Co-presence between texts

Intertextuality. According to Genette's rather restricted definition intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts."

This includes, as Eskelinen put it, the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To make matters more complicated it’s not only the dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text that counts, but also the relations between what’s visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later. Also the threshold between what’s inside and what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original text from the outside (as certain famous software agents have already shown).

In some ways, all this may lead to the decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of co-presence at work.

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Electronic media and theory

Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop).

Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unmargining and intertextuality claimed by Barthes, Kristeva, or Derrida, and to facilitate the reader's emancipation as an author. This early phase of theorizing now seems to be waning as a new generation of theorists rethink the nature of electronic textuality.

Earlier debates about the problems of literary hypertext seems now to be irrelevant. The founding arguments of authors such as George Landow, J. David Bolter, and Michael Joyce have been sometimes superseded. But how textual medium works really ?

We must approach computer literacy as literacy, and not as something completely different, be that text, theatre, cinema, comics or continental philosophy. And this purpose has to think electronic textuality in termes of Rhetorics of hypertext. While it is true that earlier attempts to situate hypertext in relation to poststructuralist text theorists such as Barthes or Derrida may seem misplaced, even naïve, I will suggest that the questions these accounts raised about the status of hypertext have not been superseded so much as abandoned.

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Intertextuality

Intertextuality, as defined by Michael Riffaterre, "depends on a system of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts."

He further states that this intertextuality is the complete opposite of hypertextuality because the former builds a "structured network" of limits that will keep the reader on track (towards the "correct" interpretation), the latter is a "loose web of free association."

This comparison forces me to question Riffaterre's understanding of hypertext. The quote comes from a 1994 article, when hypertext was somewhat different from today's (1997) version, but certainly not an amorphous, unstructured mass of material arbitrarily selected. Two distinct types of information linking in hypertext refute Riffaterre's argument. First, embedded links are placed in a text by the author. They are very rarely random. A second form, "searches", are dependent on the programming of the search engine (program). Currently, different search engines give different "hits" to the same inquiry, which indicates that someone has decided how the search will be limited because computers can not make such decisions without instructions.
Riffaterre ultimately sees the intertext from the Aristotilean perspective of certifiable truth. He even goes so far as to imagine that the "Institutions of Interpretation" have not changed since Aristotle.

Perhaps some in academia can maintain that illusion, but those who have grown up as "other" would argue the point. At any rate, he embraces an artificial standard when he states,
Intertextuality is made manifest either by syllepsis or by a gap, or by an ungrammaticality. . . Each of these is immediately perceptible to readers, who need no more, to respond to the text, than the senses nature gave them.

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Ergodic Literature

The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.

Rather than circumscribe electronic literature within print assumptions, Aarseth swept the board clean by positing a new category of "ergodic literature," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text". Making a different analytical cut through textual groupings that included computer games, print literature and electronic hypertexts, among others, Aarseth established a grid comprised of eight different operators, many of which have purchase mostly with electronic texts rather than print. The grid yields a total of 576 different positions on which a variety of different kinds of texts can be located. Although the method has limitations, notably that it is blind to content and relatively indifferent to the specificity of media, it has the tremendous virtue of demonstrating that electronic texts cannot simply be shoved into the same tent with print without taking into account their different modes of operation. These innovations have justifiably made Cybertext a foundational work for the study of computer games and a seminal text for thinking about electronic literature. Markku Eskelinen's work, particularly "Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory," further challenges traditional narratology as an adequate model for understanding ergodic textuality, making clear the need to develop frameworks that can adequately take into account the expanded opportunities for textual innovations in digital media.

Proposing variations on Gérard Genette's narratological categories, Eskelinen demonstrates, through a wide variety of ingenious suggestions for narrative possibilities that differ in temporal availability, intertextuality, linking structures, etc., how Aarseth's ergodic typology can be used to expand narratology so it would be more useful for ergodic works in general, including digital works.

By N. Katherine Hayles

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