Interviews of Michael Joyce
Interview 2
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Liam’s Going 5 |
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Reading Michael Joyce's
biography, it seems that he lives and has lived many lives. One could
encounter his work a number of ways: as a student, a collaborator, a fiction
reader, an interested party in online and/or hypertext fiction, or an
interested party in technology and how it affects peoples' lives. I
encountered his work via the online route; firstly writing a basic
post-graduate essay about hyperfiction - fiction that uses and relies on
hyperlinks within its structure - including his afternoon: a story,
commonly accepted as the "granddaddy of hyperfiction". My essay
then developed into a wider interest and dissertation about how
"readers" navigate hypertext fiction, and how theorists such as
Joyce view these readings. So it was with much interest that I tackled
another starting point to Joyce's work - the reading of a print fiction; a
"traditional" novel, at least in the sense of it being a
paper-based portable object. Liam's Going is a book with a seemingly
simple story - a story of a mother driving her son to college - the first
time he will live away; the boy's father at home; and the relationships
between all three being happy and loving. But the story has undercurrents, as
the main characters - particularly the parents, Cathleen and Noah - examine
events in their pasts, which shape and colour their lives and existence, and
their relationships with each other. Liam, on the other hand, is keen to
enter his future; to move away and start his adult life. I mostly read Liam's Going whilst
travelling by train to work, dipping in and out of the storylines, and
sometimes re-reading from before where I'd left off previously. This seemed
appropriate, as the repetition and rewriting and recreating in the book is
also a strength - the movement of and between people and places. The stories
created by and linking Cathleen and Noah often reappear in different guises -
the same event viewed by a different person, or viewed from a different place
and time. This linking of times and places (and people) is important in the
book, and works well - the undercurrents or events and thoughts surface and
submerge with equal clarity. The setting - the Hudson River Valley -
informs and tells the different moods and scenes contained in the book. Noah's
encounters with an elderly client of his law practice are steeped in the
river's myths and eddies, and these in turn help to describe his memories. So
too, Cathleen's reliving of a long-gone love affair almost becomes part of
the landscape she drives Liam through. In a potent passage, Joyce describes
how Cathleen and Noah attempt to create a pond in their lawn, eventually
surrendering to the inevitability of its reclamation by the land itself:
"A place has a self". That the people have a sense of self that is
reflected in the land(scape) flows throughout the book, and is one of its
most effective notions. It is easy to move into poetical language when
talking about Liam's Going, especially when describing the physicality
of place; the river(s) of the stories. Joyce is a great wordsmith, and there
are many breathtaking moments of prose contained in the book. I wondered
sometimes, however, who was speaking - the author or his character?
Occasionally I suspected the former; the thoughts and ideas sometimes seem
too academic, too poetical, too deep even, for the people described.
Occasionally also, the language becomes too much, too flowery; the wordplay -
delightfully wrought though it is - overpowers the storyline. That said, there are also moments in the book
of great emotion and clarity - for example when Cathleen recollects her first
meeting with her lover Paul. These are more real, and I was at times greatly
moved by descriptions of events. Liam's Going is a very human book
about very human people - their relationships, their sense(s) of self; the
way they weave in and out of each others lives; their lives and the many ways
these can be told. This is not surprising in a book by a writer of and about
hypertextual work. The author's use of hypertext - like the retelling of
events and people mentioned earlier - is very much evident, and its use in
the novel is appropriate and well crafted, making for a multi-layered and
complex narrative. As I finished the book, I became aware that
the stories do not end, but move on, like the Hudson. Each character is
undergoing their own rite of passage, informed and fed by events in their
past and present; but also their future. I was glad of this non-ending, not
just in relation to my hyperfictional interests, but because it underlines
the humanity and complexity of the book. There is much to be enjoyed in Liam's
Going, and any criticisms about style are small in a work of great
beauty. Email interview between Mary Cavill and
Michael Joyce, conducted over a period of two weeks in late October 2002. Cavill: Reading your
work, there seem to be many threads running through it, and the idea of
threads as a(n) emphasised background(s) to events. I'm thinking about the
idea of linking; brought about by technology but also between people, time
and places - the threads that we as people create through our lives. I
wondered if this is something you're aware of, or have consciously described?
