NON-INFINITE NOVELS: COMBINATORY AND NARRATIVES
In this digital experiment the statute is very simple, we started with the novel Farabeuf by the mexican writer Salvador Elizondo. One authors and 249 fragments of the book, that users can qualify to determine the optimal version.
The fragments transmute the vision of the object-being, they vary around a sectioned history where each "additional" element changes the total notion. The strategy is not to divide the plot but to dismantle it into passages that vary in style and dimension; some unfold through several pages; others approach the aphorism or the graphic novel, a genre that has transformed the vision of comics into a narrative art.
Initially, under this configuration there is the possibility of obtaining “infinite” combinations, each of which represents a possible reading. As more readers act as co-creators, the combinatorial possibilities increase. The purpose is that every reader would have a unique story. First you can read the original plot in alternative ways, because Salvador Elizondo choose to freeze an instant, so everything that happened in the novel occur at moment of the reading. Here, at comparation of the realistic literature, changing the order of the factors or fragments does not alter the product or do they?
This question goes beyond of this dynamic system of hyperliterature.
From the following equation , the preliminary result is, with the available blocks, of 1.2931425043636430929283258208097473883979374870695122 × 10^490 different readings. Just in the first exercise of five. To put this number in perspective, the number of atoms in the observable universe, by comparison, is only estimated to be around 10^80. So, each person would read a unique text
Like Jorge Luis Borges define, in the beginning of The Library of Babel “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of […]”.
In the 1950s, mathematician Claude Shannon made a calculation to determine how many different games of chess were possible, and came up with the number 10^120. Go, the Chinese game, the play ruled by the AI -alphaGo-, have a total number of possible games estimated “10700 is thus an overestimate of the number of possible games that can be played in 200 moves and an underestimate of the number of games that can be played in 361 moves.” (Wikipedia).
The algorithm generates, the structure of the communication, a population of texts that are delivered to the readers. Readers evaluate the texts by four parameters to qualify: You liked (aesthetic appreciation), the history is clear (ontological), it is the optimal order (structural) and you recommend it (general score).
Then, in the next three iterations, you can read by each particular story and characters. And in the fifth iteration, you would read a text without narrativity, the pursuit of Flaubert.
The variability of the characters and their actions, coupled with the distortions of time and space, give the feeling of both bewilderment and multiplicity, bordering on the reader seeking uniqueness and at the same time the whole.
With the tools that AI conform, the transformation of the fixed relation of the plot to be reconfigured in a specific way by means of the opening of the discourse between the user and the machine, breaking the interpretative postulate of the theory of the reception, the active reader could be offered a personalized work, with it a new hypertextual genre would be devised, when linking the digital tools with the multitextuality, in the sense that Roland Barthes uses that a text is any code to decipher. This would imply profound changes in the way of narrating and reading the stories.