Untitled - witz cultural

265RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEmoreover, much hFpertext fiction, including some of the best, exhibits a minimumhypertexhrality. As the examples of two well-regarded works-Shelleyfackson's Patchu)ork Girl and Caitlin Fisher's Waves of Girls-reveals, much ofthe limited hypertextuality in these and similar works takes the form of anorganizational superstruchrre, a top-level branching structure that leads tomultiple, relatively isolated linear narratives. Looking back at the brief historyof hyperfiction, one is surprised to note how few works have accepted thechallenge of Michael loyce's afiemoon to $eate branching story lines. Joyce'slinking produces what we may term branching narrators, and one would expectthat more writers would have tried varieties in chronology, setting, character,and so on. Of course, an advocate of the view that hypermedia is chieflya poetic form can point to the other part of aftemoon in which links producea poemlike collage of texts from Creeley and Basho. Even one of the mostsuccessful pioneers of hypertext with multiple narrative lines moves in thedirection of poetry when he begins to explore the medium.One can hazard a few explanations for the tums that digilit has taken.One possible explanation would lie in the simple fact that it's too soon to takestock of this new literary form. If it took a hundred years to invent the titlepage and other distinguishing features ofthe print codex, such as paginationand the alphabetized index, at this moment we might find ourselves too earlyin the learning curve for any assessments. Another related possibility is thatwriters are immersing themselves in various capacities of digital textincludingblending of word and image, animating words, and exploring theludic or the gamelike possibilities-because they delight in the new possibilitiesof text. Again, this could just be a stage in the development of a newliterary form. A third explanation might center on the claim that humanbeings in all times and cultures, including our own, depend on linear narrative."We tell ourselves stories," foan Didion points out, "in order to livei' Perhapslinear narrative has too much human importance to abandon.A final possibility: hypertext as a creative medium is not fundamentally anarrative form; hypertext, this argument goes, is an information technologyunsuited to telling stories-just as orality, so Mcluhan argued in The GutenbergGalaxy, makes precise logical argumentation unlikely because it cannotbe remembered and repeated. William Ivins similarly pointed out manydecades ago that a scribal culture, which has no means of accurately reproducingand hence communicating color and form, does not permit the developmentof many forms of modern science, such as zoology and botany.What, then, would be the message of hypertext as mediuml What features oftext does it privilege and thereby make likely? Since the link characterizes