Ion Manolescu

University of Bucharest, Romania

imanol@opensys.ro

 

 

Hyper-texts and Literature. A Reading Theory Approach

 

 

Abstract: This study describes the rules involved in the construction of hyper-texts and compares them to those used in structuring “traditional”, “flatland” texts. It also provides an analysis of how we read printed and electronic literature, in an attempt to demonstrate that similarities between the two types of texts and reading processes are more numerous than differences.

Keywords: Hyper-text; Reading theory; Authoring; User.

 

 

Hyper-texts are computer programs which provide the user with the opportunity to navigate in a branched, non-linear way within an electronic text. At the same time, they represent the very result of this software: open, responding electronic documents, defined by depth ramifications which the user can access in a dynamic, interactive way. Consequently, hyper-texts allow illustration (hyper-media) and enable the user both to reposition himself or herself inside the document and to connect it, by clicking on certain words or images, to other similarly engineered documents.

The grandfather of hyper-texts may have been Vannevar Bush. Between 1932 and 1939, he had the idea of building a memory extender called memex. Unfortunately for its author, the memex was never achieved, due to the poor technical means of the epoch. In his article As We May Think published in July 1945 in the Atlantic Monthly, Bush described his project as essential for providing people (and, particularly, the academic community) with useful electronic machines, which would distribute relational information to their users (Bush, 1945: 101-108). However, the term hyper-text was seemingly coined by Ted Nelson in 1965, a couple of years before Julia Kristeva used the term intertextuality in the field of literary theory and way before Gerard Genette regarded hypertextuality as a distinctive trans-textual relation in literature, based on transformation or imitation (Genette, 1982: 7-11). In his 1981 volume, Literary Machines, Nelson regards hyper-texts (or hyper-documents, as he calls them) as belonging to a new, non-sequential way of writing; its components are devised to be read neither in a pre-established succession, nor in an orderly textual flux.[1]

From a technical point of view, hyper-texts are projected (and read) on computer screens and operate via links and nodes, two software options which ensure the user’s easy navigation within the document’s electronic paths. These options help the user to find his or her way while accessing different mobile parts or patterns of the hyper-text, in a process which resembles more an act of visually altering new electronic frontiers, than merely gazing at a traditional text in a conventional, static, passive manner. A link inter-connects two nodes and is directed from the anchor node to the destination node. In fact, hyper-links are software commands attached to a button or a word within an electronic page, with the purpose of instantly connecting it to other words or pages. When the user accesses the button or word, he or she is swiftly shifted to a different section of the text/e-page/e-book etc. If, inside the world of printed, paper texts, researchers tried to find a textual device similar to the electronic hyper-links, it would probably be best represented by traditional footnotes and glossaries. To conclude, hyper-links digitally embody the relation between two segments of textual material which get connected both on the computer screen and inside the user’s mind. As Paul Gilster notices, the hyper-text is, at the same time, “a mental process and a digital tool” (Gilster, 1997: 138).

As far as the “reading” process is concerned, hyper-texts, together with hyper-media, are designed to be accessed and decoded in an interactive way, based on a non-linear distribution of information: “Instead of looking at a predefined sequence of text, pictures, or graphics, the reader or learner is enabled to build his or her own paths, to select and organize the information relevant to his or her needs or objectives.” (Rouet & Levonen, 1996: 9). However, traditional, paper texts may also be “accessed” (rather than “read”) randomly, when we shift attention from one word to another, situated at a distance, or from one page to another, other than by succession. Therefore, Christian Vandendorpe is mistaken when he declares hyper-textual and textual reading to be incompatible, entirely different processes: “On ne lit pas un hypertexte comme on lit un roman, et la navigation sur le Web procure une expérience différente de la lecture d’un livre ou du journal.” (Vandendorpe, 1999: 9).[2]

In fact, if we discard the nature of the support (digital vs. paper), things are not that different when “reading” a hyper-text and a book. In terms of performing, representing (mentally) and understanding, the cross-referencing accessing, an operation specific to users opening hyper-texts, may also apply to traditional, printed texts, as an act of cross-referencing reading. The same non-linear, branching, disorderly way of leaping from one textual section to another can be found in Michael Joyce’s hyper-text Afternoon. A Story (1987), and in Camil Petrescu’s printed novel Patul lui Procust (1933). Michael Joyce’s hyper-document contains 539 nodes and 915 links, while Camil Petrescu’s novel is based on tenths of annotations. They slice the text into two compartments (“main floor” – or surface compartment – and “footnote floor” – or underground compartment –), while creating a network of textual links which the reader is bound to “navigate” through and by means of, in order to comprehend the novel. If the printed Bible is to be considered the universal prototype of the hyper-text, Patul lui Procust has to stand as the first Romanian hyper-textual novel. Based on the “3-D” inter-connection of dislocated, discontinuous segments of information, Patul lui Procust allows the reader to create his or her own narrative path within its “radiant textuality” – to quote Jerome Mc Gann’s concept.[3] As we speak (or read), IT programmers may even get the idea of designing a hyper-textual software, intended to represent Camil Petrescu’s novel as an electronic map of its own fictional universe.

According to Ben Shneiderman, the author of a substantial study on hyper-textual structuring, editing and administration, hyper-texts generally follow three main rules: first of all, a large corpus of information is split and reorganized into numerous fragments; then, the fragments get inter-connected; and, finally, at any given moment, the user needs to use only a small part of these fragments (Shneiderman, 1989: 115-131). Other researchers, such as David Porush, insist on the self-organizing flexibility of hyper-texts, which would illustrate the new postmodernist way of perceiving reality as “relational, chaotic, and unstable” (Porush, 1989: 373). In Porush’s analysis, hyper-textuality is to be seen as the equivalent of a bold, daring postmodernist mode of writing, intertwined with the technological evolution of the postindustrial society. The same theory which brings together hyper-texts and the techno-cultural condition of postmodernity resurfaces in Deborah L. Madsen and Mark S. Madsen’s work, which emphasizes two major characteristics of hyper-textuality: the inter-relational (opposed to the hierarchical) clustering of data, and the dislocation of the text’s unity towards a multiplicity of variants (Madsen & Madsen, 1995: 144). By following these variants, in the form of both electronic cross-referencing and computerized graphic inserts, which we may call hyper-textual operators, the reader of a hyper-text will become part of a postmodernist visual spectacle, quite similar to the multi-media one provided by CD-ROM or DVD e-books.

On the other hand, spectacle books do not necessarily need an electronic shape and format. For instance, Nick Bantock’s interactive novels, which resemble, in structure and organization, the open, multi-dimensional narrative space of hyper-fiction, are printed on paper. Some of his most famous spectacle books include the Griffin & Sabine trilogy, written (or should we say “connected”?) between 1991 and 1993. Their narrative unfolds on hundreds of printed pages and on tenths of polychromous envelopes 3-dimensionally glued to specific textual areas. By touching or opening these envelopes with his or her bare hands, the reader may extract new segments of information, such as the intimate correspondence of the two protagonists, which is to be related to different parts of the textual narrative (see Bantock, 1991; 1992; 1993). In fact, one may see Griffin’s postmodernist letters to Sabine and her answers on invented postcards with inexistent stamps as the (hyper)graphic materialization of Ladima’s letters to Emilia – two essential characters in Camil Petrescu’s experimental, modernist novel Patul lui Procust (see Petrescu, 1992: 146-150).

Other spectacle books, conceived according to what today we might call typographic “hyper-textual” principles, include some of Nichita Stănescu’s poetry volumes: Operele imperfecte (1979) and Noduri şi semne (1982). Although they are written in a late “new modernist” period of Romanian literature, both volumes seem to illustrate advanced postmodernist structural and organizational techniques, such as collage, bricolage or the hybridization of the text. Both resemble the form and structure of pop-up books; both are being “engineered” via an inter-connection of segments of texts and fragments of paintings which unfold the printed page on several visual paths and towards different, plural, sometimes contradictory reading options (see Stănescu, 1979; 1982).

At a first glance, the principles of hyper-textual construction seem to be the opposite of those involving traditional textual construction. For instance, hyper-texts always encourage their readers to become users, leaving them with the freedom of choice in terms of textual paths and narrative follow-ups. But is this mechanism of producing and reading a hyper-text so utterly different from the one we encounter in traditional, printed texts?

In the chapter Interactive Fiction, from his volume Hypertext and Hypermedia (1993), Jacob Nielsen provides an ambiguous answer to the question. First, he asserts the superiority of traditional books over hyper-textual ones, saying that a fiction with a single narrative flux would be best represented in printed form and matter. Then, Nielsen reverses his initial verdict and states that, whenever fiction becomes “interactive”, the newer hyper-textual “depth” reading process is better than the conventional “turning pages” reading process (Nielsen, 1993: 82). Here, the potential “gains” of hyper-textual structuring (and reading) seem to be conditioned by the emergence of “newer fictional forms”, which would make the traditional text, its paper support and the printed book format inappropriate to public use and inadequate to auctorial expression.

There are several hyper-textual theorists who do not support the idea that electronic and printed textuality are similar in structuring, ordering and reading process. Among them, John Slatin. In his study, Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium (1991), he melts together the conventional notions of writing and reading, coining the unconventional term authoring, which would be characteristic solely for hyper-texts (Slatin, 1991: 160). Slatin also identifies three main types of hyper-textual readers: the browser (who wanders rather purposelessly, but still focused, within a hyper-textual area), the user (who has a precisely defined, often limited purpose of reading, looking for a specific information inside the hyper-text and leaving it as soon as he or she finds that information) and the co-author (who directly interferes with the hyper-text, inserting notes and comments and creating new links within the electronic document).

However, even the concept of authoring may prove unsatisfactory, for instance when applied to virtual storytelling. As Sandy Louchart and Ruth Aylett notice, authoring may have some limitations, as far as virtual narrative is concerned, since it represents just the author’s vision, in a way much too controlled: “Authoring, in storytelling terms, is stereotypically the representation of the author’s mind, the vision of one person. The author’s ability to create interesting stories. Characters and narrative events are coupled with control over the timing, order, rhythm and nature of the different story events and their display. The story, as witnessed by the spectator, is the procession of an appropriately orchestrated narrative vision for dramatic purposes.” (Louchart & Aylett, 2005: 152). The alternative would be the so-called “interactional” intervening user, a user who would be allowed to have more freedom of movement and choice inside the virtual storyspace, even if he or she simply play a role in the virtual scenario.

Despite all the theoretical opposition, one could still convincingly embrace the idea that traditional texts and hyper-texts have more than one feature in common. For example, when considering the essence of structural reading, the differences between the so-called “flatland fiction”[4] and hyper-fiction become indistinct. Pairing opposite terms, such as: linear/3-D, frozen/mobile, closed/open, centered/de-centered, restrictive/permissive, hierarchical/anti-hierarchical, may not prove so useful a perspective to draw, should we accept hyper-textuality as a virtual presence (or signature) of all traditional, “flatland” texts. As Jurgen Fauth points out, the result of a hyper-textual reading would by no means differ from the one involving a linear story, since the hyper-structure of the text (invisible to the reader) is displayed only to generate “multiple linear readings” (Fauth, 1995, on-line).

No matter which theoretical perspective we favored, the “entirely different” or the “very similar” textual and hyper-textual reading, participation seems the key word in both processes. In George P. Landow’s study, Electronic Conferences and Samizdat Textuality. The Example of Technoculture, the hyper-textual orientating paths which the reader has to follow are perceived as subject to creative work, inside a virtual map which undergoes constant changes during the reading process. Landow mentions the key role played by “active, even intrusive observers”, who do not simply choose one path or another within the hyper-document, but have the power to act as “producers” of the very text they read (Landow, 1993: 238). The same creative participation required from the reader of a hyper-text is noticed by Espen Aarseth. His cybertext or ergodic literature (terms used to describe a form of generative hyper-textuality) asks for active readers, who would add textual links or paths or create electronic notes which other readers could either follow, or develop. Ergodic texts[5] would be defined by the reader’s interactive, “nontrivial effort” of crossing over a hyper-text, and not simply moving their eyes and turning the pages of a traditional text (Aarseth, 1997: 1-2). However, it could be stated that our minds perform an ergodic reading also when reading printed texts, if we choose to change the color of a character’s clothes or the details of the scenery during a specific narrative time-frame. The mind not only chooses from different “hyper”-options, but also creates new narrative paths, according to its own freedom of imagination. If hyper-texts denote “an information medium that links verbal and non-verbal information” within a network of words and images (Landow, 2006: 3), then the mind always acts “hyper” when reading a text, irrespective of its nature.

Moreover, the “hyper” mechanisms of the mind seem to be as productive in traditional textual story generation, as in hyper-textual reading. For instance, due to their branching narratives, the “flatland” texts of fiction writers such as James Joyce, Michel Butor, Julio Cortázar or Jorge Luis Borges look very much “hyper” in structure[6]. At the same time, re-arranging segments of texts or changing the usual way of printing/reading a text, such as in the literary works of Tristan Tzara, E.E. Cummings, William Burroughs or Mircea Nedelciu may point to these authors as hyper-textual pioneers. In Mircea Nedelciu’s fiction book Efectul de ecou controlat (1981), the implicit hyper-textual feature of his “flatland” stories can be related to frequent spatial fractures inserted within the typographic text, which is constantly re-oriented, as if having a variable (hyper)textual geometry. In Nedelciu’s short story Claustrofobie, both the title (which is mentioned in a footnote) and a couple of paragraphs are either missing, or displaced, while the author, who interferes with his own narrative, urges the public to “fill in the blanks” and re-arrange the story according to his or her own choice (Nedelciu, 1981: 193). Another short story, Greva de zel, appears even more “hyper” in structuring: Nedelciu’s narrative is split into two vertical, parallel typographic columns, each representing a variant of the text (Nedelciu, 1981: 101); in digital terms, that would be the equivalent of a hyper-textual branching.

