HYPERTEXT FICTION
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context
internal and external
perception non-linear
context genre
mutable
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Structure plays a large part in generating meaning, from syntax to argument, as Sven Birkerts notes. What he fails to acknowledge in his derision of "jump-cuts" is the role of context not only to inflect but also to create meaning. The most classic example of this in film is the juxtaposition of an old man’s impassive face in close-up, with three alternate shots: a plate of food; an old woman; and a child playing. When these were screened to separate audiences, admiration abounded for the old man’s acting ability: what hunger he shows! What love he shows! What affection for the child! When the sequence is fragmented and reconstructed in different contexts, a significantly different meaning emerges. Hassan speaks separately of "fragmentation" and "constructionism" in postmodernism, but it is the conjunction of these two that sustains "the movement ‘from unique truth and a world fixed and found,’ as Goodman remarked, ‘to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.’ " (Hassan, 508)
In Jung’s Alchemy I discuss how alchemical symbolism restores context as a deciding factor in interpretation, a problem which logocentricism denies, and linear structure tries to avoid by limiting the context. In hypertext fiction, the author can never be certain in what order the user will access pages, and thus will not know in what context any given page will be read (unless there is one link only to that page). Despite this, hypertext fictions have made surprisingly fruitful use of context.
One of the simplest techniques is to use an entrance-tunnel as a mise-en-scene, which can act as a foundation context for the rest of the site. Dollspace and Hegirascope II both make use of these. In the entrance tunnel to Dollspace, image and text feed off each other and their context. The initial close-up of a woman's eye-lash appears romantic in the traditional sense of fetishizing a woman's individual features. The text, however, is ambivalent, and suggests a warning: "You are now entering deep dollspace zero". The next page, a soft-focus blue-grey close-up of an eye, would again be interpreted as traditional "romantic imagery" of the sort used to sell perfume - but for the text:
doll yoko swims up from crater mud pond of dead girls
These prior images complicate the unambiguous tenderness of the next page: this time the lips are in soft-focus close-up, slightly curved in a smile, with the text "she places her moss damp lips on yours and kisses you tenderly". The memory of the staring eye lingers, despite the simple romance of the current page.
The subsequent pages veer between tenderness and destruction, offering only one link for seven pages, all on the theme of woman-as-doll, and woman as a real, bleeding person. This provides not only a thematic basis, but enriches later meaning. Without the initial, romantic extreme close-ups of a woman’s face, when her whole face first appears there would be no contrast between this specific face and the romance of how its component parts - lips, eyes, lashes - were treated earlier. The close-ups generate an interpretation for the whole face as "this is now the real woman, not the doll," while the first sight of the whole face leads one to reinterpret the earlier close-ups as dehumanising, generalised.
Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope II also uses its entrance-tunnel to offer a theme: "What if the word will not be still?" Far from Dollspace’s vague, dreamlike quiet (and long download time, due to the graphics), Hegirascope II is quick, snappy, it won’t be still, as it jabs its finger at the breakdown of linearity, the mutability of meaning, and other snippets of postmodern fashion:
One cannot muse on the meaning for too long - the word will not be still, the time-out flings one forward into the text, and to select the previous quote, I clicked "Back", "Forward" and "Stop" about twenty times. Each time one rushes through the entrance tunnel, a few phrases catch the eye, enriched by previous visits. Within the body of the site, the word is no more obliging: four links are provided for (almost) every page, but if one hesitates over the choice too long, a new page leaps up.
Context in multimedia is not just information, however. Many sites fail to take appearance into consideration, such as Lies, by Richard L. Pryll, Jr., which I discuss below. Pryll’s site is so visually dull and uncomfortable to read, with red text running from one end of the black screen to the other, that one is inclined to leave the site despite its intruiging structure. This does not mean all sites should be as graphics-heavy as Dollspace: Hegirascope II shows that a text-only page can still be a visual pleasure, simply by narrowing the margins to make the text easier to scan, and varying background and font colours. Within his site, Moulthrop uses the colour schemes as a thematic context: in an otherwise maze-like site, the user can begin to associate a certain colour with a certain storyline or genre.
internal and external
perception non-linear
context genre
mutable
Back to summary
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation