While reading Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon” I felt like I was being pushed by the author to leave behind all the preconceptions I have about reading and interpreting a text. Perhaps that is why I failed to conceptualize the story when I initially read it, since I was desperately searching for the different pieces of the story in order to find out what it’s about, instead of enjoying the journey. However, once I left my inclination to search for any form of order in “Afternoon” – an impossible task, since “Afternoon” has numerous characters that live inside different times/spaces – I began enjoying the fragments of the various stories.
I believe Joyce has a smile on his face every time he thinks about how “Afternoon” and its lexias ask the reader to learn how to unlearn what they have learned about reading a text in order to enjoy his story.
A story that is about Peter who may have seen is his ex-wife and their son die in a car crash, but which is from a thematic perspective is predominantly about sex and death. If you don’t believe me, than explore Nausicaa and Lolly’s relationship – “Olympus” is a good lexia to begin with – or find out if there was or wasn’t a love quadrangle between Peter, Nausiica, Werther and Lolly.
If I’m to be honest I was less concerned with the story’s theme, than with “Afternoon’s” declaration of war on closure. Yes, we discussed closure in class, but only after I had found out that the last page in “Afternoon” reads: “Work in Progress” – so does every link leading out of it – did I begin to think that the purpose of this story was prove that there can be closure without ending a story. I certainly felt that there was closure in “Afternoon,” since I was at peace with the development of the story’s different fragments, and with the fact that it will never end – as the line ”Work in Progress” proves.
Then again, do we truly want closure? If we do there wouldn’t be dozens of prequels and sequels for all the movies and books that we love. I for one like the idea of having closure without, well, having closure in the traditional sense of the word. I think we always had this concept in our lives and “Afternoon” only points that out for us.