Changing Words: Time and Space in Electronic Literature
10.13125/2039-6597/1308
La letteratura su carta e quella elettronica, in particolare gli ipertesti, mettono in gioco problemi diversi per ciò che riguarda le categorie di tempo e spazio. Nella loro analisi bisognerà utilizzare approcci critici diversi, almeno per quanto riguarda un aspetto: non si potranno infatti trascurare considerazioni sul tempo e lo spazio implicati nell’atto della lettura – o dell’esecuzione – del testo. Gli ipertesti generano molte differenti letture possibili, grazie a link che si muovono nell’iperspazio, che mutano e si succedono. Di conseguenza, nel campo della letteratura elettronica è ovviamente possibile applicare le categorie critiche adoperate per le opere a stampa, ma sarebbe impossibile prescindere anche dall’esame di questioni legate a tempo e spazio presenti non solo all’interno del testo, ma anche al di fuori di esso. Questo saggio cerca di esaminare le relazioni spazio-tempo, interne ed esterne, pertinenti alla letteratura elettronica, come queste si intessono e modificano a vicenda, e come l’atto della lettura si trasforma ed è trasformato da esse. In particolare, verrà considerata la poesia online When the Sea Stands Still (1997), di John Cayley e Yang Lian, e Rice (1998), dell’artista noto come Geniwate, fondando l’analisi sugli studi di Espen Aarseth, Wolfgang Iser, Frank Kermode, Ted Nelson, Edward Said.
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Paola Di Gennaro
Between
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Changing Words: Time and Space in Electronic Literature
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Metamorphoses of Narration
2015-05-15
2014-08-28
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2015-05-15
1
Paola Di Gennaro
2014
10.13125/2039-6597/1308
Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" - Università Suor Orsola Benincasa
2039-6597
8
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Changing Words: Time and Space in Electronic Literature
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4
         Changing Words:
Reading Time and Space in Electronic
            Literature

                           Paola Di Gennaro


      In a literary work the coordinates of time and space are always ex-
tremely intertwined, and in their intersection they create the particular
set and atmosphere of each poetic text, in the widest sense of the term.
Printed literature and electronic literature, especially hypertexts, bring
into play different issues of time and space, and consequently the way
of approaching them can differ, at least in one respect: the analysis of a
hypertext implies a consideration on the time and the space of the act
of reading – or performing – the text. In other words, if in considering
these issues in electronic literature we can obviously apply all the criti-
cal categories we use with printed works, we have here to consider al-
so the time and the space that are not ‘inside’ the text but ‘outside’ the
text. In the following pages I will try to present a preliminary analysis
of the relationship between these external and internal time-space is-
sues in electronic literature – poetry in particular –, examining how
they interlink and mutually change, and how the act of reading both
modifies and is modified by them.
      As a matter of fact, reading an electronic text, especially a hyper-
text, is an experience that differs deeply from the reading of a printed
text. In one case the ‘outer space’ is constituted only by a physical
book, or whatever printed support, and the ‘outer time’ is created by
the length of time that the reader decides to spend going through the
page; in the other case, the text can modify itself, move in different web
pages, take its time and its space in a process that is not always under
the reader’s control. Paradoxically, even when the text gives the reader


Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2013)
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words



more freedom to decide which link to follow, and when to follow it, it
still implies some temporal and spatial rules that the reader cannot
change, rules that are much more meaningful than those which govern
the simple linear sequences of a book, even the most experimental
one1, and that make electronic texts a challenge both for reading and
critical analysis.
      The main characteristic of a hypertext is explicit in the definition
of the term, which was coined for the first time by Ted Nelson in the
1960s: «By hypertext […] I mean nonsequential writing – text that
branches and allows choices to the reader […] a series of text chunks
connected by links which offer the reader different pathways» (Nelson
1981: 0/2). The nonlinearity of a hypertext in both the spatial and tem-
poral dimensions is what changes our reading experience. The fact that
«the words or sequence of words may differ from reading to reading
because of the shape, conventions, or mechanisms of the text» (Aarseth
1994: 51), that is, the text’s ability to vary, not only radically decon-
structs the interpretation of the text, but also is modified in turn by the
same act of reading.
      On the printed page the time and the space outside the text – the
time of the act of reading and the spatiality implied in this act – are
quite linear, and there are not many variables at stake; this is not the
case for hypertexts, in which the reader is given much more freedom –
if he or she so wants - in exploring the work. But what is even more in-
teresting is that while the reader can modify space and time outside the
text in many different ways, both space and time can modify them-
selves in return inside that same text. The semantic proprieties of time
and space within the text – places referred to, situations, physical im-
ages – change according to the different position they acquire in the
various possible orders. In this way, the specificities of the concepts of
spatial and temporal coordinates in electronic literature, more than


      1Many scholars of electronic literature have indeed found hypertext forerunners in
the Chinese I Ching, in Jorge Luis Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, a network of real and im-
agined works that plays in a metaliterary way, and in the poems by Guillaume Apollinaire
and Raymond Queneau.



2
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



simply changing the reading of an electronic text, are changed by the
act of reading itself.
      This is not the case, of course, for electronic texts ‘normally’ writ-
ten for the paper and then just put on a website – in that instance only
the device used is different, and the reading is practically subject to the
same rules. But with hypertexts the situation is different: the time and
the space of the content can modify themselves according to the way
the reader decides to read the work. In a sort of reconstruction of tex-
tual uniqueness, the reader is given several opportunities to select a
certain route in the text, thus giving a certain coherence by means of
his/her choice of reading to an otherwise irremediably fragmentary
text; narrative becomes «a labyrinth, a game, or an imaginative text, in
which the reader can explore at will, get lost, discover secret paths,
play around, follow the rules, and so on» (Aarseth 1997: 3). Displayed
for the reader, deliberately or not, there is a series of powerful meta-
phors which accompany him/her during the progress through the text.
These works are made of fragments, both in space and time, in which
one has to find the internal cross-references which can vary according
to the different receptions of the reader, who, in this way, gives signifi-
cance to a meaning that in electronic poetry is itself unstable and
changeable. Literature is a representation of time and space within its
limits. Electronic literature broadens these limits.
      We can find here, as Stuart Moulthrop suggests, an alteration and
inversion of the relationship between metonymy and metaphors: «Me-
tonymy does not simply serve metaphor in hypertextual fiction, rather
it coexists with metaphor in a complex dialectical relationship. The
reader discovers pathways through the textual labyrinth» (Moulthrop
1991: 129), giving up the idea of a coherent conclusion in the metonym-
ic flow of language. All the parts of the text become an approximation
of the final meaning, in a more fragmentary way than in printed litera-
ture; every piece becomes just a part of the whole.
      The reader has the role of reconfiguring the text, narrowing choic-
es simply by clicking on the screen. In opposition to the Husserlian
theory of time – according to which the world of the text is made up of
the sequence of sentences in the text and those only, made into a whole


                                                                                3
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words



– hypertext’s whole cannot be perceived at once but only during the
reading process. Reading and writing are temporal processes: tempo-
rality can be considered something intrinsic or extrinsic to the text 2, but
in both cases the act of reading implies it, just like reading and writing
are always spatial, since we write topically (see Bolter 1991: 105), and
read topically.
      Hyper-reading shows a fake-immediacy that can divert our con-
ception of the text, but, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out, the temporality of
a narrative is essential in understanding how the episodes and “peripe-
teia” lead to the conclusion (see Ricoeur 1988: III). This is very true for
electronic literature, even if we do not perceive it. Obviously this is
something more relevant to narratives, but even poetry is constructed
on expectations created by the system of time and space coordinates.
Since in hypertexts both the author and the reader create the work –
even if to different extents and according to the nature of the text,
which can be interactive and relatively closed or apparently open – so
in developing a new kind of agency «the distinction between what is
“inside” and what is “outside” a text blurs» (Yellowlees Douglas 1994:
163). In placing on the reader’s shoulders the burden of configuring the
work, at the same time it opens to him/her new perspectives, new op-
portunities, different for each reading. The reader has the opportunity
to search for secret paths, not only metaphorically, but also topological-
ly. It is his/her task to decide what pace to keep through the page
he/she has chosen, and vice versa: in hypertexts time and space are
never neutral.
      It is possible to consider some examples in order to better observe
how the issues of time and space related to the performance of an ‘elec-
tronic poem’ affect the time and space denotations inside the text.



      2For example, Roman Ingarden dismisses the notion that texts have a temporal di-
mension, because in that case «one would have to attribute different temporal extensions to
one and the same work according to the length of given readings» (1973: 305-6). The relation
between hypertext and temporality is expressed instead by Espen Aarseth, for whom the
nonlinearity of a text is in the reading, which is temporal, and not in the hypertext (cfr 1997:
46).



4
                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



      A typical example of a hypertext poem is When the Sea Stands Still
(1997), by John Cayley and Yang Lian. The hyper-reading of this poem
is composed by the progress of the reader through the different sec-
tions, all diverse in length, that are disposed on the various web pages,
which one can access by clicking on the distinct links on the screen. As
stated in the first page of the work, Where the Sea Stands Still is con-
ceived to explore a personal understanding of ‘spatial poetics’. In read-
ing the text in its various possibilities one can perceive the thematic re-
currences and the movements which go through the work in its differ-
ent pieces, changing every time in accordance to the shifting of the
page before the reader’s eyes.
      The power of the composition is increased by the possibility that
the levels of different times and spaces have to intertwine and flow to-
gether. Intentionally or not, the author creates a text in which there are
many images of time – past, present and future - and space. For exam-
ple, in the first page the author seems to give us some sort of address,
implying in this way a starting point and possible directions, opening
up routes for us:

          King Street straight on
          Enmore Road turn right
          Cambridge Street No. 14
          the sea’s tongue licks into the grate the old house discloses
          countless places to watch us in the dark

      As Katherine Hayles points out, the moving of hypertexts resem-
bles a literary metaphor, becoming a sort of embodied metaphor (see
Hayles 2007): space and time become, then, a possibility for rhetorical
figures of speech. In ‘entering’ the ‘countless places’ in the dark of our
knowledge of the text, the reader can literally discover and ‘disclose’
all the cross-references and effects about time and space triggered by
the metamorphosis of the poem. There are, for example, frequent oc-
currences of phrases like “this place” and similar words referring to
space – metaphysical space (“the house of nowhere”).




                                                                                 5
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words



       The references to time, and especially to memory and the past, are
even more explicit, in a sort of metaliterary play with the progress of
the act of reading which erases the lines one has just read, as the page
vanishes in front of him/her: for example, a sentence like «Only the
now is like being forgotten» suggests that in the present there is no du-
ration: time becomes ephemeral. Many other evocative lines can be
found in the hypertext, such as «a chance enmity the enmity of all
your future in the darkness/ because of a refusal to live in this mo-
ment». Apart from their strict lyrical meaning, the play on the different
temporal levels that one can also find in this performative hypertext is
unequivocally perceivable.
       Another interesting aspect of temporality in When the Sea Stands
Still is that there are two different time settings in reading. The first one
is the pace that the reader wants to give to the act of reading: one can
decide to read one page quickly and click to another one, or go back to
the same page many times, just like in a printed book; but the reader
also has the opportunity to let the computer decide, and to passively
submit to the randomness of the software. This randomness gives the
reader more and less freedom at the same time, both temporally and
spatially, an immediacy in reading that can also be experienced as
slowness.
       The resonances of meaning and form are therefore emphasised in
a new way in literature, since the final text is made first by the author
and then either by the reader or by the computer. One can decide to
surrender to this other time, and try to follow a precise route in the
reading. This is evidently not possible on paper, or at least we take for
granted that we have to follow the traditional, linear page order; but
once we are given the opportunity, we would probably prefer to
choose our literary destiny. Our choice is never neutral, because it in-
volves other consequences in the final text; just as with Mikhail Bakh-
tin’s chronotopes, time and space influence each other, creating coor-
dinates in which the poems move. Depending on the choices of the
reader – which link to click, when to click it – the internal references
change accordingly, creating many new nuances in every reading.



6
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



     Another example of web-based poetry is Rice (1998), by the artist
known as Geniwate. It is a hypertextual anthology of multimedia po-
ems about the author’s experience as a Western tourist in Vietnam, fac-
ing issues like colonialism, war, poverty, and cultural difference. The
reader has to move here from sixteen images related to the journey,
each linked to different poems about different approaches to the histo-
ry of Vietnam. In this case, time and space are intertwined in a differ-
ent way. Depending on whether the reader chooses to read first ‘one
piece’ then another, the final conception of the whole will change: the
places met in the course of reading, with the related experiences and
emotions, will vary according to the position they acquire in each and
every performance of the text.
     This sort of “hieroglyphic writing”, in which the images are both
sign and symbol, fits well with what William Dickey, a poet of cyber-
space, said about an appealing quality of hypertext poetry:

          [it] may begin with any one of its parts, stanzas, images, to
     which any other part of the poem may succeed. This system of or-
     ganization requires that that part of the poem represented on any
     one card must be a sufficiently independent statement to be able
     to generate a sense of poetic meaning as it follows or is followed
     by any other statement the poem contains. (Dickey 1991: 147)

