WORK: turn around and look back

the WORK code implies the independent reality of the fictional universe of a text

Reality thinks it "includes" fiction, that fictional works are embedded in reality. It's the boast of a bully.

This is the traditional/readerly (SINGLE) hierarchy: reality is context, reality is up-top in the hierarchy; fiction can be multiply-embedded (Shakespeare often nested (PLURAL) plays within plays), but it is a tree, which branches from a single monolithic root out to many leaves.
The METABLOG, in contrast, is a complete directed graph (K₅ to graph-theorists; this may mean komplett, but the Germans actually call it a vollständiger Graph. It may mean Kuratowski, after the theorist, but we have collectively forgotten. As usual, forgetting removes the (SINGLE) authoritative past and gives rise to (PLURAL) histories; just as forgetting, in literature, allows the writerly act of a different re-reading, per Barthes.)

(AUTHOR: the writer of the METABLOG seems to be revealing his interests/biases on the (WORK) and (SINGLE) pages, with allusions to mathematics.)

 But just because reality's bigger doesn't make it boss. Every work of art is an alternate "world" with other rules, which threatens the alibi of naturalness our ordinary reality usually flaunts.

The idea of these alternate worlds is old, and implicit in the paradigm of readerly writing: a traditional novel is nothing more than a carefully-guided tour of a sort of Potemkin universe, comparable to a movie set. In contrast, a writerly text -- such as Patchwork Girl -- invites the reader to explore the universe, leave the beaten path and wander. It takes on new dimensions (PLURAL) of solidity and completeness (SINGLE), because its objects can be viewed from multiple angles and along multiple paths. In fact, Patchwork Girl goes further, leaving little arrows on the corners of the stage props that point backstage, where one can meet the actors and characters, who seem to shamelessly share a reality (as the (AUTHOR) does with her character in Stitch Bitch).

In this way, hypertext is a much more threatening kind of fictional work than most, and approaches a higher level of naturalness more on par with "reality".

 Every fictional world competes with the real one to some extent, but hypertext gives us the chance to sneak up on reality from inside fiction. It may be framed as a novel, yet link to and include texts meant to be completely non-fictional. 

(META): Actors and characters!

Thus the pedigreed facts of the world can be swayed, framed, made persuaders of fiction, without losing their seats in the parliament of the real, as facts tend to do when they're stuck in a novel. Hypertext fiction thus begins to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe.

This seems to presume too much. Does reality really seem less real than hypertext fiction? Or does it merely lack an immediately explicit metastructure? Does one consider all fiction and all abstractions as being part of reality as well?