(Feminist) Narratives and Hypertext

In the opening of Hypertext 3.0, Landow writes that “we must abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them by ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks” (1). Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson operates on multilinearity and links as a hypertext novel. When the reader enters the text, he/she has the option to choose from “a graveyard,” “a journal,” “a quilt,” “a story,” “& broken accents.” Each word links to a different part of the story; each link leading to more links.

 

 

Many academics believed that texts like Patchwork Girl would become so popular that print texts would cease to exist. Paul Hackman argues in his article, “I Am a Double Agent,” that Patchwork Girl “is a relevant meditation on the relationship between print and digital media, [not] a paradigmatic work of a literary movement that has yet to catch hold” (85-86). Hackman does not believe, as others do, that hypertext novels are the future. He insists that print and digital media will continue to work side by side and not in opposition to each other.

Hackman also focuses on the feminist perspective of Patchwork Girl. He references other academics (Barbara Page and Katherine Hayles) who contend that hypertext can “resist patriarchal forms of narrative” and that “copyright law privileged a version of the male author by ignoring the material conditions of the text” (86). In other words, while print perpetuates the male narrative, hypertext provides a platform for the female and feminist narrative (86). Hackman points out how scholars are split in their opinions about hypertext literature – is it “yet to come” or “already passed”? (88). He also notes how Katherine Hayles has changed her opinion over time; Hayles now believes that texts like Patchwork Girl resemble print, but still argues its importance to literature (88). Hypertext relies on “conventions of print” (102); even clicking on links in Patchwork Girl resembles “flipping” of pages.

Hackman references Bolter and Grusin’s “remediation” concept (89). Patchwork Girl and other hypertext novels “remediates print both as a medium to define itself against and as a useful and culturally significant social context for making the hypertext authoritative or meaningful” (93). Most importantly, Hackman argues that just as the gender binary should be challenged, so should the binary “between print and hypertext” (97). Additionally, “hypertext remediates print but in doing so allows print to remediate hypertext” (97); thus “Patchwork Girl present[s] print as a remediated companion to, rather than the opponent of or a precursor to, hypertext” (105). While on the topic of remediation, I would also like to bring up the relationship between Patchwork Girl and hypermediacy. Remember “hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window onto the world, but rather as “windowed” itself–with windows that open onto other representations or other media” (Bolter and Grusin 329). In Patchwork Girl, not one idea or body part is more important than another, every part of the story is on an equal plane.

What I find most interesting is what Shelley Jackson seems to be focused on in her writings: the body. The narrator (or the “monster”) is the female creature that Victor Frankenstein attempted to create, but decided to destroy. After the conclusion of the original Frankenstein, Shelley Jackson’s “Mary Shelley” takes the discarded body pieces and stitches them with pieces of her own body to create the “patchwork girl.” The random body pieces from the print novel, Frankenstein, transform into a living and thinking individual of a hypertext, Patchwork Girl. Shelley’s “monster” most importantly has a voice that was not present in the original Frankenstein text. The “monster” (or rather, cyborg) becomes a “repository of human consciousness” (Hayles xii).

Questions:
1. Do you believe, as Hackman does, that print and media are “remediated companions”?
2. Hackman cites Christopher Keep’s article “Growing Intimate with Monsters.” Do you see any other examples of the gothic in Patchwork Girl? What about examples of the gothic in other hypertexts?
3. Are the ideas expressed in Patchwork Girl posthumanist? Or is Patchwork Girl itself posthuman? (According to Hayles’ definition on page 3: “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals”)
4. Do you see hypertext novels as autopoietic? (autopoeisis: see Hayles pages 10-11)
5. I’ve been reading other blog posts on the internet about Shelley Jackson and Patchwork Girl…here is one example. One thing I’d like to point out is that one of the citations (to Jackson’s “Stitch Bitch“) is a broken link. Landow writes of the importance of link and hypertext: “string-to-lexia allows navigation through space, linking mode encourage annotation…” Consider what problems arise when there are broken links in a text, particularly links to information that are extremely valuable?

Citations:
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4:3 (1996).

Hackman, Paul. “‘I Am a Double Agent’: Shelley Jackson’s ‘Patchwork Girl’ and the Persistence of Print in the Age of Hypertext.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 84–107. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41261826.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infomatics.  University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

7 Responses

  1. Cynthia Davidson February 4, 2018 at 2:41 pm |

    Regarding the broken link: In the second Pathfinders’ video, what did you think of the moment when Jackson found a broken link in her own text that she didn’t know was there? Did you expect her to say more about that? As difficult as broken links are, in this case, are they an impediment to the text or a part of it?

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  2. Vivien Abraham February 6, 2018 at 2:40 pm |

    Hi Caterina, great thought-provoking post. In response to your first question, Hackman’s statement: “Hypertext remediates print but in doing so allows print to remediate hypertext. Both media end up altered by the intermingling” (97), is a great description of how Patchwork Girl works. I would add that although in general, incidences of this intermingling seem to occur most often in the digital world and less frequently in the real world, I recall from last week’s readings that the organizational approach of hypertext has influenced at least one newspaper, and from my own observations, it has influenced the prevalence of bite-sized information in news magazines, such as The Week.

    Reply
  3. Caitlin Duffy February 6, 2018 at 4:07 pm |

    Caterina, thanks for this thoughtful post and insightful questions.
    In response to your second question, I have noticed a few instances of the gothic mode in hypertext in general. One of these gothic instances, if we agree with Hackman’s idea that “Patchwork Girl present[s] print as a remediated companion to, rather than the opponent of or a precursor to, hypertext” (105) and apply this concept to all of hypertext, then we have a sort of doubling of medium. This reminds me of the gothic use of twins, doubles, and doppelgängers. Seen in this way, the hypertext becomes an uncanny version of the printed text, familiar yet strange. If we argue against Hackman and see the hypertext as an “opponent of” print, this doppelgänger can become the sort that threatens identity theft (think “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” or Poe’s “William Wilson”). This also points to the anxiety felt by some academics who feared the believed destruction of print in favor of hypertext. Either way, Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” now is not only a story of a monster but is a monstrous medium itself.

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  4. Cynthia.Davidson@stonybrook.edu February 6, 2018 at 4:31 pm |

    Caterina–in the article “Stitch Bitch,” Jackson speaks about her work with some frustration about how critics always tend to turn it into a discussion about texts and printing when, to paraphrase, she thinks they should approach it “for what it is.”

    I don’t know how to feel about that–I think she has set us up so brilliantly in a way to do just that, but not to do only that. Now that I have a copy of the text in hand (on computer), and can move through it slowly or quickly as I desire, I can see with how much love the narrator treats the humanity of her creations, no matter how pieced or monstrous they may seem. But the text aches for meta interpretations about textuality and she has set it up to do so.

    Reply

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