The Rationale of [Our] Hypertext
Some might see
this essay as unnecessary: why provide a rationale for working in the medium that simply
is the way of the future? Others--holding
on to print culture, insisting upon its ability to do as hypertext does, and decrying the
"garbage" so abundant on the web--would have their own response . . . or would
they? Our essay exists only on-line and so seeks to persuade an audience who might never
see it.
We argue, then, for those who already know and those who will not yet listen. We
do this for reasons that speak to both groups. We recognize with the first group the
largeness of the present moment. We join in their conversation, then, for the sake of the
record that is being created in the process of exploring and pushing this new medium. It
is a record important not only for its documentation of a process, but for its inherent
quality as a discussion. Even if print culture never dies, even if some new medium of
textuality arises suddenly and kills what now appears to be the future, valuable
conversations have been taking place.
We join the skeptics, however, in our belief that print is still not only a valid choice
but also is currently the more prominent and respected one. We feel compelled to explain
not only why we would choose this form, but why it is crucial to our project.
First, inasmuch as our project is connected to nineteenth-century American periodicals,
hypertext presents itself as an appropriate medium with which to work. Those working with
nineteenth-century periodicals, in fact, have drawn upon metaphors often
associated with hypertext and have described their own field and its concerns in ways that
are strongly reminiscent of the conversation occurring about electronic textuality. Both
are fields that emphasize connections between bodies, texts, and methods; both emphasize
the possibility of multiple paths. You can enter the print web, for instance, through your
examination of an author, a publication, a genre, a specific piece. Furthermore, anyone
constructing a picture of those connections can only be too aware of the ability for any
center to become marginal. This effect becomes abundantly clear in our own project--what
we call "the primary investigative tool" in the archive might easily be of
secondary or tertiary importance to someone interested in The Youth's Companion
or textual theory instead of Dickinson.
As a site that attempts to show a node--Emily Dickinson and The Youth's Companion--from
that print web, other connections present themselves. When Dickinson is placed at the
center, the task of illustrating the pieces of the web in which she was involved suggests
the importance of recreating
her involvement not only with The Youth's Companion but with St.
Nicholas, The Book Buyer, the Independent, and other
nineteenth-century periodicals in which she was published. Or, for someone speculating on
why Dickinson's early editors chose to send her writing to The Youth's Companion,
it becomes important to begin to track the threads of another web--Thomas Higginson's own
publication in children's periodicals or Mabel Loomis Todd's own writing for children. Yet
another person, interested in the relationships other authors had with The Youth's
Companion, might replace the "Emily Dickinson" in our project's title with
William Cullen Bryant, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Austin, and many others, and imagine still
another series of questions. Any connection made suggests another--we are left with a
project that lies always beyond completion and illustrates how the "network" in
which many nineteenth-century authors worked was a vast and tangled one that demands a
hypertext-like structure to understand it.
Second, inasmuch as this is a project that raises questions about the creation and
reception of one of many "Emily Dickinsons," it seems appropriate to present it
in a medium where
central concerns include the empowerment of the reader/user and the
responsibility of the editor/designer. In conversations about electronic textuality,
Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" surfaces with mantra-like regularity,
and "collaboration" is the word for those who describe the relationship between
author/designer and reader/user. It is also an area in which editorial theory, with its
current emphasis on multiple texts, "paratexts" and bibliographic codes, and the
collaborative nature of editors with authors, is served well. Our work speaks to these
concerns in several ways: The Youth's Companion brought Dickinson's poetry to far
more people than did the collections of her poetry in the 1890s and editorial acts in both
cases served to rework Dickinson--some would say "polish," others
"mutilate"--for the public. All of this took place after the literal "death
of the author." Those readerly constructions and editorial acts, problematic for so
many Dickinson scholars, are important at least for the reason that they have helped make
an argument for the need to "un-edit" Dickinson or at least re-edit her work in
a way that foregrounds the authority of the manuscripts. We offer our work, however, not
only in an effort to help people understand how we have reached this point but to
contribute to a discussion of where we might go from here. What hopefully will become
clear is the historic instability of any method--that which appears editorially consistent
and necessary to one generation becomes unnecessary or even malevolent interference to the
next.
We would like, finally, to suggest that in addition to the appropriateness of what we have
done, our work is valuable too for its inappropriateness. People might rightly
applaud the internet for the extent to which it mimics the human brain. But it seems
misguided to tote its merits as being greater than those of linear print culture because
it is somehow more "natural".
Arguments for naturalness are made, after all, from a predetermined position--anything
becomes "natural" or "superior" when considered with a certain set of
criteria in mind. And, that which is "natural" and "appropriate," it
seems, is not necessarily "better" or more productive. How useful we know the
unnatural form of the book to be, for instance.
Jerome McGann's name is helpful to introduce here because what we are trying to suggest is
how problematic it is to let the logic of that which you work with determine the logic
with which you approach it, an idea that he has written on extensively. In The
Romantic Ideology, the first of McGann's work in this area, he convincingly argued
that scholars had fallen too hard for the Romantic idea of poetry and that the domination
of that idea in academic discourse made it difficult to talk beyond the boundaries it
established. In "A Rationale," he makes a less elaborate but
equally forceful argument about transmission methods--we need methods outside of the book
to help us examine books more carefully. McGann reminds us that "the scale of the
tools seriously limits the possible results" and argues that the difficulties
inherent with reading and using scholarly editions "arise because they deploy a book
form to study another book form" ("Rationale" 1). It is because
hypertext is not simply an appropriate extension, because it is not bound by that
which it seeks to set out, that it allows new ways of thinking about that with which it
works. Which brings us to McGann's "Imagining What You Don't
Know." Here he suggests how the inability to know what will happen
with this strange, new form and the opportunities it allows us for deliberate perversions
shed new light on the focus of any inquiry.
We hope that what we provide here will be useful for helping people to start with such
imaginings.