Table of Contents1
Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; [. . .] afflictions of the spirit – dumps, mopes, Mondays – all that’s dismal – low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hairrinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in [. . .]
Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; [. . .] afflictions of the spirit – dumps, mopes, Mondays – all that’s dismal – low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hairrinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in [. . .]2
None of the aforementioned blues can compare to tJoyce’s Twelve blue. Being Gass the main source of inspiration for Joyc enotwithstanding, the blueberry jam background is absolutely unique. The story is sorted out in twelve threads, each of them tracing a series of events somehow relate to the mysterious,, poliedric, fascinating and charming nature of this color. Exploring Twelve Blue means poking your nose into different lemmas, connectiong the events and re-establishing connections between the different connections you meet along the way. The ergodic effort a reader has to face lies in preventing yourself from looking desperately for a specific order of things. What it is beautful about twelve Blue and any other hypertext is that you never know how many pages are missing: once again, the effort lies in not looking for the reassuring signals of a book. If someone wonders where is the end or what is the hierarchy, it doesnt exist. Or better, it exists but lasts only until you decide to keep playing with the different lexia. The path you choose to follow is just one among many possible others, and they’re all immersed in the world of possibility. Stuart Moulthrop, a famous hypertext author, says that “hypertext abhors hierarchy, hypertext is hyerarchy”, meaning that – as it happens in a multicursal labyrinth – there’s no precise or right order to follow, or better, there is but it’s hidden until someone from the outside intervenes and turns on the text. Hypertext has no hierarchy nor its ordered in a specific way until a reader comes and gives it one. Joyce’s aim is to give the reader the different hues of blue as they were colors on a palette at our disposal. They are waiting for someone to use them and mix them according to her taste.
None of the aforementioned blues can compare to tJoyce’s Twelve blue. Being Gass the main source of inspiration for Joyc enotwithstanding, the blueberry jam background is absolutely unique. The story is sorted out in twelve threads, each of them tracing a series of events somehow relate to the mysterious,, poliedric, fascinating and charming nature of this color. Exploring Twelve Blue means poking your nose into different lemmas, connectiong the events and re-establishing connections between the different connections you meet along the way. The ergodic effort a reader has to face lies in preventing yourself from looking desperately for a specific order of things. What it is beautful about twelve Blue and any other hypertext is that you never know how many pages are missing: once again, the effort lies in not looking for the reassuring signals of a book. If someone wonders where is the end or what is the hierarchy, it doesnt exist. Or better, it exists but lasts only until you decide to keep playing with the different lexia. The path you choose to follow is just one among many possible others, and they’re all immersed in the world of possibility. Stuart Moulthrop, a famous hypertext author, says that “hypertext abhors hierarchy, hypertext is hyerarchy”, meaning that – as it happens in a multicursal labyrinth – there’s no precise or right order to follow, or better, there is but it’s hidden until someone from the outside intervenes and turns on the text. Hypertext has no hierarchy nor its ordered in a specific way until a reader comes and gives it one. Joyce’s aim is to give the reader the different hues of blue as they were colors on a palette at our disposal. They are waiting for someone to use them and mix them according to her taste.3
Another characteristic hypertext feature we should look at in our analysis is the semiotic of links: how does Joyce use them? How come the meaning goes from one lexia to another? Many studies have been conducted on this topic, about the way in which a link should be created, which word or string of words to link. R. Trigg’s “A network-based approach to Text Handling” is a precise classification of the different cathegories a link can fall into. It focuses mainly on scientific hypertext but there are some good points in the study that help us understand the main features of a narrative hypertext  –sometimes finding a strong analogy, sometimes a deep difference. The main idea is that every link can be described according to its direction. Every link has a physical direction, the one that goes from a hot word to the related text, given by who first designed the hypertext; and a semantic direction, given by the kind of link and by the logical relationship that connects one word to its content. Those directions usually coincide but this is not always the case. Let’s imagine that the lemma B is commenting on lemma A: physically, there would be a link going from A to B, but semantically it goes from B to A.
