Annotation

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evted
Perspectives on

Ergodic Literature

Espen J. Aarseth

T H E J O H N S H O P K I N S U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S •==• B A L T I M O R E A N D L O N O O N

1 997

The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reseNed. Published 1 997

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

987654 32

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Library of Congress Ca1aloging-in-Publication Data will be found

at the end of this book.

A catalog record for 1his book is available from the British Library.

ISSN 0-8018-5578-0

ISBN 0-8018-5579-9 (pbk.)

Title page illustration: The design is the 811 th generation of the stairstep

hexomino, which was automatically evolved using Andrew Trevorrow’s

program Lifelab (with the 3-4 rule) from the initial state ‘I:,.

A World Wide Web site for this book can be found at

http://www.hf.uib.no/cybertexV

It contains links to many of the texts and computer programs discussed,

as well as pointers to other relevant resources.

Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the

possibilities implicit in its own material, independent
of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at
a certain point is invested with an unexpected mean­
ing, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic
plane on which we were working but has slipped
in from another level, activating something that on

that second level is of great concern to the author or
his society. The literature machine can perform all
the permutations possible on a given material, but
the poetic result will be the particular effect of one

of these permutations on a man endowed with a con­
sciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical
and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs
only if the writing machine is surrounded by the
hidden ghosts of the individual and his society.

T A 0 C A V N 0

ene
Introduction:

Ergodic Literature

The Book and the Labyrinth

A few words on the two neoteric terms, cybertext and ergodic, are
in order. Cybertext is a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener’s
book (and discipline) called Cybernetics, and subtitled Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Wiener laid
an important foundation for the development of digital computers,
but his scope is not limited to the mechanical world of transistors
and, later, of microchips. As the subtitle indicates, Wiener’s perspec­
tive includes both organic and inorganic systems; that is, any system
that contains an information feedback loop. Likewise, the concept of
cybertext does not limit itself to the study of computer-driven (or
“electronic”) textuality; that would be an arbitrary and unhistorical
limitation, perhaps comparable to a study of literature that would
only acknowledge texts in paper-printed form. While there might
be sociological reasons for such a study, we would not be able to
claim any understanding of how different forms of literature vary.

The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization
of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an inte­
gral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention
on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure
than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance
of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext
also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextua

I

process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this
selective movement is a work of physical construction that the vari­
ous concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call
ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from
the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path.” In
ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to
traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept,
there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse
the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on

2 Cybertext

the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or
arbitrary turning of pages.

Whenever I have had the opportunity to present the perspective
of ergodic literature and cybertext to a fresh audience of literary
critics and theorists, I have almost invariably been challenged on
the same issues: that these texts (hypertexts, adventure games, etc.)
aren’t essentially different from other literary texts, because (1) all
literature is to some extent indeterminate, nonlinear, and different
for every reading, (2) the reader has to make choices in order to
make sense of the text, and finally (3) a text cannot really be non­
linear because the reader can read it only one sequence at a time,
anyway.

Typically, these objections came from persons who, while well
versed in literary theory, had no firsthand experience of the hyper­
texts, adventure games, or multi-user dungeons I was talking about.
At first, therefore, I thought this was simply a didactical problem: if
only I could present examples of my material more clearly, every­
thing would become indisputable. After all, can a person who has
never seen a movie be expected to understand the unique character­
istics of that medium? A text such as the I Ching is not meant to be
read from beginning to end but entails a very different and highly
specialized ritual of perusal, and the text in a multi-user dungeon
is without either beginning or end, an endless labyrinthine plateau
of textual bliss for the community that builds it. But no matter how
hard I try to describe these texts to you, the reader, their essential
difference will remain a mystery until they are experienced first­
hand.

In my campaign for the study of cybertextuality I soon real­
ized that my terminology was a potential source of confusion. Par­
ticularly problematic was the word nonlinear. For some it was a
common literary concept used to describe narratives that lacked or
subverted a straightforward story line; for others, paradoxically, the
word could not describe my material, since the act of reading must
take place sequentially, word for word.

This aporia never ceased to puzzle me. There was obviously
an epistemological conflict. Part of the problem is easily resolved:
hypertexts, adventure games, and so forth are not texts the way the

Introduction 3

average literary work is a text. In what way, then, are they texts?
They produce verbal structures, for aesthetic effect. This makes
them similar to other literary phenomena. But they are also some­
thing more, and it is this added paraverbal dimension that is so hard
to see. A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of
expression. Since literary theorists are trained to uncover literary
ambivalence in texts with linear expression, they evidently mistook
texts with variable expression for texts with ambiguous meaning.
When confronted with a forking text such as a hypertext, they
claimed that all texts are produced as a linear sequence during read­
ing, so where was my problem?

The problem was that, while they focused on what was being
read, I focused on what was b eing read from. This distinction is in­
conspicuous in a linear expression text, since when you read from
War and Peace, you believe you are reading War and Peace. In
drama, the relationship between a play and its (varying) perfor­
mance is a hierarchical and explicit one; it makes trivial sense to dis­
tinguish between the two. In a cybertext, however, the distinction
is crucial-and rather different; when you read from a cybertext,
you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not
taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the
text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the
exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed. This
is very different from the ambiguities of a linear text. And inacces­
sibility, it must be noted, does not imply ambiguity but, rather, an
absence of possibility-an aporia.

