Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing and Hypertext

September 22, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 06, Number 2, January 1996

Barbara Page

Vassar College
page@vassar.edu

 

It was while reading my way into a number of recent fictions composed in hypertext that I began to think back on a tendency of women’s writing which aims not only at changing the themes of fiction but at altering the formal structure of the text itsel f. In a useful collection of essays about twentieth-century women writers, called Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs trace a line of authors who subvert what they see as patriarchal assumptio ns governing traditional modes of narrative, beginning with Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, and leading to such contemporaries as Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, and Kathy Acker. They write:

 

Although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms — nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering — are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (3-4)

 

Among contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing nonlinear, antihierarchical and decentered writing, but many women who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of “realist” narrative from a consciousness stirred by f eminist discourses of resistance, especially those informed by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. The claim of Friedman and Fuchs cited above is itself radical, namely that such women writers can produce themselves — as new beings or as ones p reviously unspoken — through self-conscious acts of writing against received tradition. A number of the contemporary writers I discuss in this essay make a direct address within the fictive text to feminist theory, rather more as a flag flown than as a definitive discursive marker, in recognition of themselves as engaged with other women in the discursive branch of women’s struggle against oppression.1For some writers of this tendency, hypertext would see m to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing, notwithstanding an aversion among many women to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind. My argument is not that the print authors I d iscuss here would be better served by the hypertext medium, but that their writing is in many respects hypertextual in principle and bears relation to discourses of many women writers now working in hypertext.

 

These women writers, as a rule, take for granted that language itself and much of canonical literature encode hierarchies of value that denigrate and subordinate women, and therefore they incorporate into their work a strategically critical or opposit ional posture, as well as a search for alternative forms of composition. They do not accept the notion, however, that language is hopelessly inimical or alien to their interests, and so move beyond the call for some future reform of language to an interv ention — exuberant or wary — in present discourses. I focus in particular on writers whose rethinking of gender construction enters into both the themes and the gestural repertoire of their compositions, and who undertake to redesign the very topograp hy of prose. At the most literal level of the text — that of words as graphic objects — all of these writers are leery of the smooth, spooling lines of type that define the fictive space of conventional print texts and delimit the path of the reader. Like other postmodernist writers, they move on from modernist methods of collage to constructions articulating alternatives to linear prose. The notion, for example, of textuality as weaving (a restoration of the root meaning of “text”) and of the constr uction of knowledge as a web that has figured prominently in the development of hypertext has also been important in feminist theory, though for rather different purposes.2 Like other postmodernist writers, also, many of these women experimentalists are strikingly self-reflexive, and write about their texts in the text. One important difference, though, concerns the self-conscious will among these writers not simply to reimagine writing as wea ving but rather to take apart the fabric of inherited textual forms and to reweave it into new designs. For all of these authors, restiveness with the fixity of print signifies something more than a struggle going on under a blanket of established formal meaning. Their aim is to rend the surface of language and to reshape it into forms more hospitable to the historical lives of women and to an esthetic of the will and desire of a self-apprehended female body that is an end unto itself and not simply ins trumental. One frequent mark of this new writing is the introduction of silence, partly as a memorial to the historical silencing of women’s voices, but also as a means of establishing a textual space for the entrance of those “others” chronically exclud ed from the closed texts of dogmatists and power interests.

 

As my point of departure, I want briefly to describe Carole Maso’s 1993 novel, AVA, her fourth book in order of composition, though published third. This text unfolds in the mind of a thirty-nine-year old professor of comparative literat ure named Ava Klein, who is dying of a rare blood disease, a form of cancer. The book, divided into Morning, Afternoon and Night, takes place on the last day of Ava’s life, the same day in which President George Bush draws his line in the sand of the Per sian Gulf states, inaugurating a war. Against this act and all the forces of division and destruction it symbolizes, against the malignancy of cancer and of militarism, Maso poses the unbounded mind of Ava, whose powers of memory and desire abide in the emblematic figure of a girl, recurring throughout the text, who draws an A and spells her own name. Ava’s narrative is in fragments that in the act of being read acquire fuller meaning, through repetition, through their discrete placement on the passing pages, through variation, and also through the generous space between utterances that gives a place to silence and itself comes to represent a certain freedom — of movement, of new linkage, of as-yet-unuttered possibilities. Here is how the book begins:

 

                    MORNING

Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance.  Birthdays. In-
dependence days.  Saints' days.  Even when we were poor.  With
verve.

Come sit in the morning garden for awhile.

Olives hang like earrings in late August.

A perpetual pageant.

A throbbing.

Come quickly.

The light in your eyes

Precious.  Unexpected things.

Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh.

You spoke of Trieste.  Of Constantinople.  You pushed the curls
from your face.  We drank Five-Star Metaxa on the island of Crete
and aspired to the state of music.

Olives hang like earrings.

A throbbing.  A certain pulsing.

The villagers grew violets.

We ran through genêt and wild sage.

Labyrinth of Crete, mystery of water,
home.

