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Figures in the Interface Comparative Methods in the Study of Digital Literature by John Zuern
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For
more than a decade, scholars of electronic literature have
been searching for theoretical models and critical practices
that can adequately account for the specific properties of
digitally born literary artifacts. During the same period,
their next-door neighbors in the field of comparative
literature have been attending to the difficult rebirth of
their own discipline, redefining their objects of study and
reassessing the fundamental concepts and assumptions that
have guided their research for over a century. In 2006, the
publication of the collection New Media Poetics:
Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by
Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, made a major contribution
to scholarship on digital literature; in the same year,
Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization
released the results of a “state of the
discipline” review conducted by a collective of leading
comparativists (cf. Saussy).[i]
These volumes are only two examples of a burgeoning culture
of self-reflection, retrospective as well as prospective, in
both areas of inquiry. Though the two fields have different
foci, with digital literature largely emphasizing
relationships across media and comparative literature
concentrating primarily on relationships among linguistic,
cultural, and historical contexts, both have been compelled
to define “literature” in ways that counter deeply
entrenched presuppositions: for the former, the dominance of
print-based conceptions of literary production, and for the
latter, the dominance of national (and nationalist)
conceptions of literary culture and, more recently, the
dominance of Euroamerican languages and literary traditions
over those of other parts of the world. For each field,
moreover, a retooled definition of literature has served as
an organizing principle for innovative research projects,
determining to a large extent scholars’ choice of
primary materials, theoretical frameworks, and critical
methodologies. In terms of their place within academic
institutions that offer an increasingly flimsy shelter to
the study of literature and the humanities as a whole, both
the digital and the comparative modalities of literary
scholarship face challenges to their survival that make
their task of self-definition and disciplinary legitimation
particularly urgent.[ii] In
this paper I want to suggest that these two ongoing
initiatives in literary studies, proceeding in parallel time
but rarely intersecting, have something to learn from each
other. My objective is twofold. First, in order to determine
whether an explicit emphasis on figuration is
essential to a functioning definition of digital literature,
I want to bring to the fore an ago-old question to which
comparativists have given a great deal of attention: does
the trope, the figurative as opposed to the literal
deployment of language, represent the sine qua non of
the specifically literary text, regardless of the
language (or, we must now add, the medium) in which the text
is instantiated? Assuming an affirmative answer to this
question, at least for the time being, my second aim is to
argue that if we want to develop a procedure for the
close reading of digital literary texts, a method we
can pursue in our scholarship and cultivate in our students,
we must endeavor to show how identifiable qualities of the
medium in which a text is produced, displayed, and
disseminated intersect constitutively with
identifiable strategies of figuration that make the text
recognizable as “literature.” The operative (and
tendentious) term here is “constitutively” the
strictures of such an approach would demand that we ask
ourselves, in each instance of close reading, whether
computation as such is essential to the specifically
literary properties of the text or essential only to the
existence of the text as a particular kind of physical
artifact. This distinction between literary and artifactual
properties of texts is routinely blurred in current critical
discourse on computer-based literary art. This confusion, I
will argue, is structurally analogous to the confusion
comparative literature has struggled to overcome: the
blurring of the line between the specific
“literariness” of a text (features that lend
themselves to comparison with other instances of
literariness across a broad spectrum of texts), and the
text’s presumed linguistic, cultural, and
national-political specificities (features that lend
themselves largely to contrasts with “foreign”
texts and clubby assimilation to others of its putative
kind). I am
by no means implying that scholarship in digital literature
has neglected comparative approaches. Many of the leading
critics in the field of digital literary studies, among them
N. Katherine Hayles, John Cayley, Jessica Pressman, and
Brian Kim Stefans, undertake approaches that explicitly
involve detailed comparisons across time, media, and
literary traditions.[iii]
From its beginnings, the field has worked productively
across national and linguistic boundaries, as we see in the
international scope of many projects and collaborations. I
do, however, want to suggest that the history of comparative
literature’s emergence contains an important caveat for
the developing field of digital literary studies. For
comparative literature, the “national language”
continues to pose a dilemma: it represents, on the one hand,
a set of linguistic skills that all serious students of
literature must master and, on the other, a category that is
far more ideological than it is “natural” and thus
one that we hold in suspicion as a means of configuring our
research agendas. My discussion in this chapter is guided by
the heuristic hypothesis that we can establish an analogy
between the vexed status of the “national
language” for comparative literature and the status of
the “digital” for scholars undertaking research on
computer-based literary texts. Clearly we must endeavor to
learn as much as we can about the codes and processes that
comprise digital textuality; such knowledge is analogous to
the language mastery required of the traditional literary
critic. Roberto Simanowski is correct in his early
recognition that the interpretation of digital cultural
productions requires the “Entwicklung einer
Hermeneutik der Tiefeninformation, die eine
