"The Internet Is like Literature's Pimp": Ambivalent Enthusiasm on the Electronic Frontier

"The Internet Is like Literature's Pimp": Ambivalent Enthusiasm on the Electronic Frontier
Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Thus, I won't dismiss the students who had mixed or negative reactions as lazy Luddites. Their hesitations are sometimes firmly grounded and need to be taken seriously. Partisans of hypertext as a liberatory medium trumpet the power it places in the hands of the reader, yet few of my students seemed to feel as if they were subjects unfairly bound under the dictatorship of print. In fact, the intuitive tendency of many was just the opposite: to criminalize electronic technology in general, as the one who wrote "the Internet is like literature's pimp" did. He (in this case, I'll abandon the gender-neutral pronoun) probably hadn't yet come across the work of William Gibson or Stuart Moulthrop or any of the proponents of hypertext as the cutting edge of postmodern textuality; he was protecting the investment he'd already made in the kind of cultural capital represented by a full shelf of Penguin Classics, and I can hardly fault him for it. Our campus's close proximity to Silicon Valley, the hyperkinetic center of new information technologies, may have been a factor, too: since the odds are that any career option in Northern California leads, one way or another, to or through a computer, the image of the machine as pimp may represent a projection of the understandable fear that one's own body may be used for another's profit.. In the end, however, the eruption of such a throwback metaphor (not least, a throwback in the way it casts Literature as an alluring woman to the presumptively heterosexual male subject) is also a sign of my own failure to prove that the Internet and Literature were overlapping rather than distinct categories- although I tried to end the Introduction to Reading Poetry course with a gesture at exactly those kind of cyberpoems. The days we spent in dialogue with the screen were too exceptional; I simply didn't have the hours to spend integrating the medium very deeply into the structure of the course, and the price was my still-unresolved anxiety about whether I'd thrown a good deal of time and energy into a pedagogical strategy that, in the end, was more televisionary than visionary.

What we did in my class, at least this year, didn't really qualify as hypermedia, as an enactment of wholly new technologies of the subject. It was, however, a distinctly different pedagogical experience located somewhere on the frontier between here - the embodied classroom dialogue we've long assumed as a norm - and a hypertextual there which can only be described for now as a direction, not as an endpoint. Joyce writes, "Network culture is an othermindedness, a murky sense of a newly evolving consciousness and cognition alike, lingering like a fog on the lowlands after the sweep of light has cleared the higher prospects. The same or a like fog increasingly seems to cling in the folds of the brain. We ache with it, almost as if we could feel the evolution of consciousness in the same way a sleeping adolescent feels the bone ache of growing pains as if in a dream" (Joyce 1). How thoroughly Romantic, I want to say, from the fog to the "higher prospect" to the notion of consciousness-as-dream. How Romantic, too, is the overwhelming emphasis of hypertext theorists upon the Self, and upon the necessity of redirecting creative power away from the author and into the reader. Knowing how powerfully most social and political institutions reward the cultivation of submissiveness, I tend to embrace any activity that might help fend off such universal passivity. Yet I also wonder, when reading descriptions of self-created hypertexts and self-directed virtual worlds, whether the current enthusiasm for reader-directed activities may someday seem as gorgeously, but rather boringly, narcissistic as certain Romantic lyrics. Don't we long at times to be guided by the strong will of another consciousness- a potent novelist, a teacher of strong opinions?

Nonetheless, I can't deny the appeal of that moment of gazing at our collective Go list, of having a visual impression of our footprints in the snow. Hypertext is nothing if not utopian. It taps into an ancient longing for total associational recall, for a world in which every iteration of a word or image can be linked to early or later occurrences. Joyce begins a chapter of Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture with a Czeslaw Milosz poem about gathering books from the ruins of Warsaw, which he reads as an extended allegory of the saving powers of hypertext. When I read the sentence that cites Milosz' description of scraps of the torn books "scattered like fern leaves," I was struck almost simultaneously by three mental "hits": an image from my own memory of the ferns I'd sketched as an 12-year-old, compiling a little booklet for my family about the local plants and dittoing copies of it to give to visitors at our small family-run motel. Then, a screen image from the Introduction to Photoshop class I'd recently taken: the photographic image of a fern leaf found in the prepackaged samples file, which we were assigned to outline and layer into another sample file to make a bouquet of roses. And finally, the title of Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, the popular 1854 collection that helped make Fanny Fern (a.k.a. Sara Willis Parton, an early partisan of Whitman's) a prominent arbiter of her own culture and, much later, one of the first women writers to be "recovered" by the feminist transformation of American literary history in the 1980s. Each of these hits in turn suggested further associations: my first self-publication, created with a now-obsolete technology and redolent of that pungent purple ink, recalled in an era of proliferating to self-publication. The transparent "layers" on which Photoshop and other image-manipulation software programs rely offer a nice metaphor for the process of accretion that hypertext represents: each consecutive screen impression seems a nest of ferns, their delicate lace revealing further layers above and underneath. And Fanny's Fern Leaves recalled my recent meditations on antebellum anthologizing practices, expressed in the scrapbooks, gift books, and commonplace books I've been culling from Ebay for some time now, not because of their literary value but because of the powerful will to organize significance that they express. Here is Joyce again: "In the electronic age we don't collect, we are the collection. The value of what we collect is not as much embodied in what it is as in how we found it and why we keep it." (Joyce 72-3). We are the collection, because in making associative leaps, and in assembling those leaps, we are implicitly making metaphor- making poetry.