Blog 3 - Hypertext Fiction

To be completely honest, I had no idea that the “H” in “HTML” stood for “hypertext” and that practically everything we read online is considered hypertext. I guess until this class I’d never really given much thought to the difference between online literature and literature on paper, but in actuality, it’s not that different. Writers have been creating works similar to hypertext fiction since the early 20th century, incorporating modernist ideas into their writing to create works which use “literary devices...to represent language differently in portraying associative thought than in communicating conversational discourse,” a concept that is also associated with hypertext (Rettberg 56). Modernist ideas that breathe life into hypertext have been around for nearly a century if not longer which I found to be highly interesting. Rettberg discusses a piece by Julio Cortazar called “Hopscotch” which consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which can be read in absolutely any order. This style of writing gives the reader the freedom to choose how they wish to interpret the book. They can read the book from start to finish or they can skim arbitrarily and have no direction at all in their reading. There is no wrong answer.

I took a closer look at Cortazar’s work. According to Wikipedia, “Some of the "expendable" chapters at first seem like random musings, but upon closer inspection solve questions that arise during the reading of the first two parts of the book.” Despite its randomness and lack of structure, “Hopscotch” is still a complete novel with a beginning, middle, and end, it simply encourages readers to decide the order of those events. Like a puzzle, hypertext fiction lays all the pieces out for the reader and then allows them to complete the story however they process the project. The likes of hypertext fiction have been around for decades, but computers have made the genre highly interactive, accessible, and fast. As Rettberg notes, it is a “‘fiction of possibilities,’” a “hybrid form of interactive fiction,” and a “foundation for many new types of literary work in digital media” (Rettberg 57, 86).

Lily

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Cortázar_novel)