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temporal order of the story (the story-time)", readers will always attempt to put elements
into a temporal and causal logical order. A man who wakes up has been asleep, a man
who gets up has been sitting, a man who dies has been alive before (and will be dead
from now on) etc., all these assumptions and causal relations are made by readers based
on their everyday experience of the physical lawsof the world surrounding them, against
the background ofwhich their reading is based (with probably the exception of fantasy
and SF novels, in which the common physical laws are constantly broken and readers
approach texts with this knowledge as part oftheir reading framework).
Not all texts, of course, adhere to these assumptions. Especially in modem texts a
mimetic relation between the real and the fictional world is replaced by fictional worlds
that are alternatives but not necessarily representations of reality. In Robbe-Grillet's
Dans Ie labyrinthe, for example, the hero dies four times against all physical logic. This is,
however, because of the linear presentation of the text, immediately recognised as a
deliberate experiment planned by the author, which readers can tolerate and interpret
in the knowlege of the underlying theoretical framework. In a labyrinthian hypertext
contradictory occurrences like this are less easy to contextualise. "The book is a heap of
contradictory drafts" Yu Tsun says about his ancestor's labyrinth book, "I examined it
once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive." (p.so), and a similar
reaction came from students confronted with Moulthrop's Forking Paths, where,
depending on the order in which fragments are accessed, the protagonist dies and is
lateralive again" , or can be experienced in MichaelJoyce's ajternoonr , in which it is left
open throughout the hypertext whether the protagonist's son has or has not been killed
in a car crash.
Hypertext fiction shares with other hypertext applications its spatial arrangement, which,
while again useful for non-fictional texts, may cause friction with the temporality of
fictional texts. It can be very difficult to put the individual fragment (which is physically
and logically more lacking context than it would be in a print text), to arrange elements
47 see Gerald Genette's Narrative Discourse (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980) for an
extensive discussion of story- vs. text-time.
48 see: Douglas, PrintPathways, p.IO!.
49 Michael Joyce, afternoon: a story, Storyspace disk for Macintosh (Watertown, MA: Eastgate
Systems, 1987).
Chapter 2 - page 41