Author: Meng Xiayun (Lecturer, China Foreign Affairs University)
Since entering the 21st century, the ever-changing science and technology have increasingly intervened in human life, which has brought about profound changes in human survival methods and ways of thinking. Writing and literature documenting human history and social changes have undergone an evolutionary process from ancient image symbols, manuscripts, and printed books to modern e-books and super books. Under the impetus of information technology and digital new media in the Internet age, a new literary style, digital literature, was born and developed, and the way literature was expressed and read has also changed.
Digital technology "produces, expresses, displays, stores and transmits" literary information, presented through the network, e-books, computers, disks, CDs and other carriers, which not only affects the theme, narrative and poetic effects of literature, but also changes the way literature is created, circulated and accepted. The popularity of artificial intelligence in the 21st century has enriched the types of digital literature, from the initial network literature, hypertext literature, electronic literature to robot literature and even human-machine cooperation literature, breaking through the traditional printing literature conventions and forming unique aesthetic characteristics in hypertext technology, cybertext, etc., and also affecting people's reading habits, ways of thinking and aesthetic standards, posing a challenge to print literature.
Today, Latin American literary creators and enthusiasts, especially the new generation of young people, are also keen to explore this new field of literary creation that combines interactivity, gameplay, creativity and challenge.
French painter Honoré Dumière painted don Quixote information picture
Cover of Word Toys Information Image
1. "Fork in the Road" and "Hopscotch"
Unlike Western digital literature, which was born before the advent of the Internet, digital literature is a relatively new phenomenon in Latin America. However, there are still two pioneers among Latin American writers who experimented with hypertext through printed books: Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Borges's The Garden of Bifurcation of Paths (1944) shows the bifurcation of events leading to different paths, choosing different narrative paths to present different storylines and outcomes, Borges's forks in paper text are like hyperlinks that will be clicked on in later Internet hypertexts; Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963) is a representative of the pre-digital traversal text, and the reader reads unconventionally jumps between chapters in a "hopscotch" game- The text navigation at the end of each chapter is like a hyperlink embedded in the hypertext, and clicking to follow different navigations enters different story lines. Thus, Borges and Cortázar experimented with hypertext in their "Fork in the Road Garden" and "Hopscotch Game", respectively, and it can be said that they predicted and practiced a certain type of digital literary creation in the Internet age before the birth of the Internet in 1969.
2. Gache and Rodriguez
Latin American digital literature really emerged around the turn of the millennium. At that time, the first to enter the field of vision were the Argentine writer Beren Gache's "Word Toy" and the Colombian writer Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez's "Infinite Gabria".
Gache graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and became professor of narrative science and literary theory in the 1990s. While teaching, she constantly tries to expand the pluralistic literary creation of text and hypertext. "Text Toys" is a collection of 14 works of Internet experimental literature studied and collected by Gache from 1996 to 2006. These include poems, miniature novels, reviews, chronicles and essays, all produced in a hypermedia environment and presented in a digital format. The main interface of the work is shown in an animated image of a medieval English maid blowing bubbles, and the letters on the bubbles make up the word "word toy". Clicking on the image opens a new interface for the book's cover, which contains 14 separate chapters that make up the work, and as the mouse slides on each cover, the page makes a paper-turning sound.
Like Gache, Rodriguez, while teaching at the Faculty of Literature at the University of Havelana in Bogotá, also experimented with and studied the creation of digital literature, and has written books such as Digital Narratology: Reflections on Digital Narrative, Collective Creation, and Network Culture, which explores the development of digital literature in Latin America in the new era.
Rodriguez's Infinite Gabria is a "hyperfiction" named after its narrative genre, embodying the hypermedia character it uses in its writing. This work, which was still a paper text in 1995, was encoded and transformed by the author, formed a hypertext in 1999, and converted into a hypermedia in 2002, undergoing a change from book form writing to digital writing. The work follows the story of two teenagers Gabria and Federico who lived in Bogotá, Colombia in the 1960s, and begins with the two protagonists hiding in a building with others after an explosion. The main interface of the novel shows the reader three doors that form hyperlinks to different parts of the story: the story of the bombing of the city, the story of Gabria and Federico, and others. The three doors presented in the interface and the links contained therein provide readers with reading choices, and the reader does not have to follow the order, but freely chooses the event of interest and clicks to enter the reading.
3. Strange reading experience
Digital literature brings readers a novel reading experience. For example, in Gache's "Word Toys", which animates the online poem "Bird Language", five brown birds stand on the branches, click on the cursor, and the preface of the work appears with two birds, pointing out that the poem was inspired by the story of Hans Christian Andersen's nightingale. Gache believed that birds symbolized the rich feelings of mankind, and in many Eastern and Western fables they were regarded as prophets who spoke the truth, and in their works, these birds were mechanical poets who recited verses. Every time a bird clicks, it opens its beak and chants in different languages, such as English, French and Spanish, but each language replicates the same poem, and the five birds chirp in unison to form a multilingual vocal harmony, which Gache uses to express his thoughts on the fact that literary creation cannot fall into the cage of language.
