Picking up Puzzle Pieces
Posted on October 27, 2005 at 1:28 pm by nluu"The Color of the Television" by Moulthrop reiterates image of putting a jigsaw puzzle to describe one of many reading experiences in hypertext fiction. With each new link comes a new piece of information that might or might not fit into the whole narrative. Every new paragraphs one have to hunt and search for clues to try to make some sense of what is presented before our screen. Since three different narratives seem to be put together on the same lexia, sometime by hunting around one can find clues that contain semblance of previous narrative.
The different thing about this hypertext fiction from previous ones we have read in class are the little quotations and factual information outside of the fictional story narrative located on the side of the page. Many of them explain the definition of hypertext fiction. One of the quoations I found interesting is:
"Following" a link means leaving it for another lexia; "gathering" a relation means bringing things to a central place: whereas the disjunctive link is associated with travel, the conjunctive relation is associated with locus, with an inherently structured lexia." Link to Quotation
The above quotation encapusalate another experience of reading hypertext fiction. The above quotation seem to differentiate between a disjunctive link and a conjunctive relation. In this hypertext "The Color of Television", is he creating mainly disjunctive link or conjunctive relation? Many times from one link to another it seems that the idea of gathering a relations instead of simply following a link. Nonetheless, I think that it requires both to read hypertext fiction because one can passively follow a link to whereever it leads you, but if the information does not appear as expected one must gather the information there and save it for later to see if it fits into another part of the narrative.
A readers may have to suspend a narrative from a certain characters for a while in order to gather more information surrounding the primary narrative one is reading to open more paths. As Moulthrop writes in another aside quoatation from the fictional narrative is, "READING SHOULD BE A SEAMLESS AND UNINTERRUPTED EXPERIENCE. ITS CHOICES PROCEED FROM THE EXPRESSION OF POSSIBILITIES AS A NARRATIVE MEDIUM, AND DEPEND UPON THE COMPLICITY OF THE READER IN THE CREATION OF A NARRATIVE. READING IS DESIGN ENACTED." Link to quotation Reading "should be seamless" but in hypertext fiction it is interrupted at almost every paragraph and the readers must gather up clues along the different lexia.