The Birth (and death?) of the Reader-Author

If there is any dominant emphasis in modern literary theory, it is that meaning is not inherent in a text, but is created by the reader by the act of reading.

Claire Lamont

How does the reader gain authority in a hypertext?
In the hypertext form, the reader must put the text together themselves. An author cannot stop you from reading a book in the wrong order, but there is a convention that the majority of readers will follow, reading from front to back, as the book is presented. With a hypertext the reader must actively put the texts together by making links. The hypertext fulfills Barthes' statement:
'the goal of literary work ... is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text'(S/Z).

How does the reader 'produce' the text?
The hypertext leaves much of the imaginative and logical linking to the reader, who (as we saw with the extract from White Teeth) must work to find links that are not necessarily based on plot. The hypertext allows much more space for reader interpretation, because so often the detail is partial or unordered.

What's the difference between how I interpret a novel or a hypertext?
Many writers on hypertext see it as a 'liberating' form for the reader, freeing them from the restrictions of the linear structure of a novel, and giving them control. However, Miall and Dobson use evidence of different reading experiences to point out that:
'Reading ... a novel ... our own resources of imagery are drawn upon to give inner reality to the unfolding story and its feelings and values'.

In contrast, the visual form of the hypertext, often employing colours, varied fonts and images 'is liable to impose a set of limited, standardised meanings' since 'the visual medium itself has a powerful attractiveness'. It seems perhaps the reader is using their imagination less, since they are subconsciously subject to visual effects of the text.

So who really has the authority in hypertext?
Geoff Ryman, the author of 253 states: 'please remember that once you leave 253, you are no longer Godlike. The author, of course, is.' However, we must be aware that perhaps the most innovative quality of hypertext fiction is that it is:
'not directly accessible to either the writer or the reader ... Electronic technology removes or abstracts the writer and reader from the text...There are so many levels of deferral that the reader or writer is hard put to identify the text at all: is it on the screen, in the transistor memory, or on the disk?' Bolter

This quotation neatly defines the problem of authority for the hypertext. As reader, ordering the text as I read, I am aware that without employing a mathematical and tedious process of tracing all possibilities, I will never be sure I have grasped the whole text.

It's only my computer that can really see the text in full, and as yet it does not have the consciousness to tell me what it thinks.

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