Not exactly “choose-your-own-adventure”…

It’s amazing how strong—and similar—many of the responses to Joyce’s “Afternoon” have been. Like shock and awe and many others from our class have mentioned, I was frustrated with the format of “Afternoon.” However, the hypertext was also incredibly intriguing, and it was definitely worth “reading” in order to get first-hand experience with hypertexts.

At first I went through “Afternoon” the same way I used to read the “choose-your-own-adventure” books that I read when I was little (and that Joyce references in his article, as well as Lulu on the blog). I soon realized how different the two are. You can’t completely reread, as I used to do with adventure books when I chose a certain path for the heroine but was immediately disappointed with my decision and eager to see option B. I found that with “Afternoon,” every time I chose “yes” then clicked back and chose “no”, I ended up with the same piece of story on the next screen. I assume that I hadn’t reached a part where I had the power to make the decision “yes” or “no” that actually mattered, but it was still interesting to see how active I actually could be as reader and semi-writer (which is, as both Joyce and Landow seem to say, one of the main purposes of the text).

Aside from the maddening fun I had experimenting with typing in words and seeing which piece of the story I would get (though it didn’t seem to get me anywhere in the plot), I really appreciated the hypertext after reading Joyce’s article. As Lulu and Frabby have pointed out and Joyce says, “Retrospective expectation is fundamental to the experience of rereading in any medium. Outside, our lives passed through us, we are nostalgic for a complex tense in which what was can be again what will have been other than what it was” (138). So…hypertext mimics the normal processes of life, in a sense. I’m just wondering what our class reading of the text will be like, because if, as Joyce says, “it is unlikely that successive readings by a single reader will be in any significant way alike” (137), how will many individual readers discuss the text together? It should be fun to see, but then again, I suppose finding one set plot isn’t the point of why we read it.