Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature
Definitive Forever
- And then what happens post-production? What happens to the author's "formally
fixed and stable," "definitive, artifactual," "immutable" text? I'm sure many of us share the
experience of having been reviewed. For my part, I've had reviewers write, in a national
publication, for the eyes of every agent, editor, academic colleague, and interested
bystander, that the character I thought was darkly obsessive is merely stupid, that the plot
I thought was intricately crafted was instead "overwrought" and "convoluted," that
language I hoped would render ambiguous and intriguing certain commonplace situations
was blatantly sexist? In short, have you ever read what others said you said and wailed to
yourself, "They didn't understand!"? I assure you that the claim that anything I ever
wrote somehow emerged on top in this hassle strikes me as comical. I am as much the
scene of a postproduction multilinked revision as any hypertextual beginning on a screen.
And surely our understanding of reading and language tells us that no one has to go back
and expunge written - or printed - words to assert control over their meaning. Surely the
day is long past when anyone can say that any text, hyper or otherwise, has any sort of last
say just because it has been written down.
- In recounting the ways I find being a "modernist writer" similar to participating in
an open, linked network of discourse, perhaps I sound as if I'm rejecting claims that
hypertext changes a writer's relations with the word. I feel that it does, but not in the
ways I most often read about. In the "old" culture, attention to our work and our ideas
was the real coin of a rhetorical economy, as Richard Lanham has said (64). What we said
or wrote had to have an impact on some audience to be more than a diary note to
ourselves. As I hope I have shown, it is very much the question of how to garner
attention - and how to decide whose attention to try to garner -that governs the print-
bound writer/editor/publisher relationship. Hypertext encourages us to thrust this old
issue of attention - that is, relation to an audience (that is, rhetoric) - aside.
- In hypertext, we no longer have to command attention or respect from any
arbiters, from makers of fashion, setters of standards, holders of purse strings, in order to
claim a space. We can dispense with all the archaic and artificial armor of old-time
storytelling and essay writing: no hook, no suspense, no climax, no conclusion. The limit
on what we can do is no longer the judgment of others. We don't need their attention to
justify our participation. And our range of choices is also much freer. Whether it is the
public or the autocratic publisher who mediates traditional public/published discourse,
such mediation still chokes off our choices. Hypertext leaves us freer to determine where
to spend our effort and attention.
- But it is a mistake to envision the new market as completely unfettered. First,
discourse is still a social product, constrained by culture, nibbled at by its participants but
never fully controlled. No one can break free into entirely unconstrained language. Nor is
the new market freer because it is less costly. Many costs are now borne by universities,
which open new speaking spaces for many people who would never find their way into
print under the old rules. But remember that anyone with a manual typewriter, a bottle of
white-out, and fifteen dollars worth of white paper can submit to an agent or editor, and
new writers still break in that way, albeit rarely. Can you get on the Net that cheaply? I'm
not sure.
- Second, I think we should be cautious in attributing political power to the changes
inherent in hypertextual communication. Yes, we can all express ourselves now, but
James Berlin argued nine years ago that individual expression is not always politically
potent. Berlin claimed that power arises from coalition, connection. From one point of
view, hypertext makes connections easier. But from another, it downplays the importance
of consciously seeking to make connections. No longer caring about the judgment of
others is tantamount to forgetting about audience, and it is linked audiences who make up
the coalitions on which political efficacy depends.
- Hence, rather than saying that hypertext completely changes the economy of
attention, it might be more accurate to say that hypertext enables a wider range of
rhetorical relationships than the old forms. In hypertext, the message-in-the-bottle posting
or comment, directed to no one and everyone, has new chances of washing up on a fertile
shore. But other forms of rhetoric haven't been obliterated. There's still the politically
forthright exhortation calling on all the owners of pink Cadillacs to unite. There's also the
subtly controlled and controlling rhetoric of Web links, which say to wanderers, "Here's
the menu; here are the paths that matter. You don't have to look any farther. You'll find
all the answers you're after if you just follow my lead." And there's still the impulse to be
self-conscious about our own writing, to shape it so that anyone who stumbles upon it will
linger for a while.
- In short, hypertext offers new ways of managing rhetoric, but it doesn't do away
with traditional rhetoric as a social force.
Beyond the Doubting Game
- In conclusion, hypertext has not resolved the conflict I feel between writing for
myself and writing for others. Personally, I think this conflict is one we all share. While
all of us enjoy the freedom to explore or create a hypertext, all of us also sometimes want
some recognition and response for our worth and work. If all of us had decided that the
only writing worth doing is the authentic writing-for-self, we wouldn't be rushing around
to conferences courting audiences; we'd be home scribbling in our diaries. If we believed
that the only writing worth doing was writing that sold widely, we'd be cranking out
romance novels, not publishing here.
- What hypertext actually did for me was to amplify this conflict, and paradoxically,
that's where I locate its worth. It didn't help me write the kind of book I've been writing
for years - for me, nothing is as free and inviting as plain old pen and paper, where I can
draw lines and circles and scrawl in margins and upside down and backward on the page.
In hypertext, I was too busy making screens and trying to get buttons doing what I wanted
and remembering what link led where to think much about written text. The whole
project became the text. So what hypertext finally did was suggest new types of text to
me. Though Susan and I never achieved a true co-authored work through our
hypertextual struggles, I began to envision what such a text might be. How could we
negotiate our tensions over what authority means? My classmates suggested, and I found
myself agreeing, that that effort, in itself, contained the germ of a text, a book, both for
audiences and for us, and it is a project in which I would someday like to participate.
Ultimately, I began to think of hypertext as a heuristic, an algorithm not for answering
questions but for producing them.
- The intertwined elements of our HyperCard project, for example, raise the kinds of
questions that would never have been asked ten years ago. I have tried to share some of
these questions here. Which strands of the new knowledge generated by these questions
will turn out to be useful will not be answered until they have been sought out and put into
discursive play.
- I guess that's what I, a modernist author who lives in a moldy, drafty old castle,
finally believe about hypertext.
[Usual Suspects][Definitive Forever][Works Cited]
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