The Space Between

The End

Johnson-Eilola and Hea warn that we should never try “writing the history of hypertext as if it has a beginning or an ending” (423). The medium’s built-in characteristics push it toward a never-ending chain of signification, an infinite text with uncounted possibilities. Yet, as Glazier argues, that system cannot work perfectly if it will be a hypertext. If all points of it are equally accessible and readable, it is at heart no different than print. Ironically, the idea of an infinite hypertext actually limits that hypertext. The ambivalent nature of hypertext makes it, as Jerome McGann writes, similar to “that fabulous circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (McGann). So rather than define what hypertext is, which Noah Wardrip-Fruin showed is a nearly impossible task, it is easier to define what hypertext (and in a wider sense, hypermedia) does.

There is little question that computers and networking technologies have changed the way the world works. Without delving back into the economics of access and the digital divide, I will say that the Web has altered how many people around the world live their lives—despite the theories of critics like Theodore Roszak who attempt to deconstruct our “need” for computers and the Internet. Not only has it profoundly impacted everyday life, but hypertext has also given literary theorists new ways to look at the media and institutions we once took for granted.

All of the arts, Northrop Frye argues in The Educated Imagination, are based on simple divisions. In his book, he imagines a person stranded on a deserted island. That person makes simple distinctions, Frye says, between himself and the world around him. As time goes on, the castaway makes further distinctions between himself, the natural world, and things that might be useful to his budding society. The castaway forges his closest relationship with those things he can use, but he never forgets the natural world that once threatened his existence. Art, Frye writes, is an attempt to bridge that gap, to once again become part of the world that he came from. All the myths and stories common to a society are derived from this initial separation.

Writing too is based on separation, the separation from the person and the creative power of the author. The nature of that relationship is defined in this case by the medium through which the relationship is conducted: writing. Writing perpetuates the separation by transmitting language over distance and time. The author does not have to be present for her words to be read and understood. The silent page of printed or written text has replaced the intimacy of listening to a pre-literate bard or storyteller.

The benefit of writing—after its mechanization—was, of course, reproducibility. A printed text can be disseminated for more efficiently than an oration. Writing also leaves a record, upon which scholars of later eras can build their own ideas. In that way, writing provided the scaffolding for modern scholarship, even for the modern definition of humanity if you believe Harold Bloom’s ideas about Shakespeare. Yet that authorial distance, a boon for so many years, slowly became a detriment to underprivileged voices that could not afford to put their words into print. The space that served scholarship and science, and through them the rest of humanity, for centuries began to divide the author and reader even further as economics and politics began to play a larger role in worldwide practices of reading and writing.

An overabundance of similar voices in print combined with advances in political thinking in the 1800s and 1900s to create resistance. In literature, which we are primarily concerned with here, that resistance surfaced in literary theory—a self-aware rereading of the texts that brought them into question. This came to a head around the middle twentieth century with the rise of poststructuralism and then deconstruction. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and others started to question the author/reader hierarchy. The space between the author and reader was reconceived as a social construction, a product of the Romantic Period. Those critics saw that the space between them was false; writers were just readers in disguise, and readers could be writers with the right access.

That access is at stake here. Hypertext and hypermedia technologies, pioneered in the 1960s and popularized in the 1990s, provided the tools for readers to take an active role in the creation of the textual world. The software and hardware advances that have come either to create hypertext or to serve hypertext have given average people the chance to publish their writing to an immense audience; and unlike print, which sets its words as if in stone, hypertext and hypermedia allow for free play (the heart of Derrida’s view of deconstruction). Unlike the line-for-line and word-for-word reproduction print offers, hypermedia allows its users to more easily create derivative works, sometimes to such a degree that the original work is lost, decontextualized out of existence.

The practical result is that more voices are heard/read by more people, which ideally creates a more democratic world—though economics still plays a factor in access. The theoretical implications are that hypertext and hypermedia, employed with networking technologies, especially via modern Web 2.0, applications, have closed the author/reader gap.

What comes next? That’s the biggest question of all. One example might be the novel writing project that Penguin Publishing and De Montfort University embarked on in early 2007. The project is called “A Million Penguins.” The designers are hoping to find out whether the venerable novel can survive the “crowdsourcing” phenomenon that has made Wikipedia such a success. Any visitor to the novel’s site can edit or rewrite a part of the novel, having agreed to follow Penguin’s rules of etiquette of course. The question is whether “small pieces loosely joined” can result in a complete, coherent novel with a believable narrative voice and, most importantly, a lack of ego from its authors. The site’s information page says, “We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. As James Joyce memorably put it, the artist forges in the ‘smithy of [his] soul’” (“About”). Will “A Million Penguins” reveal a new form of the novel?

Will you help reveal it?