Beyond the Page: Exploring Hypertextual Elements in Milorad Pavic’s The Landscape Painted with Sea

Abstract

Hypertext literature is a form of interactive and nonlinear narration that utilizes the digital format to create dynamic and interconnected narrative structures. Postmodernist writers like Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Milorad Pavic, etc. incorporated nonlinear interactive elements within traditional printed books to create a new reading experience. They introduce branching paths, allowing the readers to navigate through the text in a non-sequential manner. Instead of following electronic hyperlinks, readers encounter printed hypertext through footnotes, endnotes, literary games and other techniques. Hypertexts are usually reader-oriented and they usually remove the author from the text. But the works of Milorad Pavic, a Serbo-Croatian writer, follow the hypertext technique in an innovative manner. He experiments with the textual structure in such a way that it ensures both reader interaction and author presence in the hypertextual format. This paper tries to analyse how Pavic’s novel The Landscape Painted with Tea explores the experimental narrative structure to guarantee reader and author participation the text.