 

In a polemical preface to AVA, Maso argues that much of current commercial fiction, in attempting to ward off the chaos and “mess” of death with organized, rational narratives, ultimately becomes “death with its complacent, unequivocal tr uths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis.” In this preface, Maso traces her resistance to traditional narratives back to feelings of dissatisfaction with the “silly plots” of stories her mother read alou d to her as a child. In order to stop “the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax,” she would, she recalls, wander away, out of earshot, taking a sentence or a scene to dream over. Often she would detach the meanings from the words her mother read, turning the words into a kind of music, “a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me.” Bypassing the logos of stories, then, she walked into a freer space where she was able to invent, or rediscover, another tempo and o rdering of language felt as a sensuous transmission from the mother’s body to hers. “This is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body.” (From AVA 175-76)

 

This is the beginning, but not the end or sum of Maso’s fiction. Rather like Adrienne Rich’s “new poet” in her “Transcendental Etude,” she walks away from the old arguments into a space of new composition, where she takes up fragments of the already spoken with a notable lack of anxiety about influence. In the stream of her narrative one hears formal and informal voices of precursors and contemporaries, male and female, along with patches of fact, history, even critical discourse that figure as feat ures of the rhythmic text, the writing of a richly nourished adult mind — Ava Klein never more alive than on the day of her dying:

 

García Lorca, learning to spell, and not a day too soon.

Ava Klein in a beautiful black wig.  Piled up high.

And I am waiting at what is suddenly this late hour, for my ship to
come in --

Even if it is a papier-mâché ship on a plastic sea,
after all.

We wanted to live.

How that night you rubbed "olio santo" all over  me.  One liter oil,
chili peppers, bay leaves, rosemary.

And it's spaghetti I want at 11:00 A.M.

Maybe these cravings are a sign of pregnancy.  Some late last-minute
miracle.  The trick of living past this life.

To devour all that is the world.

Because more than anything, we wanted to live.

Dear Bunny,
       If it is quite convenient we shall come with our butterfly
       nets this
Friday.

You will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom --
unlike the more classical texts -- which are not texts that delimit
themselves, are not texts of territory with neat borders, with
chapters, with beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little
disquieting because you do not feel the

Border.

The edge.

How are you?  I've been rereading Kleist with great enthusiasm and I
wish you were around to talk to and I realize suddenly,

I miss you. (113)

 

For Ava, thinking and feeling go together, and reading is sensuous, rendering literal the definition of influence, so that whole passages of her text — still unmistakably her own — are washed in the colors of an admired author: Woolf, García Lorca, Beckett, and others. Ava’s reading is finally a species of her promiscuous engorgement with life, and of a mind that declines to wall off speaking from writing or to isolate recollection, narration and description from meditation and analysis. In the passage above, for example, a snatch of a letter to Edmund Wilson (“Bunny”) from the lapidary lepidoperist Nabokov stands next to a bit from Hélène Cixous that graphically tails off into broken borders which in turn begin to enact an ex pansion of the text of the sort that Cixous calls for. The book, curiously, achieves unity in the act of reading, as the rhythmic succession of passages induces a condition approaching trance. The effect is both aural and visual: when spoken, real time must pass between utterances; when read, real space must be traversed by the eye between islands of text.

 

In an essay that itself intermingles argument and reflection with quotation from her own novels and from precursor writers and theorists, Maso points to images that both ground her ambition and suggest alternatives to linear prose: “AVA c ould not have been written as it was, I am quite sure, if I had not been next to the water day after day. Incorporating the waves.” And, “The design of the stars then in the sky. I followed their dreamy instructions. Composed in clusters. Wrote const ellations of associations.” Attributing independent will to genres, she describes the “desire” of the novel to be a poem, of the poem to be an essay, of the essay to reach toward fiction, and “the obvious erotics of this.” (Notes 26) The desiring text r ebels against the virtual conspiracy between “commodity novelists” and publishers to lock a contrived sense of reality, shorn of its remoteness and mystery, into “the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.” As a lyric ar tist in large prose forms, Maso explains that

 

Writing AVA I felt at times . . . like a choreographer working with language in physical space. Language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. Creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. Shapes that then regather and re-form making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being. (Notes 27)

 

She names as precursors Virginia Woolf of the Waves and Gertrude Stein, in Stein’s remark, “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense. . . .” (28, 27) In place of plot she aims to “imagin e story as a blooming flower, or a series of blossomings,” for example, and makes space in the text for “the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. Precious, disappearing things.” (27) And here the italicized words, from the secon d section of AVA, both incrementally repeat a line from the opening of the book — “Precious. Unexpected things” — and underscore the ethical, as well as esthetic impulse in Maso’s fiction. (AVA186)

 

