Hyperlepis - a secret weapon of hypertext rhetoric

Authors: Mariusz Pisarski , Departament of Media and Communication, University of Information Technology and Management, Poland, mariusz.pisarski@techsty.art.pl

Publication: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675149 HT '24: 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media , Poznan, Poland, September 2024

DOI: 10.1145/3648188.3675149

Abstract

Hypertext offers a distanced perspective on technology and communication. On the level of style, for example, the link can be seen as modern punctuation mark [ 15 ]. On the level of narrative design, the link functions as a logical engine of interaction in computer games and elsewhere [ 1 ]. On the level of social discourse, the link serves as a tool for expressing individual freedom [ 7 ]. Hyperlepsis—a multi-level trope introduced in this article, found in interactive fiction (IF), hypertext fiction and ambient literature for smartphones, combines grammar, style, and discourse within a single rhetorical gesture. As such, hyperlepsis can be a useful descriptive category for evaluating the effectiveness of interactive rhetorics across all digital forms. It renders early hypertext fiction as a reservoir of artistic ingenuity and a field for creative intelligence. As a trope from the same group as metalepsis it contributes to the reflection on embodied, material tropes – "sign-tool-objects" – as subordinate tools of immersion, rather than disruption and metafictional intrusion. Finally, for preservationists and translators, the presence of hyperlepsis can be a crucial indicator about components of the original work that cannot be lost during migration from source to target or during reconstruction.

1 INTRODUCTION

Hyperlepsis is a rhetorical trope that brings together at least two different domains: physical and virtual, fictional and real, metaphorical and concrete. Unlike hypertext patterns such as a cycle, a counterpoint, a mirror world [ 5 ] or other rhetorical figures based on structures larger than a single node – [ 23 ] and concerned with arrangements of elements on the level of syuzet [ 14 ] hyperlepsis originates in language. From the semantic and symbolic levels it then extends to the levels of interface, code, communication, and discourse. The Greek hyper ) denotes something "above" something else, a structure built upon its individual parts. ληψιζ Lepsis (a seizure, to seize) points to a synthesizing aspect of the trope, which brings all its parts together. In other words, hyperlepsis marks its own intersemiotic impact across various signifying components of the work.

In one single moment, a single theme or motif is performed by the reader and brings into sync expressive tools found on various signifying components of the digital work. Hyperlepsis can be understood as as a special type of a link without an anchor. Rather than being marked explicitly in the text or among elements of the interface, the anchoring function of hyperlepsis is implied in the reference frame of a single lexia, a scene, the whole work. Calling Lolly, running away from zombies, scouting a coast, walking along the street, jumping from pebble to pebble in a stream – these semantic and narrative motifs, in the work of hyperlepsis, are metonimically linked with actions of the reader.

In contrast to hypertext patterns [ 5 ] and rhetorical figures [ 23 ] such as cycle, sieve or recurrence, hyperlepsis is concerned with structures larger than a node or series of nodes. It is a trope that resides in language but spreads from the symbolic dimension to interface, code, communication, and discourse. The Greek υπερ (hyper), which denotes something "above" something else, is etymologically analogous with the term "hypertext" as a structure built upon its parts. On the other hand, the Greek ληψιζ points to a synthesizing aspect of the trope, which brings all its parts together.

2 CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT OF HYPERLEPSIS

In Maginary , an award-winning animated "immersive book" for iOS by Simon Polyakovsky, the smartphone's geolocation, gyroscope, and pedometer serve as active tools for storytelling. For the story to proceed, the reader must walk 1,000 steps. On the fictional level, this walk occurs in a desert during a sandstorm. Periodically, a neon billboard in the desert displays the number of steps already taken. In the real world, the walk takes place in the reader's own environment when the iPhone's pedometer tracks his/her steps.

Current scholarship on digital narratives often interprets this effect as metalepsis: a trespassing of ontological borders of the work made by a fictional character when they leave the intradiegetic realm to appear in the world of the narrator or the reader or when the author or reader "intrude" into the fictional world [ 11 ]. Championed by scholars of postmodern fiction, metafiction, possible worlds, and "unnatural narrative" theory such as Monika Fludernik[ 10 ], Marie-Laure Ryan [ 22 ], Brian Richardson [ 21 ], Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin [ 9 ], interactive metalepsis continues to be a highly relevant trope.

Hyperlepsis brings a different angle to the personalized and embodied effects of Polyakovsky's hyper-book. They are not necessarily about a transfer of identity across ontological levels of the work but about the artistic amplification of selected narrative motifs. The core function of the trope, rather than dramatic trespassing that renders the story "unnatural" [ 20 ], is an expansion of semantic signal. Instead of metaleptic travel and intrusion, we can speak of hyperleptic spreading out and reverberation. Some aspects of both worlds echo each other at specific moments in the story, working in sync to deliver a richer, more immersive experience rather than abrupt intrusion.

The reader of Maginary is not stepping inside Polyakovsky's story in a literal sense; their body is not hijacked or "borrowed" [ 19 ]. They are doing it in a metonymic sense, walking in their own world and in their own shoes – an act that is mirrored and perceived (by fictional characters, by the narrator, and by the computing system) in both worlds simultaneously.

3 EXAMPLES

Hyperlepsis has been a popular semantic amplification trope since the beginning of digital storytelling, starting in the pre-Web era with stand-alone hypertext systems such as Intermedia, HyperCard, and Storyspace, continuing in born-digital works on the Web, and flourishing today in the post-web era of mobile apps.

3.1 Hyperlepsis in the Pre-Web era

Constrained by small screens and slow speeds, interactive narratives in the pre-Web period [ 16 ] were conversational and turn-based. Stories, whether built on node-link structures or parser-based dialog systems, were divided into smaller, bite-sized pieces and their delivery was often gated by the progress of gameplay (solving riddles and successful encounters with the parser in IF) or by narrative logic (conditional links in hypertext fiction). The constraints of modestly powered computers became a material foundation for themes of mystery, exploration (of a cave, a labyrinth, an archive, outer space), and encounters with the unknown (a haunted house, a paranoid mind). Metalepsis happens when these narrative metaphors – for example, "navigating the Web is like surfing" – are expressed as metonyms (an archive in a text adventure is also an archive on the reader's hard disk). The metonymic contiguity [ 3 ] allows for a narrative motif to be anchored within the referential function of language and within extra-linguistic codes, which opens up a space for performative, multi-layered figures activated by the reader.

Robert Coover's Hypertext Hotel (1992), a collaborative writing space based on MOO technology, offered more than a mere hotel metaphor. On several occasions, participants in this collaborative literary experiment encountered performative tropes based on contiguity. For example, each location had to be dialed in, meaning actions associated with the hotel's Reception occurred on a few ontological planes: in the fictional world of the Hypertext Hotel and in the network infrastructure of servers and server locations. Checking in at the Reception was the same as logging in on the server space named "Reception." Activities belonging to the domain of hospitality found corresponding activities in the domain of computer networks. Visiting the Lobby, and the Bar, or checking the map of the hotel [ 6 ] had their own similar doubles enacted by the system and performed by the reader.

In Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story , the default sequence of lexias, ends at the "I call" space where Peter, the main character, tries to call the office of Lolly, his therapist friend. The text ends with the words "I take a pill and call Lolly". The interaction ends with the reader hitting the return button and hearing the sound of a Mac OS Classic system error. After several attempts, the reader must make the connection: it is not only the reading that cannot proceed, but—in Peter's world—no one in Lolly's office is picking up the phone. In this single moment, through one simple gesture of stroking the return key—semiotically amplified by the system error sound—two worlds come together and a trope of hyperlepsis is revealed.

Earlier in the story, the introductory lexia "begin" sets ominous themes of danger, thundering, and explosions. Clicking on the word "fragments" from the sentence "This was the essence of wood, these fragments say," the reader encounters a sequence of single word lexias taken one by one from the introductory scene "begin". Storyspace, the authoring system created initially for afternoon, a story , had a built-in text segmentation function called "explode". Thanks to a custom delimiter macro, authors could explode the content of any lexia's into single words or characters. The first text segment of the first hypertext fiction gives the reader what many digital narratives have offered ever since—an enacted and interactive experience of a selected theme, motif, or any detail of the fictional world that can be reflected and expressed concurrently in software, in the system, or on the level of the interface.

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse , John McDaid's early multimedia novel written and read on HyperCard but also accompanied by physical artifacts, such as fictionalized letters and audio tapes that told the story of the main character in an analog (auditory and tactile) manner. Among the printed materials sold in the cardboard box that the hypertext shipped with was a letter explaining that the box's content constitutes the literary estate of Buddy Newkirk and those who read it are its inheritors. The you in the letter is the reader, Buddy is their uncle, and the "chocolate box of death" is an archive they are just about to explore. The effect of hyperlepsis happens this time through the material and sensory affordances. Even before loading Uncle Buddy's disks into the disk drive, it becomes clear that "the box and its contents suggest the entirety of the work and conspire to imbue meaning to it" [ 12 ]. After the first disk is loaded, digital affordances come into play: the reader's actual time is displayed in the fictional email exchange with Newkirk's editors and lawyers – this way, hyperlepsis is expanded further and reverberates its themes on and off the screen.

