textual space

The textual space of the printed page has come to be seen as arbitrary and self-contained. The arbitrariness is a result of the alphabet, referring to sounds in an arbitrary (and contextual) way, to the concept of the linguistic sign, which after Saussure, was described primarily as an arbitrary link between signifier and signified, and to the culture of the printed book, which has striven towards legibility through typographic simplicity and the exlusion of pictorial attributes to the page itself.

But at different moments in the history of writing, the surface has been endowed with pictorial qualities. Picture writing, which is generally thought of as the historical precursor of phonetic writing, refers through stylized images. The bridge from picture writing to phonetic writing was the realization that picture elements could be identified with sounds in language. Through the process of phonetization and abstraction, writing becomes a secondary system depending on spoken language for its meaning. (much of Derrida's work is a criticism of this idea...presumably because the system which is supposed to be secondary has become so important.) see writing.

An example of orchestrated simultaneity on the page is Blaise Cendrars' and Sonia Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France , which combined poems, maps, and illustrations on a sheet two meters long.


cendrars : Delaunay.jpg

Other examples of pictorial attributes in writing are calligraphy or the icons on the Macintosh desktop. These latter are reifications of some aspect of information processing, and they are pictures that perform and receive actions. Electric icons realize what magical and religious icons of the past could only suggest. They are functioning representations.

In Ulysses, Joyce improvised montage techniques of writing to show the simultaneous activity of Dublin as a whole, not a history of the city but a slice of it out of time, spatially extended and embodying its entire past in a vast expanded present. (This is what is referred to as Joyce's spatial form). Joyce hoped that his readers would go back to the book many times, continually building up the network of cross-references scattered throughout until Dublin came to life. Edmund Wilson conceived of Ulysses as "something solid like a city which actually existed in space and which could be entered from any direction -- as Joyce is said, in composing his books, to work on different parts simultaneously." (Axel's Castle, p. 210)

(a discussion of writing as espacement should be included) the space of the page in writing (the visual writing space)

The construction of Hypertext is most instructive. The computer is interpreted as a new writing space and programs are developed on the basis of that interpretation (See Jay David Bolter Writing Space) which turns out to be the program used to create "Weird Storyspace", in which this author presumably gets to "write his mind"

Books primarily are used in the constitution of a public space. For example, Boyle's literary technologies were dedicated to a collective witnessing of this experiments in order to establish that they referred to a true state of nature. (see also virtual witnessing.)