So why is this so difficult to see? Why is the variable expression
of the nonlinear text so easily mistaken for the semantic ambiguity
of the linear text? The answer, or at least one answer, can be found
in a certain rhetorical model used by literary theory. I refer to the
idea of a narrative text as a labyrinth, a game, or an imaginary
world, in which the reader can explore at will, get lost, discover
secret paths, play around, follow the rules, and so on. The problem
with these powerful metaphors, when they begin to affect the critic’s
perspective and judgment, is that they eI).able a systematic misrep­
resentation of the relationship between narrative text and reader; a
spatiodynamic fallacy where the narrative is not perceived as a pre-

4 Cybertext

sentation of a world but rather as that world itself. In other words,
there is a short circuit between signifier and signified, a suspension
of differance that projects an objective level beyond the text, a pri­
mary metaphysical structure that generates both textual _sign and
our understanding of it, rather than the other way around.

A reader, however strongly engaged in the unfolding of a narra­
tive, is powerless. Like a spectator at a soccer game, he may specu­
late, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse, but he is not a player.
Like a passenger on a train, he can study and interpret the shifting
landscape, he may rest his eyes wherever he pleases, even release
the emergency brake and step off, but he is not free to move the
tracks in a different direction. He cannot have the player’s pleasure
of influence: “Let’s see what happens when I do this.” The reader’s
pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent.

The cybertext reader, on the other hand, is not safe, and there­
fore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts its
would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy
demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of inter­
pretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an
investment of personal improvisation that can result in either inti­
macy or failure. The tensions at work in a cybertext, while not in­
compatible with those of narrative desire, are also something more:
a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narra­
tive control: “I want this text to tell my story; the story that could
not be without me.” In some cases this is literally true. In other
cases, perhaps most, the sense of individual outcome is illusory, but
nevertheless the aspect of coercion and manipulation is real.

The study of cybertexts reveals the misprision of the spacio­
dynamic metaphors of narrative theory, because ergodic literature
incarnates these models in a way linear text narratives do not. This
may be hard to understand for the traditional literary critic who
cannot perceive the difference between metaphorical structure and
logical structure, but it is essential. The cybertext reader is a player,
a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is pos­
sible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not
metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual
machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but

Introduction 5

rather between games and narratives. To claim that there is no dif­
ference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities
of both categories. And yet, as this study tries to show, the difference
is not clear-cut, and there is significant overlap between the two.

It is also essential to recognize that cybertext is used here to de­
scribe a broad textual media category. It is not in itself a literary
genre of any kind. Cybertexts share a principle of calculated pro­
duction, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics,
thematics, literary history, or even material technology. Cybertext
is a perspective I use to describe and explore the communicational
strategies of dynamic texts. To look for traditions, literary genres,
and common aesthetics, we must inspect the texts at a much more
local level, and I suggest one way to partition the field in chapters
4 through 7, each chapter dealing with a subgroup of ergodic textu­
ality.

Even if the cybertexts are not narrative texts but other forms
of literature governed by a different set of rules, they retain to
a lesser or greater extent some aspects of narrative. Most display
some forms of narrative behavior, just as can be found in other non­
narrative literary genres. The idea of pure literary forms or discrete
genres is not be pursued here. Instead, a perspective of complemen­
tary generic traits is used to describe the various types as synthetic,
composite genres. Perhaps, by studying cybertexts and trying to
discover this alterity of narrative, we may also get some small new
clues as to what narrative is.

It seems to me that the cybertexts fit the game-world-labyrinth
terminology in a way that exposes its deficiencies when used on
narrative texts. But how has the spatiodynamic misrepresentation
of narrative originated? And was it always inappropriate? An im­
portant clue to this question can be found in the historical idea of
the labyrinth. Our present idea of the labyrinth is the Borgesian
structure of “forking paths,” the bewildering chaos of passages that
lead in many directions but never directly to our desired goal. But
there is also another kind, or paradigm, of labyrinths. Penelope
Reed Doob, in her excellent discussion of physical and metaphorical
labyrinths of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (1990), distin­
guishes between two kinds of labyrinthine structure: the unicursal,

6 Cybertext

where there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a
center; and the multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces a series
of critical choices, or bivia.

Umberto Eco (1984, 80) claims that there are three types of laby­
rinth: the linear, the maze, and the net (or rhizome; cf. Deleuze and
Guattari 1987). The first two correspond to Doob’s unicursal and
multicursal, respectively. To include the net seems inappropriate,
since this structure has very different qualities from the other two.
Especially as the net’s “every point can be connected with every
other point” (Eco 1984, 81); this is exactly the opposite of the fun­
damental inaccessibility of the other models. Amazingly, Eco also
claims that the labyrinth of Crete was linear and that Theseus “had
no choices to make: he could not but reach the center, and from
the center, the way out … . In this kind of labyrinth the Ariadne
thread is useless, since one cannot get lost” (80). It is hard to believe
that Eco is speaking of the labyrinth where Theseus, famously, was
the first to find the way out, and only because of Ariadne’s thread.
This was the same complex labyrinth where even its maker, Daeda­
lus, was lost. Doob (1990, 17-38), on the other hand, citing Pliny,
Virgil, Ovid, and others, shows that the literary tradition describes
the Domus daedali as a multicursal labyrinth.

