Look! Music!

Text will continue to become more notably and markedly visual, but these highly inflected texts will supplant or augment not narrative, but lyric forms because they function similarly.

To show how this works, let me show you a favorite Emily Dickinson piece.

Circumference, thou bride
Of awe, -- possessing, thou
Shalt be possessed by
Every hallowed knight
That dares to covet thee.

Of all the things that could be shown here, I'd just like to point out that the shape, sound, and form of address modify the poem's meaning. The linestop at bride gives us that split second in which we think how circumference might be a bride before we combine that with aw. The archaic and biblical (even in Dickinson's day) thee, thou and shalt as well as knight and hallowed summon ideas of traditional marriage and chivalry.

This quick tug of form at meaning is all I mean by inflection. Immediate characteristics of the writing notably shift its meaning.

Heavily inflected writing requires the reader to loop steadily and intensely through a small body of text. The surprises that torque meaning come quickly, densely spaced, so a poem like this can take page after page of discourse to describe, even inadequately.

Heavily inflected texts can be longer, but a list of notable examples shows how they remain exceptional. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, Dickinson's fascicles (if one takes them as a single work) are modern examples. Granted these are precious works, and even influential, but they're never going to become the style of an entire generation because few can accomplish what they do. Many fine works that may at first seem to function similarly do not. The effects of inflection in long verse pieces, like Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's verse dramas, or Homer's Iliad or even Spenser's ornate Faerie Queen are reduced by the extensive regularity of the verse. Famous examples include the continuity provided the Elizabethans by unrhymed blank verse, or Dante's interlacing terza rima in the Commedia.

I don't mean to indicate that the materiality or inflections in Lear or Spenser are less important than those in Ulysses, only that they function somewhat differently. As has been discussed at length elsewhere, the smoothing of metric surprises in Othello or La divina commedia allow a long, sequential read. The profuse and minutely differentiated punctuation,spatial and aural variations in Dickinson, by contrast, all but convinced critics that sequential connections between mutually resonant verses in her fascicles simply don't exist, even after she had recopied them in order, joining poems written at disparate times, and carefully bound them into a sequence. Yet the editors' response was not altogether unreasonable (many would tell me it wasn't even incorrect!). One's read of the Dickinson poem above, for instance, will probably be less linear than a reading of my text discussing it. Dickinson's text is more graceful and less encumbered, but also richer and more minutely differentiated. The reader who grants it the attention it demands must loop repeatedly through it to recombine its dynamically balanced possibilities.

Visual texts like Dickinson's, like the others I mentioned in my early blog posts this semester do wonderfully in the e-universe.Vive le Flash, with or without alphanumeric text. And of course streaming multimedia makes a great way to watch movies. But the visuals will enjoy and suffer the advantages and disadvantages of lyric form, and streaming multimedia will enjoy and suffer the advantages and disadvantages of movies, without either providing that for which we read fiction books.

However, there may be another way. As I mentioned before, some linguistic objects show things by inflection that others show by sequence.