Metaphors of Multiplicity: A Genealogy of the Joycean Hypertext

My personal interest in the “Joycean Hypertext” started about four years ago at this conference. Back in Seville, I presented a paper on how the thirty-three narrative intrusions in “Cyclops” interact with each other to overcome the limitations of linear narrative. I had used Bakhtin as a critical framework, but as I started to revise this piece for publication, I found myself turning more and more toward other metaphors to describe Joycean multiplicity—networks, webs, and rhizomes—arriving somewhat hesitantly at the information systems metaphor of “the hypertext.” I found that I was not alone, and what better proof of that fact than the number of presentations at this year’s conference, four year years later, that directly address the “Joycean hypertext.”

I see the current turn toward hypertext in Joyce scholarship as one of several moves that have occurred since the 1980s—a move that emphasizes multiplicity over schemas, concordances, symbols, and archetypes. We could identify the beginning of this shift, as others have, in the 1960s: not simply with an influx of poststructuralist theory, but also with the arrival of cybernetics, complexity mathematics, and media studies into Joycean scholarship. The confluence of these approaches has led in the ‘80s and ‘90s to a vision of Joyce that emphasizes permutations of the text over artistic organicism, proliferation of signal over classical correspondence. As Leonard Orr notes, Joycean criticism of the ‘80s and onward shows a move away from a “mastery” of the text toward a denial of mastery as a possibility (90). Orr and others, myself included, see this shift as a “postmodernizing” of Joyce, calling attention to the “unreadibility” and indeterminacy of his later texts (92-93). Orr writes: “We have a new postmodernist Joyce perceived as precursor to the poststructuralists. This creates a different genealogy for Joyce, placing him in connection not with Woolf, Pound, Eliot, or Proust, but with Sade, Mallarmé, Nietzsche, and Freud” (97). We might also add, oddly enough, Vannevar Bush.

I am, of course, referring to the author of “As We May Think,” the 1945 essay that hypertext theorists cite as their scene of theoretical and technical departure. With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, hypertext has penetrated both popular and scholarly discourse. Some textual scholars have depicted hypertext as a kind of Gutenberg revolution: a radical change in medium that radically alters the possibilities of the written message. Other theorists, following on the work of George Landow, find in the dispersed writing of hypertext the technical realization of poststructuralist theory. In both camps, Joyce stands as the exemplary “precursor” to hypertext. Not surprisingly, then, hypertext theory has begun to emerge as an expression of a postmodernizing trend in Joycean scholarship. Hypertext does two things: it networks multiple texts together, and it emphasizes the reader’s active participation in the text. This second point in particular seems highly relevant to an understanding of why Joyce rather than, say, Eliot has found his way into discussions of hypertext. While The Waste Land also offers an intricately constructed network of cross-reference and allusion, Eliot conceives of his work as a completed author-ized text. In contrast, Finnegans Wake relies upon a play between reader and text: a reader who must negotiate and navigate multiple connections through a polyharmonic text.

As I began to question why this gesture toward hypertextuality had become an increasingly prevalent trope, I began to see myself as a genealogist of sorts. In tracing the genealogy of the Joycean hypertext, I located in the current moment a confluence of three critical lines: a cybernetic Joyce, inaugurated by Umberto Eco’s Open Work; a poststructuralist Joyce of both American and French ancestry; and an electronic Joyce of some half-relation to Marshall McLuhan.

While it would be tempting to begin with Vannevar Bush’s “memex” machine as a model for Finnegans Wake (or vice versa, perhaps), I prefer to begin our genealogy of the Joycean hypertext with Umberto Eco, for whom Joyce presents an exemplum of the contemporary open text. In The Open Work, written in the early 1960’s, Eco explores a 20^th century aesthetic of multiple, fragmented works that demands the reader’s interaction within the work itself. For Eco, Joyce creates texts in which the reader has an active role in determining or “completing” the text. “Suggestiveness” takes precedence over monolithic narrative structures such that the text functions as a structure of possibility. Reading resembles a mapping of connections and pathways: “the actualization of a series of consequences whose premises are firmly rooted in the original data provided by the author” (Eco, Open 19). In other words, the “open work,” like the hypertext, shrinks the space between reader and writer. Eco also introduces us to the spatiality of the network and the image of navigation implied in the word “cybernetics,” and in doing so, he helps to mark a shift of sorts away from classical Joycean criticism. In “classical” Joyce studies, we map correspondences between Joyce and other works. In contrast, cybernetic approaches to Joyce, among which I would include The Open Work, explore the proliferation of signal in the text. Communication—or if you’d prefer, correspondence—brings points into contact, demanding a reduction of “noise” in the name of “signal.” Eco emphasizes that the open aesthetic constantly questions this relation. In Eco’s words, Joyce’s chaosmos “creates a continuous web of reference. Any person or event is a cypher which refers to another part of the book” (Eco, Middle 7). Reading, therefore, becomes an active role, and more specifically for our purposes, an act of navigation.

