Whether "Quibbling" can be or may be regarded as a "story," and what other constituents it still meets, is a question I would like to discuss at the end of this section. Undoubtedly, the individual characters are confined in a story and in constellations, and they maintain relationships also among each other, some of them close, as is documented in many hints and letters. The characters occupying center stage have been mentioned already: the men displayed in individual boxes: Jacob, Will, Priam, and Cy; then the women united in one box called "nun": Angela, Agnes, Heta, and Hilda, who are in the company of "sisters." This is where we also find Bea, with seven boxes, the title text telling of an encounter in a monastery with Cora, and a few letters and diary entries by Bea in the period between February 1979 and October 1982.

Those who spent a long time reading in the "Heta" box (like myself) were surprised by the existence of separate boxes on Bea, for she is mentioned only once (in "Heta/await:" "Heta remembered Bea once telling..."). The e-mail exchanged by Heta and Priam also mentions one "Jane" who comes to visit Priam, and with Priam himself we find, in a description of a dispute between the two, the expression "Cora-come-lately." This is the phrase Bea had used on Cora already in the monastery when Cora had complained of another sister in arts training, how some "Cora-come-lately" dared to rush in and always know better; the same allusion is seen in the argument with Priam, where Cora complains that the Ghetto program designed for boys did not accept girls. Replies Priam: "We don't need some Cora-come-lately stepping in telling us how to run this program."

What relationship exists between Bea and Priam, since both use the same turn of phrase? And what is the relationship between Cora and Jane? Could it be the same person in the end? This is precisely what we are shown under "Priam" in "cora jane by bro," but the resolution of this reference - and this is one of the difficulties of reception - is days, even weeks away.

However, it is not necessary to retell the entire cast of characters and the configurations at this point (after all, those who are interested in "Quibbling" must not be spoiled their fun). Yet, there are some other, hidden characters in this puzzle about relationships. Part of the interest is generated at this point, but it not exhausted with the question of "who is attached to whom."

Upon a closer look at the entire structure of time and events, and the dates communicated, the entire setup seems to disintegrate into two trains: Jacob & Angela; Hilda & Cy (including the correspondence with Bea); and Agnes & Will take place in the period between 1973 and 1981, while the story about Heta & Priam is between 1988 and late 1990. On January 4, 1990, the author notes in her Quibbling diary ("arc/ Jrnl - title text"):

We live in time and space, our stories will always have a temporal quality to balance the simultaneity of associations. Linearity is like the individual, or even kind of like a man, we'll never get rid of him.

Of course, this does not have to be real time; it may just as well be the fictionalized time of this work. On June 12, 1990, Priam notes in his working diary whether he should explain the medieval expressions contained in Margret & Henry, but then finds it too obtrusive ("It's just obtrusive somehow."). On the same date, he sends an e-mail to Heta in which he reflects on whether he should leave all references in the narrative, but then ends in the resignation we are already familiar with: "Who in hell publishes computer fiction anyway? let alone reads it." However, we find this not with Priam, but with Heta in "daily weave/ bmk-cellaress/ I know." This type of reading across time is probably impossible in the hypertext proper; I took it from the "timeframe." Around this time, in early or mid-1990, the story about Jacob & Angela seems to be over already.

These examples show that "Quibbling" deliberately uses different text types which are types of communication and types of representation at the same time: There is the usual narrative (in a "bookman" font), the e-mail correspondence (that by Heta is printed in "Geneva", that by Priam, in bold face); as shown above, there are accompanying texts like diary entries, typed letters (e.g. by or to Bea), quotations, references (e.g. with Priam about an incident in a monastery: "This is an actual complaint to a bishop in 1449 about a cellaress named Margret Belers."), and, infrequently, graphic elements, thus with Hilda, who is a secretary at a college wondering why others are hardly able to read between the lines: "Sometimes I only have_ ... and then simply know_________"

"Quibbling" comes to stage as a hypertext and consistently fragments the pieces of the narrative while, at the same time, playing around with linearizations. It is one of the surprises (and recovery periods in reading) to find completely normal, linear sequences of the narrative which do not impose any puzzles about relationships, arrangements, and order upon the reader. This includes the initial sequence in "Lake," where the guided tour follows the logical, pragmatic order, at least inasmuch as the story may have developed.

There is one such sequence in "Stoic tears" with Heta, where the reader is well advised not to start with "Begin" (leading the reader up the garden path is part of the game). Or there is a prelinked sequence with "Dazes" with Heta where only the linkage generates the question about the subject of comparison the author may have had in mind, e.g. in "Cora per Ha," which is about an epileptic seizure suffered by Cora in the courtyard of the school, where she regains consciousness while lying on the asphalt pavement and seeing the horrified faces bending over her. This piece is linked to others about similar states of confusion and daze. Such "dazes" exist also with the other persons or, more precisely, with the female characters.

Once more: Story or no story? The individual persons and characters, respectively, are put into a network of relationships and described in it; individuals are linked to others, couples to other couples, i.e. the story is about such person-related stories, and about the story keeping the whole thing together. However, the story is not told in a biographically ordered way; it is attributed to individual persons as a subjective perspective of an extended life sequence which is reflected on only in a highly selective mode. This is the reason for one of the difficulties the reader experiences. But, of course, it also constitutes the attraction namely to combine those pieces again and arrange them about a center.

The center of gravitation of the whole story is Bea; the characters are associated with Bea more (such as Hilda) or less (such as Jacob). The story is also a puzzle, for one of the meanings of "quibbling" is fiddling at something. Would this make it a reading exercise of the kind used in completing a puzzle, a kind of reading like guesswork or detection? It is not for this reason that the title of this article refers to "riddling the reader"; at content level, it is first and foremost a matter of turning the narrative into a puzzle (after all, "quibbling" also means arguing over trifles, worrying about minute details).

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