Possibly the first Murdoch University student paper on a Web page, this submission for H237 Narrative Fiction 2 was nominated for the award of the Irene Searcy Prize in Literature for the best essay in a Part II unit in English and Comparative Literature in 1995.
PREFACE
You know, there is a sunset outside - very pretty. I can either go outside and watch it, or stay in here. On the Net. I can access sunsets in here, too. Literal or figurative: the sunset of Western culture, over Jupiter, of morality, eclipsed by Io ... the sunset speckled information-streets of the Internet. There is a multiplicity of links to sites with Ulysses tie-ins. And these tie-ins lead merely to other sites, with other links. There is a network of sites hinting at articles on Ulysses, but none actually talking about it. But in this, there is a substance of sorts. I have a review, of a review, of a book about hypertext. This is Derrida writ large - indeterminacy in action. The trace as technique. And it never ends ...
PREAMBLE
This essay has the capacity to zoom way out of control, which I why I will use this Preamble to set some textualist limits (where 'limits' is a word which will not be over-used from here on). Even in a course with 'postmodern' in the title, any question sets up only a limited space for an answer. The original question talks about (L)literary (T)tradition. This is a topic which dovetails well with the proposed focus of this essay. Thus, I will be exploring the possibility of a substantive notion of literary tradition within a postmodern framework, using Joyce's Ulysses as the 'text', and Hypertextuality as the postmodern device. These will be linked by notions of intertextuality, and by the concept of the 'body'. I also hope to answer the question in a wider critical framework of modernism into ('/') postmodernism.
ESSAY
Where were you last night, L
There, indiscreet reader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in space was actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but then wished I hadn't, wished I hadn't even thought let alone written it, wished that it had never happened. So, I pressed a key and a milky film spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressed DELETE and, whoosh, all gone ...
The letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like ectoplasm. It's an underwater symphony of soft linkings and unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip the irreparable slides backwards towards a hungry word and disappears into its maw with a slurrp, then darkness. If you don't stop, the word swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like a Cheshire-cat black hole. [1]
These lines, from Foucault's Pendulum provide us with an entry point into the text Ulysses, and to this essay. They are the computer equivalent to the following passage thought by Bloom,
Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a message for her. Might remain. What?
I.
Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide comes here a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror, breath on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know. What is the meaning of that other world. I call you naughty boy because I do not like.
AM. A.
No room. Let it go.
Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades. 2
This abandoned note to his prospective lover Gerty is symbolic of many of Bloom's actions, and of the novel's. There is contained here a feeling of the impermanence of meaning, and the impossibility of its transmission. Ulysses sits astride the high culture of the Epic, the realism of the novel, and the cultural struggle, questioning, and re-appraisal that was/is Modernism. I do not plan to deal here with an ostensive definition of Modernism - an accurate definition is necessarily passe, and one would probably do better to read the Waste Land anyway. 3
The Epic is regarded as the highest literary genre. It deals with 'great national events, a culture's history and destiny'.4 Thought of in what might loosely be called traditional terms, the sense of a literary tradition is very strong within Ulysses, if only in its rejection of these traditions. Joyce has modelled his 'epic' roughly on Homer's Odyssey, a text which Harold Bloom has located (with the first three books of the Bible) at the centre of the Western Literary Canon.5 The names of the chapters, 'Nestor', 'Proteus' etc. reflect the stages of Odysseus' odyssey, yet this is an odyssey of a very different kind. One of the things this novel seeks to do is to problematize the distinction between high and low culture, and to show that the former is very much grounded in the latter. This is also a theme which is echoed on the Internet, where there is little or no way to distinguish (without study) an article by, say, Derrida, or an article by an undergraduate (except that the undergrad's would be more lucid). An example of this problematization comes with the Church scene (circa p. 100), when Bloom notes how the service echoes the techniques of advertising, using repetition to make an impact. Also, Bloom notes the element of pretence in the priest drinking wine:
Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guiness's porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale (aromatic).6
However, as Dr Colebrook points out, this is not a mock epic, such as Heller's Catch 22, which would 'deflate'7 Bloom to the level of an anti-hero (such as almost any of Heller's characters). This serves to both paint an authentic portrait of the Dublin of the time, and ridicule the 'dignity' of the church. At the level of a realist narrative (the 'Jane Austin function'), Ulysses is more easily consumed than his later genre-busting Finnegan's Wake. As a tool to question culture as part of the modernist (ie. experimental, avant-garde art-forms, rather than the enlightenment project of modernity) project, it is successful on a number of levels. It breaks down the distinctions between, say high culture and advertising; Bloom adjasces8 reflections on philosophy with more 'mundane' considerations, and (in a more contemporarily9 relevant move) it foregrounds the function of the body in society.
