Chapter 6 - Machine-Enhanced (Re)minding: The Development of Storyspace

Summary

Re:minding.

And yet. But still. (Mais encore) Still flowing.

—Michael Joyce, 2011

Michael Joyce has kept a journal for many years. Before he begins to write, he inscribes the first page with an epigram: Still flowing. As anyone who has read Joyce's fictions or critical writing will attest, his work is replete with multiple voices and narrative trajectories, a babbling stream of textual overflow interrupted at regular intervals by playful, descriptive whorls and eddies. If there is a common thread to be drawn between his hyperfictions, his academic writing and his novels, then it is this polyglot dialogue, as Robert Coover terms it, a lyrical stream of consciousness. Joyce can tell a story. And he has told many stories: four books, 40 scholarly essays, and at last count (my count), a dozen fictions. What courses through this work is a gentle concern, or even fixation, with how stories are told – with ‘how we make meaning, as if a caress’ (Joyce 2004, 45). The metaphor of water is an appropriate one. Like Ted Nelson, who had his first epiphany about the nature of ideas and the connections between them as he trailed his hand in the water under his grandfather's boat, Joyce has long been concerned with how to represent a multiplicity of ideas and their swirling interrelationships, with how stories change over time. In the essay ‘What I Really Wanted to Do I Thought’, about the early development of Storyspace, Joyce writes:

What I really wanted to do, I discovered, was not merely to move a paragraph from page 265 to page 7 but to do so almost endlessly. I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings and to make those changing versions according to the connections that I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my readers to share. (1998, 31)