Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Seven Moving (the) Text

chapter seve n Moving (the) Text From Print to Digital k at al in sá nd or In the field of printed visual poetry, provoking and unavoidable theoretical questions about the digital medium have been raised, because printed visual literature—a corpus of medially hybrid texts at the margins of the literary canon—is familiarly reread and repositioned through questions, concepts, and metaphors that are constructed for theorizing the digital or the hypertextual. From this perspective, printed visual poetry seems to be a productive, though not unproblematic, reference point for critical discourses that do not reiterate dichotomies and canons , such as the (old) book versus the (new) Net, print versus digital, and linear versus nonlinear. Such dichotomies, as András Müllner points out, favor totalizing structures and the construction of an evolutionary history in a diachronic perception of media, and this concept of evolution is invested with certain values and ideologies.1 This is, then, how techno-optimists praise the electronic medium for its flexibility, variability, nonlinearity, interactivity, and indeterminacy; its (apparently ) more democratic way of distributing knowledge; and, for its technical potential to ‘‘put into practice’’ the poststructuralist notions of endlessly dispersed and decentered textuality. On the other hand, as Bolter observes, skeptics worry about the culture of the book: They deny that physical aspects of technologies of writing might determine its actual practice and instead argue that these technologies can be described only along social needs and preferences. Both discourses, however, seem to lack critical potential and perpetuate a ‘‘false’’2 and 144 Moving (the) Text: From Print to Digital 145 counterproductive dichotomy: counterproductive, because social needs and technological constraints are interrelated and conditioned by each other in a way that makes it impossible to separate them according to the logic of causality. The question I want to raise here, then, is: How does twentieth-century printed visual poetry look forward to, and affect the conceptualization of, the hypertextual, the digital, and the nonlinear? visual printed poetry, the nonlinear, and the digital Espen Aarseth, in his attempt to outline a theoretical framework for nonlinearity (mostly, but not exclusively, for hypertextual and cybertextual constructions), acknowledges that certain computer-mediated digital texts might show more resemblance with printed texts than with their own digital ‘‘relatives.’’3 Aarseth’s matrix of textual variants and user-functions describes textual formations without linking their nonlinearity to their medium in an essentializing way. In his typology, four types of nonlinear texts exist: simple nonlinear text, hypertext, determined cybertext, and indetermined cybertext.4 Some printed visual poems—even if not explicitly mentioned—might be discussed within the first type as simple nonlinear texts, since their scriptons (textual sequences) are not presented in a determined linear order, their textons (the basic elements of textuality) are static, open, and can be configured by the reader/user. In his study on digital literature, Péter Józsa points out that Aarseth’s approach replaces the opposition between print and digital by the dichotomy of ergodic versus nonergodic (and, I add, linear versus nonlinear ). The ergodic refers to the ‘‘nontrivial effort to traverse a text,’’ while the trivial one consists of following the lines and turning the pages; it is not necessarily linked to the mediality of the text. However, Józsa also argues that in order to avoid a diffuse terminology, it is more productive to restrict the use of the term hypertextual to nonlinear digital texts, whereas nonlinear print texts should be called protohypertexts or quasi-hypertexts.5 Recent theoretical perspectives, such as those by Péter Józsa and Anna Gács, show that visual print poems, pattern poetry, or concrete poems (together with lexicon novels, multilinear narratives, collage-like texts, self-generating texts, and so on) can be conceptualized as protohypertexts . Like hypertext or cybertext, visual print poetry rhetorically 146 Katalin Sándor works through configurative writing functions and through a nonlinear or multilinear textual body that has no predefined pattern for readability and sequence, and is also open to remaking and reconfiguration. Yet we should be prudent to build a new print canon—or at least a genre—on the basis of the concept of the hypertextual. It is instructive to consider Müllner’s reservations with respect to intertextuality in literature here: for him, in the poststructuralist perspective, all texts are intertextual as the latter is a precondition for meaning to arise in the first place...