Chapter 2: Hypertext and Critical Theory

Chapter 2: Hypertext and Critical Theory
When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they
encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary
Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson. Working often, but not
always, in ignorance of each other, writers in these areas offer evidence that provides us with a
way into the contemporary episteme in the midst of major changes. A paradigm shift has begun
to take place in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and
Andries van Dam. Using hypertext, digital textuality, and the Internet, students of critical theory
now have a laboratory with which to test its ideas. Most importantly, perhaps, an experience of
reading hypertext or reading with hypertext greatly clarifies many of the most significant ideas of
critical theory.
George P. Landow is arguably academe's most enthusiastic literary proponent of hypertext and
hypermedia. In a series of books and articles he has both explicated hypertext's theoretical
dimensions and extolled its pedagogical potential. As teaching tools, hypertext and hypermedia
create a student-centered environment in which students become active participants in the
construction of knowledge.
Hypertext, which is a fundamentally intertextual system, has the capacity to emphasize

intertextuality in a way that page-bound text in books cannot. As we have already observed,
scholarly articles and books offer an obvious example of explicit hypertextuality in non-
electronic form. Conversely, any work of print offers an instance of implicit hypertext in non-
electronic form. Take Joyce’s Ulysses for an example. If one looks, say, at the Nausicaa section,
in which Bloom watches Gerty McDowell on the beach, one notes that Joyce’s text here
“alludes” or “refers” to many other texts or phenomena that one can treat as texts, including the
Nausicaa section of the Odyssey, the advertisements and articles in the women’s magazines that
suffuse and inform Gerty’s thoughts, facts about contemporary Dublin and the Catholic Church,
and material that relates to other passages within the novel. Again, a hypertext presentation of
the novel links this section not only to the kinds of materials mentioned but also to other works
in Joyce’s career, critical commentary, and textual variants.
This kind of reading constitutes the basic experience and starting point of hypertext. Suppose
that one could simply touch the page where the symbol of a note, reference, or annotation
appeared, and that act instantly brought into view the material contained in a note or even the
entire other text -- here all of Ulysses -- to which that note refers. Scholarly articles situate
themselves within a field of relations, most of which print medium keeps out of sight and
relatively difficult to follow because the referenced (or linked) materials lie spatially distant from
the reference. Electronic hypertext, in contrast, makes individual references easy to follow and
the entire field of interconnections obvious and easy to navigate.
For example, if one possessed a hypertext system in which our putative Joyce article was linked
to all the other materials it cited, it would exist as part of a much larger system in which the
totality might count more than the individual document; the article would now appear woven
more tightly into its context than would a printtechnology counterpart. The ease with which
readers traverse such a system has additional consequences, for as they move through this web or
network of texts, they continually shift the center -- and hence focus or organizing principle -- of
their investigation and experience. In other words, hypertext provides an infinitely re-centerable
system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the now interactive reader.
Unlike books, which contain physically isolated texts, hypertext emphasizes connections and
relations, and in so doing, it changes the way the texts exist and the way we read them. It also
changes the roles of author and reader, teacher and student. Because hypertext has the power to
change the way we understand and experience texts, it offers radical promises and challenges to
students, teachers, and theorists of literature.
As readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift the center – and hence
the focus or organizing principle – of their investigation and experience. Hypertext, in other
words, provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional point of focus depends
upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense. All hypertext systems
permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation and experience.
What this principle means in practice is that the reader is not locked into any kind of particular
organization or hierarchy.
Hypertext has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and
semiological theory, particularly with Derrida’s emphasis on de-centering and with Barthes’s
conception of the readerly versus the writerly text. The concept of deconstruction, which is a
favourite idea of poststructuralism, was introduced by Jacques Derrida. He proclaims that a text
has not just one but many different meanings, and should be seen as an endless stream of
signifiers, with words only pointing to other words and without any final meaning—what
hypertext may be defined as by many.
There are critics, proponents of hypertext literature, who address the question of hypertext’s
validity as literature, in its own right, independently from books. Their view was well
summarized by Laura Miller in the New York Times: “The theory of hyperfiction insists that
readers ought to be, and long to be, liberated from two mainstays of the traditional novel: linear
narrative and the author.” She makes the point that the average reader does not feel oppression
coming down from the authority of the author, the oppression that Barthes worked so hard to
demonstrate. She then makes the point that the structure of a linear story, a chain of events is
something the average reader seeks to enjoy rather than to be liberated from. Landow however
compares hypertext with traditional text and comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to give
up "conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and
replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks."
There is a heated debate over the validity of hypertext literature. The proponents of hypertext
literature see it as a new textual utopia where their theories of what text should be and do can be
realized. The detractors of hypertext literature are diverse. Some of them prefer to read from a
printed page rather than a screen, and make this preference the center of their debate. Others take
offence to the overly theoretical nature of the very existence of such a thing as hypertext
literature, especially since the average reader is far removed from the theories behind it.
Nonetheless, although hypertext intertextuality would seem to devalue any historic or other
reductionism, it in no way prevents those interested in reading in terms of author and tradition
from doing so. Experiments thus far with Intermedia, HyperCard, and other hypertext systems
suggest that hypertext does not necessarily turn one’s attention away from such approaches.
What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext, though, is not that it may fulfill certain claims
of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them.

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Hypertext, which is a fundamentally intertextual system, has the capacity to emphasize

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