I noticed in school that I could argue anything. I might find myself delivering conclusions I disagreed with because I had built such an irresistable machine for persuasion. The trick was to allow the reader only one way to read it, and to make the going smooth. To seal the machine, keep out grit. Such a machine can only do two things: convince or break down. Thought is made of leaps, but rhetoric conducts you across the gaps by a cute cobbled path, full of grey phrases like "therefore," "extrapolating from," "as we have seen," giving you something to look at so you don't look at the nothing on the side of the path.
Hypertext leaves you naked with yourself in every leap, it shows you the gamble thought is, and it invites criticism, refusal even. Books are designed to keep you reading the next thing until the end, but hypertext invites choice. Writing hypertext, you've got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text.
Go write your own text. Go paint a mural. You must change your life. I want piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists, who take what they want from my ideas and knot it into their own arguments. Or even their own novels. From which, possibly, I'll steal it back. The real body, which we have denied representation, is completely inimical to our wishful thinking about the self. We would like to be unitary, controlled from on top, visible, self-contained.
We represent ourselves that way, and define our failures to be so, if we cannot ignore them, as disease, hysteria, anomaly. It registers local intensities, not arguments. It is a field of sensations juxtaposed in space. It is vague about size and location, unclear on measurements of all kinds, bad at telling time though good at keeping it. It is capacious, doesn't object to paradox, includes opposites--doesn't know what opposites are.
It is unstable. It changes from moment to moment, in its experience both of itself and of the world. It is neither clearly an object nor simply a thought, meaning or spirit; it is a hybrid of thing and thought, the monkey in the middle.
It is easily influenced; it is largely for being influenced, since its largest organs are sensing devices. It is permeable; it is entered by the world, via the senses, and can only roughly define its boundaries.
It reports to us in stories, intensities, hallucinatory jolts of uninterpreted perceptions: smells, sights, pleasure, pain. Its public image, its face is a collage of stories, borrowed images, superstitions, fantasies.
We have no idea what it "really" looks like. Because we have banished the body, but cannot get rid of it entirely, we can use it to hold what we don't want to keep but can't destroy. The real body, madcap patchwork acrobat, gets what the mind doesn't want, the bad news, the dirty stories.
The forbidden stories get written down off-center, in the flesh. In hysteria, the body starts to tell those stories back to us--our kidneys become our accusers, our spine whines, our knees gossip about overheard words, our fingers invent a sign language of blame and pain. Of course, the more garbage we pack into that magical body the more we fear it, and the more chance there is that it will turn on us, begin to speak, accuse us.
But that body-bag is also a treasure-trove, like any junkyard. It knows stories we've never told. It's straightforward enough to oppose the self to the not-self and reason to madness. It's even possible to make the leap from here to there, though coming back presents some problems.
But the borders between are frayed and permeable. It's possible to wander that uneven terrain, to practice slipping, skidding in the interzone. It's possible, and maybe preferable for the self to think of itself as a sort of practice rather than a thing, a proposition with variable terms, a mesh of relationships.
It's possible for a text to think of itself that way. ANY text. But hypertext in particular is a kind of amphibious vehicle, good for negotiating unsteady ground, poised on its multiple limbs where the book clogs up and stops; it keeps in motion. Conventional texts, on the other hand are in search of a place of rest; when they have found it, they stop.
Similarly, the mind, reading, wants to make sense, and once it has done so it considers its work done, so if you want to keep the mind from stopping there, you must always provide slightly more indicators than the mind can make use of. There must be an excess, a remainder. Or an undecideable oscillation between possibilities. I am interested in writing that verges on nonsense, where nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the superfluity of it. I would like to sneak as close to that limit as possible without reaching it.
This is the old kind of interactive writing: writing so dense or so slippery that the mind must do a dance to keep a grip on it. I am interested in writing this way for two reasons. One, because language must be teased into displaying its entire madcap lavish beauty. If you let it be serviceable then it will only serve you, never master you, and you will only write what you already know, which is not much.
It promotes common sense at the expense of all the others. Reality thinks it "includes" fiction, that fictional works are embedded in reality.
It's the boast of a bully. But just because reality's bigger doesn't make it boss. Every work of art is an alternate "world" with other rules, which threatens the alibi of naturalness our ordinary reality usually flaunts.
Every fictional world competes with the real one to some extent, but hypertext gives us the chance to sneak up on reality from inside fiction. It may be framed as a novel, yet link to and include texts meant to be completely non-fictional. Thus the pedigreed facts of the world can be swayed, framed, made persuaders of fiction, without losing their seats in the parliament of the real, as facts tend to do when they're stuck in a novel.
Hypertext fiction thus begins to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe. Ironically, that might make us like reality better: it's reality's hegemony that strips it of charm. Reality is based on country cottage principles: what's homey must be true. It is a tolerable place to live. What's dreadful is the homey on a grand scale, Raggedy Ann and Andy turned Adam and Eve, cross-stitch scenes of the Grand Canyon, the sun cast as the flame snapping behind the grate, the ocean our little kettle.
Those goofy grins turn frightening on a cosmic scale; the simplicity that makes it easy to pick up a coffeecup is not suitable for managing a country, or even a conscience. The closure of the normal is suffocating at the very least.
By writing we test the seams, pick out the stitches, trying to stretch the gaps between things to slip out through them into some uncharted space, or to let something spring up in the real that we don't already know, something unfamiliar, not part of the family, a changeling. She's not what he says she is. The banished body is not female, necessarily, but it is feminine. That is, it's amorphous, indirect, impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive. So is what we learned to call bad writing. Good writing is direct, effective, clean as a bleached bone.
Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that: clogged with a build-up of clutter and crud, knick-knacks and fripperies encrusted on every surface, a kind of gluey scum gathering in the chinks.
Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine which has also, by the way, been damned by its association with it, in a bizarre mutual proof without any fixed term.
It's dispersed, languorous, flaunting its charms all over the courtyard. Like flaccid beauties in a harem, you might say, if you wanted to inspire a rigorous distaste for it. Hypertext then, is what literature has edited out: the feminine.
That is not to say that only women can produce it. Women have no more natural gift for the feminine than men do. I'm not what you think I am. I am a loose aggregate, a sort of old fashioned cabinet of curiosities, interesting in pieces but much better as a composite.
It's the lines of traffic between the pieces that are worth attention, but this has been, until now, a shapeless sort of beauty, a beauty without a body, and therefore with few lovers. But hypertext provides a body, a vaporous sort of insufficiently tactile body but a body, for our experience of the beauty of relationships. It is like an astronomy of constellations rather than stars.
It is old-fashioned, in that sense. Or does her politeness make her criminal leanings steeper, more vertiginous for the height of their drawing room origins? Like a meathook hung over the spinet? Ghost writers are the only kind there are. The patchwork-like construction process of the text deliberately emphasises intertextuality and hybrid authorship.
Patchwork Girl has difficulty in understanding the division between herself and her sources. The structure and content of Patchwork Girl parallel each other; the scattered form of the work imitates the character created by the work: both the character and the work itself are a patchwork of parts that ultimately create the whole. The fusion of lexias that allow for multiple reading experiences reflects the synthesis of experiences that create the patchwork girl herself.
By adapting and borrowing from Baum and Shelley, the Patchwork Girl demonstrates how literature rearticulates the past. Jackson uses the work to create a conversation between herself and her influences. By assembling a work that borrows from various influences, Patchwork Girl embodies juxtaposition and multi-vocality that creates a composite message concerning the way we use technology to construct our own identity. Jackson uses the work to create a conversation between herself and other authors, such as Mary Shelley and L.
Frank Baum, borrowing words or phrases or ideas, and repurposing language of the past in a contemporary setting. Her inclusion of literary sources reinforces the idea that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Giants being those major texts, canonical texts, texts that have withstood time, ancient texts that are still studied today, texts that offer ancient wisdoms, texts that are referenced and made new by modern authors.
Baum, L F, and John R. The Marvelous Land of Oz. New York: William Morrow and Company, The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
Bauschke, D. Griswold, Jerry. Hayles, N. Because they are cyborg composites, the creature, the hypertext and their reader are made to cross over traditional definitions, codes and attribute. Aarseth Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Barthes , Roland. Paris : Seuil, Franck Baum , Lyman. The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
New York: HarperCollins, Bouchardon, Serge. Paris : Lavoisier, Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir.
Paris : Gallimard, Fraser, Nancy. London and New York: Verso, Hackman, Paul. Haraway, Donna. New York and London: Routledge, Hayles, Katherine K. Postmodern Culture Hayles , Katherine K. Narrative 9. Writing Machines.
Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems. Shelley , Jackson. Online: web. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. London and NewYork: Routledge, Regnauld, Arnaud. Atlantis Shelley, Mary. London: Penguin Classics, Sloterdijk, Peter. Rage and Time, A Psychopolitical Investigation. New York: Columbia University Press, Her research interests lie with contemporary British fiction and art. Supported by the 3LAM research team at Le Mans University and the Pays de la Loire region council she has been running research programs on the body and the new technologies for more than five years.
Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition. Navigation — Plan du site. Sillages critiques. Corps, techniques, technologies. La politique du genre de Shelley Jackson dans Patchwork Girl : une approche cyborg.
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