INVISIBLE CITIES online
An attempt of processing of an artistic
hypertext
The condensed translation of an article published in section "Net-Culture" of "Russian Journal" (Russ.Ru)
http://www.russ.ru/netcult/20020909_viesel.html
In
November of 1972, the Italian writer
Italo Calvino published a tiny book called "Le città invisibili"
("Invisible cities"). It wasn't easy to determine the genre of this
book: a quasi-historical novel, a branching geographical fairy tail, a volume
of poems in prose, but at that time 49-year-old Calvino, one of the Italy's
most talented post-war writers had
already habituated his readers to the suddenness of his works.
Beginning his career
with the neorealistic war novel "The Path to
the Spiders' Nests" (1947) and consolidating his neorealistic
reputation with some collections of short stories, Calvino suddenly published
during the 1960's a book called
"Cosmicomics", where the scientific euphoria of the epoch is
reflected in a very odd and sarcastic manner, and a half-fantastic, half
historical trilogy called "Our ancestors". Then he made a children's
adaptation of Ariosto's "Orlando furioso" and for a long time plunged
into the job of choosing, adapting and translating (from the dialects to
literary Italian) folk fairy tales.
The issue of Invisible cities marked the last phase
of the writer's career, which can be better described with the words of Lewis
Carroll's Alice: Curiouser and curiouser.
In such books as The Castle of Crossed
Destinies (1973), If on a
Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), Palomar (1983), and in the
short stories of those years, the transparency and richness of language
amazingly matched with the very complex but rigid logic of composition. It was
as if Rubic's Cube was created and drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.
We can only wonder how
the creative potential of this distinguished author could develop with the
coming epoch of PCs and the Internet, and how he was influenced by these
developments, but we'll never know it. During his work on the series of
lectures for an American university Six
memos for the next millennium, Calvino all of the sudden died from ictus in
September of 1985.
Thirty years
after Invisible cities was published, in the summer of 2002, I was
finally able to realize the forethought project: transform this book into a
beginingless and endless hypertext and publish it on a web site.
I can't say I my
decision was improvised.. First, I had the experience of transforming a
"conventional" (i.e. "paper-oriented") work of fiction into
hypertext. The resulting hypertext, turned from my Literary Institute fellow's
short story called
"Scrap-heap" ("Svalka"), won an
award at Russia's biggest contest of Internet literature,
"Teneta-99".
Secondly (and most
essentially), I have been concerned for quite a while with the idea that many
literary works of the XX century, called (because of the luck of the best
definitions) "experimental" and "postmodern" can be more
adequately described as latent, i.e. hidden, hypertexts, even if their authors
had no idea what a hypertext is. And I believe that Italo Calvino is one of
the best persons to verify both these statements (the latency of the work
and the technological ignorance of the author). I already explain this premise
in a separate work, that has been translated
into French.
So I can say that Invisible cities online is a laboratory
experiment, a practical test aimed to confirm or to deny my theoretical
statement.
Of course, I can't
declare that this statement is absolutely new and that my project is a
pioneering one. It's enough to mention, on the one hand, an interactive
literature game The Garden of forking hokku,
and, on the other, the section "Cyberature" in
the Russian on-line literature magazine Setevayua
Slovesnost' ("Belle-lettress of the Net").
But the difference of Invisible Cities Online from both
projects is obvious. The most important and characteristic advantage of The Garden… is its interactivity – the
opportunity to become an author that it offers to everybody. Every isolated
miniature-hokku ought not be a masterpiece; the artistic effect appears when we
begin to look at them as a moving continuum. (See my article about literary
games in the Russian Internet in Novy Mir
magazine.) Otherwise, the opuses represented in "Cyberaure", firstly,
proceed according to the rigid scheme created by their authors (often – as a
flash-animation movie), and, secondly, the texts they are based on are the
texts of modern non-professional writers, whose artistic merit is far from
undisputable.
More closely to my
project, however, is the online
version of the Russian translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This
ambitious opus was created directly for non-linearic reading and was
transformed into HTML-code in punctual accordance with the author’s scheme;
further, the translators' footnotes added one more dimension to the resulting
hypertext..
But the conceptual
difference between Invisible cities
online and Pale fire online is still
very clear. Nabokov's "hypernovel" was conceived by the author
exclusively as a text and,
accordingly, realized online as "plain text", only with pure mark-up,
without any multimedia extensions, such as sounds, pictures, or even any variation of colors, fonts and so on (to say
nothing of abilities of modern dynamic HTML and flash-animation). Today, this
looks more like a “bare” hypertext rather than a “pure” hypertext.
Of course, this can
not be a reproach to the publishers of Pale
Fire; they evidently intended to leave readers alone "face to
face" with text as the author conceived it, with only the possibility of
momentary crossing between links, without any secondary elements.
Invisible cities also could be compared with the Decameron Web
— a very sophisticated and well-designed project of Italian Department of Brown
University. But there's one difference between these two projects I want to
underline. Decameron Web, as other projects inspired by George Landow, was built and configured first
of all as an educational project - hence its impressive completeness, obvious
subordination of graphic to text and extreme transparency of navigation.
