Final

 Storytelling to hypertext: Literature in the face of technology

Storytelling came first. It was communal. It was fires crackling and the dust of someone’s voice forming shapes over the flames. It was speaker and audience, narrative and structure. It was simple. It was formal. It was entertainment, but there was something underneath like that thing that doesn’t get talked about in a joke; something in the speaker’s gestures, in the audience’s attention, something visible and tangible. You could see it in the eyes that followed the storyteller’s hands, hear it expand in the the silence that filled his pauses, feel it tense as his voice drove towards a moment of decision. The oral tradition was interactive. It was social. It was as much about the real people involved in it as it was the characters.

And then there came the printing press, and the storytellers sank away into dusty cave drawings and the myths we only ever read out of the thick anthologies our Humanities teachers force on us. Novels are the storytellers now. They are not people, but they act like them. A novel is conscious of its tone, of its inflections, of pace and even dynamics. Its story still depends on a kind of structure to carry its audience through to the end; it still follows a narrative, but its narrator is silent. The reader tells the story to himself, though he does know its plan or where it will take him. It builds up inside him and he follows it like someone feeling his way out of a cave. When he finally comes into the light he’s reached a kind of understanding, but it is only his own. He can’t share it. It is a kind of internal interaction.

Now computer technology is changing again the way we share information. Like the printing press brought forth early forms of newspapers and eventually led to the novel as a literary form, computers give us social networks, instant messaging, and even the emergence of electronic literature. Sven Birkerts collection of critical essays The Gutenberg Elegies, published in 1994, notes the changes that had already started taking place then. It is Birkerts concern that computers will take over our lives, remove us from the internal selves which we are so close to when we read traditional novels. He does not seem so far fetched in his warnings. His essays were published before the advent of instant messaging, before Facebook, before YouTube. The majority of the youth generation has a life set up for itself Online. It has its own websites, profiles, screennames. Someone of that generation who doesn’t tends to meet with a degree of incredulity: “You don’t ? Why not?”

I went through a phase in high school. I spent hours instant messaging. I loved the bloop it made when I got a message. I love seeing the words pop up. I loved watching the little bar at the bottom of the window flash typing, telling me that more was coming soon. Birkerts assertion that “the emphasis in writing has naturally moved from product to process”(159) hits my feelings on the head. I was so enamored with the idea of IM that at least in the very beginning I couldn’t have cared less about the substance of my conversations. So long as the bloops kept on coming. I was like an addict.

But I got tired of it. IM is like any form of textual communication; it can’t substitute the real thing. Do you think the first newspapers sent out across Europe gave Italians a true sense of the conflict going on in Ireland and Great Britain? No, and instant messaging does no more to communicate a real conversation. There is no body language, no facial expression, no stance to take in. Even inflection and tone of voice are missing. Conversation has been streamlined to remove the complicators, but unfortunately the complicators are what give conversations their value. Generally people recognize this. The youth generation has taken on an Online life, but it has retained its earthly one as well.

The printing press did not turn humans into mechanical machines; computers are not likely to turn us into electronic ones, though they have made subtle changes in us. At least while we are using them, our thought processes are different. A person who can spend an entire evening working his way through several hundred pages of a novel gets impatient with a long webpage of text. One gets distracted, clicks here, clicks there, explores related topics, then topics related to the related topics. A friend once told me it is possible to start at a random Wikipedia entry and in five clicks find your way to Jesus.

Birkerts points out that one doesn’t get what he calls “deep reading” from this sort of browsing through. There isn’t much internal interaction with what one scans scans over on the screen, but then, Birkerts is being very general with this point, and there isn’t much internal interaction in an encyclopedia entry either. If one is to make a fair comparison it ought to be between two forms of literature, not a form of literature and medium of presentation.

Hypertext is much more free in its structure than a novel, partly because it is so new- there are no expectations for it- and partly because of the medium. It is put together like the Internet. It uses the same basic building blocks as the Internet: links, multiple reading paths, and independent windows. Like the Internet, it is associative; it doesn’t follow a narrative. Different sections bring in different ideas about its theme. Thus, Shelley Jackson’s Pathwork Girl contains a section on the patchwork girl’s organs, a section on the women to whom they belonged, a section that is a fictional journal of Mary Shelley (her creator), and even one that is nothing more than a series of passages made of already existing texts that have been “stitched” together, called the Crazy Quilt. There is fifth section titled Story, which resembles a traditional narrative, but each of its windows of text functions on its own, and its overall significance does not lie with the story but with the ideas the windows bring forth.

However, unlike the Internet a hypertext has a subjective purpose. Someone puts it together not as an efficient way to store data, but because he wants to explore a theme, and wants his readers to do the same. As he moves through it, the reader collects ideas, and those ideas mingle inside him. While he reads about the patchwork girl’s heart he might also be remembering a passage from the Crazy Quilt which combines texts describing “perfect” characteristics in women. Whatever connections he makes between them is completely up to him. The author of the hypertext does not want to control his reader’s discovery. It’s not so much about leading him out of the cave as give him a flashlight and a map.

The changes made with the novel have gone a step further. Not only has the number of participants been reduced to one, the one is in control of the interaction that takes place. He has become his own narrator.

It is a far cry from the camp fires where we started out. However, one could argue that the fires never really died. Sure, the original myths and legends are all but returned to the earth, but what do we do, after all, when we gather together with friends? We talk. We reminisce. We share recent experiences. We discuss the things we’ve heard. Any interesting conversation is full of good stories, we just don’t notice them anymore. Birkerts’s biggest worry, the one from which his novel gets its title, The Gutenberg Elegies, that books are doomed to disappear in the face of computer technology as storytelling has in the face of printing technology is mistaken in that the issue is not so much one of presence as of place. If oral tradition is the model, then novels are not so much going to disappear as dissipate, become much less prominent, much less apparent, but much more integral parts of our everyday lives. Which may be a loss, but also may very well be something of a gain.

