William Burroughs, Cut-ups 1959
It was William Burrough's preoccupation with the deconstruction of words and language, most notably through the cut-up and fold-in techniques that he began to develop in 1959 with artist Byron Gysin, which constitutes his most significant contribution to the fragmentary, non-linear approach to contemporary narrative. Borrowing from the collage technique of visual artists, his method links fragments of texts in surprising juxtapositions, offering unexpected leaps into uncharted territories that attempt to jar and ultimately transform the consciousness of the reader. For this reason, Burroughs refers to himself as "a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas." For Burroughs, narrative operates as a vast, multi-threaded network that reflects the associative tendencies of the mind, collapsing the boundaries of time and space, drawing attention to previously undetected connections, drawing attention to the links between disparate ideas and elements.
Raymond Queneau's One Hundred Trillion Poems
In 1961 Raymond Queneau, a member of the group OULIPO (Ouvroir de litt?rature potentielle), produced One Hundred Trillion Poems. This work consists of ten sonnets, each printed on a single sheet of paper, and each sheet cut into 14 strips, one line to a strip. By turning the strips at random, the reader creates a new sonnet. The number of poems possible is 10 to the power of 14 -- exactly one hundred trillion poems as promised.
Queneau estimated that if one spent eight hours a day, for two hundred days of the year, and spent no more than one minute on each of the one hundred trillion possible sonnets, it would take more than a million centuries to finish the text.
Also of interest is Queneau's Exercises de style, a collection of about 100 renditions of a particular banal event in different styles and subject to different formal constraints (acronym, sonnet, neohellenism, &c.) Please note, link is to a French version of Exercises in Styles.
William Gillespie's 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
William Gillespie wrote 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets in homage to Raymond Queneau. The web-based poem produces a different rhyming sonnet every time the site is visited or refreshed by a random shuffling of lines of text written by Gillespie.
The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, is a Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians that explores the uses of writing of constrictive form. Members include Raymond Queneau, Fran?ois Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino.
The OuLiPo group has experimented for decades with various kinds of procedural writing, producing texts according to formal rules Ð inventing the rules themselves has been the primary focus for the Oulipians, producing actual texts is not nearly as important, thus the "potential literature" in the name. Oulipian writers impose constraints that must be satisfied to complete a text, constraints ranging across all levels of composition, from elements of plot or structure down to rules regarding letters. OuLiPo thus pushes a structuralist conception of language to a level of mathematical precision; technique becomes technical when language itself becomes a field of investigation, a complex system made up of a finite number of components. Constraints push writers into new linguistic territories--one might say that in Oulipian work is a sort of ongoing investigation into language itself: language is conceived as a complex system made up of a finite number of components, and constraints force the linguistic system's itinerary off its usual well-trodden paths.
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit&hellip the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution." Igor Stravinsky
'A word at the end for the benefit of those particularly grave people who condemn without consideration and without appeal all work wherein is manifested any propensity for pleasantry. When they are the works of poets, entertainments, pranks and hoaxes still fall within the domain of poetry.'
Oulipo manifesto, Francois Le LionnaisSome of the techniques discovered or used by Oulipo were
- lipogram (a text which omits one or more letters)
- haikuisation (producing a new poem from the rhyming words found at the end of each line of an existing poem)
- S+7 (producing a new text by replacing each substantive in an existing text with the word seven places after it in any dictionary) combinatorics (recombining elements of a text according to any rule) bifurcation (a text containing within itself many different ways of being read, as the reader is given the choice at various points of which section to read next - an obvious precursor of hypertext)
See also The Oulipo: Constraints and Collaboration William Gillespie
1962 Mark Saports, 'Composition No. 1': Card Shuffling Machine
D?blin's pronouncement - that one could easily cut the creations of epic poetry into pieces and they would still remain viable - led Marc Saporta to transform a novel into a card game in 1962. A reader opening the box will find a stack of one hundred and fifty unnumbered cards along with an instruction leaflet.
"The reader is requested to shuffle these cards as for a card game. He may take a card, if he so desires, with the left hand, as with a fortune teller. The order in which the cards lay, determines the fate of the man X. (...) It depends on the chain of circumstances as to whether all ends happily or unhappily. A life is composed of many different segments. But the number of possible compositions is infinite."
Reinhold Grimm: Marc Saporta oder der Roman als Kartenspiel, in: Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 14/ 1965sourced from http://www.hyperdis.de/txt/alte/gb/archi007.htm
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov consists of a Foreword, the poem "Pale Fire", and extensive Commentary and Index for the poem Ð the reader has several options to integrate and interpret these four sections, resulting in potentially very different outcomes as for the "real story".
From the Foreword:
"Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A. The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem, skipping a line to indicate a double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto. "The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards. Canto Two, your favorite, and that shocking tour de force, Canto Three, are identical in length (334 lines) and cover twenty-seven cards each. Canto Four reverts to One in length and occupies again thirteen cards, of which the last four used on the day of his death give a Corrected Draft instead of a Fair Copy. "A methodical man, John Shade usually copied out his daily quota of completed lines at midnight but even if he recopied them again later, as I suspect he sometimes did, he marked his card or cards not with the date of his final adjustments, but with that of his Corrected Draft or first Fair Copy. I mean, he preserved the date of actual creation rather than that of second or third thoughts. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings."
With Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) we can detect an obvious hypertextual quality already at the surface level: the text (poem) - commentary structure. This is one of the basic modes of non- or multilinear text. In addition, there are two further texts, "Foreword" and "Index", which multiply the textual network. These four different "statuspheres"[10] appear to be clearly separated - the links between the texts are (almost) invisible. With the hypertext vocabulary we may say that the anchors in Pale Fire are weakly marked. The poem, "Pale Fire", is line-numbered, but there are no other anchors. In commentary the anchors are marked with a line number referring to the poem, and with a quotation explicating the passage commented upon the "Index" is list of two-fold links - the anchor word(s) can usually be found only from the "Commentary", but a line number refers also to a relevant place in the poem. It is possible to read the book in a totally traditional manner, from the first page to the last, as any other novel - but the difference lies in that before doing this the reader has already had to make a decision - I'll ignore the "Commentary" and the "Index" when reading the poem itself. That decision (or, naturally, the decision to skip between poem and commentary frequently, for example) is an additional, non-trivial effort from the part of the reader - it is, then, an instance of ergodic activity. What makes things much more complicated is the relation of the contents of the statuspheres to each other. There are dozens of books and articles trying to explicate what it is that actually goes on in this text. One interesting treatise on Pale Fire is Peter Rabinowitz's "Truth in Fiction" (1977), in which he states that the main theme in the book is the relation between two texts, poem and commentary - but because the nature of both of these is to some extent up to the reader to decide, it is in practice impossible to determine what this relation is[11]. Rabinowitz distinguishes four different audience types (relevant for every narrative text) and traces the difficulty in reading Pale Fire to the complex constellation of these audiences in this particular text. In order to be able to make any interpretation of the text, one has either to make a decision to consciously privilege one reading over the others, "or to read the novel several times, making a different choice each time. As in a game, we are free to make several opening moves; what follows will be dependent upon our initial decision. Simply with respect to the questions suggested above, we can generate four novels, all different but all couched, oddly, in the same words.
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter3.htmsee also Zambal: Nabakov Site
pale fire: nabokov's poetic clue
Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) was an Argentine novelist and short story writer who emigrated to France in the 1950's. He was an amateur trumpet player as well. His best-known novels are The Winners (1965), Hopscotch (1966), a novel filled with jazz references, and A Manual for Manuel (1978). His short story collections include The End of the Game (1967) and We Loved Glenda So Much (1983). A postmodernist, Cortazar was a tireless stylistic experimenter.
Probably Cort?zar's most famous book, Hopscotch has been called "fiendishly esoteric" by Salman Rushdie. The book is separated into 155 chapters with the last 99 collated under a section called "expendable chapters". Hopscotch ('Rayuela' rolls gently off the tounge, while 'Hopscotch' realizes the jerky landing on another numbered square) "consists of many books, but two books above all". The book can be read straight through or by jumping between chapters in either the order Cort?zar has set, or any other the reader wishes to create. Due to its meandering nature, Hopscotch has been called a Proto-hypertext novel. It was probably Hopscotch that Cort?zar had in mind when he said "If I had the technical means to print my own books, I think I would keep on producing collage-books".
see also An Excerpt from Cortazar's Hopscotch
Robert Coover's short story "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl" is a skillfully constructed text in which vague references and the hiding of the personality of the focalisers enables several interpretations of what is really going on in the story. Brian McHale has paraphrased Coover's story as follows:"Carl, a businessman on a fishing holiday, either sleeps with one of his fishing guide's women or he does not; if he sleeps with one of them, it is either Swede's wife Quenby or his daughter Ola; whichever one he sleeps with (if he actually does sleep with one of them), Swede either finds out about it or he does not; if he does find out, he either plans to kill Carl in revenge or he does not. All of these possibilities are realized in Coover's text." (McHale 1987, 107-108).
The story consists of short passages told from an unspecified viewpoint (to be exact, the identity of the focaliser is unspecified). The magic with which the manifold story works is in the unspecified personal references and in the uncertainty of the narrator and focaliser from a passage (lexia) to passage. And finally, the story is cut off at the point where one of the possibilities would have to be chosen as the textual actual world. The first two strategies are exactly same ones that hyperfiction is heavily dependent on, the third, on the other hand, is effective only in closed print fiction.
In Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing (1972) and Take It Or Leave It (1976) exceptional typography is used extensively, and as an additional site for signification; in the opening page, for example, the text arranged round the edges of the page form a rectangle which represents the small room into which the narrator has locked himself in order to write his novel (to be exact, the narrator in the room is not the primary narrator in the novel).
Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a story collection written according to a Tarot deck: the cards are assembled in columns and rows which intersect each other, and the stories are based each on one row or one column of cards. The effect, then, is that also the stories intersect each other; they use the same materials, but the meaning of each card depends on the current story. The collection of stories is yet again an example of multilinearity - the Tarot cards serve as building blocks, of which different combinations and different stories have been put together.
Essays about Protohypertexts and hypertext theory
REPLACEMENT & DISPLACEMENT: AT THE LIMITS OF PRINT FICTION
see also TRIPTYCH: HYPERTEXT, SURFICTION, STORYWORLDS Mark Amerika
Fragment and Phrase Theory -Jane Reichhold (actually this has some good ideas for generating ideas within a series of rules)
Other Proto-hypertext links
Mark Saports, 'Composition No. 1': Card Shuffling Machine
Generative Text links
The Random Stump Speech Synopsis Haiku Generator
This page is part of a series looking at the precursors of interactive multimedia by Shiralee Saul 2001. URL: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~saul/essays/04proto.html
Index to my entire site: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~saul
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