Intertextuality (3)

I guess its time for me to prepare an assault on both Julio Cortázar's Rayuela ('66) and Nabokov's Pale Fire ('62). The former has daunted me up to now for the simple reason that you inherently have to read it at least twice to appreciate the alternative pathways its author intended. (Though worryingly this page offers a third reading guide!) Maybe a reading in Spanish then in English would sugar the pill.

The novel's main claim to fame is its non-sequential alternative narrative, leading to the possibility of non-serial interpretations.

Ted once sought the rights to do a hypertext demonstration using Pale Fire, but in the end IBM never went ahead with this. As in Rayuela the identity of the Nabokov's narrator is an established mystery. I suspect that Pale Fire examines its own navel more comprehensively than Rayuela, as Cortázar adopted the form primarily to resonate with the disjointed lifestyles of his 60s protagonists.

Cortázar's and Nabokov can be lumped with the likes of Joyce and Proust in the subset of writers that have attempted to transcend language in literature. But although highly-influential none really changed the traditional form of the novel for good. Painters have generally had greater success in this area. It seems that you can expand narrative downwards into areas beneath the watershed of consciousness, but language never really behaves as if it really belongs there - the resulting experience is tentative, incomplete...at best mystical.