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• 1 2020-07-13T09:25:43-07:00 A Critical Essay about Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden 98 plain 2020-08-18T13:43:03-07:00

  
  The Persistence of Genius: The Case for Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden

  by Dene Grigar

  “While it would not be accurate to say that the hypertext novel was completely abandoned by the first decade of the 21st century, it is the case that link-and-node hypertext would no longer be the dominant mode of literary experimentation in digital media"—Scott Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?”

  In his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question I ask myself is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”

  The answer is no. Over the last 27 years since its publication, the novel has been the subject of 100 books, essays, and theses and dissertations, close to 40% of these during the last 13 years. Ironically, Victory Garden has not been readily accessible to the public since the shift to 64-bit computing in the early 2000s and rise of mobile media in the late 2000s. Originally published in 1991 on a 3.5-inch floppy disk for the Macintosh platform and re-released in subsequent years for the Windows platform and, finally, in 2002 on CD-ROM for Macintosh computers running the Classic and PCs running Windows operating systems, Victory Garden  has not been migrated or emulated for contemporary computers. If my study of the 13 editions of Joyce’s afternoon, a story  sheds light on the challenges of keeping a work alive amid technological innovation, [1] then this study of the critical response to Moulthrop’s Victory Garden reveals the way in which a work lives on despite the lack of accessibility to it.
  
  Methodology for This Study & Findings
  My study focuses on critical writing that grapples with the novel, like Alice Bell’s essay "Interrupting the Transmission: The Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden" from her book, The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction, and avoids those in which the work was simply mentioned, like Belinda Barnet’s Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext. It also avoids writing by Moulthrop himself, with the exception of the book the two of us co-authored where I discuss the work in the chapters that I write.
  
  My data collection began with a search of ELMCIP for critical works about the novel. Finding 58 writings at this important database Rettberg developed for the field of electronic literature, I turned my attention to a more general search of Google Scholar, where I found an additional 42 critical writings not mentioned in ELMCIP. I combined the findings from the two sites and organized the information chronologically starting with the first scholarly work that appeared in 1992. From there I culled the list of those works listed as addressing Victory Garden but didn’t, like Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age. [2] My final step was to conduct a search of WorldCat and ArticleFirst and check my list against works found in these databases. The result was that I collected 100 critical writings focused on Victory Garden from 1992-2019.
  
  The list reveals three trends that underscore the work’s impact on both literary criticism and critical theory. These include: 1) a persistence in publishing activity about the work despite its inaccessibility, 2) a diverse publication audience for the work, and 3) its wide geographical reach. 
  
  Persistence in Publishing Activity
  A look at the list (below) shows that Victory Garden has been written about every year since its publication, despite the fact that it has been essentially out of circulation since the mid 2000s. In fact, it has never not  been a topic of scholarly discourse over its 27-year history.
  
  The first scholarly work about the novel was published barely a year after Victory Garden's release, an essay by J Yellowlees Douglas, entitled "What Hypertext Can do that Print Narratives Cannot." In 1993 five essays appeared. In 1994, there were two. In 1995, two more essays and the first masters thesis appeared. This trend continues during the rise of the World Wide Web and use of Flash software for digital narratives that Rettberg references in his essay, roughly the years 1995 to 2007. Despite these technological innovations, a look at the publishing history of critical writings during 2001 reveals nine books, essays, and theses published. What is interesting about that particular year is that Victory Garden had not yet been migrated to CD-ROM technology and, so, was still being accessed via floppy disk, yet the floppy disk drive had become moribund three years before for Macintosh computers and were becoming increasingly rare for PCs.
  
  In 2002 the novel was released on CD-ROM, resulting in five more scholarly works published in 2003 and 2004, three PhD dissertations in 2005, and seven more critical writings from 2006-2007. The demise of CD-ROM drives began in 2007 for Macintosh computers at the same time the Apple Corporation moved away from the Classic operating system to MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard). These changes meant that Victory Garden, along with other hypertext works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc., would no longer be accessible on contemporary Macintosh computers unless migrated to the new operating system and formats. Joyce's and Jackson's were; Moulthrop's work was not. Scholars with PCs could continue to study Victory Garden until 2015 when PCs moved to 64-bit computing. Despite these constraints, publications about the novel continued. In 2008 two books and one dissertation appeared. In 2009 there were six scholarly writings. In 2010, there were four. Between 2011 and 2015 there were 21 books, essays, and theses and dissertations produced about Victory Garden.
  
  Considering that Victory Garden was by 2016 accessible only to scholars with legacy hardware, scholarly writing about the work continued. That year Christos Karras' exhibition, which featured Victory Garden, was reviewed by Renata Elizabetta Ntelia in CounterText in a special issue entitled "Electronic Literature, Again." In 2017 my own book co-authored with Moulthrop for The MIT Press, Traversals, was released. In 2018 Astrid Ensslin and Lyle Skains wrote about the work in their essay, "Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine." Finally in 2019, Rettberg's book, Electronic Literature, was released; Domanic Garcia's essay, "Techniques for a Possible Handling of Ethics in a Post-truth Culture" for the collection, Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext came out; and Ana Abril Hernández's thesis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid was published. 
  
  For a work that has been out of reach to scholars––as Victory Garden certainly currently has been––to have persisted through time as an object of scholarly study should put to rest any question about interest about the work or demand for it. In fact, as the subject of 24 masters theses and PhD dissertations, beginning with Jon Bridges’ thesis, “Hypertext and Literature: Facts and Fictions,” at Massy University in New Zealand in 1995, it is clear that the novel is recognized by scholars as an important pioneering work, one of great interest by scholars. That some of the major digital scholars and artists working today wrote their theses and dissertations on Victory Garden, including Raine Koskimaa, Jill Walker Rettberg, Anna Gunder, Donna Leishman, Cheryl Ball, Serge Bouchardon, Maria Engberg, Hans Kristian Rustad, Markuu Eskelinen, Álvaro Seiça, and Anaïs Guilet, speaks to the fact that it has contributed to birth of and continues to breed scholars in the field.
  
  Diverse Publication Audience
  The 100+ scholars writing about Victory Garden published in a wide range of venues about the work, from mainstream and scholarly presses and across many different disciplines. As mentioned previously, the first essay published about the novel––J Yellowlees Douglas’ "What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot"––appeared in Reader. A year later, in 1993 Robert Coover, who had raised awareness of hypertext literature the year before with his provocatively titled “The End of Books” for The New York Times Review of Books, [3] wrote about Victory Garden in The New York Times in an essay called “Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer.” Along with these, we see essays addressing the novel in the proceedings for ACM’s Hypertext ’93 and the journal, The Drama Review. The former is a publication for scholars interested in computer technology, specifically hypertext systems, while the latter focuses on performance and the arts. Certainly a wide range of audiences and academic interests are exemplified by these various publications.
  
  In 1995 Robert Kendall published "Writing for the New Millennium: The Birth of Electronic Literature" in Poets & Writers Magazine and Kip Strasma published a paper in the proceedings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a conference frequented by composition instructors. The watershed year for hypertext literature was 1997 when four major books about hypertext literature came out. Of these Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and Silvio Gaggi’s From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media addressed Victory Garden. Murray calls the novel “ambitious” and recognizes the connection between navigation and the “dramatic enactment of the plot” (82-83). Aarseth studied it, along with 22 other texts––ranging from afternoon, a story to Eliza, to Pale Fire, to the I Ching––to determine the typological approach of each (65-75). The debate that arose between Murray and Aarseth regarding narratology and ludology and the fact that Victory Garden could reflect both stances shows the breadth of the work's audience in the face of their conflicting theoretical foundations.
  
  The most prevalent journals for Moulthrop’s novel—and many other hypertext literary works––are those associated with ACM conferences and workshops. A total of 10 essays on Victory Garden have been published since Mark Bernstein’s two for Hypertext ’93 and the European Conference on Hypertext (ECHT). In fact, he authored or co-authored five of the 10 essays published by ACM. His influential, “Patterns of Hypertext,” published in Hypertext '98: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, notably classifies the pattern found in Victory Garden as the “navigational feint”––that is, “a navigational opportunity that is not meant to be followed immediately” but can be “pursued in the future” (Bernstein, “Patterns”).
  
  In 1999 the work was discussed in essays for The English Journal, a publication sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, and Works and Days, known as a “scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique” ("Home") for scholars in humanities and social sciences. The next year the novel was the focus of essays for Contemporary Literature and the new online journal founded by Robert Simanowski, Dichtung Digital, and IEEE Multimedia, the scientific journal published by the IEEE Computer Society.
  
  2001 brought the 2nd edition of Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Moulthrop’s novel had come out after the 1st edition of Bolter's book, but Victory Garden appears in the 2nd and is referred to as “another of the most important early hypertexts” (130). Markuu Eskelinen’s essay for Electronic Book Review, which came out that same year, echoes this sentiment when he calls Victory Garden  “outstanding.” Other important publications in 2001 include Rita Raley’s essay for Postmodern Culture, Anja Rau’s for the Journal of Digital Information, and two essays for Hypertext '01: Proceedings for the 2001 ACM Hypertext Conference.
  
  Over the next two decades the novel continued to show up in publications for the digital humanities, literary studies, comparative literature, poetics, new media, and hypertext studies. Additionally from 2001 to 2020 a total 11 monographs were published that addressed the novel, eight of which during the time Victory Garden was becoming more and more difficult to access. What is clear is that though the novel is categorized narrowly as hypertext fiction, it has been of interest in a broad range of audiences, far beyond those focused solely on hypertext.
  
  Wide Geographical Reach
  Finally, the work has reached a broad international audience. Starting with the 24 theses and dissertations, we see that Victory Garden reached scholars in New Zealand, England, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Scotland, the U.S., France, Hungary, Australia, Portugal, and Spain over the last 27 years. Books and essays have been produced by scholars from these countries, as well as from China, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, Bulgaria, Poland, and Mexico. Though Rettberg refers to Victory Garden as an "American hypertext novel," its geographical reach ranges well beyond the U.S. borders and across the globe to four continents.  
  
  Conclusion
  When Victory Garden was exhibited for the Library of Congress's Electronic Literature & Its Emerging Forms in 2013, [4] Moulthrop provided the curators with a description for the exhibit didactics and archival website. He wrote in his usual self-deprecating tone:

  [Victory Garden] was originally intended for the first-generation Apple Macintosh, with its monochrome (but multi-font!) screen whose size would these days suggest a dashboard nav system. This was long in advance of e-books and tablets, and shortly before Myst, Doom, and Netscape Navigator unleashed their graphics revolutions; in a brief, fragile, twilight of the word.

  
  But has it really been the word's "twilight?" Is Henning Ziegler correct when he suggested in 2002 that hypertexts like Moulthrop's––that is, digital works that rely heavily on the word––have become "uncool" (Ziegler) and no longer resonate in the 21st century despite Coover's prediction that it would be literature's future (1992)?
  
  Looking at the visual arts for an answer, I do not see museums and galleries ignoring artistic works from movements no longer practiced today. Despite the fact there are a dearth of contemporary visual artists saying they work in Cubism, there have been five Picasso exhibitions scheduled in 2020 in the U.S., Germany, Canada, and Austria of this Cubist's art. The study of Cubism persists not because contemporary artists are still practicing it, but because those who did broke new ground and gave birth to a new way of thinking. Picasso has been dead for 47 years, but his work that excited the public and influenced art over 100 years ago lives on as an exemplar of human creative expression. By the same token, to suggest that because literary artists have moved on to other literary forms and techniques does not mean that the forms and techniques previously pioneered are no longer important or worthy of continued interest. Gertrude Stein herself opined about the lack of a wide readership during her lifetime, [5] but what scholars among us today do not recognize this artist's contributions? Rather, it is precisely because Picasso and Stein impacted the present, continue to ignite, excite, perplex, and challenge that scholars still engage with them. How else can we possibly explain why Victory Garden is still the object of study of scholarly works a full decade since becoming inaccessible to the public? Rettberg was correct with his assertion that the kind of hypertext Victory Garden represents is no longer "the dominant mode of literary experimentation in digital media" (Rettberg, "American Novel"), but what we scholars need to wrap our minds around––those of us who study born digital literature––is that genius is not found in any shiny new thing we access through our mobile devices, experience via VR, or interact with using whatever technology that arises in our lifetimes. It lies instead those works imbued by the artist's creative expression that move us to see a different way, to think a different thought, to inspire us to be different. If that is what cool  means, then for that reason works like Moulthrop's is that.
  
  
  
  Main Story-Lines and Characters
  The main characters in Victory Garden are people from a University town Tara, most of them teachers or students in the University. Thea Agnew is a professor of rhetorics (or something like that). Sisters Veronica and Emily Runbird are her pupils, although Emily is currently in military service in the Gulf War handling mail in the headquarters. Thea is also the head of a Curriculum Revision Committee (for studies in Western Culture). An eccentric scholar Boris Urquhart is supposedly an expert in Virtual Reality technologies, employed in a top-secret project, and also on the Curriculum Revision Committee. Harley Morgan is a television journalist who has refused to go to the Gulf Area and is spending his "stress-leave" in Tara with his girl friend Veronica Runbird (several years older than Veronica, he has earlier had an affair with Thea, too). Emily Runbird, on the other hand, has an affair with Boris Urquhart, but his former boyfriend Victor Gardner (!) is still desperately in love with her. Leroy is Thea's teenage son, who has left his school to make his "On the Road" tour à la Jack Kerouac. Gerard Madden is an F.B.I. agent on a minor job in Tara, and is an old acquaintance of Harley. Miles MacArthur, Boris' colleague, provost Tate, and Thea's adversary in the Committee, Professor Heidel, as well as Victor's student friend Jude Busch all have their parts in the stories too. 
  
  Notes
  
  [1] See the event and exhibition of Joyce’s afternoon, a story, “An Afternoon with Afternoon,” documented in Chapter 1 of this book and at https://dtc-wsuv.org/afternoon-with-afternoon/index.html.
  [2] Some works listed in the various databases I consulted like Readers are no longer available and so cannot be verified. In cases like this, I rely on the work of previous scholars and welcome assistance from anyone who can assist me with fine tuning my list.
  [3] See Robert Coover’s "The End of Books." The New York Times Book Review. 21 June 1992. Online: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html.
  [4] This exhibition was curated by Kathi Inman Berens and me on 3-5 April 13. See http://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elit-loc/welcome-to-electronic-literature-its-emerging-forms/.
  [5] See Kali McKay's "Gertrude Stein and Her Audience: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and the Reconfiguration of Modern Authorship."
  https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/185287365.pdf.

  
  List of Scholarly Writings about Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden

  
  1992
  
  Douglas, J. Yellowlees. "What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot." Reader 28 (Fall 1992): 1-19. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.3632&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
  
  1993
  
  Bernstein, Mark. "Enactment in Information Farming." Hypertext '93: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Hypertext. December 1993, 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1145/168750.168837.
  
  Bernstein, Mark, Michael Joyce, and David Levine. "Contours of Constructive Hypertexts." ECHT '92: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext. December 1993, 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1145/168466.168517.
  
  Coover, Robert. "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer." The New York Times. August 29, 1993. Vol. CXLIII, No. 49, 496. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-hyperfiction.html.
  
  Douglas, J Yellowlees. "Where the Senses Become a Stage and Reading is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction." The Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 18-37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146290.
  
  Gess, Richard. "Magister Macintosh: Shuffled Notes on Hypertext Writing." The Drama Review 37.4 (1993): 38-44. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146291.
  
  1994
  
  Bikerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. NY, NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.
  
  Dunn, John. "Hyperfiction Moulthrop's Computer Novel Weaves a Web of Alternative Endings." George Tech Alumni Magazine Online 71.1 (1994).
  
  Schmundt, Hilmar. "Autor ex Machina: Electronic Hyperfictions: Utopian Poststructuralism and the Romanticism of the Computer Age." AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19.2 (1994): 223-246. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43023678.
  
  1995
  
  Bridges, Jon S. "Hypertext and Literature: Facts and Fictions." MA Thesis. Massey University. 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/10698.
  
  Kendall, Robert. "Writing for the New Millenium: The Birth of Electronic Literature." Poets & Writers Magazine. Nov./Dec. 1995.
  
  Strasma, Kip. "A Rhetoric for Hypertext Links: Connections to, within, and beyond Hypertext Nodes." Proceedings for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. March 23, 1995.
  
  1996
  
  Travis, Molly Abel. "Cybernetic Esthetics, Hypertext and the Future of Literature." Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 29.4 (December 1996): 115-129.
  
  1997
  
  Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives of Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
  
  Bolter, Jay David. "The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction." Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation. Ed. Philip G. Cohen. NY, NY: Routledge Press, 1997.
  
  Gaggi, Silvio. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film, the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
  
  Klastrup, Lisbeth. "Hyperizons: A study of interactive reading and readership in hyperfiction theory and practice, with an outlook to hyperfictions' future inspired by the reading of Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive." MA Thesis, University of Kent, 1997.
  
  Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. NY, NY: Free Press, 1997.
  
  1998
  
  Bernstein, Mark. "Pattern of Hypertext." Hypertext '98: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. May 1998, 21-29. https://doi.org/10.1145/276627.276630. Reprinted at https://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print.html.
  
  Bolter, J. D. "Hypertext and the Question of Visual Literacy." Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographical World. Ed. D. Reinking, M. C. McKenna?, L. D. Labbo, & R. D. Kieffer. Mahwah, MJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 3-13.
  
  1999
  
  Bernstein, Mark. "Structural Patterns and Hypertext Rhetoric." ACM Computing Surveys. December 1999. https://doi.org/10.1145/345966.346011.
  
  Calvi, Licia. "'Lector in Rebus': The Role of the Reader and the Characteristics of Hyperreading." Hypertext '99: The Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. February 1999, 101–109. https://doi.org/10.1145/294469.294495.
  
  Civello, Catherine A. "'Move over, Please': The Decentralization of the Teacher in the Computer-Based Classroom." The English Journal. 88.4 (Mar. 1999): 89-94. https://doi.org/10.2307/822426.
  
  Keep, Christopher. "The Disturbing Liveliness of Machines: Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Fiction." Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. 164-181.
  
  Phelan, James and Edward Maloney. "Authors, Readers, and Progression in Hypertext Narrative." Works and Days. Vol.17 &18, 1999.
  
  2000
  
  Douglas, J Yellowlees. The End of Books--or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
  
  Douglas, J Yellowlees and Andrew Hargadon. "The Pleasure Principle: Immersion, Engagement, Flow." Hypertext '00: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia. May 2000, 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1145/336296.336354.
  
  Eskelinen, Markku and Raine Koskimaa. Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, 2000.
  
  Koskimaa, Raine. "Digital Literature: From Text To Hypertext And Beyond (Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, Stuart Moulthrop)." PhD Dissertation. University of Jyväskylä, 2000.
  
  
  ---. "Reading Victory Garden." Dictung-Digital. September 2000. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2000/Koskimaa-12-Sep/.
  
  A. D. Malmud, "Tech(xt)s [links between text and technology]." IEEE MultiMedia, 7.4 (Dec. 2000): 6-9. https://doi.org/10.1109/93.895148.
  
  Selig, Robert L. "The Endless Reading of Fiction: Stuart Moulthrop's Hypertext Novel Victory Garden." Contemporary Literature 41.4 (Winter 2000): 642-660. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209006.
  
  Suter, Beat. Hyperfiktion und interaktive Narration. Zurich, CH: Update Verlag, 2000.
  
  2001
  
  Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Asscociates, Publishers, 2001. Eskelinen, Markku. "Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying." Electronic Book Review. 2001. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/cybertext-theory-what-an-english-professor-should-know-before-trying/.
  
  Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2001.
  
  Hedqvist, Sven. "Aristoteles och Hypertextromanen – Om uppbyggnad, sammankoppling, överblick och motivation i Stuart Moulthrops fiktiva hypertext Victory Garden." Thesis. Umeå University, 2001.
  
  Jensen, Nikolaj. "Internet Hyperfiction: Can It Ever Become a Widely Popular Artform?." MA Thesis. University of Copenhagen, 2001.
  
  Kouper, Inna. "Out of Nothing: In-Depth Hyperfiction Study." Hypertext '01: Proceedings for the 2001 ACM Hypertext Conference. September 2001, 71-72. https://doi.org/10.1145/504216.504238.
  
  Raley, Rita. "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance." Postmodern Culture 12.1 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2001.0023.
  
  Rau, Anja. "Wreader’s Digest—How to Appreciate Hyperfiction." Journal of Digital Information 1.7 (2001). https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/28.
  
  Weal, Mark J., David E. Millard, Danius Michaelides, and David C. De Roure. "Building Narrative Structures Using Context Based Linking." Hypertext '01: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. September 2001, 37–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/504216.504231.
  
  2002
  
  Bernstein, Mark. "Storyspace 1." Hypertext '02: Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. June 2002, 172–181. https://doi.org/10.1145/513338.513383.
  
  Wong, Mou-Lan. "The Garden of Living Paths: Interactive Narratives in Global Geek Culture." Digitalizing The Global Text. Ed. Paul Allen Miller. National Taiwan University and the University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
  
  2003
  
  Goicoechea, Maria. "Reading Cyborgs." Internet in Linguistics, Translation and Literary Studies. Ed. Santiago Posteguillo et al. Universitat Jaume, 2003. 71-88.
  
  Johnston, John. "Vectors of the Virtual in New Media Theory." L'Esprit Créateur. 43.2 (Summer 2003): 92-104. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2010.0383.
  
  Koskimaa, Raine. "In Search of Califia." Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature. Ed. Jan van Looy and Jan Baetens, 53—67, 2003.
  
  Rettberg, Jill Walker. "Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World." PhD Dissertation. University of Bergen, 2003.
  
  Ziegler, Henning. "When Hypertext Became Uncool: Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface." Dichtung Digital 2003. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/issue/1/ziegler/.
  
  2004
  
  Gunder, Anna. "Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games." PhD Dissertation. Uppsala University, 2004.
  
  Leishman, Donna. "Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation." PhD Dissertation. Glasgow School of Art, 2004.
  
  Peacocke, Sharyn. "Hypertext & The Encoding Of Meaning." October 2004. http://peacockepress.com/SharynPeacocke/Hypertext-Encoding.html.
  
  Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps." Dichtung Digital. 2004. http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2004/1/Ryan/index.htm.
  
  ---. "Multivariant Narratives." A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Malden, MA, 2004. 415-430.
  
  2005
  
  Ball, Cheryl. "A New Media Reading Strategy." PhD Dissertation. Michigan Technological University, 2005.
  
  Bouchardon, Serge. Le récit littéraire interactif. Narrativité et interactivité. PhD Dissertation. The University of Compiègne, 2005.
  
  Maloney, Edward. "Footnotes in Fiction: A Rhetorical Approach." PhD Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2005.
  
  2006
  
  Sassón-Henry, Perla. "Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8.1 (2006): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1289.
  
  2007
  
  Ciccoricco, David. "Tending the Garden Plot: Moulthrop's Victory Garden." Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama Press, 2007. 94-123.
  
  Engberg, Maria. "Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media." PhD Dissertation. Uppsala University, 2007.
  
  Ensslin, Astrid. Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London, UK: Continuum Press, 2007.
  
  Fizek, Sonia. "Multimodality in the context of cyberliterature—have the new electronic media revolutionized a narrative." Online Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). 2007. http://pala.ac.uk./2007.html.
  
  Glavanakova, Alexandra. Reading America Hypertextually. 2007. https://research.uni-sofia.bg/handle/10506/1244.
  
  Szűts, Zoltán. "Szellem a gépben. A hypertext." PhD Dissertation. Eötvös Loránd University, 2007.
  
  2008
  
  Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
  
  Rustad, Hans Kristian. "Tekstspill i hypertekst. Koherensopplevelse og sjangergjenkjennelse i lesing av multimodale hyperfiksjoner." PhD Dissertation. University of Agder, 2008.
  
  Zenner, Roman. Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet: A Structural and Narratological Analysis. Saarbrücken VDM Verlag Dr. Müller 2008.
  
  2009
  
  Eskelinen, Markku. "Travels in Cybertextuality: The Challenge of Ergodic Literature and Ludology to Literary Theory." PhD Dissertation. University of Jyväskylä, 2009.
  
  Harpold, Terry. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
  
  Hutchinson, Andrew. "Techno-historical Limits of the Interface: The Performance of Interactive Narrative Experiences." PhD Dissertation. Curtin University, 2009.
  
  Kolb, David A. "Making Revisions Hyper-visible." Hypertext '08: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. June 2008, 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379115.
  
  Marshall, Catherine C. "Reading and Writing the Electronic Book." Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Morgan & Williston, VT: Claypool Publishers, 2009. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009.
  
  Wilhelmsson, Per. "Dynamic Interactive Storytelling in Computer Games." MS Thesis. Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, 2009. http://kiosk.nada.kth.se/utbildning/grukth/exjobb/rapportlistor/2009/rapporter09/wilhelmsson_per_09036.pdf.
  
  2010
  
  Bell Alice. "Interrupting the Transmission: The Slippery Worlds of Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 2010. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281288_4.
  
  Bennett, Guy. « Ce livre qui n'en est pas un : le texte littéraire électronique » Littérature 160.4 (2010): 37-43.
  