For Maso, the attraction of the novel is its unruly, expansive refusal of perfection. She argues that, because we no longer believe that the traditional stories are true, we can no longer write tidy, beginning-middle-end fiction, even if this means t hat we must “write notebooks rather than masterpieces,” as Woolf once suggested. (Notes 29) The gain will be “room and time for everything. This will include missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Instead of the “r eal” story, we shall have: “The ability to embrace oppositional stances at the same time. Contradictory impulses, ideas, motions. To assimilate as part of the form, incongruity, ambivalence.” (Notes 30) And for Maso, who has the confidence to found ima gination on her own experience, this form of fiction, that does not tyrannize and that allows “a place for the reader to live, to dream,” leads not to the “real” story but to “what the story was for me”: “A feminine shape — after all this time.” (Notes 3 0, 28)

 

In an essay that is something of a tour-de-force, entitled “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds),” poet and theorist Joan Retallack, like Maso, addresses what is — or can be — of particular import for women in the refiguration of writing toward non- or multi-linear, de- or re-centered prose, by means of a revaluation of the terms traditionally affixed to the subordinated figure of the feminine:

 

An interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what Western culture has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence, empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics; open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist discontents. (347)

 

In thinking about why for her the writing of women today seems particularly vibrant with potential, Retallack underscores the worth both of productive silence, that gives place to the construction of new images and meanings, and of collaboration, that emp owers writer and reader to “conspire (to breathe together) . . . in the construction of a living aesthetic event.” (356) While denying a turn toward essentialism, she argues that the historical situation of women now provides a particularly fertile “cons truction site” for new writing, one important feature of which is its invitation to the active participation of others in an ongoing textual process:

 

I’d like to suggest that it is a woman’s feminine text (denying any redundancy), which implicitly acknowledges and creates the possibility of other/additional/simultaneous texts. This is a model significantly different from Bloom’s competitve anxiety of influence. It opens up a distinction between the need to imprint/impress one’s mark (image) on the other, and an invitation to the other’s discourse . . . (358. My italics)

 

Against those feminists who despair of entering a language over-coded with misogyny, Retallack argues that “Language has always overflowed the structures/strictures of its own grammars,” and that “The so-called feminine is in language from the start.” (37 2) In this regard, Retallack supplies a validation of Maso’s ready, unanxious introduction of quotation from male authors in what she calls her feminine text.

 

That prose writers like Maso and poet/theorists like Retallack do not stand alone is indicated, for example, by the 1992 anthology entitled Resurgent: New Writing by Women which has been co-edited by Lou Robinson and Camille Norton . It brings together a generous selection of writers who mix genres of verse and prose freely and embed manifesto or critique both in the narrative and the topography of the writing. Resurgent is divided into two, or perhaps four, pa rts — “Transmission/Translation” and “Collaboration/Spectacle” — as it moves from single-author texts to collaborative and to performative texts. Lou Robinson writes in the introduction:

 

Everywhere in these prose pieces I find that unpredictable element in the language which forces consciousness to leap a gap where other writing would make a bridge of shared meaning . . . , a sense of something so urgent in its desire to be expressed that it comes before the words to say it, in the interstices, in the rhythm: Marina Tsvetaeva’s “song in the head without noise.” . . . This is writing that swings out over a chasm, that spits. (1)

 

Among the most interesting pieces in Resurgent are the collaborations, including one by Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, entitled “Reading and Writing Between the Lines,” that undertakes a punning reclamation of the term “collabor ation” itself. Their endeavor resembles that of Retallack, when she reclaims the word “conspire” by reminding readers of its root meaning as “to breathe together” and applies it to the notion of opening the authorial text to the discourse of others. In their piece, Marlatt and Warland, “running on together,” write their way through the self-betrayal of collaboration in its political sense to a celebration of co-labial play, in the lips of speech and of women’s sex:

 

'let me slip into something more comfortable'
					she glides across the
room
labi, to glide, to slip

(labile;  labilis:
labia;	labialis)
				la la la
'my labyl mynde...'
labilis,  labour,  belabour,  collaborate,  elaborate

. . . . .

slip of the tongue

				'the lability of innocence'

. . . . .

				 labia majora (the 'greater lips')
				 la la la
							and
						labia minora
				      (the 'lesser lips')
not two mouths but three!
slipping one over on polarity

						slippage in the text
you & me collabi, (to slip together)
labialization!)
slip(ping)  page(es)
like notes in class

o labilism o letter of the lips
o grafting  of our slips
labile lovers
'prone to undergo displacement in position or change in nature,
form, chemical composition;  unstable'

 

This word play owes most, perhaps, to Irigaray’s feminist displacement of the phallus as the central signifier in the sexual imaginary, particularly as articulated in Lacan. In “This Sex Which Is Not One,” she writes: “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.” (24) Although Irigaray’s language is open to the criticism that it may lead to biological essentialism, we should bear in mind that all language is shot through with metaphors, many derived from the body, and that some of the boldest interventions by innovative women writers have been throu gh an insistence on speaking the body in new terms as a way of breaking the hold of traditional discourses that denigrate and demonize the female body. This is a move against a crippling inheritance of ideology, as Nicole Ward Jouve points out: “The whol e idea of sex talking is itself symbolic, is itself discourse; the phrase is a turning around and reclaiming of ‘male’ discourse.” (32) It is also a move, as we have seen in Maso, toward the discovery, in material forms commonly associated with th e feminine, of structures capable of inspiring new forms of writing. For collaborative writers Marlatt and Warland, the co-labial slippage between two and one opens the text to a commingling of voices about the unsanctioned commingling of women’s bodies, thus enacting a double subversion of the Lacanian Law. The effect is not that of reductive essentialism but rather of the frank erotics Maso refers to, an imaginative discursive enactment of the “desire” of one text for another.