It is this last point which have led people like Kristeva to call Joyce a feminist writer, and through which I will make my first link to the internet. In an article called 'The Hyper-Texted Body, or Nietzsche Gets a Modem' (the latter of which has to be one of the best titles ever), Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein talk of 'The wireless body? That is the floating body, drifting around in the debris of technotopia: encrypted flesh in a sea of data'.10 So, how can we have a concept of the body on the internet? The question is no more unusual than the question of how the body is expressed in the novel. The body as a topic is one which has, in the Western tradition of philosophy and literature, been largely sidelined. The situation is made clear in a novel like To the Lighthouse, where we have Mr Ramsay (in role as the male, patriarchal, 'realist' philosopher) who deals in abstract and concrete (that is, Idea-s, and medium sized dry goods eg. tables) notions, while Lily's painting in the end is awash with 'scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring hideously difficult white space'.11 The spurting, fountaining image is very powerful, and very different from anything we find Mr Ramsay doing.
In an article called 'The grotesque corpus', which applies a Bakhtinian schema to both the body and the internet, Terence Harpold makes the point that
Hypertextual discourse embodies - gives body to - heteroglossia. The hypertextual corpus is a grotesque corpus - grotesque in the Bakhtinian sense - where discrete speech acts are fragmentary, dialogic and contingent. The style of hypertext can be said to be both grotesque and carnival. The former label defines the structural projection of the reader's position in the hypertext as a discursive artefact; the latter defines a way of dialogue that shapes hypertexts as a social event. Medium as meat.12
As The Dialogic Imagination is one of the theoretical texts for this unit, and the body is one of the more pressing issues confronted by the postmodern critic, this issue warrants extended consideration. If one applies this reading of the body to notions of literary tradition, we get some interesting results. The body, as opposed to more idealized and rational subjects, does not remain the same. It changes, grows, decays, and is subject to irrational ... let's call them Freudian impulses, as I will demonstrate within Ulysses in a moment. On paper/computer, too, I suggest that at a certain level, we get an empathetic reaction through our own bodies (as embodied, gendered etc. readers), and thus our own reactions will be unpredictable and changing. Due to this, it is difficult if not impossible to track how writing on the body is intertextualized - that is, taken from other writers, and passed on. Who influenced Joyce in his descriptions of the body - was it Dante, Shakespeare, or a local prostitute? Traditional criticism is well placed to discuss the transmission of the most lofty considerations of philosophy etc. - Alec McHoul had no trouble tracing the use of entropy in Pynchon - however, it seems that discussion of the body is somehow more personal and contingent. It could well be argued that this bodily model is one which is being adopted by modern literary criticism, with the disavowal of the (Leavisite) Tradition, and the more free flowing analyses of texts.
Within the text of Ulysses, the body is one of the key motifs. In Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses, there is a (now universal) table which links the bodily organs to each scene. For instance, 'Calypso' is linked to the Kidneys; 'Lotus-eaters' is linked to the Genitals; and 'Penelope' is linked to the Flesh.13 It is Molly's menstruation which supplies the novel's conclusion, and Bloom is seen throughout the novel urinating, defecating, farting and eating. More subtly (and more effectively) there is the description of Bloom masturbating,
And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all green dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet soft!
Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! 14
It is also true that the stream of consciousness style often adopted plays a part in this, as there is a seeming connection between the actuality of thoughts in the characters head and the words on the page. This consubstantiation (the phrase is carefully chosen) is a common theme among the novel's studied in this course, and with modernism in general. Take, for instance, Mersault in The Outsider. At the funeral his temples throb, in the courtroom he is dizzy, hot and confused; and most poignantly, at the moment of his murder of the Arab,
All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. It was like a re-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes.15
The novel Ulysses can be seen as one large organism, with an onomatopoeic pulse. This use of language so as to both evoke and connote impressions and meanings is one of the book's more post-structural aspects. It would be a hard (though rewarding) to get through an essay without mentioning Derrida, however, when one is dealing with the current crop of literary critics this is difficult. In the article 'Ulysses Gramophone' from Acts of Literature, Derrida writes,
Everything we can say about Ulysses, for example, has already been anticipated, including, as we have seen, the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse. We are caught in this net ... you are the captive in a network of language, writing, knowledge, and even narration ... prescribed in a sequence of knowledge and narration: within Ulysses ... by a hypermnesic machine capable of storing in an immense epic work Western memory.16
I would never be so bold as to speculate on Derrida's intended meaning, however, as I understand it (after considerable study) he is referring to the world of ecriture in which we are mere signifiers, and where words have no fixed meanings, thus we can read anything, or rather everything out of Ulysses. Despite my ingrained sarcasm, I think that there are probably less perceptive comments which can by made about Joyce's text. Ulysses does, as will shortly be shown through intertextuality, set itself up along the lines of a network.