  Chunlu, Cai. "Victory Garden: A Cyber Labyrinth." Contemporary Foreign Literature. 2010-03. http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTotal-DDWW201003019.htm.
  
  Wood, Rulon Matley. "Hypertext and Ethnographic Representation: A Case Study." PhD Dissertation, University of Utah, 2011.
  
  2011
  
  Bell, Alice. "Ontological Boundaries and Methodological Leaps: The Importance of Possible Worlds Theory for Hypertext Fiction (and Beyond)." New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Ed. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 63-82.
  
  ---. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. NY, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2010.
  
  Bell, Alice and Astrid Ensslin. "'I know what it was. You know what it was': Second-Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction." Narrative 19.3 (October 2011): 311-329.
  
  Branny-Jankowska. Emilia. "Rytm jako kategoria opisu e-literatury." Liberatura, e-literatura i...Remiksy, remediacje, redefinicje. Ed. Monika Górska Olesińska, 2011.
  
  Seiça, Álvaro. "Transdução: Processos de Transferência na Literatura e Arte Digitais." MA Thesis. Universidade de Évora, 2011.
  
  Sena Felippe, Mara Alice. "Leituras e Leitores: textos e hipertextos diante das práticas do virtual." 2011. http://www.bdtd.ufjf.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=1134.
  
  Tyrkkö, Jukka. "Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives." PhD Dissertation. University of Helsinki, 2011.
  
  2012
  
  Abba, Tom. "Archiving Digital Narrative: Some Issues." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 18.2 (2012): 121-125. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856511433687.
  
  Fagerjord, Anders. "Design som medievitenskapelig metode." Norsk Medietidsskrift. 19.3 (2012): 198-215.
  
  Gray, Michael E. "Reading Ineffability and Realizing Tragedy in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." MA Thesis. Western Kentucky University, 2012. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1188/.
  
  Nack, Frank and Annika Waern. "Mobile Digital Interactive Storytelling—a winding path." New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 18.1-2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2011.641418.
  
  Seiça, Álvaro. "E-Borges: Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden." Op. Cit.: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies 2.1 (2012):130 -141. http://hdl.handle.net/1956/8952.
  
  2013
  
  Bell, Alice. "Unnatural Narrative in Hypertext Fiction." 2013. https://tinyurl.com/y4rkhxln.
  
  De Vecchi Espinosa de los Monteros, Bruno F. "La imagen en la novel hipertextual electronica: el caso de Stuart Moulthrop." DeSignis 21 (2013): 62-71.
  
  Guilet, Anaïs. "Pour une littérature cyborg : l'hybridation médiatique du texte littéraire." PhD Dissertation. Université of Poitiers, 2013.
  
  Kolb, David. "Narrative Hypertext, On the Level." Hypertext '13: The Proceedings of the Third Narrative and Hypertext Workshop. May 2013, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/2462216.2462219.
  
  Sassón-Henry, Perla. Golpe De Gracia: Más Allá De La Trama. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2013.
  
  Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. "Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing." A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2013. 163-182.
  
  2014
  
  Galvanakova, Alexandra. "Linking Spaces in the Cybertext Novel." 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10506/1247.
  
  Swift, Elizabeth. "The Hypertextual Experience: Digital Narratives, Spectator, Performance." PhD Thesis. University of Exeter, 2014. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/16025.
  
  2015
  
  Ciccoricco, David. Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
  
  Rettberg, Scott. "The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?" Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice. Ed. Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen. NY, NY: Routledge Press, 2015. Reprinted at: http://art.colorado.edu/df/Rettberg.pdf.
  
  Zimmerman, Heiko. Autorschaft und digitale Literatur: Geschichte, Medienpraxis und Theoriebildung. Trier WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 2015.
  
  2016
  
  Ntelia, Renata Elizabetta. Review of "Digital Revolution," curated by Christos Karras. CounterText 2.2 (Aug 2016): 263-267.
  
  2017
  
  Mouthrop, Stuart and Dene Grigar. Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
  
  2018
  
  Ensslin, Astrid and Lyle Skains. "Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine." The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. Ed. Joseph Tabbi. NY, NY: Bloombury Academic, 295-309.
  
  2019
  
  Garcia, Domanic. "Techniques for a Possible Handling of Ethics in a Post-truth Culture." Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext, Emerald Publoshing Limited. (2019): 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-425-020191003.
  
  Hernández, Ana Abril. "Narrativas laberínticasestudio semiótico del laberinto en Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges y Stuart Moulthrop." Thesis. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2019.
  
  Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.
   
• 1 2020-08-18T13:15:53-07:00 Critical Essay on Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden by Raine Koskimaa 33 Reprint of Raine Koskimaa's essay from Dichtung Digital plain 2020-08-20T13:04:23-07:00 This essay by Raine Koskimaa is a revised version of the article published in Dictung-Digital in September 2000. It offers excellent insights into the novel and provides details about the storyline, structure, and influences. A special thank you to the author for allowing us to include it in our book.

  
  Reading Victory Garden: Competing Interpretations and Loose Ends

  by Raine Koskimaa,University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, raine.koskimaa@jyu.fi  

  Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) is one of the "classical hyperfictions" alongside Michael Joyce's afternoon, story (1987, 1990) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995). Of these three, however, Victory Garden has been all but neglected by the critics. While especially afternoon a story has been the subject of dozens of detailed analyses, Victory Garden has been mainly shortly referred to, receiving mentions as a rather traditional, typical academic novel, etc. There are, however, several reasons to pay closer attention to this tour de force of one of the most innovative and prolific hyperfiction authors so far, as I shall be trying to show in this article.

  Moulthrop's digital oeuvre is wide ranging. He first started with an adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" (which included a mass of original text in addition to Borges' source story) using software he had programmed himself for this purpose. He later transferred the text into the brand new Storyspace hypertext environment - the work and its reception by a group of students is described in Moulthrop's influential essay "Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor and the Fiction of Forking Paths" (Moulthrop 1991). Victory Garden was published in 1991. After the publication of this work, he moved to mainly web-based works, including The Colour of Television (1996; with Sean Cohen), Hegirascope (1995/1997), and Reagan Library (1999). Hegirascope effectively uses push technology to produce a stream of narrative fragments starting with the highly charged "What if the word would not be still?" header. Reagan Library uses Quick Time VR plug-in to add a three-dimensional panorama illustration to the hypertext; the work can be navigated both through the panorama or through the text links. It also uses random operators in selecting the text materials - repeated visits to particular locations add information to them, thus "reducing noise" and giving more coherent picture of the text. 
  
  One obvious difference between Victory Garden and afternoon, a story or Patchwork Girl is size: Victory Garden includes 993 lexias, and more than 2804 links connecting them (compared to 539 lexias in afternoon, a story with 951 links, and 323 lexias in Patchwork Girl with 462 links). In Victory Garden there are also several original features like a menu of preordered paths, and a map of the "Victory Garden" - this map differs fundamentally from the cognitive maps representing the hypertextual structure employed in Patchwork Girl (and in the PC version of afternoon). [1]
  
  Victory Garden: An Overview
  Victory Garden (Macintosh version) employs the most simple variant of reader interfaces Storyspace offers. The navigating mainly happens through a toolbar with five functions: the backtrack button (takes you back to the previously read lexia), the link list button (opens a window listing all the links leaving from the current lexia, each link is named and the title of destination lexia is told), the yes/no button (can be used to answer possible questions in the text), the print button (makes a hardcopy of the lexia), and the type-in field. Usually each lexia has a default link––that is, simply by pressing the return key, the reader can follow a path provided by the author. Pressing the control keys shows the anchor words / phrases by framing them (double clicking these words activates links which may differ from the default link). In short, the reader may move in the text by pressing the return key after reading each lexia, double clicking anchor words, opening the link list and selecting a link from the list, by typing a word in the type-in box (an alternative to double clicking anchor words), or, back-tracking her way.
  
  From the title page on, the reader has several options for going forward. She can go to the map and choose one of the lexias presented there as her starting point. She can also go to the page listing "Paths to Explore", 13 preordered pathways through the text each concentrating on different aspects of the narrative materials (some of them loosely organised around various characters appearing in the text). From the "Paths to Explore" there is a default link - which is easily left unnoticed - leading to a lexia listing "Paths to Deplore", offering seven more preordered paths (it should be noted that even when choosing one of these paths, the reader may always choose not to follow the default links and select an alternative narrative strain). There is still the possibilty of going to a lexia where the reader can build up a sentence by repeatedly choosing a word from two alternatives offered. This way several different sentences can be constructed, each leading to different starting points (some of the sentences coinciding with the starting of "Paths to Explore" & "Paths to Deplore").
  