 

At some points in Marlatt and Warland’s text two voices march down separate columns of type in a way reminiscent of Kristeva’s antiphonal essay-invocations,3 but at others, they merge into pronominal ha rmony and a playful syntactic break-up, reminiscent of Stein, that shakes loose the overdetermined subject:

 

to keep (y)our word.  eroticizing collaboration we've moved from treason
into trust.  a difficult season, my co-labial writer writing me in we
while we
are three and you is reading away with us --

who?

you and you (not we) in me and	      are you trying to avoid the auto-
all of us reading, which is what      biographical? what is 'self' writ-
we do when left holding the	      ing here? when you leave space
floor, watching you soar with	      for your readers who may not
the words' turning and turning	      read you in the same way the
their sense and sensing their	      autobiographical becomes com-
turns i'm dancing with you in	      munal even communographic in
the dark learning to trust that       its contextual and narrative
sense of direction learning to	      (Carol Gilligan) women's way of
read you in to where i want to go     thinking -- and collaborating.
although the commotion in
words the connotations you
bring are different we share the
floor the ground floor meaning
dances on . . .

 

The verbal strategies here are familiar enough to contemporary readers: the deconstructive questioning (whose is (y)our word?) that exposes the instability of subject and object; the reclaiming of terms and unmaking of conventional syntax; the diologism o f the blocked texts. The antiphonal effect of the double columns in fact puts eye-reading into crisis, just as, conversely, the broken, parenthesized, multiplication of signifiers baffles a single voice reading aloud in sequence. Unlike many collaborati ve writers, Marlatt and Warland refuse to distinguish between their two voices by use of a different type face or placement on the page. In Maso’s AVA, influences naturalize and borders among texts break; in Marlatt and Warland, collaboration undermines the notion of writing as intellectual property: we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. It is no coincidence, I think, that prose of this kind floats in generous, unconventional volumes of space, seeking escape, it would seem , from the rigid lineation and lineage of the print text.

 

Just as the potential for self-circling narcissism in Maso’s text is overcome by an ethics of regard for the external world, so similarly in many of the texts in Resurgent is celebratory subjectivity matched by an engaged politics, even — in Charles Bernstein’s words — by the “need to reground polis,” through “an act of human reconstruction and reimagining.” (200) Some, like co-authors Sally Silver and Abigail Child, directly link self-renovation with revolutionary politics, as when they urge women to “defeat coherent subjectivity on which capitalism, idealism is based.” (167) For others, though, political positioning has been made difficult by the very fragmentation of the culturally constructed self, owing to a painful severa nce from a home base. In Resurgent, the editors’ decision to select “Melpomene Tragedy” from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee highlights this phase of alienation and the yearning it engenders. In this chapter of her book, Cha writes from exile in America to her mother in South Korea and from a cultural dislocation caused by war that is felt as the separation of the self from a machine-produced screen image. In half-broken syntax, she makes a fervent and bitterly ironic ap peal to the traditional female personification of tragedy to intervene against the war machine that invented and shattered her:

 

Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but
rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than
her own.  Suffice Melpomene, to exorcize from this mouth the
name the words the memory of severance through this act by
this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once.
She without the separate act of
uttering.

 

In Cha’s Dictee, each chapter enunciates through formal and visual means a distinctive matter, often contrapuntal or even contradictory to that in other sections of the book. Its method of including writing in several languages and visua l artifacts from East and West, and its experimental form in fact led scholars of the 1980’s who were gathering the heritage of Asian American writing to shun Dictee for a time, as lacking ethnic integrity. The composition escapes the bounda ries of a single cultural identity, just as its form steadily resists confinement within the print book. As scholar Shelley Sunn Wong explains, Dictee “instantiates a writing practice that stumbles over rather than smoothes out the uneven te xtures of raced and gendered memory.” (45) At the very front of the book, for example, before the title page, appears a photograph of Korean graffiti etched in stone on the wall of a Japanese coal mine, by one of many workers forced into exile and labor. The words read in translation:

 

Mother
I miss you
I am hungry
I want to go home.