Hermeneutik der Interaktion, als den eingeplanten
Faktor der Zeichenkonstituierung, einschließen
muß” (‘development of a hermeneutics of
deep information that must include a hermeneutics of
interaction as the integral factor in the constitution
of signs’) (121). The
detailed studies of the materiality of electronic texts that
Matthew Kirschenbaum conducts in Mechanisms: New Media
and Forensic Imagination and Chris Funkhouser’s
technically precise account of the emergence of
computer-based literature in Prehistoric Digital
Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995,
both illustrate the importance of a solid grasp of the
technology for the foundational work of literary criticism,
from establishing coherent bibliographic categories to
categorizing and preserving individual artworks. Noah
Wardrip-Fruin’s work, including his contribution to
this collection, powerfully exemplifies the value of fluency
in computer programming for artists and critics alike. Yet
in terms of reading these texts, an activity that
attempts to demonstrate and conserve their meaning and
cultural relevance, a preoccupation with media specificity
threatens to override our attention to aspects of digital
texts that are analogous, if not simply identical, to
aspects of print documents, and thus to thwart critical and
pedagogical projects that trace comparisons across
differently formatted texts. Special pleading for the
digital impedes our access to each artwork’s
“literary singularity,” a quality that in Derek
Attridge’s terms “may be said to derive
from—though it is much more than—the verbal
particularity of the work: specific words in a specific
arrangement (which may include spatial arrangement on the
page or the use of pauses and other articulating devices in
oral delivery)” (65). This oversight, in turn, limits
the potential of our studies of digital literature to make
meaningful contributions to the study of literature broadly
conceived as an academic discipline, one that is
increasingly downsized and sidelined in the American
university system, and as an intellectual responsibility to
the reading public. In
the following section I describe what recent debates in
comparative literary studies, with their emphasis on the
text’s figurative dimensions, might contribute to the
elaboration of definitions, theories, and methods
appropriate for the critical treatment of digital
literature. I then offer a brief demonstration of how a
close reading practice for electronic texts that stresses
their comparability with printed texts might come to terms
with the problems I identify in current critical
orientations within digital literary studies. My example
aligns a conventionally “readable” print poem,
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Herbst”
(‘Autumn’) (1902), with a digital video poem
produced a century later, Rudy Lemcke’s “The
Uninvited” (2005). I show how an orientation to the
study of digital literature that takes into account the
digital literature’s departure from the print
tradition, an orientation that finds one of its most
sophisticated and compelling exemplars in N. Katherine
Hayles’s “intermediation,” can open our eyes
to vital, perhaps even definitive dimensions of the digital
literary artwork. At the same time, I try to indicate how
these approaches can lead us to overlook other features of
the text, in particular its specific tropology. Deviant
by Definition: Comparative Literature’s Defense of the
Figure As
Hayles notes in the opening of Electronic Literature: New
Horizons for the Literary, the definition of
“electronic literature” developed by a committee
of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) has the
virtue of a broad compass, but it also begs the question of
what “literary” actually means: in the ELO’s
terms, “electronic literature” comprises
“work with an important literary aspect that takes
advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the
stand-alone or networked computer” (qtd. in Hayles 3).
The capaciousness of this definition affords individual
artists and critics alike considerable latitude in
developing projects. In its inclusiveness, it also resonates
compellingly with Susan Bassnett’s recent argument
about how the discipline of comparative literature ought to
reconfigure itself: Bassnett’s
emphasis on interconnectedness and, especially, on the
reassessment (but not, presumably, the abandonment) of our
literary legacies corresponds in important ways with the
thrust of current efforts to stake out the intellectual
territory of electronic literature studies. A leader in this
endeavor, Hayles has noted that “as
we work toward critical practices and theories appropriate
for electronic literature, we may come to renewed
appreciation for the specificity of print” (Writing
Machines 33). The critical agenda Hayles terms
“intermediation,” though it foregrounds the
interaction between “human and machine cognition”
(Electronic Literature x), is careful to acknowledge
the connections between digitally born texts and their print
forebears: “When literature leaps from one medium to
another . . . it does not leave behind the accumulated
knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative
structures, figurative tropes, and so forth”
(Electronic Literature 58). How, though, can critics
mobilize these “legacy concepts” (84) in their
work on digital texts without overlooking the specificity of
the media and simply accommodating these new forms to older
conceptions of literature? In the remainder of this section,
I will pick up one of these inherited concepts—the
“figurative trope”—and suggest that it can
serve as a fulcrum for a robust comparative method for
digital literary studies, in part by making the specificity
of the media relative to the figural dimensions of literary
textuality. For
comparative literature, the “tropical” nature of
literary language has served as a key common ground for a
study of literature that extends its scope beyond the
confines of national cultures and traditions. In her appeal
for a renewal of the comparative project in Death of a
Discipline, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
emphasizes rhetoric as a distinguishing feature of
literature and of literature’s distinctive effect on
human consciousness: “The literary text gives
rhetorical signals to the reader, which lead to activating
the readerly imagination. Literature advocates in this
special way. These are not the ways of expository prose.
