Untitled - witz cultural

389NOTES TO PAGES203-220actually involve links, so that, as in early Hypercard proiects, clicking a link actuallyreplaces one document with another, though the reader receives the illusion that thedocument remains the same and a new word or phrase appears within it. One cannottell whether or not Vniverseworks the same way or generates text on the fly, butfrom the vantage point of the viewer a replacement link or what we may term anaction link appear identicai.7. Lyons adds: "Thus, the parentheses and interactive interface follow mutuallycompatible rules to establish what I hope are complementary contributions fromwrit language on the screen and script code behind the scenes . . . My aim here wassimply to make good use of computers to get this ridiculous poem more legible,even as the interactive capability makes a greater range of (potentially confounding)meanings more accessible. You can think of it as magnetic poetry with rules."8. Strickland's concern with reader empowerment appears in the detailed introductionshe has appended to the project.Chapter 6. Reconfiguring Narrative1. Dorothy Lee argues that the language ofTrobriand Islanders reveals that they"do not describe their activity lineally; they do no dynamic relating of acts; they donot use even so innocuous a connective as and" (157). According to Lee, they do notuse causal connections in their descriptions ofreality, and "where valued activity isconcerned, the Trobrianders do not act on an assumption oflineality at any level.There is organization or rather coherence in their acts because Trobriand activity ispatterned activity. One act within this pattern gives rise to a preordained cluster ofacts"-muchas, Lee explains, when knitting a sweater the "ribbing at the bottomdoes not cause the making of the neckline" (158). Similarln "a Trobriander does notspeak of roads either as connecting two points, or as running from point to point. Hispaths are self-contained, named as independent units; they are not to and from, theyare at. And he himself is at; he has no equivalent for our to or from" (159). Appropriately,therefore, when an inhabitant ofthe Trobriand Islands "relates happenings,there is no developmental arrangement, no building up of emotional tone. His storieshave no plot, no lineal development, no climax" (160), and this absence of whatwe mean by narrativity relates directly to the fact that "to the Trobriander, climax inhistory is abominable, a denial of all good, since it would imply not only the presenceof change, but also that change increases the good; but to him value lies in sameness,in repeated pattern, in the incorporation of all time within the same point" (161).Lee, incidentally, does not claim that the people ofthe Trobriand Islands cannotperceive linearity, just that it possesses solely a negative value in their culture and itis made difficult to use by their customs and language If one accepts the accuracyofher translations ofTrobriand language and her interpretations ofTrobriand culture,one can see that what Lee calls nonlineal thought based on the idea ofclusteringdiffers significantly from both linear and multilinear thought. Placed on thespectrum constifuted by Trobriand culture at one extreme and Western print cultureat the other, hypertextuality appears only a moderate distance from other'Westerncultural patterns. Lee's description of Trobriand structuration by cluster, however,does possibly offer means of creating forms of hlpertextual order.