RJ decided, for example, that Eliot's The
Waste Land was "a kind of hypertext, in that voices change, move
from place to place," while D. suggested that "The switching
of voices
and characters drastically in The Names almost represented a click
on a word in Patchwork Girl. You had no idea who was talking in The
Names and in Patchwork Girl you didn't know where the word was going
to take you."
As D. had wearily hated The Names throughout
our entire discussion of the book, this insight represented a major
concession (until that point stubbornly withheld) that DeLillo's book
might offer the possibility of any meaning to the reader.
Other readers revaluated the reading process in its
entirety. C wrote, "Therefore, the author, either of linear text
or hypertext, really never has full authority in these situations.
In both forms of writing the text is already created, but it is up
to the reader to choose that text and read it." R argued that,
"It is possible to write a hypertext where the power belongs
wholly to the author, just as it is possible to write a text where
the power to create lies mostly with the reader.
While discussing the content of the book, two readers
mentioned how Jackson's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein gifted
voice to the voiceless and shifted the power of narration from the
creator to the created. In many ways they might have been describing
their own experiences as they gained critical voice in relation to
literary texts, as authority shifted from the author (creator) to
the reader (created).
Choose