Literary reading has to be learned” (22). The trope
introduces a kind of difficulty into the text, a departure
from straightforward decoding that demands that readers
exert their imaginations. One of the earliest theoretical
accounts of figuration in Western rhetorical theory
emphasizes this operation of estrangement. In a remarkable
passage in the Rhetoric, Aristotle compares the
reader’s experience of a figure of speech with an
encounter with a foreigner: Working
out of a tradition of poetics that can be traced back to
Aristotle, Spivak upholds literature’s capacity to
stage an encounter with otherness, an encounter that appeals
to the reader’s ethical imagination, as a crucial
desideratum of a new comparative literature: In
order to reclaim the role of teaching literature as training
the imagination—the great inbuilt instrument of
othering—we may, if we work as hard as old-fashioned
Comp. Lit. is known to be capable of doing, come close to
the irreducible work of translation, not from language to
language but from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant
shuttle that is a “life.” (Spivak 13) Spivak’s
suggestion that the text’s impact on the imagination
ought to be the focal point of comparative studies provides
a valuable corrective to the preoccupations with “media
specificity” that have taken a firm hold on digital
literary scholarship. While our critical practices must
still pay scrupulous attention to the qualities of
electronic literature as electronic literature, this
attention will result in richer and less circular
interpretations if we ask ourselves how these
medium-specific elements figure—in all
senses—in the reader’s imaginative, ethical
engagement with the text.[v] The
work of another major contributor to the revitalization of
comparative literature, J. Hillis Miller, goes a long way
toward imagining a comparative literature that might
encompass digital forms. Though he has primarily
concentrated on how the digitalization of printed texts can
“teach us to see earlier works of literature in a
different way” (137), his affirmation of the
“materiality” of literature can
supplement—and productively redirect—the
corresponding emphasis in the study of digital literary
artifacts. Miller calls upon the comparative tradition for
models of “genuine reading” that can counter the
“mimetic, representational, descriptive
methodology” he associates with the identity politics
that have informed cultural studies in the While
we must not jump to sloppy analogies between the human
languages studied by comparatists and the programming
languages and design protocols that shape the digital texts
we seek to understand, Miller’s demand that we read
texts in the original reminds us of the essential but often
arduous task of digging through the strata of source codes,
scripts, file formats, release dates, and all the other
technical data that make up the digital artwork’s
original “language” as well as its materiality.
His emphasis on the performative and tropological dimensions
of literary text, however, directs our gaze toward those
aspects of texts that differ from and “other”
their native cultures and languages, whatever they may be,
far more than they reflect them or confirm their stability.
Even if we don’t fully take on board the habits of mind
of poststructuralist critics like Miller, his effort to call
into question the ideological presuppositions with which
many literary scholars approach their objects of study might
draw our attention to the foregone conclusions that shape
our critical reception of digital texts. How often do we
find in any given computer-based literary artifact only what
we’ve learned to look for? How often do our analyses
merely confirm the digital format’s difference
from—and implicit superiority to—the print format?
How often, regardless of the text’s specific thematics,
do we delegate it a representative of
“cyberculture” or a reflection of the
Zeitgeist of the Late Age of Print? Despite our
appeals to the digital text’s innovativeness, how often
do we allow it truly to surprise us? If we
place undue emphasis on what appear to be large differences
between the printed and the digital, we will overlook the
edgier and more edifying little differences that can be
identified only through applying to individual texts the
rigorous close reading strategies that have been a mainstay
of comparative literature’s critical methods. Our
cross-media comparativism cannot simply serve to reinforce
the priority of digital forms, nor should it accommodate its
objects to the critic’s presuppositions about
experimentalism or innovativeness. Furthermore, we need not
limit our focus to those particular printed
texts—Concrete or Language poetry, for example, or the
typographically complex works of fiction Hayles frequently
treats—that appear to share an aesthetic (or a
production process) with works of digital literature. As
Nathan Brown argues, “[t]he challenge that we
might thus pose to any art form, not insofar as we are
indifferent to its particularity, but rather insofar as
it is specific to its medium, is this: can it configure
an assemblage whose force of resistance to what we already
live is sufficient to seize us--into
thought.” Insofar as a reaffirmation of figuration, and
of figuration’s potentially transformative appeal to
the reader’s imagination, has served comparative
literature as a way of pursuing its disciplinary aims
without falling into the traps of nationalist and
identitarian essentialism, the same reaffirmation can guide
digital literary studies out of the confines of an
essentialist “digitalism.” In the next section, I
endeavor to sketch out such a path by way of a comparison of
two poems, one printed and one digitally produced, both of
which push at the limits of their respective media in order
to fashion complex, compelling, and ethically fraught
figures. 3.
Rilke’s “Autumn” and Lemcke’s “The
Uninvited” An
exegetical tradition spanning at least two millennia has
taught us how to read—and how to teach others how to
read—literary artifacts like Rainer Maria Rilke’s
well-known poem “Autumn,” published in 1902 in the
first volume of Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of
Images), which will serve here as an object lesson in
“classic” literary figuration. We are only
beginning to develop techniques of close reading that can
account for the cross-media figurations in the kind of
literary artifact the San Francisco artist Rudy Lemcke
offers us in his digital video piece “The
Uninvited,” first exhibited in 2002, which combines
photography, poetry, animation, music, and display space to
represent the hallucinatory thoughts of a homeless Vietnam
war veteran. The following comparison of “Autumn”
and “The Uninvited” takes as its starting point a
simple thematic similarity: both texts take up the image of
autumn leaves, one of the most banal and sentimental images
in all of poetry, and through a process of figuration both
poems transform and elevate this clichéd topos
into an emblem of ethical responsibility. I will first
conduct a more or less standard explication of Rilke’s
poem, as if I were discussing it in a class, and then I will
try to adapt these close-reading techniques for an
examination of Lemcke’s work.[vi]
The
first half of the first line of “Autumn” launches
the poem with a declarative statement of fact which is
immediately followed by two similes that introduce a
“counterfactual” element into the description:
“Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit / als
welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten’) (‘The
leaves are falling, falling as if from far away / as if
distant gardens were withering in the skies’). The
doubling of “falling” in the first line
inaugurates a pattern of polyptoton, the repetition
of a word in different grammatical forms, which makes up a
conspicuous structure of the poem. In “Autumn”
this repetition is marked by an intensification of
figuration. The next line anthropomorphizes the leaves:
“Sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde”
('They’re falling with gestures of denial’), and
the poem’s remaining stanzas gradually transform
“falling” from a physical movement to a
metaphysical condition of existence. The
second stanza shifts from the human-scale image of the
falling leaves to a cosmic-scale image of planetary
movement, an image that shifts, in turn, from concrete
heavenly bodies to an abstract state of alienation:
“Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde /
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit” (‘And in the
nights the heavy earth is falling / From all the stars into
solitude’). From this all-encompassing perspective, the
stanza that follows zooms back to the humans who occupy this
“heavy earth,” introducing a moral dimension into
the motion of falling that has now been established as the
poem’s central theme: “Wir alle fallen / Diese
Hand da fällt / Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in
allen” (‘We’re all falling / This hand falls
there / And take a look at others: it’s in them
all’). From the movements of the dying leaves, the poem
itself moves to the orbit and rotation of planet Earth and
then on to the movements of a collective humanity and its
individual hands. The curiously detached reference to
“this hand” prepares for the key image of hands
that concludes the poem, an image that further complicates
“Autumn’s” elaborate metaphysics by invoking
an unnamed but benevolent agency: “Und doch ist Einer,
welcher dieses Fallen / unendlich sanft in seinen
Händen hält” (‘And yet there’s One
who holds this falling / Infinitely tenderly in his
hands’). As we will see, the capitalized indefinite
pronoun “One” serves as the catalyst for this
poem’s entrainment not only of our conscious attention
but also of our ethical imagination. A
responsible teacher of this poem would insure that students
have some inkling of its biographical and
literary-historical contexts. Anyone familiar with
Rilke’s uneasy relationship with his Romantic forebears
will recognize “Autumn” as a riff on the
metaphysical nature poem; anyone familiar with Rilke’s
religious preoccupations is likely to hypothesize that the
“One” in the last stanza refers to the elusive,
yet awe-inspiring divinity who appears in so many of
Rilke’s poems. The poem is also replete with rhetorical
figures that any undergraduate student of literature should
be able to identify. Rilke employs end-rhyme
(Gebärde/Erde; fällt/halt), assonance
(ferne/Gärten/schwere/Sternen;
unendlich/Händen/hält), alliteration
(Gärten/Gebärde), apostrophe (the direct
address to the reader in “take a look at others”),
and a primarily iambic meter to fuse the poem into a densely
articulated semantic, rhetorical, sonic, rhythmic, and
visual object. Through its figural language, the poem
effects a kind of “motion capture,” seizing the
kinetic image of “falling” and propelling it
through a sequence of grammatical and tropical
transformations that culminate in the strange indefiniteness
of the last stanza’s pronoun: if this “One,”
the guardian of this “falling,” is indeed God, why
doesn’t Rilke just say so? Elsewhere he does not shrink
from naming God, as he does, for example, in the opening of
“Herbsttag” (“Autumn Day”), a companion
poem in the same collection. A second glance at the ending
should provoke us to ask who, after all, is this
“One?” In an
effort to resolve the dilemma in terms of Rilke’s own
poetic practice, we might recall the famous imperative
direct address to the reader in the last line of
Rilke’s “Archarischer Torso Apollos”
(‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’): “Du mußt
dein Leben ändern” (‘You must change your
life’). We might also refer to his lesser-known poem
“Der Leser” (‘The Reader’), also
included in The Book of Images, which gives a
sensuous description of the physical experience of reading a
book that grows heavier as the reader tires. Is it possible,
then, that the hands at the end of “Autumn,” with
their infinite tenderness, belong to me, the reader,
who holds the poem—“dieses Fallen,”
this cascade of figurative iterations of
falling—literally in my hands or figuratively in my
attentive gaze? Could it also refer to the hands of the
poet, whose manual and moral effort have brought this
specific instance of “falling” into being? Concluding
with this ambiguity, the poem tropes on its own materiality
as a hand-held text-display device. In doing so, it loops
its figurative play with language through its own physical
existence as an object, an existence that impinges upon
my own corporeal, agential being. “Und sieh dir
andre an” (‘Take a look at others’), the poem
has demanded; its last line implies that I must now look
directly at myself, at my hands, recognizing that I am
called upon to be responsible to the “others” with
whom I am conjoined in a precipitous, precarious existential
“falling.” In the course of ten lines,
“Autumn” unfurls from a humdrum remark about the
falling leaves into an ethico-aesthetic-theological
conundrum. We need not choose only one among the alternative
antecedents of “One.” In fact, holding them all in
suspension intensifies the poem’s philosophical
density. Furthermore, in terms of what Spivak identifies as
“the role of teaching literature as training the
imagination,” the poem requires a kind of “fault
tolerance” in our interpretative efforts, simulating
the necessity for tolerant, imaginative judgments in other
spheres of our social lives.[vii] Rudy
Lemcke’s animated poem “The Uninvited,”
one of the video experiments in Lemcke’s series
Light F/X, enacts another deviation from the
cliché of autumn leaves, another kind of poetic
motion capture, and another ambiguous ethical appeal to the
reader by way of its specific materiality. Exhibited at the As
a text in which “sight is in-mixed with sound, texture
with vision,” “The Uninvited” clearly
requires the kind of “synesthetic” reading Hayles
exemplifies in her examination of Michael Joyce’s
Twelve Blue (Electronic Literature 64).
