We can ask, after Mark Bernstein [1], where are the constructive hypertexts?, the social writing spaces that Moulthrop and Joyce [20, 10] sought? A constructive hypertext narrative might be thought to resemble the early experiment Hypertext Hotel [6], with bits of narrative contributed by various reader/writers. There are much more elaborated examples such as the Indian collection, the Ocean of Story [24].

The majority of the stories brought together [in [25]] have been taken from two Sanskrit works, one very famous, the other virtually unknown--which are themselves translations and adaptations of a lost original. The more famous collection, which is also the larger one, is the Brhatkathasaritsagara, "Ocean of the Rivers of the Great Romance." [24] ... [The author] Somadeva notes that he has followed his [lost] original with utmost fidelity but has abbreviated its prolixity.... However his Sanskrit rendering, which is a delightful one otherwise, is rather handicapped by this fidelity, for the main narrative has almost irretrievably got lost in the maze of stories that are added to it. At the slightest provocation a speaker recalls a tale in which a speaker recalls another tale; and the banquet conists of nothing but hors d'oervres. ([25], 1-2)

That kind of endlessly ramifying story is not yet constructive hypertext narrative, which could be made of narrative fragments that turned away from and/or fought against Aristotle's idea that a narrative must have a beginning middle and end. (But to turn away from something is still to be determined by it; there are directions you must not look. And if the text were simply a jumble of random fragments, this would be uninteresting except perhaps as a protest, which still would be connected to the notion of writing it seeks to contest).

It is not encouraging that the closest things we have to social writing spaces at the moment might be Facebook and strings of wandering comments on blog entries. These are not Temporary Autonomous Zones of writing.

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