Jay David Bolter compares the current state of hypertext literature to that of print incunabula (Bolter, 7-8), when the medium was still brand-new and its range of possibilities mostly uncharted. Because the idea of electronic hypertext literature is still developing (it is, after all, a few decades old at most), it is necessary to remember that what has been done thus far is by no means what could be done by future hypertext authors, who may move in directions scarcely even glimpsed at the present moment.
That said, perceptions of what hypertext literature is have been strongly influenced by what may be seen as the form’s founding text, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, created using the Storyspace software and first published in 1987. In this text, one could navigate both through links, which were unmarked words in the text, or through a “default” option, which would simply propel one forward along an author-designated path through the text up to a certain point. This work also made use of guard fields, by which the reader had to cycle through certain lexia a certain number of times before being able to proceed any farther into the story. (For a detailed reading of Afternoon, see Douglas, 97-106).
Because of the labyrinthine nature of the navigational scheme (the software does not allow one to view a map of the entire network), frustration becomes a major part of the reading experience. Part of this response is endemic to the limited agency allowed by most hypertext fictions, in that the reader can make choices but cannot tell in advance what the potential consequences of those choices are. Such texts demolish unilinear structure without providing the reader with the tools and information necessary to build her own structure as desired. According to Janet Murray, this does not “privilege” the reader, but rather “confusion itself”: “The indeterminate structure of these hypertexts frustrates our desire for narrational agency, for using the act of navigation to unfold a story that flows from our own meaningful choices” (Murray, 133). The reader is caught between fate and free will, with her path neither entirely determined by an omnipotent author nor entirely dependent upon her own conscious choices.
This inability to chart a course through the text leads to what Espen Aarseth calls “aporia,” a constant reminder of “inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed” (Aarseth, 33). Of Afternoon, Aarseth writes, “the hypertext aporia prevents us from making sense of the whole because we may not have access to a particular part” (Aarseth, 91); that is, one has a sense of absent meaning, of the inaccessible lexia that would provide the perspective from which the entire textual edifice would resolve itself into a comprehensible shape. In a Derridean move, meaning in the hypertext is continually evoked and continually deferred; the available fragments cannot be restored to a coherent whole. This denial of a sense of completion means that one does not achieve closure by “finishing” the text, because there is no finish line; “closure” becomes nearly synonymous with “exhaustion” (Murray, 174), as the reader may feel finished with the text long before all possible paths, or even all possible lexia, have been uncovered.
This metaphor of fragmentation becomes literal in another, non-electronic, work that is often grouped with hypertext fiction, and which shares superficial similarity to The Textual Tesseract: Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1961). This piece consists of a collection of unnumbered pages, rather larger in size than a deck of cards, on which sentences from a story (or stories) are printed. The reader can shuffle the cards and read the resulting random order, or attempt to construct a narrative from the available fragments. Unlike The Textual Tesseract, however, the suggestion of a throughgoing plotline, albeit elliptical and disordered, shapes the reader’s approach to the text, as the story is the lost structure to be imagined from the surviving ruins of text. (For further discussion of Composition No. 1, see Douglas, 67-70).
Even more resemblance to The Textual Tesseract is borne by Agnes Hegedüs’s work Things Spoken (1999), described by Marie-Laure Ryan in Narrative as Virtual Reality. In this CD-ROM, the computer displays images of a group of objects collected by the author. Each object activates two “strands of personal narrative” (Ryan, 267) that appear as lines of moving text at the bottom of the screen. These lines include hyperlinked words, which function similarly to those in The Textual Tesseract: “Once the interactor has successfully clicked on a highlighted word, she is transported into another narrative that contains the same key word, even though it describes a different object” (Ryan, 267). Ryan continues, “The impression is one of synapses firing each other in the brain, opening up new pathways into the secret caches of memory and thickening the web of its associations” (Ryan, 267). The accumulation of objects and their allied texts becomes a portrait of an individual life as it is registered in a collection of material things. The idea of the single narrating author as the unifying factor in this autobiographical mélange (or bricolage, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term [Ryan, 7]), however, causes the work to function differently from The Textual Tesseract, shifting the focus in the text from language to personality. One may read Things Spoken with aesthetic appreciation, but the text serves as a representation of the author’s own “thoughts,” “reflections,” “memory” (Ryan, 267), rather than existing as a text qua text.
