ANALYSIS OF TIME
For me Bill Bly’s
hypertext story We Descend is a mixture between detective story and
Gothic novel, which can be demonstrated by the analysis of time.
It is similar to a detective story
because, as mentioned in my introduction, you have to be a detective or
scholarly historian to get to the content of the story. You have to look at all
the different perspectives (is to they at all the different documents from
different periods of time) and analyze each one of them closely to find out the
truth. In terms of time this truth cannot be discovered completely because the
documents themselves do not include any direct time reference and leave a lot
of space for interpretation. But as Bly writes in his directions “it may help
to think of an archaeological dig, where older artifacts are buried beneath
more recent material” [1] and
it also helps to remember that “the Up (later) and Down (earlier) buttons allow
you to move through time”.
Then the
impression of the genre of the Gothik novel occurred to me because the excerpt of We descend,
displayed by the Eastgate system, starts with an image of an archway leading
onto a town-square. As the picture is in black and white and probably made with
the technique of copper engraving it gives the impression of being antique. If
it weren’t displayed on the Internet one could think of it illustrating a book
written during the romantic period. Looking at it one feels drawn into medieval
times. In addition to that the title We Descend, which is also written
in antique letters, might hint at dark times and the descent into the
underworld or hell. These first impressions from the picture are later
confirmed by the content of the story. From the various documents we learn
about the mysterious happenings around Egderus, the “9th Superius Frater of Mountain
House, in the 50th season of his tenure” [2].
Still, even though the atmosphere is dark and with its myths and legends seems
to fit into the time around the 15th century the time span is not limited
to that. According to the publisher’s description it is a “story of our far
future, unearthed by a Scholar to whom it is the distant past.” [3]
As for the
Internal Time, in this work the reader is faced with a series of archival
writings in a fragmentary form, which belong to different moments in time. We
could say that there are four time periods.
The first and
main one would be the one of Egderus, which could belong to a remote
past. If we have a close look at the documents Historian and Remnant we
find out that they are probably written by Egderus as well. (In the
description of the Remnant it is stated explicitly that it’s author might be
Egderus: “Despite vigorous advocacy from certain quarters, there
is no certainty that Egderus composed it, however much the burden of the work
is consistent with what seems to be his philosophy of life.” [4] And in the
Historians Tale it might be guessed because of Egderus’ handicap. Egderus can’t
walk very well and the Historian also writes that “ They used to
leave a woman with me, a kind of nurse who fed me and massaged my leg.” [5] ) They
probably both belong to different moments in the past of Egderus,
although it is not expressed exactly when the facts happened.
The second
time mentioned in the writings is the one of the Ancients, whose
narrations belong to a previous past to Edgerus’, that is, a moment in
time before him.
Then the
third one is the Scholar’s time, which belongs to a more subsequent
period of Egderus’, but a little bit previous to our present time. The scholar
acts here on a level between the story of the other documents and the reader.
He is part of a frame story that can be compared to the one of Scheherazade in One Thousand
and One Nights. He supposedly found the other documents (“the Scholar
uses the term "document" to describe the Egderus materials, when in
fact they comprised a sizeable archive of many documents by different authors.“
[6]) and surprised
about discovering narrations from a previous time to ours, he decides to put
them together in order to present them
to a Conference. We don’t know about the result of that conference.
The fourth
and last time period is that of the author and ours. Bly only takes the archives
and makes a compilation out of them. He thereby lets them seem to be authentic
historical material, as he does not claim to be the author of them. The title
page does not say “We Descend by Bill Bly” which would be the usual title of a
book, it says “We Descend, Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor, an excerpt from Volume One,
Rendered into hypertext form and with an Afterword by Bill Bly”
[7]. So
he claims that his main work is that of putting the texts
together and that of creating and including the title page, the afterword and
the instructions for reading the work.
If you want
to put those four times on a timeline the one which
is furthest in the past is the one of the Ancients. As the name already
indicates it is an ancient time, and seems to be long before our computation of
time. It talks about a world that existed before our time but was destroyed
because of non-specified causes. (it ends with the words: “I cannot bear
this. None of us can. A few have left, a few have died. Our numbers dwindle,
and we had not many at the start. A couple of young men continue to make plans,
but it has become merely something to do, something to keep from listening to
the endless drip drip drip. There is nowhere to go. It is too great an effort
to move at all.” [8])
Then there comes the time in which lived Egderus which seems to be during the
Middle Ages. This theory is supported by the images, as indicated above and by
the diction of the documents from this time. The term “stratioti” [9] is
mentioned there for example. If you look this term up in an encyclopaedia, you
find out that “stratioti” are “mercenaries of mostly Greek, Albanian and
Dalmatian (Serbian) origin who formed military cavalry units of the
This timeline though is only one of many
possible interpretations. The whole action might as well take place in the
future. Than the Ancients might be talking about the destruction of our world
and everything which comes afterwards is still to come. It is up to the reader
if it is for him the “far future” or “the distant” past.
What is sure
though is that the internal time, as to say the time that was described in the
text, covers a far greater scope than the external time, so to say the time you
need to read the text. While the documents composing the novel seem to take
place in different century, you need only a few hours to get through the
writings about them.
Still for me
it took quite some days as I had to reread the story several times in order to
understand the meaning of the work and sometimes it was tiresome because some
things didn’t fit together or seemed to contradict each other. Still I liked
the way of discovering things on my own, of being an explorer that saw things,
which others might have overlooked.