As Doob demonstrates, the labyrinth as a sign of complex art­
istry, inextricability, and difficult process was an important meta­
phor and motif in classical and medieval literature, philosophy,
rhetoric, and visual design. Paradoxically, while the labyrinth de­
picted in visual art from prehistoric times is always unicursal, the
literary maze (with the Cretan myth as the chief example) is usually
multicursal. The multicursal motif did not appear in art until the
Renaissance, but as Doob shows, the two paradigms coexisted peace­
fully as the same concept at least since Virgil (70-19 B.c.). In Doob’s
view, what to us seem to be contradictory models were subsumed
in a single category, signifying a complex design, artistic order and
chaos (depending on point of view), inextricability or impenetra­
bility, and the difficult progress from confusion to perception. Both
models share these essential qualities of the labyrinth, and appar­
ently there was no great need to distinguish between the two.

In the Renaissance, however, the idea of the labyrinth, both in

Introduction 7

literature and visual art, was reduced to the multicursal paradigm
that we recognize today. Consequently, the old metaphor of the text
as labyrinth, which in medieval poetics could signify both a diffi­
cult, winding, but potentially rewarding linear process and a spa­
tial, artistically complex, and confusing artifact, was restricted to
the latter sense. Therefore, I find it reasonable to assume that the
image of the text as a labyrinth has undergone an ideological trans­
formation, from a harmonic duality where the figurative likeness of
the narrative text as unicursal coexisted with a tropology of multi­
cursal aspects, such as repetition, interlaced narrative threads, pro­
lepsis, and so forth. When the unicursal paradigm faded, however,
the multicursal paradigm came to dominate the figure, devolving
the rich ambiguity of the classical and medieval labyrinth into the
less ambiguous Renaissance model of pure multicursality.

Since we now regard labyrinthine and linear as incompatible
terms, and since the labyrinth no longer denotes linear progress and
teleology but only their opposites, its status as a model of narrative
text has become inapt for most narratives. For a typical example of
this misnomer, consider the following, from a discussion of post­
modernist writing: “We shall never be able to unravel the plots of
John Fowles’s The Magus (1966), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur
(1955) or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), for they
are labyrinths without exits” (Lodge 1977, 266; last italics mine).
Here, the image of the labyrinth has become severely distorted.
A labyrinth without exit is a labyrinth without entrance; in other
words, not a labyrinth at all.

Even in highly subversive narratives, such as the novels of Samuel
Beckett or Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler …
(1993), the reader is faced, topologically, with a unicursal maze. Yet
there are some novels for which the post-Renaissance model is per­
fectly valid, for instance Julio Cortazar’s Rayuela (1966), in which
the topology is multicursal. In yet others, such as Vladimir Nabo­
kov’s Pale Fire (1962), it may be described as both unicursal and
multicursal.

The footnote is a typical example of a structure that can be seen
as both uni- and multicursal. It creates a bivium, or choice of ex­
pansion, but should we decide to take this path (reading the foot-

8 Cybertext

note), the footnote itself returns us to the main track immediately
afterward. Perhaps a footnoted text can be described as multicursal
on the micro level and unicursal on the macro level. Nabokov’s
Pale Fire, however, leaves the mode of cursality up to the reader;
consisting of a foreword, a 999-line poem, a long commentary of
notes addressing individual lines (but really telling the commenta­
tor’s story), and an index, it can be read either unicursally, straight
through, or multicursally, by jumping between the comments and
the poem. Brian McHale (1987, 18-19) sees it as a limit-text be­
tween modernism and postmodernism; it is also a limit-text be­
tween uni- and multicursality.

That some texts are hard to define topologically should not sur­
prise us, as it is exactly this aspect of their own ontology they set
out to destabilize (cf. McHale 1987, chap. 12). Neither should it dis­
courage us, since the existence of borderline cases and ambiguous
structures in no way invalidates the usefulness of categories such as
narrative and game or unicursality and multicursality.

The problem is not, finally, that literary critics use words like
labyrinth, game, and world as metaphors in their analyses of uni­
cursal works but that this rhetoric seems to have blinded them to
the existence of multicursal literary structures and to the possibility
that the concept of labyrinth (in their post-Renaissance rendition)
might have more analytic accuracy in connection with texts that
function as game-worlds or labyrinths in a literal sense. However,
this is not the place to criticize in detail the ontological problems re­
sulting from a possible flaw in the terminology of narrative theory.
Such an issue deserves at least a separate study, one not focused on
the texts that are our primary concern here. Instead, this might be
the place for suggesting the reinstatement of the old dual mean­
ing of labyrinth, so that both unicursal and multicursal texts might
be examined within the same theoretical framework. With such a
theory we might be able to see both how, in Jorge Luis Borges’s
words, “the book and the labyrinth [are] one and the same” (Borges
1974, 88), and how the many types of literary labyrinths are differ­
ent from each other. It may surprise some readers to find me still
using the word book, but a number of the cybertexts we shall discuss
are indeed books-printed, bound, and sold in the most traditional

Introduction 9

fashion. As we shall see, the codex format is one of the most flex­
ible and powerful information tools yet invented, with a capacity
for change that is probably not exhausted yet, and I (for one) do not
expect it to go out of style any time soon.

