Jon Samsel

Michael Joyce is a prize-winning novelist and a professor of English at Vassar College. Joyce’s works include the hypertext fiction novel Twilight, A Symphony, and the much celebrated afternoon, a story. Joyce has been active in the interactive and collaborative arts communities for many years. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael via phone some years ago. Here is an except of that conversation.

Q: How do you define hypertext fiction?

Joyce: From the beginning, I referred to hypertext fictions as multiple fictions. Not because I wanted to steer attention away from the technology or the modality of the telling, but because my own experience reading and teaching these fictions is that they are, in some sense, almost lifelike structures. I say this because a good deal of my recent writing life has been devoted to steering people away from the notion that these things are branching fictions and to try to elucidate what, in fact, they are if they are not branches. For me, the term “multiple fiction” gathers much more the sense of what these things have (which my students tend to call an “oddly lifelike quality”).

Carolyn Guyer, the hypertext writer, says “the thing about hyperfictions is that, for art, they tend to be extremely lifelike.”

Hypertext fiction tends to be closer to our normal experiences—the narratives that make up our lives. Closure is a matter of rhythms and of transient episodes…where we find the story of our lives and the story of the things that are important to us in successions and recurrences. The term “multiple fictions” or “multiple stories” seems to capture that for me. [Laughs] Of course, after using it for a decade and not seeing it catch on, I leap at any opportunity to mention it.

Q: What are the common misconceptions about hypertext fiction?

Joyce: Sometimes when I give a reading someone will say, “Isn’t this every writer’s dream? You can throw in all your back story—you don’t have to cut anything. It’s so undisciplined.” Usually, those comments are from people who haven’t read really good hypertext fiction. Many writers fail to realize that there is a great deal of composition in this format.

Another misconception is thinking of hypertext as branching. Hypertext is not about a story and its variations, but, rather, the inner possibilities of the story. A better term is multiplicity. We don’t go about our lives like branches.

We choose our lives instead by inclination, by urges, by happenstance, or seductions. A third misconception is to think that links are notes or annotations. As soon as the reader clicks a hyperlink, one must ask, How much more does the reader understand about the way this story is unfolding? It shouldn’t be simply that you are getting another episode; it should be that you are coming to understand the way the characters think or see their lives. Too often, you see a poorly crafted narrative Web site where you see the word “sex” and you know that if you follow that link, you will go to a sex scene. If you click on “soccer,” you will get a sporting contest. Language and storytelling rarely work that way. The things that are sexy to us sometimes are soccer matches—sex can sometimes seem like a contest. You want to evoke for your reader a sense of discovering story. The link doesn’t just get you to another part of the story, the link is part of the story.

Q: How does Twilight, A Symphony differ from afternoon, a story?

Joyce: I am willing to claim that some things I did in creating afternoon, a story were original. In fact, I’ve been deemed the originator of some art form, or at least, a first something. But when you are a first, you come to a certain humility. You become aware that what you set in motion is not under your control.

If somebody deems your creation a literary art form, they will create works which test your understanding of what it was you thought you were doing. In Twilight, there were a lot of obvious changes. Unlike afternoon, I included graphics, sounds, and QuickTime movies in Twilight. I tried to be very careful not to just seed things throughout the work because it was possible. I tried to define the relationships between the sounds, images, and the text. There were also hypertextual changes. In afternoon, there aren’t any long screens. Part of that was due to the fact that Storyspace, the hypertext system Jay Bolter and I created, was designed for the Macintosh classic and its little ice block–size screen. We only had so much textual space to work with. Partly though, it was due to the fact that we wanted to move the story along in bite-sized, pulsing rhythms. When I came to write Twilight, I bridled under my own discipline and went back to very long scrolling windows in some cases. I love the sense of the text sort of taking you beyond the point were you can hold onto it.

Another change is the overview or libretto. For over a decade now, I’ve been interested in whether there is such a thing as true interactivity. Because true interactivity, to me, means that the story would change as a result of my reading it. I don’t know of any stories or systems as yet that are truly interactive according to my definition. It strikes me that a fundamental aspect to creating true interactivity is that the reader in some sense, has to share a conceptual map with you. To share an idea of what the scope of the work is so that she can, at various turns, test her sense of how this landscape is evolving against what she perceives to be your sense of it.

In Twilight, it starts with a screen I like to think of as a libretto, something that says, Here’s what was going on before you got here. However, it is written quite consciously in the prose of something like the Texaco Saturday Opera. At a time when Texaco used to sponsor radio operas, they would have these librettos where there was this odd third person telling of the story to come. It sets in motion a set of expectations and rhythms and thematics that are not met by the opera.

