Antiabecedarian Desires: Odd Narratology and Digital Textuality

Writing systems break temporal barriers and enable the sharing of knowledge and its preservation. As if they were living organisms, the narratological structures that conform textual communication are made up of replicative ordering principles and coding forms whose roots can be traced back to a Semitic proto-alphabetic script. However, literary history also includes many examples that, like viruses, have sought to disrupt the body of alphabetic textuality. This paper looks briefly at three fundamental artists, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, and at some contemporary pieces of electronic literature. Their questioning of ABC ordering patterns anticipates the debate on the importance or not of linear structures in representation systems.