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Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology.

By George P.Landow. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Press, 1992. xii + 242 pp. $48.50 hardcover, 15.95paperback.The subtitle of this book describes a meeting, or attempted meeting, between critical theory andthe new interactive, manipulable, interpolable, computer text. The thesis is that both partners inthe meeting "argue that we must abandon conceptual systems based upon ideas of center, margin,hierarchy and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks."(2.) I believe that it might be more accurate to describe hypertext in Landow's book not so muchas one of the partners but as the

venue

locale

of a somewhat different meeting, betweentraditional literary scholarship and poststructuralist critique, with implications that are bothfascinating and disturbing.George Landow is evidently a fine literary critic and scholar of Victorian literature, a goodteacher, a sensitive reader with a refined historical sense, and a decent human being, who hasfound and used hypertext to do some interesting things in his classroom at Brown University. Iam not convinced that his own critical sensibility has been much assisted by the computer,however. The generation of literary academics that grew up before the computer essentially hadto use their own brains to do hypertext--this was a large part of their training. What is happeningnow is that this expertise is being turned into an "expert system," through the hypertextualizationof literary texts, so that students with less cultural background will be able to take a sort of crashcourse in literary scholarship. Perhaps the traditional literary education, in which the brain washypertextualized, was richer and deeper, but the new electronic concordance/reference systemsare certainly better than nothing, and may give students in the humanities more time for otheractivities, like the study of science, in which they are often woefully ignorant, and of works of literature, now frequently replaced by works of critical theory.Landow's book is a good introduction to the kinds of hypertext that can be used in literatureclasses. The description of his own hypertext version of Tennyson's

In Memoriam

is especiallyvaluable. In his discussion of the Victorian sermonist Henry Melvill he shows that hypertext canbe valuable for traditional scholarship as well. He quotes Vannevar Bush, Walter Ong and AlvinKernan to good effect, and has intelligent things to say about the canon, recognizing that it wasnever as graven in stone as either its enemies or its defenders believed--in other words, the canonis really a non-issue. He writes interestingly on how the process of writing itself is altered byhypertext, on the new ease of collaboration, on intellectual property and on the new dangers of exclusiveness once a hypertext "canon" is established.But the core of the book is the meeting between Landow, the hypertextualized literary scholar,and the deconstructionist and poststructuralist theorists to whom he goes for advice and

confirmation. The meeting itself is like the encounter in

The Silence of the Lambs

between theJody Foster character, a courageous and decent FBI trainee, and Hannibal Lecter, the brilliantinsane cannibal/psychiatrist whose help she seeks in solving a mystery. The movie itself may infact be an allegory of the experience of the humanities student entering university literarystudies: to uncover the mystery of the text we go to school with its new custodians, the "canniballecteurs" who like to deface literature, or bite the faces off its dead authors.This may sound extreme; but it is no more so than the lecteur's self-descriptions. Landow quotesGregory Ulmer quoting Derrida, perhaps the greatest Lecter of them all, on the subject of the"lexia" or "mourceau," the decontextualized citation, the "bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musicalcomposition; snack, mouthful" (and we might add "bite" or even, now, "byte") that is the meat of the critic. This "mourceau" [sic; from "mourir"?], says Derrida, "is always detached, as its nameindicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth." (9.) "Mors" is "jaw." As Ulmer says, "Theorgan of this new philosopheme is the mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, tastes. . . The first stepof decomposition is the bite." (8.)What are these teeth that bite? Landow quotes Ulmer's explanation, that they are the "quotationmarks, brackets, parentheses" (and we might add, the virgules or "slashes") so dear to thetheorists and so rife among the titles of MLA papers.What is it that is bitten into pieces, into bits or bytes--or, in the practice of the media,"soundbites"--on this island of the Doctors Morceau? It is, as Foucault says, the individuality of the writer (74), or as Said says, the human subject (75): in other words, the author's personalexpression or face. When we sup with the devil we had better use a long spoon; and when we goto school with poststructuralists, they had better be muzzled. Landow, like most of his academiccontemporaries, has been insufficiently briefed about the more problematic habits of his mentors;and like the Jody Foster character he is partly responsible for enlarging them in the world wherethey can have more old friends for dinner. Could she not solve the mystery without being helpedby Lecter--and without allowing him to escape? Speaking as a poet, and as a translator of thegreat poet Miklos Radnoti who was murdered by the Nazis, I must confess to being an interestedparty, and declare my political solidarity with all victims of the lecteurs. Radnoti describes thepoet's mission, at a time when the likes of Paul de Man were challenging all notions of truth, inhis poem "O Ancient Prisons":O peace of ancient prisons, beautifuloutdated sufferings, the poet's death,images noble and heroical,which find their audience in measured breath--how far away you are. Who dares to act

slides into empty void. Fog drizzles down.Reality is like an urn that's crackedand cannot hold its shape; and very soonits rotten shards will shatter like a storm.What is his fate who, while he breathes, will sospeak of what

in measure and in form,and only thus he teaches how to know?He would teach more. But all things fall apart.He sits and gazes, helpless at his heart.(

Foamy Sky: the Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti

, trans. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner,Princeton University Press, 1992)This poem could well stand for the poet's predicament today, when Foucault undermines thepoet's authority, Said the poet's subjectivity, Jameson the poet's political integrity, Derrida thepoet's very existence, and Rorty the notion of truth for which the poet speaks. The only thing apoet can do in his or her defense is reveal the distortions of language practiced by the enemies of poetry. Let us therefore return to Landow's thesis-statement, quoted at the beginning of thisreview, and look more closely at the terminology he has borrowed from his poststructuralistmentors. Let us pay especial attention to the terms he uses throughout the book for what isretrograde and oppressive: "linear," "hierarchical," and "central." A close examination will showhow profoundly incoherent these terms are as they are used by literary theorists, and thus howprofoundly subject to question the whole critique that is based upon them, including large areasof feminist and multicultural studies.Let us begin with "linear." As far as I can see, the word is used both by Landow and mostcontemporary theorists in three totally different and often contradictory senses, without anyawareness of the difference or contradiction. The first sense is "like a geometrical line" with theconnotations of "spatial" as opposed to temporal and processual, and "orthogonal" as opposed tocurved or differently angled. Of course a geometrical line is completely reversible: it is the samefrom B to A as it is from A to B (whereas a temporal sequence, say March 1992 to September1992, is by definition irreversible). Pure logic or inference, which is often called linear when it isfree from self-reflexion, is similarly reversible; there should be nothing in the conclusion that isnot in the premisses. Some hypertext theorists, like Nancy Kaplan, are fond of contrastinggraphics (as a politically positive medium) with text; of course in this sense, the spatial as againstthe linguistic/auditory, graphics are much more "linear" than text.