Sad Artist Outlives Usefulness
By Claire Becker
Staff Writer

Michael Joyce, whose electronic text Afternoon, a story has been called "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions," spoke Saturday morning at Rose Hills Theatre as part of See Here: A Colloquium on Attention and the Arts. Joyce teaches at Vassar College; he received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1974.

Joyce spoke in a smooth, storyteller's voice, and wore a gray and tan silk suit that looked a bit too large. As he uttered what would become the refrain of the speech, "I walk mornings," a glint of longing appeared in his small, serious eyes, as if he wished to be outside walking this morning, rather than speaking about it. He scratched his neatly trimmed beard and launched into an hour-long explanation of what he meant by "I" and "walk."

This explanation took the form of the story of Joyce's year-long sabbatical, which he spent walking in rural Italy and Berlin. This year was a retreat from all electronic matters and a time for him to question his own aspirations and to reflect on his past. Included in this past is a serious involvement in the hypertext medium, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders." Joyce co-wrote the program Storyspace, a tool for writers and readers of hypertext fiction. He has published several hypertext fictions as well as conventional novels and short stories.

Reflecting on his past, walking in circles, with little thought of a destination, Joyce "had to concentrate on where I was…both physically and psychologically." It was precisely this sojourn, that Joyce felt he needed. In San Castanzo, he walked daily to the sea and back; in Berlin, he traversed what was not a walking city. He "walked out of words and into the margin…" He defined the walk as "an art without forms, with motives highly suspect, attuned to the not-new." This definition of a walk stands in direct contrast to hypertext fiction, which had a revolutionary form and a desire to break out of the linear model of reading, and which was deliberately attuned to the new.

With regard to the "I" who walked, Joyce felt it was an other. "The invited 'I,'" he said, "...walks next to me and behind me, but no longer in front of me." Estranged from his art, Joyce was in a way removed from himself. But through these walks, a new Joyce could perhaps emerge. His long-held theory on attention: "A sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings." One such successive attending takes shape in the morning walk.

"We're sometimes infected by what we know…a while back I promised you a story and perhaps you think you've heard one," Joyce warned. But his talk was warm and well formed. He told a story, as no one else at the colloquium did. The comfort that accompanied his story, though, was diminished by its conventionality. Joyce's talk stood in stark contrast with those of the other speakers. Joyce, a pioneer of new media, told the story of his withdrawal from it. Other speakers, Lev Manovich in particular, embraced new media. While Manovich clicked frantically on the touchpad of his PowerBook, displaying multiple windows and running multiple applications, Joyce spoke calmly from the left of the stage. The great, blank screen stood idle at centerstage.

I wondered why Joyce had become disenchanted with new media. He said electronic literature had become more and more involved with gimmick and glamour, but did none of this glamour interest him? Even if hypertext was dying, the web was still a hub of possibility for so many artists.
I spoke with a student at Vassar, one Jared Maliga '03, who had taken Joyce's course on hypertext. The student said the sadness I sensed in Joyce's talk had also been present in his classroom. "He was an intellectual who assumed that the Internet would remain an intellectual affair," Maliga told me.

Joyce worked on early versions of Afternoon, a story, in the '80s, before anyone knew what the Internet would become. Now, according to Maliga, "No one wants to sift through pages and pages of text, even if they are arranged in a philosophically interesting way. They want images and video; they want to be entertained. People use the Internet to get what they want quickly. I think that he underestimated how much that would define its usage."

Joyce's walks didn't seem to change him much. He has yet to merge the two "I"s. "After months of walking," he said, "I remained half-lost." Pulling up his website, I read "Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence." This message is accompanied by a link to Eastgate Systems, the publisher of Storyspace, and a photograph of a big pile of rocks.