Some Examples of Ergodic Literature

At this point it is probably best to liven the discussion with some
examples of the literature I am primarily addressing. The exposi­
tion made here is mostly for elucidation purposes and must not
be mistaken for an attempt to produce an exhaustive historical in­
ventory of ergodic literature (see, instead, Vuillemin 1990). Rather
than seeking a catalogue of every known instance of ergodicity, I
have focused on diversity. As Roland Barthes (1977, 81) maintains
in his study of narrative, it is utopian to examine every specimen
of a genre; a deductive method, leading to a “hypothetical model of
description,” should be applied instead. Thus there may well exist
major ergodic genres or texts that I have failed to include, but since
this is a theoretical rather than an encyclopedic study, the future ap­
pearance of any hitherto unknown forms will invalidate my theories
only if they fail to comply with my general model of ergodic forms.

Since writing always has been a spatial activity, it is reason­
able to assume that ergodic textuality has been practiced as long
as linear writing . For instance, the wall inscriptions of the temples
in ancient Egypt were often connected two-dimensionally (on one
wall) or three-dimensionally (from wall to wall and from room to
room), and this layout allowed a nonlinear arrangement of the reli­
gious text in accordance with the symbolic architectural layout of
the temple (Gundlach 1985).

Possibly the best-known example of cybertext in antiquity is the
Chinese text of oracular wisdom, the I Ching (Wilhelm 1989). Also
known as the Book of Changes, the existing text is from around the
time of the Western Chou dynasty (1122-770 b.c.) and was writ­
ten by several authors. The I Ching system also inspired G. W. von
Leibniz, who developed the binary mathematics used by today’s
digital computers (Eber 1979) . The I Ching is made up of sixty-four
symbols, or hexagrams, which are the binary combinations of six
whole or broken (“changing”) lines (64 = 26). A hexagram (such as

1 O Cybertext

no. 49, == Ko/Revolution) contains a main text and six small ones,
one for each line. By manipulating three coins or forty-nine yarrow
stalks according to a randomizing principle, the texts of two hexa­
grams are combined, producing one out of 4,096 possible texts. This
contains the answer to a question the user has written down in ad­
vance (e.g., “How much rice should I plant this year?”).

Much simpler examples of nonlinear texts are some of Guillaume
Apollinaire’s “calligrammes” from early in this century (Apollinaire
1966). The words of these poems are spread out in several directions
to form a picture on the page, with no clear sequence in which to be
read. A play from the thirties, Night of January 16th by Ayn Rand
(1936), is about a trial where members of the audience are picked to
be the jury. The play has two endings, depending on the jury’s ver­
dict. In the early 1960s, Marc Saporta (1962) published Composition
No. 1, Roman, a novel with pages like a deck of cards, to be shuffled
and read in any sequence. It is written in such a way that any com­
bination will appear fluid. (See also Bolter 1991, 140-42.)

A rather well-known example is Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille
Milliards de Poemes (a hundred thousand billion poems; see Que:­
neau 1961), which is a sonnet machine book of 10 x 14 lines,
capable of producing 10 14 sonnets. Several novels have been iden­
tified as ergodic over the years: B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates
(1969), Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted With Tea (1990), and
many others. The variety and ingenuity of devices used in these
texts demonstrate that paper can hold its own against the computer
as a technology of ergodic texts.

However, after the invention of digital computing in the middle
of the twentieth century, it soon became clear that a new textual
technology had arrived, potentially more flexible and powerful than
any preceding medium. Digital systems for information storage and
retrieval, popularly known as databases, signified new ways of using
textual material. The database is in principle similar to the filing
cabinet but with a level of automation and speed that made radically
different textual practices possible. On the physical level, the sur­
face of reading was divorced from the stored information. For the
first time, this breaks down concepts such as “the text itself” into
two independent technological levels: the interface and the storage

Introduction 11

medium. On the social level , huge texts could be browsed, searched,
and updated by several people at once, and from different places
on the globe, operations that only superficially seem to resemble
what we used to call “reading” and “writing.” Armed with a good
search engine and a digital library, any college dropout can pass
for a learned scholar, quoting the classics without having read any
of them.

Several new textual genres have emerged with digital computing
and automation. Computer programs, complex lists of formal in­
structions written in specially designed, artificial languages, can be
seen as a new type of the rhetorical figure apostrophe, the address­
ing of inanimate or abstract objects, with the magical difference that
it actually provokes a response. Short, simple programs are often
linear, but longer programs generally consist of collections of inter­
dependent fragments, with repeating loops, cross-references, and
discontinuous ” jumps” back and forth between sections. Given the
seminatural vocabulary of some modern programing languages, it is
not uncommon for programers to write poems in them, often with
the constraint that the “poegrams” (or whatever) must make sense
to the machine as well.1

Programs are normally written with two kinds of receivers in
mind: the machines and other programers. This gives rise to a
double standard of aesthetics, often in conflict: efficiency and clarity.
Since speed is a major quality in computer aesthetics, an unreadable
program might perform much faster than a comprehensible one.
The poetics of computer program writing is constantly evolving ,
and through paradigms such as object orientation it inspires prac­
tical philosophies and provides hermeneutic models for organizing
and understanding the world, both directly (through programed
systems) and indirectly (through the worldviews of computer engi­
neers).

