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Pale Fire [...] reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, Pale Fire, is widely considered a forerunner of postmodernism and a prime example of the literature of exhaustion. The novel has four distinct sections. The first is a "Forward" by a man who calls himself Charles Kinbote. Kinbote, who claims to be a scholar from the country of Zembla, relates how he befriended the American poet John Shade. Following Shade's untimely death, Kinbote was entrusted with the manuscript of the poet's last major work, a long autobiographical poem called "Pale Fire." Despite the many reservations of others concerning his authority to do so, Kinbote has edited the work for publication. The second section is the poem itself, divided into four cantos. It is followed by the third, and longest section, Kinbote's own idiosyncratic commentary and line by line glosses. The fourth section is an index in which Kinbote provides brief capsule descriptions of the major people and places of the text and its accompanying commentary. The novel, however, is something more than a satiric look at the solipsistic excesses of academic exegesis. Kinbote's commentary gradually transforms the heterogenous elements of the text into a labyrinth of dazzling complexity. Kinbote's status as a reliable narrator is subverted early in the book; by the end of the Forward, we suspect him to be something of an opportunist who has made off with Shade's manuscript before the grieving widow can gather her wits. His commentary supports this suspicion. Shade's poem seems to be a fairly straightforward bit of personal reminiscence, as unmarked by worldly concerns as it is by any hint of literary talent. Bending every word of Shade's poem to ludicrous extremes, however, Kinbote proceeds to unfold the story of the overthrow of the last King of Zembla, Charles II. The story of Shade's composition of the poem is made parallel to the story of the approach of an assassin named Gradus who is coming to America to slay the exiled King. Subtly, Kinbote's identity begins to merge with his stories of Charles II, even as Shade's poem is gradually co-opted by the Commentary. Kinbote, it appears, may in fact be the exiled King, using Shade's poem as a means of telling his own story. However, even this possibility begins to slip away as a third and almost invisible narrator, a Russian emigré named Botkin, makes his way into the narrative, raising the possibility that the whole thing, Kinbote, Zembla, Charles II, Gradus, even Shade's poem itself, might be the elaborate creation of this other figure. Critics have spilled no small amount of ink trying to figure who is the true author of this text, which of these layers of story-telling is the real and which the fictional. In so doing they have unwittingly swallowed Nabokov's bait; there can be no strict hierarchical ordering of these narratives because each is as "real" as the other. Or, to be more precise, each is as fictional as the other--Nabokov is openly toying with the desire to see reality as anything but a fictional construct. Writers and readers of hypertext fiction will find much of interest in Nabokov's comic novel. Like Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, Nabokov foregoes the traditional form of the novel in favour of one usually seen as antithetical to narrative. The "Authoritative Edition" format of academic publishing allows Nabokov to re-think the conventions of the realist novel. His tale blurs the traditional distinctions between editor and manuscript, and between narrator and tale, in order to comment ironically on the very processes of reading and interpretation. As with a hypertext, the reader at first moves back and forth between Shade's manuscript and Kinbote's commentary, hoping to find the "truth" of this text by a close comparison of the two texts. However, this desire for closure is rapidly exhausted, as the reader realizes that each point of comparison, each link that is pursued, only takes him or her deeper and deeper into the open-ended web of Nabokov's design. Pale Fire instantiates many of the formal mechanisms of hypertext--its use of disparate materials connected together through an associative logic of links and anchors--only in order to signal the dangers of using these mechanisms to pursue the same old dreams of univocity and fixed meaning. (Source: Electronic Labyrinth)

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By Scott Rettberg, 19 January, 2013
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This paper proposes that link node hypertext can be conceived of as a postcinematic discourse and that a major mechanism of this geneology is available through the comparison of the hypertext link to the cinematic edit. I wish to consider the hypertext link from the point of view of Deleuze's cinematic 'sensory motor schema' where the link can be considered as analogous to Bergson's zone of indetermination between perception and reaction. This work builds upon recent theoretical work that has attempted to define hypertext as a temporal or cinematic medium.

Deleuze's analysis of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film "The Man With A Movie Camera", and the example afforded by Chris Marker's 1962 film "La Jetée", will be used to demonstrate that the significance of the link as a moment of indetermination locates the link within a larger schema. This indetermination is not only the result of a perceptual reduction (what Deleuze has described as the production of an assemblage which obeys the rule of n-1) but also expands into its possible futures. It is around the status of this interval, and the movement that it expresses, that hypertext offers a potential movement that is not so much analogous to cinema as literally cinematic. This will be developed, along similar lines to what Deleuze has offered in his philosophical history of the cinema as a concept, so that much existing hypertext practice can be defined in terms of a 'making habitual' of this indetermination (what we might ordinarily call realism). However, not only might it offer a theory for considering the manner in which hypertext design (and theory) recapitulates other forms (what Bolter and Grusin have recently defined as 'remediation'), but it also provides the framework for articulating a practice that is able to conceive of a concept of 'hypertextuality' that lies outside of its literary heritage.

To link in hypertext is to recognise an indeterminacy (whether as reader or writer) and the possibility of this gap is what hypertext theory, to date, appears unable to have to conceptualised. This paper is less concerned with what actually lies within this gap but rather what produces this indeterminancy in the first instance.

References

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema Two: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Petric, Vlada. Constructivism in Film: "The Man with the Movie Camera" A Cinematic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract

Critical Writing referenced
By Scott Rettberg, 24 January, 2012
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This negative disposition of hypertext travel language is a subsidiary effect of its function as metaphor. The resemblance of the activity of threading through a complex document to that of forecasting a ship's route, or guiding its rudder, is based on a process of approximation common to both processes. (It's a critical cliché, but perhaps not unproductive to point out here that the root meaning of "metaphor" is grounded in shift, displacement, movement, etc.: "metaphor," from Latin, metaphora, Greek, metapherein, to transfer, to carry [pherein] something from one place to another.) "Navigation" implies movement and a changing proximity to a destination. The movement should be, as I mentioned before, intentional, and the proximity should, ideally, increase, but navigation as a strategy undertaken to bring you closer to a goal happens only during the journey, not once you get to where you were going. Each moment of the journey-as-navigation is conditioned by the deferral that shapes its entire trajectory. Movement qualifies as navigation, not because it's undertaken with a goal in mind, or because it brings you closer to your destination (though it is always measured against an end that progresses logically—teleologically—from the point of departure), but because you're not there yet.

To read the link as purely a directional or associative structure is, I would argue, to miss—to disavow—the divisions between the threads in a hypertext. "Missing" the divisions is how the intentionality of hypertext navigation is realized: the directedness of the movement across the link constitutes a kind of defense against the spiraling turn that the link obscures (Harpold, 1991, 181, n6). What you see is the link as link, but what you miss is the link as gap.

By Jill Walker Rettberg, 9 December, 2011
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In this keynote, Baetens argues that the difference between print and digital literature is shrinking, because print literature has embraced the digital revolution. He proceeds to compare installment narrative to hypertext literature, looking at five aspects, where he finds that hypertext literature fails in relation to installment narrative. 

By Eric Dean Rasmussen, 14 March, 2011
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When I first started writing hypertext I discovered that the link was not neutral, but was itself a kind of argument, one that I should not duplicate in my prose. I had to learn to allow the link to make points that I would formerly have spelled out in words.

In a multimedia piece images also begin to do part of the "writing"--though it would make as much sense to say writing does some of the imagining.

...when you allow syntax to fracture, when you flaunt the bits you've cribbed from other books and let them clash with other bits, when you create unresolvable ambiguities or multiple solutions--the reader can't help feeling piqued and disoriented.

Email is so sexy that one might fear it would replace sex itself were it not for the fact that it has led to so much of it!

People who fear the "inhuman" in technology should trust their imaginations a little more.