“The American Hypertext Novel”

Surpassing Hyperfiction through Michael Joyce’s Twilight: A Symphony

Abstract

The present paper discusses Michael Joyce’s CD-ROM-based hypertext novel Twilight: A Symphony (1996), written in the Storyspace hypertext writing program, as a case study and as part of a larger set of explorations and experimental practices in electronic literature during the 1990s. Examining this early form of hypertext literature adds to the historicization of the evolution of the American hypertext novel, while bringing to the fore the trans-/re-formative potential of the hypertextual form. While Scott Rettberg acknowledges the death of hypertext as a narrative form in the twenty-first century, he observes that “hypertext has provided a basis for other emergent narrative forms” (2015a,183), illustrating that hypertextual narrative forms and practices need to be constantly re-evaluated. Twilight occupies a very particular position in the hyperfiction evolution trajectory, as it appears to be on the threshold of a new era of hyperfiction that was about to emerge after its publication, paving the path for the diverse post hypertextual narrative formulations of the 21st century. The examination of Twilight leads one to the realization that hypertext, and by extension the American hypertext novel, even as a nascent genre, has continuously been reinventing itself by subverting its own form. Joyce extrapolates in his novel that hypertext is a dynamic narrative form in perpetual evolution, a fact to which Rettberg also calls attention. This paper aims to expose the ways in which Twilight paved the path to future literary genres and practices in American digital studies; it illustrates that Joyce’s novel interrogates certain features of early hypertext writing; it demonstrates how certain elements of the novel that differentiated it from other works written in Storyspace at the time can now be considered the original “kernels” of later experimentation in the field of electronic literature; and it emphasizes where these elements can be found again, albeit in new forms, in contemporary works.