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Machan, Tim William. Chaucer's poetry, versioning, and hypertext. In
Philological Quarterly Summer 1994, v73, n3, p299(18).
Thirty years ago, Chaucer's poetry, versioning, and hypertext would
have been an unlikely triumvirate. Chaucer's poetry had been read and
enjoyed for centuries, of course, and was by then the focus of a
thriving critical and professional industry. But the very term
hypertext would not be coined until 1965, while the first commercial
hypertext system would not be marketed until the mid-1980s.(1) The
textual critical theory of versioning is even more recent, with
perhaps the first account that was widely influential in
Anglo-American circles dating to 1975.(2) Despite their brief
history, however, the coupling of versioning and hypertext with
Chaucer's poetry has quickly become an inevitability. Such databases
as the Oxford Text Archives or Project Gutenberg, for instance, are
already making multiple texts available online, while the Society for
Early English and Norse Electronic Texts actively encourages the
production of hypertext editions. Even more significantly, the
Canterbury Tales Project envisions a computer readable form that will
offer diplomatic transcriptions of all eighty-three extant
manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and computerized images of select
manuscripts and early editions.(3) What made this situation
inevitable are impetuses in literary and textual studies that are far
broader than those devoted to one writer alone and that are therefore
outside the Chaucerian focus I here pursue. Within this focus, in
fact, the reasons for the convergence of Chaucer's poetry,
versioning, and hypertext may well be less important than its
consequences and the extent to which these can be shaped. If now,
with the fast approach of the twenty-first century, the spin of
Fortune's critical wheel towards this convergence cannot be stopped,
are there reasons and ways to modulate it a bit?
The most established member in the triumvirate of my title, Chaucer's
poetry is not therefore the least complex. Both because of his
methods of composition and because of the vicissitudes of textual
transmission in a manuscript culture, the texts of individual
Chaucerian poems sometimes vary considerably from one medieval
document to another. Chaucer's contribution to this variability
consists of the revisions he wrote for several of his works. While
this is a procedure that any writer of any historical period is
likely to follow, the circulation of Chaucer's poetry in manuscripts
and before the age of copyright could result in the preservation and
transmission of variant textual states. The Prologue to the Legend of
Good Women, for example, is extant in twelve authorities. But it is
widely believed that these authorities reflect two distinct authorial
versions: the original version of about 1386, which survives in
eleven copies, and a revision of about 1394, which survives in only
one. A similar putative revision resulted in two states of the
Prologue to the Nun's Priest's Tale. In a slightly different vein,
for both Troilus and Criseyde and Truth the surviving manuscripts
would seem to suggest less systematic, sequential versions of these
poems than variant working drafts.(4)
The textual affiliations of these and many other Chaucerian works
were further complicated in manuscript transmission. In the
Parliament of Fowls, thus, the concluding roundel the birds sing "To
don Nature honour and plesaunce" may well be Chaucerian, but it does
not unambiguously seem, on the basis of manuscript evidence, to have
been intended for inclusion in the poem.(5) While Chaucer alludes to
the presence of the roundel in the "nexte vers," the extant
manuscripts actually reflect three general treatments of this
allusion: silent exclusion of the roundel, indication of the
roundel's absence, and inclusion of a text of some kind. Together
these alternatives can be understood as scribal responses to the
omission of the roundel already in the holograph. Even more apparent
is such scribal intervention in the transmission of the Canterbury
Tales, which Chaucer left profoundly unfinished: the requisite number
of Tales was never written, there are insufficient textual clues to
make the ordering of individual Tales and fragments unproblematic,
and portions of the work (such as the Prologue to the Nun's Priest's
Tale) sometimes survive in variant authorial states. Because of this
indeterminacy and presumably in response to Chaucer's growing
popularity and status in the fifteenth century, scribes actively
intervened in the transmission of the Canterbury Tales in a number of
ways. Some provided missing Tales, such as substituting the spurious
Tale of Gamelyn for the fragmentary Cook's Tale, and others altered
the order of specific Tales and fragments, such as the position of
the Squire's and Franklin's Tales. In transmitting the Canterbury
Tales in this way, scribes gave to both the text and format of the
work a degree of finish that Chaucer never had.(6)
If all this complex variation in composition and transmission is
well-known to Chaucerians and textual critics, it is so largely
because of the critical apparatus of modern editions, for the texts
themselves have been overwhelmingly in the tradition of clear-text
eclecticism. The actual texts of the Canterbury Tales, or Truth, or
the Parliament are thereby compiled from the various manuscript
sources and presented discrete from a record of variants that both
justifies the texts and challenges the unific certainty they presume
to represent. Even R. K. Root, who argued the most enthusiastically
on behalf of a three-version theory of the Troilus, offered a
clear-text edition of the poem.(7) In fact, the only Chaucerian work
for which editors have traditionally departed from this traditional
approach is the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which is often
printed in parallel columns containing both the early and revised
states. Since a similar procedure is not adopted in the arguably
similar situation of the Prologue to the Nun's Priest's Tale, the
singling out of the Legend may well depend less on any textual
particularities or theoretical propositions and more on tradition and
the popularity of the poem. Until relatively recently the Legend has
not had a particularly favorable critical reputation, so that
acknowledgment of its patently unfinished condition has not risked
the attention of a substantial audience.
