The medium of a story has the power to influence the message.
The passages readers skim over combined with the ones they zone in on is the reason why different interpretations are taken away.
The media's portrayal of a country has the power to either blur or zoom in on the truth. One may never know the reality of an unfamiliar land until seen with one's own eyes. From then, travellers have the freedom to create itineraries filled with either trips to theme parks, or assimilating with the culture. Situations one observes or chooses to ignore forms unique and personal interpretations. These interpretations may be the take-aways that are easily consumed, or the hard truths to swallow. While actual experiences and content is important, the way a path is carved or sequence of events occurs can be the difference between two adventures of a similar quest.
Under this context, readers and travellers are both [[tourists->Thesis]]. Navigating a new story, keeping up with the author's diction, and grasping the meaning is parallel to exploring a foreign country. While it's expected to feel lost at times, there is an expectation that both tourists will end their experiences with a fresh outlook on the world.
Readers feel the same sense of tourism Geniwate, the author, felt when visiting Vietnam. The multiple hypertext links allows readers to sink into 'Rice', which directly parallels how Geniwate dives into the layers that exist within twentieth century Vietnam.
Gewiwate chose to share her work on a digital space and use [[hypertext links->what is hypertext?]] to keep her ideas progressing. The nonlinear style and the unfolding of her themes would not have had the same effect had she published the piece on print.
'Rice' offers no clear beginning, middle, or end. It is up to the reader to determine how they will travel along the story. Although many paths can be taken, all readers will arrive at the general understanding that Genwiate, the author, is depicting Geniwate, her tourist self, visiting and exploring Vietnam.
The certain interactions she has and scenes she witnesses shapes her experience and understanding of Vietnam.
While using a blend of poetry, visual and auditory stimuli, Geniwate [[carves paths for readers to choose from->Geniwate's use of hypertext]] while making art of her experience witnessing the exploitation of Vietnam in her 1998 hypertext narrative ‘Rice’. Although 'Rice' was written over two decades ago, it was not an early production of hypertext fiction. Hypertext fiction had been growing since the 1980s and the peak of postmodernism, but was gaining popularity towards the late 1990s. This means 'Rice' was produced during the boom of electronic literature. In fact, “hypertext fiction was the first form of digital writing to receive sustained critical attention in the English-speaking literary studies context” (Retteberg).
Hypertext involves the “interlinked fragments of text, with multiple possible reading sequences to be navigated through the reader’s selection of links between them” (Retteberg). Hypertext fiction is notably similar to 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, where the reader takes on duties of authorship as navigating how their own version of the story will play out. Arguably, this can entail the “‘transference of authorial power’ from the author to the reader” (Landow, Retteberg). Clicking links rather than turning the page makes the reader feel as if they are diving deeper straight into the topic rather than swimming and skimming along the surface, left to right.
Genwiate’s ‘Rice’ includes these principles of hypertexts and offers a [["decentered reading experience"->Geniwate's use of hypertext]] (54, Retteberg). Genwiates story offers no directions but rather plots points for readers to navigate her work using the map of their intuition and desires.Similar to chapters in a book, Geniwate breaks up her ideas by linking sixteen 'rooms' that can be accessed through her homepage. She uses images taken from Oscar Ferriero to embed these links. The images appear to be random and not follow any specific theme besides Vietnamese writing on merchandise and objects. Like a tourist decoding foreign signs, interactors of 'Rice' must click on the images to achieve more context.
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/d1Q5fgy9/Screen-Shot-2023-03-19-at-2-16-27-PM.png>
The images are arrayed in a four by four rectangle with each image tightly attached to its neighbour, turning the images into somewhat of a collage. This collage of images with a black background acts as the table of contents of 'Rice'. From this point, readers are left with deciding which image, or link, to click on first. Every interlink takes the reader to rooms consisting of more images, poetry, audio recordings, or a combination of the three.
Some rooms include multiple layers or links within them: by clicking on the image again a reader may be prompted with another page of visual or auditory content, or may be redirected to the home page. Furthermore, every room is very visually stimulating. The text font Geniwate mostly uses is red, but in some instances are found to be white or an ombre of pinks and purples. If the text is white, however, then the background takes the role of being stimulating by using colors, patterns, or textures.
The most widely used background is a black screen with four white lined octothorpes spread out evenly across the page with strokes of red running over them. Some other backgrounds she uses include repeated poems or phrases, two thick red squiggly lines splitting a black screen into fourths, or a bright blue background with a pattern of some abstract shape or logo made up of pointy white and teal trapezoids.
Other ways Geniwate keeps the reader hooked is by using audio. Ten out of the sixteen rooms include audio samples. These sounds include traffic noises, dove sounds, sounds of the Dalat, Vietnam, snake hissing, and spoken poetry recordings. While almost all the rooms include [[poetry->content of 'Rice']], some do not. These rooms are not ignored but rather actually emphasized as they are a break from the routine, allowing the reader to zone in on the images or listen closely to the audio more.
The use of hypertext allows Geniwate to jump to each topic in an organized formation. Her writing style is very complex and prompts readers to think and question her poetry before settling on an understanding of what she is trying to explain or argue. She writes in first person as she recounts the people she witnessed and scenes she observed while visiting Vietnam.
