Patchwork Girl and Hypertext – Long Blog (Which, Ironically, is Shorter than Previous Blog Entries)
Both Patchwork Girl and Trip require the reader to derive meaning out of their “lexia” by actively making connections across multiple blocks of narrative.
In some sections, such as the journal, the lexia are connected causally. Moving from one to the next (done by clicking on the text) relates a series of events in the order that they happen. As in a book-narrative, these are written assuming that they will be read in order, mimicking the kind of writing that a book implicitly suggests in its bound-and-printed order.
These lexia can be unrelated to one another causally, but that does not mean they are unrelated to the overall narrative. In The Graveyard, for example, each body part has its own self-contained episode explaining its origins and its own temperments. The Patchwork Girl is made up of many different women, a man, and a cow. Bits of information that come back up in other parts of the story, explaining certain actions of the Patchwork Girl.
It’s tempting to refer to “other” parts of the story as “later” parts, based on the order I read them (the Graveyard before the Journal, for example). And in a way, they are. The stories of the body parts come chronologically earlier within the story, but not necessarily in the narrative.
Is this so different from how we make meaning out of a conventional narrative? After all, though a hypertext exists as a web of connections without a set path through it, we as readers still experience it as a set path. It is conceivable that one could read a book by jumping around in it – reading the chapters in a random order, for example. Would it still make sense? In the end, you’d have all the same information that you would otherwise. Certain kinds of payoffs (such as surprise endings) probably wouldn’t work as well.
In the interview linked to below, Sean Stewart talks about the nature of communication on the internet being based on gossip and sharing information. When a majority of the class was reading Trip on Monday, there was discussion not only among partners, but between groups. We were each reading the story on our own, starting from different points in the narrative. Through talking to each other, we started noticing connections between different parts of the story that, individually, would have taken much longer to come across.
If one ignores aspects of writing such as use of language, and looks at a book soley as a vehicle for telling a story, it’s conceivable that a group of people could split a book up into randomly assigned parts, read their parts, and then talk about what they read, reconstructing the story through their memories and interpretations of events. Something like this already occurs when people discuss a book they’ve read or a film they’ve seen – different people notice different things, and an open discussion allows one to develop a more complex reading of the text in question.
Hypertext requires a reader to assemble (or, perhaps not assemble, but order) a narrative from a selection of texts that can be read in almost any order. If you think about it, a chaotic series of events that we place into a narrative format is closer to the way we make sense out of real life than a book or film that presents itself in a narrative way. Whether this compulsion to narrative is biological, linguistic, cultural, or the very essence of our consciousness is debatable (locking a neurologist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and a philosophy major in a room for a week and seeing who comes out alive at the end is as good a way as any to figure out the answer to that question).