Carleton University Library /Scope01

The interplay between analogue and digital takes place in a different way with screenic text than with print, and these differences turn out to be important for human perception. With present-day screens, reading speed on screen is typically about one-sixth that with print. Although the factors causing this difference are not well understood, they undoubtedly have something to do with the dynamic nature of screen images. Text on screen is produced through complex internal processes that make every word also a dynamic image, every discrete letter a continuous process.

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As a result of its construction as a navigable space, electronic hypertext is intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print texts.

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Here is Blackstone's assessment: "Style and sentiment are the essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its identity. The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance" (qtd. in Rose 89).

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Thus a hierarchy of values emerged which placed at the ascendant end of the scale the disembodied, the creative, the masculine, and the writer who worked for glory; at the lower end of the scale were the embodied, the repetitive, the feminine, and the writer who worked for money.

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As Rose makes clear, it was the author's style--the clothes he selected to dress his thought--that was considered most indicative of his individual personality, so style was also associated with the originality that was rapidly becoming the touchstone of literary value.

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The main components of the hypertextual corpus are "body of text," containing the female monster's narration and theoretical speculations on hypertextual and human bodies; "graveyard," where the stories of the creatures whose parts were used to make the female monster are told; "story," in which are inscribed excerpts from the relevant passages in Frankenstein along with the monster's later adventures; "journal," the putative journal of Mary Shelley, where she records her interactions with the female monster; and "crazy quilt," a section containing excerpts from Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as reinscriptions from other parts of the text.⁷

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For the female monster, it is mere common sense to say that multiple subjectivities inhabit the same body, for the different creatures from whose parts she is made retain their distinctive personalities, making her an assemblage rather than a unified self.

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The body is a patchwork," Jackson remarks, "though the stitches might not show. It's run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can't really call human, but which have what look like lives of a sort... [These parts] are certainly not what we think of as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the brain

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The movement out of the flat plane evokes the hypertext's stacks, which suggest through their placement a three-dimensional depth to the screen and a corresponding ability to emerge from the depths or recede into them.

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Like the hypertext stacks, the monster will not be content to reside quiescent on the page, moving fluidly between the world represented on the pages of Mary Shelley's text and the three-dimensional world in which Mary Shelley lives as she writes this text.

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metalepsis, the merging of diegetic levels that normally would be kept distinct.⁸ It signals the dangerous potential of the monstrous text/body to disrupt traditional boundaries in a border war where the stakes are human identity.

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we enter these textual blocks through a bodily image, implying that the text lies within the represented body

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Here, however, the body is figured not as the product of the immaterial work but a portal to it, thus inverting the usual hierarchy that puts mind first.

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The transformation of the text from durable inscription into what I have elsewhere called a flickering signifier means that it is mutable in ways that print is not, and this mutability serves as a visible mark of the multiple levels of encoding/decoding intervening between user and text (Hayles, "Virtual Bodies").

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The fact that this sewing takes place within the fiction makes Mary Shelley a character written by Shelley Jackson rather than an author who herself writes. This situation becomes more complex when Mary Shelley is shown both to sew and write the monster, further entangling fiction and metafiction. "I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight," Mary Shelley narrates, "until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt" (journal/written).

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The surface of the text-as-image may look solid, this passage suggests, but the "vaporous machinery" generating it marks that solidity with the mutability and distributed cognition characteristic of flickering signifiers.

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In one of the fiction's climactic scenes, Mary and the monster, having become lovers and grown physically intimate with each other's bodies, decide to swap patches of skin.

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As the narrator notes, this body/writing analogy allowed rhetoricians to conclude that writing was bad if it resembled a disproportioned or grotesque body. But the analogy was to go only so far; writing was not actually to become the body.

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Joseph Addison found any writing distasteful that was configured in the shape of the object it represented, such as George Herbert's poem "Wings," printed to resemble the shape of wings.

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this hypertext, like the monster's body, hints that it is most itself in the links and seams that join one part to another.

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It is primarily through the complex enactment of linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies, readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author's unique genius, it self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions, from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between the monster "herself," Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the computer, and other more shadowy actors as well.

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It is primarily through the complex enactment of linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed cognitive environment in which the text is read, that Patchwork Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century debates over copyright. Instead of an immaterial work, this text foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies, readerly bodies, and the writing technologies that produce and connect them. Instead of valorizing originality, it produces itself and its characters through acts of appropriation and transformation that imply writing and subjectivity are always patchwork quilts of reinscription and innovation. Rejecting the notion of an author's unique genius, it self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions, from the monster as assemblage to the distribution of authorship between the monster "herself," Mary Shelley, Shelley Jackson, the reader, the computer, and other more shadowy actors as well.

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Since the past and the future can be played out in any number of ways, the present moment, the lexia we are reading right now, carries an unusually intense sense of presence, all the more so because it is a smaller unit of narration than normally constitutes an episode.

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Part of the monstrosity, then, is this mingling of the subjectivity we attribute to characters, authors, and ourselves as readers, with the non-anthropomorphic actions of the computer program. This aspect of the text's monstrous hybridity is most apparent in "Crazy Quilt," where excerpts from Frank Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz increasingly intermingle with other sections of the hypertext and with the instructions from the Storyspace manual.

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"Our sense of who we are is mostly made up of what we remember being. We are who we were; we are made up of memories." But each of us also holds in her mind experiences she has forgotten. Do these memories, the monstrous Anthony speculates, cohere to make another subject, mutually exclusive to the subject constituted through the memories one remembers? If so, "within each of you there is at least one other entirely different you, made up of all you've forgotten... More accurately, there are many other you's, each a different combination of memories. These people exist. They are complete, if not exactly present, lying in potential in the buried places in the brain"

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ane Yellowlees Douglas, writing on Michael Joyce's hypertext fiction Afternoon, suggests that closure is achieved not when all the lexias have been read, but when the reader learns enough about the central mystery to believe she understands it.

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Why do we talk and write incessantly about the "text," a term that obscures differences between technologies of production and implicitly promotes the work as an immaterial construct? Why do we continue to talk about the signifier as if it were a flat mark with no internal structure, when the coding chains of the digital computer operate in a completely different fashion? Why do our discussions of reading and writing largely focus on the author and reader, ignoring the cognitively sophisticated actions of intelligent machines that are active participants in the construction of meaning?

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