My interactive edition of William Blake's oeuvre finds grounding not only in theories of our newest means of disseminating poetry—computerized hypertext—but also in theories of our oldest means of disseminating poetry—oral traditional recitation.  After 500 years of increasing literacy accelerated by the technology of the printing press, we now enter the age of the computer, which, even while it opens up new and unexpected vistas, re-opens some of the neglected perspectives of oral tradition. 

From the beginnings of hypertext, one of its pioneers, Vannevar Bush, suggested that hypertext promises to allow juxtapositions and connections that imitate the "natural function of the mind to associate ideas and information."  Although computer technology can hardly be called "natural," it may paradoxically enable us to use our minds in a way that seems natural because it predates literacy.  A hypertext edition can, in some ways, take us closer to the heart of Blake's artistic process by reintroducing some of the richness that literacy has stripped away.

One of the leading theorists of hypertext, George Landow, begins his introduction to Hyper/Text/Theory with a brief list of convergences between hypertext theory and contemporary literary criticism.  Three of his examples in particular—Kristeva's intertextuality, Bakhtin's multivocality, and Deleuze/Guattari's "nomad thought"—also, without Landow's mentioning it, link contemporary literary criticism to theories of oral traditional poetry.  As led by John Miles Foley and others, oral traditional theory has in the past few years leaned away from its initial emphasis—formulated especially by Lord and Parry and Ong—on  extreme contrasts between orality and literacy and instead emphasizes "traditional" aspects.  This traditionality concentrates on depth and context (a form of intertextuality), on diversity of cultural values (multivocality), and--to adduce Deleuzian rhizomic terminology invoked by Landow--on nomos instead of logos.  All these features add up to what Foley calls "immanence," the theory of which touches unintentionally on Blake's practice at several points.

 In some ways computer technology repairs the damage that has been done to our memories--and therefore to the power of allusion and cross reference--by the invasion of literacy.   The more we read as a society, the less we feel the need to memorize.  Thus, we often read in a near-vacuum, or at least many of our students do.  This multimedia edition of Blake enables a reader who does not recognize an allusion to, say, Paradise Lost, to select links, both to Milton's text and to Blake's paintings, for enlightenment.  Even the educated reader who has no trouble remembering Blake's painting of the creation of Eve may enjoy clicking over to a reproduction of the painting and seeing Eve appear through the magic of JavaScript rollovers while listening to a voice read the passage from Milton. 

Walter Ong pegs Blake as a signpost at the watershed between orality and literacy in the late eighteenth century; Ong highlights Blake's "To the Muses" as the central lament for the silencings that literacy historically imposed on orality.  Twentieth-century composers' musical settings of Blake's Songs compensate somewhat for Blake's own music, which, along with his singing voice, is lost to us forever.  Of course the computer can not bring back Blake's breath, but it can re-create for us a combination of word, picture, sound, and context that is closer than the attempt of traditional book reproduction, which is limited by the standards of high literacy. 

To be sure, a well-stocked library of literature, art, and music enables the diligent seeker to delve into rich contexts, but such labor is more than heroic and seldom attempted.   Here, in this multimedia edition, one finds, among other features, links to all Blake's references to the Bible, to all his illustrations of the Bible, to all his references to the text of Paradise Lost , to all his paintings of Paradise Lost, to similar paintings by Michelangelo, to songs sung by Allen Ginsberg and Greg Brown, to music composed by Ralph Vaughn Williams and others, to representative criticism. 

Further justification for the value of my project occurs in the frequent echoes of commonplaces of Blake criticism in hypertext theory.  For example, when Stuart Moulthrop quotes Robert Coover as suggesting that we "must reinvent conventions, modifying familiar fictional properties like plot and character to suit the multifarious context of hypermedia," he sounds like many critics of Blake who comment on Blake's unusual characters, his twistings of plot—for example in the difficulties of following the purported narratives of Milton, Jerusalem, and The Four Zoas—and his "composite art" of combining words and illustrations. 

 Blake's approach to art resembles the "multiform" nature of oral traditional narrative, which is a keystone of Foley's theories; apparently conflicting narratives exist side by side in a society and often in a single poet's mind without apparent discomfort.  The insistence on a single, unambiguous, authoritarian plot strand is a result of high literacy.  Our deification of the term "text" can even be questioned by the term "hypertext," which, although it sounds like "text," actually implies something above and beyond text, including text but not limited by it.  Thus, hypertext offers us the opportunity to leap the bounds of narrow textuality into a richer realm of Blake's pioneering multimedia art.