From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

often widely different sources; and while in a mosaic the individual parts only find their
aesthetic value as part of a whole, the fragments in a collage are taken out of a prior
context and have a meaning on their own, which is changed, enhanced or contradicted
through the new context they are put in in a collage. Furthermore, while a completed
mosaic gives the impression of a planned and completed whole, collage is a more open
form, always open to additions and reinterpretations.
Both terms stress again the relation between hypertext literature and principles of art,
here, however, not emphasising aspects of simultaneity, but of fragmentation and of a
'non-linear' organisation and the resulting 'non-linear' reading processes, processes
resembling the perception of a painting. Pictorial perception has the same temporal
processing that linguistic perception has "with the difference that the ordering of this
perceptual sequence is not predetermined by the painting itself?", This is directly
mirrored in the claim that hypertext reading is "guided by association".
2.4.1: Parataxis vs. Hypotaxis
Derek Malmgren distinguishes between texts that organise their material predominantly
syntactically, i.e. in a "left-to-right, top-to-bottom syntactic articulation, page-to-page
continuity, and textual irreversibility" and the promise of coherence and closure, or
paratactically, arranging relatively discrete and autonomous story elements in a textual
"compositional space".
The text deconstructs conventional notions of textuality and demands that the
reader assumes a more active role in narrative management. The reader must create
his or ner own reading order for the narrative (the novel-in-a-box) or imaginatively
construct (not reconstruct) the segmented fragments of the text into a satisfactory
whole."
The first he attributes to traditional narratives, that organise their material in a relatively
linear fashion, with relative closure and temporal as well as causal coherence and achieve
the illusion of a self-contained whole within the grasp of the individual. Though it
inevitably leaves gaps in the narrative (not every thought or event can ever be described),
the text gives enough framework material and structure to allow the reader to fill them in
88 Wendy Steiner, Colors ofRhetoric (Chicago: Swallow Press,1982) P.36.
69 Derek Malmgren, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University'Press, 1985), P48.
Chapter 2 - page 61