Abstract
This chapter undertakes a detailed analysis of Argentine author Marina Zerbarini’s hypermedia narrative, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply, demonstrating how she takes up several traits from the short stories of James Joyce. It elucidates Zerbarini’s creation of technologically enabled gaps, her adoption of Joyce’s technique of unresolved endings, and her engagement with stream of consciousness, whilst also demonstrating the way she troubles these techniques. The chapter also reveals how the metaphors that Zerbarini employs lead us to question the (neo)colonial impulses inherent in the rhetoric and structure of the internet, and ends with an analysis of the interactive and user-input features of the work, highlighting the implications that this has for the crossing of ontological realms.
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Notes
- 1.
The original titles in Spanish of the works mentioned in this paragraph are, in order: Gemelos/no-gemelos, Hoy_no_caigas_en_la_trampa, Pieza sonora en clave de red, Calor, vapor, humedad: Turner en el S. XXI, Gotas de Luz, Síntesis simbiótica entre una máquina y un ser vivo, and Naturaleza asistida.
- 2.
In the original Spanish, this reads ‘un proyecto narrativo para Internet, basado en cuentos de James Joyce , se desarrollan los conceptos de hipertexto, aleatoriedad, participación, simulación de sistemas vivos y dinámicos en tiempo real’.
- 3.
Both ‘Eveline’, and ‘A Painful Case’ were included in the collection Dubliners (1914). The various short stories in Dubliners were written between 1904 and 1907, but only published together as a collection in 1914. ‘Eveline’ was first published in 1904 in the weekly publication, The Irish Homestead.
- 4.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘los afectos, los encuentros, los espacios de tránsito, el lugar del cuerpo’.
- 5.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘el inesperado final, si podemos hablar de un final en la escritura de Joyce (principal motor de esta obra), abre el juego a la riqueza interpretativa del lector’.
- 6.
In the original Spanish, this reads ‘doble y triple aleatoriedad permite relaciones dinámicas de la información, en la que difícilmente se vuelva a producir la misma relación de imágenes, tactos y sonidos’ (Zerbarini 2004, n.p.).
- 7.
In taking Culler’s gloss of the Formalists’ distinction between fabula (the events) and sjuzhet (the plot) here, I do not mean to say that these terms are in themselves stable. Indeed, as Walsh has demonstrated, there are many theorists who reject the Formalists’ proposition that fabula can be ‘innocent of artifice’; arguing that ‘whatever view we may wish to take upon the actual relations existing between the multitude of real events, the isolation of any particular sequence is already the intervention of narrative artifice’, Walsh contends that ‘fabula must be in some sense storied’ (Walsh 2001, p. 593). Rather, in my reference to fabula and sjuzhet here, I am wishing to highlight the fact that sjuzhet (the plot) is normally understood, within conventional print literature, to be a fixed system, that is, the pre-determined order by which the author has chosen to present the events.
- 8.
Woolf’s essay was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 April 1919 with the title ‘Modern Novels’, and was later revised and republished with the title ‘Modern Fiction’.
- 9.
I do not, by this, mean to say that the modernist writers in a prior era of experimentation were themselves able to present the untrammelled, associative leaps of the unconscious mind; they, too, were constrained by pre-arranged structures, these being the structures of written language as a system. There is ‘no direct access to the unconscious’, as Naomi Segal reminds us with reference to the techniques of stream of consciousness (Segal 1990, p. 94), and the modernist writers were attempting to convey the untrammelled thoughts of the mind, all the while being bound, of necessity, by the constraints of written language. Rather, I am suggesting that Zerbarini is indicating that similar constraints may be at play with regard to digital systems, which themselves are just as structured and manufactured.
- 10.
This sketch map, along with others like it, appears in the Florentine codex, compiled by Alessandro Zorzi. At the end of the nineteenth century, Wieser argued that the map was sketched by Zorzi based on a copy of a letter that Christopher Columbus sent to Spain in 1506 with his brother, Bartholomew, and that it reflects Christopher Columbus’s view of the Americas (Wieser, cited in Bigelow 1935, p. 643). However, subsequently this was called into question, with Biglow arguing that the conceptions in the sketches were not based on exclusively Columbian sources, and that they in fact represent ‘the geographical notions of Alessandro Zorzi about twenty years later, some of them derived from the Columbus brothers’ (Bigelow 1935, p. 656). Whatever the exact relation between this map and Columbus’s letter, what is certain is that the map represents an early cartographic view of the New World, showing the Americas as linked to Asia, and that it maps out the Americas according to the mindset of the European conquerors.
- 11.
Several of the other sound files in Eveline consist of electronic or metallic sounds, such as crashes that carry on resonating, or electronic beeps.
- 12.
See, for instance, Harley’s early work in the 1980s, which argued for the need to understand cartography as historically continent, and argued that, ‘in the map itself, social structures are often disguised beneath an abstract, instrumental space, or incarcerated in the coordinates (Harley 1989, p. 5), or Crampton, who reminds us that ‘maps are part of a general discourse of power’ (Crampton 2001, p. 236).
- 13.
See Helen McLure for a detailed analysis of the metaphor of the ‘electronic frontier’ to talk about the internet, which, she argues, is ‘particularly rich with images that evoke both the Old and the New West, and also suggests a logical continuity, another phase in an ongoing American experience of technology linked with territorial and/or economic expansion’ (McLure 2000, p. 458).
- 14.
‘Vos’ is the second-person singular form of address in Argentinean Spanish, denoting an informal relationship between the speaker and addressee.
- 15.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘No te dí posibilidad de opinar, no? Es que prefiero irme y encontrarte en algún otro nodo de la red. Recordá que soy una ilusión’.
- 16.
In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘este cadaver exquisito te pertenece’:
- 17.
See Chap. 4 for a more detailed analysis of the surrealist technique of the cadavre exquis as it is employed in Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia.
- 18.
The original Spanish reads: ‘estas imágenes pertenecen a las/los amigos de Eveline. Para hacerte amiga y que tus imágenes formen parte de esta historia, sólo tenés que hacer CLICK ACÁ y subirla’.
- 19.
I am here building on theorisations about the photographic referent and indexicality. Barthes’s notion of the photographic referent was developed in his Camera Lucida (1981), and refers to the fact that unlike symbolic works of art (such as paintings, for instance), the photograph is created by the actual presence of the physical object, whose light rays touch the film negative to generate chemical changes. For Barthes, the photograph is ‘literally an emanation of the referent’ since it is made ‘from a real body, which was there’ and from which proceed radiations touch the film (Barthes 1981, p. 80). Subsequently, scholars have debated whether the move to digital photography occasions a loss of indexicality, with some lamenting the photograph’s immateriality when it becomes digital, whilst others arguing that this is not so clear-cut. Bolter and Grusin have argued that what appears at first to be a ‘simple dichotomy’ in which ‘digital photography is hypermediated, while analog photography is transparent’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 111) is in fact more complicated, since analogue photographs can be reworked and combined, asking rhetorically ‘how could exposing photographic film to light, developing the negative in a chemical bath, and transferring the result to paper ever constitute an unaltered image?’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 109). In a similar vein, although taking a different tactic, Seppänen has argued that in both cases—that is, chemical-based and digital photographs—indexicality is still present, because photons create traces, and that, thus, ‘the trace still exists after the digitalization of the analogous signal because the original electronic values of each semiconductor (“pixel”) are possible to retrieve from the digital file’ (Seppänen 2017, p. 116).
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Taylor, C. (2019). Foregrounding Fragments and Gaps: Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004) (Argentina). 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_3
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