 

Wong regards Cha’s placement of this text — the only words in Dicteein the Korean language — that reads vertically from right to left, ending at the extreme lefthand margin, as a provocative move against conventional writings and readings that encode and enforce oppressive hierarchies: “Instead of leading the reader into the work, the directional movement of the frontispiece begins to usher the reader back out of the text. Within the context of narrative development, the frontispiece thus functions not to forward the narrative but, rather, to forestall it.” (46)

 

The tendencies of the kind of writing I have been describing receive fresh realization in the medium of hypertext. One of these, a collaborative fiction called Izme Pass, by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, seems particularly congruent wi th those in Resurgent, both in its politics and in its formal concerns. Izme Pass came about as the result of an experiment in writing proposed for the journal Writing on the Edge. The editors first asked hy pertext novelist Michael Joyce, best known for his hyperfiction Afternoon, to compose a story. Then they invited other authors to revise or augment his text into a collaboration. Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, each of whom had been at work on a hyperfiction of her own, took up the challenge but refused to accept Joyce’s fiction, called WOE, or a memory of what will be, as a prior or instigating text. Recognizing a patriarchal precept in the positing of a master text, they set about to create an independent construction that would also transgressively subvert and appropriate WOE. (79) In an on-screen map they placed a writing space, containing fragments of Joyce’s text, into a triad with spaces containing parts o f their own works-in-progress, then added a fourth, new work, called “Pass,” woven of connections they created among the other three texts to produce an intertextual polylogue:

 

(Image)

 

As Guyer and Petry explain: “Almost immediately we began to see how this process of tinkering with existing texts by intentionally sculpting their inchoate connections had the ironic effect of making everything more fluid. Izme Pass bega n to affect Rosary [Petry’s work] which poured its new character back into Quibbling [Guyer’s work] which flowed over into WOE and back through Izme.” (82) At the level of textual organization and of st ructural metaphor, Izme Pass mocks WOE, which graphically emanates from a “Mandala,” an Asiatic diagram for meditation supposed to lead to mystical insight:

 

(Image)

 

Instead, they designed a diamond- or o- or almond-shaped map headed by a “Mandorla,” the Asiatic signifier of the yoni, the divine female genital:

 

(Image)

 

Appropriations and revaluations of the sort illustrated here constitute critique as an internal dynamic of this hypertext. Because it is written in the Storyspace program, however, Izme Pass takes the further step of opening itself to in terventions by readers turned writers, who can if they choose add to, subtract from, or rearrange the text. In this respect, the politics of hypertext allows for one realization of the feminist aim articulated by Retallack: it provides “an invitation to the other’s discourse.” It pushes further those disruptions of the “real” story Maso calls for, allowing for effects of the sort she lists, including “missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions.” Like all hypertexts, Izme Pass prohibits definitive reading; the reader chooses the path of the narrative. The graphical device of notating linked words, moreover, sometimes introduces further narrative possibilities. Opening Izme Pass through its title , the reading begins with this figure of a female storyteller:

 

When a woman tells a story she is remembering what
will be.  What symmetry, or assymetry, the story
passes through the orifice directly beneath
the wide-spread antlers, curved horns of ritual at her head,
just as it passes through the orifice between her open
legs.  Labrys.	How could she not know?

When a woman tells a story it is to save.  To husband
the world, you might say.  Thinking first to save
her mother, her daughter, her sisters, Scheherazade
tells, her voice enchanting, saving him in the bargain.

When a woman tells, oh veiled voice, a
story.

 

In Izme Pass, words linked to other texts can also signify in the passage on-screen. Here, for example, the linked words a story; passes through; passes through; mother; daughter; her sisters; saving him in the bargainyield a narrativ e surplus, becoming syntactic in themselves and creating resonant juxtapositions. In this case, the linked words sketch an incipient story having many “passes,” constellated around a family of women, that predicates the saving of a man.

 

Proceeding into the text through the word “story” itself, on a first pass one arrives at a text space under the title “stones,” that gives a definition of “cairns” and suggests one metaphor — or several — for communal story-writing:

 

Cairns: the cumulative construction of heaps of stones by
passers-by at the site of accidents, disgraces, deaths,
violence, or as remembrances (records) of journeys.

It is as if the stones in their configuration, in the years of
their leaning against one another, learn to talk with one
another, and are married.

 

Nested in the “stones” box at the map level is an assemblage of writing spaces that themselves graphically depict a sort of cairn and produce a textual neighborhood, so to speak, of thematic materials associatively linked to the notion of stones:

 

(Image)

 

Such a rich site as this offers a host of possibilities to the reader. I might for example linger at the level of this screen to examine the variety of materials gathered into the cairn. Or I might choose a text and follow the default path where it leads , out of this screen to other locations in Izme Pass. If I choose to click on “Stonestory 1,” at the center of the cairn, I am transported abruptly to a narrative line: “She said, When I was little I held stones up to my crotch to feel the coldness.'” Following the default path from this space, I navigate next to a space titled “a wedding,” containing this text:

 

Beside her groom, the cool stone closed tightly in her palm.
Just before the ceremony he had given her a small jade
butterfly, signal of his intent.  He wanted to learn her, and
one of the first things he knew was that jade was her
stone.

Piedras de ijada, stones of the
loin.

 

And then after that to a space titled “delight”:

 

His.  Delight.	Is what she seeks.  In this shade which
she herself creates, his mind turned inward, she might
hold him in her palm so, brief reprieve.

Another, he says.  Again.