Where afternoon gave you few cues of its wholeness (and the user had to discover the big picture through its linking), in Twilight, there is an overview of sorts. An overview, which is, in itself, part of the work. It’s not really front matter. It’s not direction. It turns out to be an active part of the story too. The question I pose in Twilight is, who is this voice here?

Q: Tell me about your most recent project, Twelve Blue.

Joyce: Twelve Blue is the first project I’ve written directly for the Web. It was co-published online by Eastgate Systems and Postmodern Culture.

In Twelve Blue, as in all of my interactive fictions, voices come and go. It’s a pronominal sense of English—the fact that language allows you to have one character merge into another. Not in a morphing way, but in a way that, viewing the same screen or similar screens in different sequences, it can seem to be one or another of the characters.

For example, one scene in Twelve Blue finds two drowning men. One is a very bad man and one is a good and very innocent man. At different times, they share the same language on the same screens. The technique allows my themes and variations to become almost musical. When readers come upon these voices, they see the text differently.

Twelve Blue (excerpt) “a white witness”

He settled like the tide, then sank eventually, floating aimlessly and softly, not at all like a log but languishing and plump, a white witness to the darkness.

After the first spike of pain and the panic there was a settling sense of inevitability, the body pitted against itself, both longing for breath and at the same time snuffing it with each gulping inhalation of the frigid, pungent water. The first swallow tore against his lungs but successive ones softened them and made him heavy. Soon he was beyond panic.

There was a pinging echo as if someone hammered against a nearly empty air tank with a wrench.

A sense of someone swimming nearby in dark water.

A woman came to visit him bearing a garland of dried vines strung with flowers of various shades of blue and a few stray blossoms of pink and yellow. She sang a strange song of a Portuguese sailor and a witch. Above him water lilies floated like green clouds. They were tethered to the muck on swaying cords of soft green. Another girl signed his name over the water, singing as she formed the letters.

Q: Is multiple fiction a new art form?

Joyce: There is an absolute newness to it, but before I even talk about that, it seems important to point out that newnesses don’t spring out of nothing. Newnesses are, in fact, a result of successive attempts and experiments. It seems obvious that throughout the twentieth century, there has been an attempt on the part of various writers to open up the ability of the story to talk to itself, to talk to its readers, to contain multitudes. For instance, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf. The computer has not created these media as much as enabled them. There has been this longing for multiplicity and complexity throughout the twentieth century.

That said, the absolute newness that I think exists here is that—here let me digress a minute. . . . There is an odd backlash going on now in the mainline culture where, with the advent of the Web, hypertextuality is establishing itself as a cultural reality. I find colleagues and literary critics saying, “Well look, the book did all this. The book can do all this. The book sustains multiple stories and can reflect consciousness and do all the things that you want to claim as unique to hypertext.” What the book doesn’t do—and that is the newness here—is change every time you read it. I mean literally change the presentation of the text in a way that a very complex disk-based hypertext fiction does. Even Web fictions, which have less complexity yet have the advantage of being increasingly universally available; any reader on two successive occasions reading the “same hypertext” will discover that the work presents itself differently. So that when you come to discuss your experience of reading a hypertext work such as afternoon, a story or the Web fiction Twelve Blue, with someone who has read it, one of the things you inevitably have to do is discuss with one another what your experience with the text was. What is it that you saw? What is it that you read?

Now I realize that if you put a few students together and ask them to read and discuss Madame Bovery, each of them will have had a different interpretation of the text too. If you ask them to explain their thoughts, they will point to different pages in a way that someone could argue that the reading changes depending on the reader. But, you wouldn’t say to the group of readers, “Did you read page fifty-seven after reading page fifty-six?” In hypertext, you find yourself in that position. Did you see this screen? Did this happen? In my reading, this scene followed this, which made me think she was afraid. Someone else might say, “No, in my reading, the second scene came first and I found that she was much more confident.”

These conversations sound vaguely game-like when you first hear them, but they are actually very old literary questions—how we see character and how we see event. They are, in fact, the satisfactions of the form. What is it that sustains the form? What sustains them is the psychological reliability of knowing that as we view the events of our lives from multiple perspectives, they seem to show up differently.

Many Luddites and others in the academic community argue that our ever increasing reliance on visual communication will kill the word. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The word now takes on a very interesting power. Words can do some things that images can’t. Words in conjunction with images can do some things that neither can do alone.

Hypertext, like life, is subjunctive—as in, “it could have been otherwise.” Had I only made this turn, my life would have been different. Our lives take on a certain sadness and a certain glory because when you choose one path, that means you haven’t chosen another hundred.

Q: That reminds me of the famous stanza from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”: I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Joyce: That is true. There could be someone down the other path who could be saying those same or similar words. That’s what makes great stories. It’s what keeps an audience coming back.