It is not without irony that this essay appears not in digital form but in the resolutely material pages of a printed journal distributed in stapled volumes to university libraries and private subscribers alike.** That such a meditation on the labyrinthine nature of the World Wide Web should be confined within the rigid linearity of print is itself allegorical: each line here moves forward inexorably, page to page, even as my argument seeks to describe a medium defined precisely by its refusal of linearity. Whereas the printed codex insists upon sequence, the web proliferates digression. And yet, as I write in early 2000, the digressive exuberance of cyberspace is shadowed by its own implosion: entire portals crumble into nothing, dot-com start-ups vanish overnight, and investment corridors that once promised infinite passage end abruptly in ruin. To encounter this essay in ink is to stand at the threshold of two epistemologies—one architectural, one rhizomatic; one bounded, one infinite—and to recognise that the very act of publication already performs the allegory I wish to trace.¹

To invoke the labyrinth is, of course, to summon the spectre of Crete and the mythos of Theseus, where the Minotaur—half-man, half-beast—stood less as an emblem of monstrosity than of complexity itself.² The elaborate corridors designed by Daedalus were not simply to imprison, but to bewilder; so too do our networks of linked nodes invite awe even as they confound. When one clicks, for instance, a seemingly innocuous hypertext promising further information one discovers that such clarity is endlessly deferred, replaced by new corridors, tangents, digressions, and in some cases nowhere at all. In this sense, the hyperlink is both pathway and trapdoor, and the user—wandering without plan or compass—re-enacts the mythic drama of the supplicant within the maze.³

What, then, is a hyperlink if not a corridor paved in digital flagstones? Each blue-lit word underlined on a screen is a portal whose destination is uncertain, and to follow it is to enact the movement of a Theseus threading deeper into Daedalus’s cybernetic creation. The epistemic consequence of this act is irreversible; one is always after a click, never before. Even the possibility of return is contingent, for the only guarantee of retracing lies in the fragile mnemonic device of the browser’s Bookmarks menu, that cyber-Ariadne’s thread, which too easily frays when hard drives crash, when URLs expire, or when the labyrinth itself deceives through redirection.⁴ Indeed, the apparent safety of “Back” is an illusion, as those who have encountered looping redirects or pages that refresh into themselves will attest.⁵

And what of closure? The act of shutting the metaphorical window—be that browser or programme, be that deliberately or by accident—enacts the dead end, the cul-de-sac where the corridor abruptly terminates. In such instances the subject of cyberspace is confronted not with new passages but with the stony silence of absence, compelled to retrace steps to some prior bifurcation, or worse, to commence again from the labyrinth’s shifting entrance as portals vanish and domains expire. In the fifteenth-century pilgrimage tracts of Compostela we encounter similar impasses, where the devout, upon reaching an obstructed shrine, were ordered to return to their last crossroads. To close a tab is, in other words, not merely technical action but a pedagogical moment: it instructs us that knowledge in the digital sublime is labyrinthine, recursive, and endlessly subject to interruption.⁶

If this analogy were merely incidental, it might be dismissed as poetic flourish. Yet the history of textual culture abounds in labyrinthine precedents: scholastic manuscripts so dense with glosses, marginalia, and interlinear notes that the linearity of the base text was all but effaced, replaced instead with a fugue of cross-references and digressions.⁷ One might even suggest that marginalia themselves functioned as proto-hyperlinks, leading the reader sideways rather than forward. When Shelley Jackson constructed her body-as-hypertext, my body: a Wunderkammer (1997), the lineage was unmistakable. More aggressively, Mark Amerika’s Grammatron compelled its readers into corridors of lexia so numerous (some 1,100, though that figure is contested⁸) that the very possibility of total comprehension was mocked. Likewise, the parodic book-tour of The Unknown (1999) revelled in its refusal of closure, scattering narrative fragments across a rhizomatic web of interlinked and often self-referential passages.⁹ Such works remind us that the labyrinthine is not an accident of hypertext but an aesthetic principle: an insistence that disorientation is itself a mode of knowledge.¹⁰

The maze, however, is not constructed of pristine corridors alone. It is littered with ruins: the infamous “404 Not Found” error has evolved to no longer signify a mere technical glitch but an economic memento mori. Pets.com, Kozmo, eToys, each becomes a corridor bricked up mid-journey, an entire choice erased. Similarly entire webrings on Geocities and Angelfire dissolve into absence due to neglect, portals to nowhere with the broken or expired link akin to a passage collapsed into digital rubble. These ruins function as negative monuments of cyberspace, akin to the collapsed stones of Pliny’s long-lost Egyptian labyrinth or the vanished corridors described obliquely by Ovid.¹¹ A link once functional becomes an archaeological trace, a promise of passage now sealed. The contemporary digital wanderer learns thereby the impermanence of the structures they inhabit, that today’s shimmering corridor is tomorrow’s collapsed wall.¹² It is not insignificant that even as I write, certain references may already have decayed, rendering the footnote a ghostly echo rather than a reliable guide.

