Moulthrop offers an interesting and contentious account of the meaning of hypertext for literature (conventionally understood: fiction, poetry, drama). "This essay will argue that creative writing represents a special and crucially important case, one where the neo-naturalism of writing technologies must necessarily break down" (p. 55). Moulthrop promotes the notion of breakdown to characterize "the encounter between hypertext and the literary world" (p. 56). In the following commentary I examine the main concepts of Moulthrop's essay: I seek to show that the relation of conventional (literary) text to hypertext is misrepresented, and that significant aspects of the reading process are elided in the topos of "breakdown."

If hypertext is innovative it is because it "departs from the hard line of monology, or what Roland Barthes called the 'classic text'" (p. 57). This argument repeats the claim that conventional writing is linear (readerly rather than writerly, in Barthes's terms). In fact, literary texts are often remarkably ambiguous, as critics from William Empson to Cleanth Brooks have shown; moreover, the proposal is confirmed by studies of actual readers in empirical studies of response (e.g., Miall, 1989). The contrast between so-called monologic and dialogic texts is thus hard to sustain, whether looking at literary theory or empirical research. It is not merely that "pre-electronic writing has been moving in this direction for a long time," as Moulthrop observes (he mentions Ingarden, Iser, and Bakhtin). I would argue that significant literary texts have always been this way. The critical history of texts such as Hamlet, Gulliver's Travels, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, shows that these "classic" texts support extremely divergent interpretations. For Moulthrop, however, hypertext represents a particularly modern twist to these tendencies.

The key issue raised by Moulthrop's account centres on whether changes in the form of textuality brought about by hypertext and similar electronic media represent a change in the fundamental modes of literary response and understanding. Since there is a strong case to be made for a historic change resulting from the print revolution of the fifteenth century that began with Gutenberg, the present shift from a print to an electronic environment may represent a similar dramatic revolution. This is familiar territory. It must also be acknowledged, however, that in both cases the revolutionary change is a putative one when we consider the response processes of readers. While the Gutenberg revolution resulted in major shifts in the distribution and readership of literary texts, we know very little about the implications of this change for the reading process as such. The continuities may be more important and deep-rooted than the differences. One signal of this continuity is the enormous influence of such pre-print literary theorists as Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, or Longinus on the post-print culture of Sidney, Pope, or Coleridge. Both sets of theorists are recognizably addressing similar issues in terms of literary structure and response.

What hypertext affords, however, is conceptualized differently by Moulthrop: that is, not in terms of ambiguity or polyvalence, but "multiplicity" (p. 58). In a hypertext context such as the web, he explains, a given text "has no clear defense against the potential vastness of the network and its multiplicity, if not 'randomness'" (p. 59). The issue is thus not the dialogism of the individual text, but the promise (or threat) of hypertext to disperse textual meaning within the endless permutations of intertexuality. The future thus lies with forms of text that embrace this possibility, in particular, hypertext fiction, texts produced for and read as hypertext ("native hypertext" in Moulthrop's term: p. 60) which co-opt the interactivity of the hypertext medium. But Moulthrop also has a more radical view in prospect. While hypertext fiction (as published by Eastgate) largely leaves the reader free only to choose different pathways through fixed textual materials, new web media such as MUDs or MOOs are participatory and constantly in change. Thus,

The 'new writing' cannot have authors in the old-fashioned sense. If hypertext and other electronic media hold out any differences, it would seem to lie in participatory forms, not such traditional offerings as electronic novels and monographs. The native country of hypertext must be a stranger place that anything we have yet imagined. (p. 65)

This is in part because the concept of the author becomes problematized. While the causes of the dislocation are not clear in Moulthrop's essay (he draws on Michael Joyce's account), a major effect is to unsettle the notion of the author once again. In hypertext, "The author is placed into a context of incompleteness, stress and dis-closure" in which the major stress appears the struggle between linear and non-linear processes, what Moulthrop calls "the struggle for and the struggle against the line" (p. 67). So far, however, this struggle seems to replicate something we have always known about the form of literary texts. Invited in particular by the dialogical processes they contain, readers must continually mediate between linear relationships and multidimensional or contextual ones. An author, in this sense, can never wholly determine response: literary reading is charactistically suffused with "incompleteness, stress and dis-closure."

For Moulthrop, however, the resultant of the stresses of hypertext is the condition he calls breakdown. Quoting from Winograd and Flores, he takes over the notion of "thrownness" with its Heideggerian overtones. Discussing a scenario in which we have to react suddenly to a possible car accident, Winograd and Flores note that we are "thrown" into reacting: "We do not act as a result of consideration, but as a way of being." For the driver in such a situation, "His habits or his experience of a prior accident may be much more important than any of his concepts or evaluations of risk" (cited, p. 68). While for Moulthrop's account, the accident is a paradigm of breakdown in our encounters with hypertext, his reading of Winograd and Flores obscures a major part of the account that he cites. Reaction to an accident is far from discontinuous with previous experience, as Winograd and Flores point out: the immediacy of response means that we necessarily fall back on semi-automated routines laid down by past experience of various kinds, i.e., on our "way of being." As many years of psychological research have shown, such responses are embedded in our emotional and autonomic nervous systems. The point proves rather the remarkable continuity or persistance of our behaviour (which may, or may not be productive in a given situation, of course, but has in general ensured our survival over several millenia). The new in response, by contrast, is much more likely to come from "concepts or evaluations of risk" that require thought, and time in which to think. It is in conditions of breakdown that we are most likely to fall back on pre-existing modes of response that are somatic in form and effect.

There is another way in which Moulthrop's use of Winograd and Flores is misleading. While these authors describe "breakdown" as a software design tool, leading to repair and improvements in functioning (cited, p. 71), Moulthrop literalizes the notion and proceeds to talk about the car crash (i.e., unrecoverable breakdown and physical destruction) as symbolic of the hypertext encounter. It turns out that the car crash as a topos is rather frequent in hypertext fiction. "Perhaps," he muses, "hypertext is a technology of trauma, reflexively figuring its own assault on the textual corpus in terms of insults to the physical body" (p. 70). What Moulthrop appears to have in mind by this privileging of "breakdown" is the problem that a hypertext (his examples are all fictions) fails to fulfil our expectations: "It violates our sense of commitment" (p. 73), it decentres us from our "selfish" expectations of satisfaction from reading. In a word, it breaks the fictional illusion. As he puts it, "the act of reading in hypertext is constituted as struggle: a chapter of chances, a chain of detours, a series of revealing failures in commitment out of which come the pleasures of the web, or the text." In the highway of hypertext, he adds, "every lane is reserved for breakdowns" (p. 74).

Moulthrop's guarded concluding remarks leave unclear what has been gained or lost. For a reader the outcome of the kind of hypertext fiction he discusses seems more likely, on his account, to result in being pushed right off the highway: its apparently random, frustrating, aleotoric effects, its shocks and traumas, are unsustainable in the long term. Its promotion of a kind of continuous self-consciousness in reading (what Moulthrop conceptualizes as "resistance") forestalls the development of absorption in the reader, leads to a lack of commitment, and eventual ejection from the hypertexual circle. There is a new process here, then, but the relationship with previous modes of text is misconceived: "conventional" reading has also involved incompleteness and stress, although of a kind more usually experienced as a constructive process by the reader rather than one leading to breakdown. The main trope of breakdown conceals fundamental psychological processes, notably those residing in the emotions and the body, which have long-term implications for our survival and maintenance in a changing but not wholly unpredictable world. An account of reading that overlooks the role of these systems, whether in hypertext or more traditional forms of text, is unlikely to be effective.