The Space Between

Bookishness

Another reason why hypertext languages have thus far focused on appearances is that hypertext is inescapably bound to its print roots. Jerome McGann, as well as other critics like Brian Clark, says this condition is unavoidable because of print culture’s massive influence over every form of the “literary.” No matter what technologies develop to work with texts, “the literature we inherit (to this day) is and will always be bookish.” In other words, electronic forms of text will always be compared to print because print is second nature to literate cultures. The real advance, he writes in “The Rationale of Hypertext,” is that “we no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts” (McGann). And it is this development has threatens to topple centuries of traditional print criticism, in the forms of critical editions, facsimiles, and annotated editions.

Researching with a hypertext, provided the coding language would work with a humanities approach, as discussed above, would relieve scholars of the often difficult-to-use print editions of critical works and their innate limitations. For example, four editions of Hamlet may contain four versions of the play, all with different glosses. The researcher who wants to write expertly about the play must search through multiple volumes and wade through subtle differences in wording in the print copies. According to McGann, this is the curse of analyzing books with more books. Though printers and authors have developed conventions to force this medium to work for analysis, that analysis will always be limited by the medium. Compared to that model, a hypertext is liberating. Staying with the Hamlet example, this means that if a reader wanted to hear the song Ophelia sings after her father’s murder, the print reader would be out of luck. An electronic edition, though, could play the song. This is of course, one example, but it is an example that shows how multiple media can be merged into one hypertext document. And remember all those versions of Hamlet that might be in print? An ideal research hypertext would contain all of them at the same time, perhaps allowing its user to view them side-by-side or in some other useful way.

Despite the possibilities, electronic texts remain prisoners to the heritage of print. In “Epistemology and the Metaphor of the Book,” Gabor Forrai explains that it is the obsession with linear order that binds hypertext. McGann’s argument that books cannot be well used to analyze other books is what Forrai calls “linear justification.” He writes, “If A figures into the justification of B, B cannot figure into the justification of A” (218). In essence, Forrai is reminding us that a term cannot be used in its own definitions. Print’s linear, logical hierarchy of terms and ideas makes that kind of circular logic impossible. While it may have been acceptable for ancient philosophers to circle back upon their previous points as a rhetorical strategy, the print-minded reader sees this as an endless chain. They think it must either go on forever or terminate at some claim that “need not be justified in terms of other claims” (Forrai 218)—absolute truth, in other words, the transcendental signified. The permanence associated with print is often to blame for the death of this kind of rhetoric: “A book is something that lasts,” Forrai writes. “It is not something that can be rewritten and rewritten again, any time one finds mistakes” (220).

A hypertext, on the other hand, can be corrected “on the fly” and can distinguish editions, displaying them in such a way that they need not be organized “in relation to a central document, or some idea reconstruction generated from different documents” (McGann). One translation of a Derrida essay, for example, does not have to be the focus of a hypertextual critical edition. Electronic text’s extensible structure infinitely accommodates different linkages and points of view, allowing more freedom in reading and interpretation simply by making more material available for anaysis. At the same time, electronic editions “preserve the authority of all the units that comprise its documentary arrays” (McGann). No one text is the center of the hypertext, and all the ingredients flavor the soup without overpowering each other. The reader chooses what is most useful for a particular reading and proceeds through them. The reading of a hypertext is a contextual process that carries the reader through the reading session as if on a wave of discovery. As McGann writes, the entire process “encourages decentralization.”

Nine years after McGann published his rationale, hypertext critic Stuart Moulthrop presented his paper “What the Geeks Know” at the 2005 ACM Hypertext Conference. In that paper, Moulthrop echoes a consensus among hypertext theorists. Hypertext cannot be associated with older forms of literature, not in their shape and form or in they manner they are read. Instead, it must become “the basis for a new version of general literacy” (Moulthrop “What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy” 227) that recognizes its media-specific features.

Moulthrop divides the history of the Web into three phases: development, popularization, and now (“What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy” 227). Texts generated in the now he calls “third wave” hypertexts, and these hold the potential to rescue the notion of hypertext from the realm of theory and deliver it to the “realm of practical implementation” (“What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy” 229). He is not interested, for example, in some of the claims that hypertext is deconstruction in action. Rather, Moulthrop wonders what all this looks like when it has to be coded into a computer-readable language.