« Liquid Times —Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story ».

Résumé 0

The electronic hyperfictions published in the 1990s have been haunted by the poststructuralist ghost of an ideal mode of empowered reading that supposedly enables the reader to appropriate, co-author and recompose the text in a perfectly fluid fashion following the associative logic enabled by hyperlinks, a contention largely inherited from a misreading of so-called French Theory of text as well as the influence of contemporary physics. The present contribution aims at exploring a series of variations on the metaphors of fluidity and texture in Michael Joyce’s now classic electronic hyperfiction afternoon, a story, with a strong focus on the author’s theoretical writings, heavily influenced by several Deleuzian concepts together with chaos and catastrophe theory in an attempt to define a new form of quantum textuality, or “liquid fiction,” changing our perspective on narrative time and space.I contend that the non-chronological and textural nature of time and space in Joyce’s works, that is to say “the coexistence of sheets of virtual past” (Deleuze Cinema 2 105) forming a fluid continuum is better reflected by the topological logic of an infinite and baroque folding rather than that of foliation per se. How can we delineate the contours of a text and shape it into a meaningful and stable form since they literally never took place, except as part of an uncharted occurrence failing to map itself upon itself? In the non- Euclidian space of computer environments where every point virtually stands at equal distance from each other, the depth of field of the postcinematic flat screens that pop up one after the other, can no longer be measured in terms of spatial distance or perspective, but in terms of duration as paradoxically illustrated by the stubbornly spatial notions of coextensivity and depth respectively defined by Joyce as “the replacement of one writing by another,” (Joyce Othermindedness 27) or “the degree impingement and dissolution among elements of a hypertext” (25), and as “the capacity for replacement among elements of a hypertext,” (25) and further “the dimension or absence or indefiniteness that opens further discourse and other morphological forms of desire” (26).