IV. map as metaphor

navigational 'map'--a visualization of the Text's cognitive space

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The map is not just a visualization of the structure of lexias, but is in a highly symbolic way a representational map (the use of qualifiers like 'Northern' and 'Southern' relate to this). For example, it can be seen as "a map of a garden with paths and benches" (Coover 1992).

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The map, which represents the text as totality or metaphor, was not something to be reached through the devious paths of discursive metonymy, rather it was a primary conceptual framework, providing the essential categories of 'right', 'left', 'up' and 'down' by which these readers oriented themselves. Metaphor here was not identified with finality or revelation, but with the initial incitement to hypertextual reading, the sense of being precipitated into an unexplored space. (Moulthrop 1993, 128)

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it shows that the Text is limited, there is a limited number of storylines, and the links between the lexias are fixed (this, however, does not mean that the lexias could not be read in many alternative orders). Because of this, the reading of Victory Garden turns easily--at least after some time--into a process of spotting 'blank areas' on the map, that is, looking for those parts of the map which are not yet familiar to the reader. This can be seen as a mode of 'reading as plot' instead of the more traditional 'reading for the plot' (as described by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, 1984), but as Moulthrop himself has noted, the ultimate goal still is to 'fill in' the underlying story (Moulthrop 1994, 128).

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What I find most important here is not the actual 'working out' of all the permutations, but the realization that there is a 'finite series of linear narratives'. If Afternoon's tool bar already evoked this idea, Victory Garden's map makes it evident. This can be seen as a parallel to Slatin's view that "the fixity of printed text as an object in physical space makes the text as an object in mental space seem equally stable and fixed." (155) The fixedness of the representational object (the map of Victory Garden) makes this hyperfiction Text also seem stable and fixed.

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