The Ergodic Text

Most works of fiction call for a linear reading from title to last word, and, although the codex form of the modern book allows for easier checking backwards and forwards than the papyrus roll it supplanted and the e-book adds to this facility the capacity for searching by means of words or phrases, the basic assumption that governs the processing of fictional prose is that the text unfolds continuously from start to finish. However, a different mode of semantic enrichment may happen when the visual layout of the page or the organisation of the book includes elements that ask to be taken in separately, at a moment of the reader's own choosing. Texts of this kind invite a reading process that is the opposite of the inorganic works discussed in the previous chapter: rather than learning or deducing and following out the special rules obeyed by the text, the reader has an unusual amount of freedom in deciding how to engage with it. Espen J. Aarseth, in a discussion of cybertexts, provides a full discussion of this issue, coining the term ‘ergodic literature’ for texts in which ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’; by contrast, traditional texts, which require only ‘eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’, are ‘non-ergodic’ (Cybertext, 1). Ergodic literary productions are one example of multimodality, a phenomenon that is receiving increasing attention in studies not only of literary texts but other art forms and games. In this chapter, I wish to explore the reader's experience of this type of fiction.

Before Finnegans Wake, Joyce was content to observe linearity in his fiction. The introduction of headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses is an example of multimodality, but not one that requires the reader to deviate from a continuous progress through the text. In his last work, however, he broke decisively and influentially with linearity: the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter includes a drawing that catches the reader's eye as soon as the page is turned (293) and is studded with both footnotes and sidenotes.