Hello all! In this blog post I want to extend my analysis of the piece “Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext"” by Richard Holeton. Specifically I want to look at how the degeneration of a coherent narrative (and narrator) makes room for the play of code and dialogue with the reader.

While there appears to be nothing overtly strange in the structure of the faq, the content soon undermines this stability. As the reader progresses through the categories the creator of the faq seems less and less reliable. Often over justifying his position, and having long tangents dissolving into schizophrenic associations between paragraphs (for example, a paragraph may briefly mention Southpark and then the next will take Southpark as its subject matter), the creator of the FAQ seems to undermine his knowledge of the poem and its origins at the level of articulation . The only way to understand the faq for “Hypertext” then is through this suspicious narrator, and the reader must distrust the linear narrative and piece together many incongruous bits. This act of rearranging in fact mimics the poem “Hypertext”, which is an anagram-turned-poem of all the possible new meanings from the word Hypertext (though it should be mentioned that this same creator gives us this insight).

There is another side to this issue of the creator, and it comes with the final FAQ 9. In this section we see the typography change and the immergence of a hacker who has left their mark on the FAQ. While the actuality of this act is dubious, it demonstrates an important disconnect we have to consider because of the codified structure of this piece. We have to consider a critical disconnect between the “author” of a site and the functional code that allows that site to be viewed. The “author” does not find his origin in this code, the author is not the sign of a code/word-signifier/signified relationship, but rather code seems to report to a different sign system entirely. The entirety of this work is permeated with this notion then, that it can never justify the permanence of ontological labels like “author” imply. Words, whoever’s words, seem to stampede over all these distinctions.

A final point to bring up is the inclusion of transgendered themes in this Hypertext. The uncertainty of the transgendered position in society fits with the identity ambiguity that takes place in the faq, and the faq seems to even suggest an impossibility to determine the narrators sexuality and sexual presence. Prevalent in section two, we see this uncertainty of establishing sexuality wrapped up directly in issues of authenticity. Holeton seems to try through this hypertext to locate issues of gender and issues of authenticity in the same semantic and constructed field of identity. It is a daring move but an important one, as it includes code an code art as a site for these complex discussions of gender politics.