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and phrase-order) from the "deep structure'" (the abstract content, the "structure of
meaning''), an extension of the traditional linguistic conceptual division of signifier and
signified. He then defines linearity as one of the major characteristics of the surface
structure: "sentences, but not their meanings, which are abstract, move from left to right
in space or time, shifting the reader's attention along and sometimes impending it'" and
confirms this notion at a later place where he says: "Texts can be thought of as a
sequence of phrases and sentences {...} working progressively and disruptively to allow
{the reader} to retrieve the meaning from a surface structure in an ordered (or
disordered!) sequence."
While I fully agree with his observations about the abstract, complex and cumulative
deep structure, I feel that his term surface structure needs to be examined and sub­
divided further to allow a discussion oflinearity / non-linearity. Useful here is a distinction
Espen Aarseth makes between what he calls "text as information" (i.e. the construction,
the physical presentation of the whole text) and the "text as interpretation"? (i.e. the
consumption, focused on the reader's reception), for both ofwhich Fowler uses the term
surface structure. Aarseth argues that while the first has a spatial character, the second is a
linear, temporal process.
Hypertext cannot overcome the linearityand temporalityof the consumption of a text in
the process of reading, no matter how atomised the individual nodes - and here one can
imagine nodes consisting of single words or even letters. It can, however, represent the
spatial nature ofthe construction ofthe text. Zooming out and looking at a hypertext as a
whole, a hypertext is a non- / multi-linear spatial entity; zooming in, it can only be realised
in (often a large number of) linear fashions. The construction exists in space, the
consumption in time.
This is ofcourse also true for any physical object containing written text, and one might
6 Roger Fowler, Linguistics and the Nove/{Londonand New York: Methuen, 1983; first published: 1977),
p.6.
7 ibid, p.6.
8 ibid, P.49.
9 Espen J.Aarseth, "Non-Linearity and Literary Theory", in: Hyper/Text/Theory, ed.by George P. Landow
(Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), PP·51-86 (P·53-54)·
Chapter 2 - page26