Untitled - witz cultural

224HYPERTEXT 3.0 dislocation or omission of any element will tend to make the sequence as awhole incomprehensible, or will radically change its effect. In paratactic structure,however (where the principle ofgeneration does not cause any one elementto 'follow' from another), thematic units can be added, omitted, orexchanged without destroying the coherence or effect of the poem's thematicstructure." According to Smith, "'variations on a theme' is one of the twomost obvious forms that paratactic structure may take. The other one is the'list."'The main problem with which parataxis, like hypertext, confronts narrativeis that any "generating principle that produces a paratactic structurecannot in itself determine a conduding point" (Poetic Closure, gg-100).Since some narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends on theunity and coherence ofa fixed linear text, one wonders ifhypertext can conveymorality in any significant form or if it is condemned to an essential triviality.White believes the unity of successful narrative to be a matter of ideology:"Narrativity, certainly in facnral storytelling and probably in fictional storytellingas well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality,that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any moralitythat we can imagine" (14). Writing as a historian and historiographer, Whiteargues that such ideological pressure appears with particular darity in the "valueattached to narrativity in the representation ofreal events," since that value disclosesa desire to endow "real events" with a necessarily imaginary "coherence,integrity, fullness, and closure" possible only in fiction. The very "notion thatsequences of real events possess the formal athibutes of stories we tell aboutimaginary events," insists White, "could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams,reveries" (20,23). Does this signify or suggest that contemporary culture,at least its avant-garde technological phalarx, rejects such wishes, daydreams,and reveries) White's connection of plot and morality suggests severallines of inquiry. One could inquire if it is good or bad that linear narratives inevitablyembody some morality or ideology, but first one should determine if rejectinglinearity necessarily involves rejecting morality. After all, anyone takingseriouslythe fictional possibilities ofhypertextwants to know if itwillproduceyet another form of postmodernist fiction that critics like john Gardner, GeraldGraff, and Charles Newman will attack as morally cormpt and corrupting(McHale, 219). If one wanted liberation fiom ideology, were such a goal possible,nonideological storytelling might be fine. But before conduding that hypertextproduces either ideology-free miracles or ideology-free horrors, one should lookat the available evidence. In particular, one should examine prehypertext attemptsto create nonlinear or multilinear literary forms and evaluate the results.A glance at previous experiments in avoiding the linearity of the printed