Laurenţiu Malomfălean

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

laurentiu.trei@yahoo.com

 

 

Hypertext. Cybertext. Digitext

 

 

Abstract: In this paper I will try to define and compare three forms of textual embodiment, which are specific to different cultural periods and literary fields. In a diachronic view, those kinds of text are hypertexts only as the main paper-written text in hypermodernism, cybertexts as filling the space between paper and screen (by concerning cybermodernism) and, finally, digitexts (a relatively new concept) as the textual dominant of contemporary digitalism.

Keywords: Hypertext; Cybertext; Digitext; Hypermodernism; Cybermodernism; Digitalism.

 

 

Nowadays, terms like hypertext, cyber literature and, the more or less new, digital text are mixed and wrapped together without any logic. Hyper is not equivalent with cyber and cyber age is not the same with digital age. The differences are maybe minimal, but they are there. To begin with, the fictional world[1] became a virtual one, but the modalities of construction are similar for both[2]. In any case, the logic is the same: fictional or virtual, these more or less textual worlds have only one wish: to be more real than our beautiful real world.

 

 1. Hypertext and hypermodernism

 

 We usually relate hypertext with (hyper)links or what should be called a web hyperstructure. In this acceptation, the term was first coined in 1963 by Ted Nelson, a pioneer of our Holy Internet. But, grosso modo, hypertext was first used in poetics by Gérard Genette, in his preamble to Palimpsestes. In this book, the French author defines a transtextual relation which he calls hypertextualité, that is, in his own words, “toute relation unissant [!] un texte B (que j’appellerai hypertexte) à un texte antérieur A (que j’appellerai, bien sûr, hypotexte) sur lequel il se greffe d’une manière qui n’est pas celle du commentaire. (…) Pour le prendre autrement, posons une notion génèrale de texte au second degré ((…)) ou texte dérivé [!] d’une autre texte préexistant.”[3] It is very important to highlight those two verbs – unite and derive – in relation to what a so-called hyperlink does: only relating, but never uniting or deriving a (cyber)text with/from another. In a coincidental onomastic way, Genette illustrates a genetical approach, by showing that a hypertext is a text generated by a hypotext (as James Joyce’s Ulysses is conceived upon Homer’s Odissey). Thus, hypertext is a text born from another by means of rewriting, neocontextualisation, sequel or simply parody. Literature becomes a perpetual drafting process.

Of course, and the poetician focuses a lot on this topic, there are links between all written texts and this creates a hypertextual network of books. Not intertextual, but hypertextual. And Genette analyses various forms of textual transformations, like pastiche and parody. To be more poetically precise, like in the Borgesian Babel Library, there are connections and interconnections, describing the metaphor of the total infinite book – a Mallarméan dream finally accomplished once the Internet arised out from nowhere. Because The Garden of Forking Paths shouldn’t have become real. It should have remained only in the head of that hyperreader called Borges. Real, hyperreal, the shock is gone with the hyperreal wind. Like in a freecinema film such as Amélie, there is nothing left for us, nothing to be imagined. Everything is there, every single option is already made. We can no longer imagine, because we must choose a pre-textual path already there.

When it comes to how we read a hypertext, Gerard Genette appropriates what Philippe Lejeune called “lecture palimpsesteuse”[4], by defining it in very simple and also ambiguous terms: “lecture relationelle (lire deux ou plusieurs textes en fonction l’un de l’autre)”[5]. For me, I wouldn’t say “relational” because that term refers better to the cybermode of reading. I prefer a term like ”referential” reading, which means reading two texts simultaneously: the hypertext and its hypotext, not knowing which of them is the host of the other[6]. To correct a metaphor, as the most common textual practice, hypertextuality generates a Babelian hypertextual index rather than a virtual infinite book or library. That’s why we must reconsider what we understand by reading. Because an index can’t be read, but only consulted, like any dictionary. Literature as a hypertextual classified museum…

Even if hypertext is typically postmodern(ist) – defining a moment also called textualism in the literary field, after the well-known Derridean conundrum Il n’y a pas de hors-texte – hypertextuality has been the very basis and logic of literature since its origins. This textual practice has become dominant for what Gilles Lipovetsky calls hypermodernism – by defining hypermodernity as a superlative modernity and denying what was unhappily qualified as postmodernism and postmodernity. Because, etymologically, hyper means precisely the French de hors! And hypertext means at the same time beside the text and the text beside another text. Thus, we should say again, maybe more accurately: de hors-texte il y a  toujours un autre texte – l’hypertexte.

