Introduction

I’ve chosen this text because from the very beginning I decided to work on the aspect of time. To be honest, at first sight what caught my attention was that the parts of the text were clearly separated in different periods. Later, when I started to read the story it turned out to be very interesting, original, and very unlike the literature I was used to read.

Adrienne Eisen started her career as a Hypertext writer in 1992. Everything started when she came up with a non-lineal story line which didn’t know how and where to present. The solution came out unexpected as one her friends was working on an interactive CD and gave her the idea of presenting her work in a similar way. It was a turning point in her writing career and she has become the only winner of the prestigious New Media Invision Award. After this recognition, she has launched some new sets of online stories, but her major work as a hypertext creator is “Six Sex Scenes” published in 1995, which called the attention of both the academic and underground literary art worlds.

It is important to mention that by the time she started publishing hypertexts, there were not established specific programs and tools to create this type of fiction. Therefore she decided to use html code and keeps on working with this format ever since.

Besides her ingenious talent as a hypertext writer, Eisen is also known as a traditional writer for publishing business articles in online magazines as Business 2.0 or Bookmouth under the name of Penelope Trunk. If not taking the structure into account, in those articles she keeps the basic characteristics of her style, with a touch of irony and sharp humor.

One of the main characteristics of her works is Eisen’s personal style. Her non-lineal creations can be at the same time comic, surprising, desperate, ironic, shocking and also discerning. Her stories are like short-narrative explosions, with a post-feminist satirical edge that zooms into the American psyche. Eroticism is always present in her works, and especially in the text I’m working on, where she mixes it casually with a kind of humour that puts the reader in a complicated situation on which one doesn’t know whether to laugh or feel pity for her.

She was deeply influenced by authors like Nicholson Baker, Mark Leyner and Kathy Acker. In one of the interviews, Eisen was asked about the impact that Baker’s writings has had on her work, and she replied: “Baker writes pages and pages where everything is interesting but nothing happens. To me, this sort of writing falls outside of the arc of the novel. And when I think about what works as hypertext I think that first, the writing style has to fall outside the arc of the novel”. This comment is very important in order to understand the concept of hypertext creation, because it really has nothing to do with writing a printed novel. They differ right on the nature of the creation itself.

Talking about the aspect of time, from my point of view the division should consist of two different types of time which we will call external and internal time. The term external time in this text will be referred to the time that appears in the index of the story (which is made like a curriculum vitae, where we can see time separated by dates). Meanwhile, internal time shows the time that passes inside of each story. Both types of time will be deeply analyzed in the following section called time.