Hold on, though—we’re still quite a ways off from the Netscape Navigator icon. Clearly, however, the cybernetics of Eco’s approach calls to mind a textual space that resembles a mappable network of nodes similar to hypertext. This network of associations—an impossible map of “entropy”—supersedes any intention or “code” implied by the reader or writer. Of particular importance to our genealogy of the Joycean hypertext is Eco’s insistence that readings of Finnegans Wake are “comprehensible because the entire book, read in different directions, actually furnishes the metonymic chains that justify it” (qtd. in Roughley 63). This image of a text with multiple points of entry and multiple navigable routes provides the basic theoretical foundations for the hypertext. In language reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the rhizome, Eco describes this network as: “a mass of nodes interconnected by various types of associative links…. an immense web of interpretants where from every single point of the net every other point can be reached” (Limits 143-144, 145). The work of Joyce, or more precisely the net-work of Joyce, sets up a poetics in which the reader constantly takes part by tracing the proliferating connections in this complex web.

This emphasis on the inter-relations of the text and its function as a productive system has direct relevance to the current theoretical figurations of Joyce-as-hypertext. As George Landow has noted, Barthes’s semiotic “lexias” lead directly to the “lexias” of hypertext, in which the inter-relation of signifying units becomes realized as “clickable” links (52-53). This semiotic approach envisions a reader who, like the reader of a hypertext, constructs meaning by linking nodes into a network (Roughley 57). This particular strand in our genealogy leads us to the semiotics of Kristeva in the 1970s and her introduction of a vocabulary of intertextuality into Joycean scholarship. For Kristeva, Joyce’s texts set up networks of signification that constantly form and reform on the basis of intertextual connections. Intertextuality reaches beyond correspondence, emphasizing instead the indeterminate, tentative nature of these multiple mappings. In a similar vein, Andre Topia demonstrates how Joycean networks constantly determine meaning while simultaneously suggesting a proliferation of alternate readings that pollute, destabilize, and infect each other (104-106). For Topia, Ulysses provides an overcoding such that any textual unit provides a potential “cybernetic key” that composes a matrix of signals (109). While these intertextual approaches do not emphasize navigation per se, they do locate the reader at a crucial, active site: the site of both reception and transmission in a shifting cybernetic field (Topia 111).

From this point of view, it is a small move indeed from the intertextuality of poststructuralism to the linkages of hypertext. George Landow in particular calls attention to how hypertext, with its “network of easily navigable pathways,” literally enacts the dispersal of text figured in the theoretical structure of intertextuality (53). We will hold off on the question of how “easily navigable” these networks are. My primary concern at present, however, is the function of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in hypertext scholarship as exempla of what Landow calls “implicit hypertexts in nonelectronic form" (10). Jay Bolter makes perhaps an even stronger claim, referring to both Ulysses and the Wake as "hypertexts that have been flattened out to fit on the printed page" (24). In this terminological move from intertext to hypertext, I would argue that the spatiality of these textual linkages moves to the foreground, and along with it, the navigation implicit in cybernetic models of the network. For Bolter, both these aspects mark hypertext as a form of “topographic writing,” with Joyce as the literary precursor par excellence. The reader literally navigates what Bolter calls a writing space, “mov[ing] back and forth through the book in order to appreciate the complex relationships of its parts” (135). I could draw on many other examples as well. In fact, whenever a discussion of hypertext or “network logic” comes up in Bolter, or Landow, or Michael Heim, or Kevin Kelly or Steven Johnson—and the list does go on—reference to Joyce’s “implicit hypertext in nonelectronic form” seems not too far away.

There’s another name that pops up with equal frequency in these discussions who we will have to locate within our genealogy: that name is, of course, Jacques Derrida. For Derrida (under the influence of Deleuze, I would argue), the Joycean text is a kind of informatic “machine.” Geoffrey Bennington notes that Derrida turns to the computer when discussing Joyce not just as an image of the archive, but to imagine “the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links between sentences, words, or marks separated by hundreds of pages” (314). Joyce’s books, therefore, serve for Derrida as supercomputers of textuality: machines of signification, interconnection, and associative leaps. In both of his essays “on” Joyce, Derrida has made reference to the Wake and Ulysses as “hypermnesiac machine[s]” that record, encode, and prefigure all languages, all associations, and all readings (“Two” 147). This “joyceware” encodes wholes into each part, but in doing so, it undermines the possibility of ever exhausting this network of signification, even from two words (“Two” 155). The Joycean text becomes a kind of machine itself: a medium for proliferation that doubles and short-circuits the “powerful reading machine” of Joycean scholarship (“Ulysses” 286). And it is this emphasis on the unfinished aspect of the novel—and the impossibility of mastering the text—that finds Derrida a place in our genealogy.