On the contrary, Invisible cities online is oriented
primarily not towards representing the text per se (as in Pale Fire), nor to its studies and analysis (as Decameron Web), but towards the creation
of a complete esthetical impression.
In other words, it ought to be treated as an
art-project: not to study Calvino's work, but to delight init.
Later Calvino himself
explained:
Un libro (io credo)
è qualcosa con un principio e una fine (anche se
non è un romanzo in senso stretto), è un spazio in cui il lettore
deve entrare, girare, magari perdersi, ma a un certo punto trovare un'uscita, o
magari parecchie uscite…
Questo è un
libro fatto a poliedro, e di conclusioni ne ha un po' dapertutto, scritte lungo
tutti i suoi spigoli.[1]
(A book (I believe)
is something that has a beginning and an end (even if it isn't a novel in the
strict sense), it is a space where the reader must come in, walk around, even
get lost, but in a certain moment find an exit, or several exits…
This is a book that
is made as a polyadr, and the conclusions that it has are somewhat visible
everywhere along all its edges.)
So, I dare to assert
that splitting a screen into frames, using pictures, selecting backgrounds of
different colors, consciously depriving the navigation on the site of clarity
and borrowing to it some element of
unexpectedness, I just tried to approach to the author's will.
***
The
structure of the "Invisible Cities" site is as follows.
The book consists of
55 small chapters. In each chapter Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan, the
emperor of China, some city he supposedly visited (the question about in-novel
reality of Kublai Khan, Marco and truthfulness of his reports is quite
complicated and I examined it separately). These 55 small chapters-cities (i.e. reports) are distributed, on the one
hand, in 11 "thematic groups" according to one dominant line or
quality of description, and, on the other hand, in 9 big chapters, 5 reports in
every chapter (excluding the first and the last chapters, which have 10 reports
each). Every chapter is framed with interludes - dialogues between Khan and
Marco.
During my conversion
of the text into hypertext this opposition "from one hand –to the
other" gained visual manifestation. The workspace is divided into three
thematic frames: capitoli, maintext
and temi, each of which has two
levels. The left frame (capitoli)
shows the map-list of all nine chapters of the book, or, when one of the
numbers is clicked, the content of each
chapter. The right frame (temi) lists all eleven themes (types of the
cities), or, when one of them is clicked, the cities belonging to each type.
The mainframe (maintext) loads and
displays the texts selected from the left or from the right, or else the entire
table of forty icon-thumbnails. These icons are randomized from fifty-five
existing icons (according to the total quantity of the cities), so there is a
new set of pictures every time the page reloads.
Furthermore, the
online version also manifested Calvino's confession that there were two
"original" themes – Memory and Desire, and the other themes little by
little separated from them. The themes "City and memory" and
"City and Desire" framed the list of all themes and indicated with
black and white (gray).
The total size of the
project is 3,5 Mb. It includes 262 files distributed to 17 hierarchic
subdirectories. There are 139 pictures included, and I am proud to mention that
there isn't a picture that doesn't work as a dynamic and/or hyperlink.
Project is optimized under IE 6.0 and
resolution 1024x768 pixels.
***
About
the copyright situation.
As the initial base to
project was used Russian translation by Natalya Stavrovskaya, published by
"Symposium" (St. Petersburg) in 2001. Although I personally know Mrs.
Stavrovskaya, I preferred not to inform her about my plans. The problem is that
she is an excellent and devoted translator but knows absolutely nothing about
hypertext, HTML language, the Internet, and its specifics, and I could never
explain to her what I intend to do with
her text.
As the project is
done, however, I’m prepared to show it to the copyright keepers and tell them the following.
1.
The project is
absolutely non-commercial, non-profit and has merit only as a laboratory test
in new and extremely unstudied field of the theory of art hypertext
2.
The text that was uploaded to the site is
split into 73 chunks, each of which has to be browsed separately, in very
unobvious way. It's impossible to load a printer and receive the WHOLE text
just by once pressing the “print” key.. Even if you download all files, you
must compile them into right order, rid the text of HTML tags etc. To scan the
original "paper" book would be a much easier task to accomplish.
It is important to
mention that the text of Pale fire is
uploaded to the biggest and best known Russian on-line library www.lib.ru as one enormous file, with the
complete permission of translator Sergey Il'in, who understands that you can
take a brief look through the online text to decide if you’d like to read it,
but you can hardly READ it from the screen or even as a stack of printed paper.
About illustrations.
The word "illustration" itself doesn't fit the role that the pictures play in the project. They are the integral part of the project, a "parallel text", written in the "language of images," side by side with the text written in the "language of Gutenberg." I purposely allowed some of the pictures and their parts to duplicate in frames. This will allow, I hope, for the creation of new syntagmatic ties between different parts and new variants of relations between the characters.
The painter who drew the 70 beautiful color pictures for me for free, emphatically asked me not to declare his name on the site, but only to those who would be impressed enough to ask me in a private e-mail. For me, this condition also reveals the artist’s complete ignorance of the Internet, but, of course, I have kept the promise.
Mikhail Viesel,
August 2002