  Once having started reading the reader confronts fragments of narratives (usually several clearly successive lexias developing a certain story strand), letters, TV report transcripts, citations from books fictional and theoretical, song lyrics, and other various materials. Most of the materials are related to the Gulf War in 1991 - either things happening in the Gulf area, or, meanwhile in the home front. The Gulf War figures heavily in all the story lines, if not concretely influencing characters' lives, then at least as a background force for larger changes in society affecting indirectly (but not a bit more weakly) their lives. 
  
  There are direct citations from Jorge Luis Borges' short stories "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", as well as more or less implicit allusions to them. There are also mentions to or citations from such novels as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegan's Wake ("riverRerun"!). The theoretical materials include citations from Donna Haraway, Neil Postman, Arthur C. Kroker, Jay David Bolter, and Michael Joyce, etc. 
  
  Victory Garden, like afternoon, story, is dominated by plain alphanumeric text. The map in the beginning is one obvious exception, and there are also a few lexias with crude graphics (see picture), and the signatures in letters are reproduced in handwriting. There is even one crossword-cum-concrete poetry style lexia, enhancing the visual aspect of text. 
  
  
  Main Story-Lines and Characters
  The main characters in Victory Garden are people from a University town Tara, most of them teachers or students in the University. Thea Agnew is a professor of rhetorics (or something like that). Sisters Veronica and Emily Runbird are her pupils, although Emily is currently in military service in the Gulf War handling mail in the headquarters. Thea is also the head of a Curriculum Revision Committee (for studies in Western Culture). An eccentric scholar Boris Urquhart is supposedly an expert in Virtual Reality technologies, employed in a top-secret project, and also on the Curriculum Revision Committee. Harley Morgan is a television journalist who has refused to go to the Gulf Area and is spending his "stress-leave" in Tara with his girl friend Veronica Runbird (several years older than Veronica, he has earlier had an affair with Thea, too). Emily Runbird, on the other hand, has an affair with Boris Urquhart, but his former boyfriend Victor Gardner (!) is still desperately in love with her. Leroy is Thea's teenage son, who has left his school to make his "On the Road" tour à la Jack Kerouac. Gerard Madden is an F.B.I. agent on a minor job in Tara, and is an old acquaintance of Harley. Miles MacArthur, Boris' colleague, provost Tate, and Thea's adversary in the Committee, Professor Heidel, as well as Victor's student friend Jude Busch all have their parts in the stories, too. 
  
  There are several scenes which occur in most of the preordered paths, identically or with little variation. The order in which these scenes are related differs quite a lot from one path to another but mostly they can be arranged in a chronological order. As Jill Walker Rettberg has finely showed in her paper, "Piecing together and Tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon", Gérard Genette's narratological concepts dealing with the temporal order of narratives can be employed with hypertext narratives, too. Even though the narration in Victory Garden is anachronical (events are narrated in a different order from which they happened) and even though there are differences in this anachronical order in different paths, there are still indexes or markers enough to help the reader put the events in a particular order (Walker 1999; Genette 1980). This does not hold for the whole of Victory Garden, to be exact, but we can take it as a starting point.
  
  There is a sequence in which Thea, Veronica, Harley, and Miles are swimming in the Whitman Creek natural park area, when they learn that the area has been sold to a company planning to build a golf course up stream, effectively ruining the whole creek. Immediately after hearing about these plans, their swimming is further disturbed by a protest against the plans, ending with a scene where one of the protesters declares himself to be Uqbari the Prophet, condemns the plans to ruin the creek, and finally, symbolically, urinates into the creek in front of a TV-crew in a helicopter. Later the same evening, there is a big costume party hosted by Provost Tate. After quite a carnevalesque party scene the provost invites Thea, Harley, and Veronica to his office to discuss Boris, wondering if he is in his mind (after the Uqbari the Prophet scandal).
  
  One of the key scenes is another party, this time a much smaller one, in Thea's house, which is disturbed by another appearance of Uqbari - this time he comes up in an army style camouflage outfit and with a gun which he fires a couple of times in Thea's back yard and flees. Then Urquhart goes to the garage, meets agent Madden there, who asks him a few questions about the security of the University computer network, also inquires Urquhart's opinion of Jude Busch, possibly in liaison to assumed security violations. Urquhart leaves in Harley's car, and when he sees Madden tailing him, he tries to get rid of him, nearly crashing with a truck. He ends up at the student bar, Just Say No Cafe, where he meets Harley, takes him along, and continues running. Finally, they are stopped by the police, who, in a very Rodney King affairesque scene, start beating Harley (who is Black). But then the police see Harley's press ID, realising he is a CNN reporter - agent Madden rushes to the scene at the same time, and Urquhart uses the occasion to flee once again. He runs to the old observatory, where he was going all along, to meet Provost Tate who works there. From that point on the story branches to several variations which I shall be dealing in more detail below.
  
  There is also a scene happening in Saudi Arabia describing Emily's experiences during the first air raid after the war has finally started. It includes Emily's and her sergeant's discussion about Emily's loves, as well as various stories told by other G. I.s. The overall length of this episode differs from one path to another. One of the paths ends in a black screen with no default links suggesting that Emily and her group are victims of an Iraqi missile.  
  
  There are several quite clear-cut sequences like these: one describing a long and serious discussion between Thea and her son Leroy; a telephone discussion between Thea and Heidel, where the latter informs Thea that he has used fraudulent means to force Thea to leave her position as the Commission Head; a description of the first war evening when Thea and Veronica are watching the television coverage not quite believing the war has really broken out, when their evening is disturbed by Omega-fraternity boys who have come to protest outside "leftist radical" Thea Agnew's house; an intimate scene between Jude and Victor where Jude acts up as Emily, etc.
  
  The sequences listed above are not told in succession like this - they are intertwined with each other so that the reader can follow one scene for some lexia's length, then the focus shifts to another scene, then possibly to a third one, before returning to the first one. This is pretty much like any old modern fiction where several story lines are intertwined, but usually easy enough to follow.
  
  Even though the different paths give different weight to different scenes and characters, most of them include at least something of all the central scenes. There are exceptions though: in the "NORMAN - The Path of Glory", for example, Victor (and scenes related to him) is not mentioned at all. After the first readings of Victory Garden one is tempted to accept Robert Coover's description of it as quite a typical academic novel. But there is much more to it actually. 
  
  Hypertextual Structure in Victory Garden
  As said, Victory Garden offers 20 preordered paths through which the reader can traverse simply by pressing the return key after each lexia. These paths differ greatly for their length and coherence. The shortest path is just four lexias long, while "The Grand Tour" comprises some 400 of the 993 lexias. "NORMAN - the path of glory" is a very coherent - one is tempted to say traditional - narrative, where Emily is the main character. The scenes from Saudi Arabia and Tara are in balance, and letters from Tara to Emily, as well as letters from Emily, are also in an important role. Even though absent from Tara, Emily is clearly the central figure so that events in Tara are all somehow related to her.
  
  The paths have two ways to end. The first way is to deny the default link - at some point pressing the return key will produce only an audible beep. This is as close as hypertext can come to an ending, but this is no definite ending in any way (Jane Yellowlees Douglas especially has dealt with the question of ending and closure in hypertext fiction: see Douglas 1992, 118-152; 1994). First, there may be other links from the lexia even though there are no default links. Thus, by double clicking yielding words or activating the link list, the reader can still find links leading further from the provisional ending. And even though there were no links at all, it is always possible to backtrack one's way and make a different choice somewhere at an earlier stage and that way totally avoid the dead end. So, after a path of lexias connected with default links, the author may suggest a possible ending by denying any further default links, but this is no more than a suggestion which the reader may or may not accept.
  
  The other way to provide "a sense of an ending" is to make an infinite loop - from one point the story returns to an earlier phase in the path from which it then continues exactly the same way until it reaches the point from where it is once again thrown back to the earlier phase. Thus, the path does not exactly end, but there is nothing new happening anymore; using Douglas' distinction, we can say that in a case like this there is no ending of a conventional kind, but some kind of closure is nevertheless provided. Naturally, the same precautions hold here as with the no-default option: the reader may, at any point in the infinite loop choose an alternative link leading her out of the loop.
  
