Internet Textuality: Toward Interactive Multilinear Narrative

August 14, 2024 6:18 AM

The year is 1996. MetaFilter does not yet exist. Social media are tapes, disks, books, and other objects shared between friends. The Web is a new, exciting place for exploring new kinds of texts. As such, it's a perfect time to dig into Borges, Calvino, Cortázar, and kin, along with state-of-the-art graphics, in order to help think about the theory and future of multilinear narrative.

This post sparked by my just checking out yesterday a facsimile edition of the handwritten draft of Cortázar's Rayuela/Hopscotch, and it's cool! Never read any Cortázar before, and I'm really looking forward to it, along with the English translation when I get that.

posted by cupcakeninja (21 comments total)

Adding in 253, Jeff Ryman to this thread.
posted by my-username at 6:48 AM on August 14 [5 favorites]

when can a text be considered a text?

[g:] is there a text in this class?
posted by HearHere at 7:05 AM on August 14 [3 favorites]

MetaFilter does not yet exist.

Dark times.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:15 AM on August 14 [8 favorites]

My introduction to this topic, in the day, was Umberto Eco whose work in semiotics I found after reading The Name of the Rose.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:21 AM on August 14 [5 favorites]

Cortázar is a treat, cupcakeninja. Enjoy.
posted by doctornemo at 7:29 AM on August 14 [3 favorites]

Aw yeah, this is the stuff a bunch of us were into during the 1990s and early 2000s. Gardens of forking paths online, rhizomatic digital design, the works.
posted by doctornemo at 7:29 AM on August 14 [9 favorites]

I ran a link exchange back then (Gamer's Link Xchange / Xtreme [after the cease and desist letter]) and one of the joys of those early times of countless self-hosted sites was finding niche interests like gaming and then clicking through the hundreds of sites navigable by the link exchange systems. Random, and yet not.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:42 AM on August 14 [4 favorites]

I still use Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) as an example when I teach my library-school students about structuring/chunking ebooks and digitized books.
posted by humbug at 7:48 AM on August 14 [4 favorites]

In 2001, I created an interactive hypertext version of Borges' story The Book of Sand. It's still up.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:29 AM on August 14 [13 favorites]

I got to Umberto Eco through Borges, but I got to Borges through Gene Wolfe, who made him into the blind caretaker of the great library at Nessus
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:13 AM on August 14 [6 favorites]

Prior art (i.e. shit I was reading in 1996 at the hypertext moment):

Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by Lawrence Sterne isn't exactly multilinear - I'd say it's instead multithreaded but linear to a fault - but it has a lot to say about linear narrative.

The Trial by Kafka (1914) was not finished by Kafka at the time of his death; it was assembled into its published form by his friend and literary executor Max Brod. The manuscript Brod received/rescued from Kafka was not in any particular order. The Trial's published version is one of many possible orderings of the manuscript.

A Page Of Madness or A Page Out Of Order (1926) is a Japanese avant-garde silent horror film that rejects narrative representation. The film takes place in an asylum. The director/screenwriter claimed to have thrown the pages of the screenplay in a box, shaken it, pulled out pages at random, and made the movie in that order.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:56 AM on August 14 [4 favorites]

This is a very Nettime post. Yay.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:50 AM on August 14 [1 favorite]

The recent Dark Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix plays in this arena.

Pickman's Next Top Model, regarding prior art, I'd add The Manuscript Found In Saragossa, another deeply threaded, dare I say fractally recursive tale. It's also a really banger of a novel.
posted by chromecow at 12:15 PM on August 14 [1 favorite]

The year is 1996. MetaFilter does not yet exist.

The year is 2024. Every one of the sites referenced in "A Preliminary Discussion of Texts on the Internet" are 404 (or their domain-squatted equivalent).

Once upon a time, I worked at the university library supporting one of those sites. And so it goes.
posted by mistersquid at 4:17 PM on August 14 [4 favorites]

The year is 1996: Watch a 1996 Portrait of Gen‑X Definer Douglas Coupland.
posted by ovvl at 4:37 PM on August 14 [1 favorite]

2024. Every one of the sites referenced in "A Preliminary Discussion of Texts on the Internet" are

[wayback:] delirium

[smoulthrop:] hegirascope

[wayback:] the confessional

no dead trees (dead website?)

click me [wayback]

[wayback:] waxweb
posted by HearHere at 7:16 PM on August 14 [1 favorite]

doctornemo: Aw yeah, this is the stuff a bunch of us were into during the 1990s and early 2000s. Gardens of forking paths online, rhizomatic digital design, the works.

Count me in as one who was VERY into this kind of thing/philosophy around '96–'99.
posted by fridgebuzz at 2:32 AM on August 15

> This is a very Nettime post. Yay.

-Database and Narrative :P
-History of Thinking[1,2]
posted by kliuless at 8:00 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

database and narrative are natural enemies

narrative says something different
posted by HearHere at 4:46 PM on August 15

I mean I guess a narrative is a linked list or sorted array.

But RPG rule systems and materials are a kind of database and generate narratives
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:12 PM on August 15

Also, J-CMC (probably first notable for R. MacKinnon on the Lambda Moo affair, 1997) and Ctheory (wiki, where Arthur and Marilouise Kroker published a lot of their related work on the digital postmodern).

Landow's work on hypertexts. Negroponte channeling McLuhan, too.

And probably a hefty chunk of Routledge's back catalog from that era, tbh.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:53 PM on August 15