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Could the party be over before it ever started? We might want to
consider Coover's claims within the context of writing, or notably, literature, in general.
For Coover's essay takes as its focal point the relationship
between hypertext and literature, a relationship which originates with, in Coover's words, "classic" works
like Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story (1990) and ends with (also in Coover's opinion) "the paradigmatic
work of the era," Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995).
Such works, Coover believes, allowed the reader the "experience of losing oneself to a text"; they
created an aura of "intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and
temporality."
Today, however, Coover finds the Web "not very hospitable" to literature
because it "tends to be a noisy restless, opportunistic, superficial" space in
opposition to literature's "shape." The Web, Coover informs us, "is
shapeless."
Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful,
the Net is fast and high tech and actional.
Such a discussion, though, leads us into the trap of nostalgia. Once we had
a proper way of writing. Now this new medium has come along and made
everything the worse. Claims
that writing once embodied thoughtful, clear, and concise demonstrations
of knowledge are quickly forced to recognize the contributions of some of literature's
(including non-fiction theoretical pieces)
noisiest productions. Works by T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs,
and more recently William Gibson incorporate noise into their collections
of literary snippets, Parisian life, newspaper headlines, and popular culture. These writers (momentarily excluding Gibson) embraced the logic
of hypertext before there ever was such a logic: collage. Their noisy, contributions
to literature and thought included the collage based notion of juxtaposition. How can
one challenge control, whether it appears in the guise of ideology, language, or even
drugs? Juxtaposition, they answered.
And this is what hypertext teaches us. This is what hypertext does, not in place of,
but in addition to the challenge to linearity so often emphasized in any discussion
of hypertext, one which is highlighted here by Coover.
If we accept his claim
that hypertext's "golden age" is over, we accept the claim that hypertext was and is
only about linearity, about recapturing a textual non-linear composition process. If we do
that, it seems, we become nostalgic.
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