Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 4

Traversal of Michael Joyce's "Twilight, a Symphony"

Michael Joyce, author of Twilight, a Symphony used Zoom and YouTube to read his work remotely while Dene Grigar, on an iMac G4 running System Software 9.2. The performance was hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) at Washington State University Vancouver on Thursday, January 21, 2021. It was led by Polish scholar Mariusz Pisarski who was joined in the Q&A by ELL Director Dene Grigar and hypertext scholar Astrid Ensslin.

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 1

Mariusz Pisarski welcomes Astrid Ensslin, Dene Grigar, and Michael Joyce to the virtual room and describes the set-up of the traversal: Grigar is using the computer as Joyce directs her remotely through Zoom. Pisarski tells about the history of Twilight, a symphony which (because there was only ever one edition, the 1996 one) Joyce called his "great lost work." He goes on to describe Twilight's use of random links, which were new to Storyspace at the time, and a map interface that made all nodes findable at once and encouraged "spatial exploration" of the text. Pisarski also stresses that Twilight, a symphony is a multimedia work, in which image, sound, and movement are important. As the novel loads, Joyce acknowledges Jasmina and Milorad Pavic, with whom he had a friendly correspondence and dedicated the novel to, as well as students of his who helped in its composition. He also thanks Pisarski and the ELL for making it possible to return to a work he hadn't seen in "more than a decade." Beginning his reading, Joyce shares a lexia titled "our story so far" which describes an "eastward" and a "westward" plot -- the first of which is a journey "towards life," and the second a journey "towards death," and a "dream mind" that lives around them. Both plots revolve around Lake Superior and a man named Hugh, who in the eastward story childnaps his infant son and flees to his brother's cottage where he meets a pair of Polish emigres; and in the westward story assists one of those emigres, Magdalena, who suffers from a rare cancer, as she seeks to end her own life first through a man called the "Twilight doctor" and then on her own.

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 2While the screen loads, Joyce says that his "Twilight doctor" is based on Jack Kevorkian, and then reads from a lexia titled "here" which, like the previous and subsequent lexias, is full of alliterative and sonorous language read deliberately by Joyce. References to travel, mud, bicycles, and family join allusions to Marcel Proust and James Joyce in a stream-of-consciousness style. Grigar clicks using the spatial navigation panel past a photo of a flower on a table to a lexia titled "there," which mirrors "here" both in style and its interest in mud, bicycling, and families. Pisarski then pauses the reading to ask about the photograph, and Joyce explains he took it at a cafe in Dresden, Germany and his passion for photography came from his father, who was a photographer and steelworker. He then moves to the next screen, "caring," which features a dialog between unnamed characters and a contemplation of how "the world is incredibly full of caring." Joyce, reading on January 21, 2021, the day after the inauguration of Joe Biden as President, "must say that this is a deeply ironic screen for me given the kind of uncaring and violence and insurrection we've undergone in the past two weeks, and I'm deeply hopeful we're on the edge of this kind of quotidian caring in the world and in our lives." Pisarski then explains the functionality of the spatial navigation toolbar which opens the whole text up for exploration, and the reading moves onto a series of ekphrastics that Joyce describes as "an attempt to make language see, and in this case see death." The first ekphrastic describes the Hudson river with more travel imagery, and concludes: "Surrendering: this will be how it is to die."

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 3

Joyce moves onto the second ekphrastic, which carries on the water and family imagery in long, intricate sentences and concludes: "Sweetly dreaming: this is how it will be to die." Before moving on to the third, fourth, and fifth ekphrastics, he explains that those three show up "a bit later in the run of the story" but he will read them as a unit with the first two. The third ekphrastic seems to describe a college campus, and returns to the subject of "dreaming," concluding "Sweetly screaming: this is how it will be to die." The fourth ekphrastic describes a scene on an airplane, looking down at the Rio Grande river and desiring to suck the ankle of the woman across the aisle "not out of fetish... but to honor its sad mortality" and concludes: "Suckling everything: this is how it will be to die." The fifth ekphrastic describes the narrator watching the night sky over a lake, and following a small pen-and-ink illustration of the scene concludes: "Peace: this is how it will be."

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 4

Pisarski announces that the reading will now move on to the eastward and "life" part of the narrative, which begins with a lexia that reads "Pleasant Lake: an unfinished novel." Joyce explains that Pleasant Lake is a real place he used to go to with his "dearly-departed" brother, and although he never met a Polish expat couple there, he perhaps might have. Amid a brief bit of confusion, Grigar, Pisarski, and Joyce negotiate how to reach the lexia they mean to display, clicking through the graph-like screens of the Storyspace interface. A lexia titled "He stirs -- Obie" describes the natural beauty of Pleasant Lake and Obie, the childnapped baby of the eastward plot. The next lexia is a postcard written from Hugh to the ex-wife he stole Obie from. Hugh then meets the Polish emigre poet, in "one of the least promising episodes of international communication since Princeton's Woodrow's League of Nations"  

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 5

As Grigar navigates through what Joyce dubs "a spiderweb" of a lexia map, Joyce thanks her. Grigar informs the audience that "it's good to see the difficulty" of practicing and presenting a work of hypertext, to which Joyce replies that "reading any hypertext is easy if you let yourself go [but] we're here visiting places in a way you probably shouldn't." The next screen the team unintentionally lands on is a dedicatory page to Anne Johnstone, a friend of Joyce's who passed away and "went through [my life] like a comet." He explains that he met her at a reading of Stuart Moulthrop's work, and goes on to read the text of the lexia which is an ekphrasis of "Anne's workspace." The next lexia, called "sorrows," describes the first meeting of Hugh and Magda, and their discussion of how much she and her husband suffered following persecution in Poland and their move to the United States.  

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Part 6

As the team searches for the next lexia, Joyce thanks the ELL for "the effort and love" that has gone into the traversal and archiving project. In a lexia called "Songs," Hugh and Magda sit together ten years later watching Lake Superior, and hear a klaxon across the water, which introduces another lexia contemplating the musicality of the lake. Joyce elaborates on the link between Twilight, a Symphony and the music and writing of Glenn Gould. The reading continues to a lexia Joyce calls "the end," a long and lyrically written scene describing Magda's attempt to end her own life in a hotel room with Hugh's assistance. After Joyce reads the scene, which seems to conclude the story of Magda and Hugh, Pisarski explains that it isn't truly the end, because the novel loops back to its beginning.

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of Twilight, a Symphony, Q&A, Part 1

The question and answer session begins with Joyce and Grigar remembering an early meeting during a drive back from the airport in which they discussed Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray, whose take on "immersiveness" in hypertext they both disagree with. Joyce argues that Murray discounts the immersiveness of "the music of the words," while acknowledging she wrote a "brilliant book." Astrid Ensslin then asks about Twilight's connection with Glenn Gould, and Joyce explains that he would listen to both of Gould's versions of "The Goldberg Variations" (the first recorded when he was young, the second recorded right before his death) every day while out walking by the lake. Pisarksi inquires about the difference between the eastward and westward arcs of the novel. Joyce answers that the eastward arc was a novel he'd been working on for almost a decade that was interrupted by events in his life, and in Twilight he combined it with the westward arc about the search for death which was written some years afterward. He shares that he used to tell his students the novel was "bargain-basement Proust," but now thinks of it as a "bargain-basement Goldberg Variations" because the eastward arc was written years before the westward arc, just as one version of Gould's "Goldberg Variations" was recorded years before the other.

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of  Twilight, a Symphony, Q&A, Part 2

Pisarski and Ensslin discuss some of the relevant points from their essays (published here in this Scalar book). Pisarski starts, describing his essay summarizing "twenty years of reception" until his connection is interrupted. Ensslin takes over, bringing up her interest in reading Twilight as a "textual machine," a work where "you feel you are in charge, and in control" before it "becomes very random." She also brings up the emotional depth of the piece and how it relates to "recent developments in American politics" and the Inauguration which had occurred the day before. She articulates an appreciation for Joyce's "groundbreaking achievement" of a rich and engaging hypertext in the "impoverished computational expressive landscape" of late 1990s, which was quite "clunky." Joyce replies that part of the inspiration behind Twilight was a sense of writing against a frequent criticism of hypertext: that rather than offering the reader more freedom, it offered a false freedom of choices controlled by the author; and so he agrees that he did write a "textual machine" of some kind. Joyce then compliments the "glorious" sound Pisarski's computer made while failing earlier. Grigar expresses an appreciation for the density of cultural and historical allusions in Joyce's work, which she doesn't see as clearly in more contemporary media work. Joyce responds that while he does not wish to be an "old fart," he also sees a lack of richness in "the instagram generation" but thinks that "the covid pandemic has taught us to seek a richness of a kind we're only just understanding... that will lead to these multivocal, polyphonic understandings of time and culture and what-have-you," concluding "time is ample, copious, open, and the things that matter come back into their own richness." The group then celebrates the Inauguration ceremony and the performances of Amanda Gorman and Yo-Yo Ma. 

Michael Joyce’s Traversal of  Twilight, a Symphony, Q&A, Part 3

Pisarski asks Michael Joyce about the influence of James Joyce on his writing, and Michael Joyce answers that when he was young the idea of a Joyce being a writer gave him a sense that it was possible for him. He recalls a conference where Umberto Eco, at the End of the Book Conference in San Marino, CA acknowledged Michael's presence by saying "we are glad to have Michael Joyce here, who convinces us that hypertext is like jazz, and to have the memory of the real Joyce." He discusses his Irish Catholic upbringing, acknowledging that inspiration comes "out of a matrix, out of the sea."  

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