Milorad Pavic is a Serbian
scholar and author who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has been
called by critics the first writer of the 21st century because of his unusual formulations
of the novel. His works on paper have also been considered a pre-cursor to hyperfiction.
This recent work in hyperfictional form is an important step by someone who has managed to
point the way before it even existed. Pavic says that he wants to make literature
"reversible" meaning that a reader should be able to look at a work of
literature from all different angles, like sculpture or music or painting. To this he says
not so much that the novel is dead but that the form of the novel is dead. Form has become
architecture, literature is a house and each act of writing can take on it's own personal
form. To this procedural construction of ever new forms the computer and the idea of
hyperfiction comes into play.
Pavic's writings remind me of magic realism in a way but probably closer to a
story telling tradition that goes back to Homer. Nothing is as it seems, dreams and time
interweave, a chance odd remark will take on new meanings and importance at different
places in the story. Also, he is talking about a region and it's history that I'm
unfamiliar with. I have the feeling that in addition to history, he is somehow talking
about the present time, a layer that I'm not getting (it could be several layers that I'm
not getting.)
Damascene, I believe he is referring to damask, the reversible fabric, is about
builders and the building of a church and palace, each containing in itself a message as
implied by the architecture. Damascene is conservative as hyperfictions go with only two
branchings. The density is in the writing, events play themselves out different ways but
everything that happens in the various endings is implied somewhere earlier. There is a
mix-up of author and character here, one character has by imagination created a builder
who will "build" a conclusion to her story but who is attacked by the character
created by another builder in an alternate path. Into this mix comes the reader, an
unknown and new participant, who has the power to chose an outcome that the characters and
author can't control. It is the challenge of hyperfiction to somehow incorporate this new
entity into it's story.
