Text-based art exhibition inspired by 20th-century nonlinear literature, 2017

The Book-Sphere
It is very difficult to write a book.
And also because every book is two-dimensional.
And I would like this book to possess one property that cannot fit into the two-dimensionality of a printed work.
This requirement is double.
The first is that the bouquet of these essays should in no way be considered or perceived in sequence.
I would like all of them to be perceived simultaneously, all at once, for in the end they are all a series of sectors extending into different areas around one common point of view that defines them — the method.
On the other hand, I would also like, in a purely spatial sense, to establish the possibility of each essay being directly correlated with every other one — of moving from one into another and back again. Through cross-references from one to another. Through the interactions of one in relation to another.
Such simultaneous and mutual penetration of the essays could be satisfied by a book in the form of... a sphere!
Where the sectors exist in the form of a sphere — all at once — and where, no matter how far apart they may be, a direct transition from one to another is always possible through the center of the sphere. But alas...
Books are not written as spheres...
Planes, therefore, are needed.
And the first condition had to be satisfied by unfolding the sphere onto a plane, and even further — into a line: the essays had to be presented as if they flowed one from another, although they all exist simultaneously.
The second condition, as always, when form does not answer, must be replaced by process. By indicating — and only where strictly necessary — cross-references, both backward and forward.

What I mean is that every book was preceded by a long sequence of other books. You have never seen their covers, you have never heard of their authors, but they echo in the one you are now holding in your hands.

Snatching from memory a whole cluster of stories, I deliberately want to season my tale with other stories that I could tell and probably will tell, and perhaps have already told at some time; I want to create a cosmos filled with stories; they are nothing other than the time of my life: here one can move in any direction, as in the cosmos, discovering ever new stories; before telling them, it is desirable to tell others; therefore, from whatever moment or place we begin, everywhere we will encounter an equally dense narrative. Moreover, when I look closely at what has remained outside the frame of the main narrative, I see an immense thicket, so dense that it does not let even light pass through; this narrative material is far richer than the one I have brought to the foreground now; and it is possible that the one who follows my story may be somewhat disappointed, realizing that its main current branches into many small channels, and that instead of the main facts only faint echoes of them reach him; it is also possible that this is precisely the effect I was seeking when I began this tale; or that it is a special narrative device I am trying to apply, or a manifestation of restraint, expressed in the fact that I slightly understate my true abilities as a storyteller.

Which, if one looks closely, is a sign of real, incalculable wealth; let us say, if I had only one story at my disposal, I would embellish it this way and that and in the end ruin everything, trying by every possible means to present it in the most favorable light; whereas, possessing in essence an inexhaustible reserve of narrative material, I am able to present my story calmly and impartially, at times provoking some irritation, and allowing myself the luxury of digressing into secondary episodes and dwelling on insignificant details.

I opened the book at random. The forms of the letters were unfamiliar. The pages seemed to me speckled; the print was pale; the text ran in two columns, as in the Bible. The type was small, the text divided into paragraphs. In the upper corner there were Arabic numerals. I noticed that on an even-numbered page there stood, let us say, the number 40,514, and on the following, odd-numbered page — 999. I turned it over — the number was eight digits long. On this page there was a small illustration, like those in dictionaries: an anchor, drawn with a pen, as if by an awkward child’s hand. And then the stranger said:

“Look at it carefully; you will never see it again.”

This means that the classical text in reality has a matrix — rather than a linear — structure, but within the matrix there is, as it were, a logical-temporal vector. We are therefore dealing with a polyvalent, but not fully reversible, system. The reversibility of the classical text is blocked by the same mechanism that limits its multiplicity. This mechanism is, on the one hand, truth, and on the other, empiricism, in opposition to which — or in the interval between which — every modern text is constructed.

By creating such artistic structures, which require from the perceiver a personal, active attitude and often an ever-different recomposition of the proposed material, contemporary poetics reflect the general tendency of our culture toward such processes in which, instead of an unambiguous and necessary sequence of events, a certain “ambiguity” of situation is established as a field of probability, stimulating an operational or interpretive choice, different each time.

From all this one may derive what is, without any doubt, the highest, true meaning of the puzzle: every move that the assembler makes has already been made before by the maker; all the pieces he fits and sets aside, examines and feels, all the combinations he tries to compose, all his attempts, suppositions, hopes, and despairs have already been studied, calculated, and predetermined by another.

