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Quibbling: A FeministRhizome NarrativeQuibbling, Carolyn Guyer explains, "is about how womenand men are together, it tends slightly toward salacious, it isbroadly feminist (so to speak), or, one could say it is the storyof someone's life just before the beginning or a litde after theend" ("Something"). I begin my discussion of Quibbling by directing attentionto Guyer's emphasis on are-on a state of being rather than on narrativedrive, for in fact the tale accumulates, eddies, and takes the form, as Guyerputs it, of a "lake with many covesi' Quibbliw{s dispersed set of narrativesinclude those of four couples-Agnes and Will, Angela and Jacob, Hilda andCy, and Heta and Priam-as well as a range of other characters, includingseveral in a novel one ofthe characters is writing.Quibblingsharply contrasts with joyce's aftemoon, which seems the eiectronictranslation of high modernist fiction-difficult, hieratic, earnest, allusive,and enigmatic. In essence, the opposition comes down to attitudes towardsharing authorial power with readers, and Coover therefore well describesQuibblingas a "conventional, but unconventionally designed, romance by oneof the most radical proponents of readerly interventions in hyperfictions"1'And Now" 11). In contrastto aftemoon, which uses the resources of hypertextto assign even more authorial power relative to the reader, Quibblingtantalizesreaders into wandering through its spaces in unexpected ways.The contrast between the attitudes toward reader intervention taken byQuibbling and afiemoon clearly appears in the versions of Storyspace theyemploy. Llke Patchwork Girl, Guyer's hypertext fiction uses the Storyspacereader, which presents a single scrollable page, similar to that one encountersin the World Wide Web, along with the folderJike Storyspace view thatpermits readers to search in the innards of the text. Although foyce originallyused the Storyspace reader for some of the prepublication versions of afiernoon(including one I illustrated in the first version), in the published version,he employed the simple Page Reader, which offers the reader far less power. Inexplaining her own choice, Guyer points out: "I want people to see the topographicstructure itsell be able to go inside it and muck about directly. I wantaccess left to the reader as much as possiblel' This choice means, as Coover correctlypoints out, that Quibbling"canbe read by way of its multiple links, but itcan also be read more 'geographically' simply by exploring these nested boxesas though they constituted a kind of topographical map" ('And Now" 11).Similarly, Guyer's approach to linking reveals her to be far more willing toshare power with the reader, as her changing attitude toward links suggests:"l've always felt dense linkage meant more options for the reader, and sogreater likelihood of her taking the thing for her own. But this idea now seems