The reasons for the clear-text, eclectic treatment of the divergent
Chaucerian poems are both general and specific. Most specifically,
clear-text eclecticism responds to Chaucer's status as the "father of
English poetry," a position that has gradually accrued to him since
early in the fifteenth century.(8) Through its methods and
theoretical underpinning, this eclecticism removes the traces of
authorial indecision - even error - and manuscript transmission, both
of which mark Chaucer's poems as the productions of a specific human
being that were nonetheless subject to the cultural and technological
constraints of specific moments in history. More generally, this kind
of treatment befits and affirms Chaucer's preeminent position in
English poetry. From its inception in the humanist period to its
flourishing in the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition,
textual criticism has emphasized the equation of the authoritative
lexical work with an individual author. In effect, clear-text
eclecticism physically actualizes a theoretical valorization both of
the author's artistic preeminence and of the essentially lexical
character of a work irrespective of its documentary realizations.
These orientations, in turn, underlie both traditional textual
critical practice and, as in the case of the New Criticism, much
literary interpretation as well. The appearance of Chaucer's works in
clear-text editions, therefore, materially assimilates these works
into the main traditions of English literary history, even as those
medieval writers whose works might be available only in the largely
diplomatic editions of the Early English Text Society are precluded.
This same general context of textual criticism, however, has recently
offered theoretical and practical opportunities for transcending the
limitations of traditional, clear-text editing, and here I turn to
the second term of my triumvirate. A clear-text, eclectic edition is
unarguably convenient for the reader in the way that it foregrounds
the work it contains as the completed, coherent achievement of an
individual artist. Such convenience and coherence, then, have become
increasingly suspect for literary works in general as critics have
come to challenge them as predicates of ahistorical conceptions of
writers and their compositions. Responding in part to the decentering
of both authorship and the literary work in interpretive studies, the
socialization approach championed by Jerome McGann, D. F. McKenzie,
and others situates the object of textual criticism within a nexus of
not only literary but institutional and cultural practices as
well.(9) In this way, the literary work is not defined as the
essentially lexical production of an isolated individual. Authorial
intention embraces, rather, that individual's efforts in concert with
those of friends and publishers, while the literary work is
understood as the construction both of this expanded intention and
also of the actual documentary forms in which the work was read and
transmitted.
>From these perspectives on the authority of a text as broadly
constituted, textual critical interest extends beyond a putative,
reconstructed original to a particular literary work's various
textual states, whether traditionally authorized ones or not. Such
"versioning" theorizes the object of textual criticism not as a
product but as a process whose presentation wrests conceptualization
of the literary work from its author as well as its editor. By
recognizing and representing the integrity of differing states of a
work, versioning resists hermeneutic foreclosure and empowers, if not
compels, readers to compare texts in order to formulate their own
sense of the work's historical constitution(s). just such a
comparison is in fact possible on computers via hypertext, the final
member of my triumvirate.
In linking blocks of texts and enabling readers to access and
rearrange these blocks repeatedly and often as they please, hypertext
transcends the linearity that has informed text conception and
production since the age of Gutenberg.(10) Hypertext fiction, for
example, allows readers themselves to determine the form of a story
through the optional choices they make at various textual links; in
this way, a character who dies in one reading of a story may remain
alive and well in another. Pedagogically, as in The Dickens Web or
the Perseus Project, hypertext can link blocks of text with blocks of
social history, of literary criticism, and of other contemporary
prose or poetry, so that the reader approaches Great Expectations or
the Odyssey within the complex nexuses from which they emerged and
within which they have historical meanings.(11) Most significantly
here, hypertext enables editors to assemble in one edition all the
versions of a given literary work and readers to access these
versions, or parts thereof, in any number of ways. A hypertext
edition of The Waste Land, for instance, would enable comparison of
T. S. Eliot's original draft, Pound's corrected copy, and the final
published version, both in their entirety and in individual lines or
readings. A hypertext edition of Leaves of Grass would allow readers
not only to make these kinds of comparisons but also to construct
composite texts of Whitman's poems from the various versions
published in his lifetime.(12)
The theoretical possibilities of versioning and the practical
capabilities of hypertext, therefore, are ways around the limitations
of print and its theoretical consequences. As the motive and means
for displaying literary works as the products of specific cultural
determinants, versioning and hypertext would seem to forestall
interpretive closure in the very act of responding to the works'
historicity. In the case of Chaucer in particular, hypertext could
link the two versions of the Prologue to the Nun's Priest's Tale or
the various scribal responses to the conclusion of the Parliament of
Fowls, allowing readers to trace textual alterations for themselves
and to make their own interpretations of the historical evidence. It
could also link the several rolling revisions of Truth and, vis-a-vis
the issue of whether the Troilus survives in distinct versions, allow
for continual reassembling of that poem's variants into several
different texts.
