The other side of the ritual question yields the ritual disclosure of the mother (one could as well write “other,” it is the same phrase). In this case the turn-taking joke also discloses how thin the membrane between meaning and nonsense, or, if not nonsense, between language and echolalic music. (Mel Torme on a tear. Again the language slips between rip and weep in a word.)
The little old lady who becomes a yodel is a changing beast, a mother of many forms, cf., Magdalena and the mother here or the little old lady from Pasadena who is herself a ritual disclosure (in the song her car lets the outside in and the crypt is unveiled), surprising the beach boys with her continuing vitality.
It is a sad thing to think of Gelernter, so obviously looking for a way to reject the father in his mirror world and then ultimately wounded for the rebellion. His criticism rolls from us because it isn’t poured upon us but rather upon a spectre, a VR of the father. To say that “the computer allows you to assemble fragments of text and read them off the screen in any sequence that appeals to you, without guidance from the author” isn’t a criticism of hyperfiction, where in some sense, as Jane Yellowlees Douglas argues, the guidance of the author is, if not everything, at least redeemed. Rather this is a loosely veiled cry against yet another system of computer narrative, the realm of Gelernter’s father, Artificial Intelligence, which truly confronts you with fragments of meaning and a missing author.
Knock knock who’s there.
Father.
Father who?