To contemplate, to think. Every mental activity sends me back to mirrors.

I want to multiply my own image. Do not think that I suffer from delusions of grandeur or that I do this for the sake of self-admiration. On the contrary, among the countless illusory phantoms of myself, I am trying to hide the true self that sets them in motion. Therefore, if I were not afraid of being misunderstood, I would cover one of the rooms of my house entirely with mirrors according to Kircher’s design, and then I could walk upside down across the ceiling and soar upward from the depths of the floor.

Hyperfiction offers you a nonlinear reading that branches out in all directions, one that does not submit to the inevitable linguistic and graphic order that allows no parallelism. The computer novel allows you to choose different paths of reading and always to obtain a new development of events in the “open work,” in the sense that Umberto Eco gives to this expression. The reader participates in its creation; he establishes his own trajectory of reading and even determines where the beginning and the end will be. Hyperfiction offers you a nonlinear reading that branches out in all directions, one that does not submit to the inevitable linguistic and graphic order that allows no parallelism. The computer novel allows you to choose different paths of reading and always to obtain a new development of events in the “open work,” in the sense that Umberto Eco gives to this expression. The reader participates in its creation; he establishes his own trajectory of reading and even determines where the beginning and the end will be.

...Every open work leads us not to the proclamation of the death of form, but to a clearer understanding of it, to an understanding of form as a field of possibilities.

It cannot be, and yet it is so. The number of pages in this book is infinite. There is no first page, and no last. I do not know why they are numbered so arbitrarily. Perhaps to suggest that the members of an infinite series may bear any number.

What are you thinking about? — one wants to ask the classical text, responding to its restrained call; however, since the text is more cunning than those who, trying to find a way out, answer: “nothing,” it does not answer at all, crowning meaning with a final chord — an ellipsis.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” is an unfinished, yet not distorted, image of the world as Ts’ui Pên saw it. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in one single, absolute time. He believed in the innumerability of temporal series, in a growing, dizzying network of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. And this fabric of times, which approach one another, branch, intersect, or for centuries never touch at all, contains all conceivable possibilities. In most of these times, you and I do not exist; in some, you exist and I do not; in others, I exist but you do not; in still others, we both exist. In one of them, when fortunate chance came to me, you arrived at my house; in another, as you passed through the garden, you found me dead; in a third, I speak these same words, but I myself am a mirage, a ghost.

Perhaps we can explain the extent to which Cervantes influenced Kafka. But we can also say — and Gérard Genette has clearly shown this — that Kafka influenced Cervantes.

In the corridor there is a mirror that faithfully doubles the visible. Mirrors suggest that the Library is not infinite.

The emphasis is now placed on the process itself, on the possibility of defining a multitude of orders. The perception of a message structured as open means that the expectation discussed earlier contains not so much the anticipation of the expected as the expectation of the unexpected. Thus, the significance of aesthetic experience asserts itself not so much when a critical situation, having unfolded, is resolved according to acquired stylistic habits, but when, experiencing a whole series of continuous crises and immersing ourselves in the process itself, where improbability predominates, we exercise freedom of choice. Then, within an existing order, we establish exclusively temporary systems of probabilities and additionally try to move toward others, which — simultaneously or secondarily — we can also comprehend, taking pleasure in their equal probability and in the openness of the process as a whole.

A line consists of an infinite number of points; a plane, of an infinite number of lines; a book, of an infinite number of planes; a super-book, of an infinite number of books. No, decidedly not so.

For two thousand years, the content of every novel was unconditionally forced into the Procrustean bed of the same unchanging formal model. Now, I think, that is over. Every novel may have its own unique appearance; every story may seek and find its adequate form. This is the essence of the search in which I, and many other writers of nonlinear narrative and interactive literature throughout the world, are engaged today.

It came into my possession in a village on the plains, in exchange for a few rupees and a Bible. Its owner could not read and thought that this Book of Books was a talisman. He belonged to the lowest caste, to those who do not dare step on their own shadow lest they defile it. He explained to me that his book was called the Book of Sand because, like sand, it has neither beginning nor end.

In a word, the work in movement represents the possibility of multiple personal intervention, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate intervention; it is an invitation — not determined by necessity and not unambiguous — to directed intervention, an invitation to enter freely into a world that, however, always remains a world desired by the author.