In his account of the “postmodernity of Joyce,” Derek Attridge follows a similar line by bringing attention to what he calls the “network of potentialities” in Joyce’s later work, the “constantly renewed possibility of connection” that distinguishes his texts from the more static, finished works of Eliotic modernism (12). Attridge sees Joyce as the engineer of a textual machine that provides for a flux of meaning (14). This “machine” image, which we have already seen in Derrida, has an important place in our genealogy and brings us closer to the hypertextual Joyce of the 90s. Jean-Michel Rabaté makes similar use of the machine to describe the poiesis of meaning in the Wake (79). He describes the novel as: “a word machine, or a complex machination of meanings…. [a] perverse semic machine [that] has the peculiar ability to distort the classical semiological relation between ‘production’ and ‘information’” (79). For Rabaté, these “semic machine[s],” produce what Eco calls serial structures, which, rather than communicating by way of a given code, produce new possibilities of communication by challenging determined systems of signification (Open 219-221). In other words, the novel produces, or more accurately, performs meaning, while at the same time marking a “lapsus,” or a “misfiring” of meaning (Rabaté 91). One can see, then, in the Joycean hypertext a family resemblance to what Rabaté calls a “citational network”(92): “threads, stitches and weave, of a braid which we the readers cannot finish” (81).

I find it quite fitting that I should be seated next to Lawrence James this morning, since he is the author of one of the most extended, direct explorations that I have found of the Joycean hypertext. Written for the web and published electronically in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, his 1995 essay, “Phoenix Ex Machina: Joyce’s Solicitation of Hypertext,” presents a complex examination of the machinic properties of the Wake in the context of both poststructuralist thought and hypertext theory. James weaves Rabaté’s “perverse semic machine,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines,” Attridge’s complexity machine, and Derrida’s “hypermnesiac machine” into what he calls the “hypertextual transverse.” In any grid arrangement of the text, he argues, “this grouping of signifiers reveals, if it reveals anything, the way a transverse marks out a network of discontinuities, of metaphor and metonymy, as they relate, not to a particular context, but to what opens a context at its frontiers to an alterior discourse” (“Anamorphosis” n.pg.). James’s weavings explicitly turn to hypertext as an image of this machine that maps jumps and discontinuities into a tentative structure. But ultimately the reader of “Phoenix Ex Machina” is left waiting for that impossible map of the “hypertextual transverse,” which like Derrida’s n^th generation Joycean computer stands as a theoretical terminus that we never quite reach. In the first sentence of his essay, James asserts that Derrida’s two Joycean essays “anticipat[e] the increased significance of hypertext in Joycean scholarship” (“Phoenix” n.pg.). That work, I would argue, is just now emerging—and emerging at this conference.

It should come as no surprise that a number of articles that have explored the hypertextuality of Joyce’s writings can be found on the World Wide Web. For example, David Gold’s “Ulysses: A Case Study in the Problems of Hypertextualization of Complex Documents” attempts to “us[e] the electronic world to guide us through Joyce’s” (“Ulysses” n.pg). Gold’s central concern suggests that with its variants and editorial struggles, its ongoing controversy and its resistance to producing an “authoritative text,” Ulysses provides a work that is profoundly multiple and therefore ideally suited for a translation from paper to electronic medium (“Toward” n.pg). Darren Tofts, who spoke on Monday, has published several online pieces that explore the Wake “as a form of electronic thought, of hyperlogic” (n.pg.). He goes on to argue: “it is a mistake to think that with the Wake [Joyce] simply wrote a book that looks like hypertext. In fact he didn’t write a book at all. He provided a complex system of prompting, the primer node in an interface to be activated by the reader” (n.pg.). Even earlier works are becoming entangled in this Joycean hypertext. For example, in his online article entitled “Joyce’s Net,” David Stephens argued for the hypertextuality of Portrait, using a web page to literally map out the network of interconnections within the novel.

It should be equally unsurprising that hypertext has begun to provide a technological benefit for Joycean scholars. As I am sure many of you are aware, numerous Joyce sites exist on the web, comprising an interlinking network of primary texts, search engines, and scholarship—and creating an image, perhaps, of that “hypermnesiac machine” we’ve all heard about. Several hypertext versions of Joyce’s work are underway, one, of course, which Michael Groden demonstrated yesterday. In producing electronic versions of these texts, Mike and others have taken up Bolter’s challenge:

Joyce could not have anticipated the electronic medium, but his works would be a rich source of experimentation for writers in the new medium. Students of Joyce could, for example, begin to map the network of reference in a chapter of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake…...The result would be a massive network that the scholar and even the casual reader...could traverse in a variety of ways. (137)

In both theory and practice, then, Joyce seems quite at home in this new electronic medium.