Through the artificial intelligence research of the sixties, pro­
grams emerged that one could “talk” to. The best known of these is

1. For an example of this type of poetry, not to be confused with computer­
generated poetry, see Sharon Hopkins’ poem “Listen” (Hopkins 1995), written in
the computer-programing language Perl.

12 Cybertext

Eliza, made in 1963 by an MIT computer scientist, Joseph Weizen­
baum. Eliza could imitate a Rogerian psychoanalyst, and through a
simple pattern-matching algorithm, it used the information given
by its human “clients” to make them believe that it somehow
“understood” their situations. Another seminal program, and one of
the key texts in this study, is the role-playing game Adventure, by
William Crowther and Don Woods, released on the U.S. research
network ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet, in April 1976.2 As
the microcomputer home market exploded around 1980, Adventure
was made available on nearly every type of machine and became the
first in a short-lived, but influential, textual computer game genre,
which ended its commercial life when the graphic adventure games
took over in the late eighties.

In the seventies, some artificial intelligence researchers focused
on making systems that could analyze and write stories. A well­
known project was James Meehan’s program Tale-spin, which could
construct simple animal fables of the JEsop type. Primarily, the re­
searchers were not trying to achieve literary quality, and the stories
that were produced typically testify to this lack of ambition. How­
ever, some of the “failures” produced by Tale-spin make strikingly
original prose, succeeding where the successes failed. A later sys­
tem, the commercial dialogue program Racter, created by William
Chamberlain (1984), is even supposed to have written a book, The
Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed, but as it turns out, the book
was co-written (at least) by Chamberlain (see Barger 1993 and chap­
ter 6, below). Although the output of these generators are linear
stories or poems, the systems themselves are clearly ergodic textual
machines, with unlimited possibility for variation.

Another type of digital ergodic text was conceived by the Ameri­
can Ted Nelson around 1965 (Nelson 1965; see also Nelson 1987).
Nelson called this hypertext, a strategy for organizing textual frag­
ments in an intuitive and informal way, with “links” between re­
lated sections of a text or between related parts of different texts in

2. Personal correspondence with Woods, by E-mail, dated September 29, 1993. I
am grateful for his illuminating reply and for the fabulous computer network that
makes the Homers of digital literary history still available to researchers.

Introduction 13

the same retrieval system. Hypertext has gained in popularity in the
last decade, after personal computer programs such as Hypercard
were made available and educators started to take an interest in its
pedagogical potential. At the same time, literary authors started to
experiment with hypertext and have received considerable attention
from literary circles. Hyperfictions such as Michael Joyce’s After­
noon: A Story (1990) engage a modernist poetics to subvert tradi­
tional storytelling and present a literary labyrinth for the reader to
explore.

In 1980, inspired by William Crowther and Don Woods’ Ad­
venture (1976), two English programers at the University of Essex,
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, constructed an adventure game
that several players could play at once (see Bartle and Trubshaw
1980; Bartle 1984). They called their invention Multi-User Dungeon
(MUD, also known as MUDl), and soon participants from many
parts of the world phoned in from their modems to the Essex com­
puter to participate in the new social reality. The first MUDs were
oriented toward game playing and puzzle solving, but later MUDs,
such as James Aspnes’s 1989 Tiny MUD, allowed users to build their
own textual objects and landscapes, and soon the users came to re­
gard themselves as participants in a community, rather than a game,
with communication rather than competition as the main social ac­
tivity. As literature (although not as textual media), MUDs are very
different from anything else, with their streams of continuing text
and their collective, often anonymous readership and writership.
Life in the MUD is literary, relying on purely textual strategies, and
it therefore provides a unique laboratory for the study of textual
self-expression and self-creation, themes that are far from marginal
in the practice of literary theory.

The Aim of This Study

It is a common belief that the rapid evolution in the field of digital
technology from the middle of the twentieth century to the present
has ( among other equally astounding results) brought on radically
new ways of writing and reading. This view, stimulated by the in­
creasing personal experience with computer technology among the
academic masses, can be observed even in literary studies, which

14 Cybertext

since 1984 have increasingly attempted to capture and construct
computer-mediated texts as objects of literary criticism. The present
study can be located both inside and outside of this research. In
addition to an analysis-and to some extent a construction-of the
perceived objects by means of literary theory, this is a study of
the problems of such construction and, hence, a critical study of
the strategies used by literary researchers to expand their empirical
field in this direction. Especially, I wish to challenge the recurrent
practice of applying the theories of literary criticism to a new em­
pirical field, seemingly without any reassessment of the terms and
concepts involved. This lack of self-reflection places the research in
direct danger of turning the vocabulary of literary theory into a set
of unfocused metaphors, rendered useless by a translation that is not
perceived as such by its very translators. Thus the interpretations
and misinterpretations of the digital media by literary theorists is a
recurrent theme of this book.

A related but reverse problem is the tendency to describe the
new text media as radically different from the old, with attributes
solely determined by the material technology of the medium. In
these analyses, technical innovation is presented as a cause of social
improvement and political and intellectual liberation, a historical
move away from the old repressive media. This kind of technologi­
cal determinism (the belief that technology is an autonomous force
that causes social change) has been refuted eloquently by Langdon
Winner (1986), James W. Carey (1988), and others but continues,
nevertheless, to dominate the discussion. In the context of litera­
ture, this has led to claims that digital technology enables readers
to become authors, or at least blurs the (supposedly political) dis­
tinction between the two, and that the reader is allowed to create
his or her own “story” by “interacting” with “the computer.” The
ideological forces surrounding new technology produce a rhetoric
of novelty, differentiation, and freedom that works to obscure the
more profound structural kinships between superficially heteroge­
neous media. Even the inspiring and perceptive essays of Richard
Lanham (1993) are suffused by this binary rhetoric and, ultimately,
dominated by politics at the expense of analysis.

Whether concepts such as “computer literature” or “electronic

Introduction 15

textuality” deserve to be defended theoretically is by no means
obvious, and they will not be given axiomatic status in this book.
The idea that “the computer” is in itself capable of producing social
and historical change is a strangely ahistorical and anthropomorphic
misconception, yet it is as popular within literary-cultural studies
as it is in the science fiction texts they sometimes study. Often, in
fact, science fiction portrays the technology with an irony that the
critical studies lack (see, e.g., William Gibson’s short story, “Burn­
ing Chrome,” in Gibson 1986).

Most literary theories take their object medium as a given, in
spite of the blatant historical differences between, for instance, oral
and written literature. The written, or rather the printed, text has
been the privileged form, and the potentially disruptive effects of
media transitions have seldom been an issue, unlike semantic tran­
sitions such as language translation or intertextual practices. At this
point, in the age of the dual ontology of everyday textuality (screen
or paper), this ideological blindness is no longer possible, and so
we have to ask an old question in a new context: What is a text?
In a limited space such as this, it is impossible to recapture the
arguments of previous discussions of this question. And since the
empirical basis for this study is different from the one assumed in
these discussions, the arguments would be of limited value. In the
context of this study, the question of the text becomes a question
of verbal media and their functional differences (what role does a
medium play?), and only subsequently a question of semantics, in­
fluence, otherness, mental events, intentionality, and so forth. These
philosophical problems have not left us, but they belong to a differ­
ent level of textuality. In order to deal with these issues responsibly,
we must first construct a map of the new area in which we want to
study them, a textonomy (the study of textual media) to provide the
playing ground of textology (the study of textual meaning).

The production of new maps, however, is also a construction of
“newness,” whose political consequences we cannot hope to escape.
The field of literary study is in a state of permanent civil war with
regard to what constitutes its valid objects. What right have we to
export this war to foreign continents? Even if important insights
can be gained from the study of extraliterary phenomena with the

I

1 6 Cybertext

instruments of literary theory (cautiously used), it does not follow
that these phenomena are literature and should be judged with lit­
erary criteria or that the field of literature should be expanded to
include them. In my view, there is nothing to be gained from this
sort of theoretical imperialism, but much to lose: discussions of
the “literariness” of this or that verbal medium are ever in danger
of deteriorating into a battle of apologetic claims and chauvinistic
counterclaims. When much energy is spent on showing that P is a
perfectly deserving type of Q, the more fundamental question of
what P is will often be neglected. These nonproductive (and non­
academic) campaigns in favor of marginal media or aesthetic forms
of expression are pathetic signs of a larger problem, however: they
illustrate only too well the partial and conservative state of the
human sciences, in which nothing can be studied that is not already
within a field; in which the type rather than the individual qualities
of an object determines its value as an accepted member of some
canon or other. Where humanistic study used to be genre chau­
vinistic, it is now medium chauvinistic, organized into empirical
fields (literature, art history, theater, mass communication) with not
enough concern for general or intermediary perspectives. This “em­
pirical” partitioning is of course unempirical in consequence, since
it excludes empirical material that does not belong to the sanctioned
sectors. Also, the limited view privileged by this sort of specializing
tends to produce apologetics disguised as criticism, in an age where
the “inherent” quality of literature (or any other previously domi­
nant mode of discourse) is no longer self-evident.

Strangely, the struggle between the proponents and opponents
of “digital literature” deteriorates usually on both sides into ma­
terial arguments of a peculiar fetishist nature. One side focuses on
the exotic hardware of the shiny new technologies, like CD-ROM.
Witness especially the computer industry slogan, “information at
your fingertips,” as if information were somehow a touchable ob­
ject. The other side focuses on the well-known hardware of the old
technology, the “look and feel” of a book, compared to the crude
letters on a computer screen. “You can’t take it to bed with you” is
the sensuous (but no longer true) refrain of the book chauvinists.

Introduction 17

Isn’t the content of a text more important than these materialistic,
almost ergonomic, concerns?