In a hypertext version of the Canterbury Tales, the initial screen
might offer the user a choice between the text itself, a critical
apparatus, a record of interpretive responses, and a collection of
late-medieval references to the poem. If the reader chose the text
and began to read "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote," an icon
on "shoures" might lead to a small block of text on springtime
imagery, while one on "Aprill," which F. N. Robinson's 1933 edition
of Chaucer's Works spelled Aprille," could lead to a much larger node
on the status of final -e in Chaucer's poetry. This node in turn
might be linked to one containing some of the famous critical
commentary on this topic,(13) to another offering information on
Chaucer's prosody in general, and to still another that listed
passages in the Canterbury Tales where a final -e is at issue. This
latter node, in turn, would be linked back to line one of the General
Prologue.
More general kinds of textual rearrangement would also be possible,
allowing the reader, in effect, literally to follow Chaucer's
encouragement to "Turne over the leef and chese another tale." An
anchor at the beginning of the Cook's Tale, for instance, might link
to the Tale of Gamelyn. This Tale in turn might link to a copy of
Urry's 1721 edition of the Works (the first place this Tale appeared
in the printed canon), to a node with information on the history of
the Canterbury Tales text, and to one with other medieval accounts of
youths denied their inheritance. The appearance of the
thirteenth-century romance Havelok in this node might lead back to
the Canterbury Tales with a link connecting the shining light emitted
from Havelok's mouth to other miraculous occurrences in medieval
literature and, ultimately, the opening of the Clerk's Tale, wherein
Griselda patiently endures her husband Walter's cruel tests of her
loyalty. At this point, a reader might confront a link connecting
both to the canonical version and to the starkly moral recuperation
found in San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 140, where the Tale
appears without the other Canterbury Tales but with didactic,
religious poetry and where the Envoy is followed by Truth.(14)
Even more generally, aided by the information on individual
manuscripts in volume one of the Manly-Rickert edition, a user might
read through the Tales, from General Prologue to Retraction, in any
of the attested tale arrangements, omitting or including lines or
readings according to the specifics of particular documents. Such a
hypertext edition, moreover, could offer both transcribed forms of
medieval texts and computerized reproductions of actual documents. In
effect, a hypertext edition of the Canterbury Tales could thus
respond to the work's fundamental incompleteness by actualizing the
binding-and-loose-folders model Derek Pearsall has used to describe
Chaucer's longest composition: readers would access a text with a
fixed beginning and end (the first and tenth fragments) and with
blocks in between that could be freely rearranged.(15) And through
hypermedia, a reader might call up or interchange, at the relevant
textual places, the illustration schemes of manuscripts like
Ellesmere and Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.4.27. The extent to
which the Ellesmere pilgrim portraits contribute to the ordinatio of
the Tales might accordingly be approached through a variety of
alternative arrangements.(16)
In conceptual terms, the panoramic view of Chaucer and his poetry
that hypertext could provide would apparently obviate a number of
critical conundrums. By displaying a work's entire medieval
transmission history both spatially - how it existed at a specific
time - and temporally - how its character changed over time -
hypertext diminishes the importance of distinguishing compositional
from tranmissional variation: it simply offers all medieval versions
of the work and suspends judgment on what is authorial and what is
not. The most comprehensive tradition of Chaucerian works could thus
be used as a context for any individual textual material within that
tradition, be it an entire manuscript, individual poem, or a specific
reading. In this way, the broadly medieval character of Chaucer's
poetry - of its composition and transmission as cultural practice -
would be more accessible than it is in a clear-text eclectic edition.
