Inevitable interconnections

This week our class has read excerpts from Rayuela by Julio Cortázar (1963) along with George Landow’s introductory chapter of his Hypertext 2.0 book and a couple of chapters from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia which situates the rhizome as representative of the interconnectedness of all things. When reading Rayuela, it is evident why this text has been proposed as a paper hypertext. Being one of the central texts in the Latin-American boom, this novel presented an innovative method of reading and interacting with a novel due to its non-linear reading pathways. Cortázar offers multiple options for the reader: 1) one may read it in the traditional linear way, 2) in the order the author proposes 3) in any order that pleases the reader. Consequently, the linear reading order is disrupted and more agency is given to the reader, granting more liberty in how the reader interacts with the text. Similarly, a hypertext in the age of computers and the World Wide Web offers an analogous model. On any given webpage which includes hyperlinks, the reader/user makes decisions on whether or not to continue reading or click onto a hyperlink, return to the original page or remain in the one introduced by the hyperlink. As Landow posits, the “hypertext blurs the boundaries between reader and writer and therefore instantiates another quality of Barthes’ ideal text [….] for hypertext fulfills ‘the goal of literary work (of literature as work) [which] is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4-5). Indeed, both Rayuela and hypertexts grant the reader with the ability to engender a new product that changes according to each reader. 

First, Rayuela and hypertexts hold the potential to reorganize time given its suggested non-linear consumption. The book has the possibility to begin on Chapter 30 instead of 1, thereby suggesting that time is malleable and that a text is not obligated to follow a chronological order. Therefore, time has no beginning, middle or end necessarily, but it is able to exist in multiple spaces simultaneously. Speaking of space, hypertexts also question the notion of a defined space. When looking at a webpage with a hyperlink and one clicks on the hyperlink, for example, one is taken to another page or another space, suggesting a depth of space and sense of multiple layers that exist simultaneously. This brings to mind the image of the botanical rhizome in which its multiple roots function similarly to the multiple pages that hyperlinks lead to. Hyperlinks establish connections ad infinitum demonstrating the interrelated nature of the bigger structure: the Web. 

In terms of narrative, Rayuela exhibits a disruption of a chronological spatial and temporal configuration. Not only does Cortázar play with the order of the chapters or sections, but in Chapter 34, for example, he modifies the order of the narration in a manner that the reader has to read every other line in order to follow a narrative. Thus, the book’s plays at multiple levels reorient the book as a crystal ball (as the narrator presents), an enigma in which the reader is immersed and unaware of the next destination just as the user is unaware of what lies ahead upon clicking on a hyperlink.