Reading Vertically:
Performing Barthes's Indexical Navigations
To understand a narrative is not merely to follow
the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its construction in 'storeys',
to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative 'thread' on to an
implicitly vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a
narrative is not merely to move from one word
to the next, it is also to move from one level to
the next […] the 'search' carried out over a
horizontal set of narrative relations may well be as thorough as possible
but must still, to be effective,
also operate 'vertically': meaning is not 'at the end'
of the narrative, it runs across it.
Roland Barthes
"The Structural Analysis of Narratives"
Introduction
Aaresth, in his Cybertext, makes a compelling case for dismissing our current "spatio-dynamic metaphors of narrative theory" which perceive the "linear" codex text as presenting a space in which the reader may get lost. In so doing he marks out a, to my mind, crucial distinction between codex books as unicursal labyrinths and what he calls "cybertexts" or "ergodic literature" as multicursal labyrinths:
Reed Doob […] distinguishes between two
kinds of labyrinthine structure: the unicursal,
where there is only one path, winding and
turning, usually toward a center; and the
multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces
a series of critical choices or Bivia. (5-6)
Clearly, even in an incredibly comnplex codex book, such as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the reader cannot get "lost" or "trapped" in the text. One just keeps reading, following the line of physical marks on the page, and one will eventually reach the end.