The main difference between these works and The Textual Tesseract is that all the pieces described above function at some level as narrative; they all gesture towards the act of storytelling, even if the story told lacks many of the characteristics of traditional narratives. This work, in contrast, gathers text from the not-necessarily-narrative genre of poetry, connected by their origin not in a single creative subjectivity, however contradictory, but rather in a single creative movement, however diverse.
Hypertext poetry has received far less critical attention than hypertext narrative; partly this is because it is less dependent on sequence for the development of meaning, and thus is affected by the multilinearity of the hypertext structure in less obvious ways. In a brief aside, Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that this increased flexibility renders poetry better suited to hypertext than narrative prose: “The kaleidoscope model works better with poetic texts in which the meaning of the sequence is not narrative but lyrical – that is, not logical, causal, and temporal but associative, thematic, and quite tolerant of incongruous juxtapositions” (Ryan, 220-221). Espen Aarseth, in a similarly brief digression, casts doubt on whether a hypertext poem, as the poetic genre has been traditionally understood, could even exist:
Is a hypertext poem a poem? Or is it something else? It may be argued that clickable words and menus subvert the lyrical genre aspect by inviting the user to play an (imagined) personal role in the production of a reading path. The “poeticness” of a poem would thus be challenged by the readers’ awareness of their own subjective actions. This may not be a bad idea at all, but it makes the text something other than the poems of the past (even Apollinaire’s): perhaps a “hyperpoem,” if we could only understand the difference. (Aarseth, 85-86)Aarseth implicitly evokes the romantic-genius model of composition in this passage; a poem in the production of which the reader collaborates, in however limited a fashion, lacks the integrity of the stable print work. Aarseth’s definition of “poeticness” rests in the poem as an autonomous unity that must be read on its own terms. He also implies that for a poem to be a poem, the reader must enter into the world of the work, a process prevented by overt calls for active participation in the construction of the text.
This formulation, however, draws a tenuous distinction between what is “poetic” and what is a “poem,” without delineating exactly where that division lies; this is an especially problematic ambiguity in the context of The Textual Tesseract, in which a hypertext structure has been overlaid on works that are no doubt both “poetic” and “poems” by Aarseth’s standards. Does the translation of works conceived for traditional print media into a hypertext format alter their “poeticness”? Since “poeticness,” in the absence of definitive definition, must be a subjective classification, to a significant extent that is up to each reader to determine and defend.
In my own experience with this piece, I find the textual sequences poetic, despite the awareness that this is due more to serendipity dependent upon my choices than design. (One reason for the choice of Romantic poetry for this project is that its language is almost always immediately identifiable as “poetic” according to the common usage of the word, meaning that even when sequences lack cohesive meaning they often still produce aesthetic pleasure.) The nature of this poeticness, is however, somewhat different from that I see in the poems when read traditionally; I find that I tend to look more at immediate juxtapositions of words both within and across lexia, and less at any long-range development, as I am limited by how much text I can maintain in active memory at any given time and the inability to reread. A reader who recorded a particular track through the text and then looked at the result as a whole would no doubt have a different experience.
Aarseth’s concern for the effect of “the readers’ awareness of their own subjective actions” is also countered within this work by the low level of awareness it entails, in terms of both mental (and physical) exertion and the reader’s sense of making a meaningful choice. This difference is further illustrated by Aarseth’s concept of hypertext literature as “ergodic,” meaning that “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth, 1). For nonergodic literature, in contrast, “the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages” (Aarseth, 1-2). While Aarseth identifies hypertext literature in general with the former, The Textual Tesseract fits easily into the definition of the latter: the “arbitrary turning of pages” is not that far off from the arbitrary clicking of links. When the only decision is to keep reading or to click away, moving through the text is as effortless as channel-surfing.
In addition, the element of randomness means that any strategy the viewer might devise for navigating a particular path through the text is futile; no incentives, such as seeing more of the text or more interesting parts of the text, are offered for a deeply considered word selection as opposed to free association. There is no narrative to discover or piece together, so there is no need to search for the missing fragments needed to reconstitute the original whole; aporia is thus defused. The reader’s attention is turned from the process of “traversing” the text to the text produced by that motion: to how the linked words and phrases relate to and inform each other rather than the effort required to move from one to the next.