If all this sounds almost messianic, it nonetheless reflects a strong
trend in hypertext studies today. To visionaries like Theodore
Nelson, who first coined the term hypertext and who imagines a
"docuverse" in which everything that has ever been written is both
accessible online and elaborately linked to everything else,
hypertext and hypermedia appear as definitive solutions to critical
problems in areas as diverse as information management, pedagogy, and
cognition. Opposite but equally powerful effects are attributed to
hypertext by those who see it not as a panacea but as the ultimate
instrument of a big-brother, anti-humanist oppression. One way to
modulate the critical wheel spinning towards the conjunction of
hypertext and Chaucer's poetry is to recognize that these positions
are in fact extremes. The actual advantages and limitations of
hypertext, while not yet fully understood, are certainly much less
dramatic, though still real enough.
That these advantages and limitations have been obscured is due in no
small part to the fact that hypertext, like any technological or
theoretical novelty, can elicit emotional responses that have little
basis in empirical evidence. In one study, for example, sixteen
high-school students were shown both print and hypertext versions of
Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia. Even though the texts of
these two versions were the same, and even though use of the
electronic version was recorded to take longer than use of the
printed one, eight participants thought the former was the faster,
three maintained it had more content, and one indicated it had more
recent information." It is the same technology that makes hypertext
so deceptively attractive, in fact, that also can make it harder and
less efficient to use than print. For tasks such as proof-reading,
reading from a screen, compared to working from a printed text, has
been demonstrated to be less efficient, while results of studies on
basic comprehension have so far been no more (or less) than mixed."
Less ambiguous is the evidence about the usability of electronic
systems, for study after study notes the problems users have in
navigating hypertext. Having followed a particular set of links
through particular nodes, users can feel lost in hyperspace without a
readily accessible network map to tell them where they are, how they
got there, and how they can proceed.(20) Furthermore, to speak of
hypertext is in fact to speak of multiple, incompatible hardware and
software designs." While systems like Standard Generalized Markup
Language are being developed to allow for universal communication
between differing hypertext programs, to prepare a hypertext edition
at present risks a categorically restricted audience that is likely
to decrease even more over time as technology is updated. At a very
basic level of convenience, most hypertext programs are further
compromised by the need of at least a personal computer far less
portable than a traditional printed edition, even of the most bulky
and awkward kind.
However such technological difficulties are resolved and despite the
advantages I have already outlined for Chaucer's poetry in
particular, there remain basic limitations on what hypertext can do
for texts and other media as well as for users. Given the
late-twentieth-century context in which they arose, hypertext and
hypermedia are sometimes regarded as the means to elevate readers to
a status of full collaboration in the construction of literary works
- as technologies that in effect actualize reader-response
criticism.(22) Yet hypertext systems are anything but unregulated
hyperplay. As computer programs, they are fundamentally and
unavoidably hierarchical, with each set of options embedded in an at
least temporarily higher-order structure and with all options
determined and weighted by the author of the program. Jacob Nielsen,
indeed, reminds us that "it is an author's job to set priorities for
the readers (even in hypertext)."(23) The priorities of a hypertext
program, furthermore, can be as restrictive as those of conventional
printed media. In pedagogical applications, for example, students are
limited by the links that the program's creator has provided, whereas
with a printed book, theoretically, they could link two portions of
text from anywhere in the document at their own Will.(24) Beyond
this, though a given node may provide a user with any number of links
to any number of other nodes, the program will necessarily evaluate
the nodes differently. Some material may be pragmatically subjugated
through placement in dead-end "pop-ups," while other material will be
pragmatically foregrounded through linkage to more textual nodes. A
hypertext author who designs a program that does not make these kinds
of distinctions both deploys hypertext inadequately and fails to meet
the needs of users, for even if it were possible, an undifferentiated
collection of data would be of small utility. In William Horton's
words,
Writers of hypertext cannot abdicate responsibility to lead. Writers
may feel tempted to forego the difficult analysis that lineal writing
requires and throw the decision of what is important and what to know
first onto the user. Users expect the writer to lead them through the
junngle of information. They do not like to be controlled or
manipulate but the do expect the writer to blaze a trail for them....
Putting a million fact online ne n an intricately linked structure is
not communication.(25)
Just as hypertext cannot eliminate all strictures of authority,
neither does its lack of rigid linearity unquestionably and uniquely
mimic, and therefore support, human cognition, another claim that is
sometimes made. Although this claim dates to the 1930s and the
relations between text linking and cognition that Vannevar Bush
developed in his highly influential work on Memex,(26) an unambiguous
empirical demonstration still, in fact, needs to be made. If
hypertext is nonlinear, for example, so is a printed book in its
potential. That is, though a printed text may be linearly fixed,
readers can and do transcend this linearity by skimming,
cross-referencing, consulting footnotes, and indexing.(27) The
cognitive possibilities that hypertext offers may indeed be
technologically more efficient than what has been available, but they
are not therefore conceptually novel. Human cognition itself,
furthermore, is still not understood well enough to justify some of
the claims made on behalf of computerized technology. Pamela
McCorduck, for instance, maintains that "In the computer, we have
fashioned for ourselves a means of taking advantage of all our
biological capacities to learn and to know, and to seek and find new
knowledge; and this is - someday - how we will know." More simply, D.