 

Another click on the default path returns me to “Stonestory 1,” establishing a tight narrative circle that I realize has moved me swiftly through ritual passages of a female eroticism that has been symbolically associated with and mediated by stones. Deciding at this point to investigate the adjacent “Stonetory 2,” I navigate into the prophetic speech of a woman, here again unnamed: “She said, In order to move mountains you’ve got to know what stones are about.'” The default path in this case issues outward into a journal entry about a sort of female Demosthenes, with the words “She gathered a pearl in her mouth, an O within an O . . . ,” and then on to a screen entitled “Scheherazade,” one of Izme‘s key figures, I realize, recalling th e “stories” text with which my reading began. Backtracking to the journal entry about “an O within an O,” I take note of the growing significance of circles in Izme, and decide to revisit a screen I had previously encountered in my survey o f the cairn, entitled “salt,” and I read:

 

The alchemical symbol was the same for water as for
salt (representing the horizon, separation and/or
joining of earth and sky)

symbol of purification and rebirth

tastes like blood and seawater, both fluids identified
with the womb

 

Within this configuration of Izme‘s texts, circles have produced associations among: the form of a woman’s body, rituals of sexual passage, prophetic speaking, female storytelling and, here, a mystical perception of cosmic order. Becau se I am exploring Izme as an open text, that is, one that allows, even encourages, the reader to intervene as a writer,4 I now decide — unthinkable in one too well-schooled in reading closed pr int texts — to make a link and add a new text, by joining the O motif to the passage I quoted above in this essay, from Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One.” But where to place it? In order to answer this question, I find myself attending more closel y than I might otherwise do to how the structure of Izme and its thematic nodes interact. Finally, I decide simply to nest my new text within the salt, so to speak, by dragging a writing space I create into the interior of the “salt” space, linking it to the Irigaray passage from the alchemical symbol on a path that I name “like lips”:

 

In all of the texts under discussion here, there is a dynamic relation between feminist thematics and textuality, a relationship that intensifies in a hypertext such as Izme Pass, with its complex interweaving of disparate writings and it s invitation to the reader to move freely both among texts and between texts and syntactic maps. Not all hypertexts by women are as unconstrained or open as those, like Izme Pass, although many nevertheless contain aspects of what one might call hypertextual feminism. Judy Malloy’s lyrical fiction its name was Penelope, for example, presents only a handful of choices at any given moment of reading, through labels that may be clicked on to carry the reader into sections titled ” Dawn,” “Sea” (subdivided into four sections: “a gathering of shades,” “that far-off island,” “fine work and wide across,” “rock and a hard place”) and “Song.” Because the text screens of the “Dawn” and “Sea” sections have been programmed by the computer to produce a sort of random rearrangement with each successive reading, the contexts and nuances of any given passage change with different readings, even though one’s movement through a sequence is relatively linear. Though restrictive by comparison wit h Izme Pass, the structure Malloy adopts strengthens the analogy she intends between the text screens we read and the photographic images her artist-protagonist, Ann Mitchell, is trying to work into assemblages.

 

The “it” named Penelope in Malloy’s fiction is a toy sailboat, the inciting image of her strategic reconsideration of the Odyssey. In her story, Anne Mitchell, though a weaver of images like her wifely forebear, does not stay put but rather wends her way through relationships and sexual liaisons, evading “That Far-Off Island,” Malloy’s version of Calypso, on which, Malloy remarks in her introductory Notes, “[i]n these days, some married women artists feel trapped.” (11) Penelope’s compounded, disjun ctive structure corresponds with and seems to arise from the narrator’s restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire:

 

That Far-Off Island
On the telephone he told me a story
about working in an ice cream store
when he was 14 years old.
I looked through the box of photos that I keep by my bed
while I listened.

 

Repeatedly in the narrative, the pursuit of art draws Anne away from a lover and the “island” of monogamous, domesticated sex:

 

That Far-Off Island
We were looking at contact sheets in his kitchen.
My coffee sat untouched in the center of the table.
Where his shirt was unbuttoned,
dark hairs curled on his chest.
I got up and began to put the contact sheets
back into the manilla folder.
“I have to go,” I said.

 

Unlike its classical antecedent, Malloy’s Penelope is spare rather than expansive, made of vignettes rather than continuously developed action or panoramic description. Malloy, however, argues that Penelope, a narrabase, as she calls it, is not stream of consciousness, like parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, though it does bear a resemblance, she believes, to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, “that strove to be the writing equivalent of impressionist painting ,” just as Penelope “strives to be the writing equivalent of the captured photographic moment. . . .” (Notes 13) The analogy between the on-screen texts of Penelope and sequences of photographs prompts the reader’s reflection up on the nature of each medium. A photograph can be read as a composed image of visual objects removed from time and stilled into permanence, or as a momentary arrest of motion in time, pointing back toward a just-gone past and forward to a promised future . Similarly, though the lines of any on-screen writing are set (at least in a read-only text), and may seem as isolated as a single photograph found on the street, in the varied sequences one reads, the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, p oised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing.

