textual media

Afternoon presents a compelling argument in favor of this brand of fiction, in that its interactivity is not a gimmick by which the flimsy meaning of the text is somehow elevated, but the interactivity is bound to the text itself.  The general plot involves a man who believes he has witnessed the death of his ex-wife and son, which mirrors the reader’s attempt to discern meaning from the various tangential areas of the text.  This brings to mind certain debates surrounding video games and whether or not they, or some of them anyway, can be considered art.  The interactivity of nearly every commercial game has not been in any way married to its plot, rendering claims of artistic merit ultimately meaningless because artistic worthiness in video games is generally reserved for its plot alone, not taking into account the various tediums of stomping goombas or gaining attribute advantages.  It is impossible to claim a game is art without considering its interactivity in equal measure with its story.  Afternoon quite ably blends the two creating an artistic experience unlike what has yet been achieved by the interactivity in modern video games.

Something that immediately struck me as daunting with “Afternoon” was the size and scope of the piece. My first trial run began with a browsing of the instructions and a headlong dive into a word maze that only grew lengthier and lengthier. Overtime I decided to focus on a few key words in every segment to see if I could find any correlations. The word and its variants I chose was “she.”

What I found were pages of developing love, deep love and lost love. I noticed that with many pages, similar words such as “she,” “her,” “woman,” waitress” or even specifc female names would still lead to the same page thereafter. Oftentimes I would stumble onto poems, two of which I jotted down for memory were “Pieces” by Robert Creeley and “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams. As one can guess from the titles alone, the first poem appeared after I followed a long train of lost love memories, and the second appeared while the author seemed in the admist of deep, abiding love.

Which, strangely enough, is why “Ivy Crown” struck me as so odd. It mocked romance and likened love to “business.” The poem is stated as follows:

Romance has no part in it

The business of love is

cruelty which,

by our wills

we transform

to live together

(There was additional formatting to this piece in the form of extra spaces, the visual result was cascanding text that skewed to the right. Unfortunately, I can’t mimic the formatting in the same fashion here.)

Overall, this poem still refers to the quinessential “happy ending” that love is often fictionalized to lead, but not without a great deal of bargaining. What I found in the author, or narrator, of this piece was a gravely, jaded outlook on love and life, and perhaps this poem was a foreshadowing of what was to come, or a hint that the author’s deep love was not as deep and abiding as originally thought. Love is blind.

After following a stream of lost love memories, the other poem I came across is as follows, titled “Pieces”:

or happening

is an event only

for the observer?

No one

there. Everyone

here.

Here is all there is

but there seems so

insistently across the way

(Similar formatting was also presented in this poem as was in the previous.)

This poem is far more abstract than its counterpart. The beginning itself seems to be a fragment that originally began with an internal thought. In addition, the line breaks seem to hint at a hesitancy of thought, or perhaps emotional breaks in between. Overall, this strange, disjointed poem can be likened to the loss and disconnection someone can feel after a close relationship is severed and gone – something that the author at many times seems to feel.

It should be noted that, as dedicated as my search was through the paths of “she” and all its counterparts, the information was rarely presented in a chronological fashion. Many times I would stumble on pieces where the author was reminiscing about lost love long before I would later uncover a piece about being in love. Truthfully, I found “Pieces” first, long before I realized another poem existed in the text. I find myself currently wondering if I could have found more, since the possibilities in “Afternoon” seemed endless. All this can be attributed to the medium itself, and its multilinear presentation so dependent on its reader’s choice, and what words strike a reader’s fancy.

Altogether, this was a fun exploration, despite the confusion it sometimes created. But as I have discovered in this class while exploring textual mediums, it is best to continue forgaging through the disjointed pieces, so eventually you can grasp the overall design of its kaleidoscope.

I find Afternoon a compelling text because it is like Hegirascope in that the reader makes choices as to how the story progresses, but there is a lot more variety to the choices and paths available.  It is also intriguing that there is a narrative (or several) that can be followed for multiple frames, whereas in Hegirascope the narrative is largely fragmented.  The same can be said of how characters are handled within this text, as there are definite characters with defined attitudes and personalities, some of which we can only learn about by choosing correct paths. 

This is somewhat closer to those interactive fictions like the Baron and Fate than Hegirascope, in that the choices are much more vast and they have to be done in a certain order for anything to truly happen.  What is also interesting is that there is a sense of urgency to the choices provided, also unlike Hegirascope where you basically just chose a phrase that interested you and hoped it brought you to something more or at least equally interesting.  In Afternoon, you are given a piece of narrative, and chances are you want to make the right decision to steer that narrative in the direction you want to see it unfold.