H. Jonassen has claimed that "hypertext mimics the associative
networks of human memory."(28) Human memory may well depend on
semantic webs, but current empirical evidence is not conclusive, and
even if memory and associative networks were so connected, it does
not necessarily follow that mimicry of these networks would be
conducive to cognition. Without a doubt hypertext enables faster
processing of information, but speed alone does not constitute an
altered or improved thought process.
In specific application to Chaucer's poetry, hypertext (in
conjunction with versioning) will not solve all the difficulties of
historicity that have nagged scholars for centuries. Nor would the
rendering of Chaucer's poetry that hypertext would provide
necessarily be more faithfully medieval than that of a clear-text
edition. Most importantly, if hypertext keeps open some of the
interpretive possibilities foreclosed by traditional theory and
practice, it is itself a hermeneutic gesture that defines both the
object of its study and the character of its methods. The Chaucer and
his poetry that hypertext identifies are, moreover, paradoxically
constructed.
On the one hand, hypertext could indeed forestall questions of
authority by presenting medieval versions of poems such as the
Canterbury Tales that may have in some sense originated with Chaucer
but, being subject to medieval institutions and ideas, diversified
considerably in transmission. In effect, hypertext would subvert the
authority traditionally centered on an author figure and replace it
with a conception of authority as the function of cultural practice.
But on the other hand, to do this hypertext would depend on the
monolithic, authoritative Chaucer that reception and editorial
history, from Hoccleve to Speght to Robinson, gradually created. In
other words, what would justify the decentering of Chaucerian
authority and the hypertext presentation of indiscriminate medieval
versions of (say) the Parliament of Fowls or the Canterbury Tales
would be a decidedly centered conception of the poet. Such editions
would not be of Chaucerian poetry as traditionally conceived. Yet
they would continually require this conception as the rationale of
their subject and its presentation, since the authority of Chaucer in
a given edition could not be dispersed and reconstituted without its
prior theoretical inscription. Unlike other kinds of subversion
within literary works, this dispersion could never be seen as a stage
in a historical movement towards the clearing of a space for a new
kind of poetry or ideology. Such dispersion, moreover, is
fundamentally practical rather than theoretical. The editor must
always assume the integrity of Chaucer's works, for Chaucer's
authority would in fact be the conceptual and material condition of
existence for hypertext editions that in part could challenge this
very authority. Any interpretive maneuvers a reader might perform on
such editions, in turn, would therefore be subject to the edition's
practical dependence on Chaucer.
Even more paradoxical would be the historical character of Chaucer
and his poems as constructed by such hypertext editions. Again on the
one hand, hypertext could make all the manuscript texts of a given
poem readily accessible - all of Manly and Rickert's eight-volume
edition, for example, loaded from one reel of tape. The work's entire
textual history would thereby be available and analyzable. But on the
other, this is a history that is substantively and theoretically very
much a relatively recent creation. In practical terms, it was not
until nineteenth-century advancements in codicology, paleography, and
cataloguing that identification of all extant medieval manuscripts of
a given work became possible and that readers might easily know the
existence and transmission history of manuscripts located far away.
While a modern reader using a hypertext edition, thus, could access
all the possible treatments of a given Tale or line, a medieval
reader of Hengwrt might not know of other manuscripts, Tales, and
orders, or might know of only a few other possibilities. And
theoretically, the emphasis on authority and original texts that lies
at the heart of traditional textual criticism and remains implicit in
versioning would have been quite alien to medieval vernacular
cultural practice. Even if a medieval reader did somehow have all the
manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in one room, the non-prestigious
status of the vernacular and the exclusion of its writers from the
status of auctor would have prevented many of the critical maneuvers
of modern textual and interpretive studies. The ability and desire to
collect all the historical texts of a medieval vernacular poem are
themselves, in short, historicized well after the Middle Ages.
