The Book and the Labyrinth | |
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A few words on the two neoteric terms, cybertext and ergodic, are in order. Cybertext is a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener's book (and discipline) called Cybernetics, and subtitled Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Wiener laid an important foundation for the development of digital computers, but his scope is not limited to the mechanical world of transistors and, later, of microchips. As the subtitle indicates, Wiener's perspective includes both organic and inorganic systems; that is, any system that contains an information feedback loop. Likewise, the concept of cybertext does not limit itself to the study of computer-driven (or "electronic") textuality; that would be an arbitrary and unhistorical limitation, perhaps comparable to a study of literature that would only acknowledge texts in paper-printed form. While there might be sociological reasons for such a study, we would not be able to claim any understanding of how different forms of literature vary. |
The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of "reading" do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning "work" and "path." In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where 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. | |
Whenever I have had the opportunity to present the perspective of ergodic literature and cybertext to a fresh audience of literary critics and theorists, I have almost invariably been challenged on the same issues: that these texts (hypertexts, adventure games, etc.) aren't essentially different from other literary texts, because (1) all literature is to some extent indeterminate, nonlinear, and different for every reading, (2) the reader has to make choices in order to make sense of the text, and finally (3) a text cannot really be nonlinear because the reader can read it only one sequence at a time, anyway. | |
Typically, these objections came from persons who, while well versed in literary theory, had no firsthand experience of the hypertexts, adventure games, or multi-user dungeons I was talking about. At first, therefore, I thought this was simply a didactical problem: if only I could present examples of my material more clearly, everything would become indisputable. After all, can a person who has never seen a movie be expected to understand the unique characteristics of that medium? A text such as the I Ching is not meant to be read from beginning to end but entails a very different and highly specialized ritual of perusal, and the text in a multi-user dungeon is without either beginning or end, an endless labyrinthine plateau of textual bliss for the community that builds it. But no matter how hard I try to describe these texts to you, the reader, their essential difference will remain a mystery until they are experienced firsthand. | |
In my campaign for the study of cybertextuality I soon realized that my terminology was a potential source of confusion. Particularly problematic was the word nonlinear. For some it was a common literary concept used to describe narratives that lacked or subverted a straightforward story line; for others, paradoxically, the word could not describe my material, since the act of reading must take place sequentially, word for word. | |
This aporia never ceased to puzzle me. There was obviously an epistemological conflict. Part of the problem is easily resolved: hypertexts, adventure games, and so forth are not texts the way the average literary work is a text. In what way, then, are they texts? They produce verbal structures, for aesthetic effect. This makes them similar to other literary phenomena. But they are also something more, and it is this added paraverbal dimension that is so hard to see. A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression. Since literary theorists are trained to uncover literary ambivalence in texts with linear expression, they evidently mistook texts with variable expression for texts with ambiguous meaning. When confronted with a forking text such as a hypertext, they claimed that all texts are produced as a linear sequence during reading, so where was my problem? | |
The problem was that, while they focused on what was being read, I focused on what was being read from. This distinction is inconspicuous in a linear expression text, since when you read from War and Peace, you believe you are reading War and Peace. In drama, the relationship between a play and its (varying) performance is a hierarchical and explicit one; it makes trivial sense to distinguish between the two. In a cybertext, however, the distinction is crucial--and rather different; when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded 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. This is very different from the ambiguities of a linear text. And inaccessibility, it must be noted, does not imply ambiguity but, rather, an absence of possibility--an aporia. | |
