Hypertext is an open-ended form that lends itself particularly well to feminist and postmodernist theories. Embodying many of postmodernism's principles of indeterminancy, the schematic of hypertextual narrative has been drawn as a rhizome, a molecule, a matrix, a network, and a web, among other metaphors. But none of these is particularly satisfying or accurate. They are inadequate because hypertext is modular, multi-dimensioned, performative and peopled. Hypertext is a collective, interactive experience bearing more resemblance to holding court in a beehive than to cyberspatial surfing. Well-crafted literary hypertext makes us want to talk back.

What is integral is that hypertext does what we cannot do in books, what we cannot do on the page. True hypertext can exist only in an electronic environment for it is fluid, polylingual and multi-dimensional. (See Joyce on "constructive hypertext," 1995). We cannot speak about it, for hypertext's function is wonderfully 'unspeakable.' We cannot navigate it either except in (a potentially infinite number of) limited ways; we must surrender ourselves as readers to its performative and frequently unpredictable flights of the mind--the jumps in thought--that are made explicit in the author's programmed links. Hypertext's very fluidity precludes notions of linearity, not to mention that of a centre or of margins. Positively centrifugal, a true hypertext creates its own world, a language game, "a structure of possible structures" (Bolter 144). This is a process of embodiment, as Michael Joyce has noted:

hypertext both embodies and is itself solely embodied by what in print is an invisible process. The screen enacts the ground zero of reading. There the reader of a hypertext not only chooses the order of what she reads, but her choices, in fact, become what it is. The text continually rewrites itself and becomes what I term the constructive hypertext: a version of what it is becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist (Joyce, 1995, 235).