In this vein, the claims sometimes made that computer technology like
hypertext has introduced a new age of medieval orality are
misdirected. Robert Sturges, for instance, maintains that public and
private publication through contemporary computer printouts "in some
ways resembles medieval literary production more than it does modern
print publication. In this case, too, any reader can become a
collaborator, the text dissolves into multiple versions, the author
surrenders authority. Technology thus has the potential to transcend
the print culture, and with it concepts like author, text, and
reader; but rather than moving us into an unimagined future, it has
in some ways returned us to a medieval practice."(29) Computer
technology, particularly hypertext, does indeed render a textual
fluidity in which the user, if not fully collaborative with an
author, is nonetheless significantly more powerful than the reader of
the book. But literary works, whether chirographic, typographic, or
computerized, are not autonomous semiotic objects. They are, rather,
the products of varying relationships between specific literary,
cultural, and ideological forces, which the literary works also serve
to sustain. Contemporary computerized publication can thus parallel
the anonymous compilation of medieval manuscripts only in the
abstract and only by removing medieval and hypertext documents from
the institutional and theoretical contexts that enabled them and from
the technological means that realized them. Similarly, if the
annotations of medieval manuscripts constitute a linking structure
reminiscent of hypertext,(30) they were historically not the means
for readers to construct their own original works but ideological
tools that inscribed recognition of centered and authorized texts,
writers, and meanings. In doing this, they replicated hierarchical
medieval cultural practice and responded to the vagaries, expenses,
and limitations of manuscript transmission. Hypertext radically
distinguishes itself from these practices by utilizing the accuracy
and compression capabilities of digitalized data and the
inexpensiveness of virtual texts in correlation with post-romantic
concerns with individualism.
By the same token, the use of hypertext to record and collate
variants and their transmission as in traditional kinds of editions
is also problematic.(31) Though hypertext can certainly accomplish
these tasks with an efficiency and accuracy denied human beings with
note cards, the medium itself is theoretically conceived in an
entirely different and incompatible fashion. A hypertext edition
neither offers nor valorizes the object that lies at the heart of
traditional textual criticism - the fixed, linear text of some other
writer. Instead, hypertext is a variable, fluid phenomenon subject to
the intervention of its users. If a traditional printed edition, in
other words, presents a literary work, a hypertext edition is itself
the work. Used in the service of variant collation and analysis for
the establishment of an authoritative text, hypertext in fact
curiously becomes like the early printed books that attempted to
duplicate the layout and conception of manuscripts as closely as
possible instead of exploring and exploiting the pragmatic
capabilities of the new medium.(32)
While versioning and hypertext, then, inescapably do now sit atop
Fortune's wheel, their posture could well be modified through
recognition of their limitations as well as their advantages. Though
these new technologies and theories do indeed facilitate the study of
stylistics and textual affiliations, they also further problematize
conceptions of the works, texts, and very identity of a historical
writer like Chaucer. While hypertext may in one sense, again, aid the
study of textual transmission, to do so it must depend on inherited
notions of author, text, and variant that are incompatible with its
very ontology and that it cannot in any case validate. Even
disregarding technical difficulties, the utility of hypertext is thus
scarcely unqualified and depends entirely on the system being used
and on the user's objectives and abilities.(33)
The clearest advantage of the convergence of Chaucer's poetry,
versioning, and hypertext may well simply be that this convergence is
characteristic of the mutually constitutive relations between theory,
technology, and cultural practice in general. Traditional textual
criticism, for instance, was developed not at all coincidentally in
conjunction with humanism and the printing press: textual criticism's
focus on authoritative, lexically exact texts was justified by the
ethical underpinning of the humanist project and made possible and
actualized by print. Together these forces helped to construct the
conceptions of author, work, and text that have governed literary
studies for centuries, and in this regard there without question
remains a need for printed editions that validate and are informed by
these conceptions. In the same way, however, versioning, with its
emphasis on historical constructs and its resistance to the authority
of the monolithic author, is consonant with the theoretical impulses
of both new historicism and post-structuralism and responds to the
textual diversity of hypertext. While the complete collaboration
between author and user that is sometimes credited to hypertext is an
exaggeration, for instance, the very idea of this collaboration
reflects distinctly contemporary critical concerns. As in the
Renaissance, theory, technology, and culture today thus cooperate in
the construction of a past that is not any less historical because it
is conceptually rooted in and technologically enabled by the present.
If hypertext and versioning, in other words, initially emerge from
contemporary concerns and only then respond to historicized
phenomena, such is the case with all historical inquiry.
Above all, hypertext is a computerized, online technology of which
full use can be made, therefore, only by responding to these
features.(34) For editing, the greatest benefits of computer
technology would thus seem to arise from editions and theories
developed specifically for it. The precise character of these
editions may well not yet be clear; indeed, the Canterbury Tales
hypertext edition that I described earlier is not at all free from
the influences of print and traditional textual criticism. But the
lingering influences of supplanted paradigms are inevitable with the
appearance of radically different technologies or theories, and a
parallel can again be drawn to the introduction of print. In 1492,
nearly forty years after Gutenberg produced his Bible at Mainz, the
German Benedictine Johannes Trithemius wrote his De laude scriptorum
in which he maintained, because he saw print only within the
framework of scribal copying, that the new technology was merely
novel, unlikely to last, and, compared to copying-by-hand, not
morally edifying.(35) If the full potential of hypertext is not yet
apparent, it is perhaps because, as with print for Trithemius, the
medium is still often viewed within incompatible paradigms.