Geniwate mainly uses her own observations, but occasionally includes quotations. She quotes a nineteenth century French Naturalist Dr. Morce, North Vietnam's Communist President Ho Chi Minh, and even herself. Geniwate quotes herself by including an image of a poem of hers from 1996 titled "it's nostalgia". Interestly, these quotes are spaced nearly half a century apart in production year, and correlate in themes of [[control over citizens->citizens]].
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/bYQ8xtRH/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-10-19-03-PM.png>
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/rFjkb23D/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-10-19-55-PM.png>
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/HL7FTqZ4/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-10-26-50-PM.png>
The Vietnam War and communism is a topic that regularly gets brought up to the surface when thinking of Vietnam. However, while Geniwate hints at these occurrences, she never explicitly mentions them. Geniwate moreso focuses on grains of 'Rice', or rather fine details that when consumed all together in a spoonful of context can be linked to themes of [[control->not about Vietnam]] found inside exploitation. To export this thinking of control, Geniwate emphasizes the presence of exploitation of Vietnamese [[tourism->tourism]], [[women->women]], and [[workers->workers]].
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/0ycVKDyN/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-11-17-33-PM.png>
The hypertext image, third row from the bottom and last image on the right, opens to a picture of a hand along with a phrase. The red text describes an event Geniwate overhears when sleeping in her hotel. The incident strongly suggests a rape or sexual harrasment. Sexual assault is a very common way that men exploit women and take advantage of their rights to their bodies. The "over and over" suggests the repeated nature of such exploitation, while people overhear the "screaming" but rarely intervene.
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/V6DtDB2S/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-11-28-10-PM.png>
This room is linked on the top row, second image to the right on the homepage. While the poem itself illustrates the scenery along the Mekong River Delta, the background considers an entirely different topic. The phrase "Vietnam is working for you" reads several times across the page in a blue-green text color. Here, Geniwate is referencing Vietnamese sweatshops.
The phrase being read in the background suggests that the exploitation of Vietnamese workers occurs so discreetly and behind closed doors, that it's often overlooked and only found beneath the surface. The "you” implies the reader is from a western society, whose consumers unknowingly support these exploitation conditions due to their capitalist ideals. By putting a phrase like this into her work, Geniwate forces readers to put background affairs into the forefront of their minds.
<img src=https://i.postimg.cc/j5tfKky3/Screen-Shot-2023-03-29-at-11-45-10-PM.png>
On the second row of images, the first one to the left, is a photo of seemingly half of a mailed letter or some type of stamp. The page opens up to harsh red text again. Geniwate sets the scene by telling us she’s in Nha Trang- a coastal city in Vietnam full of beaches. She quickly grabs readers attention by aggressively saying she “started to vomit”. She gives an explanation of how she “took too many photos” and they “got into her gut”. Readers can assume here that Geniwate was experiencing culture shock. She copes with the feelings by “laying low” and only looking at objects that are “familiar”. She is trying to calm her nerves by focusing on neutral stimuli. The neutral stimuli reminds her of America and leaves no chance of feeling guilt, shame, or sorrow for the citizens of Vietnam. This can be a direct attack to how Americans tend to look away from real life depressions to turn to more easy to look at objects or scenes.
She goes on to describe her purchase of “postcards of happy-go-lucky tribespeople”. The contradiction of not being able to look at anything else after taking her own photographs, to being able to purchase someone else’s photos is a unique concept. The postcards are hiding the quality of truth that was present in her own photographs. Pictures that make you sit out after snapping them are powerful because they showcase hard-to-swallow truths about the reality of Vietnam. These postcards of smiling faces of tribespeople seem to not include real truth but rather the truth is in the perspective of the depth of the viewer. She describes the people to be “cheerfully toothless in the face of poverty and discrimination”, which can be correlated to the notion ‘ignorance is bliss’. By going on to say how the “going rate for smiles is two American dollars” points fingers at Western societies where Westerners too are blissfully ignorant in assuming Vietnamese citizens are smiling through the exploitation.
‘Rice’ is not about Vietnam, but is about Geniwate’s “experience as a Western tourist in Vietnam” (Elit Org). Geniwate plays with reliability and availability of the truth amongst individual journeys. With no [[tour guide or direction->control over a story]], tourists have the freedom, but also the responsibility, to choose which paths to follow. Geniwate gives her readers a sense of trust and some "authorial power" (Landow, Retteberg) in that they may decide to not click on certain images. Author's of hypertext fiction lose control over their story. Rather, part of the story becomes the unpredictable nature of how a reader will interact with it, and what will be taken away. Readers gain control over how they will let the story move along, rather than letting a story move them. Hypertext readers share similar qualities to those travelling across a foreign country.
There exists a sense of control over which places and people one is able to choose whether to interact with. Geniwate sets up parallel experiences of tourism to argue that individual understandings of countries or readings says more about the tourist than the actual artefact.
(click-goto:?page,"Works cited")
Geniwate. Rice , 1998, https://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/geniwate__rice/riceindex.html.
Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, 2019.
“Rice.” Electronic Literature Organization , https://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/geniwate__rice.html. <!DOCTYPE html>
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<h1>An Analysis of Geniwate's 'Rice'</h1>
<p>By Julia Danielson</p> (click-goto:?page,"Intro")
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