Abstract
This chapter analyses Chilean author Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me, one of the first works of hypertext literature written in Spanish. It focuses in particular on Labbé’s engagement with legacy media, and pre-digital forms of assemblage, cutting, and pasting, demonstrating how he makes overt reference to the techniques of collage, as championed by earlier literary and artistic experimentation by the surrealists and others. It also elucidates his use of the nota roja, a standard feature of Latin American newspaper formats, as well as the long-standing genre of epistolary fiction. In so doing, the chapter investigates how Labbé both updates the potentials of these three pre-digital formats, as well as questioning the extent to which oppositional practices can resist their recuperation by corporate media.
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Notes
- 1.
The titles in the original Spanish are Libro de plumas (2004), Navidad y matanza (2007), Locuela (2009), Piezas secretas contra el mundo, La parvá, and Caracteres blancos. Navidad & Matanza was published in English translation in 2014, even though maintaining the title in Spanish.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The print newspaper for Anderson was one of the mechanisms by which the modern nation constituted itself as an imagined community. Consumed individually but replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions), the newspaper becomes one of the daily ceremonies of the imagined community, as the reader of the newspaper is ‘continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life . […] creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (Anderson 2006, pp. 35–36).
- 5.
My translation. In the original Spanish, these phrases read ‘o muere en incendio’ and ‘Asaltan a familia’.
- 6.
It is worth noting that, in his landmark study, Bürger sees montage and collage as foundational to the concept of the avant-garde , claiming that ‘A theory of the avant-garde must begin with the concept of montage that is suggested by the early cubist collages’ (Bürger 1984, p. 77).
- 7.
See, for instance, Manovich’s exhortation in his Introduction to The New Media Reader that ‘computer scientists who invented these technologies—J.C. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Seymor Papert, Tim Berners-Lee, and others—are the important artists of our time—maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period’ (Manovich 2003). For Manovich, thus, computer scientists in and of themselves are artists, regardless of the utilitarian nature of the code, or the use to which it was put.
- 8.
The original Spanish reads: ‘terminó con puñaladas en todo el cuerpo’, ‘el cuerpo de la pequeña víctima’, ‘la navidad de sus tres hijos fue arruinada’, and ‘lloró’.
- 9.
The ‘nota roja ’ is most often used with reference to the Mexican press specifically, and forms a feature of the wider genre of prensa amarrillista, which refers to sensationalist journalism (often known in English as tabloid journalism ). The most prominent of these prensa amarrillista publications in Chile is La Cuarta, in whose pages, ‘debido al carácter sensacionalista […], se desprenden frases o palabras coloquiales, tales como la utilización de conceptos discriminatorios y diminutivos impuestos en la “memoria imaginaria”’ (Browne Sartori et al. 2011, p. 275).
- 10.
In the original Spanish, this reads ‘Accidente causa dos muertos y un herido’.
- 11.
In the original Spanish, this reads ‘puerta principal’, ‘Miranda Vera’, ‘no identificada’, ‘perro’, and ‘heridas’.
- 12.
It is worth noting that this is in contradistinction to Zerbarini’s short story discussed in the subsequent chapter of this book, in which the branching paths of Eveline are generated at random each time we open the work, and each new interface remixes the content in different ways. Following Murray’s distinction, this makes Eveline multiform, whereas Pentagonal is multisequential.
- 13.
Whilst I am here distinguishing different types of lexia within Pentagonal, I do not by this mean to suggest that there are clearly demarcated storylines which do not interact. In fact, as we see in some of the lexia, what might appear to be distinct storylines at times merge, and the ontological levels trouble each other. This is the case, for instance, with one lexia which combines the email conceit (common to the Estela story), with a mention of the national flag (a reference to the lexia about the coat of arms), and a mention of Miranda (the Miranda storyline).
- 14.
This conceit—of a doorway being both diegetic (within the storyworld ) and extradiegetic (part of the procedural enactment by which we enter the storyworld )—is also notable in other works analysed in this volume; see also how this conceit is mobilised in Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (Chap. 4) and Doménico Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel (Chap. 7).
- 15.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘30 de septiembre de 1811. “En lo más alto de la portada principal se veía figurado un alto monte o cordillera sobre cuya inscripción aparecían muchos rayos de luz con una inscripción en la parte superior que decía: AURORA LIBERTATES CHILENSIS; y en la inferior lo siguiente: UMBRAE ET NOCTI LIBERTAS SUCCEDUNT.”’
- 16.
Born in 1762 in the Viceroyalty of Peru, Martínez later moved to Chile, and found himself in Santiago at the time of the 1810 proclamation of the assembly; like the majority of the clergy at the time, he was hostile to the juntista movement. After their defeat in 1814, Martínez subsequently became the confessor and personal advisor of the new governor, Mariano de Ossorio, and on 31 July 1815, he was given a licence by royal decree to write a testimony of the events that had led to revolution. This eventually resulted in his Historical Memoire of the Revolution of Chile, widely seen as one of the most complete documentary records of the time.