 

In light of this interrelation of theme and structure in Penelope, Malloy’s decision to set the texts in “Song” — which tells a partial tale of a love affair — into a fixed sequence nudges the reader to consider how this differently des igned episode relates to the rest of the fiction. “Song” offers something of a romantic idyl, and something of a threat to Malloy’s edgy contemporary woman artist, fearful that sexual desire may lead her to yield to a man who would fill all of her space and time with his demand for her attention and care. And so the set sequence of “Song,” threaded through with images of a recording tape that is ravelled and rewound, comes to an end that allows either for a replay of its looping revery, in accordance wi th the textual program, or instead to a new departure, either through the active agency of the narrator within the fiction, who takes up the instrument of her work, or of the reader, who reaches out for a selection other than [Next]:

 

Song
Across the brook,
three teenage boys sat on a rock,
drinking beer.
I took out my camera.

END OF SONG — if you press <Next>,
the chorus will begin again.
Next Sea Song

 

Thus, in Malloy’s Penelope, the interplay of hypertextual freedom and sequential constraint — an artifact of the electronic medium itself — surprisingly produces a variant enactment of the dilemmas and decisions her woman artist struggles w ith inside the fiction.

 

In all of the works I have been discussing, the conscious feminism of the writer animates her determination not simply to write but to intervene in the structure of discourse, to interrupt reiterations of what has been written, to redirect the streams of narrative and to clear space for the construction of new textual forms more congenial to women’s subjectivity. And all of these writers have understood that their project entails both the articulation of formerly repressed or dismissed stories and th e rearticulation of textual forms and codes. It is for this reason, perhaps, that feminist theory and textual practice can be of particular pertinence to theorists of hypertext who recognize a radical politics in the rhetoric and poetics of hypertextual writing. And this is why, I believe, hypertext should prove to be a fruitful site for innovative writing by women, despite a deep-dyed skepticism and resistance toward its claims and demands.

 

In her hypertext novel Quibbling, excerpts of which provided material for Izme Pass, Carolyn Guyer embeds passages from a diary that reflect her sense of writing at a critical moment of change in relations between women and m en. Importantly, she conceives that where they are placed textually will affect how they can develop and how they will encounter one another. Here, for example, is one such passage; its title is, significantly, “topographic”:

 

8 Sept 90
I wonder what would happen to the story if I changed how
I have it organized right now.	I've been keeping all the
various elements of it gathered separately in his/her own
boxes and areas just so I could move around in it and work
more easily.  But it strikes me that each of the men is
developing as himself and in relation to his lover, while
the women are developing as themselves but also kind of like
sisters.  Each man has his box as a major element, or cove,
but each woman has her own box within the nun area.
Like a dormitory, gymnæceum, or a convent.

I've thought a number of times lately to bring each woman
into her lover's box and make each cove then a marriage box,
but have not done it.  The topography of the story speaks as
it forms, as well as when the reader encounters it.  I believe
what I was (am) doing is helping the women stay independent.
Also, giving them access, through proximity, to each
other.

 

In many ways, topography is the story of this writing, and it is remarkable that women, so long objectified and imprisoned in male fantasies of the feminine as territory, earth, terra incognita, should incorporate into the struggle to achieve self-articulation the remaking of both the material and figurative space in which they live, or will live after the earthquake that shakes down the myriad symbols and structures that have constricted them. Even in the handful of hypertextual fict ions that have been written thus far, the potential for projects of radical change in representational art is evident. Especially for women writers who self-reflexively incorporate thinking about texts into fiction and for women who wish to seize rather than shy from the technological means of production, hypertext — which peculiarly welcomes and makes space for refraction and oppositional discourses — can be inviting, even though it rightly arouses a suspicion that its assimilative vastness may swallo w up subversion.

 

This suspicion is confirmed provocatively by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan in a discussion of what they regard as the “futility of resistance” in electronic writing: “Where a resistant reading of print literature always produces another definitive discourse, the equivalent procedure in hypertext does just the opposite, generating not objective closure but a further range of openings that extend the discursive possibilities of the text for ‘constructive’ transaction.” (235) The very openness of hy pertext, initially appealing to writers of resistance discourses, carries the risk that their voices may simply be absorbed into the medium, precisely because, as Moulthrop and Kaplan explain, “it offers no resistance to the intrusion.” (235) The subversions and contestations in Izme Pass, however, suggest that resistance is possible at least at the level of syntax or structure. Similarly, as her diary in Quibbling indicates, Guyer wishes to structure gender-specific bo undaries and communities into her text, in an effort to preserve her fictive women’s independence from men while giving them proximity to other women. While the principle of linking perhaps does open a text to limitless discursive possibility, as Moulthr op and Kaplan argue, when a graphic mapping is used, as in Storyspace documents, new possibilities for demarcation and affiliation appear. This protocol, however, carries its own hazard; although any writing in an open electronic text is both provisional and discursively extendable, graphic maps or syntactic displays can reinscribe enclosure and hierarchy.