  We can think of a third solution for ending, too, even though I find it much more problematic than the previous two. The reader may always take it as her task to exhaust all the possibilities in the hypertext. In a more or less systematic way she can try to reach each and every single lexia in the hypertext. Even though there may always be readers finding this the best attitude towards hypertexts, there may not be too many hypertext fictions offering even a theoretical possibility to succeed in this attempt. With texts like afternoon, a story and Patchwork Girl (or, Reagan Library and Hegirascope) it does not take too much time and effort to read the lexias in their totality - it can even be argued that even though these texts quite naturally do invoke the idea of parallel or intersecting alternative possible stories, deep inside they also suggest precisely this exhaustive (or nearly exhaustive) reading as the "real story" - Douglas' description and interpretation of afternoon illustrates quite convincingly this point. But then, this has to be just one very special sub-class of hypertext, intentionally limited to a relatively small and dense web of storylines, and also, I would like to argue, intentionally subscribing to the aesthetics of traditional narrative form.
  
  But there is a mathematical logic behind the lexia-link structure making it unavoidable that even a relatively small number of lexias and a relatively restricted number of links between them, in any case, produce quite a great number of possible paths through the hypertext web. Because of this, the whole of hypertext is, quite soon, out of full authorial control. The order in which story segments are read, the local context for each lexia, determines to some extent how they are interpreted, and in some cases the cumulative effect of unpredicted interpretations may really produce a new story altogether. Of course, at least since Stanley Fish's essay "Interpreting the Variorum", we have been confronted with the idea that any stable, printed text may be interpreted in totally different ways in different interpretative communities (Fish 1976; reprinted in Fish 1980). With hypertexts the situation is different, though: even if we belong to the same interpretive community and thus share the same interpretative conventions, we can still end up with radically different interpretations. The difference is located in the functioning of the work itself, not in the interpretative strategies.
  
  This discussion of the possibility of exhausting a hypertext, and of totalistic control of hypertext narrative, is highly relevant for Victory Garden. With as many as 993 lexias and 2804 links the task of reaching and reading every lexia is a serious challenge - since a hypertext fiction, in Espen Aarseth's terminology, is not random, but restricted in access, many lexias require the reader to go through a certain path of lexias before it can be reached. (Thinking in other terms, if we forget the links, the textual content of Victory Garden is the equivalent of some 200 print pages, which is still, in novelistic terms, quite a modest number.) Because of that, reading all the lexias in Victory Garden means that one has to read, or at least skip through, many of the lexias several times. Douglas estimates that reading a 500-lexia hypertext requires as much as 70 hours, and compares that to the six to twelve hours required for an average reader to consume a 300-page novel (1992, 50). Trying to comprehend all the possible permutations of orders in which the lexias may be read, is well beyond the capacity of any individual reader. Thus, even though still a limit case, the Victory Garden is clearly pointing towards the kind of hypertext fiction which, because of its size, is theoretically and practically, inexhaustible. [2] Because of this, I will rule out the exhaustive reading as a definitive ending for Victory Garden (there are other reasons too, to be dealt with later). 
  
  Singular Loops
  One of the hypertextual structures in Victory Garden is what I call a singular loop (as opposed to an indefinite loop). In singular loop the reader is taken back to a previous point in the path she is reading, but the next time around not. There is a loop, a sequence of lexias read twice, but after that the path continues forward:  
  
  
  
  This particular device is used in a few places in Victory Garden, but usually there is no clear motivation for this. One explanation could be - and this is related to one interpretation I'll give for the whole text - invoking a certain sense of malfunctioning, of an unintentional lapse in the running of the narration. With loops, both infinite and singular, the question of repetition is foregrounded. Rettberg has written about the "Nietzschean repetition" (following J. Hillis Miller), repetition with difference in afternoon, a story (Walker 1999). With loops the difference follows from the backward movement in reading - it is like a concretization of Peter Brooks' idea of "anticipating retrospection" in reading: we read expecting to get a thorough understanding of a situation, trusting that that understanding will help us better comprehend the things we are currently reading (Brooks 1984). With loops in hypertext, in the occasion where some (local / temporary) conclusion is reached, the reader is taken back to read the previous moments anew in the light of that conclusion.
  
  There is one particularly interesting occasion mixing loops and repetition with variation. The moment when Urquhart - after running away from the police - arrives at the Observatory and meets Provost Tate, in one path, will be repeated not once but twice, and in each case with concrete difference, not just difference produced by the repetition. The titles of the lexias in that sequence are as follows:
  
  "Ring" -> "Help Mister Wizard" -> "Fool's Errand" -> "Ring Cycle" -> "Errant Fool" -> "In Need of Help" -> "Ring Around" -> "Arrant Fool" -> "Helpful"
  
  The beginning paragraphs of each starting lexia seem to be commenting on this exact cycle structure:
  
  "Ring": U ran through the dark field, slipping and scrambling on the dry ground. He knew Madden was behind him somewhere. He did not look. […]
  "Ring Cycle": Once more U ran through the dark field, slipping and scrambling on the dry ground. He knew Madden was behind him somewhere but he did not look. […]
  "Ring Around": U is once again still always running through that dark field, slipping scrambling through his own footprints on the dry ground. He knows Madden is behind him somewhere but he doesn't dare look. You've had this dream before, you know. [emphasis added]
  
  This sequence comes (in some of the preordered paths, at least) right after a long sequence where Urquhart is fleeing first from agent Madden, then from the highway patrolmen, and then from Madden again - so even if you happened to read only the third variation of the "Ring" (starting with "Ring Around") you could easily interpret the beginning (“U is once again still always running…”) in the light of these previous chases, totally ignorant of the other variations. Other variations during this cycle are less significant:
  
  "Help Mister Wizard": […] U picked up the book. It was quite heavy. Ponderous.
  "In Need of Help": […] U picked up the book. It was very heavy. Voluminous.
  "Helpful": […] U picked up the book. It was very heavy. Massive.
  
  The title "Ring Cycle" invokes in quite an ironical way (this is no real loop, or, ring, at all since the lexias are not the same but just closely resemble each other) an allusion to Wagner's opera cycle, and also to the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. This again can be related to a more general interpretation, where Gesamtkunstwerk could be seen as an early version of virtual reality (and multimedia). What is important here is that this time, when the repetition is only approximate (the three instances differing in details), it has a totally different effect than with real loops: this time it is more like different drafts, or adjustments, trying to find the exact atmosphere.
  
  This again nicely demonstrates the difference between hypertextual semantics and narrative semantics: narratively speaking we certainly are dealing with repetition; the hypertextual structure here is plainly a linear path (as shown in the lexia title list above).
  
  Frame Stories: Conspiracy, Virtual Reality, Dream as Hypertext
  The obvious explanation for Victory Garden's structure of alternative story paths is Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths" - the title refers to that story; Borges is mentioned in the credits "for seeing it all before," and there are instances in the text itself explaining that relation:

  “At the time of the last great War, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a fiction that would not conform to lines of determinism or destiny -- a fantastic Chinese novel called The Garden of Forking Paths. Now we find ourselves living once more through world conflict, admittedly of a very different kind from the events of 1914-18 or 1939-45.”

  There is also one lexia including a dense summary of the idea of the "garden of forking paths":

  “All the Above
  
  In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.
  
  - Borges his Garden “

  
  In this sense Victory Garden can be seen as a follow up for Moulthrop's early work "Forking Paths" - he says that explicitly on his website: "Victory Garden is an original work based partly on the structure of 'The Garden of Forking Paths'" (from the menu in the left frame, choose "forking paths"). Robert Coover has interpreted the map in the beginning as an illustration of either a garden with paths and benches, or, a graveyard (rectangles being not benches but graves) - the garden referring to Borges' story, the graveyard to Gulf War casualties.
  
  Even though the idea of forking paths must be seen as the dominant metaphor for the overall structure of Victory Garden, it is not the only possibility. Following the proper paths, the reader will confront a sequence where it is explained that the research Boris Urquhart is doing is about transforming a person's dreams into text. But that is not all - other persons may pick up things in the transcript and give related feedback to the dreamer, thus "directing" the flow of her dream:

  Loop
  
  "The transaction loop is simple," Urquhart told them. "NVACS compiles its transcript, which is displayed in real time on the monitor here." Indicating the western wall. "The transcript takes the form of a simple constructive hypertext with unconstrained possibilities for branching."
  
  Tate smiled indulgently. "What's that you say, Boris?"
  
  "Transcript contains many words. Pick a word, any word; pass it to the computer. NVACS specifies its semantic and iconolectic correlatives then formulates an appropriate Subliminal Suggestion Holoform (SSH), which it feeds back to the human interactor through his personal listening device."
  
