- 1 “The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitabl (...)
1Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl is a “technotext”, that it to say a text that foregrounds its own materiality, “a literary work that self-reflexively engages with its own inscription technologies and mobilises reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence” (Hayles 2002, 25). This material dimension makes of Patchwork Girl a hypertext in which the reader’s involvement is important, since as a hypertext its meaning is actualised through the reader’s clicking on the hyperlinks it contains, which results in the piecing up together of the various narrative threads the hypertext consists of. It can thus be deemed to be a “writerly text” i.e. a text that designates the reader as a site of production of its meaning (Barthes 1970, 5 translation mine).1 In the wealth of the production of first generation hypertexts, Patchwork Girl stands out for the particularly salient aspect of those two characteristics. Not only are its material and writerly dimensions at its core, but they also power its plot and underlie the characterisation of its main protagonist. Indeed, the female creature which Patchwork Girl’s intertwining narratives delineate is a material being whose corporeality is repeatedly foregrounded, and the reader’s designated task is to patch up the fragments of the creature’s body, as well as those of the various narratives which make up the text, to form a cyborg, a hybrid textual organic and technological creature-text.
- 2 As shown by the fact that ignorant Elizabeth is perceived as a burden to Victor.
- 3 As demonstrated by the fact that Victor gets rid of the female creature even before it is brought t (...)
2When it came out, Patchwork Girl was (and still is) particularly well received by the critics, who underlined its rich web of intertextual references (Hayles 2000, §15). As a matter of fact, Patchwork Girl engages dialogically with two works that are different in genre, style and time period but equally engage with feminism: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which builds a myth on the ruins of male scientific reason, and Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), a work of playful youth literature with a strong feminist background. The fact that Mary Shelley’s novel targets male domination as much as modern science is visible in the novel’s exposure of the patriarchal background underlying the scientific hybris of the time. Thus Victor denies his beloved fiancée Elizabeth any access to his lab and does not discuss his discoveries with her, and neither does he feel any qualm when he destroys the female creature he has started to assemble to provide a companion to the male monster he has created. If Mary Shelley exposes the complicity between scientific modernity and her contemporaries’ misogyny, her novel’s condemnation of Victor’s lack of ethos therefore dovetails with a representation of women as ancillary2 and disposable3 which makes her critique of nineteenth century gender politics fall short of satisfying completion.
3In Patchwork Girl where Frankenstein’s female creature is allowed to live and thrive, and even come center stage, Shelley Jackson muscles up the hypotext’s feminist argument by clearly empowering the female monster. Not only does she co-author the multiplicity of narratives which form the hypertext and which, pieced together by the reader’s intervention, enter into intertextual conversation with Mary Shelley’s work, but she celebrates the creature’s powers of attraction over both men and women, portrays her as enjoying a fulfilling lesbian relationship with her creator, and hails her shaping powers of imagination. When in Frankenstein the creature’s morbid origin and disastrous aspects were stressed, in Patchwork Girl the strength and beauty of the creature are extolled to illustrate her empowerment. The reader is made to contribute to the female creature’s power as s.he pieces together the narratives which relate the creature’s story, as is required by the very material way in which the hypertext is made to work. However, one may wonder whether the author’s choice of digital literature to forward a feminist agenda could not appear as something of a paradox. To what extent can the digital medium, a product of technocapitalism, escape the logic of male domination which characterises capitalism itself (Fraser 2013, 1)? How can a literary artefact that is fraught with the market economy produce pockets of resistance against male-driven forms of capitalist exploitation? And how can cyberculture, and electronic literature in particular, create narratives that can eschew the binaries and hierarchical categories underlying the discourse of technoscience permeating the digital medium? Could it be that “in electronic hypertext fiction, narrative takes shape as a network of possibilities rather than as a preset sequence of events” (Hayles 2001, 21) which makes of the narratives in Patchwork Girl an ever-renewed source of resistance against binary classifications and ensuing forms of hierarchisation?
