My first impression of Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War was that it was similar to Hegirascope in that both hypertexts are a bit scattered and disjointed. As interactive readers, we form our own meanings and interpretations about these works, meanings that are formed through the different experiences we might have, or rather, the different paths we choose to take. But it gets more complicated than that. If we control the order in which the texts and images appear on the screen, are we molding Lialina’s story and thus making our own stories out of it? Or, is the story the same although it can be read in a different order every time? I’d say we uncover bits and pieces of Lialina’s story as we go through and click on different links and images. We “fill in the blanks,” if you will, wherever the blanks need filling. This is Lialina’s story and nobody else’s story. What can be pulled from the hypertext, on the other hand, depends on the reader.
As readers, we often approach stories with the expectation that there will be a back story. In the case of MBCBFTW, there is no back story – We’re just thrown right into the mix. Therefore, we approach the hypertext with our own back stories, stories that affect how we interpret Lialina’s own personal narrative. What really happened while her boyfriend was at war? Did she cheat on him with her neighbor? Who knows. We also approach stories expecting them to have a clear point of view. In MBCBFTW, however, the point of view is not clear. Is this a dialogue between two people? Are these the innermost thoughts of two different people? Just one person? If so, who? You can see that the work raises a lot of questions. (I have a lot of blanks to fill in.)
The format of the hypertext reminded me of a puzzle. If you click and follow the links in a particular frame all the way through, you’re left with an empty frame. This could be a representation of the work itself. Although you feel like you’ve accomplished something when there is nothing left to click, like you’ve completed that part of the story, you’re still left with just a bunch of empty boxes in the end. The work leaves you without a sense of closure.
I agree that the images help in establishing a sort of dark theme, as someone mentioned below. The images also offer readers even more opportunities to create their own meanings or form their own assumptions about the story. That’s actually what I thought of when I saw the image of the window – the work is a metaphorical window of opportunity that we have to open.
I like your metaphor of “filling in the blanks” — and there are a lot of them in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. We have these very literal blank, black windows that proliferate and eventually take over the piece. Do you see these black, wordless frames as effective use of screen space? Are we invited to fill them using our imagination or do they resist our intentions?