As our final strand in this genealogy, I’d like to touch on the significant work of Donald Theall, who in re-evaluating McLuhan’s embrace of Joyce, brings our genealogy to a hybrid of sorts. With an eye (and an ear) toward media theory, Theall argues that Finnegans Wake provides “a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology” (6). As the title of one online essay suggests, Theall claims that Joyce presents a “Pre-History of Cyberspace” by creating a book that “recogniz[es] the drive toward the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium” (7). In this regard, Theall’s cyber-Joyce aligns with the Joyce of hypertext theorists, who see in his later texts a challenge to the “writing space” of the book: a challenge to the medium of the novel itself. Theall points to the blurring of reader and writer that the coding and decoding of Finnegans Wake entails: “the reader of this night-book also becomes a “raider” of the original “reading-writing” through the machinery of decoding, for ‘What can’t be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for’” (10). He sees Finnegans Wake projecting from the telegraph to the television and beyond, intimating our own contemporary questions concerning tele-media (13-20). While Theall places Joyce in the pre-history to cyberspace, his own essays, I would argue, and his earlier work on McLuhan and Joyce, present a crucial pre-history of the current emergence of the Joycean hypertext.

In sketching out this genealogy, I have hoped to call attention to a convergence of scholarly interest: an interest in networks, webs, and multiplicities, and the challenges they present to structures of meaning. At one point in his discussion of “complexity,” Thomas Rice reminds us that webs and networks have been a part of Joyce scholarship for some time (90n25). Fair enough: the Joycean Web predates the World Wide Web. But I think there’s a more important point to be made here—here, at this site of convergence called “Hypertextual Joyce” (parts one and two). In the same essay, Rice connects Joyce to the works of diverse authors from the 1930s (Gramsci, Canetti, Bachelard) who move from a hierarchical understanding of political, social, and cognitive aggregates to a conception of distributive, or networked systems (82). Again, Vannevar Bush remains unmentioned in this context, but clearly his 1945 essay, while a few years off, would fall within this same paradigmatic shift that we might hesitantly label, for lack of a better term, an emerging postmodernity. Given this framework, while it may not have been “inevitable” that hypertext theorists would have adopted Joyce, and Joyceans, in turn, would have adopted hypertext, but there certainly seems to be a shared strain of thought between the two fields of study, obsessed as they are with challenging texts, and I mean that in every sense of the word.

In “Ulysses Gramophone,” Derrida fantasizes about hooking up to the Joyce Foundation computer. Such a computer would provide access to the texts of Joyce in a kind of “mastered” fashion, but it would also undermine that attempt, pointing to those proliferating networks that the computer could not perform ahead of time without the function of a reader. Geoff Bennington engages in a similar fantasy, imagining a computer version of his own book on Derrida: “a little on the model of a ‘hypertext’ program which would allow, at least in principle, an almost instantaneous access to any page or word or mark from any other” (314). And I have found myself indulging in a similar fantasy in mapping this genealogy of the Joycean hypertext, which continues to return, like intersecting refrains, to conceptions of the “open work,” discussions of the unfinished “chaosmos,” machinic visions of multiple productions, and the denials of mastery in the name of multiplicity. Perhaps genealogy is not the best word to describe this endeavor, for it seems more and more that I have been constructing my own network of sorts, laced with interconnecting nodes and recurring themes, held together more by horizontal series than vertical structures: not a family tree per se, but a rhizome of family resemblance. I would argue that the appearance of hypertext in Joycean scholarship of the mid-‘90s is not a fad; rather, it is another enunciation of a postmodernizing trend in our understanding of Joyce, one that resuscitates some approaches to Joyce that have been neglected: most importantly, perhaps, Joyce’s own fascination with new media. And perhaps some hypertext theorists are guilty of a form of over-exuberance, performing the equivalent of uncovering of World Wide Web addresses in Finnegans Wake. But the impulse to hypertextualize Joyce, both literally and theoretically, should continue to yield an enriched understanding of the place of Joyce in twentieth century literature, and in the cultural shift that we have mapped this century by way of the word “postmodern.” This work is unfinished, open. And I look forward to watching this network grow.

Works Cited

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---. “Ulysses Gramophone.” Trans. Tina Kendall. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 253-309.

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---. The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. Trans. Ellen Esrock. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.

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Theall, Donald. “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace.” Postmodern Culture 2.3 (May 1992). <http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/ Joyce/dtheall.htm>. 27 Apr. 1998.

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Topia, André. “The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses.” Trans. Elizabeth Bell. Post-Structuralist Joyce. 103-125.