Marquez, I’m realizing, is a natural for hypertext. As in the entry below, the birds as a symbol and metaphor are causing me to continually go back in my reading to bring up a previous mention. Just as the begonias in 100 Years, Marquez weaves the symbol within the tapestry of many colors and designs. But by the third time it’s mentioned, it’s noted, and he does drop hints along the way, like breadcrumb links that need be followed to discover the nest.
Only in book format, it’s that much harder. I’ve learned to scribble down a page number with a notation when I think I’m onto something–much easier than trying to scan eighty pages or more to find a reference.
Marquez, though I can never be a single word of the writer he is, has affected me and yet I just realized it now; in the pseudohyperfiction group of four short stories I’d written and linked with bracketed page numbers by certain words, I knew that it wasnt’ exactly going off on a different trail or path as hyperfiction does, but the use of certain words that tied the stories together sounds now to me to be a form of homage to Marquez.
I would love to see a piece of work from Gabriel Garcia Marquez presented as text/audio/visual new media. The colors, the movement, the sound would confirm the life of his words.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
One of the hypertextable references I’ve noticed so far is Florentino Ariza’s “doe step” way of carrying herself, first mentioned as an old woman, then later in the flashback as the young girl.
And see, I missed that.
You mean I saw something you missed?
Omigod!