Printed texts have introduced many of the elements that George Landow claims are unique to an electronic or digital hypertext. In fact, hypertext offers few narrative inventions at all when one looks at the feats of writers like Calvino, Borges, Silko and Joyce. The few innovations hypertext relies upon are those that are made possible through new technologies, but are not properly textual features. Landow writes that "Hypertext, which challenges narrative and all literary form based on linearity, calls into question ideas of plot and story current since Aristotle."[18] Yet hypertext only continues this questioning, which has been ongoing since writing began. Landow obscures the difference between electronic/digital publishing and hypertext so that the two seem intertwined. His attribution of revolutionary narrative abilities to hypertext is an overwrought celebration of the new publishing's possible enabling of what has been a counter-tradition -- the nonlinear, fragmented text -- to become a dominant tradition.
Any other attribution of narrative innovation to hypertext is unjustified, as Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy -- which Landow credits as a precursor to hypertext -- illustrates. Shandy is a novel that undermines its narrative attempts to establish a unity of time, location, voice and action. Nothing certain lasts here; the only thing that is fixed is the language that is used to build the novel. Sterne himself is nearly kicked out as author at the novel's start. Many intertextual elements appear: a marbleized page; an approximation of a tombstone; and the narrator Tristram Shandy's sketches of his own meandering narrative paths. Yet the most effective device to undermine the unity of the novel is a very simple component of on-paper printing: the dash.
In Tristram Shandy, the dash is a prominent item of punctuation that serves to do many things in the novel. Sterne obviously is not alone among early eighteenth century writers in widely using dashes to make shifts in sentences, and by no means is every dash in Tristram Shandy significant in and of itself (a point which will be covered shortly). Yet within this novel, the dash is on nearly every page of text, in every character's speech, and in every chapter. The dash here serves multiple functions: it binds disjoined phrases in sentences, it begins paragraphs, it stands for omitted letters in prudently censored passages. Tristram Shandy is pervaded with dashes, but the effect is not exclusively to articulate Sterne's (and Tristram's) rambling style. Here, the abundant dashes make Tristram's storytelling possible through their adhesive properties. The dash serves to tie Tristram Shandy's disparate parts into a cohesive, associational whole -- it serves as a literary approximation of the point of contact between thoughts that drives the human mind's associations.
In Tristram Shandy's syntax, the dash not only binds together related phrases, but it serves to connect seemingly unrelated phrases and words to sentences in which the meaning Tristram already sees is made clear to the reader. The first paragraph of the "Author's Preface" illustrates how the dash joins the related into the whole of a paragraph so that Tristram's words create two meanings -- their literal meaning as phrases and the meaning that their paragraph has: "No, I'll not say a word about it -- here it is; -- in publishing it -- I have appealed to the world -- and to the world I leave it; -- it must speak for itself."[19] Most of the phrases are related to each other and would almost be a sentence without the dashes. But individually, each phrase's meaning is different from the next: "here it is" does not even closely mean "in publishing it," and so forth. The dash -- the moment of connection -- literally joins phrases and makes the total meaning unambiguous.
Of course, what is seen on the page represents what happened in Tristram's mind as he originated and associated the thoughts that made the paragraph. Since there is association with joining throughout Tristram Shandy, there is consistent meaning in thought and word. There are places in the novel where a disjoined phrase or thought will arrive as its own paragraph, which alone does not accommodate any connection to preceding paragraph's meaning. Yet the dash visually and syntagmatically joins the paragraph with the afterthought. Consider this passage:
It is for this reason, an' please your Reverences, That key-holes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together. -- which leads me to my uncle Toby's amours.
Tristram is returning to his intended story of Toby after diverting his thoughts to a story about his father. When his thoughts return to Toby, the dash lets him close the gap between the thoughts; the gap is that transition between thoughts that is the moment of association. This dash allows Sterne a literary device to capture a highly abstract, highly vital component of psychology. Tristram Shandy becomes a more striking approximation of an individual mind because it contains, in print, the associations as well as the actual moments of associative linking.