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From
Surfiction to Hypertext
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My argument is that
literature (or what passes for literature in our decadent
culture) too often tries to imitate what television does.
Functions like television both in form and content. Most
novels written these days are mere imitations of what
television shows us, and of how it is shown. The problem
with this is that television thinks with the mentality of a
six year old. As a result, the novels that function like
television lack intelligence. And worse, they present
themselves as being realistic, but in fact they give a false
representation of reality. This does not mean that I am
asking for a return to good old 19th century realism. On the
contrary. I would like the novel to be again the region of
great fabulation. But this requires imagination and
intelligence. Yes what makes great literature is imagination
and intelligence. Or to put it in simpler terms. Writing is
imagining while thinking. The consequences of this for
us and our culture? Gradually we will forget to think,
because television is doing our thinking. Gradually will
stop imagining because television will imagine for us. Of
course when I say television I really mean the big
businesses that control television with their
advertisements. And if it is not the businesses, then it is
the government which imposes its rules and regulations and
even dictate or censure what television can say and show.
The ideal situation would be for each one of us to control a
television channel in order to have direct access to the
world. As long as television will be controlled by the few
who are in power (politically or economically) reality will
always be falsified. Have I answered your
question? Probably not. I am known for being evasive and
ambiguous, and even contradictory. But at least I answered.
That much can be said. Now to the next question. RS:
You made your point very clear. It makes me wonder what role
the Internet is to play in this setting. I remember Robert
Coover complaining about the increase in the number of
images on the web. According to him, the web has not been
very hospitable to serious hyperfiction, but rather has
supported superficial, opportunistic events, since "it tends
to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial,
e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm ... in which the quiet
voice of literature cannot easily be heard." (article in
RF: I would rather
say the purgatory of literature. Yes literature (whether
called surfiction or hyperfiction) has not yet found its way
into the internet. It is stranded in the antechamber of
technical gimmicks. It cannot decide if it wants to become
totally iconic or if it wants to preserve what is essential
to literature, language. Literature has its place on the
internet - but as literature and now as spectacle only. But
already there is some real internet literature in some not
yet discovered corners of cyberspace. Who knows this
fabulous avant-garde zine, To get back to the topic at
hand: the role the internet can play to accommodate good
interesting imaginative experimental innovative out of this
world literature. It's easy. Let the real writers in, and
not just the technicians. Offer them space, time,
retribution even, and you'll find a flock of writers making
great literature on the net. RS:
In your manifesto you ask whether it is possible for fiction
to "survive the kind of reduction, the kind of banalization
that mass media imposes on contemporary culture". Some
answers are provided in your lectures on poetics in Hamburg
in 1990, where you call for surfiction and
critifiction. What is behind these new
terms? RF: I knew you were
going to ask that question. Do you know how many people in
the world have asked me to explain what is Surfiction, that
by now were I to give another definition, I would probably
contradict myself. So, to be on the safe side, what I can
recommend for those who are still in the dark about
surfiction and how it functions, is to suggest that these
people go to the library and check out the book entitled
Surfiction: Fiction Now... and Tomorrow... and read
the essay "Surfiction: Four Propositions in the Form of an
Introduction" [pages 5-l5]. A slightly different
version can also be found in Partisan Review (1973,
Volume XL, no. 3). For those who do not read English, that
Surfiction essay has been translated into seventeen
languages. As for Critifiction, again I
can only suggest that those interested consult the
collection of essays by that title published by SUNY-Press,
in 1993. The essays are self-explanatory and illustrate how
fiction becomes criticism, and how criticism become fiction,
or how criticism and fiction create a new genre. But without being facetious,
let me try once more to give a brief definition of the terms
Surfiction and Critifiction. Surfiction: All
fiction is written on top of another fiction, and that's
because language itself is a fiction. The fact of telling or
writing a story, the fact of relating an event (even an
historical event) always distorts, or rather fictionalizes
that story or that event -- fictionalizes it, in the sense
that it displaces the story or the event from reality into
the realm of the imaginary. Or to put it differently.
Surfiction makes not distinction between memory and
imagination. Surfiction makes not distinction between what
really happened in the world in the past and what it
imagines happened. As such Surfiction liberates itself from
the conventions of realism, and erases the lines between
past, present and future. Since language is what get us
where we want to go while preventing us from getting there,
since language is both a vehicle of communication and an
obstacle to communication, or, as the great Samuel Beckett
once put it, "Language a rumor transmissible ad infinitum in
either direction", the truth of an event can never be told
or written. Therefore, Surfiction no longer pretends to tell
the truth, but rather it denounces the lie of realism, but
tells the truth about its own fraudulence. Critifiction: Just as
Surfiction erases the lines between memory and imagination,
between the real and the imaginary, between past, present,
and future. Critifiction erases the line between genres. A
piece of critifictional writing brings together fragments of
fiction, poetry, theory, criticism, quotation, misquotation,
pla[y]giarism, or whatever is available to the
writer. As such, Critifiction becomes digressive and
discontinuous. So one can say that Critifiction invented
intertextuality and hypertextuality. |
