Richard Paez
LIT 3003: "The Forms of Narrative: Narratology of New Media"
Thursday, March 10th

Illuminations, Typographical Arrangements, and Hypertext Maps in Jackson's Patchwork Girl

More intimately and actively than in analog textual artifacts, images in digital hypertext narratives play vital roles in the reader's interaction with and understanding of the stories presented in the digital texts. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl incorporates a variety of images into its framework, both embedded within the narrative itself and parallel to the words appearing on the screen. These images take three primary forms in Jackson's text: illuminations, typographical arrangements, and hypertext maps. The illumination-type images, such as represented in the introductory node in Patchwork Girl ({her}, Figure 1), appear much like the illuminations found in traditional Books of Hours. The second type of image takes the form of typographical arrangements such as the {title page} node (which mimics the title page of Mary Shelly's original novel Frankenstein) or the {headstone} node (Figure 2, where text appears on screen in a way that mimics an actual headstone). The final and most unique form is found in the hypertext maps where the links that correspond to the reader's movements in the story are visually represented in flowchart-style arrangements of cells and lines such as the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} and {Storyspace Map: graveyard} nodes (Figures 3 and 4).

In digital hypertext narratives, the reader must click on a word, image, or in some cases, part of an image or an element of a map to "move" from one page of the text to the next. Thus, the illuminations, typographical arrangements, and hypertext maps not only perform organizational functions (such as tables of contents or indexes, which appear similar to hypertext maps) or reiterations of the story (such as those performed by illuminations in Books of Hours, which, like those in Patchwork Girl, present visual parallels to or diversions from the narration in the text) but also act as links or gateways that the reader must choose from in order to make his or her way through the narrative. By taking advantage of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of modern computers, Jackson is able to use these images to both reinforce the narrative themes of the text and to make apparent the artifice of the textual object and the reader's attempt to interact with it.

The first page that appears to the reader in Patchwork Girl is the {her} node, an illumination-type image where the main character, Her, is presented standing naked and akimbo much like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (Figure 5). Immediately, this intertextual reference calls the reader's attention to questions of the physical body and its relations to the text. Any reader who possesses a general understanding of da Vinci's studies of anatomy and of Mary Shelly's original narrative (where Dr. Frankenstein's monster is constructed of assorted parts) will be brought into Patchwork Girl's context of a patchwork, stitched-together being composing a similarly-quilted textual experience. However, the intertextual reference and inviting mathematical symmetry of Her's stance in the image are only the first layer of narrative significance. While the subject's nakedness and akimbo posture imply an invitation to examine a creature who has nothing to hide (in fact, the node's title, {her}, implies a frankness that can only be associated with forthcoming honesty) in what appears to be an autobiographical text, the window in which the image appears covers a second window (the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} node, Figure 3) that also appears when the text is "opened" (Figure 6). This not only implies that the apparently forthright Her does have something to hide (indeed, readers must perform the reading equivalent of exploratory surgery to make their way though the text), but provides a visual framework with which to interpret the image "hidden" underneath it on the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} node.

The first hypertext map encountered by the reader, the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} image reveals a narrative trope that is reiterated throughout the text. The node itself is composed of six red cells, each corresponding to a illumination-type image/node. Connected to each of these red cells are secondary black cells corresponding to map-nodes. Threading the red cells to each other and to their associated black cells are red vein-like lines. Thus when the window containing the {her} image is moved aside by the reader to reveal the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} image, with the human figure of Her available on the screen for comparison, the map in the hidden window appears much like the main arterial networks connecting organs and limbs in a human body, mimicking the human form of Her (compare Figures 1 and 3). Each cell links to an available pathway within the text and represents a part of Her's living form: the {her} cell represents the head, the {title page} cell the heart, {phrenology} and {body of text} the right arm and hand, {hercut2} and {journal} the right leg and foot, {hercut} the torso, {crazy quilt} the pelvis, {hercut3} and {story} the left leg and foot, and {hercut4} and {graveyard} the left arm and hand. Thus, the narrative thread of a body recomposed from other bodies, and the text's overall focus on the relation between bodies of text and the textuality of bodies, is emphasized by "plotting" the pathways of the narrative onto the familiar human frame.

Following the link-cell that corresponds to Her's left hand, the {graveyard} node, leads to the following invitation from Her: "I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself" (Jackson, Patchwork Girl {graveyard}). Answering Her's invitation by double-clicking within the {graveyard} cell opens the {Storyspace Map: graveyard} map, where the {headstone} node lies planted above Her's buried body parts and their corresponding cells. In this case, the cells link to Her's individual parts, with each linked node containing the embedded narrative or narratives of Her's assorted constituents. Here the collusion between the apparent arrangement of the text and the human figure of the Patchwork Girl in the opening nodes is elaborated and extrapolated further, although it is initially harder to detect. Whereas the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} node has an obvious parallel in form in the {her} node image, the {Storyspace Map: graveyard} map (Figure 4) does not at first resemble a human form, and its capstone, the {headstone} node (Figure 2), with its typographical arrangement resembling the epigraph of a literal tombstone, does not give the reader as visual a hint to the nature of its arrangement. The final line of the epigraph, "May they Rest in Piece," gives the reader the suggestion to read the {Storyspace Map: graveyard} node as a body, however, and a shift in orientation reveals that the "body" in this case is situated horizontally with the {headstone} box located above the body, the {head} to the left and the {left leg} and {right leg} nodes located on the right.

As with the correlation between the {her} node, with its representation of Her's living form, the {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} map, with its arterial connections, and the pathways made available through the map leading to the living portions of the text of Patchwork Girl, the arrangement of the {Storyspace Map: graveyard} map and the {headstone} node (see Figure 7) contribute to the narrative structure of the text by providing a visual topography with which the reader must interact to progress in the story. Her's dead and not yet reanimated parts lay in the ground waiting for the reader to dig them out so that she may tell their individual stories, after which she will be "whole" and able to proceed with the living remainder of her tale.

In the {her} and {Storyspace Map: Patchwork Girl} pair, the reciprocity between Her's living form and her living text are made tangible. In the triptych formed by the {Storyspace Map: graveyard}, {headstone}, and {graveyard} nodes (Figure 7), the dead scene of Her's parts waiting in the graveyard, their (dis)continued stories, and Her's reconstitution and reanimation are provided with a visual tope of unity before unification, sealing Her's assertion that

In the same way one could say that I existed already, before my members severed past alliances. It is merely a matter of redrawing an outline. Snaking through the space between two lives to wrap a line around some third figure. (Jackson, Patchwork Girl {already}).

Thus the two hypertext maps and their associated illumination-style or typographical images provide the reader with additional narrative information that would be difficult to produce through printed graphemes or static images. The syntheses of the modern Graphical User Interface with Patchwork Girl's narrative structure and the traversable topography of Her's human form allows Jackson to create a virtual body of text which the reader must approach intimately to engage with at all, thus making manifest in her narrative the psychic and physical intercourse readers perform with all narrative texts.

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2d ed. Totonto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Text. Ed. James Rieger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

da Vinci, Leonardo. Vitruvian Man. c. 1490.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
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