HYPERTEXT FICTION
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genre
internal
and external perception
non-linear context
genre mutable
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An advantage of context for hypertext is that each new page can be a new genre. Traditionally, the opening pages of a novel or opening sequences of a movie create an expectation of its genre, and the rules within which (or against which) it will play: the flaming titles and dramatic opening music of The Devil’s Advocate, for instance, prepare the viewer for the thriller/horror elements that develop further in the film. Any text can hybridise genre, running the risk (or pleasure) of disrupting the reader’s expectations. In hypertext fiction, however, one holds ones expectations more in abeyance than one does when one turns the page of a book. One clicks on a link with no reassurance beyond faith in the author that the next page will relate to the previous one: one is more inclined to find out where the link goes than to expect what it will bring.
In Hegirascope II, Moulthrop exploits this potential by drawing on dreams, rhetoric, narrative, fiction, non-fiction, Frenc} theory, and slogans, until the categories "entertainment" and "information" are so innapropriate that one gives in and accepts that neologisims like "infotainment" have some use. (In this case, to express the impossibility of a concrete definition rather than to define it.) Hassan lists "Hybridization" among his postmodern catenas, writing,
Hybridization, or the mutant replication of genres, including parody, travesty, patstiche... This makes for a different concept zf tradition, one in which continuity and discontinuity, high and low culture, mingle not to imitate but to expand the past in the present. (506)
Although Jameson sees this as forgetting how to think historically (xii), and examples of hybridisation such as Pulp Fiction may be accused of this, we must remember that the tool is not the use to which it is put. For some, both the dominant discourses and the history (constructed, fictionalised) that has produced them are tools thtt will not do their work. In "Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot" Michelle Cliff draws out her sense of speechlessness as an educated child of the colonies through a collage: autobiographical sketches; unanswered questions; eliptical sentences; swift literary criticism of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, to name a few; and quotations from a range of postcolonial authors, poets, and one art critic. She writes,
... part of my purpose as a writer of Afro-Caribbean - Indian (Arawak and Carib), African, European - experience and heritage, and western experience and education, has been to reject speeclessness, a process which has taken years, and to invent my own peculiar speech, with which to describe my own peculiar self... (40)
The sense of a hybrid world where the neat dichotomies of the Enlightenment no longer apply finds expression in hybrid literature.
internal
and external perception
non-linear context
genre mutable
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation