N. Katherine Hayles

English Department
University of California Los Angeles
HAYLES@humnet.ucla.edu

 

Five hundred years of print have made the conventions of the book transparent to us.¹ It takes something like Sol Lewitt’s Squares with the Sides and Corners Torn Off to bring into visibility again the convention of the page.²The pages display black squares, centered with white margins, that indeed have their corners torn. But the sides appear to be intact–until we realize that the square in question is not the black image but the entire page, cropped during production. For some time now writers and artists working in the medium of artist books have delighted in arranging such jolts of surprise, exploring, transgressing, and exploding the conventions of the book while still retaining enough “bookishness” to make clear they remain within its traditions, even as they redefine and expand what “book” means. Their work reminds us how important it is to engage the specificity of media.

 

The long reign of print has induced a kind of somnolence in literary and critical studies, a certain inattentiveness to the diverse forms in which “texts” appear. Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these clearly coming into view. Re-reading Roland Barthes’s influential essay “From Work to Text,” I am struck both by its presceince and by how far we have moved beyond it. As Jay David Bolter and George Landow have pointed out, Barthes’s description of “text,” with its dispersion, multiple authorship, and rhizomatic structure, uncannily anticipates electronic hypertext (Bolter, Writing Space; Landow, Hypertext). “The metaphor of the Text is that of the network,” Barthes writes (61). Yet at the same time he can also assert that “the text must not be understood as a computable object,” computable here meaning limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned (57). Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the word “text” has become ubiquitous in literary discourse, almost completely displacing the more specific term “book.” Yet Barthes’s vision remains rooted in print culture, for he defines the text through its differences from books, not through its similarities with electronic textuality. In urging the use of “text,” Barthes was among those who helped initiate semiotic and performative approaches to discourse. But this shift has entailed loss as well as gain. Useful as poststructuralist approaches have been in enabling textuality to expand beyond the printed page, they have also had the effect of eliding differences in media, treating everything from fashion to fascism as a semiotic system. Perhaps now, after the linguistic turn has yielded so many important insights, it is time to turn again to a careful consideration of what difference the medium makes.

 

In calling for medium-specific analysis, I do not mean to suggest that media should be considered in isolation from one another. Quite the contrary. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have shown in Remediation, media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other, incorporating aspects of competing media into themselves while simultaneously flaunting the advantages their own forms of mediation offer. Voyager’s now-defunct line of “Expanded Books,” for example, went to the extreme of offering readers an option that made the page as it was imaged on screen appear dog-eared. Another function inserted a paper clip at the top of the screenic page, which itself was programmed to look as much as possible like print. On the other side of the screen, many print texts are now imitating electronic hypertexts. These range from DeLillo’s Underworld to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, which self-consciously pushes the book form toward hypertext through arrows that serve as visual indications of hypertextual links. Media-specific analysis attends both to the specificity of the form–the fact that the Voyager paper clip is an image rather than a piece of bent metal–and to citations and imitations of one medium in another. Attuned not so much to similarity and difference as to simulation and instantiation, media-specific analysis (MSA) moves from the language of “text” to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, mutable image and durably inscribed mark, texton and scripton, computer and book.

 

In the spirit of MSA, I propose the following game. Using only the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium? The point of this game is to disallow all references to the content or operation of electronic hypertexts, although naturally these would be important in any full-scale literary analysis. Restricting ourselves to the medium alone, how far is it possible to go? This kind of analysis is artificial in that it deliberately forbids itself access to the full repertoire of literary reading strategies, but it may nevertheless prove illuminating about what difference the medium makes. Following these rules, I am able to score the following eight points.

 

Point One: Electronic Hypertexts Are Dynamic Images. In the computer the signifier exists not as a durably inscribed flat mark but as a screenic image produced by layers of code precisely correlated through correspondence rules. Even when electronic hypertexts simulate the appearance of durably inscribed marks, they are transitory images that need to be constantly refreshed to give the illusion of stable endurance through time.

 

Point Two: Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analogue Resemblance and Digital Coding. The digital computer is not, strictly speaking, entirely digital. At the most basic level of the computer are electronic polarities, which are related to the bit stream through the analogue correspondence of morphological resemblance. Higher levels of code use digital correspondence, for example in the rules that correlate the compiler language with a programming language like C++ or Lisp. Analogue resemblance typically reappears at the top level of the screenic image, for example in the desktop icon of a trash barrel. Thus digital computers have an Oreo-like structure with an analogue bottom, a frothy digital middle, and an analogue top.³

 

Point Three: Electronic Hypertexts Are Generated Through Fragmentation and Recombination. As a result of the frothy digital middle of the computer’s structure, fragmentation and recombination are intrinsic to the medium. These textual strategies can of course also be used in print texts, for example in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes. But unlike print, digital texts cannot escape fragmentation, which is deeper, more pervasive, and more extreme than with the alphanumeric characters of print.

 

Point Four: Electronic Hypertexts Have Depth and Operate in Three Dimensions. Digital coding and analogue resemblance each have specific advantages. Analogue resemblance allows information to be translated between two differently embodied material instantiations, as when a sound wave is translated into the motion of a vibrating diaphragm of a microphone. Whenever two material entities interact, analogue resemblance is likely to come into play because it allows one form of continuously varying information to be translated into a similarly shaped informational pattern in another medium. Once this translation has taken place, digital coding is used to transform the continuity of morphological form into numbers (or other discrete codes). Intrinsic to this process is the transformation of a continuous shape into a series of code markers. In contrast to the continuity of analogue pattern, the discreteness of code enables the rapid manipulation and transmission of information. Human readers, with sensory capabilities evolved through eons of interacting with three-dimensional environments, are much better at perceiving patterns in analogue shapes than performing rapid calculations with numbers. When presented with code, humans tend to push toward perceiving it as analogue pattern. Although most of us learned to read using the digital method of sounding out each letter, for example, we soon began to recognize the shape of words and phrases, thus modulating the discreteness of alphabetic writing with the analogue continuity of pattern recognition. The interplay between analogue and digital takes place in a different way with screenic text than with print, and these differences turn out to be important for human perception. With present-day screens, reading speed on screen is typically about one-sixth that with print. Although the factors causing this difference are not well understood, they undoubtedly have something to do with the dynamic nature of screen images. Text on screen is produced through complex internal processes that make every word also a dynamic image, every discrete letter a continuous process.

 

To distinguish between the image the user sees and the strings as they exist in the text, Espen Aarseth has proposed the terminology scripton and texton (62ff.). In a digital computer texton could refer to voltages, strings of binary code, or programming code, depending on who the “reader” is taken to be. Scriptons would always include the screen image but could also include any code visible to a user who was able to access different layers of code. Textons can appear in print as well as electronic media. Stipple engraving, although it is normally perceived by the reader as a continuous image, operates through the binary digital distinction of ink dot/no ink dot; here the scripton is the image and the ink dots are the textons.⁴ In electronic media textons and scriptons operate in a vertical hierarchy rather than through the flat microscale/macroscale play of stipple engraving. With electronic texts there is a clear distinction between scriptons that appear on screen and the textons of underlying code, which normally remain invisible to the casual user. This difference between print and screenic text can be summarized by saying that print is flat and code is deep. A corollary is that the flat page of print remains visually and kinesthetically accessible to the user,⁵ whereas the textons of electronic texts can be brought into view only by using special techniques and software.

