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" 'A Natural Order and Without Breaks': Making Hypertext" Gary Ryan, Department of English, Christian Brothers College High School
My involvement with The Vineland Hypertext has allowed me to explore my long-standing concerns about writing and to create interactive text. I've always wanted my work to mean more to the reader than what I'd said, leaning more toward creative absurdity than to exposition. I wanted my readers to take a leap of faith, to consult dreams, psychic flashes and omens, giving free reign to their own minds and thus contributing to that community of transactions we call "the text." But the only writing permitted me as a graduate student in English has been the linear-hierarchical style, where the reader is led step-by-step through the argument and each piece of evidence is made clear and relevant. So I learned to transform an assemblage of scattered notes and flashes into a short, periodic treatise, usually between 12 and 15 pages long. And I imagined my audience of professors passively reading for what they already knew or what they believed to be empirically verifiable. Thus, I passed. Yet this method always seemed pedestrian compared to the example of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his remarkable book Philosophical Investigations. After writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus-the definitive continuous treatise with a clear aim and a fairly clear way of achieving it-Wittgenstein changed his mind and his method. Consequently, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein presented a series of interrelated remarks arranged according to their subject matter but without a master plan. Wittgenstein had given up on the idea that language had a central core of meaning, but he had then to develop a new kind of philosophical work, without sweeping generalization, presenting only descriptions of language in a dialectical way and inviting the reader to take part in the dialogue. Wittgenstein wanted to present his thoughts in a "natural order and without breaks" (v). He thought however he had failed, explaining in his preface to Philosophical Investigations: My thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.-And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.-The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. By abandoning a periodic rhetorical method, Wittgenstein did not want to "spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate . . . to thoughts of [their] own" (vi). Thus Wittgenstein wanted to unleash the passive reader into a rhetorical situation where truth arises out of the interaction of the subject, object, audience, and language operating simultaneously. Wittgenstein knew the act of writing and reading was associative, with one word echoing another, one sentence recalling others earlier or later in the text. Wittgenstein wanted to change the relationship of author to reader, but the printed book subverted that attempt by imposing a hierarchy of forms: paragraphs, sections and chapters. If only Wittgenstein had had a hypertext program, a tool to create an electronic text, which is a network rather than a straight line and which can be read in a variety of ways. The short aphoristic passages of Wittgenstein's Investigations would be favorable to this new medium because their concentrated expressions might be approached differently with each reading. Unlike Wittgenstein, writers today do have the electronic writing space available to them. As electronic texts replace printed books, the nature of the community of text-the transactions between writers and readers-will be restructured. A natural order of reading and writing will emerge. New interactive rhetorics will also emerge and demand new methods of teaching composition in our schools. Such associative rhetorics are still being conceptualized. My participation
in The Vineland Hypertext has brought me face-to-face with
these issues. By trying to create an interactive composition-a hypertext-I
have had to abandon traditional views of rhetoric, authorship, audience,
and text. I have had to take a leap of faith. This talk will present some
actual failures and successes from my efforts to be part of the community
of writers who will write The Vineland Hypertext. |
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