Hypertext has often been compared to modern and postmodern theories of language: Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of language as an arbitrary system of signs that have meaning only in their relation to and difference from each other; Jacques Derrida’s development and reworking of de Saussure’s theories, such as in his ideas of the trace and of the deferral of meaning; and intertextuality, which, as developed by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, is “the practice of integrating a variety of foreign discourses within a text through such mechanisms as quotation, commentary, parody, allusion, imitation, ironic transformation, rewrites, and decontextualizing/recontextualizing operations” (Ryan, 6-7). Each of these theories shares with hypertext a focus on connections, on links: the network as a structure of meaning.

Marie-Laure Ryan finds the similarity of hypertext and semiotics in terms of “a Saussurian conception of language in which signs acquire their meaning not from vertical relations with objects in the world but from horizontal relations with other signs”:

The literary text, like language itself, is a self-enclosed, self-regulating system in which meaning is determined by a strategic configuration of elements. . . . Meaning is not a preformed representation encoded in words and in need of decipherment but something that emerges out of the text in unpredictable patterns as the reader follows trails of associative connotations or attends to the resonance of words and images with the private contents of memory. This operation is like following links on the Internet: surfing the surface, remaining in perpetual motion. (Ryan, 193)

Saussure emphasizes the contingency of meaning; the relationship between signified and signifier is not fixed, but instead arises out of the interaction of signs across the system. The Textual Tesseract reifies one implication of this theory in its making explicit the links between different uses of a word; the act of mapping hypertext over the literary text in this manner also maps some of the connections implicit in how words have meaning. This semantic system is, of course, much more complex than that, for a word’s meaning is not only determined by the sum of its possible contexts, but also by its difference from other words in the language. This project focuses instead on the more subtle differences inherent in the word itself; the distinction between “hot” and “cold” may be easily discerned, but that between “She walks in beauty” and “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not as immediately obvious. As Umberto Eco writes, “the classical notion of a ‘sign’ dissolves itself into a highly complex network of changing relationships” (Eco, 48); this project reveals the sign as a node between the intertwined networks of language in the abstract (potentiality in the system as a whole) and language in usage (actuality, whether in a particular text or in a particular reader’s experience) through the interposition of a third network, that of hypertext.

Jacques Derrida draws upon Saussure’s conception of language in his idea of text as “a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far” (Derrida 1979, 84). As a manifestation of language, the text cannot be a self-contained entity, but rather is a system of relations in the context of a larger network. The Textual Tesseract suggests that this referentiality acts like ripples in a multidimensional pond, in circles of decreasing intensity along multiple axes: the other nodes in the network of most relevance to a particular text are those that are closest to it in authorship, time, place, style, theme, reading experience, or any other relational criteria. This project attempts to map a subset of the infinitely complex textual network, not to exhaust its possibilities, but rather to utilize the capabilities of hypertext to make visible – experiential in time and space – intertextuality at its most basic level, that of the word.

Derrida’s substitution of “trace” for “sign” prefigures the discourse of fragment/whole in discussions of hypertextuality. A trace is a remnant of something that once was there, but is no longer: an imprint of a lost object, a marker of both absence and one-time presence. Similiarly, the depiction of lexia as “fragments” suggests that the hypertext as it is read is a succession of pieces from a lost whole, registering a phantom narrative that is simultaneously present and absent, evoked by these fragments but not able to be entirely reconstructed from them (and, since the fragments are the work, a narrative that never existed as a whole in the first place). The trace constantly refers to what is not there, deferring meaning to something outside itself, on the edge of knowledge but still unknown; as in aporia, the (de)construction of meaning is dependent upon an awareness of its absence. While The Textual Tesseract does not create the puzzle-solver’s urgency to find the missing piece that provides closure to the story, it does create an aporic absence through its very aggregation of possibilities. The more instances of a particular word one encounters, the more one becomes aware of the semantic multiplicity of that word, as well as of the potential meanings that are effaced or ignored in any particular textual manifestation, yet are linked (both metaphorically and literally in this case) through the word-trace.

Intertextuality moves beyond the language network to that of discourse, and focuses on how different discourses are referred to within a text, as internal rather than external influences. It is as if the node no longer simply connects to others via the network, but also absorbs other nodes into itself, transforming them in the process. Hypertext’s dual use of the word both as unit of discourse and as link registers this overlap: “Not only can one passage in an electronic text refer to another, but the text can bend so that any two passages touch, displaying themselves contiguously to the reader. Not only can one text allude to another, but the one text can penetrate the other and become a visual intertext before the reader’s eyes” (Bolter, 178). This interpenetration via the link enables the reader to see the commonalities among texts, and to follow these interpolations and shared forms across usages.

The interdependence of the language network (linguistics) and the discourse network (literature/text) means that intertextuality transcends literary allusiveness: “Intertextuality is more than the references within a text and allusions between texts that are common in literature; it is the interrelation of all texts on the same topic, language, or culture” (Bolter, 179). Thus intertextuality is not only the result of conscious or unconscious connection-making on the part of the writer, but also of the reader. The intertextual network can function in many different ways: as a shared universe of story or mythology (as in the ancient Greek oral bards [Bolter, 106] or contemporary fan fiction); as a theoretical approach (reading texts from a perspective based in Freud or Marx); or as an aesthetic ideology (the Romantics, the Surrealists, the Neoclassicists). The diversity of these ways of reading and writing, and their flexibility, demonstrate that, while intertextuality is founded on the text, it is not a static quality of it, but rather is dependent upon the act of interpretation.

In this transfer of the site upon which intertextuality is enacted from the text to the reader (or the reading writer), the concept is problematized, for the reader is far from a tabula rasa. As Roland Barthes points out, “I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text. . . . This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origins are lost)” (Barthes 1974, 10). The reader is a unique palimpsest on which texts are blurred and mingled, setting up the conditions for a complex and unpredictable set of resonances (to shamelessly mix metaphors). The Textual Tesseract does not attempt to model these resonances, but rather to highlight a simplified version of their parallels at the level of the text by the creation of juxtapositions across texts, determined by the texts themselves rather than the vagaries of the reading mind.

These juxtapositions multiply contextualization, which, as J. Yellowlees Douglas points out, plays a determinant role in resonant reading:

When I read a word or phrase in the context of a compound-complex sentence, a sequence involving causation, or a novel with clearly defined characters and motifs, my concept of the connotative meaning of the word or phrase is sufficiently constrained to keep me from construing them in a far-out way. When, however, you ask me to relate my feelings about the word war, or pink, or hatred, the words tend to become something of a Rorschach text, prompting what can be a whole flood of associations, many of them totally unrelated to their immediate context in the narrative. (Douglas, 75)

The Textual Tesseract increases the flow without opening the floodgates, expanding context without rendering it entirely indeterminate. In doing so it alters and adds to the resonating range of the word, causing it to create different resonances in the reader, though without precisely defining what those differences will be. Indeed, the random function of the links means that the contexts they create are always shifting, always unforeseen. No effort is made to direct the reader’s associations, other than calling attention to the word as lexical unit and providing the overarching context of Romantic poetry. The Textual Tesseract facilitates intertextual wanderings without attempting the impossible task of charting all the possible paths that may result, for they extend beyond Romanticism, beyond poetry, and beyond text.

















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