So why is this so difficult to see? Why is the variable expression of the nonlinear text so easily mistaken for the semantic ambiguity of the linear text? The answer, or at least one answer, can be found in a certain rhetorical model used by literary theory. I refer to the idea of a narrative text as a labyrinth, a game, or an imaginary world, in which the reader can explore at will, get lost, discover secret paths, play around, follow the rules, and so on. The problem with these powerful metaphors, when they begin to affect the critic's perspective and judgment, is that they enable a systematic misrepresentation of the relationship between narrative text and reader; a spatiodynamic fallacy where the narrative is not perceived as a presentation of a world but rather as that world itself. In other words, there is a short circuit between signifier and signified, a suspension of différance that projects an objective level beyond the text, a primary metaphysical structure that generates both textual sign and our understanding of it, rather than the other way around. | |
A reader, however strongly engaged in the unfolding of a narrative, is powerless. Like a spectator at a soccer game, he may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse, but he is not a player. Like a passenger on a train, he can study and interpret the shifting landscape, he may rest his eyes wherever he pleases, even release the emergency brake and step off, but he is not free to move the tracks in a different direction. He cannot have the player's pleasure of influence: "Let's see what happens when I do this." The reader's pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent. | |
The cybertext reader, on the other hand, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts its would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. The tensions at work in a cybertext, while not incompatible with those of narrative desire, are also something more: a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control: "I want this text to tell my story; the story that could not be without me." In some cases this is literally true. In other cases, perhaps most, the sense of individual outcome is illusory, but nevertheless the aspect of coercion and manipulation is real. | |
The study of cybertexts reveals the misprision of the spaciodynamic metaphors of narrative theory, because ergodic literature incarnates these models in a way linear text narratives do not. This may be hard to understand for the traditional literary critic who cannot perceive the difference between metaphorical structure and logical structure, but it is essential. The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but rather between games and narratives. To claim that there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories. And yet, as this study tries to show, the difference is not clear-cut, and there is significant overlap between the two. | |
It is also essential to recognize that cybertext is used here to describe a broad textual media category. It is not in itself a literary genre of any kind. Cybertexts share a principle of calculated production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology. Cybertext is a perspective I use to describe and explore the communicational strategies of dynamic texts. To look for traditions, literary genres, and common aesthetics, we must inspect the texts at a much more local level, and I suggest one way to partition the field in chapters 4 through 7, each chapter dealing with a subgroup of ergodic textuality. | |
Even if the cybertexts are not narrative texts but other forms of literature governed by a different set of rules, they retain to a lesser or greater extent some aspects of narrative. Most display some forms of narrative behavior, just as can be found in other nonnarrative literary genres. The idea of pure literary forms or discrete genres is not be pursued here. Instead, a perspective of complementary generic traits is used to describe the various types as synthetic, composite genres. Perhaps, by studying cybertexts and trying to discover this alterity of narrative, we may also get some small new clues as to what narrative is. | |
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It seems to me that the cybertexts fit the game-world-labyrinth terminology in a way that exposes its deficiencies when used on narrative texts. But how has the spatiodynamic misrepresentation of narrative originated? And was it always inappropriate? An important clue to this question can be found in the historical idea of the labyrinth. Our present idea of the labyrinth is the Borgesian structure of "forking paths," the bewildering chaos of passages that lead in many directions but never directly to our desired goal. But there is also another kind, or paradigm, of labyrinths. Penelope Reed Doob, in her excellent discussion of physical and metaphorical labyrinths of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (1990), distinguishes between two kinds of labyrinthine structure: the unicursal, where there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a center; and the multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces a series of critical choices, or bivia. |