What these strangely irrelevant exuberances reveal, I think, is
that beyond the obvious differences of appearance, the real differ­
ence between paper texts and computer texts is not very clear. Does
a difference even exist? Instead of searching for a structural divide,
this study begins with the premise that no such essential difference
is presumed. If it exists, it must be described in functional, rather
than material or historical, terms. The alternative, to propose an
essential difference and then proceed to describe it, does not allow
for the possibility that it does not exist and is, therefore, not an
option. Whether it exists or not is not of great importance to this
thesis, however, as such knowledge would not make much practical
difference in the world. The emerging new media technologies are
not important in themselves, nor as alternatives to older media, but
should be studied for what they can tell us about the principles and
evolution of human communication.

My main effort is, therefore, to show what the functional differ­
ences and similarities among the various textual media imply about
the theories and practices of literature. The exploration is based on
the concepts and perspectives of narratology and rhetoric but is not
limited to these two disciplines. I argue that existing literary theory
is incomplete (but not irrelevant) when it comes to describing some
of the phenomena studied here, and I try to show why and where
a new theoretical approach is needed. My final aim is to produce
a framework for a theory of cybertext or ergodic literature and to
identify the key elements for this perspective.

What Is Cybertext?

In the current discussions of “computer literacy,” hypertext, “elec­
tronic language,” and so on, there seems to emerge an explicit
distinction between the printed, or paper-based, text and the elec­
tronic text, both with singular and remarkably opposing qualities.
The arguments for this distinction are sometimes historical, some­
times technological, but eminently political; that is, they don’t focus
on what these textual genres or modes are but on their assumed

18 Cybertext

functional difference from each other. Such a strategy is useful for
drawing attention to, but less so for the analysis of, the objects thus
constructed. It might have been tempting to follow this rhetoric in
my investigation of the concept of cybertext and to describe a di­
chotomy between it and traditional, conventional literature; but the
meaning of these concepts is unstable to the point of incoherence,
and my construct would therefore probably have reached a similar
degree of uselessness.

Cybertext, then, is not a “new,” “revolutionary” form of text,
with capabilities only made possible through the invention of the
digital computer. Neither is it a radical break with old-fashioned
textuality, although it would be easy to make it appear so. Cyber­
text is a perspective on all forms of textuality, a way to expand the
scope of literary studies to include phenomena that today are per­
ceived as outside of, or marginalized by, the field of literature-or
even in opposition to it, for (as I make clear later) purely extraneous
reasons. In this study I investigate the literary behavior of certain
types of textual phenomena and try to construct a model of tex­
tual communication that will accommodate any type of text. This
project is not as ambitious as it might sound, since the model is
provisional and empirical and subject to future modification should
any “falsificatory” evidence (such as an unpredictable object) appear.
This pragmatic model is presented in detail in chapter 3.

The rest of this introductory chapter discusses the conceptual
foundations and implications of this approach and establishes the
terminology applied in the analytical chapters. These chapters ( 4
through 7) each takes on a main category ( or genre) of cybertext
roughly corresponding to the results of the analysis in chapter 3:
hypertext, the textual adventure game, computer-generated nar­
rative and participatory world-simulation systems, and the social­
textual MUDs of the global computer networks. This pragmatic par­
titioning, which derives from popular convention rather than from
my own theoretical model, is motivated by my strong belief that,
in such a newly awakened field, theoretical restraint is imperative.
Theories of literature have a powerful ability to co-opt new fields
and fill theoretical vacuums, and in such a process of colonization,
where the “virgin territory” lacks theoretical defense, important

Introduction . 19

perspectives and insights might be lost or at least overlooked. When
we invade foreign ground, the least we can do is to try to learn
the native language and study the local customs. Although several
studies have already been carried out within most of these subfields,
almost none have produced overarching, or universal, perspectives
or engaged in a comparative analysis of all the forms of textuality
examined here. Therefore, these previous approaches are discussed
in their respective chapters rather than in this general introduction.

Because there are strong similarities between new and old types
of ergodic literature, “the computer” and “information technology”
as such will not be an explaining factor in this study but, instead,
part of the field to be explored. This approach frees us from try­
ing to define such vague and unfocused terms as digital text or
electronic literature and allows us to develop a function-oriented
perspective, in which the rhetoric of media chauvinisms will have
minimal effect on the analysis. To be sure, media are far from neu­
tral, inconsequential carriers of “content,” but the essentialist idea
of “the computer medium” as a singular structure of well-defined
properties of communication is just as untenable and can be based
on only a very limited understanding of both computer applications
and media theory. Computer technology can sustain many different
types of media, with very distinctive characteristics. Such a pluralist
perspective will help us avoid the traps of technological determin­
ism and let us see the technology as an ongoing process of, rather
than a cause of, human expression. As we shall see, many of the
forms of computer-based textuality have more in common with
some of the paper media than with each other.

As can be inferred from its etymology, a cybertext must contain
some kind of information feedback loop. In one sense, this holds true
for any textual situation, granted that the “text” is something more
than just marks upon a surface. A reader peruses a string of words,
and depending on the reader’s subsequent actions, the significance
of those words may be changed, if only imperceptibly. The act of
rereading is a crucial example: the second time we read a text, it is
different, or so it seems. How can we know the text from the read­
ing? Sometimes, a reader may influence the text for other readers,
even if all the “marks on the pages” stay the same: a dramatic ex-

20 Cybertext

ample is the ayatollah Khomeiny’s reaction to The Satanic Verses.
The conventional split between text and reading (between the “in­
tentional object” and the “mental event”), or signifiant and signifie,
is not an impermeable membrane: leaks occur constantly; through
various stages of reception such as editing, marketing, translation,
criticism, rediscovery, canonization, or banishment.

