When I was in elementary school, I came into contact with what was known to me as the interactive book for the first time. I was quite lucky, to be honest, to be exposed to computers at a young age. So, the principle of hypertext fiction didn’t seem new.

Despite being fond of the formalities of hypertext, I didn’t sway from printed literature. The difference is apparent. Printed literature offers a static plot and a fixed sequence, and the principles of a plot do not apply to hypertext. Landow quotes Aristotle’s definition of a plot,

Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and also has another after it. (1462)

Aristotle also said, “a well-constructed plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described.” I find this true because due to the immensity of the World Wide Web today, there is virtually no end in hypertext. Linearity is now an option. As Robert Coover says,

“Hypertextual story space is now multidimentional and theoretically infinite, with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed, fixed or variable, or random, or both.”

Coover also mentions that hypertext is a form of active reading experience, in which the reader can also contribute to the story. For example, choosing alternative routes or approaches, taking a character’s side, and so on. But the form of hypertext that he proposes in the Landow reading are the kind that are only possible with systems that allows readers to add text and links to the narrative. There are works that were created in the past by students at Brown, like Hotel, where users can add a new room to the fictional structure, and also the ability to delete the work of others. As we can see from a modern perspective, these sort of works are subject to vandalism, but currently there are a considerable amount of works out there that implements this system. Here is a different form of hypertext but similar to Coover’s notions of an active hypertext reader,

I’d like to think that hyperfictions are perceived to provide you near infinite amount of choices on how to comprehend it but somehow there is still some sort of imperceptible boundary that exists within. There are other views on this topic, read Anna’s take on this.

In the Douglas reading, he says,

Today our representations of the world have been shaped by philosophical relativism and, in areas like quantum physics and chaos theory, we increasingly embrace a world infinitely more complex, unpredictable, and indeterminate than anything our nineteenth-century forebears could imagine.

He also added, saying Socrates disparages writing as a form or representation, and our own, where the arrival of hypertext enables us to deride the printed word for roughly the same reasons. We shouldn’t be surprised that hypertext has, in some way, had an impact in the relationship between text, reader, and world. Readers now have the liberty of making choices and decide what deserves to be a ‘good ending’. They can have their personalized ‘closure’. Easily put, readers don’t really have a choice in printed literacy because it is the authors’ domain. In hypertext fiction, the authors only have that much control over their content because even they themselves may never experience all the possible permutations. So, you can see how the arrival of hypertext has reconfigured the roles of readers, and writers alike.

Here is a good example of hypertext fiction, Blue Lacuna.