Nostalgic Angels,Chapter 5

Perpetual Motion: "Forking Paths" and the Loss of Center(s) in Hypertext Geography

[P]ersonal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one's present . . . such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.

Frederic Jameson,

Postmodernism:

Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism p. 27

 

If we sense that hypertexts such as The In Memoriam Web may be too conservative to deliver on their promises of a postmodern writing/reading, we must also admit that a more radically postmodern approach to hypertext-space is not without its own (often substantial) problems. In Karl's forking response, an important example of resistance to hypertext writing discussed by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan (1994), Karl Crary attempts to resist subordinating his own text to the hypertext that is the object of his critical reading. Karl's at resistance involves Forking Paths, a hypertext constructed by Stuart Moulthrop out of a fragmented version of Jorge Luis Borges (1962) "Garden of Forking Paths." Aside from dividing up Borges' text, Moulthrop has introduced his own complicating text-nodes, asserted multiple orderings and outcomes, and encouraged later readers to assert their own positions by writing into the text (Figure 5.4) -- things that Borges could allude to but not do in print.

 

Insert Figure 5.4 Around Here

 

Karl Crary refuses -- or tries to refuse -- to play the game the open hypertext encourages; instead, Crary attempts a strong, resistant reading of Forking Paths, critiquing and categorizing the various nodes of the text as well as Moulthrop's conception of hypertext -- the "resistant" reading here being the imposition of traditional literary techniques on a relatively postmodern text (similar to the operations of The In Memoriam Web, but at a more local level). In the end, however, Crary's attempts at resistance are futile, as his own links into the object of his critique become complicitous with his activities:

Karl Crary attempts to resist Forking Paths by objectifying it, establishing an aloofness from its gregarious metafictional game. Like a good strong reader (and he is a very good one), Crary senses what the text "wants" him to do and swerves from that interpretive track. He refuses to invent further variations on the Borges/Moulthrop themes. He will be sober and reflective, not fictively playful. His deviation heads him away from the narrative ground of story-space, off to the apparently separate realm of commentary, an alternative theory-space. "Come inside," the prior text says, "Look . . . learn . . . build for yourself." Though Crary is happy enough to look, learn, and build, he declines the first overture, preferring to hold himself and his writing apart from the earlier texts. (Moulthrop and Kaplan, 1994, pp. 232-233)

 

Insert Figure 5.5 Around Here.

 

Because Crary's writing exists in the same hypertext-file as Forking Paths, he is already playing the game (Figure 5.5); that is, by agreeing to work within the interconnected systems of the Storyspace network, Crary agrees (perhaps unknowingly) to allow his text to be absorbed by Forking Paths. As indicated by the title to Moulthrop and Kaplan's essay, readers who have entered into this system find that they have "became what they beheld." Although Crary's interpretive methods appear conventional -- even more so than those used by Landow et al -- the postmodern text of Forking Paths, like all postmodern texts, eliminates the possibility of critical distance. As Moulthrop and Kaplan point out, Crary's strategy of coming to terms with the text constructs a set of categories that (apparently unwittingly) claims Crary's own text as part of Forking Paths. Crary recounts his process of mapping the text:

One of the most intriguing aspects of Forking Paths was its relation to Borges' Garden of the Forking Paths. Having already read Garden of the Forking Paths, it was interesting to watch for Borges' original text and its relation to the other text that makes up Forking Paths.

The text in Forking Paths can be divided into four types:

1) original Borges text

2) text that sounds like Borges text, but is not

3) text that does not sound like Borges text, but is still related Borges' story

4) complete digressions

Unfortunately, it is this same relationship to Borges' text that poses some great problems. The text is excellent, but its status, legally and ethically, is uncertain.

Crary here attempts the geometrical grid of traditional scholarship but the space will not support it, absorbing the grid itself in the tangled network of lines structuring the text. As he is situated at the conjunction of multiple discourses, Crary is denied the possibility of existing outside or above the text. Moulthrop and Kaplan offer an interpretation of Karl's Forking Response that illustrates how, in the intertextual, playful realm of Moulthrop/Borges' creation, Crary's own entries appear as the text's own self-criticism. In print, Crary could at least write a critical essay that, while it oriented itself toward Forking Paths via citation and quotation, would be physically (if not conceptually) distinct from the text he was discussing. Once placed in a forum of explicit fragmentation and indeterminacy, each additional text is taken up and broken apart, reconnected, and held open as a process rather than a discrete, isolated, fixed object. We can certainly recognize the potential benefits of this situation, as students may come to understand writing as an intertextual, social process rather than the still-common notion of writing as isolated genius. But such benefits are not an automatic consequence of hypertext. As Moulthrop and Kaplan admit, "If Crary's attempt at creative resistance does not succeed, then our attempt at a technologically radicalized pedagogy must also be counted as a failure" (p. 236); the medium in which Crary worked automatically subsumed his attempts at resistance.

The problem here, the postmodern loss of individuality and personal control in writing/reading hypertext, correspond to many complaints about postmodernism in general: loss of identity, the perceived politicization of the "neutral" activity of writing and reading, the imposition of a false "free market" onto interpretive activities, etc. (see, for example, Jane Tompkins' 1990 "Pedagogy of the Distressed" and the ensuing debate in the letters exchanges in subsequent issues of College English, or Maxine Hairston's 1992 "Diversity, Ideology, and the Teaching of Writing" and responses in College Composition and Communication.). Hypertext, after all, is commonly seen as physical embodiment of postmodern theory.

In such a context, the simple node-link structure of hypertext becomes so strongly tied to the deconstructive project that writing and reading appear to be essentially nihilistic activities. Leveling the text -- fragmentation and dispersal, the primary activities of deconstruction -- threatens to become the prevailing function of hypertext. In such a geography, there is no future and no history, only a timeless succession of instants, what Dick Hebdige (1988) calls "the blank, empty spaces of the now" (p. 164). The text is fragmented and torn out of time and history; where communication once seemed to serve a social function, now it is merely wandering. This danger applies not only to postmodern fictions but also, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, to the breakdown of context in functional hypertext and the commodification of information in online information spaces.

If postmodernism is a space, it is one we walk through in Andy Warhol's post-political diamond dust shoes -- "footgear," Frederic Jameson (1991) points out, "that . . . does not really speak to us at all" (p. 8). Where a painting such as Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots could, in an earlier time, engender a hermeneutic reading "in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. . ." (p. 8), the expressive realist reading becomes impossible for postmodern object such as Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, Jameson argues, because

we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall. . . . (p. 8)

Postmodern space in hypertext appears, at least initially, to refute interpretation as a way to articulate mastery or even resistance. As the fragmentation and dispersal of authority accelerate (in the sense of both authorship and control), every node of text exists at the same level of importance. But instead of providing a "level playing field" on which a formerly disempowered reader can construct her own identity, the immense gravity absorbs and levels all movement. Many readers are not yet ready to, as Michael Joyce (1992) urges, "surrender control and in that constant declination continually render control meaningless." Where de Certeau's (1984) geography of railways admitted ceaseless circulation along the tracks, the flattened hypertext appears to deny the tracks themselves -- the tracks, after all, always situate readers back into a history as the disembark the train at the depot. There is land to travel but no place to stop. The subject -- that which joins the past and the future under the experience of the present -- dissolves. Bolter (1993) makes precisely the same connection when he draws railroad parallels from Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar:

Even Theroux got tired of railway travel in the end. We leave him on the final page happy to be rereading the story of his trip, the linear narrative that puts everything in its place. That kind of intellectual rest and recuperation is perhaps one thing that hypertext will not give us. (p. 17)

From this perspective, Landow's intertexts invert the process implied in Crary's leveled commentary. Landow begins with a monolithic geography and constructs a geometry; Karl's circumstances in Forking Paths reverse the problem in starting out with the purely geometrical and attempting to build a geography. For Crary, the text is a flattened, relatively undifferentiated plane. Instead of time being stopped or converted to space, time is simply removed. The gathered nodes become a series of eternal presents, a timeless spectacle. By attempting a stance outside the text, Crary works to create a geography from the geometry of the text (Figure 5.5, above) -- Crary's personal history of the text pulled down and left of the "main text" (Borges/Moulthrop's). By the time of Crary's arrival, however, the text is so utterly fragmented that he is unable to sustain a unified textual identity -- a distinctive voice -- for long, as Moulthrop and Kaplan note. Because Landow and colleagues as well as Crary use a somewhat conservative conception of hypertext as some interpretive vantage point that offers (or at least works toward) some angelic vision, they are turned, in Jameson's terms, into nostalgia for an earlier, innocent life. The "subject" of the space/subject articulation of hypertext appears, like hypertext, to deconstruct itself, to collapse under its own weight.