton University, and can be subscribed to be sending an e-mail to: subscribe@journal.biology.carleton.ca with subscribe ht_lit in the body of the message. Source: http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~hypertxt/tarling.html
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