Reimagined Monstrosity: Female bodies and Literary Experiments in Hypertext
At the heart of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl lies the endeavor to refigure literary texts and exploring heterogeneity with the use of hypertextual links. Teeming with playful representations of the body, Patchwork Girl fills the hypertextual gaps with thematic allusions. This essay will argue that Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, while experimenting with links and multiplicity, blends this formal experiment with thematic representations of the body and challenges readers’ expectations with a patchwork of narratives. I will first examine Jackson’s experimentation with hypertext, namely the employment of collage writing and internal dialogues. Responding to the possible critique of Jackson’s experiment being a mere form of radical intertextuality, the essay will suggest that Jackson’s hypertext represents a game of importance which transgresses the boundaries of print text and challenges classic linear narrative and closure. Acknowledging the seriousness of its experimentation, the essay will explore the newly established form of coherence. It will suggest that this new form is made possible through filling in textual gaps with thematic allusions to the female body. It will put forward the notion that Jackson’s hypertext offers readers the Barthesian pleasure of reading and writing.
To call Jackson’s Patchwork Girl an experiment is to recognize its efforts in testing new forms of writing with the assistance of the digital medium, namely literary cubism and internal dialogues. Patchwork Girl sustains its position in experimental digital literature, not “by virtue of its medium”, but the “co-evolution of compositional techniques” and electronic systems that lend them form. (Ciccoricco 471). Writing with the digital authoring system Storyspace has not made this text a bold experiment; it is rather the use of hypertext and collage writing simultaneously that contributes to the experimental nature of this piece. Digital fiction, with its emphasis on electronic medium must “rely on a fundamental premise of non-transferability” (471). Such non-transferability implies that any removal of the text from the digital medium will alter the structure of the piece, depriving it of its “aesthetic and semiotic function” (471). With its thematic representations interwoven with the features of hypertext, attempts at separating Patchwork Girl’s thematic concerns from literary experimentation of hypertext will beforceful. The teeming representations of the disintegrated body in Patchwork Girl echo with the fragmented lexias of hypertext. Lexias, as defined by Roland Barthes, are “series of brief, contiguous fragments” which when united offers a “berm of possible meanings” (Barthes 13). The Barthesian definition portrays the knitting of fragments to form a raised bank. Such image closely resembles the stitchery of body parts, which also assembles scattered parts to form the female monster. Bodies are disintegrated in Patchwork Girl, scattered in “a graveyard”, waiting to be stitched into a whole: “I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself” (Jackson/ Graveyard). In the hope of knitting together thematic representations and her experimental hypertext, Jackson makes bodies an allusion to the complex structures of hypertext. Just as the monster is put together through stitchery of fragmented parts, hypertext is given meaning as readers “[collect] narrative fragments from every stop” and thus constructed along the “virtual space of the text” (Ryan 520).
While Jackson’s use of literary cubism highlights thematically notions of stitched body and plural identities, her employment of hypertext resonates structurally and experiments with links and multiplicity. The section “a graveyard” puts together narratives of body parts gathered from various individuals. These separate narratives, “a Head, Trunk, Arms (Right and Left), and Legs (Right and Left) as well as diverse organs” rest “in piece” (Jackson/Headstone) and are connected by hypertextual links. Such hypertext is experimental fundamentally because of the author’s attempt at achieving “by artificial means the unity of a life form” (Jackson/Sewn); a unity that is given life through readers’ continuous effort in stitching together meanings. Echoing collage writing, hypertext puts together seemingly unrelated lexias and joins them “electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality” (Landow 3). The power of links and multiplicity is most evident in the section “a quilt” where Jackson merges together quotes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and many other texts:
At first I couldn’t think what to make her of. I collected bones form charnel houses, paragraphs from Heart of Darkness, and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame, but finally in searching through a chest in a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, I came across an old patchwork quilt, a fabric of relations, which my grandmother once made when she was young.
L.Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, first published in 1913. Mine is the Ballantine edition, p.15.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, edited by Maurice Hindle, 1985), p. 98
Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, John B. Smith, and Mark Bernstein, Getting Started with Storyspace (Eastgate Systems, 1990-1993), p.89.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minnestoa, 1984, p.15.
