What’s more modern than the Internet? Nothing.
Perfect for work procrastination, and looking at stuff on your Ipad and that. Quite old though. The only good hypertext novel? You decide.
So popular they even printed it as a real life book! With no hyperlinks.
..?
Posted in: Something to Read
The Frivolous Now 
Dennis
October 26, 2010
It’s a bit of a funny one, turning this into a paperback, isn’t it? It’s compulsory reading for English undergraduates at Birkbeck, and when we talked about it in the seminar, we found that most people had not read it like a normal (hardcopy) novel, but had jumped around, following links. Consequently it was quite difficult to have a discussion about it, because nobody had read the same bits: ‘Do you remember the episode with the pigeon?’, ‘No.’, etc. I guess we don’t feel the same onus to read exhaustively with hypertext as with sequential narrative.
Speaking of unusual remediations, did anyone listen to BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates on the radio last week? The book comes in a box, with its 27 chapters as individual pamphlets which you can shuffle before reading. The radio play, obviously, had to present the listener with one particular ordering, taking that choice (or more likely chance operation) away from us. But on the website you can listen to the sections separately in any order you like.
Chris Woolfrey
October 26, 2010
Absolutely: I’ve read the paperback version of 253 from cover to cover but I think I maybe spent a sum total of about 45 minutes on the original online version. And I think I prefer the online version but only for the gimmick, really; that’s the main problem with any hypertext fiction. Somebody also pointed out to me that if you own a Kindle it mentions how many pages through a website you are (apparently? I don’t know) so the idea of a hypertext novel being a kind of ‘journey’ is made redundant by new technology. I suppose Ryman’s foray into the online world is a bit outdated now, even though the idea still seems sort of new…I guess most people worked out that nobody really reads book-length works online. Or that we like good old fashioned linear narratives.
I’ve meant to get hold of The Unfortunates! Reminds me a bit of the Tramalfadorian novels in Slaughterhouse 5. BS Johnson would have done something great with computers…
Dennis
October 27, 2010
One thing I’ve found with The Unfortunates is that it very much fetishes the material: the book-as-object. It’s Nice To Have – to shuffle, to fondle, like toys or cards – in a way which isn’t exactly related to reading, and which doesn’t come across in the online carousel version.
zaradinnen
October 27, 2010
And (of course) McSweeney’s have also been there: Issue 16 (2005) featured a story by Robert Coover on a deck of playing cards. Shuffle away for a narrative-shattering experience of modern lit.
Chris Woolfrey
October 28, 2010
It’d be interesting to see if there are pre-20th century precedents. I mean, I know there always is (I think) but anything I’ve read points to Barthes and Cortazar (etc.), rather than any kind of material object like the BS Johnson or McSweeneys. Anybody know of anything from, say, the Victorian era? They had a bit of a penchant for ‘things’ so there must be something.
I also wonder whether you could do a printed version of, say, ‘Afternoon’ or ‘Victory Garden’ without the hyperlinks? And whether it’d help people get back to the originals, or whether we really hate the idea of reading things online that much?
Chris Woolfrey
October 28, 2010
(point also being that Cortazar and Barthes are also 20th Century…)
Dennis
October 28, 2010
Shuffly-bookwise, Raymond Llull had concentric rotating wheels in his books in the late C13, so you could line up certain premises & meditate on them – “HOW – [is God’s] GREATNESS – VIRTUOUS?” – and thus, supposedly, know God exhaustively, by analysing, through combinatrics, all of his possible facets.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if those books where you can mix the head of a fireman with the torso of a cavemen and a ballerina’s legs go back beyond the C20.
In 1961, Raymond Queneau wrote a set of 10 sonnets like this (Cent mille milliards de poèmes) – where the pages could be cut between each line, so you could have the first line from the eighth sonnet, the second line from the tenth sonnet, etc. etc. , and it would all still rhyme/scan/make grammatical sense. It’s the kind of thing that lends itself quite nicely to being adapted for the web…which is why Gallimard & the Queneau estate looked like such a bunch of fucks for closing down a website that did just that (the exact wording of the ruling is about half way down this page. Thankfully, a whole load of other sites have now sprung up which do the same, and it seems that Gallimard don’t have the energy to pursue them.
Tony Venezia
October 28, 2010
Isn’t this similar to those choose-your-own-adventure RPG books that address you in the second person and give you a choice of narrative routes? Italo Calvino eat your heart out…
Dennis
October 29, 2010
An Oulipian would claim that Raymond Queneau invented the choose-your-own-adventure text in 1967 with Un conte à votre façon. Here it is for the web in English.
Obviously, it’s not as good as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and would benefit from the introduction of some orcs and a twenty-sided dice…
Chris Woolfrey
October 29, 2010
I genuinely loved those books. And I think contemporary fiction really could do with a few more orcs. The dice though…they confused me. In fact I bought a set of them recently…no lie. I’d take them over Calvino any day, genuinely.
Queneau! I didn’t know this existed. Now I know what i’m doing all weekend.
Did ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ ever go online? Would link (pun intended) back into Hypertext fiction quite nicely.
Tony Venezia
October 30, 2010
There’s been talk of turning China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels into RPG. Maybe someone can turn ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ into a choose-your-own-adventure. With dice and orcs.