The End of Books by Robert Coover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Biblical Hypertextuality

In 1992 Robert Coover wrote this piece for the New York Times. It’s a report about how technology, particularly the invention of hypertext which allows jumping from one piece of writing in the middle of another, affects fiction. Coover taught a course at Brown for two semesters on the subject and his students produced some interesting results.

Coover observed at the time that “The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create.” Who could argue: If you build it they will come after all. Almost 30 years on, however, it is clear that the game of hypertextuality is a niche sport. Those who came were neither the most talented writers nor the most discerning readers.

And like many commentators on technology, Coover got the past wrong as well as the future. He thinks, for example, that “print can be transformed into hypertext, but hypertext cannot be transformed in print.” There is at least one ancient literary document that contradicts him: the Bible.

That the Judaeo-Christian Bible is a hypertext in print can hardly be denied. True, enough, both the oldest and the newest portions have been ‘frozen’ in time, but only after uncountable interpolations, edits, corrections and redirections carried out by innumerable writers over years, decades and centuries. Much of biblical exegesis is concerned with unraveling the bewildering webs of complex internal references, morphing themes, and poetic allusions contained in the document.

Biblical hypertextuality is more than structural. Just as Coover’s students discovered the joys of writer/reader interaction in their own creations, biblical engagement obliges enormous interpretative energy by the reader. The fact that so many diverse, often contradictory, interpretations have been produced, and continue to be produced, makes the point conclusively.

So, once again, perhaps there is not that much entirely new under the technological sun. Mainly, it seems, rediscovery of things we forgot we knew.

View all my reviews