4The figure of the cyborg which Patchwork Girl foregrounds is such a network of possibilities. Shelley Jackson’s hypertext turns Frankenstein’s monster into a hybrid and composite monster whose very complexity and multiplicity deconstruct the male-dominated status quo. The cyborg, a hybrid combination of human and machine with a feminist thrust (Haraway 1985, 149), embodies the female monster’s capacity to exist across the binaries that underlie gender categories. It also very aptly metaphorises the hypertext’s capacity to mix, blend and blur the walled-in categories on which institutionalised forms of (masculine) power are built, starting with the literary institution and the genre of the novel which unduly privilege narrative linearity, according to Jackson (Jackson 1997, unpag.). Even if the figure of the cyborg is one of the most striking imaginary productions of technoscience and is as such a figment of men’s imagination, since the field of technoscience was created by men and still is largely dominated by them, it is used creatively by Shelley Jackson to enable her creature to take on life outside the ideological constraints of male-dominated capitalism. As underlined by Donna Haraway, if “the main trouble with cyborgs […] is that they are the illegimitate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism […] illegimitate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential…” (Haraway 1985, 151)
5To show how Shelley Jackson uses the figure of the cyborg to forward a feminist agenda in Patchwork Girl, an analysis of the critical and political import of the creature’s composite body and self is in order. An investigation into the mirror effects established between creature and text also needs to be conducted. Lastly, the interpellation of the reader by the monster-text needs to be looked into, so as to show that the reader’s performing and performative reading gesture equally empowers the reader and the creature in the text.
- 4 The references to Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl will be given in the following order : author da (...)
6It seems highly significant that Shelley Jackson’s hypertext should represent its central figure, the female monster, as a beautiful creature who flaunts a composite body. The creature’s patched body is compared with a cloud or a swarm, images that highlight her capacity to escape rigid totality. Moreover, the female monster is capable of powerful agrandizement, felicitous grafting and fruitful permeability. Thus the tab entitled “hazy hole” in the Phrenology section, extolls the power of the creature’s body to expand beyond its own frontiers: “I am a whole, that is a funny thing, but I am a whole with a kind of haze around the edges. […] Who knows what prostheses will be grafted onto my already powerful form, making up for all the deficiencies we are yet to invent?” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/ hazy hole4)
7Contrary to Frankenstein’s monster, the creature’s heterogeneous organs and limbs are connoted positively, as they enable her to combine the qualities attached to them. The collage-like heterogeneity of her body is an asset that gives her cumulative strength. It also allows her to exert a singular power of attraction over men and women, because her resistance to categorisation awakens curiosity and desire:
I am tall, and broad-shouldered enough that many take me for a man; others think me a transsexual (another feat of cut and stitch) and examine my jaw and hands for outsized bones, my throat for the tell-tale Adam’s Apple. My black hair falls down my back but does not make me girlish. Women and men alike mistake my gender and both are drawn to me (Jackson 1995, story/hercut 3/I am).
Fig. 1: Jackson 1995, story/hercut 3/I am.
8Contrary to her nineteenth century forebear whose composite features frightened people away, the female monster flaunts her variegated body as one of the main reasons for her universal power of seduction, starting with her own creator, the writer Mary Shelley, who praises her multifarious beauty:
I have often noticed that a length of cloth however richly dyed cannot match the beauty or sustain the interest of Autumn foliage. I believe it is because the myriad differing hues, while tending toward the self-same yellow one can achieve with a broth of turmeric, say, or onion skins, creates a disturbance of other colors around the root color: a penumbra, a kind of three-dimensionality of color. In this way she was beautiful (Jackson 1995, A journal/hercut 2/she stood).
9The creature presents her heterogeneous features as a positive source of inspiration, even a daring model to imitate because “what is discontinuous and in pieces can blaze a trail” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/dotted line). She thus turns the composite aspect of her body into an aesthetic manifesto.
10The female monster’s oddly inspiring fragmented and heterogeneous body is significantly materialised on screen by a dotted line, which symbolises her plural identity.
