The situation is quite different in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl, which does not partake in the device of the alien but instead casts identity differently. Identity is explicitly regarded as being constructed, hence the invocation of patchwork. Furthermore, the text itself is regarded as a patchwork constructed from a number of texts, all of which are detailed in a bibliography of sorts. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz and a number of theoretical texts all show how this text is deeply intertextual and fully aware of this fact; it is quite deliberate I think that there is a great degree of parallel between the story of the girl and construction of the text.
Being a hypertext, one cannot speak of a linear narrative and it is also difficult to provide citations. I have chosen to cite the title of lexia in question, since it can be located through one of the interface options of the text. However, the ‘proper’ way to read the text is to simply open the text window which begins with a black and white picture of a naked woman titled ‘her’. Clicking anywhere on this image moves the reader to the ‘title page’ where the full title is shown giving the title as Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself, with six linked words below “a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, & broken accents, (sources)”. Each of these linked words begin a separate yet interconnected thread about the Patchwork Girl. ‘Sources’ is as mentioned a bibliography.
The connection to Frankenstein is immediately clear in the subtitle to the novel ‘A Modern Monster’ echoing Mary Shelley’s ‘A Modern Prometheus’. The more interesting thing, however, is the author which is noted to be “Mary/Shelley, & Herself” which immediately problematizes the concept of the author, something also inherent in the nature of a hypertext as well. First of all, Mary/Shelley is clearly a version of Mary Shelley as the author of Frankenstein who is a major influence on the text. Yet, the slash indicates that it is not the actual Mary Shelley but rather the implied author of Frankenstein and the influences inherent from palimpsesting Shelley’s novel.
Second of all, the slash indicates that ‘Shelley’ might also be Shelley Jackson the actual author of Patchwork Girl, leaving ‘Herself’ as the Patchwork Girl narrating herself, turning the text into a kind of biography. Given that all of the text is narrated in the first person, it makes it difficult for us as readers to know exactly who is speaking, except when clues are given in the text itself:
I have had plenty of time to make the girl. Yet the task was not so easy as you may suppose. I found that I could not compose a female without devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I … began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation: magic lanterns, peep show boxes, waking dreams, geometrical demonstrations, philo-sophical doctrines, fortifications and impediments, cartographic surveys, and engineering machines of all sorts. (Lexia: scrap bag, italics, emphasis and ellipses in original)
Here we have a lexia which clearly seems to be written by Shelley Jackson, a meta-comment on how she wrote the text, but immediately this notion is destabilized by the references provided in the same lexia, indicating that some of the text - presumably the various emphasis - was taken from other sources. Here we see how the text explicitly plays with the concept of author, something further enhanced in this lexia: “Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest” (Lexia: this writing).
It would at first be obvious to read this lexia as also written by Shelley Jackson, being a similar meta-comment on writing the text, but we realize that it is in fact a meta-comment about reading the text but who is the speaker, then? Clearly there is a degree of ambiguity here about the authority of the author versus the reader, something which is imperative in the case of hypertexts when it is even possible as it is in Patchwork Girl to save one reading and load it later, thus making readings materially different and not simply experientially different. However, I am here less interested in dealing with the material consequences of reading the text, as much as I am interested in investigating how the concept of identity is narrated. One lexia gives us an idea of how to read the entire text:
I am a mixed metaphor. Metaphor, meaning something like “bearing across”, is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked to other territories alien to it but equally mine. Shin bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the hip bone: 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. (Lexia ‘metaphor me’)
Here it seems that the Girl is narrating, reflecting on her own status but it also serves as a form of meta-commentary on the text itself, something which seems inherent throughout the text. This seems an obvious choice, as the Girl is presented as a patchwork in the same way the text is. Metaphorically speaking, then, we can say that the Girl is the hypertext we are reading and not a fixed subject or person. In other words, her identity is fluid and changes with every reading depending on which narrator we attribute the different lexias to, and in which sequence we read them. As such, the Girl is shaped by our gestalt of the text, to use Iser’s concept, and that gestalt always changes.
