Untitled - witz cultural

220HYPERTEXT 3.0 convincing, but I realize that ifhypertext has the kind and degree ofpowerthat previous chapters have indicated, it does threaten literature and its institutionsas we know them. One should feel threatened by hypertext, just aswriters of romances and epics should have felt threatened by the novel andVenetian writers of Latin tragedy should have felt threatened by the DivineComedy and its Italian text. Descendants, after all, offer continuity with thepast but only at the cost ofreplacing it.One interesting approach to discussing hypertextual narrative involvesdeducing its qualities from the defining characteristics of hypertext-itsnon- or multilinearity, its multivocality, and its inevitable blending of mediaand modes, particularly its tendenry to marry the visual and the verbal. Mostwho have speculated on the relation between hypertextuality and fiction concentrate,however, on the effects it will have on linear narrative. In order rocomprehend the combined promise and peril with which hypertextualityconfronts narrative, we should first recall that narratology generally urgesthat narration is intrinsically linear and also that such linearity plays a centralrole in all thought.l As Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, "there are very fewinstances in which we can sustain the notion of a set and sequence of eventsaltogether prior to and independent ofthe discourse through which they arenarrated" ("Narrative Versions," 225).Hayden White states only a particularly emphatic version of a commonassumption when he asserts that "to raise the question of the nature of narrativeis to invite reflection on the very nature ofculture and, possibly, evenon the nature of humanity itself . . . Far from being one code among manythat a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrativeis a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messagesabout the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted" (1-2). Whatkind of a culture would have or could have hypertexfual narration, which soemphasizes non- or multilinearity, and what happens to a culture that choosessuch narration, when, as fean-FranEois Lyotard claims, in agreement withmany other writers on the subject, "narration is the quintessential form ofcustomary knowledge" (Postmodem Condition, 18)l Lyotard's own definitionof postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (rxiv) suggestsone answer: any author and any culture that chooses hypertextual fiction willeither already have rejected the solace and reassurance oflinear narrative orwill soon find their attachment to it loosening. Lyotard claims that "lamentingthe 'loss of meaning'in postmodernity boils down to mourning the factthat knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26), and for this loss offaith in narrative he offers several possible technological and political expla-