*peers suspiciously*
Who are you, Roland’s reader? Why do you bother to come here, rehash a story a thousand times retold; you are in search of – what? Are you a student of literature, looking to fulfill some general requirement at university? Are you a seasoned scholar of the Middle Ages, weary of the laity’s constant misunderstanding of when the Middle Ages really happened and what was “dark” about them? (Do you take refuge in books and in your students, still open to the possibility of medieval intellectualism?) Are you a graphic novel aficionado in southern California, a creative anachronist in Vermont, or a postmodern theorist in France? Perhaps you spend your days thinking about electronica and pedagogy, or else the uses and meanings of semantic encoding?
Your first visit to RolandHT may prove disorienting. You may have logged hours of Web reading already, or you may be sceptical of any literature unsafe to read in the bath. If of a scholarly mindset, you probably want a clear-cut distinction between fiction and criticism. On the other hand, if reading this for the pleasure of Literature, you may be put off by the mere idea of theory, even compulsively close the browser window. So I will make Roland’s scholarly value as inconspicuous as possible, without hiding it. (Shouldn’t be difficult. How much literary scholarship pays attention to its own aesthetic design?)
You are fickle. Your eyes get tired quickly. You can’t cuddle up with a computer the way you can with a book. Your attention span on the Web is a few seconds, or so they claim; and instead of working to improve it, you complain that electronic narrative is just not as gripping as a good book.
You get ahead of yourself, confusing form and content. It took you years to absorb, assimilate, digest the grip of books. They are easier on the eyes, yes, than the minute pulse of a monitor’s lights. Nevertheless, avid Reader, chances are you are wearing lenses even as you read this, devices to correct eye damage you likely earned by reading books.
You want satisfaction and security Now, but to read Roland you must have patience. He has moved like a glacier through Western Europe and America for a millennium, leaving in his wake chasms, valleys, and fertile soil on which wild narrative sprouts. He has left bits of himself in more geographical locations than you are likely to ever visit in person. Such vastness is not revealed in a day, nor in a week.
I will allow leeway. You want to be in control; I will give you a choice of identity. No longer merely an input agent, sending requests for bits of data to a server (otherwise known as “clicking on links”), you will choose the eyes of a Medievalist, Computing Humanist, SCAdian, Rock Star, Arty Type. Choosing will provide you with some starting points, things you may find useful or fascinating. Entering the multi-pathed narrative will, at first, land you on a passage likely to interest — do not be surprised to begin with a song if you choose to be a Rock Star. From there on, you will be on your own, all of RolandHT open to exploration.
(Or you will remain a default Reader, have access to a site map, and off you go.)
From time to time, I will look at my access logs; they will give me an idea of the narrative paths pursued most often, and ones not pursued at all. I may even let you in on these patterns, once there is a critical mass of them. But I will not spoon-feed you, nor provide you with a magic patience pill. To know Roland is your own task.
No closure? You want to know how many pages in this book?
Why?
The question of how many more pages are left in all the world’s literature somehow never arises. We do not stop to think what will happen once we have reached the end of a paper-bound, three-hundred-page book. Why, there will be another book of course, or a re-reading; and after it another, and so on. If item 253 on our reading list happens to be Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 poems, we brave it for a while and move on before exhausting all the possibilities; perhaps we return later, or not.
Every work of literature we take in falls into the mass of the already-read and fuses with it, losing its borders, becoming part of our psyche and changing our worldview. In that same inextricable way, Roland – this Roland, at least – is tied to his sources direct and indirect, and recombines himself in relation to them. To completely read Roland is not only impossible, but undesirable; it would mean a brink to literature, words’ end. One can merely stop at a certain point, knowing that there is always another unknown turn.
