Hypertext and critical theory both agree in configuring the author of the text as a text . As Barthes explains in his famous exposition of the idea, "this I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite" (S/Z , 10). Barthes's point, which should seem both familiar and unexceptional to anyone who has encountered Joyce's weaving of Gerty McDowell out of the texts of her class and culture, appears much clearer and more obvious from the vantage point of intertextuality.
One of the most important of these ideas involves treating the self of author and reader not simply as (print) text but as a hypertext. For all these authors the self takes the form of a decentered (or centerless) network of codes that, on another level, also serves as a node within another centerless network.
