Code, Literature and the Future of Intertextuality

Throughout postmodern literature, cryptography, code and hypertext work to connect and link thoughts and ideas together to give greater meaning to a text. At its source, metaphors connect the material world with immaterial thoughts, whether by comparing similar ideas, contrasting them, or alluding to outside bodies of work and sources. Authors use code in different ways with varying motives of affecting the reader. In early work, Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Pynchon use code to allude to mystery and treasure hunting. Poe explains the cryptogram within his story, while Pynchon parodies this, leaving the meaning, or lack thereof, of his mysterious symbol up to the reader. In William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” the use of code is metaphorical. The hacker moves through cyberspace creating the illusion of physical space, invoking code, but not actually writing it within the story. With electronic poets like Mez and Talan Memmott, the use of code is literal and is used to change the meaning of the text, calling programming functions, and in doing so, creating a new language of portmanteaus. In many new media works, hypertext links are embedded directly within the work, so that users can interact with the text and connect to other “pages.” In what follows, I argue that the use of code in literature will move from plot devices meant to move a story along, to the actual use of code to create metaphorical allusions and textual connectivity with other works and ideas.

One of the first instances of cryptography used in a story can be found in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-bug. ” In the story, William Legrand is bitten by a gold colored bug, thought to be made of actual gold. He then leads the narrator on a search for lost treasure. The narrator, not knowing if Legrand is actually going crazy, follows him on his search for Legrand’s amusement. The reason for Legrand’s seeming insanity comes from his discovery of a cipher on a scrap of parchment found on the island:

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡. )4‡);806*;48†8¶60))85;1‡
(;:‡*8†83(88)5*†;46(;88*96*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡
(;4956*2(5*— 4)8¶8*;4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;480
81;8:8‡1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;88;4(‡?34;
48)4‡;161;:188;‡?; (Poe The Gold-bug, 131)

Legrand plays off of his perceived insanity and makes his servant climb to the top of a tree to drop the gold beetle through eye socket of a skull attached to a tree limb.

Legrand explains to the narrator that he used letter frequency to decode the substitution cipher, revealing the secret message on the parchment to be:

“A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat
forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north
main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head
a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out. ”

Poe uses the code as a plot device and literally describes how to solve it, revealing the method behind Legrange’s madness, while also revealing the hidden meaning in the text. The cryptogram reveals a cryptic message, which the characters must follow. Once the characters figure out the meaning, whether the reader has or not, they follow the instructions and find buried treasure. Poe, knowing that many of his readers would not be able to solve the cipher, explains the solution and uses Legrand to retell the solution process and reasoning for leading them on a wild treasure hunt. His reasoning for behaving strangely and nearly insane was to “to punish [the narrator] quietly, in [his] own way, by a little bit of sober mystification” (Poe 141). In a similar way, Thomas Pynchon uses the cryptic symbol of a muted post-horn to lead his character, Oedipa on a search for meaning.

Oedipa first finds the muted post horn symbol written on a bathroom wall of a bar in a Silicon Valley community. She shrugs off the symbol as meaningless, but throughout the story she begins to find it wherever she goes. She is unable to hide from its presence once it is connected to her dead lover’s stamp collection, of whose will she is co-executor, along with the word “Trystero. ” Oedipa connects the dots between the muted post horn symbol, the word “Trystero” and an old war between two mail delivery services, the Thurn and Taxis and the Tristero. After interviewing many people, though most will not actually give her answers, Oedipa finds that the Thurn and Taxis mail service evolved into our own postal service, while the Taxis seemingly died off, but remains underground in the valley.

Pynchon uses the muted post horn symbol to connect various aspects of the story in order to lead Oedipa down a winding path of obscurity and insanity. One of the most prominent turns occurs with Pynchon’s fictional play “The Courier’s Tragedy,” which tells the history of the two courier services with lots of blood and gore. Pynchon does not stop here, of course. He plants the trystero in a jump rope rhyme sung by children, as well as graffiti advertising for a group of polyamorists. This all works in Pynchon’s favor to create a work of paranoid fiction. Oedipa no longer understands what she is looking for and suspects that her ex-boyfriend actually made up the entire hoax and paid the entire town and stamp collectors off to pretend there is a shadow mail operation going on.

In the end, Pynchon leaves Oedipa at an auction waiting for lot 49 to come up, hoping that she will be able to find some meaning, whether it is real or all a hoax. He also leaves the reader in suspense wondering if they had skipped over the ending of the novel, or if it really was that abrupt and completely devoid of conclusion. What I believe Thomas Pynchon was trying to challenge in this postmodern work was the notion that symbols and code have meaning. Instead of having his characters actually find treasure at the end of the treasure map, he leaves them and his readers searching for their own ending.

