Hypertext novels and contemporary forms of storytelling present a challenge to general understandings of the novel but are particularly hostile concerning assumptions around authorship and authoritative interpretations, or, “top-down” interpretations. Of course, this is not the first destabilization of narrative fixity, authorial powers or interpretation. Both D.H Lawrence and Deleuze present an inverted understanding of time (for them time allows for the phenomenal self rather than time flowing as the result of a fixed self) that comes along with a deterioration of the fixity of the authoritative reading, for example, the “deep reading” model of the British academy.
Juliet Martin’s Hyperbody is hypertext work that often directly addresses the reader. Like other opened visual novels, it allows the reader to explore the inner space of the work without too much authorial influence. The novel ends with a call to the reader to return to territory of their own imagination. This mirrors one of the triumphs of the work: that there can be no unified reading. This nests nicely with the epistemological breakdown of the contemporary moment (post-truth/post-fact). Researching this work brought me back to a favorite concept that I had only previously encountered in game design and VR works: ergodicity.
Ergodic storytelling, by the book, is a form of storytelling in which the manner of navigation requires a “non-trivial” (Espen J. Arseth, Cybertext) amount of effort from the reader. Whereas, according to this model, the traditional novel does not require a significant amount of effort from the reader. Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is one of the most well-known works of ergodic literature. Multiple narratives and story fragments are presented to the reader in a way that requires them to actively construct a story from the seemingly disjointed materials. Lives, universes, stories, typographical structures and lines of inquiry live within the novel and are simultaneously realized and destroyed in this tome of potential energy. For me, this mode of existence strongly reflects the state of the internet and digital worlds that require massive amounts of efforts from users to comb through amounts of disjointed information that eek into the sublime.
Studying these works leaves me with a set of (hopefully) generative questions:
To what extent does authorial power live in feedback structures that occur within hypertext, cybertext and ergodic literature? Drawing from cybernetics, can narrative elements placed by the author force the hand of the user?
Writing off all traditional (open cover, read words from left to right and in order until you reach the end) as nonergodic strikes me as perhaps too neat. For example, is Finnegan’s Wake REALLY experienced in a linear fashion? It seems to me that such a complex novel that requires massive amount of efforts on the user to navigate might have facets of ergodicity that have been ignored by Arseth.
If many hypertext novels can be mapped out down to the level of every permutation, what is the site of narrative? Is it a structural element or something the user actively constructs? Or does that make it a mediated experience?