. Spinning .

Once again, Kundera writes as a teacher of writing in his narrative.  As he names a particular bowler hat as a "motif" he explains how it comes to take on meaning. While we are not left to discover the hat’s significance for ourselves, Kundera flips the tables to use it to delve into the background of the characters, in essence, going back in time rather than forward to develop the story.

The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity while the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it.  The fact that Tomas stood beside her fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was far from good clean fun (if it had been fun he was after, he, too, would have had to strip and don a bowler hat)… (p. 87)

Then Kundera goes on to explain what the hat meant to its owner, Sabina, the mistress of Tomas:

First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather (…)
Second, it was a memento of her father.
Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.
Fourth, it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated.
Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object.  When she went to visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the hotel-room door.  But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. (p. 87)

Kundera then clearly states that "The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life."  While the hat took on additional meanings with use and time, its accumulated meanings, or representations, became part of the whole.  We are, in other words, what we have been.  In Kundera’s continued reference to "composition," these parts may be considered stanzas perhaps, all nice snatches of song or blends of notes in themselves, yet that would take them out of context of the complete work.

This next part bothers me a bit; though I suppose it wouldn’t if I’d've read this novel decades ago:

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. (p. 88)

I myself had gotten married for the first time rather late in life and can understand what Kundera is stating here. However, I might disagree that the composition has been completed; the memories are shared, thus both parties are adding the meanings of the other to their own repertoire, and new meanings are adding new life to the composition as well. It becomes a collaboration, perhaps; something that Sabina may be unwilling, rather than unable, to undertake with Franz.

While I may have thought of hypertext fiction as revolutionary, it appears to have come about in a more evolutionary process. There is an obvious plot of maps in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, where several seemingly unrelated stories begin to twist themselves together into points of reference that cross barriers of time by playing with tense and point of view.  In Kundera’s novel, the opening begins by questioning the validity of life if it is not a recurrence of events, and again later on, in the chapter that returns to the meeting of Tomas and Tereza it puts forth the theory of coincidence and choice.

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities, or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.  "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven.  We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences.  If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence.)  (p. 51)

While Kundera does not mention choice, it exists in Tomas’ selection of restaurant, time of arrival, table, etc.  But the idea of hypertext based on choice of paths offered as opportunities is seen as a point from which lines of action are fanned out and out again that then bring the actor into situations and scenarios that will be substantially different from each other and most likely will not result in the same outcome because of that choice.  Here, however, Kundera’s map promotes several unrelated events that edge closer to a central point, a meeting.

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances; they are at a railway station when someone is run over by a train.  At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train.  This symmetrical composition–the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end–may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic."  Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. (p. 52)

There are a couple of things Kundera does here that are interesting tools of the author.  He breaks down the fourth wall by having the narrator suddenly becoming first person and directly addressing the reader "audience." He brings us into the fact of fiction as he claims that life is indeed no less unreal or astonishing than what can be dreamed up by man.  He is also setting the reader up to consider the structure of incidents as a chain of events that lead to a purpose. This is a pattern of hypertext plotting that weaves the characters into a story. 

In a current piece I’m working on in hypertext, while I have the setting as a base, I have four characters who do not know each other about to come to a meeting of sorts while first threading out their separate stories and laying out the grounds that will bring them together.

Kundera concentrates on Tolstoy’s Anna and Vronsky, drawing a similarity (or what may be considered in hypertext as a parallel pattern) between them and his own characters.  Going back to the last quote, the last line, "Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion," he continues:

They are composed like music.  Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitious occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.  Anna could have chosen another way to take her life.  But the motif of death and the railway station, unfortettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty.  Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

I’m not dealing here with the philosophy of the "laws of beauty," but rather with the seeds of hypertext opportunity I see in these sentences.  Kundera has mentioned motif, and that is a central element in hypertext where a relationship is established that can be reinforced by returning to these points of story via various methods of manipulation of paths offered by the writer.  Kundera is giving us the example of tying up loose ends by referring to earlier moments of drama that have left their mark on the reader, enough to recall when a similar moment of drama occurs.  This is that "Ahah!" moment of reading.

Kundera then exhorts the reader to understand the writer and his (the writer, any writer) own relationship to reality.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (Iike the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Here I would take beauty to mean the orchestration of events that lead to the "composition" one writes as he moves through life, making choices that ultimately lead him through life.  It would almost appear as a warning to be open to all opportunity by becoming aware that each moment may offer a single small change that fans off into a new direction. 

I see the beginnings of hypertext pattern in Kundera’s story; at the very least, to consider and take note of the encounters, the near misses, the almosts and the way they can be served up in story.         

Am in the middle of pressing wine (by hand) so I’ve not time enough to write the post itself but had to say that page 52 is about one of the best teachers of hypertext pattern reasoning I’ve absorbed. Will try to put it in a concise post entry later today.

Finally getting some time to read and I’m finding myself intrigued by Kundera’s manner of posing a theory and illustrating it by introducing a couple of characters and from there, beginning a story.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!  (p. 3)

Positing this statement and its possible outcomes is Tomas, a divorced father who has decided not to fight the system that allows his ex wife to run his life and who is warily entering into a relationship with Tereza:

Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?
There i no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?  (p.

Tomas has come up against a woman who by her persistence includes herself into his space that he has set as off limits to all other women.

Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.  Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). (p. 15)

This was Tomas’ last wall, the use of his bed for sleeping.  Tereza has broken down this wall. She may well have broken down the barrier of recurrence of the act so as to actually make it meaningful.

Just a couple pages, but it appears that we’re getting into story from this point on so I’ll make a quick comment here. I either just love the impossibility of reading this without giving it serious thought, or it makes sense because I remember thinking this kind of stuff somewhere in a blue haze:

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them; they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature.  This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict.  For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. (p. 4)

Then we are brought into the Parmenides question of opposites and in particular, lightness and darkness. We may negate the shades between, but the real emphasis is placed on which is the desirable, the weight of darkness or the freedom of lightness? If in fact, we are to say that darkness is the burden of weight, and not the light instead.

Fun, huh?

Up next, something a bit different. It seems I’ve been reading sort of realism based in the early 1900s and it’s time to go fly away a bit.

It was this, or one of Joseph Conrad’s pieces.  I have several, but Kundera sort of reached out and grabbed me by the throat.