Do the patterns created by and between the characters in your fictional work
interest you? I suspect these hydraulic images are on my
mind partly because Liam's Going is a riverine novel and at least in
part contemporaneous with a hypertext work of mine, Twelve Blue, whose
compositional method literally involved threads which I very
"consciously described" at some length in an essay called
"Forms of Future" in Othermindedness: The title screen contains a drawing of twelve
colored threads running horizontally across a field of blue. The drawing came
first, its threads creating a kind of score in the sense of John Cage, a
continuity of the various parallel narratives. When the threads veer nearer
to each other – or in at least one instance cross – so do their narratives. The twelve lines became months but also characters or pairings of them as well (that is,
sometimes a character has her own line and another line she shares with someone
paired to her, although not necessarily within the narrative threads). The
twelve threads do not start with January at the top but rather November, the
year of my year. I then made eight different cuts across the Y axis, though
in my mind they were more fabric strips or something like William Burrough's
compositional cuts. These cuts are mapped on the opening screen ... creating
asuccession of thematic sections. Within these eight longitudinal strips the
various stories take place and intermingle. Obviously however since narrative
goes forward horizontally and time here is represented vertically, there is
something of a displacement in which events along a single thread in fact
violate the larger time of the characters sensibilities. Thus the drowning deaf
boy of the story floats across various threads through different seasons
until his body surfaces at the end. This was for me a very formal exercise, an
attempt to come to terms with what seemed the constraints of the web but also
a quasi-Oulipian generative scheme. Twelve Blue is something of
the gothic counterpart, the dark imagining, to the brighter prospect of
Liam's Going, with which it shares other thematic concerns. We live by
the river, the Hudson, and that of course brings one to mind of what you
call "the idea of linking; brought about by technology but also
between people, time and places." It is not an exaggeration to say
that the Hudson served as the first network in America, and its technologies,
which besides the steamboat included the paintings of the Hudson River
School, the literatures of the mountains and valleys, and so on, remain
imprinted upon our understanding of the river as an imaginary screen for our
consciousness. Surely it seems as much to Cathleen in my novel, who at
one point thinks "O the world was a series of stories ... a gap in the
wall, windows in windows, everything linked, the whole world strung with
unnoticed silk." Cavill: What you say
about the Hudson is very interesting. It does seem a strong motif in Liam's
Going; as I read, I felt that the story(ies) didn't end (which I was glad
of), they ebb and flow along with the water. Could you say more about your
ideas about a/the sense of place? Cavill: My connections
here: Cathleen's notion about a place having a "self" [the passage
about the created pond not surviving because of this struck me very
strongly]; the idea of the space between places and people – I'm thinking about you describing the
"uncertain and increasingly virtual path
between the classroom and the library" but also its usefulness. This is
perhaps related to physical and/or virtual presence, which you talk about in Othermindedness
also… Joyce: This is a lovely
proposition for me, a connection I hadn't made so directly. Yes, of course,
what's missing in the virtual, at least as it has been present(ed) to us thus
far, is its selfhood. You know, oddly enough, in a very early essay in Of
Two Minds I wrote a meditation about VR and perspectives, how we
create spaces for and of each other, from and through each other's
perspectives: The interdeterminability of points of
perception argues against a virtual reality which depends upon successive
disclosures of self-generating spaces ... A woman walks toward me and passes,
for all I know wordlessly, yet I believe that she too creates the space she
walks through and that it is somehow different from mine. (That is,
there is no point from which to see, even in 3-space, each new point in its
own perspectives.) This, in turn (ah the endless trace, the link)
puts me in mind of Giorgio Agamben's important claim in The Coming
Community that: To appropriate the historic transformations of
human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link
together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and
to thus forge the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance–this is the good humanity must learn to wrest from commodities in their decline. That link of "image and body in a space
where they can no longer be separated" can only be dynamic, can only be
com-memoration, remembering together. For Gabriel Marcel it is the only act
we have, the measure of our humanity, the denial of death. It is what a
family does with its love, what story means to do, what place does as it
comes to have a self, as it becomes. Your question also brought to mind Jay
Bolter's and my original Storyspace interface which called its
containers "spaces" and the contained spaces (the boxes within
boxes) "places". It was language that from a user interface
perspective was unworkable but was, I think, the thinking which propelled us
into developing a "writing system" that deconstructed its own
systemization, whose hierarchies were blurred and permeated by the flow between
space and place. Pure space becomes place by proximity, particularity,
presence. The Hudson around here where we live is not its most
spectacular; just South of here the highlands which draw in and transform
Cathleen and Liam as they travel over Storm King (the latter phrase, by the
way, was the novel's working title) begin. Further south the river widens
into bays and then the palisades before the city. North are the mountain and
valley vistas of the Hudson River School landscape, thinning to a bright
thread in the Adirondack headlands. We are at the middle, soft hills, placid
and deep water (only just now, in November as I write, coming back to us as
the docks of the marina are removed). I think we are fortunate in this. The
day-to-dayness of this space make us more attentive over time, of time. It is
increasingly commonplace knowledge that the Indians called this the
"river that flows both ways" because as an estuary its current is
tidally determined. Here that flow is slow surface, like flesh. You come to
know a space like this as a self, as you come (however awkwardly and
uncertainly) to know yourself. This, too – or especially, informs the journeys of Liam's
Going. Cavill: I'm led to
thinking about the physicalness of the act of writing – quite a leap perhaps! – but are there connections? In a basic way, are your sensual surroundings – geography, technology, sound perhaps also – essential to
the writing process? I'm wondering also about the differences in
the writing process according to the intended 'product' – electronic, print, spoken? (I'm thinking here about the affirmation of
hypertextuality in Liam's Going you mentioned) Joyce: I suppose by the
question about intended product you mean an awareness of the book's insistent
physicality versus the diffuse physicality of the screen (I promise not, this
time at least, to quote myself again but I do have a sort of meditative chant
about book and screen, the recto-verso essay in Of Two Minds). I'm not
sure whether those difference are as much in mind as are the differences
between the elastic surface of the word processor screen – even one in a Storyspace
window – and the immanence and ghosted past of the book's page to page progress. You may mean another matter entirely, or at
least I will respond to another. For years my students have heard me say as a
kind of koan, "writing is a physical act", by which I mean not only
the tactility and visuality of the page or screen, but the breath and
heft, the proprioceptive quality that the poet Charles Olson (whose poetic,
projective verse was breath) summoned long before VR began to measure
experience so, how the body knows within itself. Even with afternoon I
saw the text as physical, erotic, the touch that gives way in the "words
that yield", a sense of the link as a drawing apart of fabric, a seeing
through layers. For his interactive cinema work, Sonata, Grahame
Weinbren devised a lovely a touch screen interface which involves
exactly this drawing apart. Grahame may as much have meant to evoke the
curtains which used to whisper open before a film rather than the mutuality
of the lover's unveiling that I had in mind. All that said, I do know you also meant to ask
a simple question about work habits: CD on? light from the west or south?
boxers or briefs? and so on. I used to worry over these things when I was
younger, needed a surround, space beyond and behind me, and so on. That's all
gone. Twelve Blue I wrote in the garden by the river, Powerbook on my
lap; Liam's mostly at the desk in my coffin sized study (but also in
hotel rooms here and there while away doing gigs). One thing I can say
is that I cannot work with music on, this may be because language is so
musical for me, or perhaps it is simply a generational marker (my kids and
most of my students cannot by and large work without music).
Joyce: The musicality
of words can't, I think, be divorced from the physicality of writing, which
of course was the context in which I addressed it in my last response.
I believe we carry language in breath and in depth and in our own sense of
our movement in space. I hear words in movement, when I'm walking or my
fingers are typing or writing with a pen, other movements as well. Otherwise
I think I am largely dumb, in every sense of that word. Language comes at the
instant of some motion toward and in myself. I think some of that has been
lost, however temporarily, in current electronic arts. Not just the pure
musicality, the surface poetry, but the sense of language as embodied action. Cavill: I need to dive
in here and ask an obvious – and I hope
pertinent rather than impertinent – question: I wonder if you'd be willing to talk about why you've moved "back" to print writing?
I'm thinking particularly about the way your work is so hypertextual in its
musical form; although I know the question is wider than that. I like that image, futures as a sort of Macy's
Parade of amiable machines. Tinguely contraptions but soft as clouds, moving
across oceans, white sands, to Potsdamer Platz, Temple Bar, the
Renaissance Center, West Edmonton Mall, the Zocalo in Mexico City, downtown
Tenochtitlan. No from and to, only the to and fro, the swirl and flow, of
clouds. Cavill: Despite my
hesitation to use the word "back", I'm now going to use the
"forward", to ask about your time as Professor of English and the
Library, which you talk about so beautifully in Othermindedness. I
was particularly struck by your description of the institution and library
being founded on a "tradition of change". Did/has this role
alter/ed your perception(s) of a sense of time, of archiving, of the
collected and collectable, in the "electronic age"? Joyce: Very much so. At
Vassar we have a large space in the library, not a lab or a classroom, open
to the stacks and reading tables and overlooking our main reading room, which
I had the honor of naming the Media Cloisters. In our online descriptions and
program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked
interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians
engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and
study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further
and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research,
learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library
and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus
spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectable
object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness
in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the
errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what
constitutes the collectable object is the value which suffuses our choices.
It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such
"changing change". I think it still seems so to me now but I do
fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in
representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary
mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable. It is interesting, I think, that recounting
and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with
(self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and
traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted
line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence
"There is no simple way to say this." The same is true of any
attempt to describe the way in which the collectable object participates in
(I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved
in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making
quotidian" above) the library as living archive. Derrida begins his meditation on Freud,
Archive Fever, by reminding us of the etymology of archive: "Arkhe,"
he says, "names at once the commencement and the commandment."
What begins, as well as what we are called upon to do by men and gods, he
says is an act of consignation, by which "we do not only mean the
ordinary sense of the word – to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit) in a
place – but here also
the act of con-signing through gathering together
signs". Any archive begins and commands a gathering
together of signs, around signs, in signs. One of the
glories of new media has been their ability to gather and capture such signs,
heartfelt glimpses of commencement and commandment, which is to say of
beginning again and holding ourselves to the memory of what matters. The
multiplicity of everyday events and voices, whether in hyperfiction or the
archive, gives lie to the grand and corrosive deception of the bumper sticker
propaganda we are assailed with by warmongering and fear-filled politicians
who wrest day-to-day human tragedy to serve a simplistic and jingoistic
claims that united we stand. Our archives like our fictions and other arts
assure us of what we know and value in our day - to - day lives, how we stand
strongest in our multiplicities and in our differences, in the gathering
together of the fragments and gestures which are signs of our unique being and
our intention to live together and sustain each other in community. Cavill: I see the
quotations – self and other – also as threads through your work, reference points and
anchors, like the physicality of the river(s). Going back, was there anyone/thing
that originally inspired you to write? And now – could you say who are your influences and
inspiration? (I say "thing" as well as
"one", thinking about the influence of and relationship with
technology, which you write about particularly in Moral Tales and
Meditations.) In other settings I've also said that I
discovered the power of family stories both literally and figuratively
lingering under the table in the kitchen among the aunts and listening to how
they held the world together with stories and laughter and whispered
complaints my young ears couldn't pick out from the din. It was both an
idyllic and a chaotic time of the kind the Pogues sing about in their raucous
elegy "Body of an American". The men were elsewhere, drinking
whiskey and beer and telling their own stories. The other kids were still
farther away, heading toward twilight, shouting in the streets, filching
discount soda pop from the spanking new garbage cans which served as ice
filled summer coolers. I was mesmerized by the women's stories, and
especially how they told them again and again and again. My influences when I came to write were largely
figures from Paris in the 20s and before, which I think now I must have
considered a grand literary and artistic family, ranging from Pound to Joyce
to Stein especially. Stein has proved a sustaining influence with her
layering voices, her origami prose style, her insistence on the beauties of
ordinary language and life. The next major set of influences were French
new wave filmmakers and writers, Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Robbe-Grillet,
Duras and the poetics of Charles Olson. These days I am sustained by
Cixous' constant attention to language and life, I revisit Calvino for the
clarity of his multiple fictional and philosophical visions, I find Giorgio
Agamben a prophet, I listen to Thomas Merton. There is one other major influence, another
wave in the rhythm of family, Paris, Black Mountain in my life, and that is
the classroom. Teaching for me provides the necessary action within the world
that provides the context and occasion for how to think. Teaching and
learning for me involve a profound conversation wherein the mind is formed by
and in community. I spent much of last year away on leave as something
of a pilgrim, walking hours on end through an Italian countryside and a
German city in successive seasons. During that time I was most often a silent
witness to conversations which I by and large understood but, beyond the
basics of day - to - day existence, could not generate in return. As a
writer, theorist, and teacher sometimes almost too glibly able to express
myself and invite and instigate others to do so, I felt privileged to have
this lesson in knowing silence and what it says about learning and the
stories that form us alike. Lastly and ever there is Carolyn Guyer, who is
less an influence than the measure of my being, the wind through the trees as
Pound's last Canto has it. Her early hypertext work was important to me and
to many others in the way it led us to see the artfulness of daily life and
the possibilities of attentive presence. The way she has turned her vision to
building communities among disparate others humbles and energizes my life and
art alike. Cavill: My last question
is related to the previous one in some ways; perhaps all previous questions.
I'd like to ask a kind of "what next for you" question: can you say
something about what are you working on now, which tides and eddies you are
currently following? Joyce: I wish I could
say, quite literally wish that. In fact I spend a good deal of time in such
wishing (recall that afternoon has an often-quoted one line screen
which begins, "I want to say ..." where for me wanting is always a
double of desire and lack). At the moment I am in something of a process of
discernment, a difficult thing for someone used to making a racket or at
least finding himself in the midst of buffeting potentialities. It happens
that you ask me this question literally on the eve of my birthday, a time
when, years ago and for years on end, I used to consider my life as if the
eve itself were a set of auspices, a word which has its roots in how the
auspex, the Roman augur, would study birds, whether the patterns in flight or
the patterns in an array of bones. I'd rather flight than bones just now but
it is probably not my lot to choose. |
Michael
Joyce Is Associate Professor of English and
Director of the Center for Electronic Learning and Teaching at Vassar College
in
Poughkeepsie, NY. He lives in New Hamburg, New York.
Mary Cavill is an information professional managing a
government intranet site in London, UK. She has a special interest in the 'reading'
of hypertext and
hyperfiction, and has been involved with trAce since 2001, including the
creation of the Incubation 2000 conference archive.
© http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33
Date
when I used this page 28/11/2008.
[1] , [2]
[Index
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Paper] [Reach] [Biography] [Bibliography] [Opinion] [Interviews] [Conclusion]