Umberto Eco (1984, 80) claims that there are three types of labyrinth: the linear, the maze, and the net (or rhizome; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The first two correspond to Doob's unicursal and multicursal, respectively. To include the net seems inappropriate, since this structure has very different qualities from the other two. Especially as the net's "every point can be connected with every other point" (Eco 1984, 81); this is exactly the opposite of the fundamental inaccessibility of the other models. Amazingly, Eco also claims that the labyrinth of Crete was linear and that Theseus "had no choices to make: he could not but reach the center, and from the center, the way out. . . . In this kind of labyrinth the Ariadne thread is useless, since one cannot get lost" (80). It is hard to believe that Eco is speaking of the labyrinth where Theseus, famously, was the first to find the way out, and only because of Ariadne's thread. This was the same complex labyrinth where even its maker, Daedalus, was lost. Doob (1990, 17-38), on the other hand, citing Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, and others, shows that the literary tradition describes the Domus daedali as a multicursal labyrinth. | |
As Doob demonstrates, the labyrinth as a sign of complex artistry, inextricability, and difficult process was an important metaphor and motif in classical and medieval literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and visual design. Paradoxically, while the labyrinth depicted in visual art from prehistoric times is always unicursal, the literary maze (with the Cretan myth as the chief example) is usually multicursal. The multicursal motif did not appear in art until the Renaissance, but as Doob shows, the two paradigms coexisted peacefully as the same concept at least since Virgil (70-19 B.C.). In Doob's view, what to us seem to be contradictory models were subsumed in a single category, signifying a complex design, artistic order and chaos (depending on point of view), inextricability or impenetrability, and the difficult progress from confusion to perception. Both models share these essential qualities of the labyrinth, and apparently there was no great need to distinguish between the two. | |
In the Renaissance, however, the idea of the labyrinth, both in literature and visual art, was reduced to the multicursal paradigm that we recognize today. Consequently, the old metaphor of the text as labyrinth, which in medieval poetics could signify both a difficult, winding, but potentially rewarding linear process and a spatial, artistically complex, and confusing artifact, was restricted to the latter sense. Therefore, I find it reasonable to assume that the image of the text as a labyrinth has undergone an ideological transformation, from a harmonic duality where the figurative likeness of the narrative text as unicursal coexisted with a tropology of multicursal aspects, such as repetition, interlaced narrative threads, prolepsis, and so forth. When the unicursal paradigm faded, however, the multicursal paradigm came to dominate the figure, devolving the rich ambiguity of the classical and medieval labyrinth into the less ambiguous Renaissance model of pure multicursality. | |
Since we now regard labyrinthine and linear as incompatible terms, and since the labyrinth no longer denotes linear progress and teleology but only their opposites, its status as a model of narrative text has become inapt for most narratives. For a typical example of this misnomer, consider the following, from a discussion of postmodernist writing: "We shall never be able to unravel the plots of John Fowles's The Magus (1966), Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur (1955) or Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), for they are labyrinths without exits" (Lodge 1977, 266; last italics mine). Here, the image of the labyrinth has become severely distorted. A labyrinth without exit is a labyrinth without entrance; in other words, not a labyrinth at all. | |
Even in highly subversive narratives, such as the novels of Samuel Beckett or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler . . . (1993), the reader is faced, topologically, with a unicursal maze. Yet there are some novels for which the post-Renaissance model is perfectly valid, for instance Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1966), in which the topology is multicursal. In yet others, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), it may be described as both unicursal and multicursal. | |
The footnote is a typical example of a structure that can be seen as both uni- and multicursal. It creates a bivium, or choice of expansion, but should we decide to take this path (reading the footnote), the footnote itself returns us to the main track immediately afterward. Perhaps a footnoted text can be described as multicursal on the micro level and unicursal on the macro level. Nabokov's Pale Fire, however, leaves the mode of cursality up to the reader; consisting of a foreword, a 999-line poem, a long commentary of notes addressing individual lines (but really telling the commentator's story), and an index, it can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, by jumping between the comments and the poem. Brian McHale (1987, 18-19) sees it as a limit-text between modernism and postmodernism; it is also a limit-text between uni- and multicursality. | |
That some texts are hard to define topologically should not surprise us, as it is exactly this aspect of their own ontology they set out to destabilize (cf. McHale 1987, chap. 12). Neither should it discourage us, since the existence of borderline cases and ambiguous structures in no way invalidates the usefulness of categories such as narrative and game or unicursality and multicursality. | |
The problem is not, finally, that literary critics use words like
labyrinth, game, and world as metaphors in their
analyses of unicursal works but that this rhetoric seems to have blinded