 

Original Essays

 #4

Experience vs. Thought: the traditional novel and the hypertext

 There are some new faces on the literary playground- they’re from that new development down the block, and they’ve been causing quite a stir. They are hypertexts, works of computer-based literature the likes of which have been popping up like Levittowns throughout the writing community. Full of links, multiple reading paths, text split into independent windows, hypertexts are playing in a completely new way. Traditionalists, who’ve been hanging around the same swing or slide for generations, are none too happy. They’ve got their boundaries drawn but they aren’t sure they can hold their ground against the growing trend. There’s tension in the air. The question begs to be asked: who will come out on top- and many have already set their bets on the trendy newcomers- but is that the question that ought to be asked? So early in the game? Is it possible that the conflict the whole jungle-gym is setting up for isn’t even necessary?

At this point, the sides are already clear. On one are tangible, linear works dealing with character and feeling. On the other is the virtual world beyond our computer screens, text that mingles details and ideas, concerns itself with the thinking process. In his collection of critical essays The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Sven Birkerts laments the development of this new textual environment, which he fears is leading us into “bright new hyperworld, a kind of Disneyland of information”(139). The overload of stimulation one gets from computer technology, according to Birkerts, pulls us away from the slower process that is traditional reading. Hypertext, meanwhile, stands poised to take its place. It’s designed for readers conditioned by the computer environment. Works like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a spin-off of the Frankenstein story, are built of links, and like a choose-your-own-adventure game one decides for oneself which direction to take at each splitting of the trail. They do not so much begin as open up. With the first window, in the case of Patchwork Girl, a title page, one is provided a number of options: a graveyard, a story, a journal, etc. It’s an exploration, an associative reading like searching the Internet.

Which makes it very different from the reading we are used to. Intuitively, we go from left to right, from top to bottom, from page one to two to three, so on and so forth, and authors traditionally depend on our following that pattern because a novel is set up to develop over time. Even details that seem to have little significance are placed intentionally. As the reader comes across them they are stored away in his mind, and like with working at a puzzle, the pieces come together. At first all you have is the frame, a bit of sky, green that might be grass; and then slowly the picture takes shape, you see a picnic basket, a kite, then the skirt of a dress, a little girl’s face, so on until finally that last piece pops in and everything becomes clear. As one reads, his sense of characters grows. He begins to feel towards them as he does towards real people, even as he does towards himself. He shares in their hopes and disappointments, their achievements, their breakdowns, and in the end, at that important moment when the characters reach a turning point and change (when the last piece clicks into place) so does he.

A hypertext, however, is not linear, and therefor cannot work the same way. Like the novel, its form dictates its content: a story can’t be built up from a foundation because the reader is too free. He might start in the middle if he likes, come in through a window, skip a floor. He’s no longer putting together a puzzle so much as lifting a series of shades to see what he might find on the other side. If the author does not adjust to his change the reader might easily miss details or discover them too early; all the shades look the same and there is nothing to tell him which to open first or which are most important. That important moment of the traditional novel, scattered somewhere among them, faces the very real risk of being skipped over completely.

In order for an author of hypertext to be successful his writing must have a new aim. As Jackson puts it in her essay Stitch Bitch, in which she discusses Patchwork Girl, he will “need other reasons to keep readers reading…than the compulsion to find out what comes next”. For her, this is less than a problem. She sees the novel’s linearity as a restriction: it can only ever piece together the image it wants you to see. Hypertext, on the other hand, is a realm of exploration. Each window of text is an individual, and makes implications that are suppose to be thought about at the moment at hand. Even those in Patchwork Girl’s “Story” section are about the ideas behind the action more than the action itself. It’s a kind of allegory, and when Mary Shelley removes a piece of her own skin and attaches it to her “creature” the reader is not so much meant to feel the connection created between them as wonder what it means. It’s necessary to think if one is to get out of the work what Jackson intends.

Birkert’s inexperience with hypertextual reading comes out in his criticism. He goes into his reading of a hypertext “waiting patiently for the empowering rush that ought to come when worlds open upon other worlds”(151), but that’s an unrealistic expectation. He’s looking for the moment of revelation, but that’s not what hypertext is about and it is not coming. Jackson, on the other hand, complains of novels that “sentences which ought to stop you in your tracks are like spiderwebs across the chute. You rip through, they’re gone”, but she is not being fair either. The sentences in a novel are not for thinking about, but for building up the story. If the reader stops to examine the implications of an individual sentence, he pulls out of the dream world where characters and settings are real to him, and the effect is damaged.

Birkerts goes on to worry that hypertext, as part of the expansive computer-revolution of our age, will take over novels just as computers are taking over many of the slower processes of everyday life. But the novel is no more likely to be superseded by hypertext than we are to become stationary cyborgs. Human beings crave the kind of life experience that comes from novels, which reminds him that his character connects him to the people around him. Thought, without experience to base it on, is meaningless. Patchwork Girl’s premise is based off Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; one must first experience the novel in order to fully appreciate the implications made in the hypertext. They go hand-in-hand: experience and thought, novel and hypertext. So the kids on the playground can relax. They’re not up against a rival tribe that plays by different rules. It’s a whole different game they’re after, and there’s room on the playground for both.

#1

 

The Story, the Person, and People

I love books. I like everything about books. I like seeing the words written down, the typeset, the smell of the pages, and of course I like the stories. Even those who hate reading like to hear a good story. The word literature evokes different reactions; each person has his own opinion on the value of a book, but a good story can be appreciated by everyone. Though it is important to me that I read and write, I know that it does not have to be important to everyone. Stories can be significant, however, to individuals and to groups.

