The introduction of reader’s choice, as a factor determining the sequence in which the text is presented, renders the experience of reading a hypertext work quite different from that of reading the printed page. This difference is often conceived in terms of space; while the printed book is a physical object that can be thumbed through, with individual pages clearly localizable as at the beginning, middle, or end of the text, the hypertext is not so easy to grasp. The increased freedom of movement through the text is coupled with a limited perspective on it, an inability to look ahead to what is coming next or even to how much of the text is yet unread. While The Textual Tesseract allows the reader to get a sense of the entire text through the use of a single page, movement through the text remains mostly blind; the reader knows that one link will lead to another consisting of the same sequence of letters, but not where that link will be relative to the starting point both in terms of spatial placement on the page and of poetic context.
This fundamental ignorance can lead to a form of reading akin to browsing, following links arbitrarily without attempting to follow a specific path through the text or to approach it in a systematic way. Roland Barthes calls a similar reading mode tmesis, “the reader’s unconstrained skipping and skimming of passages, a fragmentation of the linear text expression that is totally beyond the author’s control” (Aarseth, 78). Espen Aarseth argues that “hypertext punishes tmesis by controlling the text’s fragmentation and pathways and by forcing the reader to pay attention to the strategic links” (Aarseth, 78). While this statement may be true for labyrinthine, guard-fielded works such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, The Textual Tesseract sharply opposes it; its constitutive links are tools whose main function is tmesis. Moreover, this project takes tmesis a step further, in that this mode of movement through the text is not only beyond the author’s control but also in part beyond the reader’s, who chooses when to skip but not whither.
Aarseth’s phrase “to pay attention” indicates an important aspect of the reader’s engagement with hypertext literature. Because choice, however uninformed and unstrategized, is involved in moving through the text, at any moment the reader can look at the text as a semantic object or as a node in the network, as a site of meaning or as a position relative to other positions. Jay David Bolter further develops this double vision:
The text can be transparent or opaque, and it can oscillate between transparency and opacity, between asking the reader to look through the text to the “world beyond” and asking her to look at the text itself as a formal structure. This oscillation was already a characteristic of modern literature in print: it was manifested in the tension between the text as a story and the text as a structure of allusions. Here again, electronic writing seems to take the modern literary experience one step further. An electronic hypertext can make the structure visible, as its formal structure is embodied in the links between episodes. In reading an episode, the reader may succeed in looking through the text to the imagined world. But whenever she comes to a link, she must look at the text, as a series of possibilities that she as reader can activate. (Bolter 185)“Oscillation” suggests a pendulum motion between two mutually contradictory extremes. In The Textual Tesseract, however, they become superimposed: in a text permeated with instantly apparent links, the refocusing necessary to switch from text-as-text to text-as-link is minimal. The shifting of perspective is further reduced by the poetic genre of the texts, which, unlike narrative, does not create a textual world into which the reader enters (what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “immersion”), and which she must leave in order to be consciously aware of the text as words on a screen. In addition, each link is identical (if only in letter sequence) with that to which it links, meaning that looking at the individual link is also looking through it to where it leads. It is the arrival rather than the departure that is more likely to jolt the reader into seeing the text in a different way: the resulting unexpected juxtaposition, rather than the action leading to it.
The idea of reading as a series of movements is a natural corollary of the almost inescapable metaphor of hypertext as space. This figurative language taps into a much broader critical discourse of the act of reading as a performance of the text. The necessity of the reader in the construction of the text has particular significance for hypertext works, in which the reader plays a role not only in transforming written symbols into mental meaning, but also in how the text as a material object becomes manifest. Jay David Douglas compares this relationship to dance: “Until a reader assembles it, performing it, the text exists only as a set of potential motions, a sequence of steps and maneuvers that become actualized only at the instant that the reader selects a segment of text or fulfills a condition for movement” (Douglas, 31). As in particle physics, the reader’s interaction with the system collapses the superposition of possibilities into the single path she takes through the network, which constitutes the text for that particular performance of it.
The reader is the performer of the text, but is also the recorder of it (and, unless the hypertext browsing program used has a history function, the only recorder of it). The pieces of the text – the lexia – that the reader experiences as juxtaposed may be located in far distant positions on the network; their confluence exists in time but not in space, except in the fluid space of the computer screen. According to Roland Barthes, a text is unified only in the reader’s subjectivity: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (Barthes, quoted in Douglas, 18). “Unity” implies a unilinearity that is suspect at best when hypertext is concerned; while the reader necessarily takes a unilinear path through the text (for even if one is able to open multiple windows and thus follow all possible paths, it is still impossible to read two different texts simultaneously, and switching between windows becomes part of the linear motion), the awareness of multiple potential paths that may contradict each other disrupts a mental conception of the text as a unified whole. Nonetheless, what Barthes’s statement makes clear is that the reader acts simultaneously as performer and receptor, and that it is in the combination of the two that the text comes into being as a manifestation of meaning.
