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"OF DOLLS & MONSTERS"
Rita Raley: Your manifesto, "Stitch Bitch,"reads like an ode to hypertext, with its many almost-reverential remarks on the form, particularly in contrast to print. You write: "in the no-place of hypertext, there's finally room to move around"; "I adore the book, but I don't fit into it very well"; "A conventional novel is a safe ride"; "Hypertext likes give and take, snares and grottos, nets and knots"; "Hypertext, then, is what literature has edited out: the feminine"; "Hypertext is making possible a new kind of beauty, and creating the senses to perceive it with." With these comments in mind, I would like to ask you to say something
about your forthcoming book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, specifically
with regard to the distinctions between analog and digital text, linear
text and hypertext. How do you understand hypertext vis-à-vis
print? Is it bound to a particular medium or is it a rhetorical mode
that can be produced by many different media? Shelley Jackson: In "Stitch Bitch" I was using "the book" as shorthand for "the mainstream novel" (in its most tasteful and predictable incarnation), and hypertext to mean a rhetorical mode, which has had a long though not well publicized history in print. Hypertext, as I was thinking it, embraces a whole range of works, not just the most flagrantly experimental precursors (Cortazar's read-by-numbers Hopscotch, Queneau's recombinant Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, B.S. Johnson's shuffleable The Unfortunates) but many more that have been subsumed into the evolution of the novel, but whose lineage has gotten a little lost among the hordes of identicals. I'm thinking of oddball books like Tristram Shandy or Pale Fire, but also Joyce and Woolf and Stein, who are taught but not much emulated, and all the prose experiments of poets, which are largely read by other poets but by rights should send ripples through fiction too, as well as many ostensibly non-literary works like personal dictionaries and commonplace books. Hypertext--now in the limited sense of multilinear electronic writing--seemed to me to give this variegated lineage a fresh chance, because it makes a huge range of formal devices both easy and natural. RR: Your work has always seemed in some way to bridge the realms of literature and criticism and its meta-critical aspects have received a great deal of attention, but I wonder about another linking--between art and programming. How do you understand the relations between "technical" and "creative" work? How have you arrived at the point where artistry and coding converge in a manner that suggests something beyond basic application? SJ: That's a funny question to ask me, because my programming skills are minimal. But it's a good question, because I am fascinated by the cross-fertilizations between form and content. When I first started working in electronic media, the applications all seemed fraught with metaphoric implications, which not only bled into the work I was doing but inspired it. I wouldn't have written Patchwork Girl at all if I hadn't been puzzling over hypertext in general, and I wouldn't have found the graveyard and quilt metaphors I employed in that piece nearly so ready to hand if I hadn't been using an application, Storyspace, that involved moving little rectangles around inside bigger rectangles! RR: Patchwork Girl is one of the classic works produced with Storyspace, but I see that you have migrated to other production environments. What have these new production environments and their constraints made possible? Is there a sense in which your writing (now incorporating text, image, motion) has altered in relation to these different tools and the underlying code, the technological substrate of the text? SJ: I'm still interested in the possibilities of purely textual invention in electronic media, but the web made me think about creating works that moved much more fluidly between textual and visual material. I don't think I've yet achieved the kind of gooey intermingling I've envisioned; in My Body and Doll Games the text and visuals are still compartmentalized. But I have other projects in mind that would mix art forms very insistently, and then I think I would discover that my writing had to be quite different-would have to cede much more control to the images. When I first started writing hypertext I discovered that the link was not neutral, but was itself a kind of argument, one that I should not duplicate in my prose. I had to learn to allow the link to make points that I would formerly have spelled out in words. In this sense, programming is not just a substrate but an active part of the writing. In a multimedia piece images also begin to do part of the "writing"--though it would make as much sense to say writing does some of the imagining. Mind you, this is not a new issue for me: as a children's book illustrator with a wordy bent I'm always having to remind myself how much can go unsaid. RR: In one interview about his own writing, Jacques Derrida1 speaks about the monster as that which is Other, that which surprises and frightens us because it cannot be prepared for or known in advance: "the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize. A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogeneous organisms that are grafted onto each other. This graft, this hybridization, this composition that puts heterogeneous bodies together may be called a monster. This in fact happens in certain kinds of writing. At that moment, monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is….But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it, one begins, because of the 'as such'--it is a monster as monster-to compare it to norms, to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure of the monster….However monstrous events or texts may be, from the moment they enter into culture, the movement of acculturation, precisely, of domestication, of normalization has already begun." Derrida links the monster to a text that loses its monstrosity precisely because it becomes assimilated or domesticated and thus loses its power to rupture or disrupt norms, conventions, established ways of seeing, and modes of knowledge. With respect to the figure of the monster that permeates your work, and the connections you drawn between the monster and your own writing, how is that a text may retain its power as a monster, that is, its power to disrupt and resist domestication? What role might electronic media play in this regard? SJ: A radical text can't just depict monstrosity, but must be itself monstrous. Oddly, I don't think that's too hard. All texts are monstrous, really, always more chaotic and less coherent than they pretend to be, but most writers smooth over the stitches that hold them together. I think when you as a writer don't do this--when you allow syntax to fracture, when you flaunt the bits you've cribbed from other books and let them clash with other bits, when you create unresolvable ambiguities or multiple solutions--the reader can't help feeling piqued and disoriented. Sure, someone can write a thesis about "disorientation" as the new literary value, and in this sense package it safely for the world, but I believe the actual experience of disorientation is still, well, disorienting. Electronic texts can be as predictable as any others, but the medium can support really radical kinds of indeterminacy--texts that attach themselves parasitically to other texts, that morph over time, that invade non-literary parts of your online reading, send you phony emails, or erase your hard drive. I'm not saying they should, just that they could, and wouldn't that be monstrous? RR: The fantastic monsters and "hideous progeny" in your work, particularly the game-based mutant dolls, led me to consider your interest in prostheses and the constitutive elements of the body in terms of genomics and cloning (since Doll Games and Patchwork Girl certainly both give us alternative modes of reproduction and regeneration). So, considering Patchwork Girl, Doll Games, and The Body together raises the question of the relationship of your work and thinking to ALife research, particularly since your narrative environments, or ecosystems, often feature constructed but complex and quasi-intelligent agents. Also, the thematization of the body in your work--particularly the insistence on its materiality and matter that one can see in the various prosthetics, dismembered limbs, and even the stain-suggests that you might have some difficulty with conceiving of "life" purely as "information." Do you see your work in conversation with ALife art? Do you conceive of it as participating in the evolving discursive relationship between feminism and biology and in this sense situated in opposition to what Donna Haraway and others have noted as the masculinist bias of bioculture? SJ: You say that my fascination with the materiality of the body suggests that I don't conceive of life as information. I would like to turn this thought back on itself and observe that I am obsessed with conceiving of information as material. The Melancholy of Anatomy is full of objects that are both things and nodes of information--phlegm is reinvented as a kind of medium of human relationship, the egg as an incarnation of the yearning for transcendent union. In fact I would say my whole book is a meditation on how and to what extent one can find meaning in the physical world. (Though it sounds pretty boring when I put it that way!) Whether one can think through objects. Whether the world is not itself a kind of material argument. I'm not a mystic, but my imagination is fired by, for example, the alchemists, who believed that a chemical experiment could have a spiritual solution, and vice versa--that the bible was also a lab manual. My work is not a conscious gloss on AI, but I think I am asking similar questions: what is individuality, what is will, what is intelligence? What constitutes a person? I'm fascinated with undecideables, those entities we see as both animate and inanimate: dolls, automata, wind-up toys, primitive life forms. Certainly I'm partly exploring the existential condition of the fictional character. But these preoccupations preceded my identity as a writer. RR: I am intrigued by the erotic fantasy worlds of Patchwork Girl and Doll Games: in the former even intertextuality is incestuous, and the games of the latter are really a kind of erotic theater. Could you comment on the theater, game, and performance paradigms, with respect to Doll Games and to electronic media more generally? Also, what for you is the significance of ecstasy in the context of information and techno-scientific culture? How would you position your textual and corporeal eroticism--notably articulated in relation to the past--vis-à-vis the medicalized and mediated bodies and nightmarish futures of, for example, David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway? SJ: My corporeal fantasies might look nightmarish, because they are visceral and sometimes violent, but I would emphasize their ecstatic elements. Like Cronenberg and Greenaway I do see ecstasy as potentially destructive--there is a compulsive, self-obliterating aspect to desire, which Freud would probably identify with the death drive--but for me even this is worthy of celebration. In Cronenberg the monstrous has a power to seduce its victims that destroys them and people around them, but I think this is unnerving to behold precisely because that seduction works on the viewer too. I think eros can make use of the most seemingly inhuman aspects of techno-scientific culture, and that this does not represent alienation but the incredible power of desire to make the most unfamiliar material personal. People who fear the "inhuman" in technology should trust their imaginations a little more. Email is so sexy that one might fear it would replace sex itself were it not for the fact that it has led to so much of it!
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