Cubism's fragmentation of space can be directly applied to hypertext. As various views of a violin, a bottle, or a figure are combined in one space in a Cubist painting, different aspects of a character's personality, as presented by the narrator, other characters, the character's own thoughts, various situations the character is involved in, his or her actions, etc., can be juxtaposed in a hypertext by including each of the perspectives in a different lexia and connecting them with significant links. Other narrative objects such as situations or series of events can be presented in a similar manner. If the hypertext system is capable of keeping multiple windows open simultaneously, the Cubist space is all the more firmly established.
This characteristic of hypertext has previously been compared to collage, but the concept here is fundamentally different. In collage writing, unrelated (or tangentially related) narrative objects are linked to one another, generating an understanding of their illusive but inherent connections. In Cubist writing, divergent perspectives of the same narrative object are presented at once.
It is in this regard, also, that Analytical Cubism is more applicable to text than are Synthetic or Flat Pattern Cubism. Analytical Cubism is distinguished from the last two in that the painter employs modelling in each of the various planes. Flat Pattern Cubist (and Constructivist, Suprematist, Matissian decolletage , etc.) works, like Picasso's exemplaryHarlequin of 1915, create three dimensional space by superimposing flat, unmodelled objects upon one another; Synthetic Cubism eliminates painting altogether. Hypertext, since it is text, allows the author to include great amounts of detail and description, the literary analogues of modelling, in each lexia, thus creating a space more fundamentally "painterly" than synthetic or flat.
Ma Jolie