3.2 Hyperlepsis on the Web

The emergence of the Web has popularized a plethora of metaphors that help describe the new experience of global communication based on interconnected computers and the excitement it brought: surfing, sailing, navigating, the electronic frontier, and living new lives in virtual cities of cyberspace are just a few examples from the imaginary reservoir of the early days of the Web and beyond.

With more capable computers, the computer screen has became a window to infinity. The promise of a limitless generation of artistic content concretized metaphors into metonyms and metonyms into hyperlepsis. In Sea and Spar Between by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, the authors created a procedural "infinite canvas" on which billions of poetic stanzas, a number close to the estimated number of fish in Earth's oceans, could be presented. The reader can manually, or by random choice, select a location on this vast grid of virtual sea [ 17 ]. In Montfort's Round , a computational poem inspired by the fractals of the Mandelbrot Set and perhaps by the infinitely procedural Every Icon by John F. Simon, the content is assembled out of ten fragments while the code computes the digits of π (3, 1, 4, and so on). As Round runs, the text production slows down because more steps are necessary to determine the next digit of pi. Montfort warns: "Your computer will also slow down on other tasks and will physically heat up. Your computer's fan will work harder as your processor labors to complete these computations." The "pi poem" of Round is not a metaphor but a computational device that is executed in code, expressed on the screen, and present on the material level of communication to a potentially extreme effect of overheating and destroying the processor. Round can be seen as a "hyperleptic machine". Yet in this case, in contrast to Marie-Laure Ryan's "metaleptic machine" [ 22 ], a transfer of character/reader is not taking place. The poem is both ironically and literally overheating the medium while promising the impossible: infinite generation of content, realization of the "computational sublime" [ 2 ], and – at the same time – acknowledging that such a task is not possible.

The metaphor of "infinite canvas" has been turned into a multi-level metonymy in J.R. Carpenter's The Pleasure of the Coast (2019). The main character of this web hypertext is the historical figure, sailor, and cartographer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, who ventures along the coastline of the South Pacific in search of a lost research expedition. The outline of the coastlines observed by Beautemps-Beaupré is projected into virtual space, capable of scrolling infinitely before the reader's eyes. The direction of reading, from left to right, confirmed by the movement of a mouse dragging a horizontal scroll bar, may bear no relation to the “actual” movements of a ship traversing along the coast. However, after a metaphorical abstraction of adjoining interface elements, reading conventions, the depicted world, and the mathematical extensibility of space in the digital domain, the protagonist, the reader, and the world they both observe seem locked in an inseparable entanglement. Hyperlepsis occurs when reading about Beautemps-Beaupré and his voyage, the reader's own actions echo that activity in the act of horizontal scrolling of text and images – scans of the explorer's sketches of the coastline. Because the horizontal canvas for J.R. Carpenter's content is far wider than the reading window of a laptop or smartphone, the computer screen itself stands in a metonymical relation to the window of a ship's cabin. The coastline scrolls between the reader's eyes just as it would before anyone who looks out from their cabin's window on a ship sailing along the coast. Hyperlepsis is anchored in the act of scrolling that binds the levels of representation and reception, "this" and “that” side of the text.

3.3 Hyperlepsis in post-Web era

With the advancement of mobile computing, the new post-Web generation of digital storytelling abounds in "figures of presence" [ 18 ]. Tracking technologies built into every smartphone transform the reader's location and biometric data into integral parts of the story. Although IF of the 1980s allowed for the use of the reader's time or name, the smartphone - as a handheld AR and VR device – has made the effect of merging the fictional with the real a common experience. In this context, metonymy emerges as the key figure and metalepsis - the transfer of identities between these two — becomes its primary expression. In this multimodal and multilayered storytelling environment, hyperlepsis plays a subordinative role to metalepsis, especially its interactional type [ 4 ].

Zombies, Run! (2012), a mobile fitness game by British studio Six to Start and Naomi Alderman, is one of the early examples of how smartphones can deliver intense and personalized narrative content to users. The app gamifies and narrativizes a jogging experience by telling the story of a small outpost township trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Players act as the character "Runner 5" through a series of missions during which they run, collect items to help the town survive, and listen to audio narrations. It is probably the first digital fiction with a new type of link that is not anchored on text but on real-life data shared by its users. Pressing the button "run!" leaves the reader/listener jogging and listening as they perform this action—metonymically—in both worlds: the fictional and their own. Zombies, Run! set a standard for how effective narrative frameworks built upon smartphone APIs can be. This effectiveness is allowed by special figures of digital rhetoric, which in this case take the form of an embodied hyperlepsis enacted by the user's physical activity.

