When discussing literary systems, often it is useful to compare systems that are distanced vertically. The ancestor is a simple or archaic version of the descendant, and the descendant has evolved new forms or mutations to cope with a changing environment. Perhaps the clearest example of such a hierarchy among systems is the evolution of computer languages over the past century:
Programs were initially coded in machine language, strings of ones and zeros, and the author of the code needed intimate knowledge about what effect certain sequences of bits would have on the computer. Assembly languages the appeared on the scene, revolutionizing programming by giving mnemonic names to common operations, so that instead typing “1011” to mean addition, the author could simply write “ADD” and the machine would carry out the instruction. This allowed programmers from a wide variety of machines to understand each other’s work and to begin to write more dense, more meaningful programs. The next great advance was sparked by the compiled languages, beginning with Fortran, which allowed common patterns to be expressed in a language more similar to English (expressions like DO . . . WHILE . . . END), and then compiling the code down for whichever machine needed to run it. Note that
each step forward in computer language systems is built upon the shoulders of the previous one. Fortran code is compiled into assembly language, which is then assembled into machine language. Anything that you say in Fortran is also expressible in ones and zeros, but compiled languages provide a set of common forms that programmers can use to pack more meaning into less code. What once used to take hundreds of lines of assembly could now be done in a handful of lines of third-generation code. The easiest and most common metaphor
is that of an evolutionary tree. As time passes and programming systems evolve, continual advances in the amount of meaning per line of code continue to be made.
This story is part of the original inspiration for this concentration. Do the systems underlying traditional literature evolve and progress vertically, enabling more terse, more expressive texts as time goes on? Or do they only splinter horizontally, adding meaning for certain subjects and effects for certain styles, but without ever moving to a truly higher level?
