Critical Essay on Michael Joyce's "Twilight, A Symphony," by Mariusz Pisarski
"Twilight, A Symphony: The Great Lost Work of Michael Joyce"
by Mariusz Pisarski
Michael Joyce’s Twilight, A Symphony was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1996 on CD-ROM for Macintosh computers. Although Windows edition was announced on release, no subsequent editions exist. The program takes 3.1MB of space on hard drive, which allows for over 40 illustrations (photos, hand-drawn graphics) and several audio clips to be included in the work. A short video titled “apres” and a special font folder accompany the main installation file on the CD-ROM.
Navigation & Structure
Upon launching Twilight, A Symphony readers find the Hypertext Status window with the information that the work contains 389 lexias and 1337 links. The title screen, which appears after the work loads, introduces readers to a red and blue illustration with the title, copyright information, and the dedication to Milorad and Jasmina Pavic with a fragment of Pavic’s letter describing their situation during winter 1992 in Sarajevo. The quoted fragments start with: “In this moment here we live hardly, without bread and heating, so please, pray for us”. Joyce’s dedication follows under the quote: “To Milorad and Jasmina Pavic, if only winter hope and our books could save us from our shame. In memory of the ghosts and survivors of Bosnian seasons everywhere on earth."
Important changes can be observed in Storyspace navigation, layout, and presentation of the work’s structure when comparing Twilight, A Symphony to Michael Joyce’s first hypertext, afternoon, a story. The Storyspace Map View window is offered alongside text windows, which allows for alternative, spatial mode of navigation and exploration. Currently read lexias are represented as rectangles connected to other rectangles on multiple layers of the map. Storyspace Outline View is also available, which allows for hierarchical navigation of files and folder of the story. A horizontal toolbar, with text input field and yes/no buttons, which in afternoon, story let readers respond to questions raised in the text (“do you want to hear about it?”), is replaced with a smaller, vertical sidebar. A graphical window allows for horizontal and vertical Traversals of the story structure. Question mark button opens up the expanded Storyspace RoadMap panel, which presents users with two columns that display inbound and outbound connections form the current segment. A snip of text from the current space is visible in the middle of the panel. The Storyspace Reading History window is embedded in the upper part of the panel. To navigate sequentially along a predetermined path, readers must click the double-sided arrow button on the toolbar. Shift clicking the toolbar takes readers back to the previous lexia. The return key navigation, a functionality common to the early Storyspace hypertexts and famously labelled by Joyce as “the wave of returns,” is not present in the version of Storyspace Reader that shipped with Twilight, A Symphony. Somewhat paradoxically, the work that directly refers in its title to musical structures and makes repetitions and refrains its main rhetoric devices does not employ the trademark “return” feature of its software. However, the loss of “wave of returns” is compensated by a wider range of non-sequential access to the text and by Storyspace 1.5 multimedia features: illustrations, photos, sound clips and videos are employed throughout. A whole range of typographic tropes reminiscent of concrete poetry, used by Joyce already in afternoon, a story, is enhanced by the addition of color. Dominant are blues and reds featured in Twilight, A Symphony's file icon, on the title page, and throughout the text.
Significant change in the hypertext mechanics is introduced by the random link function of Storyspace 1.5. Via a simple random command /?(n)/ authors were able to determine the range and frequency of random connections form a given lexia. The introductory segment, “Our story so far” for example, leads to 11 random destinations, of which two are more likely to be followed than the remaining nine. A segment called “after”, on the other hand, randomly leads to almost any other fragment of the story (the random group consists of 342 segments). Randomness brings an element of unpredictability. It is much easier to get lost in Twilight, A Symphony than in afternoon, a story and much harder to retrace one’s steps. Alternative ways of navigating the structure of the novel, such as the Map View, Outline View, and the enhanced panel that combines the History Window with Browse Links and Roadmap serve as tools to even off this possible hypertext vertigo.
