Literary
production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five
hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with
readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual digital novel
Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel
VAS: An Opera in Flatland both
problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an
enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in
counterpoint and become productively confused. This calls attention to what I
will call a
dual dualism, a circuit
of interaction between mind and body and the literary work and its interface
(most commonly a printed book). Within this circuit, it is envisioned that the body engages with the book to facilitate the mind engaging
with the literary work.
Patchwork Girl and
VAS problematize this dual dualism as
their authors simultaneously exploit it for literary effect.
*
Both Patchwork Girl and VAS are notable new growths in the field of literary production in the late age of print, and their authors also appear to be aware of the place of their works within the genealogical tree. This is evidenced in part by the fact that both works are built upon rich allusions to other works of literature. Patchwork Girl alludes to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, (1818) and VAS to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). Both Patchwork Girl and VAS are firmly and self-consciously rooted in print culture, even as they move toward a future beyond it.
Fig. 1. Digital title page from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.
Courtesy of Eastgate Systems.
Patchwork Girl, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, contains a monster. But Jackson extends this metaphor to encompass the material form of the work itself. Eastgate Systems, Inc.—the notable early publisher of electronic literature on discrete media—first published Patchwork Girl, a hypertext novel, in 1995. It was developed using Eastgate’s proprietary Storyspace hypertext authoring software and is currently distributed via CD-ROM (for Mac and PC). The simple black and white illustrations contained within the work recall seventeenth-century woodblock prints (a minimalist approach that also reduced file size in an era when the file size of multimedia elements greatly mattered). The “title page” layout mimics a nineteenth century title page on screen and reveals a full title different than that on the CD-ROM packaging: “Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself [:] a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, & broken accents.” Shelley Jackson’s name is literally fused with Mary Shelley’s, and her expanded title further echoes the full title of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
Fig. 2. Screenshot from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.
Courtesy of Eastgate Systems.
The seeded allusions that permeate the work move from para- and extra-textual elements to the central metaphor of the work. Just as Mary Shelley used the letter or epistolary novel as an initial frame within Frankenstein (with the central narrative emerging from a written letter reporting on the telling of a tale—a movement that takes the reader from the printed book to written letters to spoken words), in Patchwork Girl this “framing” mechanism takes on new meaning and new form. Jackson seems to be asking and addressing an important question that hovers everywhere over the incunabula of electronic literary writing: How do you situate the literary work outside of the book or beyond the pages of the codex?
Fig. 3. Navigation in Patchwork Girl.
Courtesy of Eastgate Systems.
Patchwork Girl foregrounds the text itself as a monstrous creation. If the central tale of Frankenstein is seeded at the core of a series of letters bound within the pages of a printed novel, Patchwork Girl seems to bemoan the loss of this center, while in practice exploiting the nonlinear potential this decentering initiates, freed as it is from the linearity of the codex and bound in the hypertextual web of digital narrative. Like Mary Shelley’s fictional monster, Jackson’s text – the physical manifestation of the work itself – is played up (metafictionally) as a monstrous work that is out of the author-figure’s control:
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 in dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have
no sense of how that part relates to all the rest. When I open a book I know
where I am, which is restful… I am here on the page, here on this line, here,
here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no
history and no expectations for the future. (n. pag.)
This foregrounding of the nature of the text both deepens the power of the allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while also serving to nudge the reader into this new unsettling territory of the electronic literary space. The inevitable anxiety of reading an early electronic work is interwoven into the work itself and informs the architecture that structures the reader’s experience of it.
*
VAS: An Opera in Flatland postdates Patchwork Girl by seven years. It was first published in 2002 by Station Hill and rereleased in a paperback edition by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Both works are products of the personal computer, utilized in non-arbitrary ways. Yet clearly one work, namely Patchwork Girl, is a “born-digital” work meant to be displayed and interacted with on a computer, and the later work, VAS, takes the form of a printed codex if a notably unconventional one. While not a work of electronic literature, VAS is self-consciously a product of the digital age managing to gesture beyond print via print. It does so both as an unconventional, highly designed product born of the computer as design environment and, more explicitly, in that it reproduces within its pages images of websites, visualizations of (biological/genetic) datasets, and remediated facsimiles of previous textual technologies (e.g. medieval manuscripts). In this way, VAS can be read as a proto-electronic literary work, not because of where it falls in the chronology of the field of electronic literature, but because it seeks to expand the scope and potential of the traditional novel through a nuanced media-rich approach.1
Fig. 4. VAS. Courtesy of Steve Tomasula.
