About the temporality in “We Descend”
This work is a compilation of archives. Its author,
Bill Bly, appears such as a simple collector of that archives, and
he displays them as a hypertext; moreover he has added a prologue and an
epilogue.
This prologue goes with an instructions
page, very useful for reader´s navigation through this hypertext.
As the present course´s topic is the temporality, we will start talking about it; because of that I have divided my analysis in two types of Time: Internal and External Time.
So, and about the Internal Temporality, the reader of this work faces
up to a series of fragmented documents, which belong to different epochs:
we find then a quadruple temporality: the main time stream would be Edgerus´,
which seems to belong to a remote past. Edgerus is also the author (but
not expressly) of the documents called “Historian” and “Remnant”. Both
belong to different moments of Edgerus´ past, but we don´t
know with certainty when happened.
By other side we have “The Ancients”, whose narrations belong to a
previous past to Edgerus´ epoch.
“The Scholar” belongs to a very later epoch of Edgerus´, but
a bit previous to ours. This scholar found these documents and, surprised
about discovering narrations from a previous epoch to ours, he compiled
them for display them at an investigators conference. About the result
of that conference nothing is known.
The fourth and last time stream is Bly´s, i.e., ours. The only
thing Bly does is to compile and display the information as a hypertext.
His only creative contribution is to include it a prologue, epilogue and
instructions.
Surprisingly, our present world would be the earliest; the Ancients
and the other voices insinuate that our world was destroyed because of
non-specified causes...
So, the reader has to take on the paper of an historian, and read and
reread the several fragments in order to order and comprehend the meaning
of the work: Rule classes from each time have own the knowledge of the
past of their respective civilizations, so they manipulate and reinvent
it as they like it in order to control the masses.
Because of this Edgerus doesn´t know anything about our world:
because at his time ruled by an inquisitive government, which kept
intelligently the information.
About the External Time of the work, i.e., the total time spent on its
reading; I have to say previously that in the site www.wordcircuits.com
( where I extracted the text from) it wasn´t available the complete
version of the work, but a short and musty reduced and abbreviated version,
having to pay to enjoy the complete version.
Said my complains, I have to say that the time spent on reading the
work (i.e. its abbreviated version) oscillates between 30-45 min, depending
on if we read it following the way stablished by the author or if we read
by ourselves all the documents in the order we prefer.
As a final comment to say that the form to display the work by the author
seems very intelligent to me, because it transforms the reader into an
investigator-historian, what increases their interest about the work. To
discover step by step fragments of unknown civilizations, which on the
first time seemed very previous to yours, is very interesting. So that,
the work seems very good to me; the only black spot is the absence of a
full free version.
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