  Tate pointed quizzically at his ears as if to say, you mean headphones ? Urquhart nodded. "Ah," said Tate. "Thanks.” [3]

  There are several lexias which clearly describe a dream, or other dreamlike experiences - these are clearly typographically marked to differ from other lexias. A "minimal" interpretation could be that these dream sequences represent Urquhart's dreams-as-hypertexts experiments, or, simulate them (the reader's choices imitating feedback from fictional observers of the experiment). But the general logic of interpretation works so that once we detect the dream-as-hypertext structure in one part of the work; there is always the possibility to widen that interpretation to go with the whole work - so the frame number two is this dream-as-hypertext version, in which we can either read Victory Garden as a record of one such experiment (or several experiments), or, as a simulation of that kind of experiment, the reader assuming the position of the observer of the fictional experiment. There are also several places stating that Urquhart is studying Virtual Reality - and there is even a description of a course he is (should be) giving on the topic: 

  8088
  
  CS/HUM 8088 - Special Topics in Cybernetic Arts and Sciences: Simulation and Subversion
  
  B. Urquhart * Tu&F 2000-2130 * Tower 606
  
  Do you suffer from frequent headaches? Believe in extraterrestrial life? Have you ever had an out-of-body experience, with or without the use of drugs? Do you watch a lot of television? Are you a proficient COBOL programmer?
  
  This is a graduate research seminar concentrating on aesthetic and political implications of virtual reality and cyberspace technologies. Readings in cybernetics, informatics, communications theory, detective fiction. Frequent quizzes.
  
  Note: This course is not available on interactive videodisc.

  It is possible that Boris is studying both virtual realities and dreams-as-hypertexts, but it is also possible that, since his work is classified, the virtual reality is merely a cover. And of course, we can take the truly forking paths type approach and determine that in some possible story he is dealing with dreams and hypertexts, in others with virtual realities, and still, in some with both. Whatever the solution, the fact remains that there are several mentions of Boris' interest in virtual realities. Also, there are some passages which strongly suggest that at least some of the scenes in Victory Garden are representations of virtual reality experiments; there are some lexias which clearly allude to such cyberpunk classics as Vernor Vinge's "True Names" or William Gibson's Neuromancer, or the not-so-classic motion picture The Lawnmower Man:

  Create
  
  What makes you think of me as paranoid? Could be the way everyone spends his time plotting against you.
  
  Let me tell you about my vision, Tate relates, a vision of the End of History: All the experience of humankind, Tate orates, is a huge cosmic riddle whose answer is - whose answer is Something Out Of Nothing .
  
  ..and we have only now entered into the age of autonomous and self-modifying simulacra, the moment of convergence between the IS and the COULD BE. Which is where you come in.
  
  U must engineer a System - or be enraged by another man's. […]  
  
  
  Tate Reboots~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  You find the nearest rheostat and twist it till the room dims down to near blackness. This takes Tate by surprise and he's caught up in the state-change algorithm, before he knows what's going on he's been redefined down to a nearly immobile pair Tate of eyes.
  
  - Dirty trick, Tate protests, trying furiously to invoke a subroutine.
  
  You allow your palm to linger over the switch. - Don't tempt me. Now what was that about a mysterious speaker?
  
  Tate winks his left eye three times. - ESCAPE-PF13? he tries. Command-period?
  
  - Talk, you insist.
  
  - CONTROL-ALT-DELETE! he cries and vanishes in a flash of blue light. 

  Once again, we are left with the feeling that possibly all we have encountered so far is just some kind of virtual reality - possibly all of Tara, and everything else, including the Gulf War, is virtual reality simulation created for some purpose not known to us. This would be very much like the plot in Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint (1959), or more recently, in the film The Truman Show (1998). This interpretation would also explain the structure of forking paths - with simulation it is always possible to change some variables and make another run mapping an alternative course of events. There could be a sub-experiment going on trying to find out how Boris would react to different scenarios like Emily's death in Saudi Arabia.
  
  And finally, we can never forget the old conspiracy-paranoia solution. There are clear evidences of Boris believing in some kind of conspiracy; belief in different orders of conspiracies (or paranoias) could be possibly attached to several other characters too:

  Coincidence […]
  
  Tate opened his hands, palms up. "History, Agent Madden. Human affairs. The struggles of nations. What do you suppose the odds are of such a rare astronomical event happening just as the industrialized world enters its most significant military conflict since the Second World War?"
  
  As would most of us, Madden immediately heard music: the four-note signature of The Twilight Zone theme, cycling over and over in his head. He knew the spy business had had its share of eccentrics in the old days, but Tate was something special. Not wishing to show disrespect, he kept these thoughts to himself. "Coincidence," he said.  

  Big Games
  
  "Big games and nasty games, kiddo. The war's just for starters. There's some major changes in store, especially for those of us without a penis. You know what they're thinking. For ten years we tried to teach you Family Values, but you wouldn't toe the line, bitch. So now we'll have to try some new rules. Yeah. They'll come after abortion, affirmative action, and free speech early in the day, but why stop there - why not go all the way? Why not give up this pretense of equality and accept a society with different levels of entitlement, different classes of citizenship? It's their economic policy, after all. So why not go all the way and repeal the 19th Amendment?"  
  
  "Whoa," Veronica responded. "Sounds like you've been on the Western Civ warpath too long."
  
  "Bingo," Thea cried. "Everything fucking well connects."

  There is one hint of what the supposed bigger plot behind all might be about. It is related to Japanese Master Johndan's ideas of "Shadow Economy" and its systematic application as a huge simulation:

  We Can Work It Out
  
  "I'm talking about a systematic application of Master Johndan’s) vision. Think about it, Boris. A vast simulation embracing all aspects of economic activity, a gigantic competitive structure with hundreds of millions of players - or are they workers? - who would in fact derive their livelihood from subsidies paid out according to their performance in the game. A game involving technologies, politics, laws, regulations, ideas, trends, fashions, philosophies, belief systems. I'm talking about greatest imaginative endeavor in human history." […] 

  So, after all, all or some of the forking story paths may be fabrications of paranoid minds. All in all, we have four different frames with which to motivate the structure in Victory Garden: the forking paths idea (which is closely linked to possible worlds semantics), the dream-as-hypertext, the virtual reality simulation, and, conspiracy paranoia. It should be stressed that none of the above excludes any other frame. Thus, Boris may be a real paranoiac used in a virtual reality experiment being a part of some larger plot, etc. In this aspect it differs from afternoon, a story and Patchwork Girl, both of which are built around one central concept: in afternoon (according to a paradigmatic interpretation of J. Yellowlees Douglas; 1992, 118-150) the sense of guilt of the protagonist is the cause for delaying the final revelation, leading to all kinds of digressions; in Patchwork Girl, more explicitly, the equivalence of Frankenstein's Monster and the text (both being patchworks of their kind).
  
  Intertextual Fields of Reference
  I will next turn to intertextual references and allusions in Victory Garden, which support the different interpretational frames described above.
  
  1. Borges' "The Garden of Forking paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
  There is the direct citation from "Garden" (see above), and a scene from a seminar where Miles MacArthur discusses the story with his (actually, Boris') students. While the students do not find much of interest in Borges' story - ("I think Borges was an intellectual masturbator" as one of the students comments), MacArthur gives a positive interpretation of the story anyway:

  Work
  
  "No, wait," Macarthur maintained, "you're not getting it. We're talking about possibilities and alternatives. Try for a minute to see beyond necessity, beyond determinism. Who says there's only one way? Who says it only happens once? If we use our imaginations we can learn to see the world differently, and with that vision we can create systems that aren't constrained to singularity. Multiple values, multiple horizons. That's what the shift to virtuality is all about - to create new worlds that make room for difference. Why, someday we might even be able to bend time itself..."

  This is also connected to virtual realities by a student:

  With Mirrors
  
  "The trouble is," Jude Busch noted, "what that story has to say about time is really a lot of horseshit. Time is a garden of possibilities, some kind of cosmic combinatorial, a universal lottery." She reached over and poked Victor in the ribs. "I can see how that connects to VR, even if some of us are too slow."
  
  "Time becomes the matrix of all simulations," Amanda put in, her prodigiousness showing.

  This is an exceptionally explicit case of metafictionality, where the text itself discusses and proposes the way in which itself should or could be interpreted. But there is another dimension to the relation: Victory Garden as a rewriting or appropriation of "The Garden of Forking Paths".
  
