Tag: “Afternoon

Afternoon

One thing that pleased me about “Afternoon” was that it was not told from Wert’s point of view. He was quickly labeled (by me) as a character that is completely unsympathetic. It is almost as if your job as a narrator is to overlook these faults of his in order to learn more. His treatment of his wife and his disregard for the feelings and well-being of others in general made him an automatic negative presence within the story.

I admired the narrator’s personality. It made the story much easier to go through and understand. It also made Wert appear even sympathetic at times, although he mostly came off as selfish. I suppose it’s because that from personal experience I’ve learned that most people who act that way (chauvinistic, crude, or just plain jerks) do so from feelings of inadequacy or insecurity.  It also makes me wonder more about the narrator’s history with Wert- they must either have a strong attachment that allows the narrator to put up with him, or the narrator must have unending patience.

The plot in itself was pleasantly intriguing, much like the Baron’s “kidnapping” journey. Trying to figure out the story of the narrator’s ex-wife and son is just as interesting. I did have some difficulty navigating the story, though. The dialogue was hard to pick apart and I would have to think about who said what more often than I usually do when reading a conventional novel. I was a little disappointed at the conclusion. I like to have an idea at the end, like a neatly wrapped lesson. Again, to compare it to the Baron, all of those endings were satisfactory, and I understood the meanings behind them (the monster is within the father himself, he’s been scarring and torturing his daughter, etc.) Afternoon seems much more vague and requires more insight on the reader’s part- I’m not sure if I like that quality about it or not. Regardless, it was an interesting read.

Afternoon

Although Afternoon, A Story by Michael Joyce was hardly visually stimulating I did find it an interesting read. When I first went through the hypertext I started by clicking on random words to see where they would lead me to. In the beginning I did manage to hit a few words that led me to a successive number of coherent pages but this was quick to diminish. I gathered from this random clicking of words that there were several characters that were somehow intertwined. With this in mind I took a moment to take each page as it was and not be bothered with the story as a whole quite yet. I found the language of Afternoon very poetic and stimulating, the word choice spoke to me in a way that many of our previous hypertexts have not. I found the writing itself rather beautiful.

I eventually got sick of the randomness of my technique and began clicking “yes” after I finished reading each page. Here I began to get a clearer idea of the story unfolding. From my random word selection technique I gathered that there was a couple very unhappy, most specifically a man. His woman counterpart was stale in feelings about the status of their relationship. I gathered that she transfered herself between the relationship with this one man, and being the “whore” to another. As I began clicking the “yes” button the story further unfolded and I grew to understand that they perhaps had a kid together, Andy, and that somehow this family was intertwined with a car accident. As the father tries to get in touch with his child’s mother the story begins to loop around to the same several pages when the “yes” button is clicked. I than began to click upon words again and pages that previously made little sense to me began to become clearer with a basis to the story underway.

Although the story was confusing and I never really did get any sense of closure. I don’t think it would be true to the text if there was a sense of closure. I believe the whole thing was meant to leave the reader a little restless, sometimes that seems to resonate more than a happy ending.

Blog#4: Afternoon

The anticipation to actually view the story Afternoon, more than what we saw in class, had me with greater expectations in the beginning. After I opened up the file, I started flipping through the actual story. In terms of the style, I didn’t see many physical attributes that played up to Hegirascope’s entertainment value. I was relatively bored while reading and I actually think some color would have helped me to read the text. It seemed bland and it made me wonder if pictures or other aspects could have enhanced the story. Maybe Joyce’s intention was to have the reader rely solely on their imagination like a physical novel. In relation to the necessity to click, hit enter or select ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to continue, there are obviously less options, but there is more cohesiveness then Hegirascope. While there is some cohesion, because there are obvious connections to characters and themes, the story still displays much ambiguity across the paths of options. In Afternoon there is only one question that I noticed in the entire story and that was on the first page. The rest of the story heavily depended on the answer to “Do you want to hear about it?” If you click ‘yes’ it leads you on and eventually no matter how you chose to move forward, it always takes you to the same following page. The title bar for that page would say ‘yes 1,’ ‘yes 2,’ etc. no matter if you just hit enter or selected no. So, again, in relation to Hegirascope it gives you a significantly lower number of options, which allows it to be less confusing. If the reader selects ‘no’ for the first question then there is a more complicated stream of pages. Rather than majority of them being ‘no’ titles, there are other pages that contribute. For instance, on the third or fourth page, it says ‘yesterday 2.’ However, there still occurs the issue that you can’t really change the path once it’s started, because it will continue to the following page no matter what is pressed or clicked. Another aspect I noticed was the arbitrary text space next to the ‘Y’ and ‘N’ buttons. I tried to use them, but nothing really seemed to come out of it.

As far as the story context is concerned, I only tried to follow four or five pages to try and simplify a small part. I chose to not ‘hear about it’ or winter and then I just pushed enter to see where it would take me. I followed roughly the same techniques as before and found that when you go back to the previous page and hit enter again, sometimes it would take you to a different page. This was one way I found it to be like Hegirascope, but I think that was the only part in the story it did that. These five pages talk about seeing a son dying, someone driving a Japanese truck and running into beasts like raccoons, and also there was a random page with someone asking the narrator about sleeping with his ex-wife. The story itself seems like it carries the same type of characters and themes, but overall it is hard to tell where or if it ends.

“afternoon,” the concept of closure and Joyce’s notions of hypertext

It was not simply the lack of multimedia present in “afternoon,” as opposed to that in “Hegirascope” which I found somewhat irritating while reading “afternoon.” Yes, I found it bothersome that the screen was comprised largely of white space with some black text at the top and there was very little to aesthetically stimulate the reader. However, unlike in other hypertexts we have read, I found myself thinking more and more about “closure” and realizing that there were several fragments of “afternoon” which I found to be very eloquent, provocative, and led me to want to read into the particular fragment more. In general, this did not seem possible, as the reader chooses to focus on a specific word or link that leads to another fragment or simply press the return key, from whence the reader is thrown into the proverbial cold water of attempting to decipher a new text.

Relatively early on, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have some level of difficulty understanding the various voices, narrators, ‘he’s and ‘she’s, as well as the relationships between the characters. My attempts proved futile, even after exploring the text for extended periods of time, and even after returning to the text following a break from it. Nonetheless, I found much of the dialogue intriguing, as well as the narrator’s descriptions of places. [4 what I see] paints a picture of glinting glass where, ostensibly, a car accident occurred. I am left with the image of gurneys leading up to a place where bodies lay, and then, wanting to know more, I am inevitably swept away into other dimensions of “afternoon.”

While there were moments when I felt connections between story fragments, they were few and far between. Some of these threads lead to “endings,” but they are cliff-hanger endings, such as [I call], in which the narrator takes a pill and calls Lolly. One cannot enter the return key any longer. I can still navigate away from the page by clicking on the links button, but it does not alleviate the tension many of these fragments precipitated for me.

I’d rather not argue whether or not “closure” factors into “afternoon” so much as it simply provided an unsatisfactory reading experience for me in that I wanted to know more about several things and find a sense of resolve somewhere in the story. One of the speakers in [*me] asserts that “I’m not sure that I have a story,” which I found interesting. It led me to deeper questions about the text and what Joyce’s intentions in creating it were. In the interview provided in the instructions, Joyce mentions the “music of the word within our story spaces.” Given the interesting dynamics between the speakers and the diligent care evidently used in word choices, the concept of the “music” of the text certainly resonated with me. The music of the text in “afternoon,” I felt, was key to its value, at least in my interpretation of reading through it.

Additionally, Joyce refers to the transcendental nature of hypertext as opposed to traditional print text. Although I cannot say I had a “transcendental” experience while reading “afternoon,” I can understand why one might, perhaps, in that one explores a completely new set of pathways that don’t resemble the linear paths of print texts. It is a structural maze within which one can get lost in a way that may be satisfying for some.

Ultimately, after pondering the idea of “closure” as it pertains to “afternoon,” I heeded my convictions of considering its value as a musical, or lyrical, text. I lingered over well-chosen words and well-written phrases, points of interest and tension, intriguing dialogue, and so on. This greatly helped me to more deeply appreciate the text.

Learn How To Unlearn What You Have Learned

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.