Composition v1.0

Content warning: scenes of sexual violence, general sexual content, negative depictions of mental illness.

Composition No. 1 is a little-known book by Marc Saporta, originally published in French in 1962 and referred to as "the first book in a box". Consisting of 150 unnumbered pages, its story can be read in any order as series of loosely interconnected vignettes.

I first heard about Composition No. 1 during my master's degree as an early example of hypertext. However, it it proved next to impossible for me to acquire a physical copy of it. Used versions sell for well over $300 and no library seemed to carry it. I later learned that any librarians refer to Composition No. 1 as an "archivist's nightmare" due to the tendency of patrons to misplace its unbound pages.

In 2020, I finally tracked down a copy via inter-university loan and went about digitising it for research purposes. I eventually decided to turn the book into a Twine game, primarily to brush up on my programming skills, but also to make the orphan work available to wider audiences. Composition v1.0 represents a full digital conversion—albeit missing one page that was absent from my library copy.

While I find Saporta's literary experiment intriguing, I hold no particular fondness for the story found within. Most of the pages are sparse and generic, likely as part of the author's attempt to interconnect them with one another. It is difficult to find any true cohesion between the different characters and storylines, of which there are many. And some of the most evocative scenes, especially those that involve rape and mental illness, have been handled clumsily or aged poorly.

Thus, Composition v1.0 is less an endorsement of the original work and more of an attempt to render visible its structure and narrative. I may return to it, from time to time, to fix a few typos, but it mostly exists as a playful revival of a supposedly canonical early hypertext.