The Endless Reading of Fiction: Stuart Moulthrop's Hypertext Novel "Victory Garden"

Abstract

T~ he literary form for computer known as hypertext fiction requires unusually repetitive readings, clickings, and scannings to interpret its often-repetitive patterns of screens and yet, at least up to a point, its even-more-often changing ones. Consequently, a hypertext novel such as Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) not only propels us into exploring and reexploring more than a hundred pathways-most of them filled with a large number of episodes-but also rewards us with the altered perspectives of frequently changing combinations and orders. In this essay, I shall use a reader-response approach to illustrate the rewards for someone who sticks to this hypertext task of long duration. First I'll examine the challenge of gaining a view of the novel as a whole when the work, in fact, will not hold still. Then I'll attempt a close reading of just a single sequence to show how it also requires of us many rereadings simply because it comes up in pieces of varying orders, combinations, and lengths. Ultimately, though, in spite of Victory Garden's seemingly endless and renewable complexity, I will need to examine at this essay's close the kind of sadness that I for one felt when this hypertext novel's fresh nuances of discovery ceased at last to hold my attention. Of course, the reader's need for many explorations arises, first of all, from an intrinsic complexity in the hypertext software itself-its capacity for a large number of pathways and links as well as its ingenious devices for concealment. If we took a traditional novel such as