“Allegro for a prepared computer and a dynamized harpsichord” – Andrzej Falkiewicz’s Ledwie mrok [Hardly darkness] as a prototypical proto-hypertext

Abstract

This publication provides a reinterpretation of Andrzej Falkiewicz’s Ledwie mrok. This essay-novel is believed to have been an attempt at inventing a new idiom for expressing the experience of corporeality. Following from the reading of the metacommentary describing the author’s creative process a claim is made here that for Falkiewicz the role of the new media, computers in particular, was important. His project of “parcel-website”, which relies on online publication of earlier texts supports this hypothesis. The interpretative framework adopted here affords a different perspective on Ledwie mrok as a text about relations between a sheet of paper and a computer screen. These relations are here problematized by means of the concept of the proto-hypertext, introduced in the final parts of the article.