Fig. 2: Jackson 1995, her.
11Not only does the dotted line represent the rifts, ruptures and fractures which characterise the creature, but it also renders visual her specific power which lies with its capacity to graft and be grafted. It symbolises and materialises the various scars that run across her patched up body, which she describes as tokens of her singular capacity to both underline and bridge irreconcilable divides and unsurmountable binaries:
The dotted line is the best line. It indicates a difference without cleaving apart for good what it distinguishes […]. It suggests action (fold here), a chance at change, yet it acknowledges the viewer’s freedom to do nothing but imagine. It is paradoxical: more innocent than the solid line […] it can be coerced into fiercer uses than the pacifist fold: on the photograph of a cow, the classic cuts are sketched out in dotted lines. The cow doesn’t know it yet but it is an assemblage of dinners (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/dotted line).
12The fragmentation which the patchwork girl’s dotted line materialises is a means with which to repair as much as to separate. It enables the creature to graft her own body onto that of her creator, hybrid fashion:
I have a crazy wish, I wish that I had cut off a part of me […]. I would live on in her, and she would know me as I know myself. I fear this but crave it. […] I could graft myself to that mighty vine. Who knows what strange fruit the two of us might bear? (Jackson 1995, Hercut 2/female trouble).
13Thanks to her potential for expansion through grafting, the creature defies life-threatening reduction: she is “hard to do in” because the suturing power of her scars makes it possible for her to conjugate apparent opposites so as to “reign” over the whole of matter (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/dispersed).
14It enables her to transcend binary oppositions, starting with that between cutting and suturing, so that her multiple body makes her one and plural at the same time, a paradox she conveys through the image of the swarm, a conjunction of particles revolving around a central core which redefines fixed boundaries and identities thanks to its constant movement:
I am made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and have no absolute boundaries. I am a swarm. “Scraps? Did you call me Scraps? Is that my name?” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/this writing/without end).
15Because a swarm is molar and molecular at the same time, and forms a whole if looked at from afar, but dissolves into a multiplicity of heterogeneous individuals when observed more closely, the swarm-like body of the creature enables her to escape the prescriptions of a unique identity which the single name, “scraps”, encapsulates, whose negative connotations suggest that reducing the subject to one identity only is a violent act of reification. Thus, the creature highlights the power of her fragmented body which is paradoxically not a weakness but an asset because it eschews ready-made definitions and classifications.
16By flaunting her variegated body as a token of the vitality and strength of her plural identity, the creature makes a strong case against the unicity of the subject associated with its classical definition as a mind-centred entity where rationality is given pride of place. This cartesian conception of the subject is precisely that underlying Victor Frankenstein’s baleful hybris in Mary Shelley’s novel, which the creature’s plural self happily deconstructs by offering her cyborg identity as a model to be followed: “There is not even such a thing as ‘being’ female or ‘being’ monster or ‘being’ angel”. “We find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (Jackson 1995, Hercut3/birth/a good story/why hideous?multiple/identities).
17Contrary to the Cartesian subject, the creature’s plural identity enables her to cross over irreducible binaries, starting with that opposing the mind and the body, nature and culture, on which the tradition of phallocentric philosophy is based; and contrary to Mary Shelley’s monster whose hybrid and ugly body was the cause of his downfall, the patchwork girl’s composite body advertises the gay science of multiplicity, hybridity and heterogeneity. The capacity of her collage-like body to question and challenge fixed forms of identity gives her a strong critical power: a cyborg entity, a hybrid of human body and machine-produced text, the female creature embodies the power of the hypertext to deconstruct forms of authority.
18Shelley Jackson’s creature is gifted with a composite body that reads like a text, so that she is made to serve a metatextual purpose in the economy of the hypertext. What’s more, her body’s repeated semiotisation mirrors the somatisation of the text itself. Thus, her creation is compared by her creator, Mary Shelley, with the making of a quilt, a traditional metaphor for feminine writing: “I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt, as the old women in town do, night after night” (Jackson 1995, Hercut 2/written).
