CONCLUSION

This is my first experience with a hypertext and I have really discovered a new world. Peter Howard, a hypertext author that I really recommend, knows perfectly this format in which making use of Macromedia Flash ensures a work full of nuances that printed literature cannot offer.

After reading about Peter Howard and his work, we realise how humorous his work is. But on what lies his humour? He uses visual and sound effects because he knows the impact that these resources have and also because in some occasions they are not as explicit as words. Notice in “The Portrait of the Artist” the “pink teddy bear” section. What does he mean with all these pink teddy bears? Probably everyone can have their own opinion, in my case, I would dare to say that it refers to homosexuality. Pink teddy bears represent homosexual people, the first one is pointed as people do with things they don’t accept. The same happened with the next two bears but when there are a lot of them, they are not pointed any more because finally they are accepted. At the end of the section the author knows the ambiguity of that and invites the reader to think whatever (s)he wants when the nine bears disappear all together. Without all these resources it could be impossible to create such an ambiguous and dynamic work. Also in “The Portrait of the Artist”, think about the section of the weasel. Only with the visual and sound effect in the word “pop”, we understand that the poor weasel, which probably has been subjected to chemical experimentation, -remember that the warning in which it is located is “Caution. Confined space. Do not enter without obtaining permit”- finally explodes. We can observe another example of visual effects in the warning of “Caution Caustic” which contains the assertion “The words are the important thing”. We can suppose that this assertion is corroded by the caustic and hence disappears, also we can deduce that what the author means is that even words are vulnerable. The great thing of all that is that the author doesn’t say anything about these ideas, it is the reader who may reconstruct what (s)he is seeing and hearing and the most interesting is that innumerable options are possible.

I don’t want to finish this section without talking about the subliminal image that appears all the time in “The Portrait of the Artist” because of its funny. It is supposed that a subliminal image should be very concise to obtain the purpose to what it is shown but in this case, the image is a text and to read a text takes much more time than to visualise an image. For this reason the usefulness of this subliminal image is totally invalid. To prove that I only will say that as I wanted to know what the text said, I had to read this “subliminal image” twenty times!

To make a brief conclusion of what has been said until now, hypertext is a format in which authors have a vast range of possibilities that in conventional format they didn’t have. As we have seen in the case of “The Portrait of the Artist” by Peter Howard, the author uses a sort of elements –visual and sound- which are only possible in a virtual field. But in hypertexts not only authors have more possibilities but readers too. In many cases the hypertexts focus on the interactivity of the reader who has to take part on the text and take some decisions. “The Portrait of the Artist” presents an open text, that is, the reader has to do an effort to reconstruct the work, to think what does the author mean with that image or that sound and on the other hand (s)he has to choose in some occasions one way or another –“don’t think” vs. “just do it”.- Bearing all these facts in mind we could say that hypertexts have created more bonds between author and reader than ever.