Last week I began spinning out some thoughts on hyperlinking and the compositional process. Here’s some more of the same, pushed a bit further….
A couple of months ago, I asserted that the artistic possibilities of some technologies ??? particularly on platforms like Kindles, smart phones, and netbooks ??? really has yet to be explored, much like Christopher Walken urged Will Ferrell to “really explore the studio space.”
But in reading Styron again, among some other authors ??? mixed in with a greater attention paid to my own writing process ??? I’ve reached a moderate conclusion. Unlike this present bloggy matter before your eyes, some prose is just not meant to be hyperlinked.
I should distinguish, however, between “meant to be” and “could benefit from,” as well as between the hyperlink and its grandparent ??? the footnote.
A grad school professor of mine once lamented the inevitability of The Sun Also Rises entering the public domain, because Hemingway’s clean pages would then be littered with superscript numbers and bumptious blocks of footnotes. A Norton Critical Edition has no doubt been in the offing for decades, and will completely transform the reader’s experience of Jake and Brett when it finally arrives. But I doubt many authors of yesteryear ??? or is this just my naivet??? ??? composed their masterpieces by anticipating the eager, annotating scholar who colors the text with his own research as part of an overall strategy for tenure. (Nothing compliments monographs and wide publication of articles like a solid annotated edition, a colleague of the aforementioned grad school prof said to me that same year.) We can generally conclude that most novels ??? to pick one genre as an example ??? were not “meant to be” annotated, but many of them indeed “benefit from” some academic touch-up, at least to a few readers.
Hyperlinking presents all sorts of complications. I believe the “not meant to be” still holds in most cases, particularly in literature ??? and in examples composed prior to the mid-1990s, for instance, we can make this conclusion by default. When Styron wrote the paragraph I quoted last week, he almost surely did not know what a hyperlink was. But as I said then, Styron’s text still somehow jumps off the page. It’s lively, it’s vivid. And it’s wholly self-contained. It relies on no external referent for its complete enjoyment. Though someday, on some sort of platform, someone will surely provide plenty of referents, and stuff them on the page or behind a constellation of blue underlined links.
Hyperlinking and cross media publishing are exploding our assumptions not only about the creative process, but also our assumptions of how we’re meant to enjoy a given medium. Whereas footnotes sit within the medium that the reader is currently enjoying, hyperlinks can work across media…or they can be as static as the good ol’ footnote. (Viz., for examples of both, your standard Wikipedia entry.)
I suppose my only point here is that while authors in all genres push the traditional limits of their creativity ??? exploring the studio space, if you will ??? I hope we reserve some space in the culture for artists who stubbornly and triumphantly persist in one medium. I think of classical artists like Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. Centuries hence, in an era of turntables, multitrack recording, automated percussion, and intercontinental digital collaboration, we still have classical, orchestral composers. We also have Beck, Bjork, Radiohead, and The Roots. And only the musical ignoramus would deny the potential for high artistry within both spheres.