Structure

Along with materiality, even a part of it, the structure of a text, and even sentence structure can also be nonlinear, create meaning, and change the reading experience. For example, in a linear print text like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, he uses sentence and paragraph structure, and repetition to create ambiguity, an overall mood, a metaphor of memory. Robert Coover, in “The Magic Poker” for example, uses fragmented lexias, arranged in a nonlinear fashion to create ambiguous time and perspective, repeating scenes from various perspectives or with different outcomes, purposefully confusing the reader, adding to the mystery of the narrative, and merging the perspectives of the various characters into one story, which also emphasizes the subjectivity of reality.
            In electronic literature, the structure may feel random, or within the reader’s control, but often it is a tightly woven web. afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce is made up of over 500 lexias and the reader moves through them by clicking on various words or moving the text forward by answering yes or no or by moving through in a more linear fashion. The lexias are so fragmented that they seem random, reader controlled, but Joyce has carefully structured the piece so that only certain lexias appear after others or with others. This structure has the same consequences as Coover’s print stories, ambiguous time, perspective, and with overlapping connections and loops and a narrative that comes together like a puzzle as the reader continues through it.
            Some electronic structures are intuitive, straightforward, or even mapped out for the reader, as in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, which provides visual maps for both the overall work and individual sections (this does not mean the reader never gets lost in the text). This text, like many other hypertext or new media works, allows the reader to begin where they like and skip to sections as they see fit, which determines the meaning, or can at least put emphasis on one section over another. In hypertext literature, Landow’s advice to writers is “be prepared for readers who “fall in through the livingroom ceiling rather than entering through the front door” (Landow, Hypertext 3.0, 111). Writing lexias of text that can be read in any order is challenging, as is reading them, but make works like afternoon that change with every reading.