Postmodernism, unlike modernism, does not yet have any readily available 'throwaway' lines to describe it (it doesn't even have the 'Waste Land'). Brian McHale notes that 'No doubt there 'is' no such 'thing' as postmodernism. Or at least there is no such thing if what one has in mind is some kind of identifiable object 'out there' in the world, localizable, bounded by a definite outline'.17 However, some encapsulating rubric can be put forward as to what it is and is not. To begin with, I have isolated two main strands within postmodernism. The first is as an extension of the modernist principles of fragmentation and experimentation (in spite of Lyotard's complaints in 'The postmodern explained to children': 'All around I see the retreat of culture ... ').18 Another aspect is the increasing role of technology in the equation of human interrelations. Factors ranging from communications satellites which can 'footprint' 64% of the earth's surface, to institutions such as the World Wide Web which allows a massive and (excepting 'lag') instantaneous transmission of information, are making the contemporary world ever more complex. On a more general note, I have identified 8 key features which need to be considered when giving any genuine consideration to postmodernism: Technology, Production, Communication, Language, Control, Information, Choice and Illusion.19 Thus, the Internet is a wholly appropriate thing to discuss in relation to Narrative Fiction in the 90s.
In the now famous table from The Dismemberment of Orpheus,20 Ihab Hassan has pointed to oppositions such as postmodern Play vs modernist Purpose, Anarchy vs Hierarchy, Heteroglossia vs Monoglossia, and importantly Minor or Contingent Narratives vs the Modernist Meta- or Grand Narratives. In addition to this, it can be characterised by a move away from the Enlightenment based project of Modernity; a move away from universal truth, all-encompassing moralities and transcendent politics.
This being true (insert heavy irony), a postmodern novel, or postmodern fictional narrative is particularly difficult to quantify. Both the concept of narrative and of fiction have changed so radically that we need a wholly new lexicon. Narrative has been linked to a wider intellectual framework, and almost any idea can be labelled a fiction in the sense that it is not wholly true, and has its basis in the production conditions, not in something in the world. McHale has also characterized modernism as focussing on the way knowledge is acquired, and postmodernism on the basis of that knowledge. With a generous interpretation To the Lighthouse, for instance, could be looked at in these terms. The lighthouse itself, for example, is conceived of in realist terms in the beginning, but by the end of the novel after moving through 'Time Passes' has become impressionist or post-impressionist - the object as perceived by the subject, and light as fluid medium rather than as Enlightenment truth. Again, a generous reading of The Crying of Lot 49 could suggest that through the perspective of people like Mucho, who sees everything in terms of his used car business - 'each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life'21 - that Pynchon is questioning the very basis of the '50s world view or ontology. However, while this may be picked as a general trend, it is certainly not to be used for formal analysis.
However, if we were to analyse Ulysses in these terms, what would we find? Certainly, like all great novels, it questions the constructions of state and church in its setting (in this case Ireland). By it's very strangeness it is, in a way, confronting people's reading epistemology. However, I feel that this is not the way to approach Ulysses. So, what is? I will now proceed to argue that looking at (at least certain parts) of Ulysses in terms of intertextuality, and linking this in the postmodern world to hypertextuality, gives us a consistent way to interpret both Ulysses, and the concept of a literary tradition (he says in a momentary surrender to the lower case).
In Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George Landow again brings us to Bakhtin who describes 'quoting others' as 'one instance of a dialogic interrelationship among directly signifying discourses within the limits of a single context ... This is not a clash of two ultimate semantic authorities, but rather an objectified clash of two represented positions'.22 Which is to say, quoting (and, extrapolating, intertextuality) does not merely involve bringing the ideas of one to another, it involves creating a new text which is not wholly either. This idea is backed up by Andre Topia, who focuses on the style of Joyce, especially the free indirect style used for Bloom's thought. He contrasts this with the 'stream of consciousness' of Virginia Woolf, where in To the Lighthouse, for instance, the aim is to 'dissolve the boundaries between sentences, to string them into one long musical phrase blurring and effacing the discordances only to reintegrate them in a larger unit'.23 However, says Topia, 'Joyce does exactly the opposite'.24 Topia's analysis of Joyce's intertextual technique warrants extended analysis.