Map exploration and the use of the navigation toolbar are explicitly tied to semantic dimension of the story and the hermeneutic effort on part of the reader. In “Our story so far” Joyce introduces often quoted four directions that the novel can take:
The Map window that accompanies most of the randomly cast lexias out the libretto does indeed present readers with four containers seemingly representing the four directions. The container on the right (east) is called "History." The container on the left (west) titled “songs” starts with “We are looking west”. To further reinforce the connection between visual structure and the story, the north and south directions are marked by similar hints: the title “in the higher air” in case of the northbound segment, and by the first words of the lexia “there” (“This year…”) intializing the southbound group leading to the present. As a result, the Rose Wind arrows on the toolbar indeed take readers to stories indicated in the libretto. Due to random and conditional links this 1:1 type of correspondence cannot be consistently maintained although the directional metaphors, thanks to reference frame established in the libretto, are preserved and influence readers’ experience of the work.The stories, insofar as there are stories here, move in two central arcs, east toward life (though in the past) and west toward death (though in the future). Above these is something like dream or mind, a set of sometimes fragmentary, sometimes speculative linkages (with their own arcs). Below, in something approximating the present moment of the shifting text, is the beginning of a story.
The Story
The eastbound arc of the novel takes readers to the early 1980s to the shores of Pleasant Lake in the remote parts of the state of New York. The main protagonist is a journalist Hugh Colin Enright who child-naps his son Obie from his estranged wife and hides in the lake side cabin. There he meets a Polish couple, Wojtek and Magdalena, political refugees. A peculiar friendship, or comradeship, develops between Hugh and Wojtek (referred to as Boy Scrimshaw), a journalist on a run, and an unfulfilled artist making ends meet in his new country by selling sex toys. Most importantly though, Hugh develops a strong fascination with Magdalena.
The westbound arc of the story propels readers 10 years after the events at the Pleasant Lake. Magdalena is suffering from a rare form of blood cancer and reaches out to Hugh to help her search for the Twilight Doctor, infamous for arranging assisted suicides with terminally ill patients. Hugh and Magda meet at the small town of Marathon by the Lake Superior and take a cruise ship south. At the same time, on the same Lake, the Twilight Doctor travels north and the two parties never meet. Hugh decides to help Magdalena end her life himself.
The lexias “here” and “there” that follow after the introduction present Magdalena’s and Hugh's points of view. The second of these segments, “there”, links Hugh’s perspective from the present with the past and reveals further details about the relationship between both protagonists, about Hugh’s his ex-wife, and work colleagues. Additionally, the southbound section of the novel introduces third person narration in which both characters are portrayed at a distance. This perspective bridges the first person narrations of Hugh and Magdalena with metafictional, auto thematic, and autobiographical parts of Twilight, A Symphony. The the voice of the author dominates the northbound arc of the novel. Heavily linked lexias such as “cent mille the facts”, “22 short films re R Power”, “cave”, “oulipo” , “1982” introduce Joyce’s literary and musical fascinations, from aleatory music to MOOs, from James Joyce to Umberto Eco (who is himself a character in the novel) to Glenn Gould. The famous return of the American pianist to Bach’s Goldberg Variations days before his untimely death constitutes a crucial organising principle of Twilight, A Symphony. Thanks to this device, the motifs of return, repetition, and refrain – prominent already in afternoon, a story – are brilliantly motivated by the events in the story of Magda and Hugh, reverberate through metafictional, philosophical and autobiographical reflection on death, life, dream, the nature or meaning and (hypertext) narrative. Most of the time the reflection takes the shape of a “lyrical elegy” as in the highly poetic, melodic and dream-like series of five “ekphrastics” from the northbound “biomass” group:
Try to see this: say there is only this life and then who dies will not be the one who fears dying but someone beyond her as if just passing into a dream past dying likewise beyond the fear or the sadness of the living she who already mourns her. Add in the possibility that time is one and we live each moment endlessly, this one, that, the pounding surf, the wet sand under the claw, cloudy plastic cup in a cup. Try to recall all the bodies you were within or were within you: see how sweet it is, how shapeless, a baby’s finger.
The elegiac sequences are intertwined by numerous narrative and poetic intermezzos, full of humor, vigor and life, such as a collection of dream-like cut-ups and stream of consciousness lexias contained in “sleepy” or an extensive trip report from Hypertext conference in Italy (“outer space”).
Just as in afternoon, a story, there is also a narrative summary lexia (“stories”) that functions as a reward for reader’s effort where the events, characters’ motives and possible endings are reflected upon from a most general, yet highly revealing angle.
The formal ending of the story, “the end” , in which Hugh fails to follow Magda’s request to end her life and the EMT arrives is presented on the Storyspace map next to a segment called “a beginning”. It connects Magda’s return to life with a scene in which Hugh’s (or Joyce’s) mother dies. Although there are no outbound links from this lexia, its title clearly suggests that the symphony of Twilight . . . has just began: The reader is encouraged to go back to the text, make new connections, and orchestrate her/his own narrative returns.
Multimedia
Twilight, A Symphony features more than 40 illustrations, eight sound clips and one 56-seconds long video clip. The importance of these multi-modal elements is suggested by the central position of the “noons” group of lexias, containing the video and 14 photos, on the main layer of the Storyspace Map representing four principal story arcs.
The series of photographs, made by Joyce, depicting small fragments of his home surroundings arranged into a “picture within a picture” scenes where a photograph is overimposed onto a fragment of the photographed reality: a porch, a table corner, an edge of a turntable, a bed, a window pane. There is also a photo of an old fishing boat put ashore, with the hand-written name “afternoon” on its hull. This detail, along with the video, titled apres ("afternoon" in French), might suggest that the photographs come form the time of writing afternoon, a story. The sound clips, such as a piano stroke on the G key, the first sound of The Goldberg variations, or a ship horn, relate directly to the story of Magda and Hugh and supplement the linguistic mode of storytelling. There are also some hand drawn illustrations: a spiral, a digital advert of “Dali hotdogs”, child-like computer drawing, cropped and processed fragment of a photo portrait, pictures of a sky, a mountain landscape photo and a couple of scans from a journal: one depicting a pencil sketch of a pianist, the second – a coloured crayon drawing of a landscape. Both drawings are accompanied by a hand-written notes.
The photographs are presented to readers in a self-contained manner, as single lexias with a title and a short description underneath the photo. Most of the scans and illustrations, on the other hand, are placed inside the textual content in existing lexias. The prominence of audio-visual material made Twilight, A Symphony stand out among the first generation of digital fiction as a “prime example of hypermedia and one of the first and few quasi-cybertexts produced by Eastgate Systems, Inc." (Ensslin 101).
Reception
Twilight, A Symphony received a very positive reception. Ralph Lombreglia from The Atlantic Monthly compares the work to atonal and polytonal music and praised its ability to “transcend the limits of narrative and reveal the burden of infinite possibility” (Lombreglia). At the same time, the critic feels disoriented and lost in the multiplicity of narrative voices. Raine Koskimaa contrasts the work with afternoon, a story and, taking the cybertext variable outcomes as a measure, concluding that while afternoon, a story presents “several stories” and many readings, Twilight, A Symphony offers one story and many readings. Koskimaa mentions the incompatibility between structural and conceptual navigation of the work: The toolbar navigation does not strictly correspond to plot directions described by the author. Susana Tosca calls the work “an impressive scaffolding made up of voices, memories and thoughts that tell us about the eternal human themes, death and the search for the self”. In her essay, Tosca lauds the linguistic artistry of Joyce, his splendid use of various languages, lively dialogue, use of many foreign languages (at least seven), and for the homage Joyce pays to his “illustrious predecessor” James Joyces in lexias such as “the Old man and the see”. The pioneering hypertext scholar quotes a fragment from “this computer”, a lexia where Joyce directly addresses the Irish Joyce in his reflection on the nature of narrative. The same fragment appears in several later reviews:
The most extensive overview of the novel was made by David Ciccoricco in EBR and later in his book Reading Network Fiction. The critic discusses in detail the musical and intertextual aspects of Twilight, A Symphony and the ways the musical structures are enacted in the hypertext structure. Ciccoricco finds that the novel relies on returns as its compositional element. Expressed in text, emphasised by embedded audio files, and enacted by conditional hypertext mechanics refrains and returns – according to the critic – are at the heart of Twilight, A Symphony, and it is through them that the “signifying totality” is able to emerge. The emergent nature of meaning in Joyce’s hypertext is emphasised in Astrid Ensslin’s overview of Twilight, A Symphony in “Canonizing Hypertext”. The scholar highlights “infinity and evasiveness” of meaning in the reading experience. This evasiveness, argues Ensslin, is made even stronger by the use of stream of consciousness techniques throughout the work (101-104). In line with these findings, Johnson Johnson-Eilola associates the evasiveness of meaning with a sense of inexhaustibility: “Magda and Hugh’s search for death parallels my own search for final meanings, for fixed understandings: it’s always over the next rise or just under the next link”.Where do these words go after they have been driven down by these little electrical spikes, without a hammer or keyclick, into the pulsing ceramic brain within this square eyed Japanese cyclops of a machine?