The universe — some call it the Library — consists of a vast, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with broad ventilation shafts, enclosed by low railings. From each hexagon one can see two upper and two lower floors — endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: twenty shelves, five long shelves on each wall, except for two; their height, equal to the height of the floor, is only slightly greater than the average height of a librarian. One of the free sides opens onto a narrow corridor leading to another gallery, identical to the first and to all the others. To the left and right of the corridor are two tiny rooms. In one, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy natural necessities. Nearby, a spiral staircase goes upward and downward and is lost in the distance. In the corridor there is a mirror that faithfully doubles the visible. Mirrors lead people to think that the Library is not infinite — if it is truly infinite, why this illusory doubling? — but I prefer to think that smooth surfaces express and promise infinity... Light is provided by rounded glass fruits, which are called lamps. In each hexagon there are two of them, one on each of the opposite walls. The dim light they emit never goes out.

The rejection of the required center of composition, of the privileged point of view, is accompanied by the assimilation of the Copernican view of the universe, which definitively abolished geocentrism and all the metaphysical conclusions connected with it: in the modern scientific universe, as in a Baroque construction or painting, all parts are endowed with equal value and significance, and everything tends toward infinite expansion, finding no limit or restraining principle in any ideal world order, but participating in the universal striving toward the discovery of reality and toward a constantly renewed contact with it.

It must be said that the method used by contemporary writers to achieve interactivity is not all that new.

Moreover, it should be pointed out that the method writers use to achieve the nonlinearity of narrative is not new either. The nonlinear mechanism was already used in the compilation of church liturgical texts — for each day and for each service there existed its own, each time new, combinations. In this case, the calendar is used as the nonlinear structure of a sacred artistic text...

In this sense, the nonlinearity of postmodernism echoes the oral folk epic at the stage preceding the compilation of written collections, when, as Jasmina Mihajlović notes, “oral creativity, by virtue of some of its important characteristics, represented hypertext.”

Mystics claim that in ecstasy they are shown a spherical chamber with an enormous circular book whose endless spine runs along the walls; their testimony is doubtful, their speech unclear. This spherical book is God.

Perhaps we are standing on the threshold of the disintegration of verbal expression, which stamps out linear speech and castrates human thought.

Thus, the first word that a work pronounces, it pronounces through the way in which it was created.

A work of art is a rhythm that, with the passage of time and with the appearance of translations, moves ever farther away from the author. This distancing occurs because of the inaccuracy of translation, because of the incorrect understanding of the text, and also because every reader brings something of his own into the text, and this personal contribution represents a vast virtual field of world literature, ensuring its variability.

Finally, no one would dispute that some books owe their characteristic features to individual readers. Every book contains within itself the history of previous readings — in other words, every reader is under the impression of what he believes has happened to the book before. In my secondhand copy of Kipling’s autobiography Something of Myself, which I bought in Buenos Aires, a poem had been written by hand on the flyleaf, dated on the day of Kipling’s death. Was that unknown poet a passionate imperialist? Or an admirer of Kipling’s prose who was able to discern the artist beneath the veneer of chauvinism? My imaginary predecessor had the strongest influence on me, because while reading I was constantly in dialogue with him or her. A book brings the reader its own history.

Thus, fatigue must be used not as a pause before gathering one’s strength and jumping, but as a respite before deciding to throw away the baggage that burdens everyone belonging to the world of art.

...A world ordered according to generally accepted laws is replaced by a world based on ambiguity, both in the negative sense — the absence of any points of orientation — and in the positive sense — the constant revision of existing values and immutable truths.

It seems that I am gradually ceasing to see the difference between a novel and a house, and this is probably the best thing I could have told you in this essay.

The essence of the matter is that our way of reading, which has been practiced for thousands of years, is now somewhat outdated and can be changed. To do this, the writer must yield part of his work to the reader, making the reader a more equal participant in the process of creating the literary work. The reader must be given the opportunity to chart his own path through a novel, poem, or story, the content of which may change depending on which map of reading is chosen. Today, literary theory names this process in different ways: hypertextuality, nonlinear narratives, interactive fiction, literature of formal constraints (la littérature à contrainte), although the last term has a broader meaning.