      This poetic meaning is more powerful – at least in its potential –
than in traditional literature, as the categories of time and space are
more fluid and can therefore be used as a device to open the poem to a
deeper lyricism. If part of the greatness of a poem lies in its capability
to allow infinite interpretations, and to arouse diverse feelings thanks
to its ambiguity, then electronic poetry is even richer in meaning,
thanks to the possible combinations of spatial and temporal coordi-
nates that make the text more ambiguous and elusive. This is the rea-
son why such a polyphonic and polymorphic genre is often seen as a
good possibility for literary experimentation. If we think of Roland
Barthes’ concept of “tmesis” – the reader’s skipping of passages in a
fragmentation of the linear text that is not under the author’s control –



                                                                                7
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words



we realise that in the case of hypertexts it is the opposite: it is the read-
er who deliberately tries to avoid meeting the same fragments more
than once3. In doing so the reader is forced to face, and to analyse, the
strategic structures of the work, thus focusing on cross-references and
hints, even finding more references than the ones expected by the au-
thor.
      There is another important role that the issues of time and space
cover within a literary text: they prepare for the reader the set of expec-
tations about the ultimate conclusion of the work, the final whole of the
‘faits accomplis’. If time and space are always changeable and uncer-
tain, open to many different possibilities, the final impression of an ac-
complishment will certainly be different. One could even wonder if
there could ever be a final, definitive accomplishment in a hypertext.
Although narrative more than poetry moves around what Aristotle
recognised as the three constitutive parts of a work – beginning, mid-
dle and end –, poems too raise expectations in the reader, who may at
least have the sensation of having read a perfect, complete form, and
the desire to find its poetic end.
      This issue of ending is crucial, because it involves the question of
how reality and human feelings are represented in literature. In The
Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode explains how man tries to impose
false paradigms on the world, and then on fiction, in order to give
“simple chronicity” to a “purely successive, disorganised time”, which
is the one in which we live. According to Kermode, the search for an
ending is therefore something strictly tied to human nature itself:

            Men, like poets, rush “into the middest”, in medias res, when
      they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of
      their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such
      as give meaning to lives and poems. (Kermode 1968: 7)

     The necessity that man seems to have of imposing form on time,
the habit of imposing such false paradigms in literature, is a need for

      3 Aarseth refers to the «disoriented reader looking for fresh links in a hypertext laby-
rinth» as an «ergodic aporia» (1997: 78-9).



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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



order that we cannot find in our natural life – at least not before our
death. An order that Kermode calls “tick-tock”:

           The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a
    plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form;
    and the interval between tock and tick represents purely succes-
    sive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise. Later I
    shall be asking whether, when tick-tock seems altogether too easily
    fictional, we do not produce plots containing a good deal of tock-
    tick; such a plot is that of Ulysses. (ibid.: 45)

      Electronic literature follows the trend of modernist fiction and
avant-gardes in their disrupting of linear representations and decon-
struction of traditional time-space coordinates. In relation to socio-
historical contingences, the tendency to invert order, the tendency to
meaninglessness appears in every form of art, in opposition to the ten-
dency to minimise ambiguity typical of linear narratives, as in the Bi-
ble, which starts with Genesis and finishes with the Book of Revelation.
Ending is essential to the pleasure of reading, according also to Jane
Yellowlees Douglas (see 1994: 159) and to the epigraphs with which
she prefaces her essay (epigraphs taken from Joseph Conrad’s “Henry
James – an Appreciation”, 1905, and Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller:
Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, 1935-1938). Only the end can
finally determine the meaning of a work, as it is true of any sentence,
which needs a grammatically exact structure.
      Multiple beginnings and endings with changeable, uncentred
middles open new critical models for hypertexts. As stated by Ted Nel-
son,

          There is no Final Word. There can be no final version, no last
    thought. There is always a new view, a new idea, a reinterpreta-
    tion. And literature, which we propose to electronify, is a system
    for preserving continuity in the face of this fact. (Nelson 1981:
    2/61)