When I was in the fourth grade I decided I wanted to be a writer. I already liked books, and after a certain point it seemed natural to me that I should make up my own stories. I started out changing ones I knew: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Snow White, The Prince and the Pauper, Beauty and the Beast- not just books. I didn’t differentiate between what I got off a page and what I got from a screen. The story was always there, only the presentation changed. When I first came up with my own stories they were mix of words and images. It was impossible to make a movie, so I wrote them down. After a while writing worked in automatically, and when something happened I thought about how to describe it. I thought about different ways a situation might be presented, and how saying something in different ways changed its meaning. Writing became important to me because it was a part of the way I thought and it’s been a part of my development.

I realize that writing is not universally important to everyone. There are a lot people who do not like books, who never got anything out of them. But when a story exists independently of a jacket and print the stigma that some people associate with reading goes away. Stories are everywhere. They get shared between friends and family on a daily basis. Almost every good joke is a story. A story gives someone the ability to identify and connect with other people. It’s a shared experience, one that involves human feeling and action.

Last year I took a class where I learned about Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, both well-known American folksingers. I didn’t know much about folk music before then, but I liked it, and I’ve started myself a little collection. There’s something to the idea of writing music not because one has creative drive, or to express some personal emotion, but because song can affect large numbers of people. One can hear the whole audience singing along in live recordings of Seeger’s playing. He shouted out lines before he sang them just so the audience could sing with him. His songs are not about himself. I remember thinking, too, at some point, that neither he nor Woody Guthrie are literary figures. They didn’t write any sophisticated works. They weren’t singing for people who studied poetry and literature. What they sang was meant for everyone, especially those no where near the literary elite. They were out for the common man. And it just struck me that that’s the kind of art that’s necessary. That’s the kind of writing that’s necessary- what’s there for everyone, what brings people together; and if a story does that, then it has to be worthwhile.

When I was in middle school my family took a trip to Washington D.C. to visit a cousin and see the monuments. The first day we walked down towards the Washington Monument, and as we went along the stone wall near the park, I saw an old man shaking an empty Styrofoam cup; not exactly empty. He had, maybe, a dollar’s worth of change in there.

I’d never seen anyone like him before. I’d seen poor people; I’d seen the scruffy clothes and the greasy hair and the gray faces when my mother took me to work with her in Providence. But none of those people had been asking for help, most of them didn’t even seem to see me, and I’d barely noticed them. Here was this old man with his coffee cup, looking at people, watching them pass, just shaking, shaking, without any expression on his face. I started digging through my pockets.

Later, while I was collecting change from my father and brother, my mother warned me away from it. You’re just getting them drugs or booze, she said; but I couldn’t be persuaded. It gave me a high. I was above everything: what I was doing, no matter where it went in the future, was good because it was good in the moment that I did it. I dropped my quarters into that old man’s cup, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and neither one of us knew anything about the other, but there we were. And maybe it’s true he was a drunk, maybe my mother was right, but you can’t take away that moment, the recognition.

I know there was a certain amount of naivety to what I did then; I was in middle school, but I do think it’s true about the moment. I think it matters that I stopped and didn’t ignore him. There’s something human in it. There would have been nothing human in passing him by. And by human, I don’t mean charitable or kind. You can’t begin to be charitable or kind, and you can’t be cruel or rude to a person you refuse to see.

So much of what is significant to being a person depends on one’s actions. With that point of view, it is easy to let reading and writing fall by the wayside, but I think reading and writing can still have a place there. One’s actions, after all, are decided by one’s thoughts. Something that influences thought influences action. An interesting question is whether, if I did not think so much about writing, and characters, and therefore people, I would have stopped by that old man and dropped my change into his cup. It’s possible I would have, and it’s possible that, like everyone else going by, I would have passed without looking. The question within the question is why I stopped.

Stories are full of people; full of people you do not know and will never meet. People you would not recognize on the street, and who would not recognize you. But when you read a book you become involved with their lives though they have nothing to do with you, though you know that in fact their lives do not exist. If one can interest oneself in the experiences of someone who is fictional, then he can easily recognize the people he passes on the street. If he sees an old man in a shabby gray coat, shaking a coffee cup at those going by, then he might stop, not because the man obviously needs money, but because no else is looking.

 

 

Reflection

 I’m really happy with my revision essay. I think it really ended up being an entirely new essay, but I like the way I brought in aspects of both the first and the fourth. The argument is about hypertext’s place in the world of literature, like the fourth, and I still use Birkerts as a critic, and Patchwork Girl as an example. The argument sort of extends to computer technology in general too, though, and that’s where I bring in my personal experience. I mean, it worked out really well, ’cause I’m in such a good position to talk about it, being a part of the generation that’s grown up with computers.

I think my favorite part is the first paragraph. I had a lot of fun with it. I used a lot of imagery, a lot of stuff that a few years ago I only associated with fiction. I sort of work into a more regular style as I move along, but I tried to keep that edge in it. One thing I’ve noticed about our readings, even though I think I lean more toward’s Birkert’s point of view, I found Jackson’s essay the most engaging. I thought it was so interesting, because it wasn’t really in an essayist’s style. She took a lot of liberties with it, and that’s exactly what made me want to read it. I especially like her images. So I tried to add some stuff I’ve learned about fiction writing to this essay. I mean, a good image can be just as effective in an essay as it can in a story. I tried to put a lot of images in this essay.

There was one point where I felt my argument got a little lost. I think I could make my position in relation to Birkert’s a little more clear. In the beginning I agree with him, but as I go along I sort of switch it up. I’m not sure the reasoning behind that is completely clear.

