Translating afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce, or How to Inhabit a Spectral Body
Résumé
As a work of electronic literature, Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story exists on various levels, the ones experienced by the average reader (as opposed to those critiqued by the metareader, or the translator for that matter who both have to peer into the code as well) being parcellary by definition. The underlying layers of code underpinning the text-to-be-seen remain obfuscated below the visible surface of the screenic interface, offering only a partial view of the text which comprises both lines of code and strings of English interspersed with a few graphic elements. To further complexify the reader’s relation to the surface text, the fragmentary nature of hypertextual lexias prevents the recomposition of an ever elusive and paradoxically impossible totality since some narrative lines are simply incompatible with one another unless one should decide to embrace a form of quantum textuality. The inaccessibility of the work as a whole etches out a ghostly body of text, a hazy halo that haunts the margins of each lexia notwithstanding the underlying layers of code whose presence is to be felt, if not actually seen or read, in the performance of the text. What is to be translated then? Or, to put it differently, is the code to be deemed part of what is usually designated as “the text” as if it could be abstracted from its medium? It ensues that the relation between the underlying code, or layers of code, to natural languages must be interrogated. This even though “the code is not the text,” (Cayley 2002) to quote John Cayley, and yet clings to the body of text from which it cannot be dissociated, nor repressed along the translating process even though code does not translate per se.