LITERATURE: The Unbearable Lightness – Hypertext Roots

While I may have thought of hypertext fiction as revolutionary, it appears to have come about in a more evolutionary process. There is an obvious plot of maps in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, where several seemingly unrelated stories begin to twist themselves together into points of reference that cross barriers of time by playing with tense and point of view.  In Kundera’s novel, the opening begins by questioning the validity of life if it is not a recurrence of events, and again later on, in the chapter that returns to the meeting of Tomas and Tereza it puts forth the theory of coincidence and choice.

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities, or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.  "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven.  We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences.  If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence.)  (p. 51)

While Kundera does not mention choice, it exists in Tomas’ selection of restaurant, time of arrival, table, etc.  But the idea of hypertext based on choice of paths offered as opportunities is seen as a point from which lines of action are fanned out and out again that then bring the actor into situations and scenarios that will be substantially different from each other and most likely will not result in the same outcome because of that choice.  Here, however, Kundera’s map promotes several unrelated events that edge closer to a central point, a meeting.

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances; they are at a railway station when someone is run over by a train.  At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train.  This symmetrical composition–the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end–may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic."  Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. (p. 52)

There are a couple of things Kundera does here that are interesting tools of the author.  He breaks down the fourth wall by having the narrator suddenly becoming first person and directly addressing the reader "audience." He brings us into the fact of fiction as he claims that life is indeed no less unreal or astonishing than what can be dreamed up by man.  He is also setting the reader up to consider the structure of incidents as a chain of events that lead to a purpose. This is a pattern of hypertext plotting that weaves the characters into a story. 

In a current piece I’m working on in hypertext, while I have the setting as a base, I have four characters who do not know each other about to come to a meeting of sorts while first threading out their separate stories and laying out the grounds that will bring them together.

Kundera concentrates on Tolstoy’s Anna and Vronsky, drawing a similarity (or what may be considered in hypertext as a parallel pattern) between them and his own characters.  Going back to the last quote, the last line, "Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion," he continues:

They are composed like music.  Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitious occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.  Anna could have chosen another way to take her life.  But the motif of death and the railway station, unfortettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty.  Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

I’m not dealing here with the philosophy of the "laws of beauty," but rather with the seeds of hypertext opportunity I see in these sentences.  Kundera has mentioned motif, and that is a central element in hypertext where a relationship is established that can be reinforced by returning to these points of story via various methods of manipulation of paths offered by the writer.  Kundera is giving us the example of tying up loose ends by referring to earlier moments of drama that have left their mark on the reader, enough to recall when a similar moment of drama occurs.  This is that "Ahah!" moment of reading.

Kundera then exhorts the reader to understand the writer and his (the writer, any writer) own relationship to reality.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (Iike the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Here I would take beauty to mean the orchestration of events that lead to the "composition" one writes as he moves through life, making choices that ultimately lead him through life.  It would almost appear as a warning to be open to all opportunity by becoming aware that each moment may offer a single small change that fans off into a new direction. 

I see the beginnings of hypertext pattern in Kundera’s story; at the very least, to consider and take note of the encounters, the near misses, the almosts and the way they can be served up in story.