The slightly magically realistic cover of Water Poem features letters and concentric circles moving at full speed, and clicking on the letters jumps out of a close-up photo of a sink. The cursor lands on the tap, clicking on the sound of rushing water and gushing water. It was a poem of letters that fell on the sink to form a spiral of text. These words are poems written by some famous writers in different countries describing time and water, such as Borges's "Poetry" "Looking at the long river formed by time and flowing water, thinking back to time is another river, to know that we are like a river that never returns, a face like water skimming"; In Arthur Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat", "Green water penetrates the hull of my fir wood, the sweetness races through the sour apples that children eat, absorbs the stains of blue wine and vomit, and washes away my iron anchor and my rudder."
Like the multilingual poetry of Bird Language, readers also read multilingual poems by many famous poets in Water Poetry, including the American poet Alan Ginsburg, the French poet Antonin Aalto, Stefan Malami, and the Spanish poet Francisco de Govedo. On the one hand, these poems are interpretations and expressions of time, describing time as flowing, changing and disappearing like water; on the other hand, they are also Gache's reflections on language as a flowing element, especially in the digital age of discourse gradually fragmented, many out-of-context text fragments in front of the reader briefly gain value, and then dissipate in the long river of time.
4. Engage and interact
The process of literary creation and literary reception that developed around the emergence of digital writing in Latin America is socially and culturally relevant, and computer technology developed around the turn of the millennium provides the material basis for these works, and hypertext structures connect written and spoken texts, computer code, sounds, and images, bringing readers a new cultural experience, allowing readers to interact with authors, creators and audiences. Interaction and participation have thus become typical features of digital literature.
In the Don Quixote chapter of Word Toys, click on the envelope with Cervantes' head and an indicative preface appears. Inspired by the artistic ideas of the American artist Andy Warhol's "Do It Yourself" series, she set the default pigments used in landscapes or still lifes of famous paintings, as long as the paintings are not too demanding, everyone can experience the feeling of becoming a painter Rembrandt; the same is true for writing, giving materials and vocabulary, and also experiencing Cervantes's writing.
Based on the meta-fictional nature of Don Quixote itself, Cervantes tries to tell the reader that the story is not conceived by him, but from an Arabic manuscript he found in the Toledo market, thus confusing the true identity of the author, providing the possibility for others to try to write Don Quixote, but also allowing some people to exploit the loophole. After he completed the first part of Don Quixote, a man who called himself Alonso Fernandez de Avilanida wrote the "second part" of the forged Don Quixote in 1641, whose identity remains a mystery. When Cervantes learned of the existence of the forgery, he accelerated the writing of the second don Quixote for the sake of orthodoxy. 300 years later, in 1944, Borges also created Pierre Menard, the author of his short story "Quixote", who tried to write Don Quixote. Menard tried to write the exact same and verbatim Don Quixote, and at first he brought himself into the role of Cervantes, learning the same language and experiencing the same events, but the different historical and cultural backgrounds made him still not the original Don Quixote. Borges used this to express that "the meaning of the text is constructed in every reading, and every writing is only a rewrite", and different authors can write works with the same form but completely different connotations in different time and space.
Thus, in Write Your Own Don Quixote, the reader can experience what it feels like to write your own Don Quixote story, but the technical code is set to type out the established Don Quixote text no matter what key is pressed, at which point the reader realizes that although he is formally involved in the creation, he cannot really intervene in the narrative of the story.
The Butterfly Book and The Library in Word Toys allow readers to participate directly and intervene, modify or expand the work. Infinite Gabria also allows readers to participate in the re-creation of the story by commenting on the text, expanding the narrative, and adding audiovisual elements.
Two brilliant digital works, Word Toys and Infinite Gabria, also opened the way for the later development of Latin American digital literature, with an increasing number of interdisciplinary young Latin American writers producing avant-garde and novel digital texts, such as Carlos Rabe's Five-Pointed Star: Including You and Me, Domenico Chape's The Extracted Land and The Minotaur Hotel. Latin American writers such as Santiago Ortiz from Colombia, Eduardo Caque from Brazil, Fabio Doktorovic from Argentina, Luis Correa Diaz from Chile, Clement Padin from Uruguay, and Eugenio Ticelli from Mexico have constructed an immersive and increasingly interactive world of online literature for online readers with their own diversified explorations.
Guangming Daily (2022-03-10 13th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily