MICHAEL JOYCEI try to recall winter. <As if it were yesterday?> she says, but I do not signify one way or another.
By five the sun sets and the afternoon melt freezes again across the blacktop into crsytal octopi and palms of ice--rivers and continents beset by fear, an we walk out to the car, the snow moaning beneath our boots and the oaks exploding in series along the fenceline on the horizon, the shrapnel settling like relics, the echoing thundering off far ice. This was the escape of the wood, these fragments say. And this darkness is air. <Poetry> she says, without emotion, one way or another.
Do you want to hear about it?
--Reading Michael Joyce's "Afternoon" to Explore Elements of Hypertextual Fiction.
--Using Storyspace to Construct Fairy-Tales.
--Michael Joyce's "Afternoon" (on computer network)
--StorySpace Documents (constructed by students)
A. Today students will be asked to perform two "readings" of Michael Joyce's "Afternoon," a work of hypertext fiction created in StorySpace (for my class, this lesson comes in the middle of a week that is devoted to creative writing, Beat prose and poetry, and short stories from the 1990's). Students should be instructed to open "Afternoon" and simply follow the instructions. It is important that students are allowed two readings of the text; because of Joyce's hypertextual format, each reading of the text will be radically different from the last. Each reading should last approximately fifteen to twenty minutes. Of course, closure will not be reached in either of these readings, and the teacher is left to unnaturally terminate students' readings. But it is the experience of reading, thinking and constructing meaning that is of concern to us here. Consider just a small portion of the map view from "Afternoon," and the multiple directions that individual lexias can lead readers.
Sample Map View for Joyce's "Afternoon"
B. Once students have spent some time working in "Afternoon," the class should spend some time processing the reading experience. How did students feel about reading a story written in hypertext? Can they talk about "Afternoon" as if they had all read the exact same story? Can they reconstruct the plot? Make generalizations about characters? How different is reading a hypertext story from reading a short story in an anthology (here teachers should be careful to avoid leading students into a print vs. technology binary). Teachers might choose to brainstorm some of these ideas on the blackboard. 20 minutes.
C. In the last half-hour of class, students should be given a very quick tutorial on constructing lexias and links in Storyspace (here teachers can "mode out" students' computers and illustrate the composing process on the main computer screen, or they might hook up their computer to an overhead projector). Students should then split into groups of two or three and begin writing their own documents in StorySpace. An easy way to get students started writing is to have them construct new versions of "traditional" fairy-tales. The goal here is to engage students in a new mode of writing in which they attempt to organize their thoughts and texts through associative links and multiple paths (this is not meant to be a completed assignment, but simply a chance for students to work in the new medium; teachers may, of course, choose to transform this assignment into a separate lesson). Here is a sample map view for the fairy-tale exercise, followed by individual lexias linked from the opening lexia.
Sample Map View for Fairy-Tale Exercise
This opening block of text contains three "hidden" links, and the direction a reader travels in my fairy-tale will be determined by which words he/she decides to click-on in this lexia. For example, clicking on "Leroy" lets readers learn more about the pig's life while clicking on "the pond" takes readers in another direction altogether.
There is a line in the new film Jerry Maguire that got me thinking about hypertexts while what I should have been thinking about was romance: "You complete me." Tom Cruise is speaking of the completion of a man by a woman who completely understands his heart and soul, someone who can predict what he'll order for dinner and can finish his sentences before the first few syllables are out of his mouth. What I'm talking about is the completion of a text by a reader. Of course, all readings are acts of completion (just as all readings are acts of interpretation). But with hypertext fictions like "Afternoon", readers are asked to assume larger roles in this process of "completion"; they are becoming responsible for constructing narrative, piecing together blocks of text, and producing their own sense of closure. In other words, hypertexts allow readers to asssume the role of author and rewrite the text in significant ways.
One of the greatest advantages of looking at a text like "Afternoon" is that helps move students outside the realm of New Criticism, where texts are seen as cohesive wholes that need to be "properly" interprted by some expert (who often turns out to be the teacher). Although New Criticism has lost considerable theoretical favor at the college level, many secondary school students (and teachers!) continue to operate within this framework, believing that all possible meanings and interpretations are contained within a literary work (and that students simply need to look hard enough to find those meanings!). "Afternoon" helps readers to explore their own constructions of meaning. In other words, Joyce's story shifts authority from the author and the text (as is) to the reader and the text (as constructed by that individual).
Michael Joyce writes: "A constructive hypertext should be a tool for inventing, discovering, viewing and testing multiple, alternative organizational structures as well as a tool for comparing these structures of thought with more traditional ones and transforming one into the other" (Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics 42-43, emphasis added). Earlier in the year, I spent a great deal of time trying to decide if "Afternoon" is an exploratory or constructive hypertext. I came to the conclusion that reading Joyce's "Afternoon" is a constructive experience for less-sophisticated readers because it asks them to think about their reading experiences at a more self-concious level. In other words, reading in hypertext forces readers to engage in metacognition, to think about their navigation through the text and test "multiple, alternative organizational structures." A student's traditional method of reading is challenged and transformed by the hypertextual experience, and the result is a more active engagement with the text and the student's own thought processes. This notion of "transformation" is essential to understanding this lesson. Part of the reason I have chosen to have students construct a fairy-tale in StorySpace (in addition to the fact that I saw it modeled quite well in Randy Bass' class) is that it asks students to take a traditional form and see what happens to it in a new medium (consider, for example, Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods). Do we have to begin with "Once upon a time..."? Do we have the luxury of ending with "And they lived happily ever after..."?
In a discusion of "Afternoon," Jay David Bolter states: "We move back and forth between reading the verbal text and reading the structure" ("Literature in the Electronic Writing Space"). I think the same can be said for writing in StorySpace: users move back and forth between constructing ideas and constructing structure (or, as Shirk would say, "a cognitive architecture") until, eventually, these two acts fuse into one. Hypertext forces us to look both AT and THROUGH writing, to combine the reading/writing experience with the "new experience of choosing the path" (Bolter). The linear, hierarchical print paradigm for reading/writing is therefore replaced with a multilinear, associative and electronic one. This last point becomes the basis for my final lesson.