Untitled - witz cultural

243RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEwrong to me. Excessive linkage can actually be seen as something of an insult,and certainly more directive . . . In the end, I find I cannot bring myselfto make the physical links that are inherent in the writing, that is, the 'obvious'ones (the motifs of glass, water, hands, color, walking, etc.)" (Journal).Guyer's emphasis on an active reader, as opposed to simply a responsive,attentive one, relates directly to her conception of hypertext as a form of feministwriting. In fact, like Patchwork Girl, Quibblingmakes us wonder whetherhypertext fiction and, indeed, all hypertext is in some sort a feminist wdting,the electronic embodiment of thatl'4criturefetnininefor which H6ldne Cixouscalled several decades ago. Certainly, like Ede and Lunsford, whose alignmentof collaborative authorship with feminist theory we have already observed,Guyer believes that hypertext-an intrinsically collaborative form as she employsit-speaks to the needs and experience of women: "We know that beingdenied personal authority inclines us to prefer . . . decentered contexts, and wehave learned, especially from our mothers, that the woven practice of womentintuitive attention and reasoned care is a fuller, more balanced process thansimple rational linearity" (quoted by Greco from loyce, Of Two Mind.s,89).According to Diane Greco, Guyer sees hypertext as the embodiment of"ostensibly female (or perhaps, feminine) characteristics of intuition, attentiveness,and care, all ofwhich are transmitted from one woman to another yiathe universal experience of having a (certain kind of) mother. The opporhrnitiesfor non-linear expression which hypertext affords coalesce, in this view,to form a writing that is 'female' in a very particular way: hypertext writing embracesan ethic of care that is essentially intuitive, complicated, detailed, butalso 'fuller' and 'balanced"' (88). Reminding us that "some notable hypertextsby women, such as Kathryn Cramer's In Srnall s{ Large Pieces and fane YellowleesDouglas's I Have Sqid Nothing, feature violence, rupture, and breakageas organizing imagery," Greco remains doubtful of any claims thathypertext,or any other mode of writing, could be essentially female or feminine.l2Whether we agree with Guyer that hypertext fiction necessarily embodiessome essential form of women's writing, we have to recognize that she haswritten Quibblingas a non-Aristotelian networked cluster of stories, moods,and narrative fragments that gather and rearrange themselves in ways thatembody her beliefs about female writing. In her essay in Leonardo, she emphasizesboth how her fiction web lacks conventional narrative and conventionalaspirations to be literary: "It is hardly about anything itself, being morelike the gossip, family discussions, letters, passing fancies and daydreamsthat we tell ourselves every day in otder to make sense of things. These arenot exactly like myths, or fairy tales, or literary fiction. They are instead the