 

Point Five: Electronic Hypertexts Are Mutable and Transformable. The multiple coding levels of electronic textons allow small changes at one level of code to be quickly magnified into large changes at another level. The layered coding levels thus act like linguistic levers, giving a single keystroke the power to change the entire appearance of a textual image. An intrinsic component of this leveraging power is the ability of digital code to be fragmented and recombined. Although the text appears as a stable image on screen, it achieves its dynamic power of mutation and transformation through digital fragmentation and recombination. In addition, the rapid processing of digital code allows programs to create the illusion of depth in screenic images, for example in the three-dimensional landscapes of Myst or in the layered windows of Microsoft Word. Thus both scriptons and textons are perceived as having depth, with textons operating digitally through coding levels and scriptons operating analogically through screenic representation of three-dimensional spaces.

 

Point Six: Electronic Hypertexts Are Spaces to Navigate. Electronic hypertexts are navigable in at least two senses. They present to the user a visual interface which must be navigated through choices the user makes to progress through the hypertext; and they are encoded on multiple levels that the user can access using the appropriate software, for example by viewing the source code of a network browser as well as the surface text. As a result of its construction as a navigable space, electronic hypertext is intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print texts.

 

Point Seven: Electronic Hypertexts Are Written and Read in Distributed Cognitive Environments. Modern-day computers perform cognitively sophisticated acts when they collaborate with human users to create electronic hypertexts. These frequently include acts of interpretation, as when the computer decides how to display text in a browser independent of choices the user makes. It is no longer a question of whether computers are intelligent. Any cognizer which can perform the acts of evaluation, judgment, synthesis, and analysis exhibited by expert systems and autonomous agent software programs should prima facie be considered intelligent. Of course books also create rich cognitive environments, but they passively embody the cognitions of writer, reader, and book designer rather than actively participate in cognition themselves. To say that the computer is an active cognizer does not necessarily mean it is superior to the book as a writing technology. Keeping the book as a passive device for external memory storage and retrieval has striking advantages, for it allows the book to possess a robustness and reliability beyond the wildest dreams of a software designer. Whereas computers struggle to remain viable for a decade, books maintain backward compatibility for hundreds of years. The issue is not the technological superiority of either medium but rather the specific conditions a medium instantiates and enacts. When we read electronic hypertexts, we do so in environments that include the computer as an active cognizer performing sophisticated acts of interpretation and representation. Thus cognition is distributed not only between writer, reader, and designer (who may or may not be separate people) but also between humans and machines (which may or may not be regarded as separate entities).

 

Point Eight: Electronic Hypertexts Initiate and Demand Cyborg Reading Practices. Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity. Although this subject position may also be evoked through the content of print texts, electronic hypertexts necessarily enact it through the specificity of the medium.

 

In articulating these eight points, I do not mean to argue for the superiority of electronic media. Rather, I am concerned to delineate characteristics of digital environments that writers and readers can use as resources in creating literature and responding to it in sophisticated, playful ways. In much the same way that artists’ books both reinforce and challenge the conventions of the book, so electronic texts can variously reinforce the characteristics of the medium or work against them by creating representations that mask their operation, as Voyager does with its Expanded Books. In either case the specificity of the medium comes into play as its characteristics are flaunted, suppressed, subverted. Whatever strategies are adopted, they take place within a cultural tradition where print books have been the dominant literary medium for hundreds of years, so it can be expected that electronic literature will use the awesome simulation powers of the computer to mimic print books as well as to insist on its own novelty, in the recursive looping of medial ecology that Bolter and Grusin call remediation.

 

To show how the eight points discussed above can be mobilized in a reading of an electronic hypertext, I will discuss Shelley Jackson’s brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl, an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors. I have chosen Patchwork Girl for my tutor text not only because I think it is one of the best of the new electronic fictions, but also because it is deeply concerned with the prospect hinted at in Points Seven and Eight, that a new medium will enact and express a new kind of subjectivity. To measure the difference between the subjectivity envisioned in Patchwork Girl and that associated with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts it parasitizes, I will find it useful to return to the eighteenth century, when a constellation of economic, class, and literary interests clashed over defining the nature of literary property. Although the decisions that emerged from the ensuing legal battles were no sooner formulated than they were again contested in legal and literary arenas, the debate is nevertheless useful as a foil to Jackson’s work, which positions itself against the subjectivity associated with this moment in the print tradition.

 

Text as Vapor

 

In his important book Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Mark Rose shows that copyright did more than provide a legal basis for intellectual property. The discussions that swirled around copyright also solidified assumptions about what counted as creativity, authorship, and proper literature. One of the important assumptions that emerged out of this debate was the assertion that the literary work does not consist of paper, binding, or ink. Rather, the work was seen as an immaterial mental construct. Here is Blackstone’s assessment: “Style and sentiment are the essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its identity. The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance” (qtd. in Rose 89). The abstraction of the literary work from its physical basis had the effect of obscuring the work’s relation to the economic network of booksellers who purchased shares in the work and used their economic capital to produce books. The more abstract the work became, the further removed it was from the commodification inherent in book sales, and consequently the more exalted the cultural status that could be claimed for it. Cultural capital was maximized by suppressing the relation between cultural and economic capital, although it was primarily economic capital that stimulated the booksellers’s interest in promoting literary works as immaterial works of art. As a result of these representations, literary works operated somewhat like Platonic forms achieving perfection because they were not sullied by the noise of embodiment.

 

Although Rose does not develop the gender implications of an evaluation that places abstraction above embodiment, his examples reveal that men producing these discourses had specifically in mind the male writer, whose creative masculine spirit gave rise to works of genius that soared above their material instantiations in books. Thus a hierarchy of values emerged which placed at the ascendant end of the scale the disembodied, the creative, the masculine, and the writer who worked for glory; at the lower end of the scale were the embodied, the repetitive, the feminine, and the writer who worked for money.

 

Rose traces a series of developments that progressively abstracted the work further away from its material instantiation, only to re-embody it in purer, more transcendent form. Although Blackstone located the work both in “style” and “sentiment,” subsequent commentators realized that the part of the work that could be secured as private intellectual property, and therefore the part appropriate for copyright protection, was the way ideas were expressed rather the ideas themselves. This aspect–“style” or “expression”–was frequently likened to clothes that dressed the thought. Through the clothes of expression, the body of the work entered into social legibility and was recognized as partaking in the social regulations that governed exchanges between free men who could hold private property. As Rose makes clear, it was the author’s style–the clothes he selected to dress his thought–that was considered most indicative of his individual personality, so style was also associated with the originality that was rapidly becoming the touchstone of literary value. These interrelations were further extended through metaphors that identified the style with the author’s face. Note that it was the face and not the body. Not only was the body hidden by clothes; more significantly, the body was not recognized as a proper site in which the author’s unique identity could be located. The final move was to reconstitute the author from the “face” exhibited in the style of his works, but by now bodies of all sorts had been left so far behind that critics felt free to attach this ethereal, non-corporeal face to any appropriate subject. (The prime example was the detachment of “Shakespeare” from the historical actor and playwright and the reassignment of his “face” to such august personages as Francis Bacon.) As Rose observes, these developments operated as a chain of deferrals sliding from the embodied to the disembodied, the book to the work, the content to the style, the style to the face, the face to the author’s personality, the personality to the author’s unique genius. The purpose of these deferrals, he suggests, was to arrive at a transcendental signifier that would guarantee the enduring value of the work as a literary property, establishing it as a “vast estate” that could be passed down through generations without diminishing in value.

 

In the process, certain metaphoric networks were established that continued to guide thinking about literary properties long after the court cases were settled. Perhaps the most important were metaphors equating the work with real estate. The idea that a literary work is analogous to real estate facilitated the fitting together of arguments about copyright with the Lockean liberal philosophy that C. P. Macpherson has labeled possessive individualism. Rose finds it appropriate that James Thomson’s long landscape poem The Seasons became the occasion for a major copyright case, for it was read as a poet transforming the landscape into his private literary property by mixing with it his imagination, just as the Lockean man who owns his person first and foremost creates private property by mixing it with his labor (Rose 113). Whereas the landholder supplies physical labor, the author supplies mental labor, particularly the originality of his unique “style.” Rose makes the connection clear: “The Lockean discourse of property, let us note, was founded on a compatible principle–‘Every Man has a Property in his own Person‘ was Locke’s primary axiom–and thus the discourse of originality also readily blended with the eighteenth-century discourse of property” (121).

 

We have to go no further than Macpherson to realize, as he pointed out years ago, that there is implicit in Locke a chicken-and-egg problem. Whereas Locke presents his narrative as if market relations arose as a consequence of the creation of private property, it is clear that the discourse of possessive individualism is permeated through and through by market relations from the beginning. Only in a society where market relations were predominant would an argument defining the individual in terms of his ability to possess himself be found persuasive. The same kind of chicken-and-egg problem inheres in the notion of literary property. The author creates his literary property through the exercise of his original genius, yet it is clear that writing is always a matter of appropriation and transformation, from syntax to literary allusions and the structure of tropes. A literary tradition must precede an author’s inscriptions for literature to be possible as such, yet this same appropriation and re-working of an existing tradition is said to produce “original” work. If arguments about literary property were found persuasive in part because they fitted so well together with prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity, that same fit implied that certain common blindnesses were also shared.

 

In particular, anxiety about admitting that writing was a commercial enterprise haunted many of the defenders of literary properties. In a fine image, Rose remarks that “the sense of the commercial is, as it were, the unconscious of the text” for such defenders of literary property as Samuel Johnson and Edward Young (118). There were other suppressions as well. The erasure of the economic networks that produced the books went along with the erasure of the technologies of production, a tradition that continued beyond print technologies to other media, and beyond Britain to other countries. Rose recounts, for example, the landmark case in the U.S., Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884), in which the court decided that the photograph derived entirely from the photographer’s “‘original mental conception'” and thus owed nothing to the camera that produced it (cited in Rose 135). The decision clearly relied on the notion of the author’s “originality” as a key component of an artistic work. The commitment to originality led to especially strained interpretations when the work was collaborative, for “originality” implied that the work resulted from the unique vision of one gifted individual, not from the joint efforts of a team of skilled craftsmen. Thus the legal fiction was invented that allowed an organization to become the “author,” a fiction that to this day is routinely invoked for films in which hundreds of cultural workers may be involved in the production.⁶

 

The patchwork quality of these legal fictions indicates how fragile was the consensus hammered out in the eighteenth century. Over subsequent decades and centuries it was challenged repeatedly in court. It was also challenged through artistic productions that sought to wrench the idea of the writer away from the transcendent ideal of the autonomous creator, from the automatic writing of the Surrealists to the theoretical arguments of Michel Foucault in his famous essay “What Is An Author?” Patchwork Girl contributes to these on-going contestations by exploiting the specificities of the digital medium to envision a very different kind of subjectivity than that which emerged in eighteenth-century legal battles over copyright. Those aspects of textual production suppressed in the eighteenth century to make the literary work an immaterial intellectual property–the materiality of the medium, the print technologies and economic networks that produced the work as a commodity, the collaborative nature of many literary works, the literary appropriations and transformations that were ignored or devalued in favor of “originality,” the slippage from book to work to style to face–form a citational substrata for Jackson’s fiction, which derives much of its energy from pushing against these assumptions. When Patchwork Girl foregrounds its appropriation of eighteenth-century texts, the effect is not to reinscribe earlier assumptions but to bring into view what was suppressed to create the literary work as intellectual property. In Patchwork Girl, the unconscious of eighteenth-century texts becomes the ground and surface for the specificity of this electronic text, which delights in pointing out that it was created not by a fetishized unique imagination but by many actors working in collaboration, including the “vaporous machinery” that no longer disappears behind a vaporous text.

 

Performing Originality through Reinscription

 

Patchwork Girl‘s emphasis on appropriation and transformation begins with the main character, who is reassembled from the female monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Recall that in Frankenstein the male creature, having been abandoned on the night of his creation and learned through hard experience that humankind finds him repulsive, returns to beg Frankenstein to create a mate for him, threatening dire revenge if he does not. Frankenstein agrees and assembles a female monster, but before animating her, he is struck with horror at the sight of her body and the prospect that she and the monster will have sex and reproduce. While the monster watches howling at the window, Frankenstein tears the female monster to bits. In Shelley Jackson’s text the female monster reappears, put together again by Mary Shelley. Like the female monster’s body, the body of this hypertext is also seamed and ruptured, comprised of disparate parts with extensive links between them. The main components of the hypertextual corpus are “body of text,” containing the female monster’s narration and theoretical speculations on hypertextual and human bodies; “graveyard,” where the stories of the creatures whose parts were used to make the female monster are told; “story,” in which are inscribed excerpts from the relevant passages in Frankenstein along with the monster’s later adventures; “journal,” the putative journal of Mary Shelley, where she records her interactions with the female monster; and “crazy quilt,” a section containing excerpts from Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as reinscriptions from other parts of the text.⁷

 

From the hypertext links and metaphoric connections between these parts, a vivid picture emerges that radically alters the eighteenth-century view of the subject as an individual with a unique personality and the Lockean ability to possess his own person. For the female monster, it is mere common sense to say that multiple subjectivities inhabit the same body, for the different creatures from whose parts she is made retain their distinctive personalities, making her an assemblage rather than a unified self. Her intestines, for example, are taken from Mistress Anne, a demure woman who prided herself on her regularity. The monster’s large size required additional footage, so Bossy the cow contributed, too. Bossy is as explosive as Mistress Anne is discreet, leading to expulsions that pain Mistress Anne, who feels she must take responsibility for them. The conflict highlights the monster’s nature as a collection of disparate parts. Each part has its story, and each story constructs a different subjectivity. What is true for the monster is also true for us, Jackson suggests in her article “Stitch Bitch: the Patchwork Girl.” “The body is a patchwork,” Jackson remarks, “though the stitches might not show. It’s run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can’t really call human, but which have what look like lives of a sort… [These parts] are certainly not what we think of as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the brain” (527).

 

The distributed nature of the monster’s subjectivity–and implicitly ours as well–is further performed in the opening graphic. Even before the title page appears, an image comes up entitled “her,” displaying a woman’s body against a black ground. Traversing the body are multiple dotted lines, as if the body were a crazy quilt of scars or seams; retrospectively the reader can identify this image as representing the female monster’s patched body, among other possible referents. Cutting diagonally across the ground of this image is a dotted line, the first performance of a concept central to this hypertext. As the reader progresses further into the text, a map view of the different parts opens up, displayed in the Storyspace software (in which the text is written) as colored rectangles which, when clicked, contain smaller rectangles representing paragraph-sized blocks of text or lexias. The lexia “dotted line” explicates the significance of this image. “The dotted line is the best line,” this lexia proclaims, because the dotted line allows difference without “cleaving apart for good what it distinguishes” (body of text/dotted line). Hovering between separation and connection, the dotted lines marks the monster’s affinities with the human as well as her differences from other people.

 

The dotted line is also significant because it suggests that the image can move from two to three dimensions, as in a fold-up that lets “pages become tunnels or towers, hats or airplanes” (body of text/dotted line). The movement out of the flat plane evokes the hypertext’s stacks, which suggest through their placement a three-dimensional depth to the screen and a corresponding ability to emerge from the depths or recede into them. The text mobilizes the specificity of the technology by incorporating the three-dimensionality of linked windows as a central metaphor for the fiction’s own operations. Like the hypertext stacks, the monster will not be content to reside quiescent on the page, moving fluidly between the world represented on the pages of Mary Shelley’s text and the three-dimensional world in which Mary Shelley lives as she writes this text. Lying on a plane but also suggesting a fold upward, the dotted line becomes itself a kind of join or scar that marks the merging of fiction and metafiction in a narrative strategy that Gerard Genette has called metalepsis, the merging of diegetic levels that normally would be kept distinct.⁸ It signals the dangerous potential of the monstrous text/body to disrupt traditional boundaries in a border war where the stakes are human identity.

 

In hypertext fashion, let us now click back to “her,” the opening graphic, and explore some of the other links radiating out from this lexia. Linked to “her” is “phrenology,” a graphic that further performs the metaphoric overlay of body and text. Showing a massive head in profile, “phrenology” displays the brain partitioned by lines into a crazy quilt of women’s names and enigmatic phrases. When we click on the names, we are taken to lexias telling the women’s stories from whose parts the monster was assembled; clicking on the phrases takes us to lexias that meditate on the nature of “her” multiple subjectivities. Thus we enter these textual blocks through a bodily image, implying that the text lies within the represented body. This dynamic inverts the usual perception the reader has with print fiction, that the represented bodies lie within the book. In print fiction, the book as physical object often seems to fade away as the reader’s imagination re-creates the vaporous world of the text, so that reading becomes, as Friedrich Kittler puts it, a kind of hallucination. The bodies populating the fictional world seem therefore to be figments of the reader’s imagination. First comes the immaterial mind, then from it issue impressions of physical beings. Here, however, the body is figured not as the product of the immaterial work but a portal to it, thus inverting the usual hierarchy that puts mind first. Moreover, the partitioning of the head, significantly seen in profile so it functions more like a body part than a face delineating a unique identity, emphasizes the multiple, fragmented nature of the monster’s subjectivity. The body we think we have–coherent, unified, and solid–is not the body we actually are, Jackson claims in “Stitch Bitch.” Like the monster’s body, our corporeality, which she calls the “banished body,” is “a hybrid of thing and thought… Its public image, its face is a collage of stories, borrowed images, superstitions, fantasies. We have no idea what it ‘really’ looks like” (523).

 

Although the monster’s embodiment as an assemblage may seem unique, Jackson employs several strategies to demonstrate that it is not nearly so unusual as it may appear. Drawing on the contemporary discourses of technoscience, the lexia “bio” points out that “the body as seen by the new biology is chimerical. The animal cell is seen to be a hybrid of bacterial species. Like that many-headed beast [the chimera], the microbeast of the animal cells combines into one entity, bacteria that were originally freely living, self sufficient and metabolically distinct” (body of text/bio). In this view, the “normal” person is already an assemblage, designed so by evolutionary forces that make Frankenstein appear by comparison an upstart amateur. Other perspectives yield the same conclusion. Boundaries between self and other are no more secure than those between plant, animal, and human. “Keep in mind,” the monster warns us in “hazy whole,” that “on the microscopic level, you are all clouds. There is no shrink-wrap preserving you from contamination: your skin is a permeable membrane… if you touch me, your flesh is mixed with mine, and if you pull away, you may take some of me with you, and leave a token behind” (body of text/hazy whole). The mind, Jackson writes in “Stitch Bitch,” “what zen calls monkey-mind and Bataille calls project, has an almost catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality, and unity.” The project of writing, and therefore of her writing most of all, is to “dismantle the project” (527).

 

Following this philosophy, the text not only normalizes the subject-as-assemblage but also presents the subject-as-unity as a grotesque impossibility. The narrator satirizes the unified subject by evoking visions of resurrection, when the body will be “restored to wholeness and perfection, even a perfection it never achieved in its original state” (body of text/resurrection). But how can this resurrection be performed? What about amputees who have had their limbs eaten by other creatures? Following medieval theology that held the resurrected body will “take its matter, if digested, from the animal’s own flesh,” the narrator imagines those parts re-forming themselves from the animals’ bodies. The “ravens, the lions, the bears, fish and crocodiles… gang up along shorelines and other verges to proffer the hands, feet and heads that they are all simultaneously regurgitating whole… big toe scraping the roof of the mouth, tapping the teeth from the inside, seeming alive, wanting out” (body of text/resurrection/remade). Bizarre as this scenario is, it is not as strange as the problems entertained by medieval theologians trying to parcel everything out to its proper body. Some philosophers theorized that eaten human remains will be reconstituted from the “nonhuman stuff” the creature has eaten, a proposition that quickly becomes problematic, as the narrator points out: “But what (hypothesized Aquinas) about the case of a man who ate only human embryos who generated a child who ate only human embryos? If eaten matter rises in the one who possessed it first, this child will not rise at all. All its matter will rise elsewhere: either in the embryos its father ate… or in the embryos it ate” (body of text/resurrection/eaten). This fantastic scenario illustrates that trying to sort things out to achieve a unity (that never was) results in confusions worse than accepting the human condition as multiple, fragmented, chimerical.

 

As the unified subject is thus broken apart and reassembled as a multiplicity, the work also highlights the technologies that make the textual body itself a multiplicity. To explore this point, consider how information moves across the interface of the CRT screen compared to books. With print fiction, the reader decodes a durable script to create, in her mind, a picture of the verbally represented world. As we have seen, with an electronic text the encoding/decoding operations are distributed between the writer, computer, and reader. The writer encodes, but the reader does not simply decode what the writer has written. Rather, the computer decodes the encoded information, performs the indicated operations, and then re-encodes the information as flickering images on the screen. The transformation of the text from durable inscription into what I have elsewhere called a flickering signifier means that it is mutable in ways that print is not, and this mutability serves as a visible mark of the multiple levels of encoding/decoding intervening between user and text (Hayles, “Virtual Bodies”). Through its flickering nature, the text-as-image teaches the user that it is possible to bring about changes in the screenic text that would be impossible with print (changing fonts, colors, type sizes, formatting, etc.). Such changes imply that the body represented within the virtual space is always already mutated, joined through a flexible, multilayered interface with the reader’s body on the other side of the screen. As Jackson puts it in “Stitch Bitch,” “Boundaries of texts are like boundaries of bodies, and both stand in for the confusing and invisible boundary of the self” (535).

 

These implications become explicit in one of the opening graphics of Patchwork Girl, “hercut 4.” In this image the monster’s body, which was previously displayed with dotted lines traversing it, has now become completely dismembered, with limbs distributed into rectangular blocks defined by dotted lines, thus completing the body/text analogy by making the body parts visually similar to the hypertext lexias, connected to each other in the Storyspace display by lines representing hypertext links. In addition, the upper right-hand corner of the image looks as though it has been torn off, revealing text underneath. Although fragmentary, enough of the text is visible to allow the reader to make out that it is giving instructions on how to create links to “interconnect documents and make it easier to move from place to [word obscured].” Thus the text underlying the image points to the software program underlying the text, so the entire image functions as an evocation of the multilayered coding chains flexibly mutating across interfaces to create flickering signifiers.

 

Of course print texts are also dispersed, in the sense that they cite other texts at the same time they transform those citations by embedding them in new contexts, as Derrida among others has taught us. Moreover, print texts can engage in reflexive play at least as complex as anything in Patchwork Girl, as Michael Snow’s wonderful artist book Cover to Cover playfully demonstrates.⁹ The specificity of an electronic hypertext like Patchwork Girl comes from the ways in which it mobilizes the resources of the medium to enact subjectivities distributed in flexible and mutating ways across author, text, interface, and reader. As we have seen, electronic text is less durable and more mutable than print, and the active interface is not only multilayered but itself capable of cognitively sophisticated acts. By exploiting these characteristics, the author (more precisely, the putative author) constructs the distinctions between author and character, reader and represented world, as permeable membranes that can be configured in a variety of ways.

 

In Patchwork Girl, one of the important metaphoric connections expressing this flickering connectivity is the play between sewing and writing. Within the narrative fiction of Frankenstein, the monster’s body is created when Frankenstein patches the body parts together; at the metafictional level, Mary Shelley creates this patching through her writing. Within Patchwork Girl, however, it is Mary Shelley (not Frankenstein) who assembles the monster, and this patching is specifically identified with the characteristically feminine work of sewing or quilting. The fact that this sewing takes place within the fiction makes Mary Shelley a character written by Shelley Jackson rather than an author who herself writes. This situation becomes more complex when Mary Shelley is shown both to sew and write the monster, further entangling fiction and metafiction. “I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight,” Mary Shelley narrates, “until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt” (journal/written). This lexia is linked with “sewn”: “I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form” (journal/sewn).

 

The feminine associations with sewing serve to mark this as a female–and feminist–production. Throughout, the relation between creature and creator in Patchwork Girl stands in implicit contrast to the relation between the male monster and Victor Frankenstein. Whereas Victor participates, often unconsciously, in a dynamic of abjection that results in tragedy for both creator and creature, in Patchwork Girl Mary feels attraction and sympathy rather than horror and denial. In contrast to Victor’s determination to gain preeminence as a great scientist, Mary’s acts of creation are hedged with qualifications that signal her awareness that she is not so much conquering the secrets of life and death as participating in forces greater than she. In “sewn,” the passage continues with Mary wondering whether the monster’s fragmented unity is “perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author. Authoress, I amend, smiling” (journal/sewn). The self-conscious placement of herself in an inferior position of “authoress” compared to the male author–surely in relation to her husband most of all–is connected in Jackson’s text with subtle suggestions that the monster and Mary share something Mary and her husband do not, an intimacy based on equality and female bonding rather than subservience and female inferiority. Although Mary confesses sometimes to feeling frightened of the female monster, she also feels compassionate and even erotic attraction toward her creation. Whereas Victor can see his monster only as a competitor whose strength and agility are understood as threats, Mary exults in the female monster’s physical strength, connecting it with the creature’s freedom from the stifling conventions of proper womanhood. When the female monster leaves her creator to pursue her own life and adventures, Mary, unlike Victor, takes vicarious delight in her creation’s ability to run wild and free.

 

In her comprehensive survey of the status of the body in the Western philosophic tradition, Elizabeth Grosz has shown that there is a persistent tendency to assign to women the burden of corporeality, leaving men free to imagine themselves as disembodied minds–an observation that has been familiar to feminists at least since Simone de Beauvoir. Even philosophers as sympathetic to embodiment as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mark Johnson are often blind to issues of gender, implicitly assuming the male body as the norm. The contrast between woman as embodied female and man as transcendent mind is everywhere at work in the comparison between Mary’s care for the female monster and Victor’s astonishing failure to anticipate any of the male creature’s corporeal needs, including the fact that making him seven feet tall might make it difficult for the monster to fit into human society. Whereas the disembodied text of the eighteenth-century work went along with a parallel and reinforcing notion of the author as a disembodied face, in Jackson’s text the emphasis on body and corporeality goes along with an embodied author and equally material text. “The banished body is not female, necessarily, but it is feminine,” Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch.” “That is, it is 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… Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine” (534).

 

Reinforcing this emphasis on hypertext as “femininely” embodied are links that re-embody passages from Shelley’s text into contexts which subtly or extravagantly alter their meaning. A stunning example is the famous passage from the 1831 preface where Mary Shelley bids her “hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (qtd. in story/severance/hideous progeny). “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations” (qtd. in story/severance/hideous progeny). In the context of Frankenstein, “hideous progeny” can be understood as referring both to the text and to the male monster. As Anne Mellor points out, taking the text as the referent places Mary Shelley in the tradition of female writers of Gothic novels who were exposing the dark underside of British society. When the monster is taken as the referent, the passage suggests that Mary Shelley’s textual creature expresses the fear attending birth in an age of high mortality rates for women and infants–a fear that Shelley was to know intimately from wrenching personal experience. Moreover, in Barbara Johnson’s reading of Frankenstein, Shelley is also giving birth to herself as a writer in this text, so her authorship also becomes a “hideous progeny.” The rich ambiguities that inhere in the phrase make Jackson’s transformation of it all the more striking.

 

In Jackson’s work, the passage’s meaning is radically changed by “Thanks,” to which it is linked. In this lexia, the female monster says, “Thanks, Mary, for that kindness, however tinged with disgust. Hideous progeny: yes, I was both those things, for you, and more. Lover, friend, collaborator. It is my eyes you describe–with fear, yes, but with fascination: yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (story/severance/hideous progeny/thanks). The linked passage changes the referent for “hideous progeny,” so that the female monster occupies the place previously held by the male creature, the text of Frankenstein, and Mary Shelly as writer. All these, the link implies, are now embedded as subtexts in the female monster, who herself is indistinguishable from the ruptured, seamed textual body that both contains her and is contained by her. “The hypertext is the banished body,” Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch.” “Its compositional principle is desire” (536). If desire is enacted by activating links, this linked text not only expresses the reader’s desire but also Mary’s desire for her monstrous creation. Its most subversive–and erotic–implication comes in changing the referent for the lost companion “who, in this world, I shall never see more.” Now it is not her husband whose loss Mary laments but the female monster–the “lover, friend, collaborator” without whom Patchwork Girl could not have been written.¹⁰

 

Among Patchwork Girl‘s many subversions is its attack on the “originality” of the work. “In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality,” Jackson writes in “Stitch Bitch.” “One can be surprised by what one has to say in the forced intercourse between texts or the recombinant potential in one text, by other words that mutter inside the proper names” (537). This muttering becomes discernible in Shelley Jackson’s playful linking of her name with Mary Shelley’s. The title page of Jackson’s work performs this distributed authorship, for it says Patchwork Girl is “by Mary/Shelley & herself,” a designation that names Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, and the monster all as authors. (In a perhaps intentional irony, the Eastgate title page inscribes Jackson’s name below as the “authorized” signature, along with the usual warnings about copyright infringement, even though the entire thrust of Jackson’s text pushes against this view of a sole author who produces an original work.) Jackson’s subversions of her publisher’s proprietary claims continue in a section entitled “M/S,” a naming that invites us to read the slash as both dividing and connecting Mary Shelley and Shelley Jackson. When Jackson re-inscribes Shelley’s text into hers, the act is never merely a quotation, even when the referents are not violently wrenched away from the originals as in “Thanks”; witness the fact that Jackson divides Shelley’s text into lexias and encodes it into the Storyspace software. Rather, the citation of Shelley is a performative gesture indicating that the authorial function is distributed across both names, as the nominative they share between them would suggest (Mary Shelley/Shelley Jackson). In addition, the slash in M/S (ironically interjected into the MS which would signify the “original” material text in normal editorial notation) may also be read as signifying the computer interface connecting/dividing Mary Shelley, a character in Patchwork Girl, with Shelley Jackson, the author who sits at the keyboard typing the words that conflate Mary’s sewing and writing and so make “Shelley” into both character and writer. The computer thus also actively participates in the construction of these flickering signifiers in all their distributed, mutable complexity. “There is a kind of thinking without thinkers,” the narrator declares in “it thinks.”

 

Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters. We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourself: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery. (body of text/it thinks)

 

The surface of the text-as-image may look solid, this passage suggests, but the “vaporous machinery” generating it marks that solidity with the mutability and distributed cognition characteristic of flickering signifiers. Even the subject considered in itself is a site for distributed cognition, Jackson argues in “Stitch Bitch.” “Thinking is conducted by entities we don’t know, wouldn’t recognize on the street,” Jackson writes. “Call them yours if you want, but puff and blow all you want, you cannot make them stop their work one second to salute you” (527).

 

The trace of flickering signification is as pervasive and inescapable in this text as it is with the constantly refreshed CRT screen. In one of the fiction’s climactic scenes, Mary and the monster, having become lovers and grown physically intimate with each other’s bodies, decide to swap patches of skin. Each lifts a circle of skin from her leg, and Mary sews her flesh onto the monster, and the monster’s flesh onto her own human leg. This suturing of self onto other reveals more than a wish of lovers to join. Because Mary is the monster’s creator in a double sense, at once sewing and writing her, the scene functions as a crossroads for the traffic between fiction and metafiction, writer and character, the physical body existing outside the textual frame sutured together with representations of the body in virtual space. Throughout, the narrator has been at pains to point out the parallels between surgery and writing: “Surgery was the art of restoring and binding disjointed parts… Being ‘seam’d with scars’ was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition” (body of text/mixed up/seam’d). One of the sutures that reappears in several lexias is the “intertwisted” closing that “left needles sticking in the wounds–in manner of tailors–with thread wrapped around them” (body of text/mixed up/seam’d). Thus a metaphoric relay system is set up between surgery, particularly sutures using needle and thread, sewing, the seamed body, and writing.

 

Jackson uses this relay system of surgery/sewing/writing to set up an argument about “monstrous” writing that reverberates throughout the text. The narrator points out that “the comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric. Membrum or ‘limb’ also signified ‘clause'” (body of text/typographical). As the narrator notes, this body/writing analogy allowed rhetoricians to conclude that writing was bad if it resembled a disproportioned or grotesque body. But the analogy was to go only so far; writing was not actually to become the body. Decorum dictated that the barrier between the book as physical object and text as immaterial work be maintained intact. Joseph Addison found any writing distasteful that was configured in the shape of the object it represented, such as George Herbert’s poem “Wings,” printed to resemble the shape of wings. The narrator remarks that Addison called this “visual turning of one set of terms into another” the “Anagram of a Man” and labeled it a classic example of “False Wit” (body of text/typographical). This aesthetic judgment is consistent with the assumption that the work is immaterial. Making the physical appearance of the text a signifying component was improper because it suggested the text could not be extracted from its physical form. According to this aesthetic, bodies can be represented within the text but the body of the text should not mix with these representations. To do so is to engage in what Russell and Whitehead would later call a category mistake–an ontological error that risks, through its enactment of hybridity, spawning monstrous bodies on both sides of the textual divide.

 

It is precisely such breaches of good taste and decorum that the monster embodies. Her body, “seam’d with scars,” becomes a metaphor for the ruptured, discontinuous space of the hypertext, which in its representations also flagrantly violates decorum by transgressively mixing fiction and metafiction in the same chaotic arena. When deciding what skin to swap, the monster, with Mary’s consent, significantly decides that “the nearest thing to a bit of my own flesh would be this scar, a place where disparate things are joined in a way that was my own” (story/severance/join). Comprised of parts taken from other textual bodies (Frankenstein and Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, among others), this hypertext, like the monster’s body, hints that it is most itself in the links and seams that join one part to another. “My real skeleton is made of scars,” the monster says in a passage that conflates body and text, “a web that traverses me in three dimensions. What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself in the gaps between my parts” (body of text/dispersed). The reader inscribes her subjectivity into this text by choosing what links to activate, what scars to trace. Contrary to the dictates of good taste and good writing, the scars/links thus function to join the text with the corporeal body of the reader, which performs the enacted motions that bring the text into being as a sequential narrative. Because these enactions take place through the agency of the computer, all these bodies–the monster, Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the specificity of the electronic text, the active agency of the digital interface, and we the readers–are made to participate in the mutating configurations of flickering signifiers.

 

As a result of these dotted-line connections/divisions, the text has a livelier sense of embodiment than is normally the case, and the bodies within the text are more densely coded with textuality. “I am a mixed metaphor,” the monstrous text/textualized monster declares. “Metaphor, meaning something like ‘bearing across,’ is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked with other territories alien to it but equally mine. . . borrowed parts, annexed territories. I cannot be reduced, my metaphors are not tautologies, yet I am equally present in both poles of a pair, each end of the wire is tethered to one of my limbs. The metaphorical principle is my true skeleton” (body of text/metaphor me). The multilayered sense of “metaphor” here–a rhetorical trope of writing that is also a Storyspace link and a scar traversing the monster’s body–implies that the movement up and down fictional/metafictional levels is not limited to certain moments in the text but pervades the text as a whole, spreading along with (and becoming indistinguishable from) the “true skeleton” of the text/monster/software. In this fluid movement between bodies inside texts and texts inside bodies, inside is constantly becoming outside becoming inside, as if performing at the visible level of the text the linkages between different coding levels within the computer. The dynamic makes real for the user that each visible mark on the screen, in contrast to the flat mark of print, is linked with multiple coding levels whose dimensionalities can expand or contract as the coding commands require.

 

The dynamic inside/outside/inside is vividly, hauntingly represented in “body jungle,” in which the monster dreams herself inside a lush jungle landscape comprised of body parts: beating hearts “roost like pheasants on high bone branches”; “intestines hang in swags from ribs and pelvic crests, or pile up like tires at the ankles of legs become trees”; “ovaries hang like kumquats from delicate vines” (story/falling apart/body jungle). The monster imagines passing days and nights in the jungle: “In the morning the convoluted clouds will think about me. They will block my view of the domed sky, which I know will bear faint suture marks, the knit junctures between once-soft sectors of sky.” In time she supposes that her legs will be dissolved by the acid dripping form the overhanging stomachs: “My bony stumps will sink deep; I will shuffle forward until I tire, then stand still. I will place the end of a vein in my mouth and suck it. At last I will no longer bother to remove it… I do not know how my skull will open, or if I will still know myself when my brain drifts up to join the huge, intelligent sky.” In this vision she becomes a body part of some larger entity, perhaps the computer that thinks/dreams her, just as her parts were once autonomous entities who have now been incorporated into the larger whole/hole that she is. In hypertext fiction, Jackson remarks in “Stitch Bitch,” there are especially powerful opportunities to “sneak up on reality from inside fiction to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe” (534).

 

We can now see that the construction of multiple subjectivities in this text and the reconfiguration of consciousness to body are both deeply bound up with what I have been calling flickering signification, constituted through the fluidly mutating connections between writer, interface, and reader. It is not the hypertext structure that makes Patchwork Girl distinctively different from print books. As Dictionary of the Khazars has taught us (along with similar works), print texts may also have hypertext structures. Rather, Patchwork Girl could only be an electronic text because the trace of the computer interface, penetrating deeply into its signifying structures, does more than mark the visible surface of the text; it becomes incorporated into the textual body. Flickering signification, which in a literal and material sense can be understood as producing the text, is also produced by it as a textual effect.

 

It is primarily through the complex enactment of linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies, readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author’s unique genius, it self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions, from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between the monster “herself,” Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the computer, and other more shadowy actors as well.

 

To complete the comparison between Patchwork Girl and the subjectivity implicit in eighteenth-century debates over copyright, let us now turn to the distinctions between style and idea, form and content, face and body that informed the invention of copyright. Although one could still talk about the “style” of Patchwork Girl, the text offers another set of terms in which to understand its complexities: the alternation between lexia and link, the screen of text that we are reading versus the “go to” computer command that constitutes the hypertextual link in electronic media. In Patchwork Girl this alternation is performed through a network of interrelated metaphors, including tissue and scar, body and skeleton, presence and gap. Underlying these terms is a more subtle association of link and lexia with simultaneity and sequence. The eighteenth-century trope of the text as real estate has obviously been complicated by the distributed technologies of cyberspace. When the print book becomes unbound in electronic media, time is affected as well. The chronotopes of electronic fictions function in profoundly different ways than the chronotopes of literary works conceived as books. Exploring this difference will open a window onto the connections that enfold the link and lexia together with sequence and simultaneity.

 

With many print books, the order of pages recapitulates the order of time in the lifeworld. Chronology might be complicated through flashbacks or flashforwards, but normally this is done in episodes that stretch for many pages. There are of course notable exceptions, for example Robert Coover’s print hypertext “The Babysitter.” Choosing not to notice such experimental print fictions, the narrator of Patchwork Girl remarks, “When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here” (body of text/this writing). In Patchwork Girl, like many hypertexts, chronology is inherently tenuous because linking structures leap across time as well as space. As if recapitulating the processes of fragmentation and recombination made possible by digital technologies, Patchwork Girl locates its performance of subjectivity in the individual lexia. Since the past and the future can be played out in any number of ways, the present moment, the lexia we are reading right now, carries an unusually intense sense of presence, all the more so because it is a smaller unit of narration than normally constitutes an episode. “I can’t say I enjoy it, exactly,” the narrator comments. “The present moment is furiously small, a slot, a notch, a footprint, and on either side it is a seethe of possibility, the dissolve of alphabets and of me” (body of text/a slot, a notch).

 

Sequence is constructed by accumulating a string of present moments when the reader clicks on links, as if selecting beads to string for a necklace. In contrast to this sequence is the simultaneity of the computer program. Within the non-Cartesian space of computer memory, all addresses are equidistant (within near and far memory, respectively), so all lexias are equally quick to respond to the click of the mouse (making allowance for those that load slower because they contain more data, usually images). This situation reverses our usual sense that time is passing as we watch. Instead, time becomes a river that always already exists in its entirety, and we create sequence and chronology by choosing which portions of the river to sample. There thus arises a tension between the sequence of lexias chosen by the reader, and the simultaneity of memory space in which all the lexias always already exist. The tension marks the difference between the narrator’s life as the reader experiences it, and that life as it exists in a space of potentiality in which “everything could have been different and already is” (story/rethinking/a life).

 

When the narrator-as-present-subject seeks for the “rest of my life,” therefore, the situation is not as simple as a unified subject seeking to foresee a future stretching in unbroken chronology before her. To find “the rest of my life,” the narrator must look not forward into the passing of time but downward into the computer space in which discrete lexias lie jumbled all together. “I sense a reluctance when I tow a frame forward into the view,” the narrator says in an utterance that conflates writer, reader, and character, as if reflecting within the jumble of fiction and metafiction the jumbled time represented by the lexias. “It is a child pulled out of a fantastic underground hideaway to answer a history quiz. Were you brought out of polymorphous dreams, in which mechanical contraptions, funnels, tubes and magnifying glasses mingled with animal attentions and crowd scenes, into a rigidly actual and bipolar sex scene? Don’t worry, little boxy baby, I will lift you by your ankles off the bed… I will show you the seductions of sequence, and then I will let the aperture close, I will let you fall back into the muddled bedsheets, into the merged molecular dance of simultaneity” (story/rest of my life).

 

The interjection of simultaneity into the sequence of a reader’s choices makes clear why different ontological levels (character, writer, reader) mingle so monstrously in this text. In the heart of the computer, which is to say at the deepest levels of machine code, the distinctions between character, writer, and reader are coded into strings of ones and zeros in a space where the text written by a human writer and a mouse click made by a human reader are coded in the same binary form as machine commands and computer programs. When the text represents this process (somewhat misleadingly) as a “merged molecular dance of simultaneity,” it mobilizes the specificity of the medium as an authorization for its own vision of cyborg subjectivity.

 

Part of the monstrosity, then, is this mingling of the subjectivity we attribute to characters, authors, and ourselves as readers, with the non-anthropomorphic actions of the computer program. This aspect of the text’s monstrous hybridity is most apparent in “Crazy Quilt,” where excerpts from Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz increasingly intermingle with other sections of the hypertext and with the instructions from the Storyspace manual. Typical is “seam’d,” a significantly named lexia that stitches together the surgery/sewing/writing metaphoric network established in other lexias with the Storyspace program: “You may emphasize the presence of text links by using a special style, color or typeface. Or, if you prefer, you can leave needles sticking in the wounds–in the manner of tailors–with thread wrapped around them. Being seam’d with scars was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition” (crazy quilt/seam’d). The patchwork quality of the passage is emphasized by the fact that another lexia entitled “seam’d” appears elsewhere (body of text/mixed up/seam’d), from which some of the phrases cited above were lifted.

 

Although memory is equidistant within the computer, such is not the case for human readers. In our memories, events take place in time and therefore constitute sequence. The “seam’ed” lexia in “crazy quilt” relies for its effect on the probability that the reader has already seen the lexias of which this is a patchwork. Because we have read these lines in other contexts, they strike us now as a crazy quilt, a textual body stitched together from recycled pieces of other lexias and texts. Memory, then, converts simultaneity into sequence, and sequence into the continuity of a coherent past. But human memory, unlike computer memory, does not retain its contents indefinitely or even reliably. If human memory has gaps in it (a phenomenon alarmingly real to me as my salad days recede in the distance), then memory becomes like atoms full of empty space, an apparent continuity riddled with holes.

 

Fascinated with recovering that which has been lost, the narrator recalls a speech made by Susan B. Anthony at a “church quilting bee in Cleveland” in which the monster “was the featured attraction, the demon quilt” (body of text/mixed up/quilting). Anthony (or is it the monster?) remarks that “Our sense of who we are is mostly made up of what we remember being. We are who we were; we are made up of memories.” But each of us also holds in her mind experiences she has forgotten. Do these memories, the monstrous Anthony speculates, cohere to make another subject, mutually exclusive to the subject constituted through the memories one remembers? If so, “within each of you there is at least one other entirely different you, made up of all you’ve forgotten… More accurately, there are many other you’s, each a different combination of memories. These people exist. They are complete, if not exactly present, lying in potential in the buried places in the brain” (story/séance/she goes on). Like the eaten body parts incorporated in the animal’s flesh that scrape to get out at the resurrection, like the textual body that exists simultaneously within the equidistant spaces of computer memory, human memory too is chimerical, composed of the subject I remember as myself and the multiple other subjects, also in some sense me, whom I have forgotten but who remember themselves and not me.

 

When the monster offers to buy a past from Elsie, a randomly chosen woman she approaches on the street, this lack of a past is in one sense unique to the monster, a result of her having been assembled and not born, with no chance to grow into the adult she now is. In another sense this division between the past the monster can remember and the pasts embodied in her several parts is a common human fate. “We are ourselves ghostly,” Anthony/herself goes on. “Our whole life is a kind of haunting; the present is thronged by the figures of the past. We haunt the concrete world as registers of past events… And we are haunted, by these ghosts of the living, these invisible strangers who are ourselves” (story/séance/she goes on). Significantly the hybridity performed here is a mental assemblage that does not depend on or require physical heterogeneity. Even if the text were an immaterial mental entity, it still could not be sure of internal cohesion because the memory that contains it is itself full of holes and other selves. On many levels and across several interfaces, this monstrous text thus balances itself between cohesion and fragmentation, presence and absence, lexia and link, sequence and simultaneity, coherent selfhood and multiple subjectivities.