These well-known processes are not entirely trivial, however,
because they remind us that a text can never be reduced to a stand­
alone sequence of words. There will always be context, convention,
contamination; sociohistorical mediation in one form or another.
Distinguishing between a text and its readings is not only neces­
sary, it is also quite impossible-an ideal, in other words. On the
one hand we need the image of “the text” in order to focus on any­
thing at all; on the other hand we use the metaphor of “reading” to
signal that our apprehension of a text will always be partial, that
we never quite reach the “text itself,” a realization that has led cer­
tain critics to question the very existence of such an object (see, for
instance, Fish 1980). This hermeneutic movement or desire -per­
haps better described as asymptotic than circular-holds true for all
kinds of textual communication, but the particular organization of
a text can make both the reader’s strategic approach and the text’s
perceived teleology very distinctive, perhaps to the point where in­
terpretation is stretched beyond the cognitive bounds of a singular
concept. It is this field of varying textual organization that this study
attempts to clarify. The differences in teleological orientation-the
different ways in which the reader is invited to “complete” a text­
and the texts’ various self-manipulating devices are what the con­
cept of cybertext is about. Until these practices are identified and
examined, a significant part of the question of interpretation must
go unanswered.

The meaning of text used in this study is closer to philological
(or observable) work than to the poststructural (or metaphysical)
galaxy of signifiers. But though my meaning is related to both of
these meanings, it is also radically different from them. Instead of
defining text as a chain of signifiers, as linguists and semioticians do,
I use the word for a whole range of phenomena, from short poems

Introduction 21

operator

text I machine

verbal sign medium

Figure 1.1. The Textual Machine

to complex computer programs and databases. As the cyber prefix
indicates, the text is seen as a machine-not metaphorically but as
a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal
signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so
a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection
of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third
party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text
takes place. (See figure 1.1.) The boundaries between these three
elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can
be defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the func­
tional possibilities of each element combine with those of the two
others to produce a large number of actual text types.

Previous models of textuality have not taken this performative
aspect into account and tend to ignore the medium end of the tri­
angle and all that goes with it. In his phenomenology of literature,
Rom·an Ingarden (1973, 305-13) insists that the integrity of the “lit­
erary work of art” depends on the “order of sequence” of its parts;
without this linear stability the work would not exist. While Ingar­
den here certainly acknowledges the importance of the objective
shape of the text, he also reduces it to a given.

This taken-for-grantedness is hardly strange, since it is only after
we have started to notice the “medium” and its recent shifting ap­
pearances that we can begin to observe the effect this instability
has on the rest of the triangle. As Richard Lanham (1989, 270) ob­
serves, literary theorists have for a long time been in the “codex

22 Cybertext

book business,” restricting their observations (but not their argu­
ments) to literature mediated in a certain way. Even within the field
of codex literature there is room, as experimentalists from Laurence
Sterne to Milorad Pavic have demonstrated, for mediational varia­
tion, but these attempts have not, apparently, produced sufficient
contrast to provoke a systematic investigation of the aesthetic role of
the medium (a notable but much too briefexception being McHale
1987, chap. 12). There is also the fascinating phenomenon known as
“Artists’ Books,” an art movement that originated in the sixties and
dedicated to the creation of unique works of art that challenge the
presumed properties of the book from within (cf. Strand 19926 and
Lyons 1985).

Cybertext, as now should be clear, is the wide range (or perspec­
tive) of possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as vari­
ous kinds of literary communication systems where the functional
differences among the mechanical parts play a defining role in deter­
mining the aesthetic process. Each type of text can be positioned in
this multidimensional field according to its functional capabilities,
as we shall see in chapter 3. As a theoretical perspective, cybertext
shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender,
text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse be­
tween the various part(icipant)s in the textual machine. In doing
so, it relocates attention to some traditionally remote parts of the
textual galaxy, while leaving most of the luminous clusters in the
central areas alone. This should not be seen as a call for a renegotia­
tion of “literary” values, since most of the texts drawn attention to
here are not well suited for entry into the competition for literary
canonization.

The rules of that game could no doubt change, but the present
work is not (consciously, at least) an effort to contribute to the
hegemonic worship of “great texts.” The reason for this is prag­
matic rather than ethical: a search for traditional literary values in
texts that are neither intended nor structured as literature will only
obscure the unique aspects of these texts and transform a formal
investigation into an apologetic crusade. If these texts redefine lit­
erature by expanding our notion of it-and I believe that they do­
then they must also redefine what is literary, and therefore they

Introduction 23

cannot be measured by an old, unmodified aesthetics. I do not be­
lieve it is possible to avoid the influence from literary theory’s ordi­
nary business, but we should at least try to be aware of its strong
magnetic field as we approach the whiter spaces-the current final
frontiers-of textuality.

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