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This essay emphasises what are commonly regarded as formalist conceptions and ideas of structure - the relation of syntagmatic to paradigmatic series - as a defining trope for 'literariness' and 'realism'. However, it should not be assumed that, just as in the cinema (witness for example the extremely creative visual and narrative work that appears in television commercials), there is a clear distinction between a 'literary' or 'poetic' work and nonliterary or nonfiction work (again, BBC nature documentaries routinely make the most extraordinary leaps in their editing).
As Tosca has argued, the issue is not one of predetermining what links mean but of recognising the contingent and contextual nature of link use, as readers and writers. This is common in poststructural approaches to discourse, which no longer place much store in hierarchies determined by formal categories, and is particularly the case in hypertext where it seems reasonably clear that readers find connection by virtue of the link.
It is important that we recognise that hypertextual narration is composed of syntagmatic series, and that this series is determined on the basis of some measure of narrative 'integrity' - whether episodic wholeness, readerly comprehension, temporal or thematic unity, or some other criteria (Rosenberg 1996). This is important because it suggests that the definition and decision of what constitutes a sequence lies as much outside of each constituent part as it does within the content or the connecting of its parts. Hence, if it lies outside, then any ambition to develop or define a typology or classificatory system must always be surrendered in the face of this outside.
What is less clear, and is generally poorly theorised, is the dissatisfaction some readers feel with hypertext which is characterised generally in terms of its unintelligibility - the common reader complaint of "not getting it." This is not the result of problematic links but more generally the difficulty students (and teachers) have in describing the role of syntagmatic series in meaning production. Readers don't 'get' a link largely because of their performative nature (and here performative has all the connotations of constative force and contextual relevance that speech act theory attaches to it, see for instance Petrey, 1990). The criticism largely concerns the difficulty in discerning syntagmatic patterns within the work, a difficulty contributed to by the paucity of critical tools available to describe narrative structure in hypertext.
These are questions of critical competency, not link typology. (Imagine trying to read a medieval encyclopedia today with its teleological principle of classification - and imagine how profane, and abstract, a modern encyclopedia would appear to the authors of a medieval encyclopedia!).
There is nothing inherent in a formal cinematic device, such as a fade to black, that it must mean any particular thing - it as easily signifies a flashback as a flashforward. Likewise there is nothing inherent in a formal rhetorical device that it must mean something specific - what these things mean are determined in the interstitial space between those contexts brought by the text being read and by the reader. The narrative and readerly context determines the significance of any connection being made and this is always a question of readerly pragmatics.
Furthermore, if the manner in which links and narrative segments are interpreted is contextual, a result of the interaction of the text with the reader and the world, then structure, as a defineable and reproducible quality, disappears (Kaplan's breakdown). It is contingent, variable, and always subject to pragmatic fancy. This suggests that the ground of interpretation that allows a link or a sequence to be understood is derived from larger contexts than that provided by the local link, and that in some ways such a context operates teleologically, offering itself as an endpoint against which sequences are judged.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information