The words of Lemcke’s poem are meant to be
read as well as “looked at” as visual
details in the overall ensemble of images, yet their
transient appearance before our eyes makes a stringent
demand on our attention, and they must compete for that
attention with the choreography of the much-larger animated
images that dominate the screen.[ix] The
most conspicuous visual elements of “The
Uninvited,” the leaf-puppets are also the locus of the
work’s most intense figuration. Whereas the cascade of
tropes in Rilke’s “Autumn” issues from the
declarative statement “the leaves are falling,”
Lemcke’s tropology departs from actual leaves and
plants; the images in “The Uninvited” are
digital photographs of three-dimensional puppets Lemcke
constructed from dried plants he gathered in The
opening stanzas identify the poem’s speaker as a
homeless person who dreams of “going home” but
suspects that the home he dreams of “could have been /
something I saw on TV / I guess I don’t remember
clearly / my Like
the kinetic image of falling in Rilke’s
“Autumn,” the psychosomatic image of phantom pain
provides one of the guiding metaphors for “The
Uninvited.” Lemke’s poem consists of a
hallucinatory monologue in which the speaker relives
incidents from the war, including the suicide of a platoon
mate who “shot himself in the head one night.” He
seems confused about when and where this particular event
occurred; “it happened over there,” he says,
apparently referring to Describing
this conflation of past and present in the speaker’s
mind, the verbal text of “The Uninvited” alludes
directly to the work’s visual and musical components: and
the sound of gamelan music in the wind Although
these lines seem to suggest that the shadow-puppets
represent the “uninvited” specters of dead
comrades who haunt the speaker’s memory, the poem as a
whole resists any definitive alignment of its words and
images. Rather than merely offering a
“visualization” of the verbal text’s meaning,
the animation serves dynamically to stage a range of
possibilities for signification, providing an example of
what Talan Memmott ingeniously refers to as a “mise
en écran” whereby “the media/medium
makes intentionality, poiesis, and poetics negotiable,
rendered through various sensual and experiential stimuli
rather than limited to the word” (304).[x]
Like the indefinite “One” in Rilke’s poem,
Lemcke’s animated leaves are the locus of an ambiguity
that keeps our interpretive options in play. The
anthropomorphic shapes of the shadow puppets allow them to
operate like indeterminate yet nonetheless personal
pronouns, stand-ins for the assembly of unnamed and
politically “unrepresented” human
others—“the uninvited”—on behalf of whom
the poem solicits our compassion. As is
the case in “Autumn,” the ambiguity in “The
Uninvited” also serves to invoke some sort of
super-human, if not divine, agency. The line “‘. .
. I in their midst’” quotes Jesus’s words in
Matthew 18:20: “where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Although we might easily read this citation from the gospels
as an ironic indictment of American society, which
relentlessly claims Christian values even as it routinely
betrays them, the inclusion of this precise passage,
describing a human fellowship into which the godhead comes
essentially “uninvited,” complicates the frame of
reference of the work’s title. Evoking the zero-degree
of social collectivity (“two or three”), the scrap
of scripture allows us to interpret the small cast of
puppets as the emblem of the polis to which the
poem’s speaker and the poem’s reader belong by
default, but within which they must negotiate the terms of
their gathering (“in my name”). “The
Uninvited” does not preach a Christian ethics, but its
compositing of this particular text from the Christian
tradition into its array of signs compels us to introduce
the themes of mutuality and responsibility into our effort
to assemble a coherent meaning from its component parts. As
does “Autumn,” “The Uninvited”
employs its particular material configuration to call
our attention to the potential moral agency of our own
hands. Lemcke originally conceived his poem as an
interactive Flash piece in which each of the puppets would
serve as a clickable link to parts of the poem, but he
ultimately rejected this idea in favor of the uninterrupted
flow of the poem and the continuous, painstakingly
choreographed movement of the images.[xi]
The decision to exclude interactivity has the effect of
intensifying the implication of its adaptation of
shadow-puppet form. Moving “on their own,”
propelled by some invisible impetus (unlike wayang
kulit puppets, these have no tell-tale stick indexing
the hand of the puppeteer), Lemcke’s puppets implicitly
raise the question of agency. Like Young-hae Chang Heavy
Industries’ aggressively non-interactive Flash pieces,
“The Uninvited” makes its very lack of interactive
options a dimension of its overall aesthetic and of the
“ethical semiosis” it stimulates in its audience.
