During the late '60s the rigid categories of works of art has started to change; and beyond the fixity of works, we have faced with newly emerged hybrid forms that emphasized the openness, the contingency and the continuity. New paradigm has mainly focused on the “open work of art”, the dynamic processes rather than the completed works or the static objects. Umberto Eco is an important actor for us to highlight the notion of open work. Eco examines the idea of open work, which reflects the relativity and discontinuity of the modern world, to explain the obvious difference between modern and traditional art.
According to Eco, most extreme form of the idea of the open work is formed by “works in motion”. What such works have in common is the participant or interpreter is required to complete the work of art, to cooperate with the author in making the composition, that means author leaves some of the components to the interpreter or to chance, thus giving them a multiplicity of possible orders. Indeed, the construction process of an open art work could similarly be read to the construction process of Self, and I am going to explain this analogy through Bakhtin dialogism as a starter, then I am going to emphasize Cortazar's novel Seksek to analyse the open work in terms of hypertextuality and literature.
Dialogical Work, Dialogical Self
Traditional monological and dichotomic form of subject was challenged by Bakhtin’s According to Bakhtin, individuals complete their Selfhood by interaction & communication, when they are in a relationship with other, who has a surplus of seeing and is able to see what we cannot see. We have the same surplus of seeing too with the other, a kind of intersubjective cooperation for social totality. So the construction of every Self is dialogical, there is a mutual necessity in the relation of “I & the Other” to complete a view about the Self. Similarly, by referring Eco's texts, we could talk about the mutual necessity between the author and the interpretor to gain a complete perspective about the work of art; and therefore we could suggest the analogy between “Self and Work of art” in terms of reciprocity.
On the other hand, Bakhtin considered language and its system as hybrid as society to explain heteroglossia that means language is something multiple, include various kinds of voices, words from different people with different social and cultural backgrounds. And additionally individuals use different words in different contexts, so individuals are not the passive, obedient actors under the text, or social structures. Maybe the terms of heteroglossia lead us thoroughly to think about the active role of interpretor.
Although subjects -or interpretors- are ideologically marked by particular cultural and discursive formations that are determined within asymmetrical power relations, as Bakhtin mentioned that, subordinate social groups-or interpretors- can diagolize and rewrite monological discourses with new meanings. To sum up, open work as a kind of dialogue, is not simply an exchange; indeed, it stresses the continual interaction, interconnectedness, and an intersubjective communication. Hence, the construction process of the open work provides us with the most important medium that is dialogue, through which selfhood is expressed and realized. So, Umberto Eco's open work could be seen an example of dialogism.
Cortazar's Seksek, an example of Hypertexuality
The idea of openness of the work of art can be seen in the multiplicity of interpretations and the continually interactive play between reader and text or author in literary theory. However, while the literary text itself remains the same, different readers have different highlighters to the text as a matter of form rather than its content. This is somehow distinctive then to say that different readers will interpret the text in various ways. What happens is that readers' ideas about the form of text are different beyond its content. And in my opinion Eco's definition of open work could be challenged by the relations between content, form and the reader or interpretor.
This becomes apparent in works of hypertexts or Cortazar’s Seksek. Cortazar's work is a game with multiple endings and with this game the reader reaches an interesting spatial metaphor; hypertextual structure offers a single drawing with a multitude of combinations. Seksek is divided into three parts and 155 chapters as two different but interrelated stories. The work can be read either in direct sequence or by jumping through the chapters. The later alternative reading offers an alternative narrative within the text. The work does not end with the word “the end”, instead there are three stars at the end of the first book. Seksek has a hypertextual, experimental structure where the reader can access the information in different contexts. Reader's involvement is important in this hypertextual work because the reader makes the link between two different moments of two different stories.
In Seksek, same textual elements of information are used to reestablish different stories through hypertextuality; and what makes this work unique is the meaning that is produced by the interplays of the inner texts which reactivate readers of the work to experience the text in different ways and construct different forms between inner texts. Hence, it is the form -not the content- , the new strategy of the open work that make the meanings reachable and interpretable.
Questioning the text, questioning the world
Text is a social construct and hypertext is a paradigm for the social construction of meaning. Hypertext is a structural strategy with its new field of possibilities, where the reader or interpretor finds a space for freedom. And as a multicentered medium, hypertext or postmodern textuality destabilize the traditional textual practices and cultural discourses that we experience through the texts; and thereby it liberates text - and us- from the limitations of strictly defined linearity and hierarchy.
Within the blurred boundaries of postmodern textuality, we become able to subvert our habit of reading and thinking as a result of interaction and multiplicity in a decentred work without any given interpretative privilege. This challenge of postmodern textuality allows us as reader of texts but also informs our readings of the world from a multi perspective and anti hierarchical function, and I think, this is the point where Bakhtin and Cortazar meet beyond the work of Eco.
In conclusion, the idea of openness suggests a wide range of information that admits for numbers of possible readings, and it is the very condition of every work of art, specifically in literary works. Texts encourage the readers, interpretors to provide what is not there, so that the whole communicative process of reading itself becomes interplay between the clear and the ambigious, the expressed and the unexpressed. The readers can be successfully engaged with the experience of the interaction and in turn produce and create themselves as well as the production of meaning.
Yorum Gönder