. Spinning .

Barthes’ theory of the reader "writing" the book takes into account not only experience that persuades perception but I would think that it covers as well the historical time in which the words are read.  This particular passage, relating Sabina’s fear and discomfort about parades, struck a chord in light of the current political campaigning:

A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part, Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism.  She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them.

When she told her French friends about it they were amazed.  "You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?"  She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison."  (p. 100)

For me, this took on the meaning of mob mentality, and that the difference of point of view is often founded in good intention but that the intent is lost in the passion of voice it is often given.

Kundera makes clear his metaphor of musical composition for a lifetime, and several times he has reinforced the image if not outright making it a clear statement.

My own inclination is to often call all creative forces "art" and so as a metaphor for the way one composes his life would be to also call it writing the pages, or painting the picture. Kundera, by using the art of music, manages to bring in movement as he brings the characters of Sabina and Franz into their separate experience with parades.

And so as long as he lived in Paris, he took part in every possible demonstration.  How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others. (…) The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward. (p. 99)

Kundera here uses the march and its essential accompaniment of music to focus changes of more than character, to approach changes of a place–a country and its society–writing its historical composition. Kundera then goes on to state what he seems to think of the metaphor or writing for life:

Franz felt his book life to be unreal.  He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts.  It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival–in other words, a dream. (p. 100)

What is Kundera saying, exactly? Even as he makes the case for the movement and physical reality of the crowds, he places Franz in a position of not realizing that his reality was in truth his solitary office and library life. The parades Kundera calls, a dream; why?  Because they are transitory? Because they are bolder and more exciting than the reality? Is a concert more or less real than a novel?

I realize that as a hypertext enthusiast and writer I look for these things in other areas of life, but I don’t think that it can be denied that the past produces the present and so some form of primitive thinking in traditional text does form the basis of thought that allowed hypertext to burst forth once Al Gore took the initiative in creating the internet.

Kundera:

But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A.  The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed.  The first betrayal is irreparable.  It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal. (p. 92)

But in hypertext, we can form loops that return us to these points of betrayal–or change, choice, etc.–and from that point, decide upon a new tactic to choose another unknown path, still significantly different from the original choice.  

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.