Aesthetics of the Virtual

8 For an Aesthetics of the Hypertext

111 8 For an Aesthetics of the Hypertext It seems very easy to define the hypertext.1 For Landow, for example: Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers also to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication. “By hypertext ,” Nelson explains, “I mean non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.” Hypertext, as the term is used in this work, denotes text composed of blocks of text—what Barthes terms a lexia—and the electronic links that join them. . . . electronic links connect lexias “external” to a work—say, commentary on it by another author or parallel or contrasting texts—as well as within it and thereby create text that is experienced as nonlinear , or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequential.2 Naturally, the chunks connected by links can include not only verbal data, and so hypertext is also hypermedia. Now, as we know, from this definition Landow traces out some interesting consequences at the level of theory, such as to involve notable and rather diverse contributions from the likes of Foucault, Bakhtin, Barthes, and Derrida. There remains, however, the problem, which implies other issues, of the opposition between nonlinearity and multilinearity. The multilinear is a quantitative strengthening of the linear in the same way that the mul­ tisequential is a strengthening of the sequential. So if hypertext really is multilinear text, then far from representing and experimenting models 112 Aesthetics of the Virtual of nonlinear inscription, writing, or thought, it actually confirms and reinforces the usual models of linear production. There is an interesting note in Landow’s book regarding nonlinear thinking: Dorothy Lee finds an exception to linearity in the language of trobriand Islanders, which reveals that they “do not describe their activity lineally, they do no dynamic relating of acts; they do not use even so innocuous a connective as and.” According to Lee, they do not use causal connections in their descriptions of reality, and “where valued activity is concerned, the trobrianders do not act on an assumption of lineality at any level.” . . . Appropriately, therefore, when an inhabitant of the trobriand Islands “relates happenings, there is no developmental arrangement, no building up of emotional tone. His stories have no plot, no lineal development, no climax.”3 I am convinced that thinking is neither linear nor sequential but is, so to speak, a diffuse center, whereas verbal language, as discrete, can only be linear and sequential (except for certain exceptional cases, which are exceptionally interesting to study).4 But any hypertext, and especially narrative hypertext, acts in a manner precisely opposite: from any (programmed ) point (the inevitable “start,” in the sense that even if there are many possible beginnings that are always already programmed in their possibility, nevertheless the start will always be one of many) there start causal connections that proliferate patterns, which can develop toward a climax or, obviously, choose a different strategy for the device, but always in a “linear” way. From this point of view, narratology can rest easily: the old categories (fable, narration, plot, and so on) also work for hypertext.5 The relevance of these categories, however, can become more complicated, because hypertext (narrative hypertext in particular) realizes certain possibilities, that is, certain possible worlds permitted by the text, and is ultimately an exhibition of the multiplication of possibilities: it is an exhibition in the proper sense because it brings out the trace of its own rules of constitution. This, on the one hand, provokes an inevitable and essentially importunate interruption of transparency, interrupting a fiction that one would always want to be as mimetic as possible, an exposure of the technical operations of the scene (not of the author, as hypertext is always a product of teamwork , carried out at varying levels of competence), and on the other, For an Aesthetics of the Hypertext 113 it conversely provokes in the consumer a sense of freedom, which is simply the positive aspect of the well-known effect of disorientation in the navigation of hypertext. We are now faced with two questions that converge into one: the question of what belongs to the hypertext with respect to its enjoyment, or, if one prefers, of what potentialities of formatting on...