[Joyce] carefully places insidious discordances at strategic spots, gathers them together in a montage by juxtaposition and makes this the privileged vehicle of meaning. These discordances can involve a text not present on the page as well as textual units actually present and contrasted with each other ... the Joycean text takes as its point of departure an extremely strict and organized law which it then proceeds to actualize in a fragmented text.25
An example will help to illustrate this. On p. 86 of our edition, there is a typical Bloomian episode,
His right hand once more more slowly went over again: choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world.26
In a way characteristic of all of Bloom's appearances, his thoughts do not separate themselves from his actions, or the thoughts of others. We see all objects as perceived through his subjectivity - for instance, the phrase 'finest Ceylon brands' presumably comes from 'the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company'27 where he 'read the legends of leadpapered packets'.28 Yet this is not exactly how the labels read when he first encounters them. It read 'choice blend, finest quality, family tea'.29 Thus, Bloom's consciousness has worked on the words, and changed them, yet they still bear a trace of their origin. Or do they - was the original inscription a representation too? Does or did the sign actually exist? Do all of Joyce's intertextualities follow this pattern? Well, that is, perhaps. Topia points out that 'This disappearance of quotation marks is crucial: it eliminates all typographic indicators permitting the distinction of the different levels of discourse. Nothing permits us to know a priori if the sentence 'belongs' to Bloom or not'.30 There is insufficient information as to the origin of the words, and thus we integrate them into Bloom's discourse. Yet, a trace of their origin they still bear.
This is even more marked on page 47 where we read,
Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs.31
An unwary reader (without a love of Hamlet) could easily miss the fact that in Act 1, Scene iv of the Bard's masterpiece we read 'The air bites most shrewdly: it is very cold ... It is a nipping and an eager air'.32 This seems like a direct reference, but as we are given no pointers to Hamlet, we realize that we could so easily have missed it, and that there must be hundreds of other intertextualities which we do miss. This casts a pallor of suspicion over the whole text. For instance, Nietzsche is continually referred to:
My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch.33
He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.34
Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo.35
The effect bringing in these texts has is difficult to track, and can most easily be explained by referring to hypertext, as I will shortly. There are further questions that can be asked. For instance, the lines,
Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves.36
seem particularly reminiscent of certain parts of the 'Waste Land', for example,
My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, Bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.37
What is the effect of this? The effect on the reader is not a linear or chronological process - the fact that the 'Waste Land' was written after Ulysses is largely irrelevant in the picture I am developing. The literary tradition is becoming more amorphous, based upon effects rather than causes. What is more, the reader in this scenario is taking a more active role in the interpretive process, and the text Ulysses seems wholly able to deal with this.
This, then, is where the concept of hypertext comes in. I will not be giving a technical explanation of hypertext.38 Using it, you can develop multiple fictions, which will change and alter as you skip through them. One of the essential parts of this process is the fact that the reading process becomes NON-LINEAR, that is, we do not read from beginning to end, but take a beginning point at random, and go off through tangent upon tangent until WE stop - the 'text' simply doesn't end. Michael Joyce has referred to hypertext as 'the genuine postmodern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great "either/or", and embracing, instead, the "and/and/and"'.39
George Landow talks of 'reading an article on, say, James Joyce's Ulysses, [where] one reads through what is conventionally known as the main text, encounters a number of symbol that indicates the presence of a foot- or endnote, and leaves the main text to read that note, which can contain a citation of passages in Ulysses ... '.40 He then goes on to say that Hypertext is essentially a living embodi41ment of this. However, as is clear, the links are particularly difficult to track. It is less similar to an 'Endnote' system, and more similar to the kind of intertextuality which I have discussed as taking place in Ulysses. Barthes defines readerly texts as which 'make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text'.42 Thus, Hypertexts are the ultimate in readerly texts.
There is much which can be said about the theory of hypertextuality, and it's links to the intertextuality of Ulysses. For example, Stuart Moulthrop says that hypertexts 'invalidate the informing 'master narratives' of modernity, leaving us with a proliferation of incompatible discourses and methods ... hyperreality privileges no discourse as absolute or definitive'.43 This has many implications for modernity and for literary criticism. Hypertextual narratives are appearing on the Internet, and the problem of hypertextual criticism will soon be a real one. However, both considerations of essay length, and concerns about the relevance to the course preclude such extended discussion. Thus, for the remainder of the essay I will be discussing the implications of what I have said for the notion of a postmodern literary tradition.