NOTES
(1) For brief summaries of the history of hypertext, see Jakob
Nielsen, Hypertext and Hypermedia (Boston: Academic Press, 1990), pp.
29-41; and Cliff McKnight, Andrew Dillon, and John Richardson,
Hypertext in Context (Cambridge bridge U. Press, 1991), pp. 1-12. (2)
Hans Zeller, "A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary
Texts, "Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 231 64. Also see Donald H.
Reiman, "`Versioning': The Presentation of Multiple Texts," in
Romantic Texts and Contexts, Reiman, ed. (U. of Missouri Press,
1987), pp. 167-80; and, more generally, Peter Shillingsburg,
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (U. of Georgia Press), 1986.
(3) See Robert L. Kellogg, "E-Text Society," Chaucernet, May 12,
1993, "The Canterbury Tales Project," The Chaucer Newsletter 15:2
(1993), 1, 6-7, and N. F. Blike, ed., The "Canterbury Tales" Project
Occasional Papers, Volume 1 (Oxford U. Computing Services, 1993). For
an account of other hypertext editing projects, see Charles B.
Faulhaber, "Textual Criticism in the 21st Century," Romance Philology
45 (1991): 123-48. (4) For convenient summaries of the central issues
here, see Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 1178-79, 935, and 1161-62. On
Truth see Ralph Hanna III, "Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision,
Scribal Error? Or, The Truth about Truth," Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 10 (1988): 23-40. Recently, however, Joseph A. Dane has
argued that the so-called revised version is "simply a ridacal
variant" of the original version "produced in response to a radically
damaged exemplar." See "The Notions of Text and Variant in the
Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: MS Gg, lines 127-38," The
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993): 65-80.
(5) Hanna, "Presenting Chaucer as Author," in Tim William Machan,
ed., Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, (Binghamton, New
York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 17-39.
(6) Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 1118-22; and Aage
Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (1925; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967). (7) Robert K. Root, The Textual Tradition of Chaucer's
"Troilus," Chaucer Society, 1st ser. 99 (London: Kegan Paul, 1916);
and The Book of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer (Princeton
U. Press, 1926). (8) See Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers:
Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton U. Press,
1993); and Machan, "Speght's Works and the Invention of Chaucer,"
Text, forthcoming. (9) E.g., Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern
Textual Criticism (U. of Chicago Press, 1983); and D. F. McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library,
1986). (10) For printed illustrations of how hypertext works, see
Nielsen, Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 15-27; and William K. Horton,
Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Help Files to Hypertext
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1990), pp. 292-300. The whole of David
H. Jonassen, Hypertext/Hypermedia (Englewood wood Cliffs: Educational
Technology Publications, 1989) is printed in imitation of and
designed to be used as a hypertext system. (11) George P. Landow,
Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1992), pp. 96-100 (on The Dickens
Web) and 113-19 (on fiction). On the Perseus Project, see Gregory
Crane and Elli Mylonas, "Ancient Materials, Modern Media: Shaping the
Study of Classics with Hypertext," in Paul Delany and George P.
Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1991), pp. 205-20. The literature on hypertext and its
applications has already become vast, though concise introductions
are available in onassen, Hypertext/Hypermedia; Nielsen, Hypertext
and Hypermedia; and McKnight, Dillon, Richardson, Hypertext in
Context. As its subtitle suggests, Landow's book concentrates on the
relation between hypertext and theory. In this regard also see Delany
and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. A useful survey of
the available hypertext fiction is Robert Coover, "Hyperfiction:
Novels for the Computer," The New York Times Book Review, August 29,
1993, pp. 1 and 8-12. (12) Faulhaber surveys the potential of
hypertext in editing and also considers the specific needs of a
hvpertext edition as well as the features still to be developed. See
"Textual Criticism in the 21st Century." (13) E.g., James G.
Southworth, "Chaucer's Final -e in Rhyme," PMLA 62 (1947): 910-35;
and E. Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer's Final -e," PMLA 63 (1948):
1101-24. (14) See Lerer, Imagining Chaucer, pp. 100-16. (15)
Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), p.
23. (16) For a sketch of a Canterbury Tales hypertext edition that
emphasizes the technology's collation potential, see Peter M. W.
