Is it
really literarily "new"?
Cyberspace is certainly new,
the computer era is certainly new, the entire medium is certainly new. But is
the emerging literature being created with the new medium's hypertextuality
"new?"
By definition, hypertextual writing inspires a non-linear narrative technique, a
technique in itself that isn't literarily new. Novelists and poets have long
experimented with ways of conquering the normal demands of narrative, from
structure to marginalia and footnotes, writers such as Laurence Sterne, James
Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Cervantes, not to
mention T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs and even William Gibson. "The structural
interest offered by hypertext is as yet nothing dramatically different from what
writers have been doing throughout the last century," believes critic Carrie
McMillan.
In fact, a case can be made for the nonlinear, fragmented roots of hypertext to
go back much further than that. Even before Gutenberg, texts were often
collections of scrolls, sorted in no fixed sequence. Non-linear is the structure
of The Book as it's called in cybertheory circles—the Bible—whose structure
pioneered the idea of what makes all books, since Gutenberg's printing of the
King James Version of it. Maybe the most famous example in our literature of a
single story told in a nonlinear fashion is the Bible's story of Jesus, points
out critic Edward Picot "The Gospels tell the story of Jesus from four different
viewpoints, sometimes with quite substantial differences of style, detail and
chronological sequence...They do not have the same unity as a conventional
linear narrative: they have a different kind of unity instead, more ambiguous,
more fragmented, and more challenging to the reader."
Does cyber-hypertexuality, then, offer anything unique, though, for the aspiring
creative cyberwriter?
In "The End of the Book" Robert Coover says yes: "True freedom from the
tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the
advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact
does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text."
Cybertheorist Paul Delaney says yes and no:
Hypertext can create a kind of 'zero degree' narrative, entirely liberated
from the sequential imperatives of a standard plot. But does this achieve any
more than those books of the 1960s that were issued unbound, so that the pages
could be shuffled and read in any order?
Poet Jorge Luiz Antonio says yes. In fact, he believes the "vehicle" on which a cyberwork is read alone forces any reading of literature to be classified as "new": The use of a computer, even if we are reading a piece of traditional literature such as a sonnet, implies a mediation which alters the final product. Access to poetry through a machine is totally different from opening a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or a copybook. The computer re-makes the text.
Might future technology make a difference? Probably not. The task facing cyberwriters, as the Electronic Labyrinth theorists pose it. is the "necessity of making language and its increasingly outdated technical modes live again": "No amount of RAM will, in itself, make a work succeed, but Marshall McLuhan reminds us, the "medium is the message." Writers working in a new medium, no doubt, will find new messages and new ways of refashioning the old ones.