Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perpsectives on Ergodic Literature

Rather than offering a chapter breakdown this week, I thought I would focus a little more exclusively on some of the issues that I hope we'll be covering in our discussion. Aarseth's book, because it focuses on cybertext rather than hypertext, is not as "on topic" as some of our other readings this semester, and yet, as you undoubtedly discovered as you read it, his avoidance of certain topoi within hypertext criticism is both intentional and reasoned.

We've had our trouble this semester with the notion that hypertext (simply) blurs the boundaries between author and reader, trouble that finds a pretty solid home in Aarseth's work. In place of an oversimplified rhetorical triangle (author-text-reader), he proposes a "textual machine" on page 21, composed of the operator, medium, and virtual sign. Other models, he argues, have ignored the medium as well as the performative aspect, which is unusual given that it is textual performance (the reader's selection of links) that marks one of the differences between hypertext and most codices. He doesn't simply dump the author out of the equation (although a case could easily be made that many ergodic texts are quite authorless), either. At the tail end of the book, Aarseth illustrates the "diversity (rather than the convergence) of the reader and author positions" (174) by talking about the various layers of development and use that a Hypercard application might imply. One answer, then, to the question of author and reader with hypertext is perhaps that we have been focusing our attention too narrowly. Most of us don't know the ins and outs of printing an actual book, but I would guess that my chances of learning to do so are far better than the likelihood that I'll ever learn to program at the level of deep code. Until the latter happens, I will always have ceded a certain amount of authorial influence over to the application or medium. Certain types of links are possible in StorySpace that aren't available to me on the web, and vice versa.

A second, related issue that's of interest to me hinges on Aarseth's discussion of nontriviality, the idea that an ergodic text is one that requires nontrivial efforts to move through it. One of the things that I stress with my writing students is that academia involves what I might call (analogously) nontrivial reading. That is, I tell them that it's not enough to simply read an essay for what it says (reading to remember); we also strive to read it to understand what it does, even if it's as simple as labeling paragraphs with phrases like "introduces the essay," "makes a claim," or "provides evidence." Nontrivial reading allows us to get into issues of organization, focus, coherence, and it allows us to understand writing as models, I think. Hypertexts/cybertexts up the ante on nontriviality in a way that most hypertext critics don't really discuss. It is a different process altogether to write for a reader who must proceed in a nontrivial fashion--it forces us to account for the choices we offer the reader/user, to try and anticipate their motives, to write at a step removed from the engagement that we normally bring to a print-based essay. Hypertexts provide a small fraction of the possibilities that Aarseth's typology suggests, but even they are texts that both "say" and "do," and these two modes of textual performance are both explicit in hypertext in a way that we don't typically associate with the codex.

I'd also like us to consider the value of Aarseth's typology. If you've read Eskelinen from the recommended readings for this we

Collin Gifford Brooke