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The
story begins with a chapter called "Our story so far" that
explains the basic argument, giving the reader the
contextual basis to understand the multiple fragments from
the start. There are two stories, distant in time and space
but related because they both have lakes as scenes and
characters in common. In the first story, Hugh Colin hides
with his son (his mother has the custody) in a holiday place
where he meets a couple of Polish political refugees. In the
second one, later in time, Hugh and the Polish woman, Magda,
are looking for Doctor Twilight, one of the few doctors who
practise euthanasia, because she has an incurable
illness.
Upon this basic structure,
Joyce builds an impressive scaffolding made up of voices,
memories and thoughts that tells us about the eternal human
themes, death and the search for the self.
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"My
search is for what authentically can be said about
a life, how people talk about what is in their
hearts and whether it is possible to do so all
outside the ironical. All this is meant to be in
the most authentic voice I can here summon, knowing
-aside from the theoretical questions- that my own
authenticity is always in question even for me.
Aware always also that as soon as you have read
this I begin to disappear or, like
Mallarmé´s swan, freeze into the form
of my own inaction."
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The language is splendid, or
we should say "languages", because it is a constant
variation of integrated styles: lyrical, lively dialogue,
journalistic language, philosophic language... Joyce uses
even the language of literary criticism, quoting enemies of
hypertext or making Eco and Goodard act as characters in a
theoretical discussion. Other narrative techniques are:
direct and indirect quote, words in at least seven languages
other than English, the repetition of sentences or texts
that reappear included within different texts and even
doubly joycean word games like "the Old man and the
see".
In fact, Joyce pays here
homage to his illustrious predecessor not only by playing
little style games, but so explicitly as this:
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there´s
only been one book ever written and it was a Greek
who 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.
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This work reveals Joyce as a
master of the hypertextual environment from where he´s
taken the last advances to tell his tale. Twilight, a
symphony is compositionally a step forward compared to
afternoon, a story.
The first innovation is that
two screens open at the same time: text screen and map
screen. The map places the space we´re reading,
allowing the reader to navigate everywhere, from one
hierarchy to the next, conscious of every fragment´s
belonging to a coherent structure where relationships are
made explicit. There is an specific tool to move within maps
other than clicking on them: a four-headed arrow. The upper
arrow takes us to the superior space to that we´re
reading, the lower arrow to a space within the space
we´re reading, the left-hand arrow to the space
we´ve read before, and the right-hand arrow to the next
space.
Other known tools are the
possibility of saving our reading and the "dialog box" that
comes out pressing the information button and which contains
a list of the links leading to and from the current space
and a history of the reading in "recently visited spaces".
However we can´t write our own notes or use bookmarks
to mark pages.
Twilight, a symphony
includes more than text. There are pictures, photos, a video
of a short film, music and other sounds including human
voices. These components are not only decorative but have
their own semantic purpose and serve as links to different
parts of the story. The photos show smaller photos and
meaningfull objects as very deep personal memories. The
short film could be described as impressionist because of
its shifting light and colours and the rock music that we
can hear. Music is very important in this work as we can
already tell by the title. We not only hear fragments and
read about composers and musicians (Glenn Gould, Bach,
Chopin, etc.), but the reading´s ups and downs suggest
the movements of a symphony.
This multiplicity is
specially adequate to Michael Joyce´s ideas about the
meaning in motion and the impossibility to end stories,
everything is relevant in Twilight, a symphony. He quotes
Harold Pinter´s words making them his:
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Meaning
begins in the words, in the action, continues in
your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to
meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parcelled,
labelled and ready for export is dead, impertinent,
and meaningless.
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Michael Joyce´s work is
not only attractive for its mastery of the technical
hypertext environment, Twilight, a symphony is a beautiful
work of art that deserves to be read for its own sake. Maybe
the best compliment to be paid to this work is that,
although we´ve used a few lines to talk about technical
matters above, the reader uses the hypertext tools
unconsciously, getting absolutely involved in the meaning of
the story, which is the most valuable thing in Twilight, a
symphony. The hypertext is not the enemy or the competitor
of the printed page, but a logical follower, another way of
telling stories:
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There is only one
story of time and space and it is constantly
retold: someone far away tries to come
home.
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This article was first
published on the spanish hyperfiction magazine HIPERTULIA
(http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/hipertul/review.html). We
thank Susana Pajares Tosca for permission to post it here
again on July 15, 1999.
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