Untitled - witz cultural

221RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEnations, the most important of which is that science, which "has always beenin conflict with narratives." uses other means "to lesitimate the rules of itsown game" (xiii).'zEven without raising such broader or more fundamental issues about therelation of narrative to culture, one realizes that hypertext opens major questionsabout story and plot by apparently doing away with linear organization.Conventional definitions and descriptions of plot suggest some of them.Aristotle long ago pointed out that successfirl plots require a "probable ornecessary sequence of events" lPoetics,1465). This observation occurs in themidst of his discussion of peipeteia (or in Bywater's translation, peripety),and in the immediately preceding discussion of episodic plots, which Aristotleconsiders "the worst," he explains that he calls "a Plot episodic when thereis neither probability nor necessity in the sequence ofits episodes" (1464).Answerin g Aristotle: Hypertextand the Nonlinear PlotOne answer to Aristotle lies in the fact that removing a single"probable or necessary sequence ofevents" does not do awaywith all linearity. Linearity, however, now becomes a quality ofthe individual reader's experience within a single lexia and hisor her experience following a path, even ifthat path curves back on itsell orheads in strange directions. Robert Coover claims that with hypertext "thelinearity ofthe reading experience" does not disappear entirely, "but narrativebytes no longer follow one another in an ineluctable page-turning chain.Hypertexhral story space is now multidimensional and theoretically infinite,with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed,fixed or variable, or random, or both" ("Endings").Coover, inspired by the notion ofthe active hypertext reader, envisionssome of the ways the reader can contribute to the story. At the most basic levelof the hypertext encounter, "the reader may now choose the route in *relabyrinth she or he wishes to take, following some particular character, forexample, or an image, an action, and so on." Coover adds that readers canbecome reader-authors not only by choosing their paths through the text butalso by reading more actively, by which he means they "may even interferewith the story introduce new elements, new narrative strategies, open newpaths, interact with characters, even with the author. Or authorsi' Here, ofcourse, Coover, who has used Intermedia and Storyspace in his hyperfictionclasses, refers to the kind of hypertexts possible only with systems that permitreaders to add text and links, and very few works of this sort have beenattempted. Although some authors and audiences might find themselveschilled by such destabilizing, potentially chaotic-seeming narrative worlds,