We might take the risk of arguing that Lemcke’s work
imaginatively “disables” its viewers, and in doing
so demands that its audience re-imagine the ethical and
political abilities it does posses but does not always
exercise. The ambiguity of agency—the question of who
controls the puppets, in the poem and in our social
lives—is posed with particular intensity in the final
lines, in which the speaker apparently becomes at once an
active “master” and a passive “memory”
of the shadow-play: While
the conclusion of Rilke’s poem moves in the direction
of generalized metaphysics, Lemcke’s conclusion moves
in the direction of a highly specific politics. “The
Uninvited” reminds us of something that critics
of digital literature too often appear to be in danger of
forgetting: that literary texts have on the whole tended to
concern themselves with topics other than their own material
conditions of possibility. Even those texts that make
references to their own physical nature—Rilke’s
gesture toward the hand-held printed page, Lemcke’s
gestures toward his “strange theater of
shadows”—do so in order to trope on this
physicality, engaging figuration to apply literal, material
means to poetic and often ethical ends. Our critical
practice must keep up with this movement of the properly
literary beyond literature’s now breathtakingly
expanded means of production, or it will lose sight of
literature’s still far more expansive aesthetic and
ethical ends. What
matters in both these works, in terms of their status
as literary objects, is the juxtaposition of verbal, visual,
and auditory components that produce complex multimodal
figures: metaphoric fusions, metonymic contiguities,
tantalizing and philosophically compelling ambiguities.
While Hayles’ definition of materiality as “an
emergent property created through dynamic interactions
between physical characteristics and signifying
strategies” unquestionably applies to texts in general
(My Mother Was a Computer 3), when we seek to apply
the definition to specifically literary texts, must
we not isolate a subset of these “signifying
strategies” that
are specifically figural, even if they are not specifically
digital? Hayles and the critics who follow her example are
hardly blind to figural language, yet the role of the trope
as a distinctive feature of the literary tends to get
eclipsed by their detailed, provocative assertions of the
distinctiveness of the text’s machinic substrate and of
the revolution in reading borne out by the partnership of
intelligent, literate humans and purportedly intelligent,
literate machines in the processing of the text’s
layered codes. In the case of Lemcke’s digital video
work, the programming and machine-language codes that
contribute to its constitution are, as Cayley has put it,
“largely sublinguistic, or on the outer margins of
paratext” (“Time Code Language” 314). In his
production of “The Uninvited,” Lemcke certainly
required photo-editing and animation software to accomplish
the text’s figural nuances, yet it is this figuration
rather than computation that takes the literary upper hand. Works
such as Lemcke’s “The Uninvited” qualify as
“electronic literature” because they estrange the
practices of digital photography, text animation, and visual
display from their conventional applications in industry and
commerce in ways that compare to the “making
strange” of language’s declarative,
information-bearing functions in more traditional modalities
of literary discourse. Groundbreaking though they may be in
terms of form, digital texts are no less rooted in this
fundamental dimension of the literary. In human-computer
interfaces made literarily deviant, we certainly find an
opportunity for reflection on the hyper-mediated world in
which now we live our lives and engage with the lives of
others, but we are also sent back to the deep and richly
varied history of our practices of reading and writing,
which are bound up with the perennial conundrums of our
curiously human being-in-language. The
close reading practices that have developed within
comparative literature demand that critics, grounded in a
knowledge of the text’s codes, look closely at the
linguistic specificity of a given work and at the same time
look across a broad set of works, taking a synoptic view
that allows them to make inferences about literature’s
functions and values. Maintaining this broad perspective
without lapsing into pat generalities has required a
constant negotiation with pre-determined categories and
entrenched critical prejudices. Comparatism always entails
relativism; some aspects of the text’s totality will
take a back seat to whatever dimensions the critic chooses
to privilege. To a large extent, we assess the validity and
relevance of critical interpretations by weighing the costs
of these choices. Throughout this chapter I have tried to
stress the expense of passing over the problem of
figuration, whether it occurs in verbal, visual, or
procedural forms, in order to emphasize the material
differences between digital and non-digital literature. I
have focused primarily on what comparative literature has to
teach digital literary studies, but obviously arguments can
be made in the other direction. Comparative literature is on
the verge of being digitally remastered: as it continues to
engage with the different human languages and cultures that
have been its traditional focus, comparative literature will
now have to cross the many systems of encoding and
modalities of discourse that increasingly shape the
production of literary texts in contemporary
culture.[xiv]
“We must learn to ‘code-shift,’” as
Sander Gilman puts it, “moving elegantly between a
command of the language and culture of our object of study
and an awareness of the purpose of that research for the
culture in which we live, learn, and teach” (23). My
emphasis here on the need for digital literary studies to
maintain a focus on the conditions of figuration that
pertain to the literariness of digital texts has its
corollary in the need for comparative literature to become
more attentive to the material conditions of textuality and
their impact on figuration. It is
tempting to conclude with a prediction: it seems likely that
we will find the results of our present-day efforts to
establish a class of literary objects that are by definition
“digital” to be no more philosophically sound or
methodologically useful, in the long run, than were the
results of the efforts of scholars a century ago to
establish a class of literary objects that were by
definition “German” or “French.” Such an
assertion obviously requires the invocation of mutatis
mutandi: digital formats like hypertext and animation
are not natural languages like Russian and Urdu, and the
values driving the definitions and disciplinary formations
appropriate for digital literature are for the most part
untainted by nationalist chauvinism. Few critics have been
so bold as to claim that the digital medium should be the
only consideration when it comes to interpreting digital
texts, and most recognize the complex interpenetration of
digital forms and their printed precursors. Furthermore, it
remains clear that in order to understand the historical
development of digital literature, as Funkhouser does, and
their complexity as material objects, as do Hayles and
Kirschenbaum, a deep knowledge and close critical attention
to the digital dimension of these artifacts is indeed
essential to building the foundations of a robust field of
literary study. Nevertheless, an insistence on the alleged
“flatness” of print still pervades critical
discussions of digital literature, and this recognition of
the printed page’s literal two-dimensionality
frequently slips from a more or less empirical, more or less
trivial observation about the materiality of printed
documents to a denigration of the aesthetic and cultural
potentials of literary language that happens to have been
printed.[xv]
This over-emphasis on literature’s material substrate
seriously underestimates the dimensionality introduced into
all properly literary texts by way of the diverting,
distancing, layering, and deepening operations of
figuration. At stake here is hardly a defense of print, but
rather a defense of the virtuality of the trope, the
deviancy and illusionism that constitute the defining
characteristic of the literary. By the time print finally
disappears, no one is likely to shed a tear for it. By the
time figuration disappears, we will have taken leave of a
fundamental capacity of our linguistic and ethical existence
as human beings, a departure we might be wise to bewail in
advance. Works
Cited Aristotle.