  Quite apparently, there is a correspondence in names, other than the title alone. Boris Urquhart is usually referred to as just U. which is read like the name of Yu (Tsun), and there is an agent Madden in both texts. Yu has to kill his friend Albert to indicate to the Germans which French city will be the target of an attack - Moulthrop has interpreted this by saying how Yu has to reduce the person Albert to mere sign in order to fulfill his task (Moulthrop 1991, 119-124). When Urquhart arrives at the Observatory, he tells he has to kill Tate - to reduce the multiplicity of virtual realities? There is a war in the background in both stories and from that analogue we may infer that also in Urquhart's case it is the war that is the motivating force for everything.
  
  Here comes to play another hypotext by Borges, namely "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". The lexia "Story of My Life" refers to the story:

  Borges referred to a place called Uqbar, supposedly "a region of Iraq or Asia Minor" which was in fact unreal. Uqbar is brought to you by the people who invented Tlön, a conspiracy to replace the bad old world with a novus ordo saeculorum. There's a lot of that going around.

  Urquhart uses the role name "Uqbari the Prophet" - Uqbari, that is, a citizen of Uqbar. Thus, Urquhart is part of the "novus ordo saeculorum", The New World Order, which, not coincidentally at all, is located in the region of Iraq. More "realistic" intepretation might be that Urquhart is an Islamist activist, but more convincingly, part of some even bigger plan of New World Order. Or still, Uqbar is figment of the Tlön people; that is, Urquhart lives in a fictional world of Virtual Reality simulation. Choose your own favourite conspiracy.
  
  2. William Burrough's Cut Up Technique
  There is one sequence in Victory Garden which works as a digitalized version of Burrough's cut up technique. All the titles of the lexias in this sequence are just a few letters long fragments, and the contents of the lexias are (at least seemingly) random bits and pieces from previous lexias:

  Th
  
  A large man wearing a bowling shirt and headphones was stretched out on a truly ugly Italian couch. His sleeping cap was wired for EEG. It was at this point that something entirely plausible happened.
  
  Let me explain.
  
  Miles wasn't sure he wanted to know what the suit looked like once it got wet. the 38th Vice President of the United States, Spiro T. "My Kind of Guy" Agnew big schnozz beady eyes and all
  
  "Live and in person, the fascist pig god himself."
  
  A little paranoia never hurt anyone, Tate insinuates, nor for that matter a whole lot. ESCAPE VELOCITY, the P.A. announces. The audience stands to applaud. What was it, too much Liquid Sunshine back in the sixties?

  From "Escape velocity" to "applaud" the two sentences are from the lexia "Miles & Miles" [4]; "A little paranoia" sentence from a lexia titled "A Little Paranoia"; "the 38th vice president" from the lexia "Wallshot", etc. This sequence could be interpreted as a lesson in cut up, and a key to understand the hypertext structure as a device with which the reader may "cut up" their own narratives. And one should not overlook the mention of Liquid Sunshine in a passage which is formally linked to Burroughs - add to the list of paranoia and conspiracy also the drug induced hallucinations.
  
  3. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
  Stuart Moulthrop is introduced in the leaflet attached to Victory Garden, as: "In 1975 he read Gravity's Rainbow and became an English major". Even without this knowledge of Moulthrop's enthusiasm about Gravity's Rainbow (1973), it must be one of the primary hypotexts for any attentive reader. There are no explicit references - curiously enough - to Pynchon's magnum opus, but more indirect allusions all the more. There are certain scenes which resemble situations in Gravity's Rainbow: Emily's waiting in the shelter while planes are screaming outside parallels with Gravity's Rainbow's opening (and closing) scene where people are sitting in a theater hearing the screaming outside - possibly a V2 which would blow the whole place to pieces, just like Emily's shelter may be the target of an Iraqi Scud missile. But mainly the similarities are in the huge web of entangled plots and subplots. In a recent essay about misreading and "interstitial fiction" Moulthrop has quoted the following paragraph from Gravity's Rainbow:

  "This is some kind of plot, right? Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.
  
  "Everything is some kind of a plot, man," Bodine laughing.
  
  "And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways," Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors.
  
  Which is Slothrop's first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself… that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston's - and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he's headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom (603).

  
  This could as well be a description of Victory Garden - and after this we can offer one more interpretation for the map; it could be a transportation track plan with stops (as entrance points to the different plots). In Gravity's Rainbow the German V2 missiles are in a central role (the title suggesting the parabola-shaped path of a ballistic missile; and one of the characters is able to predict the missile attacks - he is so conditioned that he gets a hard on always a few minutes before the attack…) and while in Victory Garden there is just the Saudi Arabia scene which is directly dealing with missile attacks, there is one interesting by-way: in Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint the protagonist is kept in a virtual reality in order to provide him with safe surroundings; but all the while he is partaking in TV quiz program in which he actually calculates the targets of extraterrestrial missile attacks! It may be a bit far-fetched, but tempting anyway, to assume Urquhart's work, whatever its apparent form, is actually doing some kind of military calculations (there is even the strong science fictional element in the Observatory scene hinting that there may be something happening in the astronomical scale while everybody's attention is on the Gulf War).
  
  Also, the simulation-application of Master Johndan's "Shadow Economy" is just the type of "second order plot" (about second order plots, see Lyotard; 1991, 27) any Pynchon reader would immediately find familiar.  
  
  One of the most important narrative techniques in Gravity's Rainbow is the way Pynchon veils the changes in narrative levels - the narration may shift from representing the textual actual world ("fictional reality") to representing some textual alternative world (like, a person's dream, or as often in Gravity's Rainbow's case, hallucinations) without giving any clear marks of this change (a thorough analysis of this device in Gravity's Rainbow is in McHale; 1992, 61-114). Very much the same thing is happening in Victory Garden - at least if we choose to interpret it in the dream-as-hypertext, or, virtual reality simulation framework - telling which scenes belong to the textual actual world, which to textual alternative worlds is totally impossible.
  
  Competing Interpretations - Loose Ends
  As is clear by now, I hope, there are several possible interpretations for Victory Garden. All these competing interpretations share the common property of being very flexible, and also strongly indeterminate - despite that they still cannot in any way explain each and every aspect of the large web of Victory Garden. There are always some loose ends, which will not have a "natural" place in one or another composition of the larger picture.
  
  Interpreting Victory Garden means mainly to try and give it a structure - to try to describe how the mechanism works. In other words, trying to explain the poetics of Victory Garden. It refers towards even larger and more complex works, in regard to which there is no sense anymore to talk about individual story lines or scenes at all - all that may be reachable is some kind of understanding of the metastructures which govern the whole and set limits to it’s possible actualisations.
  
  Notes
  
  [1] More about these maps and their differences, see my PhD thesis, Chapter 5 "Visual Structuring of Hyperfiction Narratives", http://users.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/thesis.shtml.
  
  [2] Actually, this does not necessarily require that much of materials to begin with: Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliard de Poèmes manages with 140 poetry lines to produce the amount of sonettes mentioned in the title. In this case, there is a very modest number of lexias, but a much greater number of links (1300) – but even the number of links is still far away from infinite – the net result of these two factors is the unimaginable number of one hundred million billiards… In the case of narrative hyperfiction, the fact that many lexias are strongly attached to each other (forming a certain narrative scene, or, paths) in practice reduces the number of possible permutations somewhat.
  
  [3] Michael Joyce's term "constructive hypertext" is used here, and in another lexia there is a quite a long citation of Joyce's definition for the term. Another important cybertext author could be mentioned here, John Cayley. In his Book Unbound the reader may choose a word or a passage from the text she is reading, which is then fed back to the program and used as a factor in generating the continuation for the text - a procedure which closely resembles Urquhart's explanation of what's happening in his experiment.
  
  [4] "Miles & Miles" is a good example of Moulthrop's way to use linguistic puns (in very much the same way as Michael Joyce); "Miles & Miles" is a dream sequence in which a character is running through a stadium which is full of Miles Macarthur replicas - " you must be passing forty or fifty Miles a minute".
  
  References
  
  Brooks, Peter (1984) Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  
  Douglas, Jane Yellowlees (1992) "Print Pathways and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hypertext Narratives Affect the Act of Reading." New York: New York University. [unpublished doctoral dissertation thesis]
  
  Fish, Stanley (1980 [1976]) ”Interpreting the Variorum”, in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press.
  
  Genette, Gérard (1980) Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  
  Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991) The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  
  McHale, Brian (1992) Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
  
  Moulthrop, Stuart (1991) “Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of ‘Forking Paths’” in Landow & Delany (eds.), 119-132.
  
  Moulthrop, Stuart (1999) "Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks", Style 33:2.
  
  Rettberg, Jill Walker (1999) ”Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon”, in The Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext.