e-Vocative Cases: Digitality and Direct Address

Electronic literature poses several exciting
challenges and questions to literary scholars:
How do we balance our interpretations of
digitally born works against the specific modes
of production that make such works possible?
How do our conceptions of authorial intent
shift in relation to works that solicit active
participation from their readers? How do we
account for readers’ participation in such works,
as well as the way their experiences shape
and re-shape the text? In this paper I offer
one strategy of interpretation that cuts across
some of these questions: tracing the path of
direct address in works that are digitally born, a
technique that both emerges and departs from
conventional literary practice.
When I visit a certain website, I am greeted in
a peculiar fashion: an animated avatar with a
human form speaks to me, blinks at me, and
follows my mouse movements on the screen
with her eyes while I read. On another site, a
string of text hails me and addresses me by
name, purporting to welcome me to all the
treasures contained within its digital domains.
As startling as these salutations initially seemed
and as commonplace as they have become, I
remain intrigued by their overt and shameless
invocation of the reader — in this case, me.
Strictly speaking, this mode of address should
not be possible, at least not according to the
familiar conventions of literary tradition. In
Anatomy of Criticism
, Northrop Frye states the
matter unequivocally: “Criticism can talk, and
all the arts are dumb...there is a most important
sense in which poems are as silent as statues.
Poetry is a disinterested use of words: it does
not address a reader directly” (4). While the
examples of address above are decidedly not the
poetical specimens Frye has in mind, his stance
nevertheless serves as a firm response to a larger
problem, one that has endured since the time
of Socrates and persists to this day, a problem
that can be crudely summarized in the following
terms: there has always been something of a gap
between the written word and its reception.
Each time I see my own name staring back at me,
however, I question whether the gap between
text and reader has been in some way bridged,
or at least contracted. Each time the avatar
speaks to me, I am unable to locate myself in
relation to the text no matter which paradigm I
might use to explicate our relationship. Within
a spectrum bounded at one end by the New
Critical emphasis on textual autonomy and at
the other by the “virtual” text that emerges
necessarily as a correspondence between author
and audience in reader-response theory, I do not
know where I stand. With the announcement
of my own name, I am aware that I have been
identified, and therefore can no longer even
maintain the convenient illusion of being, as
a reader, either ideal or implied. I have been
specified. The “text,” such as it is, has called me
out.
The spectrum I have identified here is, of course,
absurdly streamlined and unequally weighted.
The New Critics exclude the reader’s thoughts as
a given principle, while reader-response theory
alone has perhaps generated more ways of
labeling its reading audience than the sum
of other critical interventions combined — in
addition to offering a strong and convincing
counterpoint to Cleanth Brooks’ ideal reader,
Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader is only one star
in a constellation of terms that includes the
mock reader, the actual reader, the fictionalized
reader, the hypothetical reader, the narrative
reader, the ideal narrative reader, and the
“real” reader, not to mention Stanley Fish’s
interpretive reading communities (Brooks, 24;
Iser,
The Implied Reader
, xii; Rabinowitz,
125-128; Fish, 219).
In all of these models of reception, the impulse
to name the reader, to re-assert her importance
in the construction of textual meaning, still
participates in the tacit agreement that this
reader, whoever she may be, is never fully
concretized by the written text. How could she
be? Rather, a “virtual” text emerges as a sort
of ghostly correspondence between the two,
one that is nigh on impossible to trace. In
the words of Iser, “It’s difficult to describe
this interaction...because...of course, the two
partners in the communication process, namely,

2
the text and the reader, are far easier to analyze
than is the event that takes place between
them” (“Interaction Between Text and Reader,”
107).
The hypothesis that I would like to test in
this essay is that works of electronic literature
push the issue of responsibility and specificity
into uncharted readerly terrain. What if, in
certain examples of electronic literature, direct
address online were specific to you, the reading
reader, and not an implied reader? Put more
specifically, pressed even further, what if direct
address online were to make traceable the
ghostly correspondence between reader and text
that Iser outlines? This is not as far-fetched as it
seems. As we shall see, the reader’s participation
in some examples of electronic literature is
required for textual constitution in ways that
are fundamentally different from even the most
successful and extreme examples of non-linear
narrative practices found in print. In the case
of electronic literature, direct address functions
to bring the text into being, by signaling the
reader and requiring a
response
of her. Even
more remarkable, this response has the ability
to become a part of the initial text, such that the
text that emerges is literally constituted through
the feedback that exists between the reader’s
actions and the author’s words.
While many claims about interactivity and
customization have been made about electronic
literature, there has not yet been a sustained
attempt to consider the more specific mode of
address that occurs in such works in relation
to overtly literary practice. In the space that
follows I attempt to remedy this by considering
instances both subtle and overt that occur in
select works of electronic literature — including
Dan Waber and Jason Pimble’s “I, You, We,”
Mary Flanagan’s [theHouse], and Emily Short’s
“Galatea” — that signal, cue, or otherwise
point outside themselves to the reader as she
progresses through the text. If the use of
the vocative in conventional literary texts has
the ability to point not only to characters
within their narrative confines, but to an entire
social, political and cultural discourse that
lies tantalizingly close, yet perhaps ultimately
outside the textual boundaries, I explore
whether modes of address in online works allow
us to exceed these boundaries altogether.
References
Brooks, Cleanth
(2004). 'The Formalist
Critics'.
Literary Theory: an Anthology.
Julie
Rivkin, Michael Ryan (eds.). Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Fish, Stanley
(2004). 'Interpretive
Communities'.
Literary Theory: an Anthology.
Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (eds.). Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Frye, Northrop
(1957).
Anatomy of Criticism.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
Iser, Wolfgang
(1980). 'Interaction Between
Text and Reader'.
The Reader in the Text:
Essays on Audience and Interpretation.
Suleiman, Crosman (eds.). Princeton: Princeton
UP.
Rabinowitz, Peter J.
(Autumn, 1977). 'Truth
in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences'.
Critical Inquiry.
4:1
: 121-141.