Electronic Literature and the Author/Reader Paradox

From English 194 Wiki Site

By Alex Barkett
00:55, 9 May 2006 (PDT)

1 Abstract
2 Description
3 Analysis and Evaluation
4 Works Cited
5 Additional Resources

Abstract

The author/reader paradox arises from the struggle for control over the written text. Authors write and readers analyze and interpret. Both parties depend on each other, but each one’s specific practices can be detrimental to the effectiveness of the other’s work. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault examine important characteristics of the author that determine his or her control and authority over the text. Espen Aarseth applies the paradox to works created using the computer as medium. A comprehensive weaving of certain concepts from analyses of print theory extracted and carefully steered into the collaborative network that accompanies electronic reading practices may yield an unfortunate futility of proper understanding.

Description

A new interpretation of the author/reader paradox as it applies to Electronic Literature.

Analysis and Evaluation

Literature is a collaboration (see Collaboration defined) between reader and author. Reading and writing are so inherently and indefinitely intertwined through written works that Michael Joyce, an author and critic of hypertext fiction, has even termed the crossbreeding of the two: “wreading”. For reading and writing to come together in literature, there must be readers and there must be authors. The distinction between these two parties has never been as obscure as right now. Literary theorists and critics have always been invested in defining the appropriate practices of these actions; but with the advent of the computer came the introduction of electronic literature and the vanguard for a completely new offensive to clarify the increasingly vague divide that is the broadly termed author/reader paradox. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault provide illuminating and surprisingly prophetic strategies for outlining and taking control of this conflict. Espen Aarseth adds to the plan his modern exploration of the power struggle between readers and authors taking place in digital texts. These theorists and critics allow me to assert that electronic literary tendencies promote a collaborative approach that is unrestricted but wholly ineffectual.

Every reader has power when reading. We can put the book down or close the computer window or turn the screen off; we can always leave the room. The very notion of enhancing or diminishing the power of the reader is inherently false. The reader at all times has the final authority. The question then turns to the author. What power does the author have over the reader? The mission of the author is to create a text that, as James Joyce describes, leaves the reader in a state of complete ‘arrest’. The goal for the author, aesthetically, is to take away the reader’s authority to disengage from the text, not physically, completely.

One thing that should be made clear is that the ultimate authority that the reader controls often leads to destructive rule. Here we must bring in the complicated term, interpretation. Readers are technically free to interpret texts in any way they see fit. Clearly, however, this can lead to serious problems in determining which interpretations are important or correct, and which are personal fantasy. To determine how to isolate the truthful ones we must briefly allow all interpretations to examine the consequences of such ideology. Any interpretation is valid, but if all are truthful, then one person can determine a story to mean ‘x’ and another can determine the story to mean ‘not x’, and they must both necessarily be correct. If this is the case, then the story must have no meaning, this being an extreme but logical generalization. By analogy, people are free to act in any way they wish, but society puts certain restrictions on this freedom to permit a greater social order. Readers are similarly unrestricted in their freedom to interpret and consequently do not always use their freedom correctly. But what distinguishes a correct interpretation from a false one? There is a source for determining the truth or falsity of literary interpretation in one of three options: the reader, the text, and the author. As our discussion of interpretation has elucidated, we cannot look to the reader. We are then left with two options: the author or the text itself. The text itself, electronic or otherwise, can support or refute conclusions based on certain evidence therein, but it cannot act as any sort of authority to determine truth or falsity. It can only give suggestions.

The determined truth or falsity of interpretation must come from the author. This is likely an unsatisfying conclusion for most people. Since readers have the ultimate authority of engagement with the text, they assume they should have the same authority when interpreting the text. While they do technically have this freedom, they too ardently combine the fact that they can draw any conclusion with their desire to believe that what they conclude is true. The author of the work should theoretically be able to say, “yes, that is exactly what I intended to mean in paragraph four” or “no, that reading is completely false and supports the complete opposite message than I intended.” Once again, it is ludicrous for the reader to determine correct interpretations of the text because of their unavoidable subjectivity. Roland Barthes argues in S/Z:

Objectivity and subjectivity are of course forces which can take over the text, but they are forces which have no affinity with it. Subjectivity is a plenary image, with which I may be thought to encumber the text, but whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes which constitute me, so that my subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereotypes (10).

The text itself can only be seen through the eyes of a reader and can therefore yield no basic truth or falsity. It is ridiculous to call the author’s interpretation of his/her own text subjective; the author’s interpretation is the text, just simplified. The author is the only source with the key to unlock the codes of the text. Unfortunately, the author himself is the code, and authors notoriously keep their analyses locked firmly. Or, as is most often the case, the authors are no longer living and cannot offer an appraisal. Does this mean all our readings of classical texts are meaningless? Clearly not, but they are uncertain and will remain that way. They can only become less uncertain by understanding the creative vision of the author in its entirety, as best as possible (for this is an extremely difficult task).

