Untitled - witz cultural

Reconfigu ring N arrativeApproaches to HypertextFiction-SomeOpening RemarksEvery digital narralive, we must remind ourselves, does notnecessarily take the form ofhypertext. A case in point appearsin Christy Sheffield Sanford's visually elegant World WideWeb fiction, Safora in the Beginning (1996), which the authordescribes as "a web-novel" written in the spirit of classicaltragedy about "a young African princess taken as a slave fromSenegal to Martinique." The opening screen, the first of twenty-one successivelexias, explains that to the left of the "main texh:al body, Bible quotationsand natural history descriptions echo Old Testament Christianity and Animistictraditions at their point of contact: mythopoetization of naturel' Essentially,Sanford works with the powers of digital information technology toadd colors, images, and some motion to narrative, but the HTML links functionsolely to provide sequence. Among her twenty-one lexias, she includeswhat she describes as "five filmic scenes using the close-up, time-lapse andother cinematic effects. These techniques enable the conflict-crisis-resolutionmodel to have conciseness and scope." These cinematic effects appear, not asfirll-motion video but as a kind of a film script, though Sanford's romantictragedy does use occasional animations above and to the left of the main textspaces. I cite this elegant project not to criticize its lack ofhypertextuality butto remind us that the digital word and image, even on the World Wide Web,does not inevitably produce hypertextual narrative.The examples of hlpertext fiction at which we shall look in the followingpages and have already examined in the earlier discussion of writing hypermediasuggest that even in this early stage hypertext has taken many forms,few of which grant readers the kind of power one expects in informational