Just as in Polyakovsky's Maginary , the users of Zombies, Run! do not cross any ontological borders; their bodies are in both worlds at the same time, working in sync. In Maginary , a similar function is given to the compass on the phone. Without the compass and proper alignment of directions between the reader and fictional characters, the adventure cannot proceed beyond the introduction. Soon after, the iPhone's torch is used to locate an object lost in the story. In this worthy successor of Zombies, Run! , similar tropes abound.

The role of hyperlepsis as a trope supporting the amplification of illusion can be found in Kate Pullinger's Breathe (2018). The "book in a room" type of smartphone app uses three APIs— related to weather, time, and location—to access data via the reader's phone in order to personalize their experience and raise the narrative tension of its main narrative motif: a story about seeing ghosts. Thanks to the figures of presence based on shared user data, an "uncanny effect" is produced whereby the ghosts in the story know where the reader is located[ 8 ]. After the reader takes a photo of their room and allows for location tracking, a series of hyperlepsis follow: the name of the reader's street, nearby train station, local cafes can now appear on the device and in the story. These echoes of the reader's environment in the setting of the story initiate the strongest and most spectacular effect of metalepsis: ghosts entering the reader's room and neighborhood via linguistic, visual and auditory means.

4 APPLICATIONS

Hyperlepsis demonstrates expressive power of hypertext and digital narrative that cannot be – as a rule – replicated in print and other analog media. As a performative figure making a single image, idea and motif manifest itself on different layers of the work – as a way of saying one thing in three or four different ways with a single gesture and in a single moment – hyperlepsis offers an amplified rhetoric that is hard to miss. "Say it in hypertext" – a call that three decades ago would suggest a provocative strategy aimed at confusing the reader, was in fact – from the start – a call for a fuller, richer speech advocated by Czesław Miłosz, one of the poetic mentors of Michel Joyce. Miłosz sought a language that goes beyond the cycle of denotation and connotation, a language that conveyed images and ideas that can be seen, sensed and experienced[ 13 ]. Hyperlepsis brings digital narrative readers a bit closer to this ideal.

On a practical level, identifying hyperlepsis in digital narrative can greatly benefit translation, curating and preservation of digital works. With the number of communities interested in preserving and archiving digital heritage growing, the effort itself can all too easily mirror the proven methods of analog preservation, with disregard to medium-specificity. Digital tropes such as hyperlepsis, as flag posts of medium specific expression can ensure that documentation goes beyond metadata and text and includes elements of storytelling that were both medium and work-specific to en extent that made the reading experience unique and engaging.

Identifying the presence of hyperlepsis is useful in mapping components that otherwise may be missed. A good example is the "wave of returns" – a feature of any hypertext from the "Storyspace school" of hypertexts that guided the reader – if they kept pressing the Return key on the Macintosh keyboard – along the default narrative sequence. In the reading instructions to afternoon, a story Joyce introduced navigation by the Return key as a tool for more traditional, linear reading and likened it to turning the page of a print book. Later, the term "wave of returns" was coined, and the metaphor started circulating among the community of readers and scholars.

On the one hand, the feature was a bridge to the print culture, a return to the traditional way of reading; on the other hand – striking the Return key was a vehicle for discovering new phenomena, such as hypertext patterns, and performing simple animation effects within Storyspace [ 9 ]. As such, "the wave of returns" became a signifying component manifested in hardware, interaction, paratexts, and discourse (exchange of ideas, reading practices, critical apparatuses, and lore within the reading community). Its presence on all those levels makes it a hyperlepsis. In the Polish browser-based translation and edition of afternoon, a story (2011), and in the online edition of Moulthrop's Victory Garden (2022) the "wave of returns" was migrated and preserved. One can easily imagine an edition in which – for any editorial or technical reasons – this feature is omitted to fit a new target format, new interface, and new reading habits. It should not and its status as a hyperlepis, an important digital trope, should give the translator or digital preservationist enough leverage to convince editorial or technical teams that preservation of this particular element of the work is necessary.

5 SUMMARY AND FURTHER RESEARCH

The entanglement of hypertext form and semantic content provides a fresh perspective on rhetorical figures in the digital realm, particularly regarding immersion versus metafictionality. Hyperlepsis, as a special, amplified trope that connects multiple ontological levels of storytelling within a single rhetorical gesture, can be seen as an artistic effect particularly favored by hypertext authors. As such, it holds significant potential for revitalizing the study of the early digital storytelling, including parser-based systems, HyperCard, Storyspace, and other stand-alone platforms.

By treating early hypertext fiction as a reservoir of born-digital tropes and a space of creative intelligence, hypertext scholarship reinforce its role as source of reflection on roots, patterns and deep structures of communication and technology today.

REFERENCES

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HT '24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland