Trivializing or Liberating? the Limitations of Hypertext Theorizing

The textual world is no longer what it was - at least, his is what some prominent hypertext theorists would have us believe. For them, the new world of cyberspace and hypertext has freed text from the constraints of the pre-electronic medium of print. Stuart Moulthrop is one of several recent theorists who speak for this new vision: what it means, he urges, is "that we must fundamentally re-think our position as subjects of electronic textuality" (edge.html). As he sees it, the enthronement of hypertext as the writing space of the future has been accomplished: now we must be prepared to accept and work through its implications. George Landow adopts a similar tone in the second paragraph of his Hypertext 2.0: "we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks" (2). Associated with a liberationist and democratizing rhetoric that promises to realize the true potential of text, hitherto locked within the prison-house of the book, such claims at the same time announce that the abstractions of postmodern theory are about to be incarnated and tested on the electronic pulse. The prescriptive tone of such pronouncements, however, suggests that not all of us may be quite as comfortable in the hypertextual world as its advocates seem to imply. Not surprisingly, a vision as comprehensive as this has met with resistance on several grounds. Sven Birkerts, seeing the electronic medium as a threat to the imaginative solitude of the book reader, argues that we are about to cut ourselves off from the sense of history we gain from books (20). Myron Tuman complains that online literacy replaces the psychological depth of reading with the technical cleverness of the programmer (41). Andrew Dillon attacks several "myths" that are central to hypertext theory: the belief that because the mind is associationist in how information is linked, hypertext is more natural; the belief that print is linear, hence constraining (28-30). Noting that empirical studies that demonstrate the claimed benefits of hypertext are hard to find, Jean Francois Rouet and Jarmo J. Levonen suggest that hypertext theorists have substituted ideology for scientific inquiry. In this essay I want to articulate my own sense of resistance to hypertext advocacy by focusing in particular on problems inherent in the view of reading proffered by theorists of this new medium. As I see it, although hypertext may have much to offer, both aesthetically and pedagogically, the universalizing nature of the claims made on its behalf, and the polarization involved in deprecating (often explicitly) all previous forms of printed literature, obscures the central issue: namely, what it means to read, and how far reading practices change in the context of a new medium such as hypertext. In particular, I will argue that literary reading, that is, reading of imaginative texts such as novels or poetry, is rendered incomprehensible by the model of reading put forward in hypertext theory. To clarify the issues, I will begin by assessing the emphasis on hypertext as a visual medium with spatial or iconic properties, and show how a false sense of the reader's freedom has been inferred from this. Second, I will analyse two claims commonly associated with hypertext: the instability of electronic text, which is said to make it both more creative and less "serious,' and the attribution of agency to text. I will suggest that on both grounds the disembodied nature of electronic text precludes much that is most significant in the process of literary reading, which depends on the reader's affective engagement with a stable text. Finally, I will call into question the information processing or network model of text that underlies hypertext theory, arguing for an alternative, constructive model of reading that, while incompatible with the forms of hypertext, better accounts for what is known about readers' responses to literary texts. …