Fig. 3: Jackson 1995, Hercut 2/written.
19In turn, the author’s sewing of the creature’s parts together is equated with writing because both activities are concerned with the creation of a life-like monster: “I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form” (Jackson 1995, Hercut 2/sewn).
20Like the creature’s composite body, the hypertext presents itself as a collection of patched up pieces borrowed from various intertexts. The section entitled “Quilt” is a case in point, which mixes up fragments from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, passages from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by Frank Baum and excerpts from landmark texts written by feminist and poststructuralist authors such as Deleuze, Irigaray, Bolter, Lyotard or Cixous. Referred to as a heterogeneous, quilted patchwork of texts, the lexias in “quilt” transform the hypertext into a hybrid monster which mirrors the cyborg creature that inhabits it. Both text and body are traversed by linguistic signs, so that their semiotised surfaces become interchangeable: “You could say that all bodies are written bodies, all lives pieces of writing” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/all written).
21The fluid circulation between text and monster, monster and text is facilitated by the hypertext’s troping of the female monster as a multi-layered encoded text yielding multiple significations: “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.” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/metaphor me).
22The specificity of the reciprocal metaphorisation of creature and text in Patchwork Girl lies precisely with Shelley Jackson’s capacity to create a Janus-faced reality, half monstrous body, half monstrous text, a mix of machine and human that is a cyborg hypertext. This cyborg hypertext serves a critical function: thanks to its hybridity it deconstructs the male-dominated and plot-based tradition of the novel.
23Shelley Jackson’s cyborg-like construction of creature and text is indeed a potent critical and political tool: it belongs in the category of the apparatus, as defined by Foucault (Foucault 1975, 170), i.e. it is a combination of material and immaterial (linguistic, ideological) elements which, because it is traversed by power structures, can be an instrument of creative production as much as of oppression. As it is traversed by the logic of the apparatus, the cyborg hypertext cannot be reduced to one meaning only. It contains multitudes:
Still written. First, because our infinitely various forms are composed from a limited number of similar elements, a kind of alphabet, and we have guidelines as to which arrangements are acceptable, are valid words, legible sentences, and which are typographical or grammatical errors: “monsters.” We are inevitably annexed to other bodies: human bodies, and bodies of knowledge. We are coupled to constructions of meaning: we are legible, partially; we are cooperative with meanings, but irreducible to any one (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/bodies too).
24This enables the hypertext to escape the boxes of pre-formed categorisation and essentialisation, whereby it demonstrates that there is no such thing as “real”, “pure” or “natural” bodies or texts. It shows that a body, like a text, is a construct, that it is of a hybrid nature, because both matter and linguistic signs are chimeras, hybrid realities traversed by thought. They transcend pre-established binaries and boundaries:
There is a kind of thinking without thinkers. Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters. We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery. (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/it thinks)
25In the same way as Shelley Jackson celebrates the female monster’s capacity to cross over entrenched divides by patching up heterogeneous realities, she hails her hypertext’s ability to reconcile and distribute irreconcilable opposites. By representing bodies and signs as reciprocal matrixes or reservoirs, the hypertext points out its own economy as one of distribution. Its own meaning is indeed shared between images and signs, text, machine and human. Thus, the section entitled “Phrenology” represents the image of a head containing various lexias on which the reader has to click to activate the hyperlinks.
Fig. 4: Jackson 1995, Phrenology.
26Significantly enough, this head appears in profile and turned away from the reader so that it looks like a faceless limb which metonymically refers to the body it stands for. The fact that it is the image of the body that yields the lexias and not the other way round as in traditional print fiction shows that the hypertext does not prioritise the semiotic over the somatic but enables body and signs to form a harmonious meobius-like strip of accretive and distributed meaning. Thus, the “exquisite corpse” (Jackson 1997, unpag.) that is Patchwork Girl presents the reader with a monstrous cyborg creature of a hypertext where body and text appear as seamlessly continuous. This leads the reader to pay particular attention not only to the body in the text but also to the body of the text: it spotlights the hypertext’s texture and foregrounds its material dimension, which is anchored in its technological nature.
