The use of the web as a literary mode remains very limited nowadays. Indeed, hypertext is still considered to be a subversive and experimental genre that George P. Landow has defined as:

A text composed of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails, in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, mode, network, web and path (Landow, 1992: 3)

Quite a few novels such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, James Joyce's Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and more recently J. L. Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths have been identified as having hypertextual characteristics but no-one has yet tried to put them on the web to see if the reading experience of these novels would be altered in any specific way. The only attempt to do so was with Stuart Moulthrop's adaptation of The Garden of Forking Paths. Unfortunately this hypertext fiction is not available ( here are the reasons why) for the moment, so I had no model to look at when working on At Swim-Two-Birds. The hypertext version of At Swim-Two-Birds covers about nine per cent of the book. It represents the beginning part of the novel and corresponds in the book with the pages 9-33 (Penguin edition). This hypertext fiction differs somewhat from Landow's definition of hypertext mainly because the story of At Swim-Two- Birds was not produced for the web. Thus, this hypertext fiction is not an "open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality" although it is supported by a medium that combines all these characteristics. At Swim-Two-Birds has only one true beginning and ending even though it tricks the reader into believing that it has many more.                                       

Working on the hypertext version of At Swim-Two-Birds seemed quite simple at first since the novel presented four narrative levels with four correlated introductions so the idea was to build four independent stories that would interweave and intertwine following the model of the book. This idea however soon proved not to be feasible, first because the narrative levels that were quite independent at the beginning of the book tended to blur with one another towards the end. We have, for example, the Pooka Mac Phellimey and Finn Mac Cool who appear in a story on their own right at the beginning but then they join the other characters of Trellis's book for the trial of the novelist. So it was very difficult sometimes to ascertain whose was the speaking voice, furthermore it appeared that the stories were interdependent so it became impossible to make four stories for the hypertext version. So what I did instead was to divide the main story into two sub-stories; Story 1 would be about the narrator and his mind and Story 2 would be about the narrator's book, Trellis's book on sin and Orlick's book on his father. Both stories would intertwine while pursuing their own further extensions. The extensions for Story 1 include the narrator's thoughts and his childhood reminiscences whereas for Story 2 they deal mainly with comments about Dermot Trellis. Each story is recognizable not only through its content but also thanks to the background of the web pages. This as well as the introductory note at the beginning of the hypertext version of At Swim-Two-Birds were added in order to make up for the lack of linearity and the rather complicated structure of the novel.

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