Hypertext and Rayuela

The topic for this week’s class discussion is Electronic Narrative: Cortázar and Hypertext. The readings assigned were selected fragments from Rayuela (1963) by Julio Cortázar and “Hypertext: An Introduction” by George Landow. Some of the suggested Readings were “Instrucciones” by Belén Gache; “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture” by Stuart Moulthrop and “Introduction: Rhizome” and “The Smooth and the Striated” by Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari. The prompt for this week’s blog entry is on the implications and possibilities of the use of space, time, narrative and interaction.

…Roland Barthes describes an ideal textuality that precisely matches that which in computing has come to be called hypertext–text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms links, node, network, web, and path: “In this ideal text” says Barthes, “the networks…are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has not beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one… (Hypertext 2.0. p.3)

By ‘hypertext,”’ Nelson explains, “I mean non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (Hypertext 2.0. p. 3).

These two explanations by Roland Barthes and Theodor H. Nelson, helps us to understand how Hypertext functions in electronic environments. Nonetheless and after reading Cortázar’s Rayuela one might consider his novel as an extension of a hypertext in printed literature. His novel matches what Bartes and Nelson argue on “hypertext’. It offers multiple paths to the reader. The sections are connected by are not meant to be read in a linear way. The reader might chose however to do that, but the possibilities for approaching this novel and its interpretations are multiple. Cortázar, in a way with Rayuela seems to go against the traditional notion of a novel. He plays with the time and space and narration mechanism in a way that resembles more an electronic piece of literature than a traditional printed text.

There are some however, that experience the text as a sequence or as a connection to previous texts or ideologies. For example, George Landow points out that Michael Foucault “conceives of text in terms of network and links…he points out that the ‘frontiers of a book are never clear-cut,’ because ‘it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network… [a] network of references’” (Hypertext 2.0. p. 3) One can assume that Cortazár’s novel was not a divine inspiration, but perhaps a revelation that took place after reading numerous novels that did not quite fully satisfied his vision of a novel.

Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari on “Introduction: Rhizome” declare, “The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature” (5). This idea can probably help us to approach Cortazár’s novel. Cortázar possibly attempted to imitate the chaotic world we live on, which most of the time does not make much sense. We take different paths in life hoping that we get somewhere, but when we do get there we hoped we had opted for the other option we had, but that at the moment did not seem to be the right way to go.  We go on life trying to make sense of our lives and experiences, but sometimes we are not successful and it is until we reopen the closed chapter that we left behind, that we start to make sense of what is happening to us right a the present moment. That’s when we get lucky, for when things get really in front of us, we cannot decipher the links, nodes, networks, webs, and paths that permeate our lives.