Tag: Michael Joyce

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.

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.