Authors, Readers, and Progression in Hypertext Narrative

George Landow, Espen J. Aarseth, Stuart Moulthrop and many others have heralded the development of hypertext because they believe it represents a revolution in textuality that will radically alter how we read and write, including of course how we read and write narrative. Print texts, we are reminded by the champions of this new medium, are linear while hypertexts are nonlinear. Consequently, the argument goes, print narratives encourage reading in a fixed, straight-line sequence—one word after another, one page after another—under the control of the author. Even postmodern attempts to subvert the fixity of the print sequence cannot overcome the stability of the printed page and the restrictions on format imposed by the traditional book. Hypertext narratives, on the other hand, are fluid by design; their sequence changes based on readerly decisions. To put it another way, as those who advance this argument sometimes do, readers approach hypertext narratives from variable positions within the narrative, and so their progression through the text—indeed, the progression of the text—is not fixed but variable from reader to reader and from one reading occasion to the next. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan so famously pronounced, then it would follow that reading hypertext narratives should be a significantly different experience from reading print narratives. It is our hypothesis, however, that the differences between hypertext and print narratives are neither as absolute nor as stark as they first appear and that understanding their similarities will enhance our understanding of each individually. We will support this hypothesis by calling attention to some frequently neglected features of narrative progression in both print and hypertext narratives and by analyzing the progression of one well-known hypertext, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.

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