The key theme of this essay has been the non-linearity, and the difficulty in tracing origins which has been brought about by computers (as in hypertext, and Foucault's Pendulum) and postmodernity, and which is demonstrated through intertextuality in Ulysses. The concept of a substantive literary tradition is one which assumes a new significance through works like Ulysses and 'The Waste Land' (which sent generations of critics scurrying through Frazer's The Golden Bough). It seems it is no longer either fully feasible, nor necessarily desirable, to focus upon origins (such as our disregard of Pynchon's (supposed) existence). Like Bloom's writing in the sand, there is a sense that 'All fades', in the sand which is the postmodern literary scene. This tendency is heightened by technologies such as the Internet, which are as removed from, say, the Bloomian 'Anxiety of Influence' as it is possible to be. Tradition has been 'informationized'. However, this is neither a certain nor a fixed trend. Stuart Moulthrop notes that,
Early experience with hypertext narrative suggests that its readers may actually be more concerned with prior authority and design that readers of conventional writing ... The constantly repeated ritual of interaction, with its reminder of discursive alternatives, reveals the text as a made thing, not monologic perhaps but hardly indeterminate (italics mine).44
Thus, the cause of the textualist is not wholly lost. In his elegiac work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom points out that, 'In any case, we cannot rid ourselves of Shakespeare, or of the Canon that he centers. Shakespeare, as we like to forget, largely invented us'.45 Ulysses, even as it is used to question notions of tradition, remains at the centre of a tradition which, while barely self-aware, is still very much an entity. While postmodernism should, if followed to its logical conclusions, preclude the possibility of any substantive Tradition, the history of humanity is the history of the irrational and humanitarian triumphing over efficiency and rationality. Yet history, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake ...
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Hill and Wang, New York, 1974.
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, Harcourt Brace and Company, London, 1994.
Bolter, Jay, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, 1991.
Burnett, Kathleen, 'Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design', Postmodern Culture, 1993: 3, 2.
Camus, Albert, The Outsider, Penguin, London, 1982.
Colebrook, Claire, Lecture 5 for H237 Narrative Fiction II, 1995.
Delany, Paul, and Landow, George, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, Routledge, London, 1992.
Eco, Umberto, Foucault's Pendulum, Picador, London, 1989.
Eliot, T.S., 'The Waste Land', in Leonard ed. Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, 2nd ed., OUP, Melbourne, 1992.
Gilbert, Stuart, James Joyce's Ulysses, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963.
Harpold, Terence, 'The Grotesque Corpus', Uni of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, 1995.
Joyce, James, Ulysses, Penguin, London, 1992.
Joyce, Michael, 'Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, The Ends of Print Culture', Postmodern Culture, 1992: 2, 1.
Kroker, A, and Weinstein, M, 'The Hyper-Texted Body or Nietzsche Gets a Modem' from Data Trash: The theory of the Virtual Class, St Martin's Press, New York, 1994.
Landow, George, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, John Hopkins Uni Press, Baltimore, 1992.
McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, London, 1992.
Moulthrop, Stuart, '"You say you want a revolution?" Hypertext and the laws of Media', Postmodern Culture, 1991: 1, 3.
Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49, Picador, London, 1979.
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Penguin, London, 1982.
Theall, Donald, 'Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace', Postmodern Culture, 1992: 2, 3.
Topia, Andre, 'Intertextuality in Ulysses', in Attridge, Derek, and Ferrer, Daniel ed., Post-Structuralist Joyce, CUP, Cambridge, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, Penguin, London, 1992.
Endnotes
1 Eco, Umberto, Foucault's Pendulum, Picador, London, 1989, p. 26.
2 Joyce, James, Ulysses, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 497-8.
3 eg. 'What are the roots that clutch,
What branches grow in this stony rubbish.
Son of man you cannot say or guess,
For you know only a heap of broken images'
T.S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land'.
4 Colebrook, Clare, Lecture 5 for H237 Narrative Fiction II, 1995.
5 Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, Harcourt Brace and Company, London, 1994.
6 Ulysses, p. 100.
7 Colebrook, Clare, Lecture 5 for H237 Narrative Fiction II, 1995.
8 A neologism rather than a typo.
9 Ibid.
10 Kroker, A, and Weinstein, M, 'The Hyper-Texted Body or Nietzsche Gets a Modem' from Data Trash: The theory of the Virtual Class, St Martin's Press, New York, 1994.