In this sense, whether or not reading the text is linear or not, Patchwork Girl’s identity is constructed narratively by the reader, and this narrative is explicitly one which is constructed by fragments taken from other texts. Jackson even invokes Derrida’s Dissemination as one of the sources of the text, so it is evident that this textual process is not only used explicitly but also viewed as a generative process and one which applies to the construction of identity as much as narrative technique. This connection between narrative and the human is noted explicitly by the text itself: “The comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric” (Lexia: typographical).
There is a further connection between composition and the human body in the way that each of the five entry points into the different narrative spaces each is preceded by an image. This image is the same image of the naked woman which opens the text, but in each case it has been cut up and re-arranged. These images are titled, unsurprisingly, ‘hercut’, ‘hercut2′, ‘hercut3′ and ‘hercut4′ with the fifth being titled ‘phrenology’ and shows a phrenological image of a head with a number spaces drawn onto it each of which is filled with a word. In all cases, each of these images lead on to a specific storyspace in which a specific and separate narrative unfolds. Each space provides us with one narrative of the Patchwork Girl, but it is only the combined narratives that allows us to stitch together the entire story of the Patchwork Girl.
What is significant about Patchwork Girl is less the meta-discussion of the text as intertext and more about how identity is viewed as being tied up in similar intertextual strategies and how the text understands identity as being constructed from a repertoire of narratives. Read in this way, the story takes on a different form, being as much a discussion of the way we as readers are positioned today as opposed to the texts Jackson employs.
The literary texts used are old compared to the theoretical texts used, just as much of the text centres on the discussion of identity and selfhood. These concepts are questioned by the practice of the text, showing how the Girl’s identity is one of collage and assemblage. As Katherine Hayles points out “the text not only normalizes the subject-as-assemblage but also presents the subject-as-unity as a grotesque impossibility” (Hayles, 2000: 29). Although the Girl is a named a monster, it also becomes obvious that we have all become this kind of monster, in the way the text breaks down the boundary between author, text and reader. Hayles states that
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. (Hayles, 2000: 13)
Jacskon’s text takes up this discussion, and it becomes evident that ‘monster’ in this connection should not be considered as a frightening beast from mythology, but rather the offensive and transgressive entity which is the same concept that we find in Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Jackson - who cites Haraway’s cyborg essay as one of the sources of Patchwork Girl - shows us how we need to conceive of our identities as fragmented and constructed and that they have in fact always been so.
As I see it, this is one of two reasons for choosing Frankenstein as one of the source texts; it shows that identity has always been constructed and that this is nothing new. The second reason is that it creates a metaphorical dependency which allows us to perform the normalizing move which Hayles notes. We understand Frankenstein’s monster as constructed, and what is more important is that Shelley’s narrative allows us to understand and accept this normalizing move.
By inserting the concept of identity developed by Jackson in Patchwork Girl into the narrative frame of Shelley’s Frankenstein, we can make sense of the lexias as part of a greater whole; we understand that linearity is not necessary for the representation of an identity, just as we accept that our own identity is not fully linear. This realization may seem at odds with the concept of identity as narrative developed earlier in this chapter by Worthington, but one need only remember that the storyspaces developed by Jackson constitute narratives when read, even if the sequence of these narratives differ every time we read them.
We should not presume that just because Jackson employs a metaphoric dependency from Frankenstein that the Girl is identical to the monster; it is evident that what is borrowed from the Frankenstein narrative is a way to concretize the detournment which is taking place in Jackson’s text: identity is shown to be a hybrid always both Same and Other. The monster, though not configured here as an extraterrestrial alien, is still emblematic of that which is alien to the human, but Jackson’s point is that we are all alien to ourselves in the way we all contain a number of different narratives, textual fragments and cultural objects which are disseminated into our sense of self. Technology has simply become the latest addition in a long row of objects that we have assimilated.
In this way, Jackson’s narrative is less one of cultural resistance as it is one of radical reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Jackson refuses to portray this view as original, instead casting her text as one permutation of many intertexts which compose current cultural imagination. By mirroring narrative and textual materiality, she refuses to separate things which are necessarily connected. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren in his book TechnoLogics has an interesting point in this connection, where he states that “we become individuals because we are mediated subjects that exist alongside the others that we add on and subtract” (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 165-166), which is to say that we only become individuals when we are narrated and that this process includes adding and subtracting; in other words when detourning and recuperating a variety of cultural texts into ourselves.
Kochhar-Lindgren is interested in the ways that contemporary society is developing and how we as humans are reconfigured by it, especially in connection with technology and cybernetics. His concerns are thus very close to those of Haraway, Hayles and Jackson. As he argues
There is a profound fear, in transepochal culture, of becoming incorporated into the Borg or of being attacked by the monsters spawned by technics, but, on the other hand, this is a moment of opportunity, for as Guattari argues, “A machine assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, and creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoeisis”. We are the aliens, we are already other, and the work of the hetero- and the auto- must be enacted, with as much panache as we can muster, keeping in mind that the logic of such a move must deal not with an imitation of the human form, much less an ideal Platonic form, but with a technologics of production that wills the perfection of nature along certain of its axes. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 127-128, italics in original)
As we can see, Kochhar-Lindgren also finds it useful to conceptualize the transformation of contemporary culture in terms of sf. He uses the image of the Borg from the Star Trek series and films, where it is an alien race composed of various humanoids assimilated with cybernetic technology. The Borg (or Borg Collective, as it is fully known) is frightening because it eradicates difference, even the ultimate difference between life and death as Adam Roberts puts it (Roberts, 2000: XX).
By positing Sameness as the horrible nightmare, Kochhar-Lindgren reverses the opposition between Same and Other as it is typically envisioned in dominant culture. Being alien, being different, becomes a positive and necessary thing, even as it is something we already are. Being an individual, according to Kochhar-Lindgren, and I would argue, Jackson as well plus Bowie and Ra, is to be different. For Kochhar-Lindgren, this change is already coming in the way the we have begun to understand the human differently because of cybernetics:
Through cybernetics, history has instituted this next stage by combining forms of the human and nonhuman into a provisional “new foundation.” This new form of existence apparently overcomes the hostility inherent in alienation, at least in its simple “classical” form, by erasing the line that separates and distinguishes human from nonhuman (both animal and inorganic forms). The line can be crossed in either direction: humans can incorporate animals and machines (baboon hearts and pacemakers), and animals and machines can begin to incorporate human characteristics (ears, genes, language, thinking). The end of human history, and the beginning of the posthuman, would necessarily entail a humanization of the machine and the mechanization of the human. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 90)
More than simply dealing with the technological and the mechanization of the human, I would argue that the artists dealt with here have all shown how identity and subjectivity can be reconfigured by detournment and how sf has proved a successful strategy for just such a detournment. Whether it serves as a rebellious resistance for those dissatisfied with the subject positions available to them, or if it serves as an attack on a specific way of conceiving identity, the introduction of sf devices becomes a way of narrating an alternative position.
Just as sf employs a textual strategy which creates a distinct form of fictional space where it can investigates zones of possibility and impossibility, so do the same devices when introduced in terms of subjectivity create spaces where the articulation of alternatives become possible. Specific and unique cultural spaces are opened by the introduction of these dissonant and discontinuous elements.
The conception of the human as cyborg or posthuman, however, need not be resistant. Kochhar-Lindgren is working from the assumption that we are all changing; at least those of us living under technocapitalism, which for him is the episteme which is emerging from the 21st century (4). Technocapitalism, then, is the new dominant culture although it will be different from what is happening now, which is why it represents an opportunity as much as a threat. In the end, when we understand not just our environment but even ourselves through sf narratives, when sf has contaminated our subjectivities, it’s penetration of our culture can be said to be complete.
