A Return to Patchwork Girl
The Douglas and Hargadon essay provides a term that is useful for the discussion of Patchwork Girl. Shelley Jackson is consciously working to tweak and outright frustrate the schema we use to make sense of a narrative.
Schema of books: Books are made up of chapters are made up of paragraphs are made up of sentences are made up of written words are made up of letters are representative of phonetic sounds which make up spoken words which make up spoken sentences, etc.
We read from left to right, top to bottom, front to back (in English). “Front to back” is, in these phrases, the most illustrative of how our mode of reading imbues these terms with meaning. The front of a book written in English is the side facing the reader when the spine of the book is on the left and the writing is right side-up. That same physical side of a Hebrew book held that way, though, would be the back of the book.
When we are learning to write, we are taught a certain way to structure paragraphs (topic sentences!), to punctuate. Writing is standardized in a way that works to minimalize ambiguity. It is important that writing say exactly what it is meant to say, because in writing our words become divorced from our person. A reader may not be able to ask us to clarify a point in our writing the way they can if they hear us speak.
As I suggested in a previous post, hypertext stories require the reader to provide an order in which the narrative is read. Books provide this order (as stated above, we read them left to right, top to bottom, front to back). We read the first chapter before the second chapter. When events are read about in a story that occur chronologically before the events that preceded them narratively, we understand them to be flashbacks. They are considered a part of the same story mainly because the paratext of the book itself is a schema that suggests unity.
The physical structure of a book was cemented in place when the printing press was invented – the compartmentalized nature of pages (as opposed to, say the more fluid nature of scrolls) was necessary for mechanical reproduction (this idea is something I came across somewhere else, but I do not remember where). Until other machines like the typewriter and the computer printer came along, sheet size was limited by the size of the printing plate (the story of Kerouac typing On the Road on a scroll so as to avoid breaking his flow by having to change pages suggests an analog alternative way of doing things).
As several others have pointed out (in class and in blogs), there’s no sense of “where you are” at any given time in Patchwork Girl. This is intentional. From the “this writing” lexia:
When I open a book, I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, 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.
Why do this, though? Why break up the form of the book if it works so well in conveying a narrative? Leaving aside amorphous, though not unimportant, concepts like Patriarchy and Feminism (which I have neither the time nor the references to work with here), there are still things Patchwork Girl exposes that other texts (and their readers) must take for granted in order for the texts to make sense.
In reading, we assume that because Sentence B follows Sentence A, they are connected. Why? Because they are written that way? This isn’t necessarily the case – that’s the notion the Quilt section of Patchwork Girl explodes. Each lexia contains several sentences that seem part of a cohesive whole, but when you click on it and the font changes, the breaks are revealed. Sentences are constructed from phrases taken (or poached, if you prefer) from works written decades apart by different authors. The connection between sentences, then, comes from the order in which they are read. The structure of the text implies relation between two sentence – either because of physical proximity or because of ideas about the nature of written text shared by the writer and the reader.
It’s an extreme example that underscores the difference between writing a text and reading a text. This blog post did not spring forth from my mind in the order you are reading it – several previous paragraphs were written between my finishing this sentence and starting the next one. Narratives are everywhere – they are read, watched, experienced. Mass media provides us with hundreds of them every day. Knowing how to read these narratives is an important skill.
Learning to read is more than just learning how to spell words that are spoken. It’s about learning how to work with specific schema that both the writer and the reader understand (often unconsciously) to make meaning out of a text. The difficulty with understanding a hypertext is partially based on its different physical nature that frees it from the schema that govern books. Patchwork Girl requires a new way of reading that is related to this schema, but still different.
A problem in the adoption of hyperfiction (and video games) by a mainstream audience is this lack of standardized schema – the Storyspace Reader is different from the straight HTML navigation of Trip, which is different from the navigation around the world of Myst. In reading a book, you might not understand the written word, but the mechanics of navigating change very little from one to another (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, page-by-page, front-to-back). Once you’ve learned to turn the pages in a Dr. Seuss book, you can physically navigate most any book in the English language. This is a consistency whose absence may be one of the defining features of hyperfiction. Each text requires you to learn to read in a different way, which is not an easy thing to do if you are not used to it.