It was very interesting for me to see certain characters develop in ways that I did not expect.  At first when introduced to the characters Nausicaa, Lolly, Wert, and Peter I had assumed that Lolly was Nausicaa’s psychiatrist and that they had become friends, and that Wert was married to Nausicaa.  Now, either another character was introduced and I missed it, or Lolly is in fact a prostitute being used by the other three characters.  I’m not exactly sure, just as i’m not sure about the relationship between Peter and Nausicaa, though I think they’re dating.  There were also other characters, one named Andrew and another I forgot who were named and then I didn’t learn anything more about them because the story ended for me (and apologized for doing so, strangely enough.)

I wouldn’t consider Afternoon a joy to read through and navigate, yet it does possess an interesting quality of intrigue. As I began the first time, I chose not to click any words, instead, just pass through the backbone of the story by pressing return until I could no longer. This provided me a basic story which was presented in a more or less orderly and unchanging style.  Unsatisfied with the result, I went back and sought out interesting words I thought would lead to interesting subplots or just random information. Most of what I clicked on resulted in pages I found to be unrelated, at least in an explicit sense. Many of the other comments before mine talked about a lack of decent closure and I couldn’t disagree.

I think it’s interesting to note that the story seems somewhat chaotic based upon what the reader chooses to explore. In some ways I found it a metaphor for how it would feel to be in the main character’s shoes after such an accident. If you think about how you’d react to such an event, and the consequential confusion that would result, it could be understood this story attempts to replicate such an experience.

So I transferred into this class a little late and need to make up a few blogs to be able to get to the checkpoint for next time.  By my watch this should be my 4th post.  I know this is a little late and that we all have gone over this little piece (it was my first experience in this class) but I think it is worth it for me to revisit it to see how far we have progressed in class for the past few weeks.

I really enjoyed this piece and the many ways that it can be interpreted.  Obviously the infidelity of a partner while the other was fighting in a war. What strikes me as to be so important in this piece is the font size, case, and use of bold and italics.  “he was my neighbor” is obviously a whisper while “WHERE IT WAS?” is obviously a loud demand.  The dynamics of soft and loud, of war and of pretty dresses is, I think, very important to the reading of this piece.

The imagery too, I believe, is an important thing to keep in mind while reading and clicking away.  The very statement “After dinner they left us alone” brings up all kinds of imagery in the white print on the black background. Who is “they”? I imagine it to be parents of the girlfriend and boyfriend, like they met for a dinner to finalize wedding plans or engagement party plans or something of that matter.  I can picture these two sitting not really knowing what to say to each other due to the time and the seperation between them, and all the things that he has seen at war.  “DO YOU/LIKE/MY/NEW/DRESS?” conjurs up images for me of some kind of WWII era frilly frock worn for a soldier’s homecoming.  I feel like she still has it on from earlier in the day and is trying to change the subject from the earlier conversation on infidelity.

One can read into a lot of things in this text, the ability to click on any window in any order, and the ability to expand those windows to make them seem more important, but I think that the imagery should be an important consideration upon reading.

So it took me awhile to mull around what I was going to write as a response to Afternoon.  I really like the stream of conscious style of narration.  It seems to me that no matter where you click or what you type or if you answer yes or no you are still somewhere in the narrators brain thinking about a million things a minute.  That brings me to the timeline of the so-called story.  There is no definite setting or period you can place all of these characters in.  They are infinite beings running around telling about their lives, experiencing a few moments together and are in no way stagnant.  I don’t even know if you can refer to them as definite characters.  Sometimes they just seem to be ideas in whoever decides to narrate the story at any given times head. There is also some weird love triangle (square?) also in circulation of these characters which deepens the story-line (if there really is one. I feel like I may have just contradicted myself saying so.).

Getting into more technical terms of the story-line, if you simply click on words from the start until as I have found you get bored, you have a somewhat circular plot, not really resolving itself and mostly presenting you with information you have already come across.  If you utilize the input option and the y/n option you are able to yield more results and to learn more about the characters.  I feel that this whole story and what the reader gets out of it is completely due to the level of involvement put into it.  And really, isn’t that what makes interactive fiction great?  The ambiguity and the possible outcomes and what can be said of books can truly be said of it that no one reads the same thing and you can definitely never really read the same thing twice.  I feel like it’s a beautiful thing.