 

Final Project Compost

In my first essay I talked a lot about how stories are significant because they give experience and bring people together. I also sort of drew a line between stories and literature. I made literature anything written down in actual book form, the sort of thing to which someone can say “reading’s not my thing.” and be done with it, and made a story something that everyone engages in casually. I think I can definately do something with that. In one of Birkert’s essays, maybe more than one, he talks about how wisdom, stories, etc. used to be passed down through spoken word, how books replaced them. At times, in his discussion of hypertext and computer technology he implies that we are moving both further away from that beginning or back towards it. He writes that in the sense that we are committing less and less to memory we are certainly still moving away from it, but in that there is this collectiveness to it, more of a sense of community, we are moving back. He only mentions it once or twice though, he never really gets into it. I think it could be interesting to dig into the issues there a little more. I mean, are we moving further away or getting back? I think really we’re getting further away, because even if there is a sense of collectiveness, this feeling that you are a part of something that involves other people, those people are not around you when you are using a computer. It’s a bit of a contradiction in itself. They are there somewhere, and here is this communal project you are all working on (wikipedia, for example), but there’s no interaction going on. I mean, isn’t that important? Doesn’t a lot of substance come from actual human interaction?

That’s part of the reason I never really liked facebook or IM or any of that. When it comes right down to it it’s more or less useless. I mean, I’ve tried that stuff. I found that I just discounted everything that happened online when I was actually with the people themselves. It was like it wasn’t real, like it never happened. You totally freak out at someone on instant messenger, or tell them you love them, and it can just glide over. It’s all too easy, and it’s easy because its unreal. You don’t have to sit there and look and someone’s face as they yell at you or you yell at them. The body language, which is the real interaction (90%, right? I’ll have to see where that number comes from), is missing completely.

I think I could bring my story about the homeless guy in there. I made a big deal about the fact that I saw him, and there was this little recognition. I mean, you don’t have that online. Those moments disappear. I mean, those are really important moments. Everybody has them sometimes. You know, like when you meet a stranger’s eye and instead of dropping it you both hold it there for a second, just a second, before you look away, and it’s like you see this person, this real person there, even though you don’t know them. I’ve been thinking kind of a lot about how you get to know people since I’ve come to college. It’s weird, because I haven’t made a whole lot of friends, but it’s not as though I’m alone all the time. It’s just I don’t know anybody very well. I don’t have a feel for people. Then I think back to some kid I never really talked to at home, but who went to elementary and middle and high school with me, and who I saw all through that time, and I almost feel I know him better than I know my friends here, though I talk to them and hangout with them all the time. It’s funny, the way you get to know people really isn’t necessarily through conversation. It’s just time. It’s just seeing them over years, getting accustomed to the way they walk and the shape of their head, so that when you stand in a crowd you recognize them without thinking; you just know who they are. All that’s lost with a computer program.

Experience vs. Thought: the traditional novel and the hypertext

 

There are some new faces on the literary playground- they’re from that new development down the block, and they’ve been causing quite a stir. They are hypertexts, works of computer-based literature the likes of which have been popping up like Levittowns throughout the writing community. Full of links, multiple reading paths, text split into independent windows, hypertexts are playing in a completely new way. Traditionalists, who’ve been hanging around the same swing or slide for generations, are none too happy. They’ve got their boundaries drawn but they aren’t sure they can hold their ground against the growing trend. There’s tension in the air. The question that begs to be asked is who will come out on top- and many have already set their bets on the trendy newcomers- but is that the question that ought to be asked? So early in the game? Is it possible that the conflict the whole jungle-gym is setting up for isn’t even necessary?

At this point, the sides are already clear. On one are tangible, linear works dealing with character and feeling. On the other is the virtual world beyond our computer screens, text that mingles details and ideas, concerns itself with the thinking process. In his collection of critical essays The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Sven Birkerts laments the development of this new textual environment, which he fears is leading us into “bright new hyperworld, a kind of Disneyland of information”(139). The overload of stimulation one gets from computer technology, according to Birkerts, pulls us away from the slower process that is traditional reading. Hypertext, meanwhile, stands poised to take its place. It’s designed for readers conditioned by the computer environment. Works like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a spin-off of the Frankenstein story, are built of links, and like a choose-your-own-adventure game one decides for oneself which direction to take at each splitting of the trail. They do not so much begin as open up. With the first window, in in the case of Patchwork Girl, a title page, one is provided a number of options: a graveyard, a story, a journal, etc. It’s an exploration, an associative reading like searching the Internet.

Which makes it very different from the reading we are used to. Intuitively, we go from left to right, from top to bottom, from page one to two to three, so on and so forth, and author’s traditionally depend on our following that pattern because a novel is set up to develop over time. Even details that seem to have little significance are placed intentionally. As the reader comes across them they are stored away in his mind, and like with working at a puzzle, the pieces come together. At first all you have is the frame, a bit of sky, green that might be grass; and then slowly the picture takes shape, you see a picnic basket, a kite, then the skirt of a dress, a little girl’s face, so on until finally that last piece pops in and everything becomes clear. As one reads, his sense of characters grows. He begins to feel towards them as he does towards real people, even as he does towards himself. He shares in their hopes and disappointments, their achievements, their breakdowns, and in the end, at that important moment when the characters reach a turning point and change (when the last piece clicks into place) so does he; it’s an experience.

A hypertext, however, is not linear, and so it cannot work the same way. Like the novel, its form dictates its content: a story can’t be built up from a foundation because the reader is too free. He might start in the middle if he likes, come in through a window, skip a floor. He’s no longer putting together a puzzle so much as lifting a series of shades to see what he might find on the other side. If the author does not adjust to his change the reader might easily miss details or discover them too early; all the shades look the same and there is nothing to tell him which to open first or which are most important. That important moment of the traditional novel, scattered somewhere among them, faces the very real risk of being skipped over completely.

In order for an author of hypertext to be successful his writing must have a new aim. As Jackson puts it in her essay Stitch Bitch, in which she discusses Patchwork Girl, he will “need other reasons to keep readers reading…than the compulsion to find out what comes next”. For her, this is less than a problem. She sees the novel’s linearity as a restriction: it can only ever piece together the image it wants you to see. Hypertext, on the other hand, is a realm of exploration. Each window of text is an individual, and makes implications that are suppose to be thought about at the moment at hand. Even those in Patchwork Girl’s “Story” section are about the ideas behind the action more than the action itself. It’s a kind of allegory, and when Mary Shelley removes a piece of her own skin and attaches it to her “creature” the reader is not so much meant to feel the connection created between them as wonder what it means. It’s necessary to think if one is to get out of the work what Jackson intends.

Birkert’s inexperience with hypertextual reading comes out in his criticism. He goes into his reading of a hypertext “waiting patiently for the empowering rush that ought to come when worlds open upon other worlds”(151), but that’s an unrealistic expectation. He’s looking for the moment of revelation, but that’s not what hypertext is about and it is not coming. Jackson, on the other hand, complains of novels that “sentences which ought to stop you in your tracks are like spiderwebs across the chute. You rip through, they’re gone”, but she is not being fair either. The sentences in a novel are not for thinking about, but for building up the story. If the reader stops to examine the implications of an individual sentence, he pulls out of the dream world where characters and settings are real to him, and the effect is damaged.

Birkerts goes on to worry that hypertext, as part of the expansive computer-revolution of our age, will take over novels just as computers are taking over many of the slower processes of everyday life. But the novel is no more likely to be superseded by hypertext than we are to become stationary cyborgs. Human beings crave the kind of life experience that comes from novels, which reminds him that his character connects him to the people around him. Thought, without experience to base it on, is meaningless. Patchwork Girl’s premise is based off Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; one must first experience the novel in order to fully appreciate the implications made in the hypertext. They go hand-in-hand: experience and thought, novel and hypertext. So the kids on the playground can relax. They’re not up against a rival tribe that plays by different rules. It’s a whole different game they’re after, and there’s room on the playground for both.

 

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.

Jackson, Shelley. “Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl.” 20 Nov. 2008 <http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/jackson.html>.

 

 

 

Patchwork Girl, a hypertext, vs. the traditional novel

 

There are some new faces on the literary playground- they’re from that new development down the block, and they’ve been causing quite a stir. They are hypertexts, works of computer-based literature the likes of which have been popping up like Levittowns throughout the writing community. They’re full of links, multiple reading paths, chunked text in independent windows. Traditionalists, who’ve been hanging around the same swing or slide for generations, are none too happy. They’ve got their boundaries drawn but they aren’t sure they can hold their ground against the growing trend. There’s tension in the air. The question that begs to be asked is who will come out on top- and many have already set their bets on the trendy newcomers- but is that the question that ought to be asked? So early in the game? Is it possible that the conflict the whole jungle-gym is setting up for isn’t even necessary?

The differences between hypertexts and traditional novels has them tending towards opposite corners of the classroom. One is tangible, is linear, deals with character and feeling. The other exists in a virtual world beyond our computer screens, is a mingling of details and ideas, concerns itself with the thinking process. In his collection of critical essays The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Sean Birkerts laments what he predicts will be the loss of the traditional novel to a “bright new hyperworld, a kind of Disneyland of information”(139). The immediate satisfaction one gets from computers and especially the Internet leads him towards a frame of mind that rejects the slower, deeper processes that go on while reading a novel. Hypertext, on the other hand, is designed for the reader who has been conditioned for just the kind of environment one finds online. Works like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl are built of links, follow any number of reading paths- it’s up to the user to click his own way through- and have no set beginning or end. Instead, the reader goes through a series of window-texts and eventually returns to his starting point. It’s a boomerang vs. linear reading pattern.

The traditional novel depends on it’s form. An author writes with the assumption that his readers are going from left to right, top to bottom, from page one to two to three, so on and so forth. The author needs his readers following that pattern, because he wants to develop his story for them bit by bit. He’s not just going to go around spitting out important bits of information willy nilly- in fact, he’s not going to go around spitting out important bits of information at all. Craft teaches not saying what one means, but implying- show, don’t tell-. One doesn’t want one’s reader to know the story but feel it. The conscious mind is not the important player here. It’s the subconscious. Details like the color of a young girl’s dress mean nothing to the brain- it merely stores the information away. One does not stop to consider it, to deliberate over it, to wonder, what is the significance of that particular color? But nevertheless, it registers somewhere; it connects with other details the brain has picked up and put away. One develops a sense of characters, of setting, of scene, without realizing it. He comes to recognize the imaginary figures of the book as real people, and more, as himself. He shares their hopes, their ambitions, their successes and disappointments- so that in the end, at that turning point where the character makes his realizations and changes, so does the reader. It’s an experience.

Hypertext does not have that start to finish pattern, however, and so it cannot work the same way. The craft of writing fiction, when it comes to a work like Patchwork Girl, is null and void. It’s an example of form dictating content: the medium does not allow for a conventional novel. Jackson’s work opens onto a diagram, from which one can click into whichever section he chooses. From there he can usually click into a subsection, sometimes even a sub-subsection before reaching any actual text. He’s constantly moving, constantly pulling in and out. Jackson calls it “dispersed” reading. One picks up on an idea here, a little later one here, and makes his own connections. He puts the pieces together as he moves along.

One section of Patchwork Girl, crazy quilt, features passages from several different literary works “stitched” together into paragraphs that one may read through as one cohesive block or see with the origin of each part identified. It is a perfect example of hypertext- not only is it a conglomeration of outside works, links into different trains of thought, but the reader decides how he will take it in. He can see it as a single chunk of text, a complete paragraph, and consider its implications that way, or he can look at each piece within it and see how they are all used together.

 

Patchwork Girl and Birkerts

I’m interested in Birterts’s deeper argument about new technology leading to a loss of soul. I’d like to see how Patchwork Girl reinforces or works against his ideas. Insofar as it draws the reader out, instead of burrowing him down, I think it does reinforce them. Reading PG, one does not feel like one is inside something, as in a book, but searching through. It’s almost a kind of hunt, only you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for- like starting a research project by typing the subject into google. You have to wait, to click around, to think a lot. It’s your job to sift through the details and decide what matters. In a book, the author has already done this for you. He has created the path you walk on, he’s showing you something you know but maybe haven’t thought about much. It’s funny that good stories resonate with everyone who gives them thought- it has to imply we’ve all got something in common, when it comes right down to it. Maybe this constrasts Birkert’s claim- because we all can appreciate a good story it kind of brings us together. It’s something personal, I think, but at the same time, it matters because you know that something’s universally true about it, that other people will recognize the same thing. I think it brings you closer to yourself and closer to everyone else at the same time, in away very different from computer technology. Computer technology allows for communication- but what to communicate is up to the user. One can communicate garbage and it would still be communication. I think literature, the way that Birkerts thinks about it, allows people to communicate with each other on a level of understanding.

I guess the thing to consider next would be whether PG communicates understanding or not, though if not, I don’t think that necessarily dooms it. PG is such a different thing than a regular book that I think it might just follow a different set of rules. One has to consider what it’s aim is. I’m not sure that Jackson is interested in leading a reader into a kind of realization. I think that she wants him to do that on his own; but she gives him the means to get there. Instead of supplying the road, she’s given him a car and a map. He can go where he likes.

I was thinking about using the Quilt section of PG, since it’s such a good example of how she spreads things out and makes it ambiguous. I mean, I’m still not sure what connection there is btn any of the boxes (though I think it has something to do with color…), but you know they are there for a reason, and they’ve been put together the way they have for a reason. I feel like I’m trying to decode something. The more you go over it, the more you feel dots connecting in your head, even if you’re not sure what they are. You figure they’ll come out eventually.

Then there’s the Story section, I just started reading, but since that is basically a normal book-type narrative, it might be interesting to bring into the discussion. I mean, why she did that. I feel like I’m going to need to know how that section ends, though, before I can say anything definitive about it. Endings are important. I mean, if it has a smooth, rounded out ending, then you know that despite her own argument that there is a problem in the way novels shoot readers through to the satisfying conclusion, she must have some respect for it. I think she does too. I mean, what is she saying, that Melville had it wrong? Speaking of Melville, he’s not a really good example for that, is he? I mean, Moby Dick could totally be a hypertext. It might even work better as a hypertext. -But he does have a plot in it. Like Jackson’s got her Story section. That might be something.

Birkerts and Jackson

Birkerts and Jackson, and also Hayles, bring up a lot of the same points, but discuss them in very different ways. I think that Birkerts and Jackson have a certain appreciation for what they are talking about in common, however. I don’t think they are quite as different as they first appear. Hayles is a slightly different story. She reminds the reader at intervals that she doesn’t mean to say that new technologies should or will trump the old-fashioned book, but she’s not completely convincing, I think because that’s all she says. She gets it out quickly so she can move on with her discussion. One has a sense that she is at least herself much more interested in what can be done with computers than books. Perhaps also because her writing style seems to relate much more to the computer world than Birkert’s or Jackson’s. She uses a lot of computer terminology, and makes up a lot of her own. The way she throws new words out reflects the way language is constantly being changed with computer-based communication; it happens so fast a lot of people don’t catch on right away, you have to go back and ask, what exactly is that? Most of her discussion circles the presentation of the text as well, versus the actual text itself.

Both Birkerts and Jackson are interested in the what at least equally as much as the how. They see the change in presentation as important because it changes what is being said. Hayles is all about materiality, and I think her pieces almost become about materiality for its own sake. Birkerts and Jackson always keep content in perspective. I like Jackson. I feel like her interest in computers comes out of her love of writing and reading. I also like Birkerts, who might consider that a bit oxymoronic. I’m not sure though- I’ve noticed that Birkerts makes a lot of concessions. He’s not so dead set against the new computer age as he originally appeared- he’s just lamenting the inevitable loss he feels will come from it. He always points out advantages to go along with the dangers of new softwares, audio books, etc. I think he might plausibly take many of Jackson’s arguments in stride. I mean, she’s coming from a very different perspective, and I’m not sure he may have considered it yet.

Jackson and Birkerts differ primarily in that Birkerts is dealing with the past of literature while Jackson is dealing with the future. Jackson says nothing in her essay about what is happening to old texts in the computer-age. Perhaps she would agree with Birkerts that they might suffer in it; however, they are not her subject. She wants to know how computer technology can be used to create a new form of literature that is equal to the old. She criticizes the assumed characteristics of good fiction- that it projects the reader through the story, gives a sense of closure at the end- but she also brings in writers of ”normal” novels, Kafka, for instance, which shows she has an appreciation for their work. There is more going on with her than she states directly. I bet you she could have a pretty intelligent conversation with Birkerts about James Joyce or Raymond Carver. I mean, I think she knows her stuff. I’m not so sure about Hayles.

Hayles on Shelley Jackson

Hayles keeps making the same point, in her book and in this essay, that the medium in which something is produced matters, her “Media Specific Analysis”. While I think it’s true that readers tend to be unaware of the substance of what they are reading, I don’t think substance is something that goes totally ignored. Authors have to be aware of presentation. They want to keep the reader from being distracted- if it becomes too obvious then there’s something wrong. It’s like style: when you can tell that someone is using fancy language, or trying to be original on purpose, that’s a problem. I don’t see how physical appearance is any different. And really, where is the substance of a work (not the physical substance, but the important part)? It’s in what’s said. Presentation should reflect it, maybe even possibly enhance it, but it should not take precedence. 

