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VI:30. Clearly, schemes such as Aarseth’s are useful for the better understanding
of textual technologies, and this is entirely within the scope of every poet’s concerns. However
poets, even the innovative variety, seem to have been primarily interested in the construction of highly
sophisticated texts which nonetheless remain conservative in their exploitation of the potential of
textuality itself as a plastic medium. There are good reasons for this. The
“interpretative user function” in Aarseth’s scheme is, after all, the doorway to the
writerly universe. While the manifest textuality of a poem may be limited in its
“technology,” it may nonetheless open out into endless readings, ramifications,
inspirations, linkings, intertextualities, not only in the mind of the reader, but in her library, her own
writing, her life. There is nothing stopping a reader from extending the meaning-creation of
any text of any kind outside itself into radically new and indeterminate (literary) situations. Returning
to the spirit in which this essay set out: what more do you want?
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