I can relate to some of the frustrations about afternoon, a story not having a clear story line.  Some pages of the so-called “story” don’t always relate to subsequent pages, and this caused me to feel a little bit stumped while I was reading.  I would say that afternoon doesn’t fufill our need or desire for closure, but I do think that this was Michael Joyce’s intention.  The work raises a lot of questions for the reader – something I think all enjoyable texts do.  It’s ironic, however, that although we desire closure, we are also intrigued by ambiguity and uncertainty.  As readers, we like to ask questions about the larger meanings behind a work.  What is the writer doing here?  How does he or she do it?   What is the significance of this particular character, object or scene?  How does this apply to the real world?   There’s something appealing about a text that leaves readers on the edges of their seats and gives them the feeling that they want more.  Just as afternoon doesn’t have a clear story line, our lives don’t follow a predetermined path.  Our life experiences are often scattered and disconnected and leave us feeling baffled, like afternoon does.  This is perhaps why the hypertext appeals to us and why we can identify with Peter’s character, who doesn’t seem so stable.

So one thing that intrigued me while I was perusing afternoon was the different references to tigers.  The character of Nausicaa mentions them when she reflects on a businessman she once met in India who “kept white tigers in a chrome steel cage surrounded by orchids.  Afternoons his servants would walk them through the gardens on long leashes.”  Nausicaa then recounts her dreams of the “white tigers in the cool garden.  [She] would think of them stretching their flanks, their paws like velvet across the cool stones of the garden paths, their tongues slowly lapping the curved surface of the gold radio.”  Another reference to tigers comes when Peter describes the humidity – “Four full days now it has crouched over us, the humidity like the exhalation of tigers, scratch of tough leather across the piss damp concrete.”  I thought the juxtaposition of hard and soft was interesting here.  By this I mean that when I usually think of tigers, I think of them as hard, aggressive animals.  The mention of the “chrome steel cage” also evokes the idea of hardness for me.  On the other hand, the mentions of “orchids,” “long leashes,” “dreams” and “velvet” evoke the idea of softness.  It’s an unlikely combination, and I’m not quite sure what the meaning  behind it is.  However, I think the releasing of the tigers from the cage and into the garden might be symbolic of Peter’s unraveling or unpacking of memories that might reveal that he did in fact witness his son’s death.

The path I ended up going down focused on two female characters from the story, Lolly and Nausicaa (sp?).  It seemed that no matter what I learned about or what stories I read, I ended up at the same page in the end. The page said something like: “It all comes back to that in the end, doesn’t it? Love or death. The lady or the tiger.”  I believe I came across this page no less than 5 times during my journey. I wasn’t annoyed by this fact, but rather a bit encouraged. It made me feel that I was exhausting certain branches and that this “choice” was central to my afternoon experience.

I didn’t learn much about the main character at all during my playing experience. He seemed more interested in providing the backstories for the 3 other characters I ran into, Lolly, Nausicaa, and Wert. I read a great deal about what all 3 had been through in their lives and I have to say the 2 women had a great more “color” to their stories. My 2nd time through was more pleasurable than my first attempt because I actually was able to follow a story in a sense. Each page flowed into the next and I was driven into a world where these characters existed and interacted. I can’t say I felt like I made progress (I never did quite reach a true “ending”), but I did feel that at least I got more of the story this time around.

My journey ended when I got to a blank page that did nothing no matter where I clicked. I was frustrated because I got no closure out of it, but in reading some other posts, I suppose I’m not the only one. I don’t know if that was totally the intention of the author, but it makes sense to me. After all, I learned about history and my story did not have much to do at all with present or future actions.

As I went through afternoon, a story, I tried to see if I could maybe piece together what I though might be different stories, or at least parts of the story. Going through this piece of hypertext, I was very much confused, as I have been with many of the other hypertexts we have looked at. With afternoon, I felt like each piece of information in each page I reviewed only added to my confusion. I never understood if one page would help me understand the next, or if it was a different story. I can presume that all of the pages of the story somehow connected and related to a larger story, however with the way hypertext works, receiving such small bits of jumbled information in different sections, it was very easy for me to get lost quick. Every time I would feel as if I understood that one small bit of information on the page and I would click to the next page, something completely different would present itself and I would once again get confused.

Somehow, I think the author intentionally created afternoon, a story as a hypertext, in this ambiguous form as to purposely confuse the reader. I have not quite figured out why because I am still trying to figure out the story, but I believe the actual confusion in trying to figure out the story in some way relates to the story being confusing itself. Perhaps with the story line or the characters themselves, I am not quite sure yet.