In the essay Hayles touches on a subject that she doesn’t (or hasn’t yet?) in Writing Machines. The idea that all this materiality and dispersedness is wrapped up with feminism bothers me a little. Copyright laws are about masculine glory? I mean, what? What sort of sense does that make? And I take offense that she humps feminine writing in with the “repetitive” and “writers who work for money”. She seems to imply that writers who work for money are no less significant than writers who work for the sake of what they do, or maybe, writers who write for glory. I see no problem with writing for glory. I think writing for glory is a lot more virtuous than writing to make money. 

Anyway, about Patchwork Girl. It’s sort of an odd thing. I think it’s true what Carrie said to me in class, that it’s organization, even though it has one, is sort of piece meal. You don’t have a steady build-up to a climax, then a denouement and closing. The text is all over the place, there are pictures, there are links to this and that. There are windows that open and show nothing. There are circles. There are multiple reading paths. It seems much more like the exploration of an idea than a novel. 

It takes time to figure out how it works. Every now and then one hits a wall- which is not something that happens in a normal novel. One is forced to stop and go over previous steps, sometimes back to the very beginning. It’s a constant reminder of the environment one is reading in. I think Jackson wants us to be aware of it; she is, looking at her set up. The title page resembles one you might find in a book, but changes are built into it- links attached to words, claims that don’t make sense (“by Mary/Shelley, and Herself”)- the title page has become a part of the fiction and the interactive environment, vs. an informational pre-text.

Illustrations play a different role than they do in books. Illustrations in books, when there are any, are simply fixed on a page near the scene it represents. Serious novels almost never have pictures. There’s something almost childish about it. Here the illustrations have a symbolic meaning. They also come before each section of text, according to the outline, serving to condition the reader for what he will be reading. One, phrenology, is a port to a separate part of the work focusing on the stories that come together in Patchwork Girl’s body.

Whatever you want to call it, Jackson’s work is certainly something different. Simply by making it’s user aware of what he is doing it follows rules different than those that guide your standard novel. It might work for what it is, but I don’t know that I would call it a novel.

Frankenstein and Beauty and the Beast: Appearance vs. character

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, do not appear, at first glance, to have any resemblance. One is a children’s movie from the nineteen-nineties, the other is a gothic novel from the nineteenth century. One is optimistic and light, the other dark and haunting. However, they share the same themes and use many similar character’s, and using these elements, one might reasonably read the Disney film as an interpretation of the novel, despite that it more than likely is not intended as one. It takes those characters and themes it has in common with Shelley’s work, but makes both subtle and obvious changes to produce a story with very different implications.

Beauty and the Beast makes clear that it will take a different point of view on its subject with its opening scene. Here the audience is presented with two facts: one, the film is a cartoon; two, it is a musical. Imagine, for a moment, how Frankenstein would come off if he broke into song at important points in his story. It would look ridiculous. Singing and dancing are fun, and a film of which they are such an integral part simply cannot take itself so seriously as the brooding novel on which it is based. Even the bright, solid colors lend the movie a brighter tone than the book’s, and the exaggeration of animation makes characters much more like caricatures of people than like people themselves. There is an element of satire in the medium.

Frankenstein uses a similar approach in his narration, but because he lacks humor the effect is opposite. His exaggerations distance characters from the reader. Those around him do not come off as people, or even as caricatures of people, but as projections of his ideals. They never become familiar as a person would. Disney’s cartoons are based on real people, and not what a particular person would have people be. Despite their exaggerations, they can be recognized.

Belle, for example, is not simply beautiful and kind. The townspeople call her strange, she has no one to talk to; these are problems, and problems with which her audience can identify. She is sympathetic. Frankenstein’s Elizabeth, however, is not someone to whom the reader becomes close. Victor holds her out at arms’ length, showing only what he wants to be seen. One never actually knows what is going on in her head. It is all Victor. Everything that comes out about Elizabeth somehow relates back to him, as is the case with all character’s in his narration. He is at the novel’s center; everything revolves around him.

By making Belle a principal character, the film pulls some of that focus away from Victor. It also pulls focus away from him by depositing his character in two places: Gaston and Beast. Gaston shares his vanity, his selfishness, and his blind ambition, not to mention his unhappy end. Both he and Frankenstein have the greatest confidence in their pursuits. As far as they are concerned, nothing can go wrong, until it does. Gaston does not even bother to ask Belle to marry him until arrangements have been made and the priest is waiting outside the door. As a result, he gets humiliated. Frankenstein never stops to consider the implications of what he is doing, and so is completely unprepared when the creature finally opens its eyes. Gaston cannot accept the rejection; he projects his anger at Beast and takes it upon himself to hunt him down. The same happens with Frankenstein, except that in his case it is responsibility he cannot accept and projects onto his quarry. Neither is successful; both are killed before their goal is accomplished.

Gaston, however, is the story’s antagonist. Frankenstein is the protagonist. This switch puts a highlight on a point that is made much more subtly in the novel. Despite Victor’s intelligence, eloquence, and even endurance, he has faults and serious ones at that.

The same goes for Beast. It is through his faults that he has become what he is- he’s made a monster of himself. This differs from Victor’s creation because it is internal. Victor can easily brand the creature a devil and be done with his responsibility for it. Beast has no such luck. He is stuck with his mistake because he is it. He must deal with the creature’s loneliness, hideousness, and sense of rejection. He seeks out love just as the creature does. However, where the creature comes up short, he is amazingly successful. Not only does Belle accept him, she loves him, and she loves him romantically. The creature could not even get Felix, who risked his life to save a man he’s never met, to stand looking at him. At this point the film makes a deliberate deviation from the novel. It has asked the same questions: what is the significance of appearance, how deep is man’s capacity for love, is man capable of loving that which repulses him. However, in it’s answer it contradicts the novel’s conclusions in a big way. The monster does find love.

The ending is not the only place where there are contradictions, however. Rather, it is a culmination of contradictions. In all the examples mentioned here, the film rejects or criticizes an idea presented in the novel, specifically ideas presented through Frankenstein’s narration. By making Belle a sympathetic character, it highlights the lack of character in Elizabeth. By making the character which most resembles Victor the antagonist it states plainly the importance of his flaws where the novel only suggests it. It reinforces this point through Beast, who shares Victor’s flaws but is forced to recognize them and their result, and who changes for the better. With the conclusion, the film makes it’s final blow. Frankenstein, it argues, is wrong. The world is not skin deep. Men’s affections are dependent not on the sight, but the character of that to which they are exposed.

 

Beauty and the Beast and Frankenstein

I think it is interesting, the similarities and differences between the Disney film Beauty and the Beast and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At first they probably don’t look alike at all. One was written in the 19th century, one made in the 1990’s. One is dark and complicated, the other simple, directed at children. One concludes ominously, the other happily- the ending of a fairy tale. However, there are many parrallels between characters: Belle and Elizabeth for example, and the theme of ugliness and exile is strong in both. Granted, the creators of Beauty and the Beast probably were not looking to make a new interpretation of Frankenstein, but the parrallels are there, and it can be read as one.

The characters in Beauty and the Beast are cartoons, but one might argue that those in Shelley’s novel are equally unrealistic. They could be caricatures of real people. Elizabeth is perfect: beautiful, poised, innocent, always doing the right thing; Clerval is the best friend: loyal, entertaining, poetic; Frankenstein Sr. is sturdy and wise, always giving good, stiff advice. In each story we are given the outside characters- which are the cartoons and caricatures, and the main characters. In the novel the main characters are Frankenstein (clearly- the narrator) and his monster. The reader is shown different sides of these two, and develops a sense of their characters which he does not have for Elizabeth, Clerval, etc. In the Disney movie there is something of a switch: Belle, who identifies with Elizabeth is the main character. Gaston, who shares Frankenstein’s self-centeredness, has been pushed to the side. The monster is still in focus- but he has become something of both Frankenstein and his creation. The vanity is there in Beast, but so also is the sense of exile. In this interpretation important characteristics have been switched around. Frankenstein has been split. There is the selfish oaf who comes to a bad end, and the selfish oaf who grows out of his faults and is redeemed. The Disney movie knows its message.

The Disney movie is a lot more confident than the novel. Take tone. In the novel it is set up by the narrator’s style- longwinded, wordy, over-wrought. The movie, first of all, is animated. There is no ambiguity in the solid colors and definate lines. Faces and body shapes are simplified and exaggerated for effect. Gaston’s broad shoulders and long chin, for example. The Beast’s blue eyes. The music especially- the fact that there is singing at all. A musical has a certain feel. You won’t see any film noirs breaking into song. If one were to come up with one’s own film interpretation of the novel, a musical would not likely be in the running. The story is too dark, too confused. We are drawn through a series of frames, we hardly know what to believe, and we are left still asking questions. The novel is gothic, and at its center is the monster. The monster. We think, automatically, horror films and Halloween.

Hayles Ideas and Novels

The thing about an artist’s book is that it’s a piece of art, not a novel. With artist books Hayles is no longer talking about literature, but art and communication. The materiality of a novel is only important insofar as it supports the content. Hayles sees literary scholars’ focus on content as a detriment to the progress that can be made in the relationship between text, image, and everything in between. However, she does not recognize that a novel is written by an author because he wants to tell a story, and read by someone who wants to hear that story. Were this book written by an author, I think it would sound very different. Of course, technology can affect the way one presents his work. To some degree it matters whether one clicks a link or turns the page. However, the influence that Hayles seems to imply modern technology will have on our perception of text is overblown. Works like Lexia to Perplexia resemble artist books much more than any standard novel. And how has the standard novel been influenced by artists’ books? The fact is that many of the techniques artists use to develop the narrative on their books based on images don’t apply to books based on text. Novels requires subtlety and ease. The reader must be led along carefully, not distracted, not made aware of himself. One of the number one rules of novel-writing is creating verisimilitude, a sense of reality, a dream world. A reader who is aware of himself and his relationship to what he is reading is not involved with a dream world. An author writing a book about incorporating computer technology into one’s writing would probably focus as much on making sure that one does not kill the reader’s interest in the story with noise as it would on the possibilities that hypertext allows with its multiple reading paths, links, etc.

Hayles uses an encyclopedia as an example of a hypertext that exists as a book. Multiple reading paths, links, and chunked text are not particularly prominent in novels. Multiple reading paths can be interesting. However, one builds up one’s writing with an ending in mind. Everything that happens in a novel, every sentence and every word, works towards the resolution. Using multiple reading paths would force one to water down his writing in order for it to two or more different resolutions. The more divergences, the less dense the writing. Novels do often have Tables of Content (a form of links) and chapters (chunked text), however, there is a difference in that the Table of Contents is all in one place -at the front of the work- and the reader is not bothered by it while he is involved with the text. Not so in Hayles examples, where one finds links (whose comes from their being present) throughout the reading process. Also, a chapter is simply a form of organization. So is chunked text, for that matter. There is nothing particularly significant or unique about it. Everything must have some kind of organization, whether it is written out on a sheet of notebook paper, or on a website. Text is text, for that matter. You can mess with it all you want, but really all we want to do is read it.