I was reminded of Tomasula and Farrell’s VAS when attending the 2009 &Now conference on innovative writing in Buffalo, New York. (I had read VAS several years ago soon after the release of the first Station Hill edition, when a colleague at the Newberry Library where I then worked loaned his copy to me.) Two papers given at the conference, one by Flore Chevaillier and the other by Anne-Laure Tissut, both addressed this question of the body and the book when discussing VAS. Both paper titles suggest change: “Literary and Bodily Evolution in Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell’s Vas: an Opera in Flatland” (Chevaillier) and “Mutating Languages in Vas: an Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell” (Tissut). Like Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, VAS can be understood as a transitional work, in that it is both a product of and comment on media change in the late age of print. Also like Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, VAS utilizes or at least invokes a problematics of the book even while working within the space of the printed codex. In VAS this problematics is also bound
to an allusion to another text. The subtitle of VAS, “An Opera in Flatland,”
refers to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Victorian satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Following Abbott’s work,
Tomasula sets his novel in “Flatland,” a two dimensional universe. Where Abbott
is satirizing the social order of Victorian society, Tomasula sends up the
hegemony of print culture itself, especially its overdetermination of what the
space of the novel—its graphic surface—can and should look like.
At the center of VAS is a seemingly
linear novel housed and made sequential by the codex. The central strand
narrates the domestic drama of a couple struggling over their reproductive
decisions and histories (miscarriage, c-section, abortion, and the vasectomy of
the title), but this central text is under siege by supplementary information
in the form of marginal commentary, collaged information including text-images
from such diverse sources as medieval manuscripts, racist documents of 19th
century pseudoscience, and early aughts websites about body modification and
genetic engineering. VAS, like Patchwork Girl, can be described as a book about how technology in collusion with
information transforms the body and, similarly, the literary object—the
book. The images and language of the book make the reader consider how
technology has affected the body, while the design and experience of navigating
the physical book force the reader to consider the various dimensions of
literary engagement. In Abbott’s novel the leadership of Flatland makes it
criminal to acknowledge the existence of three-dimensional “Spaceland.” In VAS, Tomasula and Farrell force the
reader to reconsider the two-dimensional space of the printed novel, and the
potential for exploiting its graphic surface as something more than simply a
platform for displaying black text on the white page in the usual, codified
ways.
Fig. 5. VAS. Courtesy of Steve Tomasula.
*
Both
VAS and
Patchwork Girl invite
the productive confusion between body and book, while also dramatizing our
shifting textual landscape and its implications for our literatures past and
future.
VAS is styled like a body.
It’s cover (in the Chicago edition) depicts semi-transparent skin revealing
blue veins underneath, reminding the reader of the book’s rich history, when
medieval codices were written on animal skins, while also perhaps drawing a
link to the circulatory systems of narrative and literary meaning contained
within. The page is a skin in
VAS (as
shown through the design). The (counter)narrative is stitched together from
different sources, as the page itself is visually depicted as being stitched
together like a wound, just as the patchwork monster in
Patchwork Girl parallels the patchwork text. And thus both
works initiate an enfolding between book and body within the metaphorical /
material space of the book. The physical book and the literary text are
enmeshed and intertwined in disrupting ways, and we, as readers, get our wires
crossed. We are both inside and outside we are sewing together the narrative
and making meaning, yet the work is also forcing our hand, pushing us into
foreign spaces, ejecting us back into our bodies but left with a lingering
strangeness.
Fig. 6. VAS (paper cover); University of Chicago Press edition. Courtesy of Steve Tomasula.
VAS and Patchwork Girl, draw our attention to
the practice of reading itself, and the dual dualism of the circuit embodied by
the interaction between reader and the literary object.2 Of the history of
reading the scholar and book historian Robert Darnton writes, “The history of
reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as
well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts.” He concludes, “The
tension between those tendencies has existed wherever [readers] confronted
books” (79). This confrontation is both a physical and an intellectual one, and
it has existed at least since the invention of writing (and was perhaps made
more complex as the practice of silent reading gained prominence, thus closing
the circuit—one reader, one book—as I have described it here). In
his essay on Ronald Sukenick, “Taking the Line for a Walk: In Form to Narralogues, A
History in Medias Res,” Tomasula
addresses the shifting relationship between readers and novels, while hinting
at the dual dualism of the reading experience, which I have sought to
characterize here. He writes:
A novel was a thing the reader actually holds in his or her hands. It should also
be a part of the reader’s actual experience, and not a facsimile of some
exterior reality, negating its status as print by inviting readers to enter a
dream state as does the traditional novel in which the story is conceived of as
a kind of virtual reality that lulls readers into forgetting that the words
they are reading are a construction on a page. (27)
VAS and
Patchwork Girl
disrupt this soporific mode of the novel. Both works jolt readers from their
dream state, and force them to consider the physicality of the technology of
literature and to become aware of their own embodied being. By addressing this
aspect of reading, both works problematize the reader’s relationship to the
physical text. They circumscribe a problematics of the book in the late age of
print, when print is increasingly supplanted by new means of storing and
displaying textual and graphic information. This can be characterized as a
problematics of the
extimacy of the
book—the book as external, yet intimate Other: the book as an uncanny
reflection of our mind in the mirror.
