Interviews of Michael Joyce

Interview 1:

Michael Joyce recently published Twilight: A Symphony (Eastgate Systems), a hypertext that is a lyrical, haunting, present-minded, and compassionate cascade of words, constantly moving and falling back in fresh, artful currents. This description, however, suits most of his writing. Simply put, Joyce is one the most imaginative artists of his time.

Joyce’s first hyper-novel, afternoon: a story (Eastgate Systems), was called "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions" (New York Times) and an "arresting, intricate, delicately contoured prose sculpture" (Washington Post). His widely reviewed first novel, The War Outside Ireland (1982) won the Great Lakes New Writers Award in fiction. Joyce’s innovative work in theory and criticism includes Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (University of Michigan Press). He is a professor of English at Vassar College.

Camille Renshaw: My favorite Giacometti quote is from James Lord’s little book. It reads, "The very measure of our creative drive is that we longingly dream of one day being free of it." Later he says, "If I could find someone else to do it exactly the same way I want, I could stop forever." Whenever I see an artist with an obsession, I assume he doesn’t see anyone else doing it exactly the way he wants it done. How would you describe your obsession with hypertext? What do you want to do with hypertext that nothing else can do?

Michael Joyce: What a lovely question, especially for someone who, like any obsessive, is of course obsessed most of all with obsession. And yet your last turn, from someone to something no one else can do inverts everything, doesn’t it? Hypertext does nothing that nothing else can do but does everything that few other things can do as well, that is, satisfy my longings for shifting form, for multiplicity, possibility, surface pleasures – language does this as well. Yet if your question is a feint, and you really mean to ask what is it that I think I do that others don’t seem to do in that fundamental way which becomes a recognition (I recognize the intensity of the Giacometti quote; I was just telling my students about first reading D. H. Lawrence and having that feeling: it is done, I need not do more or attempt to), I would have to say – and this is less hubris, I swear, than a humble recognition from what others say about reading my work – that I have a way of shaping the experience of the text so that it becomes like a maze of mirrors set at angles to each other, not a funhouse labyrinth exactly nor the mirror in mirror, but rather an angularity wherein the mirror mirrors the blue opening as well as the opposing surface so that surface and opening multiply and intertwine. That, and I have a certain elegiac tone, probably the result of an American-Irish upbringing, which is attracted by and honors what is mortal, that lingers on the mere coincidence of recurrence and looks for meaning there, if only the meaning of the interval (that time passes and we with it).

CR: How do you think the linear and nonlinear forms of hypertext work with or against this desire to find meaning in recurrence?

MJ: The meaning comes in passage, what I called the interval, the sense that each new occasion is a rehearsal for the last, in the double sense of the previous and the final. When I would leave after a visit home in the years after I went away to New York to work as a community organizer (meanwhile working slowly through various colleges over an eight year period), the oldest of eight kids equally distributed between both trump suits, we would all line up in the front hallway as I left, mother, father, and whatever kids were at home, as if in a receiving line at a wedding or a wake, exchanging embraces that merely anticipated the last. And so when the time came for truly last greetings we were ready for what we felt – not in the sense that we could in any way anticipate what death was like – but in the true sense of readiness, that is, able to feel. Hypertext, like any real literature, does this. It makes you ready and able for what you feel.

CR: What a beautiful way of expressing this. Every author must think through not only the story he wants to tell but also how the reader will interpret the literature presented. How is the hypertext writer’s dilemma both similar and different as he attempts to perceive and use the reader’s unconscious means of interpreting literature?

MJ: In some sense the so-called dilemma, which is of course otherwise called the joy of writing , i.e., that alternation between being the maker of a world and its constant and continual first inhabitant, is endlessly renewed in writing hyperfiction. I wrote an essay for the literary journal Modern Fiction Studies (Issue 43:3) where I suggest that the fundamental nature of hypertext is rereading but doing so in the way a writer does where our choices change the nature of what we read. "Hypertext is a representation of the text which escapes and surprises by turns," I wrote. Given the pure unaccountability (it is literally impossible to read all the possible variations of a richly linked hypertext) a hyperfiction writer is always attuned to "how the reader will interpret the literature presented" since its presentation shifts and flows in its composition as well.

http://www.pifmagazine.com/vol32/i_m_joyce.shtml

Date when I used this page: 28/11/2008

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