- 17.
As Ossa Santa Cruz argues, despite some continuities with the old regime, the creation of the Santiago Junta brought about major political changes in the country, since the expulsion of the governor in 1810 caused a ‘peaceful yet decisive break with the authorities that governed Spain after Napoleon’s invasion’. It was, thus, according to Ossa Santa Cruz, ‘an irreversible blow to the colonial regime’ (Ossa Santa Cruz 2014, p. 11).
- 18.
For more on the import of this date as patriotic symbol, and as forming part of a discourse of national identity, see Grez Toso (2011).
- 19.
The original Spanish reads: ‘30 de septiembre de 1811. “Todo el frontis del suntuoso edificio con sus dos principales patios interiores se veían iluminados con más de ocho mil luces , y con éstas guardaban correspondencia y simetría las que se hallaban a la parte exterior del frente.”’
- 20.
The original Spanish reads: ‘A los siete años, supe que en la Tierra dominaba el mal. Era de noche, en verano, papá. Yo lloraba en silencio . Tú te compadeciste, ¿recuerdas? Me tomaste de la mano y fuimos al jardín . Nos tendimos en el pasto, boca arriba. Había luna llena. Dijiste: -Miranda, no siempre la noche es negra’.
- 21.
The original Spanish reads ‘Te pregunté si Dios había hecho agujeros en la noche para que pudiéramos mirar detrás del cerco . No me respondiste. Roncabas, como siempre. Yo había dejado de llorar. Un rato después, te despertaste, pusiste tu manota sobre mi cara e indicaste la luna: -Algunas noches, se preocupa de recortar un inmenso hoyo en la oscuridad. Mira. Podemos ver que allá afuera hay luz.’
- 22.
It is worth noting that there is a predominance of lexia relating to the profession of the real-life Miranda Vera in other sources within Pentagonal, not just in the fictional lexia about this character. As well as those lexia which are patently about the fictional character Miranda, there is also a notable number of lexia which reproduce factual sources or scientific definitions of astronomical bodies.
- 23.
This is not to say that the genre started in the eighteenth century; scholars have long noted an established tradition of epistles which the epistolary novel builds upon, stretching as far back as classical times. See, for instance, Singer who identified the precursors of the epistolary form in Cicero, and in Egyptian cuneiform tablets that date as far back as the fifteenth century BC (Singer 1933, p. 1).
- 24.
See, for example, Uruguayan artist Brian Mackern’s work with ‘found objects’ in his Galería de objetos encontrados, in which the ‘objects’ in question are the temporary files saved on his computer—the remnants of the digital age—and also the work of Marina Zerbarini, analysed in the following chapter in this volume, which integrates post-digital sound.
- 25.
The original Spanish reads: ‘Dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás. Por favor que sea otro de tus jugueteos. Dónde te has metido, Estela, dímelo. No me importa dónde, sólo dame un aviso de que estás en algún lugar . Nadie se desvanece de este modo. ¿O sí? No quiero pensar lo peor, Exquisa, ¿pero qué voy a hacer si ya van a pasar dos días enteros desde que encontré la puerta de tu departamento abierta de par en par y, adentro, el vacío?’
- 26.
In the original Spanish, these read: ‘horroroso plan’, ‘broma más aburrida’, ‘tu actuación’, ‘personajes en tu historia’ ‘no juegues conmigo’.
- 27.
In the original Spanish, these read: ‘Dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás’.
- 28.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘Qué es esto. Otro capítulo de la novela electrónica. Ya está bueno. Aparece. Aparece. Aparece. Hay una falta ortográfica: se escribe “lucero”, con c. Me estoy poniendo nervioso, Estela. Tú tienes que estar reposando, el doctor te prohibió moverte demasiado. No seas tan tonta. Una hipernovela sobre la importancia de lo accidental en nuestras vidas , me dijiste, y ahora se me vienen todas las posibilidades más macabras a la cabeza. Por favor que no te haya pasado nada. Esto me decías cuando te sentaste a escribir: voy a tomar cinco personajes que nunca se han visto y los haré colisionar.’
- 29.
The original Spanish reads: ‘Estoy asustado, dime que estás bien, lograste que me dé el miedo. Dijiste que tú y yo íbamos a ser personajes en tu historia, no juegues, es sólo una novela, para qué hacerse la misteriosa además, Estélida, porque me siguen llegando trozos de la hipernovela.’
- 30.
This use of metalepsis and the troubling of ontological levels will also be seen in several of the other authors whose work is studied in this volume, including Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Belén Gache’s Radikal Karoke, and Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia. Crucially, here in Labbé’s Pentagonal, this metalepsis remains inter-diegetic: that is, it exists within the context of the story, even if characters transgress the levels across these stories. As we shall see in the case of Zerbarini and Gache , some of the most disconcerting of the instances of metalepsis come when the reader him/herself transgresses these levels.
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Taylor, C. (2019). Revitalising Legacy Media: Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001) (Chile). In: Electronic Literature in Latin America. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_2
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