The Flowering of Verbal Art in Digital Culture
A vast research literature has documented the strong tendency toward playfulness and stylization in oral genres of communication, particularly in societies without writing (e.g., Hymes, 1964; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1976; Edwards and Sienkewicz, 1990; Bauman, 1977). In previous papers on writing as performance on IRC, we already developed the argument that digital writing has much in common with communication in oral culture. The many factors fostering playfulness in computerized writing are resulting in a flowering of artful uses of language which we have associated in the past with oral genres. We are, of course, not alone in making this argument (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993). The evidence for our own case came from a detailed analysis of one relatively short sequence of interaction on IRC--not much material at all, when one considers the hours and hours put in by thousands of people, daily on IRC. Our work on the activities of the Hamnet Players, both the scripts and the performances, now provides important new evidence of playful stylization in digital culture. Although we have not been able to present detailed analysis of the two later scripts and their performances in this paper, the general features which we have discussed in this paper are also striking in them too.
We have seen that in the script of "Hamnet", Stuart Harris "froze" the playful style of online communication on IRC as a medium of quasi-literary composition, and then in performances, the script became the basis for an exuberant carnival of improvisation. Again and again, we encountered virtuoso feats of wordplay, including one liners, sequences of punning, clever parodies of Shakespeare, play with the IRC software and the norms of IRC culture, and with the conventions of theater. The punning and other forms of wordplay in Hamnet productions are very much in the spirit of Shakespeare himself: his works themselves are full of puns (Hussey, 1992: 142 145), including even in contexts where to many modern eyes the puns seem perhaps inappropriate, as in Mercutio's line in Romeo and Juliet (III.1), "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man (Culler, 1988: 3).
Nevertheless, the bias of print culture has been to suppress stylization in the name of transparency of meaning (Palmer, 1994, chap. 11). Even as august a literary figure as the 18th-century Samuel Johnson nastily condemned the puns in Shakespeare as being against "reason, propriety and truth" (Attridge, 1988: 140; Palmer, 1994: 141). Test (1991: 156) suggests that puns have had a particularly bad press in relation to the English language. Maurice Charney has noted, in reference to the rise of literature and the status of the comic in literature, that "Writing, and especially printing...tends to fix and stabilize meanings....In an oral culture, the sounds are literally the basic units of meaning, with almost unlimited possibilities for punning. The awareness of spelling tends to restrict the free play of the comic imagination" (Charney, 1978: 19). Bolter makes a similar point when discussing the nature of the new electronic medium: "there is a solemnity at the center of printed literature--even comedy, romance, and satire--because of the immutability of the printed page" (Bolter, 1991: 130). As Nash puts it, "We take punning for a tawdry and facetious thing, one of the less profound forms of humor, but that is the prejudice of our time" (Nash, 1985: 138). Even in contemporary conversation they are often looked down upon, or seen as a distraction (Sherzer, 1978; Test, 1991). But the most prejudiced attitudes clearly pertain to writing, and especially to print. There has a discomfort with figures of speech that pluralize meaning; this is reinforced by a positivistic desire to set boundaries, to establish structure and unity.
Earlier in this paper, we devoted a section to the issue of genre in
the case of the Hamnet Players. We looked, in turn, at the literary
categories of farce, parody and satire, and concluded that "Hamnet"
scripts are best described as hybrid genre--either satirical parody
or parodic satire. But what of Hamnet performances in their
entirety? To what genre shall we assign online events? Shouldn't we
see the start of these events--the performance-- not as the moment
the virtual curtain goes up and the ASCII Elsinore castle is loaded
on screen, as our title seems to imply, but as the opening of the
#hamnet channel and all that takes place until the last person
logs off? Indeed, the latter position is implied by our discussion of
the carnivalesque elements in Hamnet performances. If everything that
happens in the channel is pertinent, then we need a way of
conceptualizing genre that takes into account both the theater and the
carnival components, and both the pre-composed and the online, dynamic
aspects of Hamnet productions. Viewed in this broader perspective now,
we propose to characterize Hamnet productions as something new in
the world: (1) interactive, (2) computer-mediated, (3)
primarily textual (5) half scripted, half improvised (6)
satirical parodies (or parodic satires, if one prefers the latter term).
It is not by chance that
Shakespeare is the butt of the parodies performed by the Hamnet Players. Many
people have commented on the fact that we tend generally to parodize what is
very familiar, not necessarily what is canonized. Again and again, in
different times and places, we turn to Shakespeare, especially when consensus
wavers, or in times of change. When Thomas Edison toured cities promoting
and demonstrating his new invention, the telephone, about 100 years ago, he
drew on Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy. (Aronson, 1977). This
is a modest but nevertheless telling instance of the general tendency to turn
to Shakespeare particularly in times of technological change. Lawrence Levine
(1988) has analyzed the vagaries in the popularity of Shakespeare in American
culture, from earliest colonial times to our own times. Shakespeare was
extremely popular in 19th-century America, so much so that performances of his
plays and derivatives of them were a major form of popular culture. By mid-
19th-century, his plays had become "a staple of theaters in the Far West"
(Levine, 1988: 19). Levine comments:
Many authors have commented on the fact that cyberspace has
much in common with the 19th-century American West
(
Barlow,
1990;
Reid, 1991;
Ruedenberg, et al., 1995;
Danet, et al., in press).
characterized it as "vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous,
verbally terse..., hard to get around in, and up for grabs." For all
the attractions of the strange new world that is the Internet, we too
hanker after the familiar. No doubt, Stuart Harris chose plays by
Shakespeare intentionally, in order to reach as wide an audience as
possible. The choice was also a natural one for him, given his
background as an Englishman with experience in theater now living in
the United States.
