The Space Between

Rhetoric of Departure

As we have seen, hypertext—like all forms of writing—is a site of conflict between authors and readers. What is at stake in that conflict is the meaning that will be taken from the reading. In hypertext, the conflict stems from nonlinearity. Someone reading a hypertext version of this thesis, for example, would see one word in this sentence underlined or somehow else made distinct from its context. But clicking on that word with the mouse pointer, the text on the screen would be replaced with something probably related to that distinct word, perhaps other relevant information or a definition. Many critics see this instantaneous and metaphorical transportation as the most important part of hypertext.

George Landow, perhaps the most published hypertext critic, discusses the Web’s universality. Landow writes that, on the Web “the borders and limits of these hypertext documents, their edges, as it were, clearly have to be understood only as fictions, as agreed upon conventions” (H/T/T 148). The defining characteristic of hypertext for Landow is its ability to cross textual borders. For example, computers often use a folder structure that gives users a sense of organization and hierarchy, but hypertext frees users from that sort of system and reinforces the notion that computer hierarchies are optional. Though the reader might read one lexia in a conventional manner, “once one leaves the shadowy bounds of any text unit, new rules and new experience apply” (H/T/T 148).

Hypertext “permits one to make explicit, though not necessarily intrusive, the linked materials that an educated reader perceived surrounding it” (Landow H-T 2.0 35). In other words, hypertext does not distract readers from their readings. In fact, distraction must be redefined, since hypertexts de-center what would have been the principal text. Material that would once have been deemed less important by the reader is put on equal footing with the principal lexia. The electronically linked text exists “as part of a much larger system in which the totality might count more than the individual document” (Landow H-T 2.0 35). Instead of disrupting a reading, hypertexts provide contexts that the reader already knew were there, context she half-expected anyhow.

The chief difference between the electronic link and the printed notation is space. With a footnote, the point of departure from the reading experience is marked with a superscript or asterisk or other small, relatively unobtrusive glyph, as I use superscript numbers in this thesis. This tells the reader that she should look for a corresponding symbol at the bottom of a particular page or at the end of a chapter, at some point that is separated from where the eye was focused. The space the eyes or fingers must cross makes it unlikely that most readers will visit the footnote or endnote. The extra physical action draws the reader’s attention even further from the line of thought they may have been following in the main body of the text. It is a subtle reminder that it is not the reader’s line of thinking that is important; it is the author’s.

The shift from footnotes to electronic links threatens the intellectual domain of the author by blurring the boundaries of texts and reconfiguring “our experience of both author and authorial property,” by reducing “the hierarchical separation between the so-called main text and the annotations, which now exist as independent texts” (Landow H-T 2.0 25). By presenting the reader with options and context, hypertext disallows a “tyrannical, univocal voice” that speaks to the reader from a position of authority. Instead, Landow writes, the voice of the hypertext is “distilled from the combined experience of the momentary focus” (H-T 2.0 36). This is especially evident when hypertext is compared to the world of print. Instead of relying on the authorial voice, the reader must use the mutivocality she is presented with to perform the act of interpretation at the site of reading.

One of Landow’s most important points is that, despite all the material that can be included in a hypertextual web, there can never be a complete version or final word. When works traditionally thought of as complete are converted into hypertextual formats, they instantly become incomplete (H-T 2.0 79) because hypertext’s links make a text “always open, borderless, unfinished and unfinishable, capable of infinite extension” (H-T 2.0 175). This could be a detriment to the reader, who is caught in what Landow calls a “rhetoric of departure” (H-T 2.0 175), a rhetoric full of comings and goings where the reader can never finish a single text because of hypertext’s multiplicity. Stuart Moulthrop put it another way, saying “links tend to dislocate even as they connect” (“Pushing Back” 662).

But this expansive nature of texts is not a new idea. Jay David Bolter writes that it was print and not hypertext that originally “made textual overload a permanent condition” (Writing Space 90). By textual overload, he means that sensation that there is far more to read than there is time to read it, to be overwhelmed by the number of connections and interpenetrations between texts. To avoid the negative consequences of Landow’s rhetoric of departure and textual overload, Bolter argues that readers must be welcomed into a hypertext and situated at their arrival point or points. They cannot, he says, move throughout a hypertext without some sense of context because they already “must decipher the system as they read” (Writing Space 61).