                                                                                9
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words



      Today electronic literature is one of the possibilities in which the
desire for non-closure, for irregularity, for strangeness and indefinite-
ness, for plurilinguistic, pluristylistic, and plurisexual forms can be
represented in art. Jerome McGann affirms: «The textual condition’s
only immutable law is the law of change» (1991: 9). An open-ended
and expandable text can give a sense of incompleteness that menaces
us, but can also be the expression of other kinds of desires. In both cas-
es, the reader will find a way to end his/her reading. Although it is not
necessarily physically provided by the text itself (see Yellowlees Doug-
las 1994: 17), the reader can create his/her own sense of an ending,
since «a poem cannot continue indefinitely» (Smith 1968: 33). Accord-
ing to John Slatin, in electronic literature the exiting is «not a point de-
fined by the author as “The End” but rather when s/he has had
enough» (1991: 158). Following Yellowlees Douglas, we can argue that
even if there is no ultimate ending, «it seems that merely a plausible
version or versions of the story among many will suffice equally well»
(Yellowlees Douglas 1994: 185). The aim becomes not reaching the end
but only one of the possible endings, just as with the new sophisticated
videogames that are so popular nowadays.
      Lost in the labyrinth of more or less secret pages and ephemeral
moments, the reader must face a different sense of an ending: one that
depends on personal choice. Even when not subjected to the Aristoteli-
an rhetoric of “first”, “second”, “third”, reading, perceived as a tem-
poral activity, must come to a conclusion; a conclusion which, especial-
ly in electronic literature, will follow the reader’s fantasies and expecta-
tions. We could say that, in wandering among time and space varia-
bles, the reader experiences what Wolfgang Iser calls the «continual in-
terplay between modified expectations and transformed memories»
(1978: 111).
      A fragment of Where the Sea Stands Still sounds: «become every
imagination/ denied by being seen». What is lost in reading, the «path
not taken, voices not heard» (Aarseth 1997: 3), is probably the most fas-
cinating and interesting aspect of reading hypertext poetry.
      The many variants of both the time and space of a hypertext can-
not allow a univocal and linear end; the reader can choose to surrender


10
                                  Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



to this incompleteness or decide to create one of the possible endings
for him/herself alone. The reader will either be finally reassured about
the coherence of the text, and happy with the harmony found in a sort
of circular emotional work, or will be excited by the strangeness and
anomalous shape in whose depth curiosity can wander. This is the
strength of electronic literature, what makes it different from printed
literature, and maybe complementary to it.
      The particular characteristics of the system created by time and
space in electronic literature set up a relationship with the act of read-
ing that triggers an interesting short-circuit. Hypertexts generate many
different possible readings thanks to the changing and shifting links
which move in hyperspace. The reader is called on to decide which
route to follow, which path to enter, and in which order. The implica-
tions of the different choices of the reader have, in turn, deep influ-
ences on the representation of space – places quoted in the text, but al-
so images, pictures, the position of the words – and time – order of epi-
sodes, length of the apparition of the text, reminiscences lingering in
the reader’s mind. Experiencing electronic linking also changes the
work’s spatial and temporal relation to other texts, through a network
of quotations and cross-references which amplifies the pleasure of the
always elusive and endless experience of a literary work. A pleasure
that no sense of an ending, or its absence, can ever smother.




                                                                              11
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words




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Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
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                             Sitography

Electronic Literature Organization, http://eliterature.org.
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      timo accesso 27/08/2014).




                                                                              13
Paola Di Gennaro, Changing Words




                                    Author

Paola Di Gennaro

       Paola Di Gennaro è professore a contratto di Lingua e Letteratu-
ra inglese presso le Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” e
Suor Orsola Benincasa. Ha compiuto studi nel campo delle letterature
comparate presso l’Università “L’Orientale”, Sophia University di To-
kyo, SOAS - University of London, conseguendo poi il dottorato di ri-
cerca presso l’Università di Salerno. I suoi interessi di ricerca sono la
letteratura inglese e comparata, soprattutto dei secoli XIX e XX. Si de-
dica a traduzione e scrittura creativa, sia in italiano che in inglese, e ha
pubblicato saggi in ambito anglo-americano e giapponese, traduzioni,
poesie e racconti. Tra le sue pubblicazioni, le monografie Walk in Pro-
gress. La ricerca dello straordinario in Bruce Chatwin (Enzo Albano Edito-
re, 2009) e Wandering through Guilt. The Cain Archetype in the Twentieth-
Century Novel (Cambridge Scholars, di prossima pubblicazione).


       Email: pdigennaro@unior.it

                                   The paper

Data invio: 28/08/2014
Data accettazione: 13/11/2014
Data pubblicazione: 07/12/2014

                        How to quote this paper

Di Gennaro, Paola, “Changing Words: Reading Time and Space in
Electronic     Literature”,    Between,       IV.8     (2014),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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