Because certain literary philosophies advocate turning to the text itself for determining truth or falsity I will go back and clarify my opinion on the matter. We often attribute the value of our interpretations with their perceived paralleling of the text itself: the plot, the metaphors, the ambiguities. These do not determine value, they only act as material for analysis. Just as the words of the text lose their meaning when taken out of context, so too do the literary motifs or units of analysis. When we determine our interpretations to be true, we are not doing so by proving they are in line with the text but by assuming they are in line with the creative vision of the author. This distinction may seem trivial with regard to the interpretation itself, since authors rarely, if they are even still around to do so, divulge the intensions of their work. However, outlining the actual direction of our analyses is a necessary step to coordinating them with the changes that occur when the author of a creative work is no longer one person.

The poet has long been ushered off the pedestal of divine esteem. With New Criticism and the Formal Method we consider the art, not the artist. Indeed, the author has died writing. Roland Barthes describes, “we know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” (1258). This ideology, while true, cannot be the basis of our current conceptions of reading. Without the author there can be no correct reading. There can, in fact, be no reading at all. The reader killed the author; this much is true. It was done to destroy the author’s dictatorship. It was not a simple reformation but a violent takeover. The reader took power as a common majority that struggles to sit on a teeming throne and hammers new laws of proud misunderstanding.

Espen Aarseth’s book, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, provides the groundwork for my translation of the author/reader paradox in digital literature (see Electronic Literature). Electronic or digital literature is based on a linking system. Links allow readers to traverse through the text, sometimes in a linear fashion, sometimes in a complicated network, and sometimes seemingly nowhere at all. These links, which give the reader more options for controlling the text than they would otherwise have with a print text, are my primary focus because they lend the reader a certain control (not be mistaken with power) over the text.

I will first note that explaining the genre, if it can even be called such, is nearly impossible because we are still too dependent on traditional literary terms and devices. Also, there are many traditional print texts with characteristics or elements akin to that of the digital, which makes identifying clear-cut distinctions between print texts, electronic texts, and electronic gaming incredibly difficult. Aarseth runs into and describes many of the same frustrations in the beginning of his book, yet he successfully explores the new medium despite these difficulties.

Aarseth outlines different theories on the new relationship between the reader and author throughout his chapter entitled “Ruling the Reader”. In one instance he says, “the extra functions of user participation are seen as liberating and empowering by some and oppressive and authoritarian by others.” He later adds “that the author and reader are becoming more and more the same person and that digital technology is responsible.” Then two pages later he states, “A user of a hypertext novel, for instance, who annotates and relinks his or her copy of the hypertext structure, is not on the same level of discourse as the novel’s creator” (163, 165, 167). Aarseth himself offers no definitive theories of his own on this specific subject, but these statements provide a good basis for the paradox at hand and an introduction to my interpretation of the divide.

One last quote from Cybertext gives a good description of how reading practices change with electronic literature, specifically hypertext. Aarseth cites George P. Landow and his claim that “hypertext blurs the boundary between author and reader”. One of the ways he says hypertext does this is “by permitting various paths through a group of documents, it makes readers, rather than writers, control the materials they read and the order in which they read them (Aarseth 170). When readers gain control over what they read (separate from the power to start or stop reading), to the point where they can alter the meaning of the text, then they themselves run the risk of becoming the author.

Hypertexts can be read with beginnings and ends along numerous paths with different meanings. If the author plans for every possible reading of their text, then they retain the ability to ‘arrest’ the reader, and control the meaning of the entire piece. If the reader at any point can alter the text to create a rendition that is not explicitly planned for by the author, then the reader becomes a co-author. The more of this control the reader gains, the more the author loses. (This would expand Foucault’s statement to read: “writing is now linked to sacrifice” (Foucault 1261) in two ways). This control must be kept conceptually separate from interpretation. All interpretations are necessarily (often unfortunately) allowed, and only some are correct (as I described earlier), depending on the author’s vision. Control is the tangible forefront to interpretation. It is a physical alteration of the text while reading, not a subjective, mental study of the piece.

A rare and interesting possibility is when the author intentionally allows for randomness. That is, if a part of the text is supposed to be altered by the reader in a way that the author cannot specifically predict. This possibility does not necessarily signal a loss of control. It does, however, engage the reader in a style of free thought, and this is nearly always detrimental to the effectiveness and merit of the text.

The opportunity for, as Roland Barthes would describe, ‘writerly’, control over the text, or in other words, the opportunity for multiple authors, means the loss of ability to ascertain definitive meaning. Multiple authors working independently means competing creative visions and therefore no possibility of retrieving verification of meaning from the creator. Roland Barthes writes in S/Z:

The writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. The writerly is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation, writing without style, production without product, structuration without structure (Barthes 5).

Language is infinite, the network is open, and there are entrances everywhere. This is the product of electronic literature and collaboration. What we need now is one poet to point out the exits.