William Gibson also uses code in his cyberpunk fiction, though not explicitly. Instead of writing code on the page and showing what the hacker characters are typing on the computer, he depicts the Graphical User Interface of the system as a lush physical world, instead of a virtual space behind a screen. While exploring the enemy system, Chrome, Bobby Quine describes the virtual world projected from a matrix simulator as, “ice walls flick away like supersonic butterflies made of shade. Beyond them, the matrix’s illusion of infinite space…” (Gibson Burning Chrome p. 189). Gibson contrasts high end computers easily overheating and being surrounded by a firewall with a cold, dark plane, reminiscent of a barren, frozen tundra. Quine tries to “remind [himself] that this place and the gulfs beyond are only representations, that [they] aren’t ‘in’ Chrome’s computer, but interfaced with it…” (Gibson 189). Gibson represents cyberspace as a real, physical space in order to mirror and bring it closer to reality. The remark that they are “only representations” is interesting because that is actually what a GUI is; just a representation of 1’s and 0’s.

Gibson represents the code metaphorically as actual terrain, but that is not so different than how we represent a command terminal as an office desktop, dragging and dropping folders and files in a Microsoft or Macintosh operating system. Each of these representations on modern computers are metaphors that allow us to know exactly how a system works. We know what file folders do in the real world, so why not use the same system to represent that virtual?

In order to make the story more interesting and something that reader can relate to he describes the landscape like a cityscape, “the core data tower around us like vertical freight trains, color-coded for access. Bright primaries, impossibly bright in that transparent void, linked by countless horizontals in nursery blues and pinks. ” (Gibson 189). Instead of a typical desktop interface, or even a text-based command line interface, like Unix, Gibson contrasts the idea of file folders and directories with brightly colored towers, almost like the movie Tron.

Gibson also uses an outside piece of code, a “Russian military ice-breaker, a killer-virus program,” as a secret weapon to get to the inside of Chrome. Gibson spares his readers the technicalities behind the program, not even the main characters seem to know what it is or does, but the piece of software is used like a canon. Gibson describes the program as “waves of hungry glitch systems and mimetic subprograms” and in Bobby’s dream, “it was an animal of some kind, shapeless and flowing. ” The waves mirror what the text of a Russian program might look to an American, while the animal shows the wildness of the program, something that Bobby is unable to control. Code that what created by another human, but once unleashed cannot be stopped. Now let’s switch to a form of new media poetry that actually uses code as part of the text.

Australian author MEZ (Maryanne Breeze) blends a mixture of programming code, ASCII and English to form a new language called Mezangelle, which N. Kathryn Hayles asserts “push toward the creation of a creole comprised of English and code. ” (Hayles Deeper into the Machine). Mez uses the programming aspect of code in her poetry to break apart words and form new meanings for the individual words and lines. In her poem, “[re]store from[d|raft]?,” Mez uses capitalization, parenthesis and underscores to differentiate the words:

[mOSs_colOur_dRips]
[se(e)pia_eYe(s)_line(r)s]
[gO(lden)rg(on)eous_h(t)ides]

||

golde(gg)n_gorg. on(|off)s.
operati(o)n(al)g_drips.
seeping>sing(e)ing>eyes. ”

In line 1, the capitalization reveals OS, Our, Rips, differentiating from the other meaning of the line, moss coloured drips. You see lines with eyes, or sepia eyeliner. Golden, gorgeous hides or tides. The second stanza begins to use programming functions, with the golden egg, gorgeous being set to on or off. The parenthesis in the fifth line break up the word operational into operating drips. The seeping, singing or singeing eyes, Mez uses the code to completely change the meaning and give contrasting views and images. Hayles asserts that Mez’s poetry “draw[s] on the literary tradition and programming protocols to ask what it means for contemporary users to be constructed by both. ” The subject matter can be viewed from the human perspective, degeneration and death, while also pertaining to the computer condition of incompatibility and becoming obsolete or dying.

While this is an interesting comparison in subject matter, the similarities between man and machine are very real. In Talan Memmott’s hypermedia work, “Translucidity,” he explores the same comparison between man and computer:

“…Forgotten, foresaken dead fragments, burnout filaments of ID. entity,
the cadavatars of any/everybody [Never-ending Nameless] -- trapped and starving shadows, phantoms of previous display, ignored bookmarks, a forgotten address, datasets of I elsewhere that no longer serve any diplomatic function between (t)here and (t)here -- populate the elsewhere [here rendered as any/every otherworld], are no longer attached to any I…” (Memmott 8)

Cadavatars, a mixture of bodies and virtual identities, describes the death of our cyber self. The phantoms of previous display are images burned onto the screen from previous use, but no longer appear on purpose, like the flash of an old webpage layout stuck in your cache, now an updated and newer version. Humans keep bookmarks and rarely clear them out, Memmott describes the process of broken links as no longer serving the “diplomatic function” of bringing together here and there. The disconnect between pages occurs all the time on the internet when domains are shut down, or pages moved and the links are not updated, but Memmott depicts this as a sort of cyber death.

