figuration

This paper, which is part of the collection of essays Reading Moving Letters (see introduction) reflects on what the emerging field of digital literature studies and the more established (but continually evolving) discipline of comparative literature might contribute to one another in terms of defining concepts and methods of literary analysis. My discussion is guided by the tentative proposition that the vexed status of the "national language" for comparative literature can be seen as analogous to the status of the "digital" for scholars undertaking research on computer-based literary texts. Aiming to overcome the ideological strictures of nationalism, many present-day comparatists are returning to the old question "what is literature?" and are placing renewed emphasis on the role of figurative language as a defining feature of literary texts and, consequently, as the appropriate focus of comparative textual analysis. Should scholarship in electronic literature head in a similar direction and cultivate skepticism about the essentialism of the digital, opening up greater possibilities for comparative work across literary media? In support of an affirmative answer to this question, the essay undertakes a detailed comparative analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn") and American artist Rudy Lemcke's digital video poem "The Uninvited."

author-submitted abstract: In the past, the “innovations” of electronic poetry often have been circumscribed in rather general terms; today, it seems important to characterize its stylistic, semantic and pragmatic devices with more precision. The traditional “figures of speech” have sometimes been considered as capable of achieving this aim. By denominations like “animated metaphor”, I have tried for example in my book Matières textuelles sur support numérique to describe “phenomena of meaning” in electronic literature, when animation effects enter in meaningful relations with the contents of words or letters. It is however undoubtedly dangerous to use a terminology which have been forged to characterize textual phenomena, whereas the signs of electronic texts are often based on various semiotic systems. In a recent article for the review Protée (which I also presented during the e-poetry seminar in Paris), while describing what I would call “figures of speech on media surface”, I sometimes continue to use traditional taxonomies; in order to avoid too dangerous analogies, I try in other cases to invent a new terminology. It appeared in particular important to me that these terms mark the difference with the technical processes which are used to produce animations: a morphing effect for example should not be considered as a figure; morphing only becomes a “figure” in relation to the content of the media to which it has been applied (I propose for example the term ciné-gramme for animations remembering the calligramme on paper medium, the term sporulation when an element appears by an effect of graduated multiplication, the term emergence when a textual element appears gradually, and when this appearance transforms the meaning of the word). But electronic poetry not only explores textual animation. The experimentation with interactive forms constitutes one of the most frequent characteristics of electronic poetry - in particular when the poem has been published online. Confronted with animated medias, the critic can still find some references in traditional cinema theories; confronted with interaction, he really must invent. He can start again by testing traditional terminologies. Jean Clément suggests for example to apply the concept of metaphor to hypertext phenomena. Katherine Hayles proposes the term of “embodied metaphor” in order to characterize the relation between functional similarities and inter-actions in video games. Serge Bouchardon establishes connections between the hypertext and the « art of ellipse », identifying more specifically “figures of displacement”, “substitution” and “transformation”. When the contents of the interactive media, the interactive gesture and the contents transformed by the gesture enter in incongruous, impertinent relations, I propose to call these phenomena of meaning « figures of speech on media interface ». Most of the time, on electronic support, the relation between the interactive gesture and interactive and interacted media contents enters in perfect accordance with the « grammatical rules » of electronic the document. At the beginnings of the Internet, the possibility to interact with textual elements in a palpable way appeared certainly disconcerting, and it was perhaps legitimate to consider any hypertext as a stylistic device; today, the activation of a key word revealing a definition, the code word opening access on a bank account, the displacement of textual or iconographic elements in order to reconstitute a puzzle, do not surprise anymore. Informational or commercial writing on electronic supports aims at an immediate effectiveness. The interactive gesture facilitates the rapid access to the required information while making understand, in a palpable way, the complex relations between segments of information. The “style” of electronic poetry is based on an endangering of the « grammatical rules » established by social practices, on “a difference between sign and meaning” (Genette). Thus the “figures of media interfaces” that I will try to detect and to describe in this paper (by a close-reading of desordre.net), can be considered as revealing of the « poetic fact » in electronic texts.

According to the French author and theoretician Jean-Pierre Balpe, “all digital art works are first conceived outside the framework of a pragmatic relation to materiality. Any manifestation of digital art is but a simulated moment of an absent matter.”

However, I wish to show that there is at least as much materiality in the digital media as in other media. Of course, as a formal description, digital and material can be distinguished. Digital media correspond to formalization, insofar as formalization is understood as the modelling of a given reality through the use of a formal code. But because digital media refers to the effectiveness of digital calculation, it can be considered as “material”, at least on two levels:

on the level of what occurs in the machine, calculation being a material process,
on the level of what occurs in the interaction with the user, a symbolic and behavioral interaction, in which the system acts on the user and is acted by the user.
The question of materiality is indeed related to that of the media. Yves Jeanneret insists upon this materiality, when he says that “the power of writing is primarily related to the materiality of its media.” Unlike those who present digital writing as deprived of any materiality, Yves Jeanneret points out the materiality of this form of writing : “In addition to its own materiality (network, memory, screen, keyboard, etc), computerized writing is a repeat, a quotation, a mise en abyme of all the materialities of the documentary culture. Digital writing does not amount to a loss of materiality. In fact, materiality is not absent from digital writing. On the contrary it is doubly there, it is materiality squared : the materiality of the media, and that quoted by the media.”

In electronic literature, this materiality is often used for aesthetic purposes. The Trésor de la Langue Française gives a definition of literature as « the aesthetic use of the written language ». This definition may seem very narrow, especially because it doesn’t take into account the oral literature. However, what we can observe in many digital literary works is a displacement of the “aesthetic use of the written language” to the aesthetics of materiality : materiality of the text, of the interface and of the media. That is what I shall show on the basis of a corpus of digital literary works.