Untitled - witz cultural

'n'lRECONFIGURINGTHE TEXTin Storyspace do not. Like most webfictions, Patchwork Girlhas an openingscreen, a drawing of Frankenstein's female monster that is equivalent to thefrontispiece in a book, and it is followed by a second screen, which simultaneouslyserves as a title page and sitemap, presenting the reader with fivepoints atwhichtobeginreading: "agraveyard," "ajournal,""aquilt,""astory,"and "broken accents." Much, of course, depends on what Ryan intends by "systemof links"; if one means the narrative, then her claim is not always tnre. Ifshe means "that point of the hypertext that one sees first," then the claim istrue but only in a trivial sense, because in those Storyspace hyperfictions thatdo not have an opening screen but present the reader with the software'sgraphic representation offolders and documents, the reader can choose anystarting point in these spatial hypertexts. Ad arvls Bookstore, for example, whicharranges its lexias in a circular pattem, invites readers to begin at any point.(Observation suggests most readers begin at the top center or top right.)Similarly, even if we concentrate on webfiction-andRyan's use of"address" suggests that she is thinking only about the Web, since a URL is anaddress-we encounter two ways in which readers do not enter narratives ata fixed point. First, search engines can guide readers to any lexia within ahyperfiction; authors of course do not intend such an apparently randomstarting point, but once they place their work on the Internet, they allow it tohappen. (That is the reason I tell my students writing both hyperfiction andhlpertext essays to be prepared for readers who "fall in through the livingroomceiling rather than entering through the front door," and therefore atleast consider including navigation and orientation devices that will givereaders some idea of where they have landed-and perhaps encourage themto keep reading.) Second, webfictions can also open, like Potchwork Girl,witha first screen that provides the reader with multiple beginnings. The openingscreen, then, is no more the beginning of the narrative than are the tide pagesof Jane Eyre or Waterland.Drawing on Edward W Saidk work on origins and openings, one can suggestthat, in contrast to print, hypertext offers at least two different kinds ofbeginnings. The first concerns the individual lexia, the second a gathering ofthem into a metatext. Whenever one has a body of hypertext materials thatstands alone-either because it occupies an entire system or because itexists, however transiently, within aframe, the reader has to begin reading atsome point, and for the reader that point is a beginning. Writing of print, Saidexplains that "a work's beginning is, practically speaking, the main entranceto what it offers" (3). But what happens when a work offers many "main"entrances-in fact, offers as many entrances as there are linked passages by