malleable medium part 2: Shelley Jackson’s monster

To fully comprehend this short discussion, you should be somewhat familiar with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). If you aren’t, you can grab a quickie version of the plot summary here.

The most significant landmark in hyptertext literature, and a clear example of how flexible the medium and literature (and we) have become is Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a virtual novel in which Mary Shelley creates “the female companion to Frankenstein’s monster” (Landow, 2000). N. Katherine Hayles calls it “the text that heralded the transition to second-generation electronic literature” (Writing Machines, 37).

Jackson concerned her audience with what happened to the characters between screens. Readers became concerned with the fragmented seconds that are virtually non-existent when we read print literature. What happened to the monster’s consciousness during these fragmented seconds? “Did it dissolve into the noise of the machine, decomposed back into ones and zeroes?” (Hayles, 38).

[I can certainly empathize with this. I feel as though I am a part of a collective. So many others are watching and wanting to be watched. What happens when I time out? Does the web's energy decrease somehow? Have I missed something? (11/2006)]

The most signifying aspect of Jackson’s process in Patchwork Girl was providing a series of hypertextual portals stemming directly from an image of the monster’s brain (right). Each girl who was used to make the monster was assigned her own section, which served as a launching point to a set of memories — a detailed history — of the specific donor. There was no linear way to approach this narrative and because of this, no specific story was given superiority over another. Shelley’s masterpiece (then considered a gamble) turned its back on linearity by utilizing a “collage” style narrative to expand the story of Frankenstein.

Hayles describes her first encounter with Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story (written in 1987, published in 1990), the first novel of its kind — one that attempted to employ hypertext as its main narrative tool. According to Hayles, the first iteration of the Storyspace software used for the novel (the same software, though a later iteration, that was used for Patchwork Girl five years later) fell short, but she still saw some significance there. She shared it with other academics who immediately wrote it off due to its failure to involve readers as seamlessly as print novels did. The burning question in Hayles’ mind? How could one teach this type of literature? Clearly the rules that worked for print literature had changed with a switch in media. Was something lost? “It would take years and many more experiences with electronic texts before she began to understand that electronic literature operated in fundamentally different ways than print and required new critical frameworks to assess its reading and writing practices” (Hayles, 37).

It’s helpful, if not necessary, to keep in mind this fundamental difference between print and electronic literature. Otherwise I might be in danger of pigeon-holing my analysis/theories to digital media, even though that’s the primary site of research. Hayles writes that literature is “the interplay between form, content, and medium” (31). Taking into account imitation and remediation, Media-Specific Analysis attends to the medium as well as the text, and so it ceases to be only “semiotic” in nature. For example, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) addressed hypertext before even computers were a reality, let alone the World Wide Web; Bush’s hypertext was mechanical, not electronic. It occurs to me that this may be Cybertext theory’s shortcoming. The analysis assigned to certain digital/electronic works cannot be restricted to digital media alone because then we lose the ability to recognize its presence and effects when instantiated in other media.

It’s almost impossible to draw up theoretical framework for criticism or analysis (like I am about to do for this small number of online literary journals) without some bias rearing its head. Because I am mainly familiar with (print) literary criticism it’ll be a challenge to approach online communication with a fresh eye, so to speak. What biases and prejudices will I most likely bring to my research? Hard to tell, but N. Katherine Hayles’ observation regarding Afternoon, a Story and Patchwork Girl says it all: electronic literature requires new critical frameworks. More on the differences between print narrative and electronic narrative later…

*The gif above is a loop of images from Patchwork Girl.

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