 

How can such a text possibly achieve closure? Jane Yellowlees Douglas, writing on Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction Afternoon, suggests that closure is achieved not when all the lexias have been read, but when the reader learns enough about the central mystery to believe she understands it. The privileged lexia, she suggests, is “white afternoon”–privileged because its transformative power on the reader’s understanding of the mystery is arguably greater than other lexias. Although Patchwork Girl has no comparable central mystery, it does have a central dialectic, the oscillation between fragmentation and recombination. “I believed that if I concentrated on wishing, my body itself would erase its scars and be made new,” the narrator confesses, an endeavor that continues in dynamic tension with the simultaneous realization that she is always already fragmented, ruptured, discontinuous (story/falling apart/becoming whole). When this oscillation erupts into a crisis, the text initiates events that make continuation impossible unless some kind of accommodation is reached. The crisis occurs when the narrator awakes one morning to find she is coming apart. As she tries to cover over the cracking seams with surgical tape, the dispersion rockets toward violence. “My foot strove skyward… trailing blood in mannered specks. My guts split open and something frilly spilled out… my right hand shot gesticulating stump-first eastward” (story/falling apart/diaspora). The tide is stemmed when Elsie, the woman whose past she bought, comes upon the monster disintegrating in the bathtub and holds onto her. “I was gathered together loosely in her attention in a way that was interesting to me, for I was all in pieces, yet not apart. I felt permitted. I began to invent something new: a way to hang together without pretending I was whole. Something between higgledy-piggledy and the eternal sphere” (story/falling apart/I made myself over). This resolution, in which the monster realizes that if she is to cohere at all it cannot be through unified subjectivity or a single narrative line, leads to “afterwards,” in which the monster decides that the only life she can lead is nomadic, a trajectory of “movement and doubt–and doubt and movement will be my life, as long as it lasts” (story/rethinking/afterwards). Thus the narrative pattern of her life finally becomes indistinguishable from the fragmentation and recombination of the digital technology that produces it, a convergence expressed earlier through the metaphor of the dotted line: “I hop from stone to stone and an electronic river washes out my scent in the intervals. I am a discontinuous line, a dotted line” (body of text/hop). Connecting and dividing, the dotted line of the monster’s nomadic trajectory through “movement and doubt” resembles the lexia-link, presence-absence pattern of the screenic text. Following this trajectory, she goes on to become a writer herself.

 

But what does she write–the narrative we are reading? If so, then the authorial function has shifted at some indeterminate point (or many indeterminate points) from Mary Shelley to the monster, recalling the earlier distribution of authorship between M/S. Just as the reader can no longer be sure if, within the fictive world, the monster now writes herself or is written by Mary, so the monster is similarly unsure, in part because her body, like her subjectivity, is a distributed function. “I wonder if I am writing from my thigh, from the crimp-edged pancakelet of skin we stitched onto me… Mary writes, I write, we write, but who is really writing?” Faced with this unanswerable question (unanswerable for the reader as for the narrator), the monster concludes, “Ghost writers are the only kind there are” (story/rethinking/am I mary).

 

The larger conclusion suggested by juxtaposing Patchwork Girl with eighteenth-century debates and the characteristics of digital media goes beyond showing how this text makes the unconscious of the earlier period into the stage for its performances of hybrid subjectivities by exploiting the specificities of the computer. More fundamentally, Patchwork Girl demonstrates that despite such important critical developments as deconstruction and Lacanian theory, we continue to operate from assumptions that are grounded in print technologies and that become problematic in the context of digital media. Why do we talk and write incessantly about the “text,” a term that obscures differences between technologies of production and implicitly promotes the work as an immaterial construct? Why do we continue to talk about the signifier as if it were a flat mark with no internal structure, when the coding chains of the digital computer operate in a completely different fashion? Why do our discussions of reading and writing largely focus on the author and reader, ignoring the cognitively sophisticated actions of intelligent machines that are active participants in the construction of meaning? The effect of Patchwork Girl‘s creative juxtapositions is to shake us awake from the dream that electronic fiction is simply “text” that we read on screen instead of on paper. If Patchwork Girl insists through its appropriations that the past can never be left behind, it also shows through its transformations that new media create a new kind of literature and a new sense of cyborg subjectivity.

 

As we work toward crafting a critical theory capable of dealing with the complexities of electronic texts, we may also be able to understand for the first time the full extent to which print technologies have affected our understanding of literature. The juxtaposition of print and electronic texts has the potential to reveal the assumptions specific to each, a clarity obscured when either is considered in isolation. Mark Rose ends his book (note that I use the media-specific practice of calling it a book and not a text) by suggesting that copyright continues to endure, despite its many problems, because it reinforces “the sense of who we are” (Rose 142). Patchwork Girl invites us to understand the situation differently. Although the sense of who we are is still informed by the assumptions of print technology, the specificities of digital technologies provide writers with resources to complicate that sense through flickering connectivities, re-working it into something rich and strange.

Notes

 

1. In formulating the framework for this essay, I am indebted to the readers who critiqued it for Postmodern Culture. Although their names are not known to me, I wish to express my gratitude for their insights and helpful comments.

 

2. I am indebted to librarian Jennifer Tobias at the Reference Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for arranging access to their extensive collection of artists’ books. An excellent survey can be found in Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books. An illustration of the Lewitt book can be found on page 199.

 

3. For an exploration of what this Oreo structure signifies in the context of virtual narratives, see Hayles, “Simulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us,” Critical Inquiry 26 (1999): 1-26.

 

4. I am indebted to Robert Essex for this example, proposed in a discussion of William Blake’s strong dislike of stipple engraving and his preference (which for Blake amounted to an ethical issue) for printing technologies that were analogue rather than digital.

 

5. There are of course exceptions to every rule. David Stairs has created a round artist book entitled Boundless with spiral binding all around, so that it cannot be opened. A similar strategy is used by Maurizio Nannucci in Universum, a book bound on both vertical edges so that it cannot be opened. Ann Tyler also plays with the assumption that pages are visually and kinesthetically accessible to users in Lubb Dup, an artist book in which several pages are double-faced, so that one can see the inside only by peering through a small circle in the middle or prying the two pages apart enough to peek down through the top. These plays on accessibility do not, however, negate the generalization, for the effect is precisely to make us conscious of the normative rule.

 

6. This practice was visibly reinforced for me when I sat through the credits of Wild Wild West and watched this disclaimer roll up on screen: “For purposes of copyright, Warner Bros. is the sole author of this film.”

 

7. This list omits the graphics, of which there are several as the hypertext opens. A note on citations from Patchwork Girl: I identify them using slashes to indicate a jump in directory level, moving from higher to lower as is customary in computer notation. The uppermost level is always a name the reader would see on the screen when opening the highest level of the map view in Storyspace, and the lowest level is the lexia in which the quotation appears. Thus the citation “body of text/resurrection/remade” indicates that within the major textual component entitled “body of text” is a sub-section entitled “resurrection,” which when opened also contains the lexia “remade,” where the quoted passage appears.

 

8. I am indebted for this reference to Reader #1 in his/her critique of this essay for Postmodern Culture.

 

9. This visual narrative begins with a realistic image of a door, which a man opens to go into a rather ordinary room. With each successive image, the previous representation is revealed as a posed photograph, for example by including the photographer in the picture. As one approaches the center of the book the images begin shifting angles, and at the midpoint the reader must turn the book upside down to see the remaining images in their proper perspective. At the end of the book the images reverse order, so that the reader then goes backwards through the book to the front, a direction that the orientation of the images implicitly defines as forward.

 

10. The lexia’s explosive potential may explain why it is partially hidden. It can be seen in the Storyspace chart view but is not visible in the more frequently used map view.

Works Cited

 

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