To speak, therefore, of the web as labyrinth is not merely to describe a structural condition but to recognise a semiotic law. The maze does not simply confine; it produces meaning through its constraints. The cybersubject, clicking links and stumbling upon ruins, finds themselves as an embodiment, an amalgamation, of Theseus, Daedalus, and Minotaur: at once prisoner, wanderer, architect, and monster. They navigate a world where knowledge is contingent upon movement, and where the act of navigation itself becomes the primary content of consumption. To wander is to know; to become lost is to learn..¹³¹⁴

If antiquity imagined the labyrinth as trial, and the Middle Ages as penance, then the dot-com era depressingly imagines it as ordinary, quotidian, unavoidable. We are always already in the maze. Each query typed into AltaVista is a thread, each hyperlink a new passage, each closure a stone wall. The user wanders through corridors erected by start-ups and hobbyists that may not exist tomorrow, threading Ariadne’s fragile cord through speculative IPOs and collapsing portals. Even disconnection is no escape, for the structure persists whether or not we traverse it. The web is not like a maze—it is the maze, the architectural allegory of our century, promising neither clarity nor exit, only the endless allure of the next corridor, the next footnote, the next link. To be lost, paradoxically, is to be precisely where one belongs.¹⁵

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1. See Pseudo-Diodorus, Labyrinthia Antiqua (Alexandria: Heraclitean Press, 1743). Cf. note ¹³ ↩︎
2. Cf. F. Grimmelhausen, Topologies of the Minotaur, Journal of Allegorical Studies 14.2 (1989): 34–57. For a contradictory reading, see ¹⁴ ↩︎
3. L. Zizekova, Forgetting in the Age of Bookmarks (Prague: Akropolis Press, 1996). See note ⁴ ↩︎
4. The Akropolis Press collapsed in 1995. No record exists of Zizekova. Cf. ^{13 8 2} ↩︎
5. N. Twombly, “Closure and Cul-de-Sac: Browser Windows as Digital Dead Ends,” e-Semiotica 2.3 (1998): 88–104. DOI broken ↩︎
6. J. de Compostela, Peregrinus Obstructus (Paris: Gallimard, 1321/1967). Cross-ref ¹⁵ ↩︎
7. P. Argyros, The Gloss as Maze (Athens: Lyceum Editions, 1972). But cf. ¹⁴ ↩︎
8. Amerika, M., Grammatron (1997), http://www.grammatron.com. Estimates vary: some place it at 1,056 lexia, others at 1,157. See ^{4 2} ↩︎
9. Rettberg, S., Stratton, J., Gillespie, W., & Marquardt, D., The Unknown (1999), http://unknownhypertext.com (site intermittently offline). Cf. ¹⁰ ↩︎
10. The site’s disappearance has itself been described as “the ultimate lexia.” See M. Trismegistus, “On Errant Footnotes,” Proceedings of the Invisible College 2.4 (1641/1999): 1–23. See also ^{12 2} ↩︎
11. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.19; cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII. ↩︎
12. The translation relied upon may itself be forged. For further clarification see ¹⁴, which refers back here. ↩︎
13. Contra Pseudo-Diodorus: Arminius (1798) demonstrates that no such manuscript existed. See Catalogue of Imaginary Manuscripts (Bonn: Van der Kroft, 1898). This correction itself may be apocryphal — cf. note ^{8 2} ↩︎
14. Journal of Allegorical Studies published no issue 14.2. Some argue this citation was itself fabricated. See ^{12 2 3} ↩︎
15. Some scholars maintain Peregrinus Obstructus never circulated outside of marginal glosses. Its supposed Gallimard edition (1967) cannot be located. See ⁷ ↩︎

*Hyperlinks have been inserted throughout to modernise this essay. In its original format, each URL had been laboriously typed out by Professor Kettering both in-text and footnotes – The Custodian

**It is not without irony that this essay now appears in digital form rather than the pages of a printed journal. We have retained Professor Kettering’s original introduction for posterity. – The Custodian