It Walks Like a Duck: When It Has To

Hypertext authors understand that they problematize readers' sequence, of course, but play to generate one or another syntagmatic payoff by the consequent re-association or re-sequencing. Stated differently, the readers make various linear connections, which they must reform as the story shifts

However, neither readers nor writers usually generate sufficient gravity in the linked narrative to cause readers to re-evaluate categorizations. That is, readers may find the text either too little coherent or too arbitrary in its relationships to contradict their assumptions: the reading seems to contradict itself, not them. Insofar as readers make their own readings or even believe that they are doing so, each reading becomes an invention that they correct to fit pre-existing notions rather than a contradictory force which will produce literary activity -- the revaluation of one's thought-system in response to a language object.

Readers may engage in the creative experience by virtually re-writing and re-assembling the text as they go. I heartily enjoy and approve all this, for whatever that's worth to anyone, but the pleasures resemble those of avante garde poetries or of what Charles Bernstein calls "open text" way more than those of even contemporary novels. That is, the revaluations come of study and revery in the torque of the words.

As such, the best of Eastgate's products share the qualities of much wonderful but ever-marginalized work, and the survival of the company after so many years should be considered a grand success. I'd hate to suggest that someone like Shelley Jackson ever intended her work to be anything that I could call mainstream. But a mainstream path for literature, "serious hypertext" ain't -- because it tends to lack line and sequence.

However surprising it may be for the high-lit people of the last few generations, many of whom were raised on novels that we called nonlinear or asequential, especially those of us who have diligently studied how to write open texts and to avoid closure, the activity of text and reader requires line as well as nonline, certainty as well as surprise.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, I suppose.