All these theoretical and literary examples testify to the fact that hyper-textual generation, processing and reading is not that different a process from traditional textual generation and reading. Although hyper-texts rely on software (while “flatland” texts do not), although they have electronic links and nodes (while “flatland” texts do not), the similarities between the two types of texts, as well as between the two kinds of writing and reading processes are considerably larger than the differences. Not only does the human mind perform similarly when generating or reading a text (be it traditionally printed, or “hyper”), but it also provides us with the same instruments of understanding how different texts are being structured. Such is the case with “traditional” literary theory instruments, as in Roland Barthes’ “réseaux” (1970) and Jacques Derrida’s “liaisons”, “toile”, “réseau” (1972), or with “new media” theory instruments, as in Espen Aarseth’s “ergodic” patterns (1997) and George Landow’s “hypertext 3.0” structures (2006). Text vs. hyper-text? As researchers from both sides recently started to point out, the distinction may soon prove irrelevant.

 

 

Works Cited. Fiction, Hyper-Fiction, Poetry

Bantock, Nick (1991) – Griffin & Sabine. An Extraordinary Correspondence, San Francisco: Chronicle Books

Bantock, Nick (1992) – Sabine’s Notebook, San Francisco: Chronicle Books

Bantock, Nick (1993) – The Golden Mean, San Francisco: Chronicle Books

Nedelciu, Mircea (1981) – Efectul de ecou controlat, Bucharest: Cartea Românească

Petrescu, Camil Patul lui Procust (1992) – Bucharest: Minerva [©1933]

Stănescu, Nichita (1979) – Operele imperfecte, Bucharest: Albatros

Stănescu, Nichita (1982) – Noduri şi semne, Bucharest: Cartea Românească

Joyce, Michael (1987) – Afternoon. A Story, Watertown: Eastgate Systems

 

Works Cited. Theory

Aarseth, Espen (1997) – Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP

Barrett, Edward (ed.), 1989 – The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia & the Social Construction of Information, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Barthes, Roland (1970) – S/Z, Paris: Seuil

Bolter, Jay David (1991) – Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum

Bush, Vannevar (1945) – As We May Think, in Atlantic Monthly, 176/July

Calleja, Gordon (2009) – Of Mirrors, Encyclopedias, and the Virtual, in Herbrechter & Callus (eds.), 2009

Delany, Paul; Landow, George P. (eds.), 1991 – Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press

Derrida, Jacques (1972) – La dissemination, Paris: Seuil

Dowson, Jane; Earnshaw, Steven (eds.), 1995 – Postmodern Subjects/Postmodern Texts. Postmodern Studies 13, Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi

Fauth, Jurgen (1995), on-line – Poles in Your Face: The Promises and Pitfalls of Hyperfiction, at http://sushi.st.usm.edu/mrw/06sept/06jurge.html

Genette, Gerard (1982) – Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil

Gilster, Paul (1997) – Digital Literacy, New York, Singapore, Toronto etc.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Harbrechter, Stefan; Callus, Ivan (2009) – Cy-Borges. Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges, Lewisburg: Bucknell UP

Landow, George P. (1993) Electronic Conferences and Samizdat Textuality. The Example of Technoculture, in Landow & Delany (eds.), 1993

Landow, George P.; Delany, Paul (eds.), 1993 – The Digital World: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press

Landow, George P. (2006) – Hypertext 3.0. Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP

Louchart, Sandy & Aylett, Ruth (2005) – Managing a Non-linear Scenario – A Narrative Evolution, in Subsol (ed.), 2005

Madsen, Deborah L. & Madsen, Mark S. (1995) – Hypertext and the Demise of the Metanarrative, in Dowson & Earnshaw (eds.), 1995

Mc Gann, Jerome (2001) – Radiant Textuality. Literature after the World Wide Web, New York: Palgrave

Nelson, Theodor Holm (1981) – Literary Machines: The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow’s intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom (1981), Sausalito, California: Mindful Press

Nielsen, Jacob (1993) – Hypertext and Hypermedia, Boston, San Diego, New York etc.: Academic Press Professional, Harcourt Brace & Company Publishers

Porush, David (1989) – Cybernetic Fiction and Postmodern Science, in New Literary History, nr. 20

Rouet, Jean François & Levonen, Jarmo J. (1996) – Studying and Learning with Hypertext, in Rouet, Levonen, Dillon, Spiro (eds.), 1996

Rouet, Jean François; Levonen, Jarmo J.; Dillon, Andrew; Spiro, Randy J. (eds.), 1996 – Hypertext and Cognition, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers

Shneiderman, Ben (1989) – Reflections on Authoring, Editing and Managing Hypertext, in Barrett (ed.), 1989

Slatin, John (1991) – Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium, in Delany & Landow (eds.), 1991

Subsol, Gérard (ed.), 2005 – Virtual Storytelling. Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag

Vandendorpe, Christian (1999) – Du papyrus à l’hypertexte. Essai sur les mutations du texte et de la lecture, Cap-Saint Ignace: Boréal

 

 

Notes