them to the existence of multicursal literary structures and to the
possibility that the concept of labyrinth (in their post-Renaissance
rendition) might have more analytic accuracy in connection with texts that
function as game-worlds or labyrinths in a literal sense. However, this is
not the place to criticize in detail the ontological problems resulting
from a possible flaw in the terminology of narrative theory. Such an issue
deserves at least a separate study, one not focused on the texts that are
our primary concern here. Instead, this might be the place for suggesting
the reinstatement of the old dual meaning of labyrinth, so that
both unicursal and multicursal texts might be examined within the same
theoretical framework. With such a theory we might be able to see both
how, in Jorge Luis Borges's words, "the book and the labyrinth [are] one
and the same" (Borges 1974, 88), and how the many types of literary
labyrinths are different from each other. It may surprise some readers to
find me still using the word book, but a number of the cybertexts
we shall discuss are indeed books--printed, bound, and sold in the most
traditional fashion. As we shall see, the codex format is one of the most
flexible and powerful information tools yet invented, with a capacity for
change that is probably not exhausted yet, and I (for one) do not expect
it to go out of style any time soon. |
The Aim of This Study | |
It is a common belief that the rapid evolution in the field of digital technology from the middle of the twentieth century to the present has (among other equally astounding results) brought on radically new ways of writing and reading. This view, stimulated by the increasing personal experience with computer technology among the academic masses, can be observed even in literary studies, which since 1984 have increasingly attempted to capture and construct computer-mediated texts as objects of literary criticism. The present study can be located both inside and outside of this research. In addition to an analysis--and to some extent a construction--of the perceived objects by means of literary theory, this is a study of the problems of such construction and, hence, a critical study of the strategies used by literary researchers to expand their empirical field in this direction. Especially, I wish to challenge the recurrent practice of applying the theories of literary criticism to a new empirical field, seemingly without any reassessment of the terms and concepts involved. This lack of self-reflection places the research in direct danger of turning the vocabulary of literary theory into a set of unfocused metaphors, rendered useless by a translation that is not perceived as such by its very translators. Thus the interpretations and misinterpretations of the digital media by literary theorists is a recurrent theme of this book. | |
Lanham: The Electronic Word, Ch 4
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A related but reverse problem is the tendency to describe the new text media as radically different from the old, with attributes solely determined by the material technology of the medium. In these analyses, technical innovation is presented as a cause of social improvement and political and intellectual liberation, a historical move away from the old repressive media. This kind of technological determinism (the belief that technology is an autonomous force that causes social change) has been refuted eloquently by Langdon Winner (1986), James W. Carey (1988), and others but continues, nevertheless, to dominate the discussion. In the context of literature, this has led to claims that digital technology enables readers to become authors, or at least blurs the (supposedly political) distinction between the two, and that the reader is allowed to create his or her own "story" by "interacting" with "the computer." The ideological forces surrounding new technology produce a rhetoric of novelty, differentiation, and freedom that works to obscure the more profound structural kinships between superficially heterogeneous media. Even the inspiring and perceptive essays of Richard Lanham (1993) are suffused by this binary rhetoric and, ultimately, dominated by politics at the expense of analysis. |
Whether concepts such as "computer literature" or "electronic textuality" deserve to be defended theoretically is by no means obvious, and they will not be given axiomatic status in this book. The idea that "the computer" is in itself capable of producing social and historical change is a strangely ahistorical and anthropomorphic misconception, yet it is as popular within literary-cultural studies as it is in the science fiction texts they sometimes study.Often, in fact, science fiction portrays the technology with an irony that the critical studies lack (see, e.g., William Gibson's short story, "Burning Chrome," in Gibson 1986). | |