 

In differently structuring the text spaces of men and women in Quibbling, Guyer moves toward the encoding of difference at the level of structure, but then, through the reflexive interpolation of the diary, she shifts the signification of those spaces into history, by analogy to women’s communities in the dormitory, convent or gymnæceum. Historians of women have viewed such places variously, either as sites of confinement or as sites where women have achieved both supportive commun ity and freedom from servitude. While giving scope to the independence of women, in Quibbling (and in the collaborative Izme Pass) Guyer places emphasis on the importance of women’s communities through both structure and story. In Penelope, Malloy lays emphasis on the development of women’s subjectivity: like the individualistic Woolf with her room of one’s own, Anne Mitchell seeks a place where she can concentrate her attention and do her work, like Maso wh o wants to write, not the “real” story, but what “the story was for me.” (my italics) There is ample room in feminism for both tendencies; one can easily imagine an Ava or an Anne Mitchell at work within the fictive space of Quibbling. The direction hypertext and its fictions will take in this volatile moment for textuality and for gender relations is not altogether clear, but if hypertext is to realize its potential as a medium for inclusive and democratic writing, it is profoundly important that women’s desire and creative will should contribute to its future shapings. As Guyer writes, “the topography of the story speaks as it forms,” and a more hospitable topography will speak a fuller, richer story, one that can, as Retallack a rgues, invite those former Others into an ongoing shared discourse.

 

Notes

 

1. On the matter of “writing the feminine,” two questions are likely to be raised right away: (1) does the very term impose an invidious construction of the dyad masculine/feminine, such that the “feminine” locks writers into otherness, lack, and erasure; (2) does “writing the feminine” limit or liberate the writer, or perhaps achieve some other unanticipated result? I intend to take up these questions less in reference to theory than to the practice and professions of women writers wh o regard themselves as feminist or who regard their texts as examples of writing the feminine.

 

2. See for example Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.”

 

3. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” for example.

 

4. In her essay, “Fretwork: ReForming Me,” Carolyn Guyer describes her dismay on finding that someone had taken up her invitation to add writing to a work of hers, because she first judged that it was not good and then felt guilty becau se she “was imposing cultural values as if they were universal, absolute standards.” In this essay she searches for theoretical and figurative means by which to incorporate and embody “the challenges of multicultural communities,” uncovering along the wa y the trap of perfectionism (as Maso has also done in her argument for the messiness of the novel) and, by contrast, the privilege, as she defines it, “in sharing rather than in the owning of knowledge.” This leads her to argue for the value of opening a rt to differences that alter contexts and restore the vitality of dynamic process rather than the stillness of mastery. Guyer’s argument calls to mind John Cage’s advocacy of aleatory composition.

 

Works Cited

 

  • Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992.
  • Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. 1982, Berkeley: Third Woman P, 1995.
  • Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.
  • Guyer, Carolyn. “Fretwork: ReForming Me.” Unpublished.
  • —. Quibbling. Eastgate Systems. Software, 1991. Macintosh and Windows.
  • Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. Izme Pass. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate Systems, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
  • —. “Notes for Izme Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 82-89.
  • Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
  • Joyce, Michael. Afternoon. Eastgate Systems, 1987. Software. Macintosh.
  • —. WOE. Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991). Eastgate, 1991. Software. Macintosh.
  • Jouve, Nicole Ward, with Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. “Where Now, Where Next?” The Semi-Transparent Envelope: Women Writing — Feminism and Fiction. Eds. Roe, Sellers, Jouve, with Michèle Roberts. London and NY: Marion Boyers, 1994.
  • Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. NY: Columbia UP, 1986.
  • Malloy, Judy. its name was Penelope. Eastgate Systems, 1993. Software. Macintosh and Windows.
  • Maso, Carole. AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1993.
  • —. “OnAVA.” Conjunctions 20 (May 1993): 172-76.
  • —. “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: A Lifelong Conversation with Myself, Entered Midway.” American Poetry Review 24.2 (March/April 1995): 26-31.
  • Miller, Nancy K. “Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. NY: Columbia UP, 1986. 270-95.
  • Moulthrop, Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. “They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing.” Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Eds. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1994. 220-37.
  • Retallack, Joan. “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds).” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 344-77.
  • Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton, 1978.
  • Robinson, Lou, and Camille Norton, eds. Resurgent: New Writing by Women. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1992.
  • Wong, Shelley Sunn. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 43-68.

 

Some Other Hypertext Works by Women

 

  • Arnold, Mary-Kim. Lust. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
  • Cramer, Kathryn. In Small & Large Pieces. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
  • Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. I Have Said Nothing. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:2 (1993).
  • Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, by Mary Shelley and Herself. Eastgate Systems, 1995.
  • Larsen, Deena. Marble Springs. Eastgate Systems, 1993.
  • Mac, Kathy. Unnatural Habitats. Eastgate Quarterly, 1:3 (1994).
  • Moran, Monica. Ambulance: An Electronic Novel. Electronic Hollywood, 1993.
  • Smith, Sarah. King of Space. Eastgate Systems, 1990.