Twelve Blue

"Twelve Blue is by Michael Joyce, who is the author of afternoon , called ‘the grandfather of hypertext’. He’s a master of the form and is truly just a beautiful writer. And you can see the influence of that other Joyce – James Joyce: the writing flows. And the play with puns, visual and verbal, as in the kinds of sea metaphors that are taken up in the blue text. I read it years ago, and I was hooked; indeed, it was with this piece that I decided to focus in this field. I started reading the novel in the late afternoon and realised at around midnight that I had completely lost all sense of time and was immersed in a work on screen. I dove into this digital work about the sea. It’s so beautiful. But also so simple. It’s just a hypertext – it’s just text on screen in which there are lexias, meaning it’s a nonlinear narrative comprised of chunks of text connected by links that demand reader interaction to produce the plot. So you and I could read Twelve Blue in completely different orders. When you’re teaching it, you’re aware that some of the students have seen certain screens and some haven’t. It requires a very different understanding of what it means to read, close read, or even finish reading a work. It is a great work in terms of its content, because it’s one that uses its form, as good literature should, to create beautiful content. There are full-blown characters here and a deftly intertwined plot. You can forget, as I did, the fact that you’re clicking through windows onscreen to access a disorienting hypertext and just be lost in the story. That’s why I selected it – because I think it exemplifies the hypertext genre. And it’s available online for people to see. And it is really just beautiful. Hypertext actually has been around a long time. Think Tristram Shandy , or Nabokov’s Pale Fire , or – later, much later – David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest : these kinds of works rely on footnotes to move the reader in a nonlinear fashion through the text. These can also be considered hypertexts – or at least proto-hypertexts. But hypertext became identified as the first genre of electronic literature because when the internet went public, it was text-based and based on hyperlinks. The hypertext period became associated with the larger category of digital literature, but it is really and more rightly defined as the first generation of electronic literature."