Scott Carpenter – Constructing Meaning in Hyperfiction

“When we speak of “reading” a movie or a cultural event, we have not actually rethought, from the ground up, the role of the reader: in film analysis or cultural studies we continue to assume that the reader receives a preestablished object of study. In fact, a major area of critical study has precisely to do with the way different readers develop different interpretations of the same material. Hyperfiction, however, propels readers into more active roles, ones according to which they participate in the construction of the text, and the complexity of interpretation is increased by this added layer of involvement.”

— Scott Carpenter “Click Here: Hypertext and Reader Response” (2000)

 

In this passage Carpenter is referring to reader response theory. Reader response theory focuses on the role of the reader in interpreting a text. It is not a new theory and has been applied to many types of text, including, more recently, hypertext fictions. The idea of reader response theory is that interpretation of a text – in other words, the construction of meaning – stems from a combination of the reader and the text. Reader response theory moves away from the idea that the text is “a preestablished object of study”, and instead moves towards this combinatory effect of the text and the reader. Carpenter also draws a distinction between the actual reader (the real person reading the text), and the implied reader (the one the author created in their own head, and had in mind when producing the text). Complexities arise from the fact that actual readers do not always engage with texts the way the author expected the ideal reader would, and so new meanings are created that cannot, according to reader response theory, be classed as “right” or “wrong”.

In terms of hypertext fiction, or hyperfiction, readers play an even greater role in developing meaning from the text, moving from just construction of meaning towards construction of the text itself. Different readers may work with a hypertext fiction and re-create it in different ways, much like different readers might interpret or create meaning from a text in different ways. Each reader, through their choices, develops a recreation of the text that becomes a sort of “collaboration” between themselves and the author of the hyperfiction. Carpenter suggests that this complicates reader response theory further, as each reader will be reading a different re-creation of the text, developed through their own interaction with the hyperfiction. The creation of different variations of the hyperfiction means that meaning is constructed differently both because the text is different between readers, and because the readers interpret texts differently depending on what is significant to them.

These complications lead to a “complexity of interpretation” that is “increased by [the] added layer of involvement” in hyperfiction. These complexities raise the question of if interpretation of reader response is possible with hypertext fiction in the way it is possible with “static” texts such as novels. A researcher trying to understand readers’ construction of meaning in hypertext fictions would have to interpret each readers’ construction of meaning in relation to individually developed texts – assuming that the hyperfiction being studied records each of the reader’s choices along the way and provides a “script” or version of each re-creation.

Readers will respond to hypertext fiction in different ways – with some finding the added level of involvement in the fictions compelling and empowering, and others finding the invasion of the author’s “ideal reader” controlling and limiting. However readers respond to hypertext fiction, and whatever meaning they construct from it, Carpenter makes it clear that understanding reader response theory in relation to hyperfiction is a complex process.