INTRODUCTION

A Sunday of October 2008 I was in my friend’s home, Pilar, who had invited me to eating a paella. We were talking about this and that and, in a point of our conversation, I said that I was studying English Narrative written in hypertext. Her eyes stared at me surprised and she asked me what the hell a hypertext was. I could perceive her panic facing such a new world… ‘hypertext’….. She is an actress, and words and texts are her friends, she is working with texts everyday, analyzing the meaning, the subtext that lies under the words, etc…But that neologism scared her, later, when I explained her that a hypertext is not a devil, that she was reading hypertexts everyday when reading on the net, she calmed down and an interesting conversation was born in that moment. Talking about links she believes that the first hypertext she has ever read was Rayuela by Julio Cortázar. Actually, in that book the author gives to the reader different pathways to follow in the reading, among all the chapters. It could be called a kind of proto-links. It is true. But technologies render more comfortable this way of reading. We can consider that Rayuela was built in the Stone Age of Hyper Literature. And this is a suggestive reason for taking TOOLS as field of study. But, let me go on.

From the beginning of the 90s hypertexts and hyper-fictions have been growing up on Internet. It seems that in those days many of the writers, who decided to publish on Internet, did it because no one wanted to print their texts. Years have passed and nowadays many authors are publishing on Internet because it is their will and not because there are not editorials that do not want to print their works. Everybody knows the advantages of a hypertext respect to a printed text. They are more dynamic, more accessible, cheaper, faster and so on…The elements which render these characteristics a hypertext are electronic tools.

Tools in a hypertext are very important. In fact, they are the very things that distinguish a hypertext from a regular printed text. Clickable links, music, images, animations, etc…make up the universe of a hypertext.

In this paper I have analyzed a hypertext by Robert Swigart, About Time ,on the field of TOOLS . Swigart has written this hypertext and Allen Strange created the arrangements of the music. His contribution to these fictions is very seductive, since the music, called ‘Environmental Sounds’, fits perfectly in the reading.

About Time is designed with two intertwined stories; Mouth’s Journey 40,000 Years Ago and The De Granville Files Present Day, which are located in different moments of mankind’s existence. One of the stories shows us the evolution of human beings in the annals of the History and is located in Australia. The other one is happening in the present century where technologies are intimately related with people.

Here there are a link, that Robert Swigart gave to me, where you can find more e-texts written by him and other writers.