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You're not where you think you are. In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted. It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down. It is always at its end and always at its beginning, the birth and the death are simultaneous and reflect each other harmoniously, it is like living in the cemetary and the hospital at once, it is easy to see the white rectangles of hospital beds and the white rectangles of gravestones and the white rectangles of pages as being essentially synonymous. Every page-moment is both expectant and memorializing, which is certainly one reason why I have buried the patchwork girl's body parts in separate plots in a zone called th cemetary, while in the story zone they are bumptious and ambulatory.
Hypertext doesn't know where it's going. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle," said Kafka. It's got no through-line. Like the body, it has no point to make, only clusters of intensities, and one cluster is as central as another, which is to say, not at all. What sometimes substitutes for a center is just a switchpoint, a place from which everything diverges, a Cheshire aftercat. A hypertext never seems quite finished, it isn't clear just where it ends, it's fuzzy at the edges, you can't figure out what matters and what doesn't, what's matter and what's void, what's the bone and what's the flesh, it's all decoration or it's all substance. Normally when you read you can orient yourself by a few important facts and let the details fall where they may. The noun trumps the adjective, person trumps place, idea trumps example. In hypertext, you can't find out what's important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country, you are not native.
Hypertext
is schizophrenic: you can't tell what's the original and what's
the reference. Hierarchies break down into chains of likenesses,
the thing is not more present than what the thing reminds you
of; in this way you can slip out of one text into a footnoted
text and find yourself reading another text entirely, a text
to which your original text is a footnote. This is unnerving,
even to me. The self may have no clear boundaries, but do we
want to lose track of it altogether? I don't want to lose the
self, only to strip it of its claim to naturalness, its compulsion
to protect its boundaries, its obsession with wholeness and
its fear of infection. I would like to invent a new kind of
self which doesn't fetishize so much, grounding itself in the
dearly-loved signs and stuff of personhood, but has poise and
a sense of humor, changes directions easily, sheds parts and
assimilates new ones. Desire rather than identity is its compositional
principle. Instead of this morbid obsession with the fixed,
fixable, everyone composing their tombstone over and over. Is
it that we want to live up to the dignity of our dead bodies?
Do keep in mind the dead disperse, and even books, which live
longer, come apart into different signatures.
NO-PLACE
I'm not where you say I am.
Hypertext
blurs the distinction between subject and object, matter and
the absence of matter. We no longer know where it does its thinking,
or what it is driving at. (It's no one and no-place, but it's
not nothing. ) Instead, there is a communicating fabric spread
out over a space without absolute extent, a place without placement
(a place without placemats, I almost wrote, which is good too).
In the no-place of hypertext, there's finally room to move around,
like an orifice I can fit my whole body into, instead of just
my finger or my p-p-p-pen. I adore the book, but I don't fit
into it very well, as a writer or a reader, there's always some
of me hanging untidily outside, looking like a mess, an excrescence,
something the editor should have lopped off and for which I
feel a bit apologetic. To make something orderly and consecutive
out of the divergent fragments that come naturally feels like
forcing myself through a Klein bottle. My hypertext novelPatchwork
Girl grew in clumps and strands like everything I write, but
unlike everything else it had permission to stay that way, to
grow denser and more articulated but not to reshape itself.
(It made me slightly nervous. Maybe I puritanically half-believed
I ought to button down, zip up.) I can't help seeing an analogy
between the editorial advice I have often received to weed out
the inessentials and lop off the divergent story lines, and
the life advice I've received just as often to focus, choose,
specialize. You don't show up for tennis in a tutu and a catcher's
mask, it's silly. But in this place without coordinates I cautiously
began to imagine that I could invent a new game, make a novel,
if we still want to call it that, shaped a little more like
my own thoughts. It is as though somebody chewed a hole in a
solid and irrefutable wall, and revealed an expanse of no-space
as extensive as the space we live in, or as though the interstices
between things could be pried apart without disturbing the things
themselves, to make room for what hasn't been voted into the
club of stuff.
GAPS,
LEAPS
You won't get where you think you're going.
A conventional novel is a safe ride. It is designed to catch you up, propell you down its track, and pop you out at the other end with possibly a few new catchphrases in your pocket and a pleasant though vague sense of the scenery rushing by. The mechanism of the chute is so effective, in fact, that it undoes the most worthy experiments; sentences that ought to stop you in your tracks are like spider webs across the chute. You rip through, they're gone.
Hypertext likes give and take, snares and grottos, nets and knots. It lacks thrust. It will always lack thrust; thrust is what linear narrative is good at. As far as I'm concerned, we can trust thrust to it. It means we'll need other reasons to keep readers reading--assuming that's what we want--than a compulsion to find out what happens next. There's no question that hypertext will lose or never acquire those readers for whom a fated slalom toward the finish line is the defining literary experience; hypertext's not built for that. Probably it is because linear text's so well-built for it that it has become the dominant narrative style in the novel. But there are other reasons to read. I can be caught in that slalom myself, but I emerge feeling damp, winded and slightly disgusted. It is a not entirely pleasant compulsion disguised as entertainment, like being forced to dance by a magic fiddle. It becomes harder and harder to imagine going anywhere but just where you're going, and words increasingly mean just what they say. (Common sense reality does the same thing: there is little opportunity for poetic ambiguity in the dealings of everyday life.) Plot chaperones understanding, cuts off errant interpretations. Reading a well-plotted novel I start by knowing less than I know about my own life, and being open to far more interpretations, which makes me feel inquisitive and alive. I finish by knowing more than I want to know, stuck on one meaning like a bug on a pin.
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