Anyway, that acceptation of hypertext as the underlying structure of Internet, conceived as a global hypermediatic and without ending network, is the result of a literalisation process, which put into practice what Derrida metaphorically stated in L’Écriture et la difference. Those virtual hyperlinks are the hyperreal forms of the references that are invisibly coining various paper-written texts. Of course, one could say it’s the same thing. Only that it’s hyperreal! The difference lies not simply in the textual format (typed and digitalized), but also in two aspects of textual reality, which transgresses the limits that make possible the very existence of a text.

In conclusion, at first sight, what Internet or digital medium does is only to put into practice a metaphor, to make a figure literal, by destroying its charm. The result is hypertext as we use it everyday. But emphasis should be placed on the synonymy of hyper with… paper. In describing a text translated on a digital support, a term like cybertext is more accurate, as I shall state in the second part of this, again, paper.

 

 2. Cybertext and cybermodernism

 

In 1997, Espen J. Aarseth defined cybertext as a type of ergodic literature[7], emphasizing the role of the cyber-medium in the reception of cybertextual realities. But not only there is the medium a character, if we want to follow Aarseth’s statements. First, a medium is always defined in contrast with another, and even paper is present more than in a tactile way when we read a book. Secondly, the choice of the reader who has become a user is only a graduation of the same possibility, pre-existent in the nonvirtual age. Finally, the long proclaimed openness of cybertext is just a little bit larger than the traditional one. I would just say that the openness of the text is real, not only a critical metaphor.

In short, cybertext is a transition between hypertext and digitext or, in more words, a paper text translated into digital form, but without any digital qualification. The pure transcription of a text from its analogue form into its digital format. Extrapolating, I think we should expand this definition in both sides – id est in every possible direction. Thus, cybertextuality as textual practice would be the proliferation of literature beyond the paper-written support and also the penetration of digital media into the realms of literature. A blog, for example, is mainly a collage of texts indirectly or even directly copied from a classic support on a digital one. But, on the other hand, we have that large amount of cyberpunk paper-written literature, which moves from the virtual into the classic (or rather modern?) reality. In any case, it’s just a translatation, a transliteration between two textual boundaries, provoked by the cyber-space boom.

Of course, terms like cybertextuality and cybertextualism become absolutely necessary in these conditions, and they must be defined in relation with hypertextuality and hypertextualism. Then, this new kind of text permits a participative and collaborative reading (when it moves from the paper support onto the electronic one), made possible by the hyperlinks. But, I repeat, at this level a (hyper)link only connects and never unites two texts in a scriptic succession rapport. I will give one example of producing cybertexts: in the Romanian virtual space (if such a localisation is not superfluous) the latest collaborative practice of writing is the Babel Story site[8], a free platform for intercyberauthors. But, like that Storyspace of the 80’s, this Babelian story project hardly uses of the digital specificity; it could be conceived as well in a traditional analogical medium as a creative writing session – collective, how else.

The new millennium marks the end of postmodernism (although hypermodernism is a more accurate term), and cybermodernism emerges as a transition towards a completely new cultural paradigm. If hypermodernity proposed the end of humanity as a collective subject, cybermodernity proposes the cyborg as an alternative to the death of man. A cyber-persona surrounding the inner void. A void eternally on-line. But everything has an end. Even ending. If this (or that, already?) cyberhumanity was the literalisation – id est realisation – of a cultural metaphor due to Foucault’s  post-humanity, we should be the messengers of the rebirth of man. But this paper is about literarisation, not about literalisation.

 

 3. Digitext and digitalism

 

When it comes to what I shall define as digitext, the pre-examples are already common: Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch or the novels of Milorad Pavić, in which reading is a combinatorial act, ordered by the reader and not by the author, who only proposes different trajectories. In addition to this, we could say that the reception theory of this kind of texts is beyond reading, overcoming it into a more complex interaction.

