Hypertextuality: how a programmer reads TS Eliot's 'The Waste Land' | Hacker News Reader

Hypertextuality: how a programmer reads TS Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

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67 pointsTycho17 comments

For those not familiar with The Waste Land, it's a ten page or so poem about the decay of knowledge and purpose in modern life (circa 1920s). It's regarded as one of the first/founding works of literary 'modernism.' Interestingly, a large portion of its text consists of fragments of other works, and it's littered with countless subtle references/allusions to other things. Drawing meaning from it requires investigation of these links; you need to follow the trail.

The person who made this website is a software engineer, without any university qualifications or formal education in literary analysis. It's also one of the best resources about this poem you can find - and there are literally thousands of books and papers to compete with. The hypertext format didn't exist when The Waste Land was written, but its a perfect fit.

This is a wonderful resource, despite the difficulty of navigating all of the content. Where did it come from? Are there others?

As far as I know its a one of a kind, set up by a hobbyist. It draws on the notes Eliot supplied himself though (they are actually linked alongside the lines they correspond to); and no doubt on the work of other scholars to unravel the poem's mysteries.

There are other good candidates for this sort of treatment though: poetry of Ezra Pound, lyrics of MF DOOM...

Nabokov's Ada is given similar hypertextuality here:

http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/

Here is a similar treatment of Das Racist lyrics:

http://blog.mtviggy.com/2010/03/16/an-exercise-in-futility-d...

There are many works that fit into this format, e.g. Joyce's Ulysses, the classics, etc.

My sense is that he was trying to understand modern life as a classicist would understand ancient times. Trying to create that heighten state of fragmentary deep meaning, etc. -- but mapped to the disillusionment he felt in the present.

Normally a classicist is involved in the function of:

Classicist -> immerses in ancient literature

Eliot's 'trick' is that he would attempt higher order functions and map the whole technique to the present:

[Classicist -> immerses in ancient literature] -> immerses a Classical understanding of the present,

which makes the present seem Classical in importance. Nor is that the only way to go. But I think one of the greatest things that Eliot offers through his poetry is this challenge to become more sharply critical (the same way philologists must rise to the level of their material, after translating, etc.). Hypertextuality helps a lot. But, as I think Tycho sort of hints at here and in other comments, the goal is to engage the whole approach.

I think you are right. I think the epigraph tells us a lot. It refers to 'the Sybil' a Greek prophetess who wrote Appollo's oracles/prophecies on leaves which then scattered in the wind before followers had a chance to digest their information. If we take these leaves to represent the deeply significant facts/patterns/secrets of a civilization, the classicist has had time to 'gather the leaves' and make sense of it all. In The Waste Land the leaves of modern times are gathered, but no sense has been made, or some are missing. In fact, as the epigraph says, the Sybil 'wants to die.' The process through which deeper meaning/understanding is generated and dispersed cannot sustain itself any longer, because the dispersal, the scattering, is too violent.

The epigraph actually being written in ancient Greek with no translation provided is the icing on the cake.

What's this? Two submissions about 'The Waste Land' on the front page of HN?

As much as I don't like conceited meta-comments, I have to say that this is an incredible and surprising community...

I couldn't imagine a worse way to read literature (although hats off to the creator for the hard work). The beauty of The Waste Land comes from slowly unwrapping the references and allusions yourself. As we know from exploratory programming, there's value in the process of both discovery and understanding. This medium removes discovery.

On a different note, certainly the first read of any poem shouldn't be as cluttered and busy as what's presented here.

To be fair, I think most people kickstart their 'unwrapping' of The Waste Land by reading the notes Eliot supplied himself - which are fairly detailed, though not exhaustive (but neither is this webpage. for instance line 25 mentions 'the red rock' I believe is a reference to Mars-->The God of Wa-->/WW1). I agree one should read the pure text to start with, and try to make sense of things by yourself, but you're going to need help at some point.

What I like about this is that it lets you see viscerally how interlinked the text is. I like to visualize modernist poems as crystalline datastructures floating through the heap of culture with pointers to other objects in (public) memory.

Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem for anyone interested: http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_h...

Also the text on its own is here http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

I was only a teenager when I first read it (plus it was my first exposure to modernist texts), but it did take me quite a long time to even get past the 'wtf?' stage, until it eventually clicked.

This is a great resource, but yikes is it difficult to navigate.

Agreed. However, I feel it's way better than a "traditional" system of footnotes and annotations.

It's difficult to navigate due to the sheer amount of information it contains, most of which can be ignored. That being said, it can certainly be improved, but I empathize.

I bet there are literary critics who would kill to have a nice system to generate documentation in multiple formats... Do any exist?

Here's a link to the main page: http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explor...

I am studying a course in digital culture, part of that involves studying electronic literature, part of which involves studying hypertextuality. There is as yet no literary exemplar of the hypertextual realm, it is curious that we have to go back to a poem that predates the hyperlink to find a good fit.

Thank you ever so much for posting this, I really appreciate it and know quite a few others that will find this very intellectually stimulating.

What do you mean by:

There is as yet no literary exemplar of the hypertextual realm, it is curious that we have to go back to a poem that predates the hyperlink to find a good fit.

Do you not count hypertext fiction? E.g. stuff like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon,_a_story

Good example you've chosen. Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patchwork_Girl_(hypertext) using (coincidentally created using the same authoring system that you link to) is another fine, if not finer, example.

However, owing to the youth of the medium, and the very slow uptake I feel we have as yet to see any outstanding works in hypertext fiction. By which I mean of great artistic merit and a piece of work that transcends its form so that it is just thought of as a great work of fiction and not just a great work of hypertext fiction. (Non-fiction is a different matter entirely). As is suggested in this thread it is very possible that by sacrificing pace that a crucial component of fiction is lost to the author in the hypertextual realm. Ask me again in 50 years, really we're back in Gutenberg times with electronic literature - very exciting stuff, but really what we have are a lot of hypertexted bibles and not much else. (And I say that with all respect to the authors working in this field.)

The reason IMO hypertext is not a popular medium for narrative is that it is difficult to write. Narrative often draws power from unfolding events at a particular pace and in a particular order. Hypertext makes it difficult for an author to establish a particular pace/order.

I find that the less linear a narrative is, the more homogenous the options/nodes available are. E.g. the options available outside the main storyline in a game like Fallout, or the structure of the novel 253 http://www.ryman-novel.com/info/home.htm. I say outside the main storyline with ref to Fallout because the main storyline is linear: since it's hard to spin a good story without linearity.

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