Untitled - witz cultural

121RECONFIGURINGTHE TEXTphysical isolation of each text, the division between main text and footnoteestablishes the primary importance of main text in its relation to other textseven when thinking about the subject instantly reveals that such a relationshipcannot in fact exist.Take our scholarly article, the kind of articles we academics all write. Onewishes to write an article on some aspect of the Nausicaa section of ]oyce'sUlysses, a text that by even the crudest quantitative measures appears to bemore important, more powerful than our note identifying, say, one of thesources of Gerty McDowell's phrasing from a contemporarywomen's magazine.foyce's novel, for example, exists in more copies than our article can orwill and it therefore has an enormously larger readership and reputation-allproblematic notions, I admit, all relying on certain ideologies; and yet mostof us, I expect, will accede to them for they are the values by which we work.Ostensibly, that is. Even deconstructionists privilege the text, the great work.Once, however, one begins to write one's article, the conventions of printquickly call those assumptions into question, since anything in the main textis clearly more important than anything outside it. The physically isolateddiscrete text is very discreet indeed, for as Ong makes clear, it hides obviousconnections of indebtedness and qualification. When one introduces otherauthors into the text, they appear as attenuated, often highly distorted shadowsof themselves. Part of this is necessary since one cannot, after all, reproducean entire article or book by another author in onet own. Part of thisattenuation comes from authorial inaccuracy, slovenliness, or outright dishonesty.Nonetheless, such attenuation is part of the message of print, animplication one cannot avoid, or at least one cannot avoid since the advent ofhypertext, which by providing an alternative textual mode reveals differencesthat turn out to be, no longer, inevitabilities and invisibilities.In print when I provide the page number of an indicated or cited passagefrom foyce, or even include that passage in text or note, that passage-thatoccasion for my article-clearly exists in a subsidiary comparatively minorposition in relation to my words, which appear, after all, in the so-called maintert. What would happen, though, if one wrote one's article in hypertextlAssuming one worked in a fully implemented hypertexrual environment,one would begin by calling up foyce's novel and, on one side of the videoscreen, opening the passage or passages involved. Next, one would writeone's comment, but where one would usually cite foyce, one now does so ina very different way. Now one creates an electronic link between one's owntext and one or more sections of the foycean text. At the same time one alsolinks one's text to other aspects of one's own text, texts by others, and earlier