Of course, digitext is coined from the words digital and text. However, the emerging word is completely new. It’s neither a derivative word, like hypertext or cybertext, where we have two terms – a prefix and a root word – nor a compound word. It’s a new noun, which has nothing to do with digital, nor with the common text. Because in digitext the two component parts are unified in that internal „-t-”, which mixes them together. Like in a chemical reaction, the two reactants – in this case, digital and text – make a new substance. What does salt have to do with chlorine and sodium? Anyway, if hypertext remains on paper and cybertext remains the virtual form of a paper-written text (or the virtual reality put on paper), we now can define digitext as a writable, operable and performable text only in a digital medium, inconvertible to a paper support. Obviously, we could play a little and say that digital literature is written with all our ten fingers on a keyboard. In contrast, the other old literature is written with a pen(cil) held in one hand, being a manual literature. And, surprisingly, analogue means exactly manual!

Yet, this digital literature seems to be sentenced to immaturity. Besides interactive fiction, let’s take poetry for example. Of course, poems could be written at two hands, on yahoo messenger. But poetry, that true Poetry, will always remain a solipsist act. As for the rest, only fakes and hypocrisy. Literature at its best is the result of a lonely pact with the real – whatever that real is. That’s why digital poetry won’t surpass the fad freaky stage. Or, at least, with extreme difficulty. Maybe digital prose or digital dramaturgy will have more luck. Because poetry cannot be unlinked with our soul, without it ceasing to be poetry. Mais, hélas, c’est une autre histoire! For now, we must agree that as a culmination of the writing liberalisation (a main result of blogging, the cybertextual phenomenon par excellence) the  aesthetic value of the digitext collapses under a very common pleasure principle, being a forced form of literature, too little spontaneous. But who knows? Maybe the real digiwriter is not born yet. Afterwards, reading is a death concept in our digital age. But we could accept a performative reading, equal in importance with the writing process. Anyway, to finish with these obsolete categories, for digitext – and not only for it – critical literacy became a myth. Digitext contains its own critical approach. Digitext is beyond criticism and aesthetic value. That’s a fact.

Above, I defined cybermodernism as a buffer zone between hyper-and-not-post-modernism and a new episteme. How should we call it? If we regard digitext as the specific textual form of the new cultural paradigm, it is as logical as possible to define the moment digitalism. Why this movement from a textual embodiment towards a dominant -ism? Inaugurated by the relation between textualism and postmodernism, this direction of thought became almost a rule. So let it be digitalism. But still, at this point I have to mention and vigorously quote Alan Kirby, an Oxford-based cultural critic whose last-year book, Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, debates our subject. I will postpone the terminological polemic on the deficiency of a word like digimodernism and accept its content:

 

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship. These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality. Digimodernist texts are found across contemporary culture, ranging from “reality TV” to Hollywood fantasy blockbusters, from Web 2.0 platforms to the most sophisticated videogames, and from certain kinds of radio show to crossover fiction. In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development. Hence “digimodernism”, properly understood as a contraction of “digital modernism”, is a pun: it’s where digital technology meets textuality and text is (re)formulated by the fingers and thumbs (the digits) clicking and keying and pressing in the positive act of partial or obscurely-collective textual elaboration.[9]

 

 Obviously, this process of textual digitisation hasn’t come out of nowhere, and Alan Kirky further asserts that “in its early years a burgeoning digimodernism co-existed with a weakened, retreating postmodernism; it’s the era of the hybrid or borderline text (The Blair Witch Project, The Office, the Harry Potter novels)”, but also cyberpunk literature and other forms of cybertext. As I have shown above, cybermodernism was precisely that borderline between hypermodernism[10] and our digitalism.

And finally, the promised polemic. Why digitalism and not digimodernism? On the one hand, a contraction of ”digital modernism” is improper in this case, because the result gives us a term without any reference to the digital. We don’t have a prefix like digi, we must use digit. What functions in the word digitext as a fusion, here is a nonsense. On the other hand, we should at last get rid of this modernism, which has become a mere stereotype and, thereby, a self-sufficient headache! Because the digital revolution marches beyond modernism. In other words, why not simply digitalism? Why must we always, again and again, reuse this twentieth-century suffix named modernism? We must go on!

Of course, to quote the paper call for this article, digital technologies open the field of literature and literarity to new forms of literary practice, yet we cannot even suggest ”the demise of literature” in the age of digitalism. There is only a diminution of the literarity as what makes a text to actually be a text and, secondly, we are witnessing a proliferation of new textual practices, alternative styles of reading and spectacular ways of collaboration.

 

 

Bibliography:

 Aarseth, Espen J.: Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1997;

Genette, Gerard: Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Éditions du Seuil (collection Poétique), Paris, 1982;

Kirby, Alan: Digimodernism. How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture, New York, Continuum, 2009.

 

 

Notes