Applying Landow

I had a lot I wanted to write about after reading Landow’s “Hypertext and Critical Theory”, but I thought I’d try something a little fun—apply genre theories to a flash game, specifically The Great Gatsby for NES (the link leads to a video of the game; if you'd like to play the game, click here). I had to present a game in my Flash Games class, and I chose a game which was based on The Great Gatsby. After my presentation, my teacher mused on how he thought, as game genres continue to evolve, they might come to be considered “literary.”

In regards to Landow's essay, the game does well in capturing the detachability of a novel’s “reading units”: “The implication of such citability, separability, appears in fact, crucial to hypertext, that, as Derrida adds, ‘in so doing it can break every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’ (34)”  

The main citation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the shared title between the game and the novel. A further citation is a very basic plotline; a man seeks another man named Gatsby at a 1920s party.  The game gives this basic, shared plotline a new form, allowing certain parts of the novel to transform and “break” its “given context.”  For instance, Dr. Eckelburg’s glasses shooting laser beams in the context of Fitzergerald’s novel would be strange, but within the context of the game, this function of the glasses is possible. The glasses used in the novel function as a symbolic device working to relate the presence of God. In the game, the function of the glasses expands to represent a God who has active presence as a literal obstacle to the characters’ motives; the glasses shoot laser beams prohibiting the character from moving onto the next level. The game may not capture all of the novels’ intents, but in the case of laser beam shooting glasses, it does capture the symbol’s essential functionality as an obstacle.

An interesting aspect of the game is that the character seeking Gatsby is never named. Having read The Great Gatsby, I assume this character is Nick, but if I had not read the novel before playing the game, then I could make no such assumption. This too hearkens to Landow’s presentation of Deleuze and Guatttari in that a “hypertext…has ‘multiple entryways and exits” (40). Some gamers may play the game having read The Great Gatsby, whereas others will enter and identify with the game through different means.  Essentially, the game exists as a parody in relation to the novel The Great Gastby, but without this context, it can stand alone as a flash game with its own original characters and narrative. This also demonstrates how the game has components which are situated within its own narrative context (laser-beam glasses situated in an alternative universe 1920s), and also, the game itself is situated in a web-like discourse, linking it to The Great Gatsby. 

The idea of the hypertext is that no text stands on its own, representative of an inarguable truth. Instead, texts are themselves and contain extricable units, which come to light by applying them to other texts or modes (e.g. flash games).

To go back to our practice of categorizing the cards in class, I want to ask what genre(s) does this game fall under? Literary? Parody? Also, reading about "breaking given contexts", I was reminded of memes, and how pictures and phrases can come to represent all sorts of differing situations. What do you think about the hypertextuality of memes?

P.S. I almost forgot this. What's really cool about the game is how it takes Fitzgerald's theme of  "being borne ceaselessly into past" and visualizes it. The game was created in Adobe Flash but designed as if it were for the Nintendo. The form the content of the game takes reflects the intention of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The game exists as both a commentary on the past (Nintendo) and the present (Adobe Flash). Perhaps, this goes back to repeating a novel's "mourceau" in a different context in order to expound the possibility of its applications.