Magnets snare them, tape heads swallow them. Not the Sirens but the Lotus Eaters (there’s only been one book ever written and it was a Greek wrote it—though some say he was Armenian, Asia Minor, Greek-Jew or Jew-Greek or something—and then an Irishman rewrote it and everybody else kept trying).
Among the critical acclaim of the work, an issue of disorientation and an unfulfilled navigational promise made in “libretto” is pointed by Koskimaa, Ensslin, and Eilola. The “seemingly transparent” navigational devices of are perceived as “more problematic and opaque than expected” (Eilola). Koskimaa concludes that the navigation machinery “isn't really working”. The goal of tying the hypertext map with hypertext narrative proves to be – in eyes of critics – too ambitious to sustain within the work that features much more than four narratives; combines fiction and autobiography; prose and poetry, and tries to joint together many separate narrative pieces. As I have demonstrated in the section of the structure of the work, this is not necessarily a valid point of critique. In the hypertext environment, especially one that is scripted by conditional and random logic, it is simply impossible to maintain a cohesive, enacted bond between the structural (visual) and semantic elements of the work.
Legacy
Twilight, A Symphony remains one of the best novels in the career of Michael Joyce, a prolific author of electronic and print fiction. Unfortunately, the technological milieu of the work at the time of its publication in 1996 proved to be harsh, unfavourable, and ultimately (almost) deadly to the work. The global transition form Mac platform to Windows in the mid 1990s, the emergence of the Web as the platform for electronic literature publication, and the fading popularity of commercial, stand-alone authorial software such as Storyspace made Twilight, A Symphony stillborn on arrival. By the end of the decade only the specialised audience of critics and academics was able to read the work. Joyce himself call it his “great lost work”.
Fortunately, the work did gain new audiences. The five ekphrastics from Twilight, A Symphony occur in Anita Pantin’s online video installation, or interactive opera, Cinque Canzoni (2001) dedicated to the victims go 9/11 attacks. Michael Joyce narrates the pieces. In 2015 Twilight, A Symphony was translated into Polish and published online as Zmrok. Symfonia. It was the first, full online edition of a Storyspace hypertext from Eastgate’s Systems, Inc.'s catalog with conditional and random linking systems (although not the Map View) ported for the Web. Additionally, the live Traversal and extensive documentation of the work in Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4 brings the work closer to the global audience ahead of its English online edition planned for 2021.
References
1. Lombreglia, Ralph. 1996. "So Many Links, So Little Time," The Atlantic Online, November 20, 1996, https://web.archive.org/web/20160724183542/https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/digicult/dc9611/dc9611.htm.
2. Koskimaa, Raine. 1998. From Afternoon till Twilight, AltX, http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev7/r7kos.htm.
3. Tosca, Susana Pajares. 1999. "Michael Joyce: Twilight, a Symphony." Review. Dichtung Digital, http://www.dichtung-digital.de/Tosca/15-Juli-99/twilight.htm
4. Ciccoricco , David. 2002. Returning in Twilight: A review of Michael Joyce’s Twilight, A Symphony.” Electronic Book Review, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/return-to-twilight/.
5. Ciccoricco, Dave. 2003. "The Contour of a Contour," Electronic Book Review, 06-13-2003, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/the-contour-of-a-contour/.
6. Ensslin, Astrid. 2007. Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. NY, NY: Continuum.
7. Pantin, Anita. 2011. Cinque Canzoni, https://anitapantin.com/canzoni.
8. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. 1999. "Confessions at Twilight: Variations on Michael Joyce’s Twilight Symphony," http://www.worksanddays.net/1999-2000/17-Johndan_Johndan.pdf