Part of the craft of authoring in hypertext masterfully manifested in Twelve Blue is this gradual passage in and out of focus of the diegesis or imaginary space and time of the narrative world. Some of John Cage’s experiments anticipate the potential of a different mode altogether of reading and writing, such as those in which he attempted to produce in prose the effect of working the tuners of numerous radios to pass in and out between noise and speech. This experience of initial disorientation and confusion that modernist fiction labored so hard to produce is more or less inherent in the nonlinear linking of hypertext. The effect of spending a couple of hours browsing Twelve Blue is the literary equivalent of seeing an interlaced gif assemble itself, passing from an unintelligible array of diffuse shapes into a fully coherent representation. Each cell offers at least one link within the prose, motivated this time by formal or aesthetic motifs derived from the attributes or properties of objects, places, events, persons. The large righthand frame displays the prose segments printed in light blue on a dark blue background. This effort will not produce a linear path, however, for the work is nonlinear in both conception and execution. Since the URLs are numbered in sequence the reader might be tempted to move through the hypertext in a linear fashion by entering the document addresses in consecutive order. Clicking on these threads moves the reader through the web in digital jumps. Indeed, each thread is a link to a document in the web running the cursor over the frame shows the range of URLs available. We are given to understand that these threads, mostly of a dark color except for one line of yellow, represent the StorySpace network.
The layout includes two frames-a narrow column on the left displaying a field of colored threads or yarn, spread horizontally from the top to the bottom of the frame. Think of lilacs when they are gone.” It so happens that I have never stopped thinking of the lilacs that grew in the backyard of my childhood home, the very scarcity of flowering bushes in Montana making their brief but fragrant appearance all the more impressive. The reader is offered a definition that turns out to be a phrase from the work: “12 Blue isn’t anything. The introduction explains that the hypertext includes 269 links in 96 spaces. I anticipated then that Joyce would continue this experiment, testing its applicability as a way to design a hypertext (and I was not disappointed).
Gass’s text demonstrates what I now call writing with the choral word (derived from a strategy often used by Jacques Derrida)-the inventio and dispositio are governed by the principle of blue (every possible usage) rather than by a thesis statement or a story (although the text both argues and narrates). I have long admired Gass’s meditative essay, for which Twelve Blue provides a narrative counterpart. The epigraph makes explicit the intertextual relationship between Joyce’s hypertext and On Being Blue by William Gass, a tour de force of poetic prose. Its great evocative power also shows off the craft of Joyce as a creative writer. Twelve Blue thus demonstrates the strengths (but also some of the limitations) of StorySpace as an authoring environment for the Web. His most recent composition, authored in StorySpace for presentation on the World Wide Web, may be found at.
Michael Joyce is well known as a theorist, teacher, and creator of hypertext fiction.