Hypermedia narratives: paratactic structures and multiple readings

Storytelling involves the recounting and shaping of events by portraying in words, images, and sounds what happens in realistic or fictional worlds. Whether in traditional formats like books or new media formats like CD-Rom and World Wide Web hypermedia, narratives combine a series of events, characters, and settings which may be comprehended by a reader, listener or viewer throughout complex structures. However, hypermedia narratives call into question the idea of plot associated to traditional narratives, which present a certain stability in their arrangement of parts as well as an unambiguous extent. In this paper, I argue that the “performing” dimension - links and interactive devices like reader control-animated images - within hypermedia fiction splits narrative in that it conveys paratactic structures, that is variations on a single theme, that contribute to the volatility of meaning and the constant reconfiguration of the narrative sequence. I intend explore this phenomena in some digital works like The Book of Waste (2004), Nada tiene sentido (Ara; Lorenzo: 2002), and The Jew’s Daughter, (Morrissey: 2001), and Serial Letters (Malbreil, 2002).