Alternative Approaches to Narrative in New Media Forms: Mapping out Narrative in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
National Communication Association, 2005
As new media emerge with developing technologies, the nature of communication takes on new forms that favor different sensory modalities than the ones employed by previously existing media. The task of meaning-making in various textualities, then, requires a media-specific analysis that explores the possibilities and the constraints of each medium in shaping texts. Marshall McLuhan characterizes the advent of the phonetic alphabet as a technology that marks a significant shift in the history of civilization. Pre-literate societies display an audile-tactile bias where experiences result in an organic whole in which multiple sensory modalities are stimulated simultaneously. The invention of the phonetic alphabet, however, has initiated a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of senses, of functions, and of operations. The neutral world of the eye, favoring linear logic that emphasizes cause and effect and hierarchical connections, has replaced the magical world of the ear which displays an interaction amongst the senses. The advent of electronic technology, due to the speed with which it can transmit information, moves us back to the auditory world of the simultaneous and over-all awareness by retranslating the fragmentation instigated by the alphabet technology into interdependence on a global scale. McLuhan contends that this retranslation back to the oral modes of perception creates confusion for the Western man who is now torn between the claims of visual and auditory cultures and structures.
I intend to demonstrate how Shelley Jackson's hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl; or a Modern Monster is a work that illustrates this anxiety that comes about as a result of the emerging communication environments in the digital age. The progress of narrative relies on the constant interplay between the audile-tactile modes of perception and the visual logic of the alphabetic era. Patchwork Girl utilizes the female body as a narrative strategy to re-tell the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. On one level, the work establishes a strong affiliation between the female monster's fragmented body and the electronic text. In this sense, the female body becomes the medium through which writing becomes the extension of the human senses. On another level, Patchwork Girl structurally recreates the fragmentation resulted during the alphabetic era by resurrecting the ideology of the print text by way of extensive borrowing from various print sources. The result is a disassembled story waiting to be restitched into a whole by the reader. Through its readings, the text is able to create multiple totalities out of the fragmentation that came about from linear and hierarchical perception that has dominated print culture. In order to reconstruct the story, the reader has to alternate between the narrative whose progression is determined by the body, and the hierarchy of the visual order introduced by the structural aids such as charts and trees which establish a meaningful connection between the lexia.
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