27The specific texture of the hypertext is grounded in the technological materiality of the medium it uses. Indeed, the meaning produced by Patchwork Girl is the product of the hypertext’s unique combination of analogue resemblance and digital coding. It is owed to the combination of “textons” (the code) and “sextons” (the text and images appearing on screen) (Aarseth 1997, 67) which are technologically layered into producing the specific linguistic and visual contents of Patchwork Girl. This provides the hypertext with a unique power to create effects of aliveness through the combination of continuous symbols and discrete digits. This combination makes the signifiers appearing on screen seem to “flicker” (Hayles 2000, 1) and come to life. This aliveness is rooted in the fact that the hypertext relies for its actualisation on the presence of hyperlinks which the reader needs to activate in order to piece up the text together. The fact that the hyperlinks may be actualised, or not, depending on the reader’s decisions, provides the hypertext with a certain haphazard, random and even event-like appearance which makes its experience akin to the contact with a living thing. This impression of aliveness does not stem from the inexorable unfolding of a narrative or a plot like in traditional print fiction. Rather, it belongs to the “flow” or “flux” of the kinetic system of production of text and images that characterises the hypertext. It is born of the fact that the hypertext is a very fragmented, discontinuous and syncopated form (Regnauld 2009, 72).
28The specificity of Patchwork Girl lies precisely with the fact that it accentuates this impression of aliveness by presenting itself as a “monstrous, devious, fuzzy, vaporous, anti-social, ungraspable, impure and slippery” creature of a text (Jackson 1997, unpag.). It seems to beat with the pulse of the creature’s, the writer’s and the reader’s desires for the text, inflamed by the “sheer pleasure of movement” (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/flow) which characterises the creature’s mode of existence in the text:
The flow […] turns out to be the main point. Not the passages I am moving through, however beguiling […] but the sheer pleasure of movement. […] Here where the spindly bamboo bridges of the links criss-cross the void (from tufted hillock to leaning tower I am in a Seuss landscape, where gravity is an untested hypothesis), I run faster and faster over the quivering spans, dizzied by the echoes of my footsteps that rebound from far below me and from above until I doubt up and down and scuttle through a universe of sideways. I will follow the paths and dispense with the scenery. I will be pure particulate flow, an electronic speedster gunning it through a cloud chamber, a quantum sky-diver (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/flow).
Fig. 5: Jackson 1995, Phrenology/flow.
29This movement is not restricted to the straight line “Rooted” as it is in the material specificity of its syncopated hyperlinks, the hypertext’s flow defies the teleological trajectory of the narrative which traditionally characterises the novel. Thus, the narrative fragmentation that gives the hypertext its visually distinctive traits is made to serve a genre-as well as a gender-bending agenda: not only does its fragmentation enable the hypertext to cut across gender divides by allowing the creature to take control over and inform the aliveness of the text, but it also makes possible its deconstruction of the linear dominant discursive forms we live by, which are based on continuity and progression of plot. More specifically, fragmentation forwards the hypertext’s critical revision of the male-dominated, science oriented and hybristic narrative of modernity which forms the background ideology of Frankenstein the novel. Indeed, as it systematically punctures textual attempts to reach narrative totality, Patchwork Girl refuses the logical, consequential and positivist “thrust” of that narrative, whereby it teaches the reader to critically appraise Victor Frankenstein’s desire for coherence, exhaustivity and objectivity.
30As a hybrid of machine, text and human that constantly draws the reader’s attention to its specific materiality, the hypertext presents itself as a cyborg for which the female monster appears as a particularly apt metatextual metaphor. This cyborg dimension debunks the narrative of rational modernity responsible for the monster’s downfall in Frankenstein, because it fosters the creation of a multiplicity of stories, when rational modernity claimed for the univocity of scientific truth:
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. […] Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as I care to put together (Jackson 1995, Phrenology/this writing).
31One of the ways the cyborg hypertext creates those multiple stories is by violating the rules of grammar and language itself: Patchwork Girl joyfully distorts syntax and meaning by bringing together words that may never have co-existed before, thanks to the specific mechanism of the hyperlinks. For instance, it makes the hypertext cross over divides, symbolic and otherwise, by bringing together two lexias that are apparently unrelated: the “hop” and the “dotted line” lexias in the Phrenology section, thanks to the fact that the “hop” lexia is equipped with the hyperlink “dotted line”. This material versatility of the hyperlinks enables the hypertext to play with nonsense, where nonsense is not defined as an absence of sense but as an excess of it, as an exhilarating potential for invention and creation (Lecercle 1990, 104), which enables monstrous linguistic pairings and oxymorons to proliferate. If this play with nonsense sometimes makes the hypertext resist interpretation, which may frustrate the reader, it also turns the cultural artefact into a particularly felicitous vehicle for the critique of the fixed binaries and categories we live by. When the apparently haphazard positioning of the hyperlinks renders it impossible for logical grammatical and syntactic sequence to be established or for textual and temporal linearity to be shaped, traditional hierarchical categorisations between man and woman, body and mind, author and reader, text and representation, space and time, begin to get blurred. The rhizomatic power of connection of the hyperlinks thus makes it possible for them to cross over the boundaries that cater for entrenched categorisations and hierarchisations that oppress men and women alike, according to Shelley Jackson. This joyful desacralising power of the cyborg hypertext cannot fail but to prompt the reader into performing cyborg-like acts of reception.
32If literature is traditionally defined as “the aesthetic usage of written language” hypertext literature relocates this usage in the material dimension of the medium which constitutes it. Thus, it defines an “aesthetics of materiality” (Bouchardon 2009, 213 translation mine) which engages the reader physically and performatively in the actualisation of the hypertext, by prompting her to click on the various hyperlinks it contains, to piece the story, or rather the stories, together. Without the reader’s gesture of clicking on the hyperlinks, the hypertext would not yield any consistent meaning at all. The materiality inherent in the specificity of the medium (Bouchardon 2009, 214 translation mine) combines with that of the very language used in the hypertext to transform the reader’s encounter with the text into a bodily experience. Reading the hypertext requires a physical engagement of the reader’s body, and in particular of her arm, hand and finger, into the text, with the act of clicking. This physical engagement is of a haptic nature since it makes the reader touch the interface but also the images and the text it displays, which establishes a physical contact of the reader with the very subject matter it deals with. Not only is this experience of a haptic nature, but it also constitutes a performance that is performative. Indeed, the hypertext calls upon the reader to actualise the hyperlinks by clicking on them. The activation of the windows corresponding to the hyperlinks makes the reader aware of the physical relation of contiguity between the links and what they stand for synecdochically. This very synecdochic relation enables the reader to perceive firsthand that her reception of the hypertext is literally an intervention, a meaning-producing performance. It harnesses the reader into the very co-production of the hypertext, so that one may speak of a (w)reading intervention which makes the reader actualise and perform the text.
33This engagement of the reader’s body in the production and actualisation of the hypertext undeniably serves a critical and political function in Patchwork Girl: as she clicks on the hyperlinks the reader becomes actively involved in and empowered through the deconstruction of the traditional binaries and categories which the female monster and the hypertext target. The reader experiences what it is to be the author of a text thanks to the ergodic nature of the hypertext: her physical intervention in the text actually modifies the linguistic and narrative sequences that make up the hypertext. It also and by the same token makes her experience the empowerment of intervening directly in the production of text and meaning. This agency which the hypertext grants the reader is made to be felt materially and physically by her, in the action of clicking and of being able to modify the sequence of text, so that one can speak of a “heuristic value” of the hypertext (Bouchardon 2009, 216 translation mine) which creates a “distributed cognitive environment” (Hayles 2000, §13) where text, creature, writer, reader and machine are equally important contributors in meaning making in the hypertextual apparatus. The active participation of the reader in the actualisation of the hypertext provides her with a first-hand experience of what it means to be a cyborg creature.
34Indeed, if “hypertexts initiate and demand cyborg reading practices” as K. Hayles argues (Hayles 2000, §13), then this is especially true for Patchwork Girl whose reader pieces together the creature’s body and story. As an answer to the text’s capacity to foster the emergence of plural identities and multiple subjectivities, the reader takes clicking decisions that modify her own subjective positioning since each of them starts a new narrative, and with it, the elaboration of a new imaginary world by the reader. Her act of reading becomes plural and collective, in par with the “contradictory, partial and strategic” types of subjectivities fostered by the cyborg hypertext (Jackson 1995, Hercut3/birth/a good story/why hideous?/multiple/identities). Against a type of reading that consists in elucidating a single centripetal meaning that exhausts the significance of the text, Patchwork Girl makes it impossible for the reader’s acts of interpretation to be final: it opens them to new relocations and reconfigurations even as it destabilises the reader’s expectations about the text, forcing her to remain open to the constant variations which the hypertext produces when she clicks on its hyperlinks.
35This constant changeability of the text fosters subjective relocations in the reader, in the sense that the reader constantly needs to revise her interpretations but also the linguistic and symbolic assumptions underlying them, if she wants to truly actualise all the rhizomatic possibilities produced by the hyperlinks in the hypertext. Thus the hypertext gives birth to reticular modalities of subjectivity in its reader. For the process of multiple subjectivation starts with the very reading operation, since every time the reader clicks on the hyperlinks, her action is “read” by the computer which plays an interpretive role as it launches a series of operations in code. Thus, the hypertext involves the reader in the distribution of subjectivities it performs across the distinction between human and machine, interface and text. It makes the membrane between all those entities permeable. Patchwork Girl’s capacity to mobilize the resources of the medium to generate subjectivities distributed in flexible and mutating ways turns the reader into a cyborg who plays a decisive role in the critical and political thrust of the hypertext.
36The very materiality of the hypertext allows for a political and critical agenda that empowers the female creature in and of the hypertext. It is the materiality involved in the hypertext that makes it an incisive critical and political tool able to “wage a molecular civil war” on our society’s dominant gender politics, to take up Sloterdijk’s words in Rage and Time (Sloterdijk 2010, 210). Thus Shelley Jackson’s hypertext proves to be an angry literary artefact prone to cultural, social and political unrest.
37This political agenda may be carried further through the potential irony it contains. Indeed, the gender politics of the hypertext is rooted in the creature’s body. Yet this body is presented as a patchwork quilt that is sewn and tied together by scars. Moreover, it is defined as a body of desire. It is also rooted in the body of the hypertext itself which Shelley Jackson compares with that of her creature. This vaporous patchwork quilt generates subjective modalities that are hazy, fuzzy, ragged on the edges. One may wonder to what extent this patchwork quilt escapes the traditional binaries of gender categorisation. Indeed, the activities of assembling and sewing the patchwork together are traditionally coded feminine. Viewed in this light, the patchwork quilt invites ironical reinterpretation since the author uses it as a metaphor for a hypertext that seeks to debunk gender binaries and prejudices.
38Although Shelley Jackson describes the medium she uses as a “feminine” form (Jackson 1997, unpag.) anchored in a feminist gender-bending agenda, the irony which peppers her hypertext invites the reader to probe deeper and deconstruct further. Because they are cyborg composites, the creature, the hypertext and their reader are made to cross over traditional definitions, codes and attribute. The deconstruction of binaries at work in Patchwork Girl goes beyond the author’s identification of her creature and her hypertext as being “female” as opposed to male. The ironic use of the image of the quilt, as a symbol of woman’s writing anchored in traditional gender role attributions, suggests that the binaries which consciously or unconsciously shape our society should be done with. It bears witness to the hypertext’s capacity to truly complement and extend Shelley Jackson’s own feminist agenda in Patchwork Girl by queering it.
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