Most literary theories take their object medium as a given, in spite of the blatant historical differences between, for instance, oral and written literature. The written, or rather the printed, text has been the privileged form, and the potentially disruptive effects of media transitions have seldom been an issue, unlike semantic transitions such as language translation or intertextual practices. At this point, in the age of the dual ontology of everyday textuality (screen or paper), this ideological blindness is no longer possible, and so we have to ask an old question in a new context: What is a text? In a limited space such as this, it is impossible to recapture the arguments of previous discussions of this question. And since the empirical basis for this study is different from the one assumed in these discussions, the arguments would be of limited value. In the context of this study, the question of the text becomes a question of verbal media and their functional differences (what role does a medium play?), and only subsequently a question of semantics, influence, otherness, mental events, intentionality, and so forth. These philosophical problems have not left us, but they belong to a different level of textuality. In order to deal with these issues responsibly, we must first construct a map of the new area in which we want to study them, a textonomy (the study of textual media) to provide the playing ground of textology (the study of textual meaning). | |
The production of new maps, however, is also a construction of "newness," whose political consequences we cannot hope to escape. The field of literary study is in a state of permanent civil war with regard to what constitutes its valid objects. What right have we to export this war to foreign continents? Even if important insights can be gained from the study of extraliterary phenomena with the instruments of literary theory (cautiously used), it does not follow that these phenomena are literature and should be judged with literary criteria or that the field of literature should be expanded to include them. In my view, there is nothing to be gained from this sort of theoretical imperialism, but much to lose: discussions of the "literariness" of this or that verbal medium are ever in danger of deteriorating into a battle of apologetic claims and chauvinistic counterclaims. When much energy is spent on showing that P is a perfectly deserving type of Q, the more fundamental question of what P is will often be neglected. These nonproductive (and nonacademic) campaigns in favor of marginal media or aesthetic forms of expression are pathetic signs of a larger problem, however: they illustrate only too well the partial and conservative state of the human sciences, in which nothing can be studied that is not already within a field; in which the type rather than the individual qualities of an object determines its value as an accepted member of some canon or other. Where humanistic study used to be genre chauvinistic, it is now medium chauvinistic, organized into empirical fields (literature, art history, theater, mass communication) with not enough concern for general or intermediary perspectives. This "empirical" partitioning is of course unempirical in consequence, since it excludes empirical material that does not belong to the sanctioned sectors. Also, the limited view privileged by this sort of specializing tends to produce apologetics disguised as criticism, in an age where the "inherent" quality of literature (or any other previously dominant mode of discourse) is no longer self-evident. | |
Strangely, the struggle between the proponents and opponents of "digital literature" deteriorates usually on both sides into material arguments of a peculiar fetishist nature. One side focuses on the exotic hardware of the shiny new technologies, like CD-ROM. Witness especially the computer industry slogan, "information at your fingertips," as if information were somehow a touchable object. The other side focuses on the well-known hardware of the old technology, the "look and feel" of a book, compared to the crude letters on a computer screen. "You can't take it to bed with you" is the sensuous (but no longer true) refrain of the book chauvinists. Isn't the content of a text more important than these materialistic, almost ergonomic, concerns? | |
What these strangely irrelevant exuberances reveal, I think, is that beyond the obvious differences of appearance, the real difference between paper texts and computer texts is not very clear. Does a difference even exist? Instead of searching for a structural divide, this study begins with the premise that no such essential difference is presumed. If it exists, it must be described in functional, rather than material or historical, terms. The alternative, to propose an essential difference and then proceed to describe it, does not allow for the possibility that it does not exist and is, therefore, not an option. Whether it exists or not is not of great importance to this thesis, however, as such knowledge would not make much practical difference in the world. The emerging new media technologies are not important in themselves, nor as alternatives to older media, but should be studied for what they can tell us about the principles and evolution of human communication. | |
My main effort is, therefore, to show what the functional differences and similarities among the various textual media imply about the theories and practices of literature. The exploration is based on the concepts and perspectives of narratology and rhetoric but is not limited to these two disciplines. I argue that existing literary theory is incomplete (but not irrelevant) when it comes to describing some of the phenomena studied here, and I try to show why and where a new theoretical approach is needed. My final aim is to produce a framework for a theory of cybertext or ergodic literature and to identify the key elements for this perspective. |