Untitled - witz cultural

74HYPERTEXT 3.0 by using narrative to structure description, In Memoriam anticipates electronichypertextuality precisely by challenging narrative and literary formbased on it. Convinced that the thrust of elegiac narrative, which drives thereader and the mourner relentlessly from grief to consolation, falsified hisown experiences, the poet constructed a poem of 131 fragments to communicatethe ebb and flow of emotion, particularly the way the aftershocks ofgrief irrationally intrude long after the mourner has supposedly recovered.Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833 forced Tennyson to question hisfaith in nature, God, and poetry. In Memoiam reveals that Tennyson, whofound that brief lynics best embodied the transitory emotions that buffetedhim after his loss, rejected conventional elegy and narrative because both presentedthe reader with a too unified-and hence too simplified-version ofthe experiences ofgriefand acceptance. Creating an antilinear poetry offragments,Tennyson leads the reader of In Memoiam from grief and despairthrough doubt to hope and faith; but at each step stubborn, contrary emotionsintrude, and one encounters doubt in the midst of faith and pain in themidst of resolution. Instead of the elegiac plot of "Lycidas," 'Adonais," and"Thyrsis," In Memoiam offers fragments interlaced by dozens of images andmotifs and informed by an equal number of minor and major resolutions,the most famous of which is section 95's representation of Tennyson's climactic, if wonderfully ambiguous, mystical experience of contact with Hallam'sspirit. In addition, individual sections, like 7 and 1!9 or 28,78, andL04,variously resonate with one another.The protohypertextuality of In Memoiam aromizes and disperses Tennysonthe man. He is to be found nowhere, except possibly in the epilogue,which appears after and outside the poem itself. Tennyson, the real, onceexistingman, with his actual beliefs and fears, cannot be extrapolated fromwithin the poem's individual sections, for each presents Tennyson only at aparticular moment. Traversing these individual sections, the reader experiences a somewhat idealized version of Tennyson's moments of grief andrecovery. In Memoiam thus fulfills Paul Val6ry's definition of poetry as amachine that reproduces an emotion. It also fulfills another of Benjamin'sobservations, one he makes in the course of contrasting painter and cameraman:"The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, thecameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous differencebetween the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of thecameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under anew law" (Illuminations, 233-34). Although speaking of a different informationmedium, Benjamin here captures some sense of the way hypertext,