There is clear independent evidence of the continuing centrality of
Shakespeare in contemporary English-speaking culture. In this era when
the very notion of canon is undermined, there are those who are
working desperately to save it. Harold Bloom's (1994) "heroically
brave" (Fruman, 1994: 9) attempt to restore or salvage the canon in
the humanities placed Shakespeare among the four masters of Western
drama. In a survey carried out for the New York Times at the beginning
of 1995, respondents were which is the most important drama in current
Western culture (New York Times, 1995, cited in the Hebrew newspaper
Ha'aretz, 1995: 6b). Remarkably, seven out of the ten dramas making it
into the list of the top ten were plays by Shakespeare. Moreover,
Hamlet won first place. These results suggest that not only technology,
but general times of major cultural change, reinforce the trend to turn to the
familiar. Despite the continuing argument over the future of the canon in
elitist circles, Shakespeare remains an important cultural anchor. Globalization, Democratization and The Hamnet Players
There has been, and no doubt will continue to be a good deal of hype in
the near future about the potential of the Internet to foster globalization
and democratization of culture. Although there are many channels on IRC for
non-English-speaking groups, most are English-speaking/writing. Hamnet
scripts are written in English, and performances are also in English. The
question arises, then, is there any basis to claim that the Hamnet Players are
an international phenomenon? Or does the group mainly attract people from
English-speaking countries, whether as performers or as audience members,
thereby fostering in its small way the continuing domination of English
language and culture in the world? We also want to ask: is this truly a new
form of popular culture, or do these activities mainly attract members of an
elite? To answer these questions, we examined the addresses of
participants in all six Hamnet performances--not only the two of "Hamnet", but
also those of "Pcbeth" and "An IRC Channel Named #Desire". Scanning the logs
for participants' addresses, we found that, while at the beginning, people
from American universities stood out both as participants and as audience
(addresses ending in "edu" dominated), over time the British element became
more prominent, and people from a wider range of countries joined in, both as
audience and as participants. Among the countries represented, in addition to
the United States and England, were Slovenia, Switzerland, Israel, Finland,
Ireland, Slovakia, Austria, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, South Africa, Norway,
the Netherlands, and Sweden. People from Asian countries were notably absent.
To some extent this reflects the slowness of some of these countries
(especially China) to discover and join the Internet. Another difficulty is
that some public servers, e.g., that in Taiwan, are frequently used by people
in the West to gain access to IRC, so an address including any of these
servers does not necessarily indicate a participant logged on from that
country. Despite these difficulties, we believe that the international
element has steadily grown over time. The dominance of Americans and of people
belonging to academic institutions appears to be declining. This may also
reflect more general changes in the Internet itself, as wider sectors of
society are joining it. Among Americans, more persons whose addresses end with
"com " (commercial sector) participated in the later performances. Recent
statistics on the Internet confirm these trends (Bournellis, 1995). For
instance, "com" is now the largest and fastest growing sector, according to
these statistics. On another note, it is widely known that women are
heavily underrepresented on the Net, a reflection of their traditional
distaste for computers and for technology generally (Turkle, 1988; Perry and
Greber, 1990). The record for women in Hamnet activities turns out to be
much more encouraging. While there were relatively few women among the
performers in "Hamnet", by the time of "An IRC Channel Named #Desire", roughly
half the performers were women. We believe that the Hamnet Players are making
a small, limited but nevertheless important contribution toward
democratization on the Net. This is true both for the representation of
countries and for the representation of women "on stage," behind the scenes,
and in the audience. At the same time, let us not romanticize these
developments. As long as the English language continues to dominate scripts
and productions, the ability of persons whose native language is not English
to participate will remain problematic-- unless they are fairly competent
bilinguals (there are countries where bilingualism and even
multilingualism are routine, e.g., the Netherlands, where people speak German,
English and French as well as Dutch). Finally, there is another important
reason why democratization will remain limited, both with respect to the
Hamnet Players and to the near future of the Net generally. In the discussion
of Hamnet productions as carnivals of wordplay, we overlooked an important
fact: unlike RL carnivals which make possible a momentary leveling and even
reversal of RL status hierarchies--the poor people have their day--the
carnival discussed in this paper is an elite one in which only well-educated,
sophisticated middle-class persons can participate. In short, we must conclude
that despite their mixing of elements of high and low or popular culture and
the evidence for the participation of persons from non English-speaking
countries, the activities of the Hamnet Players perpetuate elitist Western,
English-speaking culture on the Net.
We take monist reasoning for granted. Truthfulness [has been]
equated with simplicity, not complexity...Figures of speech such
as metaphor or irony confuse binary thought because they add
the complexities of 'both/and' to 'either/or', thereby blurring the
lines we like to draw between truth and falsehood, fact and non-
fact....punning is not respectable....Most Europeans...are trained
to admire irony but to disapprove of puns. The socially expected
response to a pun is a ritual protest: a groan" (Ahl, 1988: 21).
Shakespeare's popularity in frontier communities...
[fits] our knowledge of human beings and their
need for the comfort of familiar things under the
pressure of new circumstances and surroundings"
(Levine, 1988: 20).
Hamnet article: [return to paper table of
contents]
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contents]