3 Within the productive confusion of
this circuit we sense a path from
noumenon—the
thought of only—to the
phenomenon—the
physically manifest thing—bound in a recursive loop extending out through
the author-figure and feeding back from/to an ill-defined and unseen reading
public of which we as reader are either an indistinct and unnecessary, or
originary part.
*
In Chevaillier’s essay delivered at &Now she analyzed in part how readers
received
VAS, addressing in
particular the sentiment that any extra-textual elements served only as a
distraction rather than an integral part of the literary work itself. She
remarks, “What frustrates or satisfies readers is that our reading process does
not rely only on the deciphering of a message, but also on an immersion in the
material of the text.” Similarly, Tissut commented on the significance of the
“plasticity of language” in
VAS. This
tension between material and message is critical for understanding both of the
works under consideration here. And it links precisely to the problematics of
the book these works both address and exploit—this problematics that is a
sort of mind/body dualism encompassing both the reader and what is read.
These
works force us to ask questions of the literary artifact. Does the literary
work exist as an abstract immaterial concept? Is it just a text, in the sense
of an alphanumeric code, requiring only an arbitrary display mechanism, be it
the pages of a paperback book or the display on an Amazon Kindle? Or is the
literary work most fully realized as the embodied thing? Mallarmé has called
the book a spiritual instrument, and, in fact, the rise to prominence of the
codex over the scroll emerges contemporaneously with the early development of
the cult of Christianity. To take Mallarme’s characterization further, are we
to understand the literary work as the soul of the book? (Perhaps the answer to
this question depends on the book under consideration.) Both Patchwork Girl and VAS provide complex examples, indicative of a potential literary
art where the medium and means of embodiment matter. While one can argue that
the means of embodiment for literature always matters, the power of print
culture is that the means of how our literature is produced, manufactured, and
presented becomes virtually invisible to the reader.4 We expect our books to
be organized in familiar and established ways. In fact the Kindle is a
technology based on this generalized understanding of books as essentially
their alphanumeric codes displayed in strictly codified ways.
So
too do literary theorists and critics largely construct the space of the novel
as an imaginative space where the text serves as the instructions that
transport the reader into the space conjured by the author. The book is
discounted in this formulation as a mere means to an end. It must simply
deliver its code. While most will recognize this as a gross oversimplification,
it should also be recognized that literary critics almost universally discount
the material manifestation of literature. (Following from the soporific
model of literature, which Tomasula warns against but acknowledges as the rule,
we can perhaps conclude that the majority of our critics and scholars would
rather remain asleep, unshaken from their dream-state.) Bibliographers and
textual critics have long argued for the importance and significance of the
book’s materiality, and it is not surprising that electronic-literature
scholars like Matthew Kirschenbaum and N. Katherine Hayles have turned to these
fields to address our emerging digital textual landscape.5 Works like VAS and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl undermine the implicit
assumption of most of our literary criticism that embodiment does not matter.
These works force us to wrestle with literature as both a linguistic and
material/technological mode of art.
In his essay on Sukenick, Tomasula
comments on the significance of evolving technology and its effect on literary
production. And perhaps in his views on Sukenick we can gain some insight into
his intentions with VAS and in his
more recent electronic work. He writes:
While
some critics mourned the corpse the novel had become, others had given up on
its relevance in an age of film and television. Marshall McLuhan among others
proclaimed an end to not just the novel, but the whole Gutenberg galaxy. Yet
Sukenick characterizes this time as a moment of exciting possibility, noting
that ‘genre is traditional,’ i.e., a matter of how literary conventions were
conceived, while ‘medium is technological’. If the novel were to reinvent
itself, as … every novel that aspires to art must, it would have to do so by
revisiting these two defining characteristics—the tradition that allowed
some works, but not others, to be thought of as ‘novels,’ and the possibility
of both being expanded, not narrowed, by technology. In fact, he writes, “this
is typically what happens when a new medium is introduced. The new
medium…creates more options, and the older ones become more essentialized
because they no longer need to be concerned with what the new mediums do
better.” (24)
In other words, it is a connection to the traditions of genre that prevent the
“book” or the “novel” from becoming something else entirely as literary forms
migrates to new media and evolve through new technologies. And perhaps we
should be reminded at this moment of relatively rapid media change that the
history of the book and the novel are not as simple nor as technologically
homogenous as they at first may appear. When we consider the presence of
volvelles (spinning disks) in an early printed book or the Technicolor, wholly
unique marbled page in a first edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we may reconsider limiting the future of literature to what can be displayed in a mass market paperback or on an Amazon Kindle.6
If
the literary-work-as-code model is the dominant model, as I have argued, I
would suggest that both VAS and Patchwork Girl point towards the tactile
and not just visual potential of literature, and they do so in a sense that
plays with this liminal space between thinking-of and physically
interacting-with. It is fitting that early critics of electronic literature,
notably N. Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen, use the model of proprioception,
or the sensing of the physical limits of the body, when examining the reading
experience in media-rich environments. Chevalier, citing Laura Marks’ phrase,
refers to this reading of the material as “haptic visuality” a sort of touching
with the eyes. (Mark Hansen has also written notably about the link between the
haptic and visual in the realm of new media.)7 And “touch computing” may be
the most distinguishing feature of the (yet to be seen) “iPad revolution.”8 Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that much of our electronic literature
requires more interaction with the material technology (this interaction may
call for physically navigating a virtual space by touching a screen or
directing and clicking a mouse, or by inputting our own texts, as in
“interactive fiction”).9
How can we separate the book and its work from the thinking self during the act of
reading? Where do the physical limits of this circuit begin and end? Perhaps
our most persuasive new literature—or at least a radical strain of
it—will encourage and further this productive confusion wherein the line
between reader and that which is read becomes confused. But perhaps literature
has always walked this line, and it is only as technology is rapidly changing
that we revisit this question anew.
If these two works ask: How does technology determine our bodies? They also raise
the question: How does technology determine our literature? And in this liminal
space between these two questions, between the space of literary questioning
and the space of understanding our own embodiment, perhaps we can contemplate
our existence in new ways. This is the dual dualism I am concerned with, this
is the territorialization these works elicit.
In this approach, I see a potential literature, a possibility for an electronic
literature that is self-aware of its transgressions, that utilizes new tools to
achieve new effects, while remaining conscientious of the expectations of the
reader and the traditions of genre (even as it seeks to disrupt or subvert
them), aware of the very process of reading as it plays out from author to work
to reader, aware of how this transaction occurs and where it can be transformed
and reimagined. As the book is transformed, its ghost-book, a past essence
lingers, a potential powerfully resonant metaphor.
Both Patchwork Girl and VAS look back to literatures past as
they point towards literatures future. These works require critics and scholars
to establish deeper histories that acknowledge the rich history of the book
both as a vehicle for literature and as an evolving technology put to use in a
variety of manners and contexts. Yet, if critics are to assert that the
form of the book cannot be understood as language alone, then what of our
criticism? If we are to take these questions seriously, do we not also require
new forms of criticism?
Notes
1 See TOC: A New Media Novel (FC2 2009) for
an example of Tomasula’s born-digital work, also created in collaboration with
Stephen Farrell, published on DVD.
2 See Darnton 68, for his famous “communications circuit” for a contrasting, more sociological, model of the relationship between readers and books in the early modern period. Darnton’s model served as the inspiration for the “circuit” framework and description.
3 Extimacy is a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan, and I am indebted to James Pate for
introducing me to the term via his essay in Action,
Yes.
4 See the introduction to Johns, 1-57, for a discussion of the assumptions of modern
readers about the nature of books in the late age of print, situated within the
greater context of the history of the book.
5 See Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer
103-104, and Kirschenbaum for more on bibliography and electronic literature.
6 See Trettien for more on volvelles as precursors to multi-media and digital
literature. “Technicolor,” used here anachronistically, recalls the moment in
the film Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy
steps out from a world of black and white into a world of color—another
moment when a new technology is utilized to metaphorical effect.
7 See Hansen for an insightful analysis of the “haptic” in the context of new media
art and literature.
8 See Halpern for one of many sources addressing the so-called “iPad revolution.”
9 See Montfort for more on the history of interactive fiction as genre.
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