The text that leaves a trace in the reader’s mind is itself a trace of the author’s mind. Since the hypertext author creates not only what is read but also “designs an experience that unfolds in time[,] . . . a series of potential interactions that span both time and space” (Douglas, 133-34), she can influence not only what the reader reads, but how she reads. In Lev Manovich’s adaptation of Louis Althusser, in reading hypertext “we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own” (Manovich, 61), to read the “pre-programmed, objectively existing associations” (Manovich, 61) devised by the author as expressions of our own choices and mental processes. Marie-Laure Ryan, in contrast, reads the same fundamental lack of agency as a path not to the external author but to the internal unconscious: “The randomness of the act of clicking figures that which is beyond conscious control – the subliminal, the obsessive, paths to the forgotten – in the mode of production of the imagination” (Ryan, 239). These two very different approaches are reconciled in Janet Murray’s delineation of how authorship functions in hypertext works:
Authorship in electronic media is procedural. Procedural authorship means writing the rules by which the texts appear as well as writing the texts themselves. It means writing the rules for the interactor’s involvement, that is, the conditions under which things will happen in response to the participant’s actions. It means establishing the properties of the objects and potential objects in the virtual world and the formulas for how they will relate to one another. The procedural author creates not just a set of scenes but a world of narrative possibilities. (Murray, 152-153)It is from this idea of the procedural author who can both impose a structure of associative meaning on the reader and provide a means to unlock the reader’s unconscious that we approach one of the most fraught terms in hypertext theory: interactivity. The site of most contention seems to be exactly how much user input is required and exactly what degree and kind of effect that input must have on a system for that system to be considered interactive. Depending on how these two criteria are defined, most hypertext literature may not be interactive at all, unless the reader is able to become a procedural author herself and alter the structure of the system, rather than just move through it.
The problematic ambiguity of interactivity may be obviated by thinking instead in terms of agency, the reader’s ability to choose a path through the network even if she cannot change its structural arrangement. In The Textual Tesseract, the main limitations on the reader’s freedom are the random nature of the links, and that links exist only between words as lexical objects. The reader cannot browse thematically, or metrically, or topically, though the linking of author’s names and the arrangement of the poems on the page in order by publication date make it relatively easy to browse biographically or chronologically. Some limitations on freedom, however, are necessary to make the hypertext work a meaningful experience; even if it were possible to create a Borgesian hypertext of infinite possibility, such a text would be either incredibly overwhelming or incredibly dull, or possibly both.
While the possibilities created by The Textual Tesseract are certainly finite, this project differs greatly from most other works of hypertext literature in one particular possibility: it allows the reader to choose to avoid the hypertext structure altogether, and to see the entire text without clicking a single link – which is not, however, an abnegation of agency; as Michael Joyce puts it, “in hypertext even the linear is a choice” (Joyce, 133). In the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this is a “smooth space,” which the reader “explore[s] for the pleasure of the journey and for the discoveries to be made along the way” (as opposed to a “striated space,” which is “traversed to get somewhere”) (Ryan, 47). Since the emphasis is on the journey rather than the destination, closure is not an issue; one is done with the text when the journey ceases to be engaging, rather than when reaches a particular point in the text, a model well suited to the structure of The Textual Tesseract.
Even when a hypertext work does incorporate a natural ending point offering some sort of resolution (or many such points), the knowledge that it could change significantly upon another encounter with the textual system (which would most likely differ in terms of the text read) makes that sense of closure provisional at best. As Umberto Eco writes of the “open work”:
Every performance explains the composition but does not exhaust it. Every performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all possible other performances of the work. In short, we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work may admit. (Eco, The Open Work, in Douglas, 120)Eco’s formulation suggests Aarseth’s aporia; the necessary awareness that some performances of the text are absent, and that there will always be some absent, means that the reader’s experience of the text will never be finished. In a system like The Textual Tesseract, in which no closure is promised by any semblance to a narrative, this awareness is less troubling than in a work that evokes the desire to know how a story ends and then refuses to satisfy that desire.
In one sense, closure occurs in this project at the very beginning. Janet Murray proposes a conceptual closure, which consists in an understanding of the structure of a work, of how its pieces fit together relationally, even if its content remains semantically unclear (Murray, 174). Since this project’s hypertext structure is immediately apparent, the reader has no need to try to discover it, and can instead focus on exploring how it works rather than what it is. The reader may find moments of aesthetic closure in her movements through the text, when a fortuitous connection of words results in an almost musical resolution of poetic tonality; such moments are certainly possible within the system, but there is no purposeful trajectory towards them, and they cannot be sought, only appreciated when they do appear.