In his essay, “Hypertext and the Laws of Media,” Stuart Moulthrop discusses the idea of connectivity in Hypertext, text linking to other text in a non-sequential fashion, while pertaining to the Xanadu Project:

“Hypertext systems exploit the interactive potential of computers to reconstruct text not as a fixed series of symbols, but as a variable-access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association. A hypertext is a complex network of textual elements. It consists of units or "nodes," which may be analogous to pages, paragraphs, sections, or volumes. Nodes are connected by "links," which act like dynamic footnotes that automatically retrieve the material to which they refer. Because it is no longer book -bounded, hypertextual discourse may be modified at will as reader/writers forge new links within and among documents. Potentially this collectivity of linked text, which Nelson calls the "docuverse," can expand without limit. ” (2509)

This is what a lot of new media work is striving for, both interactivity and connection. Moulthrop invokes Pynchon to describe paranoia as “the realization that everything is connected” (2513). Now I don’t think that one should be paranoid, though you might be if you are reading Pynchon, about the interconnectivity of the internet. With a few privacy settings, googling someone’s name will not bring up their Facebook and Twitter. The idea of everything being connected does not allude to fate, but rather to an increased knowledge and connection to everything.

What I wish to talk about is the evolution of code in literature as a way to connect to other sources. Many sites, like Wikipedia, already do this, but what about in literature? Why are there still footnotes when we could link to the actual source? There are many problems inherent in this idea; inability to maintain links, the inability to even find a source, whether it is an ancient text or just undocumented in obscurity, sacrificing the cohesiveness of a work for the importance of sources. One of the problems with the prevalence of broken links, both literal and metaphorical, is the complete inability to find a source.

While attending a symposium on Ovid, Dante and Boccaccio in 2009, Dr. JC McKeown discussed the hardships he faced when researching sources of antiquity. In his “Amores,” Ovid mentions “fluminum amores,” roughly translated as the love affairs of rivers. McKeown spoke of this as a historical myth, something that is referred to like common maxims or parables. We do not know what the meaning behind “fluminum amores” or even what it refers to, nor will we unless we find the original source. McKeown mentioned another earlier text that acted as a reference guide for what a best man were to say at wedding. One was supposed to mention and tell the stories of the “fluminum amores,” so as to compare the love of the newlyweds to the gods. McKeown moved onto other aspects of Ovid in his lecture, but the inability to find meaning, in what was deemed as a well known allegory at the time, left my mind wondering. What would it be like if all sources were accounted for and linked to the works that reference them? What would it be like if we were able to reconnect all of the dead hyperlinks? Stuart Moulthrop asserts this is what Project Xanada, if it were to come to fruition, would fix. It would “mean the end of the death of literature.” (Moulthrop 2515). Connectivity and intertextuality is what I see for the future of literature in the postmodern age.

In the alternate reality game (ARG) story, Cathy’s Book, Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, and Cathy Brigg solve the problem of interactivity and source linking in a print book in an interesting way. In the jacket of the book is an evidence pouch full of scraps of paper ranging from cartoons Cathy has drawn, to business cards, to mock legal documents like birth certificates and medical records. Specific parts of the book invite the reader to look through the evidence pouch to find out more about what is going on in the story. Instead of immaterial ideas, the authors wish to present physical copies for the reader. The text asks the reader to query internet search engines to find out about the space in which the characters inhabit. The book also contains numerous phone numbers found throughout that the reader is invited to call, which is a major storytelling device to connect internet based ARGs to the real, physical world. These phone numbers actually work and are linked to real voice mail machines that play messages from the characters in the story. I find this to be an interesting attempt to make a book be interactive in the physical world. Now, I realize Cathy’s Book is aimed at a young adult audience, but I do not see why this creative idea should be limited to the youth. Why not have adult fiction be interactive in the physical or cyber world?

Placing hyperlinks in physical books with paper pages is not a reality in the near future, if ever, but with the invention of e-book readers, I think an alternative is fast approaching. In the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, internal links are placed within the work in order to connect to different parts of that specific text. I know making it have to ability to link to other works would ruin the moneymaking model Amazon is trying to enforce, or it would force the consumer to buy other work. I feel this would be easier to implement, and better suited for a laptop with a less abrasive display. In order for this to actually work, modern day authors and researchers would need to start annotating their work with hyperlinks, systems like Diigo and Zotero could work well. Where I think the modern work could truly become postmodern would be in the interaction with the reader. Allowing the reader to adapt, add to, change and “remix” a work could lead to some truly revolutionary story telling.

Whether it be as a plot moving device, metaphor or tool for interaction, the use of code has had a major impact on literature. Where will the future take us? One can only imagine. But with the eventual invention of a more effective linking mechanism in the internet, I feel that the implementation of code in literature will revolutionize the way we think of sources and connectivity.