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New Literary History 32.2 (2001) 283-300



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Visible and Invisible Books:
Hermetic Images in N-Dimensional Space

Jerome McGann


To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" 1

Or if it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to that blessed region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. . . . In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent.

E. A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of
Many Dimensions
2

All the news organs have picked up the story: "After five centuries of virtually uncontested sway, the Book seems to be facing a serious threat to its power. Informed sources report a large computerized force continues its sweep through traditional centers of bookish institutional control. Resistance has been fierce in certain quarters, and vast areas remain wholly under Book authority. Spokesmen from both sides describe the situation as volatile. According to militia leader Sven Birkerts, major centers of Book power throughout the country have been voluntarily joining forces with the Electronic invaders and. . . ."

That kind of report shapes much of the public discussion about the relation of books and our new array of electronic textualities. Such reports are often, however, only factually true, like Kenneth Starr's report to Congress. Under a mask of objectivity that kind of reporting generates a different kind of "hyper"media. In matters of some moment it helps to have "an inner standing point" rather than an agenda. The inner standing point gives you access to the complexities.

Nor is there any doubt that we are, at this millennial moment, passing [End Page 283] through the first stages of a major shift in how we think about and manage texts, images, and the vehicles that carry them into our attention. From a literary person's point of view, the relevance of these changes can appear purely marginal: for whatever happens in the future, whatever new electronic poetry or fiction gets produced, the literature we inherit (to this date) is and will always be bookish.

Which is true--although that truth underscores what is crucial in all these events from the scholar's point of view: we no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance.

Trying to think clearly in this kind of volatile situation is not easy. In fact, after working for most of this decade to implement The Rossetti Archive, an online hypermedia tool for studying all the writings and art works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I am beginning to see some simple but fundamental truths about books, digital tools, and what we might think about or expect of them. 3 These simplicities are what I want to talk about today. Ultimately I hope to persuade you that setting these two forms of thought and expression into a mutually critical relation--encouraging each to interrogate and explore the other--is probably the most fruitful thing we could do right now.

Let me start, then, with a fundamental misconception: that a digital work is prima facie more complex and more powerful than a book. Well, it isn't so, they are just tools designed to manage knowledge and information at different scalar levels. Our worlds are differently constituted by spoons on the one hand and by steamshovels on the other. Nor is one of these instruments "better" or more powerful. They do different things. Right now and in the foreseeable future, books do a number of things much better than computers. There is no comparison, for example, between the complexity and richness of paper-based fictional works, on the one hand, and their digital counterparts--hypermedia fiction--on the other. Nor does the difference simply measure a...

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