Hyperbaton

Jay Bolter once showed me an interesting approach to the dialectic of singular and multiple sequences in hypertext (1992). He invoked the rhetorical figure of hyperbaton or scrambled syntax -- the way Yoda speaks in the Star Wars movies. According to this way of seeing, hypertexts (e.g., interactive fictions where linear order alternates with disjunctive jumps) represent deliberate deformations of a primary discursive or narrative sequence. Readers traverse the network in different ways, but they understand these traversals in terms of an intuited ur-sequence, in much the same way that we understand what Yoda means when he says, "Sorry I be but go you must." We register the disorder in the text but make sense of it by extrapolating a more conventional pattern.

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