Untitled - witz cultural

234HYPERTEXT 3.0reminds us that fabricating folk tales, spoken discourses, and interpretativereadings of print nanatives follow an essentially similar process that entailsthe immediate, in-process construction of meaning and text. Miller's observationsallow us to understand that one must apply the same notions to theactivities of the reader of hypertext fiction. In brief hypertert demands thatone apply this structuralist understanding of speaker and writer to the readeras well, since in hypertext the reader is in this limited sense a reader-author.From this theory ofthe reader and from the experience ofreading hypertextnarratives, I draw the following, perhaps obvious but nonetheless important,conclusions. In a hypertext environment a lack of linearity does not destroynarrative. In fact, since readers always, but particularly in this environment,fabricate their own structures, sequences, and meanings, they have surprisinglylittle trouble reading a story or reading for a story.T Obviously, someparts ofthe reading experience seem very different from reading a printednovel or a short story, and reading hypertext fiction provides some ofthatexperience of a new orality that both Mcluhan and Ong have predicted.Although the reader of hypertext fiction shares some experiences, one supposes,with the audience of listeners who heard oral poetry, this active readerinevitablyhas more in common with the bard, who constructed meaning andnarrative from fragments provided by someone else, by another author or bymany other authors.Like Coover, who emphasizes the inevitable connection of death and narrative,foyce seems to intertwine the two. In part it is a matter, as BrianMcHale points out, of avant-garde authors using highly charged subjects(sexuality, death) to retain readers' interest that might stray within puzzlingand unfamiliar narrative modes. In part it is also a matter of endings: whenthe reader decides to stop reading afi.emoon, he or she ends, kills, the story,because when the active reader, the reader-author, stops reading, the storystops, it dies, it has reached an ending. As parl of that cessation, that willingnessto stop creating and interpreting the story, certain acts or events in thestory become deaths because they make most sense that way; and by stoppingreading the reader prevents other alternatives from coming into being.Stitch ing Together N arrative,Sexuality, Self; Shelley f ackson'sPatchworkGirlPatchwork Girl, Shelley fackson's brilliant hypertext parableof writing and identity, generates both its themes and techniquesfrom the kinds of collage writing intrinsic to hypertext(Figure 28). fackson, a published book illustrator as well as author,creates a digital collage out of her own words and images(and those of others, induding Mary Shelley, Frank L. Baum,