Felix Nicolau
Hyperion University, Bucharest, Romania
felix_nicus@yahoo.com
The Jumpiness of Hyperliterature
Abstract: Hyperliterature is a creative modality already pushing out a second wave of writers and theorists. The non-linear narration and the multi-layered plot exclude the syntagmatic, completely sensuous reading. The new type of reading will be a jumpy one, devious and unpredictable as long as any reader is able to customize their narrative itinerary. The implicit risk is that the profane reader, deprived of the necessary training for approaching an arborescent reading, should choose the plain, non-heuristic trajectory – the one named by Jonathan Carr “the low bandwidth literature”. Assuming the risk or not, interactivity is the only way for the written message to survive in the epoch of the audio-visual.
Keywords: Postmodernism; Interactivity; Hyperliterature; Scripton; Texton; Canon.
Since the publication in 1981 of Theodore “Ted” Nelson’s book Literary Machines, we have got used with the terms hypertext and hypermedia. Of course, those literary machines were the computers and they were supposed “to make possible a new unified electronic literature” (Koskimaa, 2) with the help of a special programme named Xanadu. According to Ted Nelson, hypertext is a “non-sequential writing-text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (in Koskimaa, 3). The point was to create interactive and non-linear fictive texts, able to empower the readers to create their own way of approaching a literary work. Now we have to pay attention – it’s about fictive texts, a thing which restates the illogical, that is the free and open nature of literature.
The first hypertext fictions appeared in the early eighties, the series being inaugurated by Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. A Story (1987). This one firstly benefited from a commercial distribution. Hyperliterature was in a certain way a sequel to poststructuralist principles and was possible only with the emergence of computers. It is no more about chronology, space contiguity and a sequential plot built on chapters. Now the text is “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible” (Koskimaa, 6). Like with the history of philosophy, we can start with the end and finish with the beginning. But what is the use of speaking in conventional bourgeois terms like: introduction, unique author, the constructed identity of characters, plot, climax, epilogue and so on? The question arises: does hyperliterature belong to postmodernism or is it a conclusion of the latter? Linda Hutcheon wrote it explicitly: “certainty becomes undecidability; control and identity make room to contradiction and to a move toward antitotalization” (41-2). Now if postmodernism is mainly about borrowing characters and creating a “transworld identity” (McHale, 58) which is supposed to be parodied afterwards, hyperliterature is about setting freer the act of reading. The reader can access the chapters-folders in the order they want. For instance, what was for Barthes a simple text, for Nelson became a docuverse, which is the sum of all documents existing in the global network. Of course, globalization is the first concept to be coined here. But wasn’t this the case with textualism? Didn’t it envisage the universe being compounded of texts able to self-generate? Wasn’t the later stage of textualism preoccupied with the communication that replaced the classical roles of author – reader? At a certain point, the death of the author had been declared, then the tables turned and the author rose from the dead. It was the reader’s turn to die. But this disappearance was immediately followed by the resurrection of the reader as an author. This was the later textualist communication about: nobody actually reads anymore, but everybody writes. Irrespective of the media used, all the people are absorbed into a process of generating texts. The question of aesthetic value is useless at this point.
The advantages of being limited
Hyperliterature bridged this gap: the reader is invited to become an author. Not necessarily through writing, but through taking an active part in combining the written material. The problem is that the academic definition of literature clings to form and format, rejecting senselessly other ways of laying out the content of a literary work. Then what is it to say about SMS poetry, a species which has already triggered plenty of enthusiasm? How could a classical critic approach a poem like this: “14:/a txt msg pom./his is r bunsn brnr b1%,/his hair lyk fe filings /w/ac/dc going thru./I sit by him in kemistry,/it splits my @ oms/wen he :-)s @ me” (http://rawsocket.org/rtfm/arquivos/2001_06_01_arquivo.html). Accessed the 29th of November 2010)? Thus, the new types of media involve different types of hurdles to jump over. In this respect, Elisa Batista posted the article Don’t Go Gently into That SMS in Wired News: “The limitations are the best things about it. Having rules and barriers to overcome is very liberating for creativity. Creation becomes a game, a test of ingenuity. How can I fit this into 160 characters? That leads to much better poetry than the freedom to express deep thoughts on deep subjects at great length” (in Koskimaa, 8). As one can notice, the principle is exactly the same as with the one involved in elaborating the rules concerning the classical theatre.
As mobile phones have become live books, hyperliterature is baptized by Espen Aarseth “ergodic literature”. In the new type of literature “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (in Koskimaa, 8). In his opinion, hypertext is a static structure. There is mutability in scriptons (from one reading to another), but the textons and their relations (the links) are immutable. In Brian McHale’s words, the text is consolidated into a “super-text” (57). One way or another, Mikhael Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and heteroglossia are validated by hyperliterature too.
The most organized disorder
George P. Landow wrote about the rhetorics of hypertext and dwelled upon the close relationship between hypertext writing and deconstructionist ideas, mainly upon the way in which the reader becomes an author. This is clearly possible only through interpreting the form, with the specific meaning of reorganizing it. Working on form has an obvious impact on content. One could argue that the reader becomes an author by sheer imitation. But this counter-argument brings to my mind a quotation from Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde: “Imitation changes, not the impersonator but the impersonated” (24). Isn’t this close to the Victorian situation, when Ch. Dickens was planning his serials depending on the readers’ preferences? Giving her/his readers the freedom to shuffle fragments, the author offers them a partnership. Maybe this is the only way out for literature, the only solution left for the artistic writing to survive in a world where everything is about advantages and entertainment. The slogan goes for it: Screening is way up!
