If Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is the Yin of hypertext literature, then Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling is the Yang: perhaps the ultimate hypertext of female sensitivity, poetics, and politics. Published in the autumn of 1992, Quibbling seems to be everything that afternoon, a story wasn’t. Instead of a single protagonist on a paranoid knowledge quest about those close to him and himself through a labyrinth of his fear and desire, the “digital rhapsody” [1] by this woman American author gives voice to a group of characters, four couples, without a distinct narrative centre towards which other voices would gravitate. As readers we are invited into their stories, their intellectual horizons, and into uncovering relations between these characters in the past and in the present. The whole work is broadly feminist, and as such it represents an innovative form of l'ecriture feminine [2] from the early 1990s with a fascinating, added value of experimentation with form in the electronic realm of hypertext. A male perspective is consistently rejected as something too linear to give way to a fragmentary poetics, small narrations, and sensual dimensions of language and the body.

In fact, the main goal of the project––as the author admitted during her Traversal [3]––was to show how women tell stories to each other. And they do tell them differently than men: in passing, with spicy detail, digression, quotation, gossip, as a part of the daily flow of impressions, images and snippets of information. The text resembles water: You can shape it as you want, draw from it, like a hand drawing water from a stream, to which water, like text, adjusts itself. A sense of totality, a sensation of having one’s feet more firmly on the ground might break through these freely drawn fragments only later, because at the initial stage we first need to taste it. Indeed, the number of colors, textures, and shades