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why the initial reading material came into existence remains untouched.
To respondfreely to a humanpoetis one thing; to weep at thelines ofa machine one has considered
to beonlya numbercruncber isquiteanother. (AlfredKem)»
Questions about meaning/sense and theoretical undermining of concepts of a stable
meaning situated within a text which readers can retrieve either correctly or incorrectly
have been taken up in literary theory before, and computer-generated writing adds an
interesting practical facet to the debate. Unlike TALE-SPIN, whose failure to achieve its
aim ofhuman imitation in a satisfactory manner only strengthens the beliefin the creative
human mind and the meaningful communication it can create through literature, Racter
triggers similar effects to nonsense or chance poetry and renders concepts not only of
meaning and sense, but also ofintention very slippery indeed.
What is different in the case ofRacter from other genres such as nonsense poetry, where
similar questions are put in the foreground, is the explicit knowledge that, at least at first
glance, there is no easily identifiable author figure behind Racter's output; it is only
accredited to a computer program. How can we sympathise with the emotion in a text, if
the 'creator' of this text does not have the ability to feel them? How can we laugh about
the absurdity ofa text if its 'creator' has no concept ofabsurdity or humour? How can we
make sense ofa text ifits 'creator' has no intentions?
Unlike hypertext fiction, which attempts to shift some of the responsibility for the
construction of the narrative and of narrative meaning to the reader, but does so on a
theoretical level without always succeeding to translate it into a deconstruction ofauthorial
power on the level of practice, and also unlike collaborative projects, which diffuse and
multiply authorial voices without negating them, computer generated texts take notions of
the disappearance of the author onto an open, immediate and applied level. When
confronted with texts which have a computer program as their attributed author, readers
are confronted with a thoughtprovoking alternative to the human author-reader
interaction; when faced withwhat seems to be the absence ofintentionality ofthe creator
of the text read, the "lack of real intelligence", that Hartman ascribes to the computer,
the lack of "narrative competence", as Ryan puts in, the process of sense-making seems
to shift by default away from the author figure as sense-giver and from the text as sense­
.\0 Alfred Kern, "GOTO Poetry" Perspectives in Computing, vol.j, no.j (October 198j), pp. 44-5 2 (P·47)·
, Chapter s- page 188