I particularly enjoyed reading Borges’s short story Garden of Forking Paths. It’s quite interesting imaging a novel written in the style of Ts’ui Pên, refusing to follow the typical narrative of a novel where each choice a character makes eliminates all other options at that point in the story. His novel isn’t even a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type of narrative where one can somehow return to a point: if the character makes a choice on page 74 only to realize it leads to a dead end on page 82 they might return to 74. Rather, in Pên’s story, every single possible outcome of any choice occur all at the same time which continually spreads into another round of all possible outcomes occurring and on and on and on. Albert tells Tsun that in the some of the story forks they do not exist, in others only one of them exists, in one Albert is a ghost, in yet another Tsun arrives to find Albert recently dead, then finally he foreshadows his own death by saying one scenario involved himself as Tsun’s enemy. Tsun promptly lies to him and then murders him.
After reading, I was considering why hypertext didn’t lead to the predicted transformed literary future of endless possibility with a move away from linear literature as a format. Rather, we commonly use hypertext in linear literature to more efficiently address the information level that each reader seeks: if they want the most in-depth look they can open every hyperlink, or they can skip over every link and absorb as little as they want. I think it is largely because non-linear literature quickly becomes a pain to read if written too similarly to linear literature, and if it is written “well”, it becomes a pain for the author, who must at each point must provide the reader background information on the characters and such to make the work at least somewhat digestible. So while hypertext hasn’t transformed literature, it has provided internet users the ability to hop around in a somewhat nonlinear fashion, seeking out what interests them from an article from The Atlantic or the details of a poll aggregated onto a model on FiveThirtyEight. –Levi