Intertextu[re]ality
Stephanie Strickland
V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una
Penguin, 2002.
52/48 pages. $18.00, paper
Also at http://vniverse.com
Stephanie Strickland's print/hypertext fusion, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing
L'una, may be one of the longest and oddest extended metaphors
yet produced in poetry. A multi-dimensional work of (literally) astronomical
intent, it is as much manifesto as poem, more experience than text,
a philosophical discourse/demonstration whose form and content together
explore the nature of systems: mathematical, mythological, linguistic,
cultural.
How does a reader even begin to approach this invertible volume, with
its
two printed beginnings and a middle—or is it an ending?—etched
out in cyberspace against a backdrop of stars? Though the publisher
has added a dose of predetermination by planting a barcode, a logo
and the price on the WaveSon.nets side, thus arbitrarily branding
it as the "back" of the book, the dilemma remains. I spent
a good deal of time just pondering it—unopened— as I would
an envelope with a bizarre postmark addressed in an unfamiliar hand,
flipping the book end over end, warily noting the URL at its center.
Its knowing opacity was intimidating. Uncertainly diving into the
Losing L'una side, I found the author's own procedural advice
on page 34:
7.113
Gentle Reader, begin anywhere. Skip
anything. This text
is framed
fully for the purposes of skipping.
Of course,
7.114
it can
be read straight through, but this is
not a better reading.
not a better life. You are being asked
7.115
to move with great
rapidity. As if it weren't there. As
if you were a frog,
a frog that since it's disappearing
7.116
thinks to ask,
for the first time, in which element
it really does
belong. Leaping progress
7.117
will consist
in considering this and closing the
book. Anything
else will represent a settled course.
["Errand
Upon Which We Came"}
Narrative, either implied or apparent, is not a factor. The very
expectation of linearity would brand the reader as "settled,"
conventional, unimaginative, a lame frog. Strickland was asking for
much more than my attention—she was asking for my transformation
into a different kind of reader, one who would not only follow the
words on the page, but allow them to act as nodes of suggestion which,
when connected with other nodes, would lead to the admission that
we are indeed inhabitants of a new "element," one made possible
by the fusion of digital technology with postmodern ideas of de-centeredness
and fragmentation.
True, this is not an earthshaking revelation. Cable news channels
are now motley pastiches of talking heads, crawling text, stock prices,
weather maps and advertising blurbs. Web sites produce pop-up progeny
that ask us to click, subscribe, vote our opinions, while we simultaneously
scan the morning's e-mail, listen to music made from samples of other
music and sip white mocha soy milk lattes. Meanwhile, our cell phones
are ringing, and the kids are downstairs re-editing bootlegged downloads
of Star Wars movies on their laptops or posting fan fiction rewrites
of Harry Potter. Beginnings and endings erode into continuous streams
of stimuli:
Isomorphism, another name for coding.
Words of others.
Lists and strings are fluid data structures.
["WaveSon.net 45"]
And the structures flow everywhere, criss-crossing and overlapping
into a global, virtual tapestry as varied and complex as the night
sky. V—with nodes in both print and virtual dimensions—attempts
to mimic the texture of this new, disembodied world by calling attention
to its granularity and pervasiveness. For example, each individual
stanza in each poem of Losing L'una is numbered in some way,
signifying both its position within a predefined structure and its
integrity as a modular unit that can be moved from one structure to
another. These pieces can be seen as "Minute portions of the
world precisely as complex // and organized as the large." ["WaveSon.net
41"] In essence, Strickland has "pre-digitized" her
own work, that it might be re-distributed or recombined in a nonlinear,
non-print medium. The online section of V, There Is A Woman in
a Conical Hat, [http://vniverse.com] visually anchors the WaveSon.net
poems to stars and constellations that take shape when one clicks
on a particular star. Double clicking "releases" a WaveSon.net,
first a tercet, then the entire poem.
Like Ezra Pound, Strickland's intellectual interests are encyclopedic
in scope, but in her poetry she focuses on a handful of deeply mined
specialties. If Pound's were the classical Greeks and Romans, the
troubadours, and economic theories, Strickland's are the life and
work of Simone Weil, mathematics, and the nature of systems. V
is her second book to take Weil for its explicit muse (the first being
1993's The Red Virgin), and the much-lauded True North
(Notre Dame, 1998) also surveyed the intersections of language, numbers
and mythology, eventually spilling over into a hypertext version published
by Eastgate [http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/TrueNorth.html]. Strickland's
long-standing interest in the theory and application of hypertext
is well established, and with 1999's The Ballad of Sand and Harry
Soot [http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot] she produced a
hypertext poem, combined with striking visual components, whose theme
is "the passionate relation between silicon- and carbon-based
life." The Ballad offers the option of reading each piece
in its original order, in random order, or via links consciously chosen.
Nevertheless, the novelty of hypertext poetry has been waning, largely
because —as many critics have noted —poetry is itself a
kind of hypertext, relying far more on associative connections than
narrative ones. The leaps a poem achieves in our minds are not necessarily
lengthened by breaking the work up and hiding the pieces around the
house like so many Easter eggs. Also, despite its supporters' claim
that hypertext enlists the reader's participation in reshaping the
text, the points at which one might veer off from the original order
are themselves predetermined by the author. (A useful symposium on
the conceptual issues surrounding hypertext—initiated by Strickland
herself —can be found in American Letters & Commentary
#12, 2000 [http://www.amletters.org/index12.html].)
My own reservation about hypertext poetry—illustrated I'm afraid
by this review—is that discussions of form inevitably co-opt
the content of the work, and while toying with recombinant poems can
be interesting for a time, even surprising if serendipity comes into
play, the point—which is often the familiar point about authorial/cultural
control versus reader empowerment—gets made pretty quickly. Surprise
entrusted to chance—as John Cage and Jackson MacLow have shown—is
more a matter of mechanics than of art. We're still left to ask "Now
what?" when all the clicking is done.
For all its adventuresome spirit, V is at heart an academic
enterprise. Content plainly matters. Yet despite its dense allusiveness—obscure
references to Weil, Diophantus, the Tarot, and Haitian goddesses abound—the
work's formal self-referentiality ("I will thread/thee th[m]emes"),
the question of why it assumes the form it does, takes precedence.
The absence of glosses for specific references invite engaged readers
to consult the list of books Strickland provides (e.g. Hamlet's
Mill, Weil's Notebooks, Mandelbrot's work on fractals),
but such enticements to abandon the text at hand again serve to enact
her demonstration of intertextual form—that one should carry
ideas generated by V to its sources and ideas from the sources
back to the poem again.
Though my ambivalence toward hypertext poetry in general remains,
it's clear that V is unquestionably an intriguing and inventive example
of the genre—a "passionate" study of epistemological
textures, if you will—and should inspire coffee house debates
and doctoral dissertations in the years to come. Whether or not V
constitutes a literary step forward is open to discussion, but it
is most certainly a step outward.