I am hesitant to call anything in “Afternoon” closure.  I feel that, as with real life, closure is ever-ellusive and almost impossible to find with only one vantage on a given subject.  As I went through Joyce’s work, I tried to piece together what happened, how, and a list of other events that all seemed hazy depending on the reading.  I tried to go through and map out different readings and see if there was any coherency–to see maybe if different stories were different bits of the same story that could be pieced together or different stories altogether. 

At times, it felt a lot like I was standing back in the shopping “Aisle” looking for Clare.  Except, this time, you aren’t in a little place where the people are within earshot and easy jar-launching range; imagine trying to find your maybe-dead lover in a collosal setting, where all you have to go on is scattered memories and an action, that may, in the end, be fruitless.  That’s what I felt like going through “Afternoon.”  I never knew if the story I got would be any more helpful than the last time, or if it would even make sense with the previous conclusions. 

I kept feeling like I was getting somewhere with it all–making some progress at figuring it out or at least making sense of little bits of it, and then something would come along, like Clare being alive and around the corner, that would cast my progress into rubbish.  It’s in that way that I don’t feel anybody can properly say that there is a good deal of closure to be found.  With the ambiguity of it all–the misleading paths and the broken narratives; the speakers and characters–it becomes to much to easily sit down, satisfied in having read a “story.”

Based on my experience with Afternoon and reflecting back to our maps, unlike the arborescent pattern of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Afternoon has a network structure.  In my opinion, this is where some cohesion and clarity are lost.  My first experience with Afternoon, I clicked words that interested me.  The second time, I used the return key.  The experiences were totally different; however, I read some of the same links using both methods.  This tells me that the paths are uni- or bidirectional.  The third time, I used the return key again but experienced a different sequence of pages.  Most, I had not seen before.  Now, I’m wondering if the program was purposely designed, like Hegirascope, to create a new narrative path with each experience.  

Regardless of how I navigate Afternoon, aspects of the text are confusing.  I have had difficulty identifying the changing narrator.  I also find it difficult to sort out the complex and entangled relationship(s) of Lolly, Nausicaa, Lisa, Peter, and Wert.  Also confusing is the fact that most of the pages are peppered with pronouns but contain few or no antecedents.  Who is “he” or “him?”  Who is “she” or “her?”  Who is “I?” I am also confused by incorrect grammar – wondering if it is deliberate and has meaning or if it is a mistake?  Ex.  The page “Lovers”: “…sometimes weeping for all the guilt her feels…”

The pages relating to Dataquest puzzle me as well.  For example, the page “Dream Pools”:  Dataquest is compared to sex that uses – as in prostitution.  Is this a figurative description of the workers and their relationship to the company, or is the speaker (Nausicaa?) really turning “tricks?”  Why is Dataquest important to the narrative? 

 I am intrigued by the name Werther.  Is Joyce’s choice of this name deliberate in relationship to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther?   Are the entries/pages of Afternoon supposed to be a collage of entries from the perspectives of all of the characters, a multi-faceted epistolary of sorts but not recognizable as letters?   Or is there even such a thing?  Reading Afternoon, I have more questions than answers. 

At this moment, I have a renewed appreciation for Tolstoy, and nothing seems more appealing to me than curling up in my favorite chair with Anna Karenina.

In his instuctions to “Afternoon,” Michael Joyce describes closure as a “suspect quality,” something that his text supposedly avoids. Not only is that claim false, there is nothing suspect about the concept or quality of closure in text.

All literature is fantasy. The point of literature is to present the reader with a reality that is different from the one he lives in. Even in Non-Fiction represents a different reality than most readers, and in being published after its events, it contains a different perspective than even the people who’s events it covers. At the same time, literature must connect to our lives in some fashion, or we won’t relate to it.

This is why closure is present in literature – because while true closure doesn’t happen in life, even our written works fall victim to an end. When a book ends in, “and then they lived happily ever-after,” that is our way of transforming reality through art. It is false in the sense that it is not an accurate representation of our reality, but that is precisely the point of art in the first place: it is false. But while the art may convey a sense of eternity, it ends. This is how literature connects back into our lives: it ends just as we do, and events that happen after its in must go on without its knowledge.

Furthermore, the idea that afternoon does not contain closure is false. As with any other work of art, it is finite. It dies. While it can be viewed forever, it eventually becomes a corpse – lifeless and without any new creation. That is the closure of “Afternoon”: finishing every single word of the text. Once it is read in this fashion, it becomes like every other piece of literature.