Neither hypertext theorists nor the postmodern critics to whom they appeal have examined actual reading, except putatively or by extrapolation from their own reading processes (cf. Miall and Kuiken, in press), nor do the writings I will mention show signs of serious engagement with the empirical evaluation of hypertext by its users.
[. . .] my aim is to question the imperializing implications of the rhetoric of hypertext theory itself.
In what follows I elaborate the following arguments. First, I suggest that the iconicity of spatialized text is likely to restrict reading to shallow, associative forms of processing; second, that the foregrounding of links between textual sections or nodes encourages shallow reading, or “surfing”; third, that the choice of multiple pathways through hypertextual space provides only an illusion of reader emancipation; and, fourth, that the more the reader’s attention is given to the spatial qualities of text, such as the three aspects just enumerated, the less feasible becomes any commitment to non-spatial dimensions of reading, such as literary context, personal imagery, feelings, or self-reference.
The emphasis on the spatial (shown by the title of Bolter’s book, Writing Space) originates with pre-computer literary theorists, notably Roland Barthes. In S/Z the writerly text is figured as a network; “we gain access to it by several entrances”; “the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable” (Barthes 5-6). In the view of Bolter or Landow Barthes is a hypertextualist avant le lettre. Thus, Landow observes, “hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment of a principle that had seemed particularly abstract and difficult when read from the vantage point of print” (Landow 53). What is more embarrassing, perhaps, is the literalization of arguments that Barthes proposed figuratively. Where Barthes, with great subtlety, reveals what he terms the “writerly” text within Balzac, pointing to a remarkable array of reading operations to which we are invited in construing this narrative, the hypertext equivalent described by Bolter or Landow imprisons the reader within a predetermined set of operations that preempts the writerly response in favour of controlling the reader.
This interactive process of reading is systematically disrupted within the hypertext medium. The linking of one text node to another tends to promote superordinate connections and elicit an analytical response more appropriate to expository prose than to literary response. The mechanical invocation of nodes through links will rarely correspond to the process of anticipation that a reader of a literary text experiences, since the need to choose from an array of multiple pathways at each step is unlikely to sustain the progressive unfolding of the reader’s affective engagement with the text. This suggests, paradoxically, that the fixed form of the printed text may be more liberating for the reader than the constrained process of linking imposed by a hypertext, where the requirement to decide on which link to follow every few sentences seems likely to prevent the immersion characteristic of literary reading.
Electronic media, as most critics agree, modify subjectivity and generate previously unrealized cultural formations. My argument against hypertext rhetoric is intended to make two primary points. First, that hypertext as a mode of reading does indeed change the nature of the reading process, and does so in ways that appear to be antipathetic to literary response. Second, that it is fallacious to claim that hypertext instantiates the “real” nature of reading by liberating it from the constraints of linearity. Cyberspace is a significant and powerful new medium, and one which our literary and academic culture must learn to accept and control. But resistance to the imperializing claims made on its behalf will be equally significant. The fate of reading is too important to be decided by hypertext theorists.
