Michael Joyce, hypertextual reading/writing, and the Aleph

The title of Michael Joyce’s essay—“Nonce upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction”—is misleading. Probably intentionally so. Because as much as it’s about reading and rereading, it also consistently reads like a handout a professor might give to his hypertext fiction workshop. And that’s probably Joyce’s point: “reading in hypertext means to re-create the writers experience of rereading in the process of composing printed works” (139). Earlier in this essay, Joyce explains his perception of the writer’s rereading/revision experience: “That is, writers imagine readers reading as they read when they reread and rewrite” (134).

In one of those “how the hell did I stumble on this page with this search string??” moments that happen so frequently with google, I was directed to the online course overview for one of the University of Iowa’s advanced fiction writing workshops. Not only does this page spell out some of the questions we’ve been asking about how to preserve a focus on good writing and good narrative in the face of avant-garde technological experimentation: At every entrance and exit, the writer seems to bump, jar, and rudely shove the reader out of the way until, discovering this clumsiness at last, the writer tries to make amends with a gesture so misconceived that it proves insulting. How much should a reader be told? What can be left unstated? How do readers understand such things as space-breaks, titles, nonstandard punctuation, italics, made-up words? At what point does uncertainty cease to be suspenseful and become an annoyance? It also gives a much more explicit definition than Joyce about the sort of mental activity that constitutes a writer’s reading: By studying what other writers have written, by paying close attention to your own expectations for their stories as you read them, by trying to understand your instructor's comments on how your writing has failed to meet his or her expectations, and, of course, by writing persistently and doggedly and copiously, you will develop a certain mastery of the language you use. In other words, you will understand how the reader is interpreting your signals and can achieve a kind of freedom from the limitations these interpretations would like to place upon you.

Reading—yourself and others—closely means rereading, and in this process we learn to think carefully about words and language, and about the effects, intended or otherwise, created by our use of those tools. True, there are limitations on the way you can use a hammer—you can pound nails, bend nails, remove nails, make dents in certain materials, smash and destroy others—but the potential number of things to be made or unmade within that statute of limitations is quite possibly infinite. So much (maybe all?) of our use of language, oral and written, is a battle against these conventions, a struggle to express and define and then move and redefine some personal notion of a center. But with modernity, and especially now with hypertext and other electronic literature, the convention most experimented with is the very definition of language—its essential successiveness and sequentiality, the relative, associative nature of its meaning.

I’d say Landow oversteps himself when he claims that “the hypertext document becomes a traveling Aleph” (37). Borges’s description of the Aleph, in addition to being great, great literature, emblematizes the limitations of language: “I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors… the central problem—the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity—is irresolvable. In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture.” A hypertext allows you to change and to choose sequences, to have a whole realm of possibilities within close clicking distance, but although the infinity of possibilities exist simultaneously, the readings of them never do, and to "capture" even some small part of that infinity we must approach it through a series of successive readings. I think that this, perhaps, explains Joyce’s cryptic, poetic statement of “the overwhelming force of our mortality in the face of our metaphors” (132)—the writer’s hopelessness is the reader’s is the human dilemma: that we are bounded creatures in a universe of unbounded potentials.