(Jackson/Research)
Jackson’s collage writing takes on the deconstructionist form, laying naked a fabricated textuality and an honest disclosure of the process of writing. Such bravery in exposing the raw before readers’ eyes aligns with Lyotard’s avant-garde postmodernism and experimentation; his emphasis on the “artwork’s relation to the sublime” and the “unpresentable” (McHale 149). Through making the references available to readers, Jackson unveils the “material basis of world building” and brings into sight the truthful portrait of the “writer sitting there writing the page” (147). This textual intercourse generates meanings that are foreign to their original texts and takes on an unconventional path that suggests something more than the “pretense of originality” or exercise of “selection and contextualization” (Jackson 534). Just as how Patchwork Girl’s body appears to be “a succession of individuals”, the hypertext is as well “a succession of versions” (Van Hulle 159). The experimental hypertext is Barthes’ galaxy of signifiers and Jackson’s “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (Jackson/Identities). Through exploring the intertwined relationship between bodies and hypertext, Jackson has successfully woven together form and content, creating an inseparable linkage.
Adding to the experiments of links and multiplicity is Jackson’s use of internal dialogues in her hypertext. In the form of an interrupted quote from Jacques Derrida’s Disseminations, Jackson creates the lexia “Interrupting D”:
As a living thing, logos issues from a father
---I, on the other hand, have adopted a nominal mother (M/S) who is more like a midwife, and spring unparented from my own past selves---
There is thus for Plato no such thing as a written thing. There is only a logos more or less alive, more or less distant from itself.
---that is, I don’t exist. I am a passel of parts and should be returned to their original owners (‘Did you hear something? Never mind, there’s nobody there, some butcher’s scraps fought over by dogs’)---
(Jackson/ Interrupting D)
The lexia presents in a new form Derrida’s criticism of Plato’s opinion on the written as opposed to the spoken language and infuses it with the Patchwork Girl’s contemplation. Resonating with the Derridean assemblage, such internal dialogue possesses a web that allows “different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together” (Landow 9). It brings together a “double-exposure”, in which the overlapping of referential realms leads to multiplicity (Mchale 151). By choosing to put Patchwork Girl’s comments in red, Jackson illustrates her endeavour in differentiating the two voices. While Derrida chooses the masculine metaphor in explaining the relationship between speaking and writing, Jackson juxtaposes it with her feminine metaphor and connects the lexia with the brimming feminine representations in her hypertext. Jackson makes the Patchwork Girl a metaphor of hypertext and the “nominal mother” an allusion to the author of hypertext. Like a “midwife”, the author only assists the birth of the hypertext; the hypertext “spring[s] unparented” from its own links and forms into a whole with readers’ construction. Through juxtaposing two distinct voices, Jackson has provided a virtual space for meanings to interact and experimented with multiplicity.
Far from being a mere form of radical intertextuality, Jackson’s hypertext appears to be a serious game that tests the boundaries of print text and challenges narrative closure and linearity. Containing five major parts, Patchwork Girl offers five different start and end points depending on readers’ selection. The meaning in hypertext is constantly flickering as new sets of narrative fragments come into sight. Its multiplicity denies the “reader the satisfaction of a totalizing interpretation” (Van Hulle 156) and makes textual linearity a pure chance relying on readers’ choice. Such hypertextual experimentation takes the risk of losing its readers by leaving them in idleness and searching for connections on their own. Constantly exposed to unfinishedness and plurality, readers can get easily exhausted by the amount of attention they need to pay to all details. Despite the acknowledgment of these risks, Jackson’s hypertext continues to resist conventional closure and to experiment with openness and multiplicity, allowing things to “spring up in the real we don’t already know” (Jackson 533). It is true that the hypertextual experiment calls for a more active reading experience and requires from readers an openness to explore a wide range of outcomes and an acceptance of the unavailability of closure. Thus, the essence of the Jackson’s hypertext lies not just in the making of a “new kind of beauty”, but more importantly, the creation of “the senses to perceive it with” (Jackson 534).
Such new hypertextual beauty is not a random compilation of narratives or generation of nodes, it exhibits a coherence that is constructed with links. Through joining the lexia with relevant texts both inside and outside the hypertext, these hypertextual links bring unity to the text, permitting “meaning from separate subsections to bleed into one another” (Landow 239). In Patchwork Girl, the section on “a graveyard” carries strong body imagery and conjures up a powerful portrait of female resurrection. Such resurrection serves as an allusion to the monstrous birth of Jackson’s hypertext. The thematic parallel on the union of broken body parts joins the subsection “a graveyard” with “broken accents”, in which the Patchwork Girl meditates on the female and hypertextual body. Jackson’s hypertext has not just made use of “electronic connections”, but fills textual gaps with “allusions, metaphors and implicit parallels” (Landow 207). Linking together texts like Stafford’s Body Criticism, Eastegate Systems’ guide Getting Started with Storyspace and other literary texts, Jackson demonstrates to readers her careful selection of related materials in quilting her hypertext. These works either illustrate a thematic parallel on creation and monstrosity, or concerns for hybridity, unity and plural identities. While sewing together the chosen pieces, Jackson discloses readily to her readers her method of quilting. Lying there naked, the section “Crazy Quilt” openly identifies the sources of the stitched together text. Such construction is not concealed, but exposed in detail and invites challenges and difference. Jackson’s text illustrates the form of writing which springs out from the fabrication of multiple texts. Just as how the act of construction is pivotal to Jackson’s writing of her hypertext, it is of the same importance to readers’ reading. Reading hypertext calls for a similar act of construction, which knit together fragments from various lexias. Patchwork Girl is thus not a purposeless coining of texts, but a coherent web of connections that sew together various representations and demonstrate to readers the importance of construction.
Jackson’s hypertext challenges readers’ general expectation of a rewarding reading experience and requires from them a new vision to perceive hypertext’s beauty. In S/Z, Roland Barthes has made clear that the “goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (Barthes 4). Conventional texts are hierarchical, giving authors most of the control and leaving to readers “the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text” (4). Patchwork Girl, however, opens up possibilities and delegates to readers “the pleasure of writing” (4) by offering them chances to alter the outcome in the hypertext. While traditional readers derive their reading satisfaction from narrative suspense and the pursuit of novelistic closure, Jackson’s hypertext offers them a new source of content---the control over the text and a share of the author’s pleasure in the course of textual production. Such pleasure stems not directly from “the [fiction’s] content or even its structure”, but “the abrasions [a reader] imposes upon the fine surface” (10). Jackson’s hypertext urges readers to open up to a new definition of a rewarding reading experience and builds into their reading the pleasure of writing. Such reward no longer lies inside the text, but reaches out to the world where readers live and foster as a meaningful activity in life. Hypertext rewards its readers with choices to “go write [one’s] own text” and “paint [one’s] mural” (Jackson/ Gaps, Leaps). Believing that the decision to do “something else might be the best outcome of a text”, hypertext urges readers to change their life. While traditional text occupies readers with overwhelming amount of information to the extent that they become “stuck on the meaning like a bug on a pin”, hypertext nurture adventurous, risk-taking opportunists to take what they think useful into their life and “knot it to their arguments” (Gaps, Leaps). Offering readers space to interpret and choose, hypertext encourages a new rewarding reading experience which rests on grounds of innovation and reproduction.
In the attempt to experiment with multiplicity and links, Shelley Jackson takes Patchwork Girl away from conventional print text and presents it with the chimerical hypertext. Instead of merely relying on electronic links for an arbitrary textual unity, Jackson manipulates allusions and thematic parallels in bridging gaps. Her experimentation with collage writing and internal dialogues resonates with thematic representations of bodies and femininity. Such interweaving of writing techniques and thematic concerns helps in forming a strong coherence. Jackson’s hypertextual experiment is playful in its crossing of boundaries set by conventional print text, but its carefully knitted narrative clusters also demonstrate seriousness in achieving textual coherence. Not satisfied with the mere experimentation of forms, Patchwork Girl challenges its readers to take on an active reading experience that invites choice and creation.
Works Cited:
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McHale, Brian. “Postmodernism and Experiment”. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Ciccoricco, David. “Digital fiction: Networked Narratives”. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork girl. Eastegate Systems Inc, 1995. CD rom.
Jackson, Shelley. "Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl." Paradoxa 4.11 (1998): 526-538.
Landow, George P. HyperText: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical theory and new media in an era of globalization. JHU Press, 2006.
Ryan, Marie‐Laure. "Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium." A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005): 515-528.
Van Hulle, Dirk. "Hypertext and Avant‐Texte in Twentieth‐Century and Contemporary Literature." A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008): 139-159.
