Hypercompendia

Actually that would have been a good title for the last post and is sort of irrelevant to this one because this is on characters.

(NOTE:  Is this how unstructured hypertext makes you feel?  Plopped in the wrong pond?)

Something else Steve mentioned in his post has me thinking again about characters within hypertext, and if the form itself influences the decision towards limitation. 

"If Anne is linked to Jeremy, Jeremy linked to Joyce, then how is Joyce linked to Anne?"

With the hopping around in the spaces of time and place that hypertext encourages, doesn’t one of the grounding elements then depend upon something else such as characters?

Can you imagine The Brothers Karamzov–or any Russian novel–in hypertext?  (though a link on each name to a box of description, i.e., "Mickail is really Ivanovich Dostoley, whose middle name is Mickailovich but three of his friends call him Mickail") 

I think that hypertext narrative may indeed require that a grounding force be determined, whether it be character, place (I can see this as a room in an Italian castle and the people who have slept there through the years), theme (killer instinct within every individual), leit moif (Marquez’s begonias), etc.  So there might be the need for one constant, and maybe this has already been discussed on Mark’s pages or one of his links. 

In Steve’s novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, I see the narrative linked by limited main characters, Ham’s search for his brother, and the grounding of place, particularly his southwest home.  The main character himself seems to emanate from his home space, and his travels and time spent away just circle back to base.  There’s the theme of water and borders, and of course, I’d almost consider the string theory a leit motif.  The patterns are all there.  The scattering that hypertext allows then, must be skillfully tied together–this is no shotgunning of possibilities, but a patterned whole.