Jan-Hendrik Bakker in conversation with Michael Joyce

Jan-Hendrik Bakker: How did you work on afternoon? Did you have a complete story in advance, which you later cut up in pieces, the procedure, more of less, followed by Julio Cortazar in Rayuela? I guess this was not the way you wrote afternoon, because of the enormous amount of sublines. If you compare the work you did for The War Outside Ireland with that of afternoon, what were the main differences?

Michael Joyce: I wrote afternoon entirely within the system of Storyspace, with very little on paper (a few notes of the Boolean logic for 'guard fields'). The process was thus also quite different from Cortazar's (or, as recent criticism suggest, his girlfriend's work) in Rayuela. Afternoon was in fact much more similar to The War Outside Ireland in that its connections were discovered in the unfoldings, unfolding which exposed no 'center', but rather only other unfoldings, a surface of possibilities and events. I have a vivid sense of having to imagine the readership of this work, and how to explain the process of reading in terms of its compositional process. If you are looking for predecessor texts, you should look elsewhere, really, to the intricate unfoldings of Gertude Stein's prose or the projective verse and field composition of the American poet, Charles Olson. The method for me was most similar to that of painting or making a large drawing, where the composition is found in the whole but through the exploration of successive surfaces. Jazz is also a good comparison (it is the one Umberto Eco makes in characterizing my work as "the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story".)

Hypertext and the human factor: Narrativity after Modernism

The scroll and its successor, the codex, force their users to read their content linearly: the order of contents is fixed and precludes successive, contextual readings of individual passages. Hypertext documents are far more flexible. They can be read in a variety of orders, allowing users of widely divergent backgrounds to choose their own paths. Although various writers (notably Julio Cortazar in his novel, Hopscotch) have tried to apply this flexibility to the conventional text format, their success has been limited by the constraints of the medium.

Wanda Williscroft: Hypertext, Argument, and Relativism

The narrative techniques used by Julio Cortazar, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Federman, Italo Calvino, etc., which for many readers were mere tricks and annoying distractions, now elicit totally different responses because of their adaptation to the electronic environment. Whereas jumping from page to page when reading Hopscotch might have been annoying, it is much more enjoyable to explore the possibilities of hyperfiction interfaces. The aspect of mastering a computer environment is an essential part of the hyperfiction reading experience, an aspect common with playing computer games.

Threads: Hypefiction aesthetics

 

In its tendency toward self-referentiality and self-ironicization, hypertext participates in the stylistic, linguistic, and formal games played out in what is variously categorized as the literature of chaos, meta-fiction, or postmodernity: Julio Cortazar's and Ana Castillo's chapter orderings in Hopscotch and The Mixquiahuala Letters, respectively; Donald Barthelme's interruption of Snow White with a questionnaire for reader-response; the novelistic fragments in Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler; the problem of closure in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, and others; linguistic hybridity and fragmentation in Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; the self-referentiality and attention to the mechanical process of narrative transmission in Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II; and the often-cited meta-criticism of Borges's fiction. Because hypertext emerges out of postmodern fiction and uses a similar set of symbols, it is unlikely that its allegorizing structure and systems of reference would be materially different. It is not simply that hypertext is inherently about itself in a postmodern or metafictional mode, however, but that it has constituted itself around the problem of its difference; self-referentiality is not just another or exchangeable move in the game, but a necessary move.

Rita Raley: "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance," Postmoden Culture 12 (2001).

 

It is informative to consider how Hopscotch might differ if it was implemented as an electronic text. On a computer, each chapter would be a node, linked to the following chapter. At the beginning of the novel, the reader would choose between the two paths; subsequently, each reading would appear linear. No further choices would be required; no indication of the intertwining of chapters would be apparent. There would be no anchors, no internal links. In short, there would be little indication that Hopscotch was a hypertext at all.

The novel, then, must be a paper hypertext. Much of its structural power is derived from the tension between Cortázar's devices and our expectations of a novel. The actual experience of reading this book depends on having to physically search through the pages for the next chapter in sequence. Along the way, one flips through text one has never seen, text to be read later, text that perhaps will never be reached. On a computer, this process is rendered instantaneous, and is hence insignificant.

The Electronic Labyrinth: Hopscotch as a Hyperbook

The theme of the danger of immersion has not awaited the advent of the electronic age to be thematized in Western literature. Its most celebrated victim is probably Don Quixote. As Cervantes writes: "In short, he so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason". More recently, in Julio Cortázar's short story "Continuity of Parks," a reader immersed in a thriller becomes the victim of the narrated murder, thus paying with his life the disappearance of the boundary between fiction and reality.

Marie-Laure Ryan: "Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory" SubStance 28.2 (1999) 110-137.

Julio Cortázar (1914-84)

Julio Cortázar :
"I just want to explode when forced to read a book from beginning to end like a good child. This business of one word following another needs to be completely reconsidered. The most important thing is to involve the reader as an active participant, an accomplice even. ." (Hopscotch)

Interview with Julio Cortazar By Evelyn Picon Garfield

- Center for Book Culture

Bo Helgesson: "Julio Cortázar: Den lekande häxmästaren"