A special piece of
hyperficiton is 
"Die
Aaleskorte der Ölig"
(Oily's Eel Escort) by Dirk Günter and Frank
Klötken, prizewinner of the German competition for
internet literature 1998 (see review
in dichtung-digital). In this piece are no hotwords on the
page linking to one another at all. Nevertheless, there are
6.9 billion ways to navigate the text. The reason for this
is that the story consists of twenty scenes most of which
can be told by every of its five involved parties. Combining
each scene from each perspective with each scene from every
other perspective adds up to 6.9 billion. This amount of
alternatives is reminiscent of Raymond Queneau's book "Cent
mille milliards de poèmes" (1961), one of the
precursers of hypertext in print that offers ten sonnets
printed on ten thick sheets in such a way that each line of
each sonnet can be combined with each line of another.
"Die
Aaleskorte der Ölig" opens
like a movie and pretends to be a movie. Underneath the
picture we find fake reviews from fake film magazines. One
of the lines translates: "One can watch this movie again and
again, it will never be the same." (see next file in Java
Window).
We do not have the time
today to get deeper into the issue of child abuse that
Ölig tries to overcome by eating the eel. The question
is why and to what extent the hypertext structure is
important to the story. Basically, it is not important to
the story. While the authors suggest that every new
combination will shed more light on the whole, we know that
in reality they can not know this to be true. They certainly
have not had the time to check out every single combination.
They do not completely know their own text. So how can they
make such a promise?
They can, because reading
the whole in a rearranged way means to read it again. This
is exactly the point. Reading and rereading this piece, we
finally discover the deeper meaning beneath the banal
surface. However, the deeper meaning reveals not through the
hypertext structure, but because of the re-reading that this
structure forces. It is not the openness implied by the
combinatorial possibilities of the text that is important,
rather the openess of the text with respect to its meaning.
The hyperfiction "Aaleskorte" makes fun of hypertext by
overplaying its central feature. This fits with the ironic
style we have encountered in the first page and can find
throughout the text. What initially looks to be the
quintessence of multilinear form turns out in the end rather
to be a critique of it.
As we see, this piece of
hyperfiction employs images and animation. And since the
language of pictures is very important here and actually
provides the key to revealing the deeper meaning, we might
also have put this piece into the hypermedia section.
However, since it displays multiple combinations it belongs
to hyperfiction. I now turn to examples of hypermedia that
focus more on multimedia than on linkage.
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