Another characteristic hypertext feature we should look at in our analysis is the semiotic of links: how does Joyce use them? How come the meaning goes from one lexia to another? Many studies have been conducted on this topic, about the way in which a link should be created, which word or string of words to link. R. Trigg’s “A network-based approach to Text Handling” is a precise classification of the different cathegories a link can fall into. It focuses mainly on scientific hypertext but there are some good points in the study that help us understand the main features of a narrative hypertext  –sometimes finding a strong analogy, sometimes a deep difference. The main idea is that every link can be described according to its direction. Every link has a physical direction, the one that goes from a hot word to the related text, given by who first designed the hypertext; and a semantic direction, given by the kind of link and by the logical relationship that connects one word to its content. Those directions usually coincide but this is not always the case. Let’s imagine that the lemma B is commenting on lemma A: physically, there would be a link going from A to B, but semantically it goes from B to A.4
Going back to Joyce again, there are two outgoing links from each page, one located in text and the the other generated when clicking on the image on your left. Those two links send the reader to two different parts of the text, so that she has to make every time the choice of where to go next. Joyce has made it on purpose and if you try to go back, reload the page and see what would have happened if you had chosen the other link, you see that the hot word in the text has disappeared. Is this a sort of threat, saying that once you’ve chosen your way you cannot come back? Or maybe it has been built under the principle that we should not visit the same link more than twice? The physical direction of a link is thus under the writer’s control: he knows where we’ve already been and tries to guide us towards the points we haven’t seen yet. As for the semantic direction of the links, each of them has its own according to the content and context in which the link appears. How words are well-placed in general – and this is one of the most difficult things about creating a hypertext: through hot words the writer creates expectations in the reader’s mind of which he has to be aware of. If you loose the reader’s attention or elude her expectations, then she won’t be able to follow you anymore and will drop reading and clicking. This is even more true in a narrative hypertext as Joyce’s: we have to build the meaning and if lemmas weren’t connected in a proper way, we wouldn’t be able to follow Joyce for more than a couple of minutes. Though it is Joyce himself who declares at the very beginning that
Going back to Joyce again, there are two outgoing links from each page, one located in text and the the other generated when clicking on the image on your left. Those two links send the reader to two different parts of the text, so that she has to make every time the choice of where to go next. Joyce has made it on purpose and if you try to go back, reload the page and see what would have happened if you had chosen the other link, you see that the hot word in the text has disappeared. Is this a sort of threat, saying that once you’ve chosen your way you cannot come back? Or maybe it has been built under the principle that we should not visit the same link more than twice? The physical direction of a link is thus under the writer’s control: he knows where we’ve already been and tries to guide us towards the points we haven’t seen yet. As for the semantic direction of the links, each of them has its own according to the content and context in which the link appears. How words are well-placed in general – and this is one of the most difficult things about creating a hypertext: through hot words the writer creates expectations in the reader’s mind of which he has to be aware of. If you loose the reader’s attention or elude her expectations, then she won’t be able to follow you anymore and will drop reading and clicking. This is even more true in a narrative hypertext as Joyce’s: we have to build the meaning and if lemmas weren’t connected in a proper way, we wouldn’t be able to follow Joyce for more than a couple of minutes. Though it is Joyce himself who declares at the very beginning that5
Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn’t do get caught us in the threads the water weaves.
Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn’t do get caught us in the threads the water weaves.6
Is Joyce trying to tell us that we should let ourselves go in the fabulous blue river of his narrative, without thinking too much about which direction is the best to take, just like water flows without wandering whether it is following an ebb tide or it is going to melt in the sea?
Is Joyce trying to tell us that we should let ourselves go in the fabulous blue river of his narrative, without thinking too much about which direction is the best to take, just like water flows without wandering whether it is following an ebb tide or it is going to melt in the sea?