On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic
Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Attridge,
Derek. The Singularity of Literature. Bassnett,
Susan. “Reflections on Comparative Literature in the
Twenty-First Century.” Comparative Critical
Studies 3.1–2 (2006): 3–11. Brown,
Nathan. “The Function of Digital Poetry at the Present
Time.” Web Site for N. Katherine Hayles’s
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Electronic Literature Organization. 7 April 2009. <http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php?id=11> Cayley,
John. “Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and
Programmed Signification.” New Media Poetics:
Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Ed. Adalaide K.
Morris and Thomas Swiss. ———.“Writing
on Complex Surfaces.” Dichtung Digital 2 (2005).
22 Mar 2009
<http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2005/2-Cayley.htm>. Culler,
Jonathan. “Wither Comparative Literature?”
Comparative Critical Studies 3.1–2 (2006):
85–97. Funkhouser,
Chris. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology
of Forms, 1959-1995. Gilman,
Sander L. The Fortunes of the Humanities: Thoughts for
After the Year 2000. Grigar,
Dene. “Kineticism, Rhetoric, and New Media
Artists.” Computers and Composition 22.1 (2005):
105-112. Hamill,
Sean D., Michael Parrish, and J. Michael Kennedy.
“Surge Seen in Number of Homeless Veterans.”
The New York Times. 7 Nov 2007. 22 Mar
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/us/08vets.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>. Hansen,
Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital
Media. ———.New
Philosophy for New Media.
Cambridge,
MA: MIT P, 2004. Hayles,
N. Katherine. Electronic
Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2008. ———.Writing
Machines.
———.
My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary
Texts. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2005. ———.
“Print is Flat, Code is Deep.” Poetics
Today 25.1 (2004): 67-90. Kirschenbaum,
Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic
Imagination. Kotz,
Liz. Words to Be Looked At. Lemcke,
Rudy. Artist’s Web Site. 22 Mar. 2009
<www.rudylemcke.com>. ———.
Personal Interview. 14 July 2006. ———.
“The Uninvited.” Light F/X. Circulated on
DVD 2005. Memmott,
Talan. “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the
Problem of Miller,
J. Hillis, and Manuel Asensi. Black Holes/J. Hillis
Miller, or Boustrephodonic Reading. Nevius,
C. W. “Park Nomad, Laptop in Tow, Calls Bushes
Home.” San Francisco Chronicle. 31 Jul 2008. 22
Mar 2009
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/31/BAPB1227KF.DTL>.
Pressman,
Jessica. Digital Modernism: Making it New in New
Media. Diss. Yale, 2007. Rilke,
Rainer Maria. “Herbst.” Gedichte. Vol. 2.
Leipzig: Insel, 1927. 53. Saussy,
Haun. Comparative Literature in an Age of
Globalization. Baltimore, ML: Johns Saussy,
Haun. “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh
Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes.”
Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization.
Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore,
ML: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. 3-43. Simanowski,
Roberto. Interfictions: Von Schreiben im Netz.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Shklovsky,
Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist
Criticism. Four Essays. Ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and
Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, NE: U of
Nebraska P, 1965. Spivak,
Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. Stefans,
Brian K. Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. ———.
“Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic
Writing.” The Electronic Book Review. 5
Nov. 2005. 22 Mar 2009
<http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/databased>. Watten,
Barrett. “Poetics in the Expanded Field: Textual,
Visual, Digital . . . ” New Media Poetics: Contexts,
Technotexts, and Theories. Ed. Adalaide K. Morris and
Thomas Swiss. Notes [i]
New Media Poetics is the outcome of the October 2002
New Media Poetry Conference at the [ii]
For a discussion of the institutional challenges that are
shaping the intellectual expansion comparatists are
attempting to foster in the academy, see the essays in the
2006 issue of Comparative Critical Studies devoted to
the future of comparativism, in particular Susan
Bassnett’s “Comparative Literature in the
Twenty-First Century” and Jonathan Culler’s
“Wither Comparative Literature?” Sander
Gilman’s The Fortunes of the Humanities provides a cogent diagnosis of the imperiled
state of humanistic study as a whole in the [iii]
Hayles’s extensive examinations of the connections
between digitally born texts and print texts that leverage
the capacities of their digital production is clearly
comparative, although her work also demonstrates the
tendency to fuse the questions “is it literary?”