Because I was speaking earlier about the variants and invariants in hyperliterature, I should mention the example of B. S. Johnson who, in The Unfortunates (1969) used loose pages that were to be shuffled and read in random order. That way each leaf became a texton and the orders in which they happened to be read were scriptons. Noticeable are the non-finite nature of the work and its inherent non-linearity. This apparent disorder and the chance for the reader to turn into a reader-as-author stir academic dissatisfaction, as regarding futile genres and species. There comes, then, the anti-technique argument. But, paradoxically, hypertext isn’t a format pertaining exclusively to digital media. Appeal is made to Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”), which some claim he considered his best work.
Another instance in case is Paul Ford’s Ftrain that contains thousands of links, references and content from other texts. Every item in this scaffold can be remixed, linked to, or copied in what could be called a derivative work.
What about the canon?
Staying within the borders of the field, Nora Boyle enlarged upon the subject of digital literature, which is mainly about hypertext (HTML). She invoked Einstein’s theory of relativity, namely that time can move backwards and forwards. Consequently, her tone got inflamed or intelligently ticklish: “With the advent of the Digerati, or the ‘online’ cyber writers, everyone is publishing. The bluestockings ladies of yesteryear are today’s cybergirls, and a ‘man of letters’ transmutes into ‘webmaster’ or ‘online editor’. […] The mouse is mightier than the sword. The postmodern writer no longer writes, he transmits” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/15595903/Digital-Literature, accessed at 26th of October, 2010). Then the question in this “speed-of-light information age” is: TO BE or Not to BE Digital?
What will happen to the canon? Undisputedly, it will have to digest the new literary formulae. It is not a problem of IF, but of WHEN. In 2005, the Dutch government established the Committee for the Development of the Dutch Canon, with the specific recommendation to conceive a canon for all Dutch’ people (see the website of the Dutch Canon: http://entoen.nu/informatie.aspx?id=5&lan=e). Isn’t this a hint that the intellectuals’ communities tend to establish the canon after their high-brow modernist criteria? Already Marshall McLuhan in Understanding media (1964) prophesized the emergence of a “global village”, functioning with the help of media innovations. After all, in this village literature is a Second Life-like system, more real than the “First Life”. As McLuhan put it: “the new media are not ways of relating us to the old ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will” (272). The good piece of news is that in this cybersociety the reader is more involved in creating the final text too. Naturally, the concern for the reader’s qualification regarding the status of a self-aware author pops up.
The literature at stake
It is possible that we should head for a “low bandwidth” literature, as Jonathan Carr, the editor of Magazine Minima, described it. With this occasion, we have to understand that the medium is no longer a container for the content, but that they got intertwined. Hyperliterature is not only about shuffling chapters or pages, but also about backing up the written content with sound and image. The definition of hyperfiction in Wikipedia goes like this: “Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion rearranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories” (Accessed the 1st of December 2010). And this is actually the condition of originality – reshaping older stuff in order to obtain new things. Peter Ackroyd formulated it precisely: “originality consists in forming new and happy combinations rather than searching after thoughts and ideas which have never occurred before” (Chatterton, 29). Aristotle’s theory also went in this direction: extracting the act from potentiality, the latter being the vast deposit of previously accomplished creation – in our case. But reference could be made as well to Baudrillard’s interpretation of postmodern culture as a simulacrum, that is a copy which doesn’t possess an original. In hyperliterature, the original is very fluid and can engender numerous copies, which actually are derivate originals.
Another connection with postmodernism is the adjacent intertextuality. The cybertext theory considers that all texts are machines fit to perform some functions. In this context, intertextuality becomes interactivity. An example of this kind is Markku Eskelinen’s Interface (1997), a three-phased work started as a novel and evolving afterwards on the internet, in an equation author’s input-reader’s feedback.
Make it interactive
Interactivity can combine with kinetic techniques, like in Jim Rosenberg’s Intergrams (1997), where simultaneities (the layers of text are juxtaposed so that by moving the cursor, single layers can be read) protrude into a syntax externalised to graphic symbols which weld fragments of text. In Robert Kendall”s poem A Life Set for Two (1996), the reader has the possibility to select the atmosphere of the text from a menu. Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. A Story (1997), the first hypertext novel, is a hypertext story consisting of 539 lexias and 951 links connecting them, which makes possible several ways of reading (different set of lexias, in different orders). Such a system engenders quite different stories, or a frame-story embracing the readers’ stories. This process has already been coined as humanistic computing and is a testimony of the digital text dynamics. An acronym was created to give evidence for all these – MUD, meaning multi user domain.
Famous writers contributed some of their works to this challenge of crossing traditional literary boundaries. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire opens with a Foreword, and then the poem Pale Fire follows, the rest consisting of extensive commentary and Index. The reader can study and interpret these four sections in optional orders. Rayuela by Julio Cortázar has 155 chapters. The author proposes a certain order of reading them in the beginning, but the reader may skip this guideline and find other paths across the story.
These are a few elementary data about a type of literature which for sure will be the winner in the near future. And about which we know almost nothing. Because we are sluggish and, as a rule, we hate to be stirred, to be valued as anti-routine human beings.
Works cited:
Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. 1987. London. Hamish Hamilton..
Ackroyd, Peter. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. 1983. London. Hamish Hamilton.
Bakhtin, M. Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. 1981, Editor Michel Holquist, Trans, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 15th edition, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. 1988. New York and London. Routledge.
Koskimaa, Raine. DIGITAL LITERATURE. From Text to Hypertext and Beyond. http://users.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/thesis.shtml. Accessed June the 13th 2010.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. London and New York: Methuen.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. New York: McGraw Hill.
Vianu, Lidia, coordinator, The Critic’s Light. The Moment after Clarity Is Night. 2007. Ed. Universităţii din Bucureşti.