Robinson, "Redefining Critical Editions," in George P. Landow and
Paul Delany, eds., The Digital Word: Text-based Computing in the
Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 271-91, at
281-84. (17) Both extremes are represented in Myron C. Tuman, ed.,
Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with
Computers (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). For the utopic viewpoint
for medieval literature in particular, see Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge
de la variante: Histoire critique de la phitologie (Paris: Seuil,
1989). (18) From a 1989 study by Gino Marchionini reported by
Nielsen, Hypertext and Hypermedia, p. 153. (19) McKnight, Dillon, and
Richardson, Hypertext in Context, pp. 43-64. (20) McKnight, Dillon,
and Richardson, Hypertext in Context, pp. 65-86, and Nielsen,
Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 127-41. (21) For a sketch of the many
available programs, see Nigel Woodhead, Hypertext and Hypermedia:
Theory and Application (Wilmslow, England: Sigma Press, 1991), pp.
153-201. (22) E.g., George P. Landow and Paul Delany, "hypertext,
Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The state of the Art," in Delany and
Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies, p. 29. (23) Nielsen,
Hypertext and Hypermedia, p. 163. On the hierarchical organization of
many hysertext systems see Woodhead, Hypertext and Hyperinedia, pp.
15-34, and David S. Herrstrom and David G. Massey "Hypertext in
Context," in Edward Barrett, ed., The Society of Text: Hypertext,
Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 45-58. (24) McKnight, Dillon, and
Richardson, Hypertext in Context, pp. 118-19. (25) Horton, Designing
and Writing Online Documentation, p. 312. For guidelines authors need
to follow for effective hypertext composition, see Woodhead,
Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 117-34, and Landow, "The Rhetoric of
Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors," in Delany and Landow, eds.,
Hypermedia and Literary Studies, pp. 81-103. Intermedia, developed at
Brown University, does allow users to add links of their own, though
only the most sophisticated kind of user could be considered in any
way to resemble a full collaborator with the author; and even this
user would be initially constrained by the original nodes and links.
See Landow, Hypertext, pp. 82-85, and Norman Meyrowitz, "The Missing
Link: Why We're:all Doing Hypertext Wrong," in Barrett, ed., The
Society of Text, pp. 107-14. (26) James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, eds.,
>From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine
(Boston: Academic Press, 1991). (27) McKnight, Dillon, and
Richardson, Hypertext in Context, pp. 39-40. (28) McCorduck, "How We
Knew, How We Know, How We Will Know," in Tuman, ed., Literacy Online,
pp 245-59, at 259; and, Jonassen, quoted in McKnight, Dillon, and
Richardson, Hypertext in Context, p. 95. Also see Landow and Delany,
"Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies," pp. 7-8; and Barrett,
"Thought and Language in a Virtual Environment," in Barrett, ed., The
Society of text, pp. xi-xix. (29) Sturges, "Textual Scholarship:
Ideologies of Literary Production," Exemplaria 3 (1991): 130. Also
see Landow and Delany, "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies,"
p. 12. The work of Marshal McCluhan and Walter Ong has significantly
contributed to the notion of the computerized modern age as
simultaneously one of new orality. (30) Nielsen, Hypertext and
Hypermedia, p. 64. (31) This is in fact one of the primary stated
objects of the Canterbury Tales Project: "The transcriptions will
permit full collations and analyses of the manuscript relations of
each tale or any part.... Through the collations, the variant
databases and computer-aided stemmatic analysis, the evolution of the
manuscript tradition may be studied in precise detail" ("The
Canterbury Tales Project," pp. 1 and 6). (32) Cf. Woodhead, Hypertext
and Hypermedia, p. 98. Many hypertext programs in fact imitate this
very process by offering terminology and features that are strongly
reminiscent of book technology. This is even more the case when
optional files are imaged as a shelf of books or when the screen
presents the text within the frame of an open book. In a related
vein, Nielsen has suggested that "there is very little to be gained
from converting traditional forms of fiction to the online medium. As
long as you are just reading a regular novel with a single stream of
action, you are much better off reading a printed book. Only when new
forms of fiction are invented will we gain any benefit from putting
them on hypertext" (Hypertext and Hypermedia, p. 78). Also see
William Dickey, "Poem Descending a Staircase: Hypertext and the
Simultaneity of Experience," in Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia
and Literary Studies, pp.143-52. (33) Cf. Nielsen, Hypertext and
Hypermedia, p. 158. (34) Cf. Horton, Designing & Writing Online
Documentation, p. 5. (35) Johannes, Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes:
De Laude Scriptorum, ed. Klaus Arnold, trans. Roland Behrendt
(Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1974).
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