and “is it digital?” Other examples of careful
comparative work in the field include John Cayley’s
“Writing on Complex Surfaces: which links his work in
CAVE with Joan Retallek’s ethopoetic practice and, in
an inspired cross-medium move, Saul Bass’s film-title
design; Jessica Pressman’s efforts to show how digital
literature builds on the traditions of literary Modernism in
her dissertation Digital Modernism: Making it New in New
Media; and Brian Kim Stefan’s attention to the
legacy of experimental poetry in “Privileging
Language: The Text in Electronic Writing,” as
well in as many of the essays in his Fashionable Noise:
On Digital Poetics. [iv]
Countless efforts to define literary
figurality have returned to this notion of the trope’s
strangeness; in the twentieth
century, several important schools of thought have built on
this notion that the literary is constituted by an
estrangement of the instrumental operations of language. The
best-known versions of this idea are the Russian Formalist
conception of “ostranenie” (‘defamiliarization’) put forward by Victor
Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt”
(‘alienation effect’).
Though their political investments in tropology are quite
different, each of these theorists asserts that a text fulfills
its properly “literary” function by way of a
departure from naturalized protocols of linguistic usage. [v]
Animation and kinesthesia are examples of
medium-specific elements that can in some cases provide the
basis for figuration. Literary texts that solicit physical
responses on the part of the reader, whether in small-scale
forms such as clicking a hyperlink to large-scale forms such
as full-body immersion in virtual worlds exemplified by
texts written for CAVE environments, certainly promise to
effect something like a translation “from body to
ethical semiosis” (Spivak 13) In Writing
Machines, for example, Hayles includes “kinesthetic
involvement” in her list of features of electronic
literary texts that distinguish them from print (20). See
also Dene Grigar’s “Kineticism, Rhetoric, and New
Media Artists,” and in particular the extensive
treatment of embodiment in relation to digital literature
and art in Mark B. N. Hansen’s New Philosophy for
New Media and Bodies in Code. [vi]
The translation of Rilke’s poem is mine; it is an
“occasional” translation aimed at highlighting
Rilke’s figural language and clearly conveying the
poem’s central images rather than at offering a
definitive rendering. Despite the awkwardness of the
presentation, I provide the original German to preserve the
language-specific details of its stylistics and to allow
readers of German to cross check my English version. [vii]
I understand Spivak to be claiming that in our serious
engagement with the simulated, “virtual” reality
of a literary text we acquire a certain kind of skill:
insofar as literary reading often confronts us with
difficulties, uncertainties, and ambiguities that
nonetheless demand an effort to make meaning, we gain from
it a capacity to fashion provisional, qualified, but
nonetheless active responses to real people and in
the face of real ethical and political problems. The
important point is that we do not draw “morals”
from exemplary situations depicted in the text, but rather
that we build up our ethical capacities by way of our
encounter with textual alterity and through the heavy
lifting of interpretive work. [viii]
The entire text of “The Uninvited” and a clip of the
third section of the video are available on Lemcke’s
Web site at <http://www.rudylemcke.com/Pages/VideoPages/UninvPg.html>. [ix]
In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz gives a detailed
account of experimental artworks of the 1960s that
incorporate text in ways that make the words’ semantic
values relative to their visual impact as images. Both Brian
Kim Stefans in “Privileging
Language: The Text in Electronic Writing” and
Warren Batten in “Poetics in the Expanded Field:
Textual, Visual, Digital . . .” address the influence
of this artistic tradition on the attitudes regarding
words-as-words and words-as-images in contemporary digital
literature. [x]
Though I certainly affirm Memmott’s formulation as it
applies to Lemcke’s text, as well as to a great many
digital works that integrate text with images, animation,
and sound, we must acknowledge that it applies equally well
to other non-digital multimedia art forms that put verbal
language into play alongside other signifying systems (opera
is an often-cited example). The phrase “limited to the
word” (304) and the mysterious suggestion that words
are not sensual, is symptomatic of the effort to establish a
“digital difference” at the expense of precision. [xi]
“I’m really aware of the choreography of it,”
Lemcke reported in a 2006 interview, “and I really
think of it as dance. I spent hours and hours with it,
trying to get the motion the way I wanted it. The slowness
of the piece, but not so slow, slow enough to be moving at a
kind of elegant breathing pace, exhale and inhale on the
screen at a very gentle pace.” Animation and
video-editing software has made the “writing”
component of the terms “choreography” and
“cinematography”—dance-writing and
movement-writing—even more literal; Lemcke’s
composition of the kinetic dimension of “The Uninvited”
compares to Rilke’s
careful attention to the sounds and rhythms of words as much
as does his composition of the poem’s verbal text. [xii]
See C. W.
Nevius’s article on Tom Sepa, a self-described
“urban outdoorsman” who holds down a full-time job
as a telemarketer while living in [xiii]
See, for example, “Surge Seen in Number of Homeless
Veterans,” in which The New York Times reports
that by the end of 2007 “[m]ore
than 400 veterans of the [xiv]
Though it was completed before the explosion of
literary creativity in digital forms that followed the
expansion of the Internet and the emergence of the World
Wide Web, the 1993 American Comparative Literature
Association report, “Comparative Literature at the Turn
of the Century,” contains a
premonition of this transformation in recommending “that
comparative literature turn from a concentration on
literature to the study of cultural productions or
discourses of all sorts” (Culler 87). [xv]
I have in mind Hayles’s “Print is Flat, Code is
Deep” and Cayley’s “Writing on Complex
Surfaces.” |