11 Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 174.
12 Harpold, Terence, 'The Grotesque Corpus', Uni of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, 1995.
13 Gilbert, Stuart, James Joyce's Ulysses, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 38.
14 Ulysses, p. 477.
15 Camus, Albert, The Outsider, Penguin, London, 1982, p. 60.
16 Derrida, Jaques, Acts of Literature, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 281.
17 McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 1.
18 This quote is taken from memory, Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 1992, p. 1.
19 This list needs some explanation. Technology is an obvious feature of a post-modern world(view). Everyone from Heidegger onwards has dealt with this. It is usually linked to other features such as Production - mass marketing, eg. the fact that there are over 64 types of breakfast cereal in the average supermarket etc. This last is relevant. In 1750, for example, when you had a choice of oats, oats or oats for breakfast, it was easy to see the world in simple blacks and whites. When Chocanilla Pebbles come into the equation, however, the suggestion that there is not 'one truth' is considerably more palatable. Linked to Production and Technology is Communication, shown through thing like advertising (often of the mass Produced goods). Communications Technology has advanced at an amazing rate. This massive spread of Information has an equivalent effect on thought as the Choice given by breakfast cereal. This factor of Choice is central to a post-modern world. In very real ways, the Control of these Choices - through contemporary political formations such as 'voting' and 'TV referendums' - constitutes the heart of contemporary political actions. These are Controlled by mechanisms of Information and Communication. Language is the medium which is used in the post-modern world - yet it is more than a mere transparent medium. The Control of Language, and its Communication, is a central feature of any philosophical or intellectual discourse in a post-modern world, and as pointed out above, the boundaries between discourses are being removed. Overshadowing all of these is the concept of Illusion. The Illusion of Choice, and it's Control. The Illusion of free speech, of equal production and opportunities; the Illusion that the spread of Technology is under Control; above all, the Illusion that the individual has the capacity to change things.
A genealogy could be produced of most contemporary theorists by looking at what they focus on in this schema. Baudrillard, for example, will focus on Information, Illusion, Control, Communication, and Technology. Deleuze and Guattari focus on Production, Technology, Control and Language. Foucault looks at Choice, Illusion and Control. He thinks (thought) that he also looked at history, but postmodern history (aptly named on Michael Jackson's latest CD 'HIStory') is just a conflation of Information, Control, and Illusion. Lyotard looks at Control, Communication, Production, and Technology. Irigaray looks at Language, Control, and Illusion - probably in that order.
20 Hassan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, Uni of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1982.
21 Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49, Picador, London, 1979, p. 8.
22 Landow, George, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, John Hopkins Uni Press, Baltimore, 1992, p. 68.
23 Topia, Andre, 'Intertextuality in Ulysses', in Attridge, Derek, and Ferrer, Daniel ed., Post-Structuralist Joyce, CUP, Cambridge, 1984, p. 107.
24 Ibid., p. 107.
25 Ibid., p. 107.
26 Ulysses, p. 86.
27 Ibid., p. 86.
28 Ibid., p. 86.
29 Ibid., p. 86.
30 'Intertextuality in Ulysses', p. 108.
31 Ulysses, p. 47.
32 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Penguin, London, 1982, Act 1, Scene iv.
33 Ulysses, p. 27.
34 Ibid., p. 27.
35 Ibid., p. 98.
36 Ibid., p. 96.
37 Eliot, T.S., 'The Waste Land', in Leonard ed. Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, 2nd ed., OUP, Melbourne, 1992, p. 119. NB. - This link, and all others (unless they are directly referenced) are my own.
38 'Hypertext denotes an information medium that links verbal and non-verbal information ... Electronic links connect lexias 'external' to a work - say, commentary on it by another author or parallel or contrasting texts - as well as within it and thereby create text that is experienced as nonlinear, or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequencial. Although conventional reading habits apply within each lexia, once one leaves the shadowy bounds of any text unit, new rules and new experience apply.' Hypertext, p. 4.
39 Joyce, Michael, 'Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, 'The Ends of Print Culture'', Postmodern Culture, 1992: 2, 1.
40 Hypertext, p. 4.
41 I'm sure that you get the point.
42 Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Hill and Wang, New York, 1974, p. 4.
43 Moulthrop, Stuart, ''You say you want a revolution? Hypertext and the laws of Media', Postmodern Culture, 1991: 1, 3, para 2.
44 'You say you want a revolution', para 21.
45 The Western Canon, p. 40.