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The version of this essay published in Writing on the Edge was preceded by the following "Technical Introduction." I include it to give the reader some idea of what the print project entailed. The numbered references are all implemented here as actual hypertext links.
Introduction to the Printed Version
The literature of hypertext contains many writings that describe experimental work, but this essay is somewhat different, constituting in itself an experiment in argument, analysis, and reading. I am trying here to construct a discourse about conceptual changes that might help us expand our idea of hypertext rhetoric. I also try to apply those changes by combining conventions of traditional print discourse with conventions of hypertextual writing. This undertaking is strange enough to require a little explanation.
In interactive media, practice is often more important than theory. We learn first by doing. In order to inaugurate new avenues for writing and thinking, at least some of the work on hypertext needs to be read and written as hypertext. Yet print is still far more accessible than electronic hypertext for a general academic audience. Unless we want to continue the restriction of hypertext to a small technological elite, we must find some way to make the concepts and experience of hypertext accessible for ordinary readers.
This is impossible to achieve in any absolute sense: static media like print or desktop publishing do not allow the dynamism and multiplicity of hypertext. Yet it is plain that the concepts embodied in hypertext are not alien to print; hypertext emerges out of allusive, intertextual traditions that have been alive in writing for centuries (Landow Hypertext, 54). So we may attempt, by suspending some of the usual print proprieties, at least to approximate the qualities of electronic writing. (For a different version of the same project, see Amato.) The project of this paper, then, is to produce a print document resembling hypertext as much as possible: a reasonable facsimile, a virtual reflection, or a paper shadow of the electronic text. >>45
The essence of hypertext lies in alternative reading sequences which are articulated by a series of links running among the discursive elements, or lexias, which make up the body of the text. The linking scheme employed here was invented by the novelist Julio Cortazar for his fiction Rayuela or Hopscotch. That book consists, Cortazar writes, "of many books," that is, many possible sequences in which its numbered chapters may be read. Two of these sequences are outlined in an introductory note. One proceeds directly from chapter 1 to chapter 56, at which point the reader is supposed to stop midway through the book. Or the reader may pursue a second, non-serial reading by following indications in the text (5).
I have implemented both of Cort‡zar's methods here. You may read this essay straight through to lexia 46, "Perfunctory Closure," and stop there, or you may follow the alternative transitions (links) indicated by the chevrons (>>) at the end of each section. The link indicator at the end of this line, for instance, directs you to lexia number two, immediately below. >>2
There are, of course, other ways to read as well.
>>19
>>8
>>29
>>62