Article: Reading Victory Garden
Abstract
Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) is one of the "classical hyperfictions" alongside Michael Joyce's Afternoon (1987) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1993). Of these three, however, Victory Garden has been all but neglected by the critics - in its truly novelistic size (993 lexias), multifarious navigating possibilities, innovative hypertextual devices, as well as intertextually dense frame of references it is well worth closer attention. The essay starts with an overview of the work, describing both the technical aspects (like the reader interface) and the main story lines and characters. Then, the hypertextual structure of Victory Garden is discussed, with particular emphasis on Moulthrop's use of the device we call "singular loop" (as opposed to an indefinite loop). In singular loop the reader is taken back to a previous point in the path she is reading, but the next time around not. There is a loop, a sequence of lexias read twice, but after that the path continues forward. One possible motivation for this kind of structure is to invoke a certain sense of malfunctioning, of an unintentional lapse in the running of the narration. Also, the questions of repetition and repetition with difference are discussed, trying to demonstrate the difference between hypertextual and narrative structures. Next, we try to identify alternative "framestories", which would motivate the hypertextual structures employed in Victory Garden. There are at least four of those: the Borgesian forking paths idea (which is closely linked to possible worlds semantics), the dream-as-hypertext, the virtual reality simulation, and, conspiracy paranoia. Further on, we will next turn to the intertextual references and allusions in Victory Garden, which back up these different interpretational frames. Three essential subtexts are Jorge Luis Borges' stories (especially "Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), William Burrough's stories employing the cut up technique, and, Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. In this essay we offer several competing interpretations of Moulthrop's work, but even all of them together cannot explain each and every aspect of the large web of Victory Garden. But, as we argue, trying to interpret Victory Garden means mainly to try and describe how the mechanism works; in other words, trying to explain the poetics of the text.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Koskimaa, Raine: Reading Victory Garden. In: Dichtung Digital. Journal für Kunst und Kultur digitaler Medien, Jg. 2 (2000-09-12), Nr. 6, S. 1-21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/17392.
@ARTICLE{Koskimaa2000-09-12,
author = {Koskimaa, Raine},
title = {Reading Victory Garden},
year = 2000-09-12,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/17392}",
volume = 2,
address = {Cambridge},
journal = {Dichtung Digital. Journal für Kunst und Kultur digitaler Medien},
number = 6,
pages = {1--21},
}
author = {Koskimaa, Raine},
title = {Reading Victory Garden},
year = 2000-09-12,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/17392}",
volume = 2,
address = {Cambridge},
journal = {Dichtung Digital. Journal für Kunst und Kultur digitaler Medien},
number = 6,
pages = {1--21},
}
Keywords
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