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"Games are the enemy" says MichaelJoyce, "at least the enemy ofliterature.57
Michael Joyce's afternoon has, since its appearance on the hypertext scene in 1987,
already become canonical and is a starting point for many discussions of hypertext
fiction. The work by this professor of literature is, with 950 lexias and 539 links, of
considerable length and marks a move away from the games of interactive fiction that
had before been the most prominent and promising experiments in computer literature
and reader interaction.
Using stream-of-consciousness techniques and deliberate shifts in narrative voices, Joyce
creates a narrative in which we follow the protagonist, a writer, through a summer
afternoon. "1 want to say 1 may have seen my son die this morning" is possibly the key
sentence in the fiction, a sentence to which paths lead back continuously, but which is
never confirmed. He never calls the hospital, never finds out the truth; within the
narration ofdoubt and anxiety and memories we find interwoven memories of friends, of
his ex-wife and his analyst as well as highly self-referential digressions on the nature of
his story and its hypertextual narration.
afternoon is in many respects very different from games like Adventure. Instead of the
second person narrative, its narrative perspective is non-deterministic and constantly
shifting. There is also, in Stuart Moulthrop's words, "no grail quest", no puzzle to be
solved or solution to be achieved. Exploration for the sake ofexploration is the aim: "To
read afternoon is to wander and explore, not to seek and appropriate"."Joyce is, in fact,
very suspicious of any attempt to achieve a solution or closure in his text and lets the
reader know so in a lexia entitled ''work in progress" right at the beginning ofthe reading
(see screenshot below). Closure is something the reader has to achieve for him/herself, it
is not in the realm ofresponsibility ofthe author.
"Sarah Smith, "Electronic Fictions: The State of the Art", New York Review ofScience Fiction , n.63
(November 1993), I, 8-11 (P.9).
68StuartMoulthrop, "Hypertext and'the Hyperreal'",ACM Hypertext '89 Proceedings (New York: The
Association for Computer Machinery, 1989), 259-266 (p.262).
Chapter 3 -page 112