| When I was a little girl, I used to have breath-holding contests with my friends in our neighborhood pool. We would take in as much air as possible and sit down on the pool floor in the shallow end (but away from the stairs where the babies in their swim diapers and moms in their modest skirted swim suits were) for as long as we could stand it. I don’t remember being particularly good at this game, but I do recall how delicious the air seemed when I burst out of the water and took that first breath and the air filled my lungs. | |
| If silence becomes not a void but a space that has meaning if listened to in certain ways, then the mouth opens and lets the empty silence come in and out--- traditional textual, corporeal boundaries begin to blur as the other approaches. In Patchwork Girl, Jackson opens up the notion of the subject and text. By telling her reader that she is always trying to find a way to show that every latest word I write has space for anything after it. Everything could have been different and already is (PG "a life"). The boundaries between any number of dichotomies dissolve at rather frightening rate – you can really pick any one you like, it won’t hold its own against this Stitch Bitch. She hates dignity (Baum 132). Trying to keep one’s mouth shut and keep the division between self and other hard and fast can only lead to the before-seen denied come rising again irrefutable and welcome. The pressure of what was tucked lady-like away could only build (PG "or putting myself together"). | |
| It’s even hard to say that she wrote the text "herself" with almost all of the "crazy quilt" section consisting of the snippets of other texts. Who has the authority of ownership if not the author? Also unsettling is her promiscuous willingness to allow theories of various sorts to enter into the "mixed up" "body of text." From biological theories about women’s mosaic nature to the theological discussions of fallen angels, the theory inherent in this body of text cannot be sifted out from the story because of its incorporation in the corporeal nature of the text which portrays the physical body of the patchwork girl. Furthermore, these theories insist quite loudly on the monstrously mixed nature of the women’s bodies and subjectivities: Because of her Barr bodies a female mammal is a genetic mosaic, made up of two kind of cells: those with active X #1 and those with X#2, just as a mosaic might be made up of blue and green tiles (PG "mosaic girls"). Thus here, as Katherine Hayles argues in her discussion of Patchwork Girl, the boundaries between theory and fiction blur to depict the merging of fiction and metafiction in a narrative strategy that . . . signals the dangerous potential of the monstrous text/body to disrupt traditional boundaries in a border war where the stakes are human identity (26). |
page 131 of Frank L. Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
page 33 of Frank L. Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
Even though the reader knows what theory sounds and tastes like, the integration of the fiction’s other, metafiction, into the body of text and the text of body precludes the strict identification of either fiction or metafiction because the story constructs a theory just as the theory tells a story. One of the authors of the novel has told Mark Amerika that I like to run up against the written thing, bruise myself on its edges. I like writing that’s a little hard to swallow. And I’m not impressed by the difference between theory and fiction, anyway. All ideas about reality are fictional, and some of them are beautiful, too ("Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author"). Thus the merging of fiction and metafiction in Patchwork Girl not only disturbs the serious and dignified nature of genre boundaries but also undermines the fundamental separation between fact and fiction. The Stitch Bitch notes that in her hypertext You can’t figure out what matters and what doesn’t, what’s matter and what’s void, what’s the bone and what’s the flesh, it’s all decoration or it’s a substance ("Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl"). |
| Just as Haraway argues for a new conception of identity through her hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction in her "Cyborg Manifesto," so too does the merging of fact and fiction in the patchwork girl’s body and Patchwork Girl the text create new subjectivity that subverts any notion of a closed unitary self or text (149). Just add an unusual character where you want each writing space to end, and choose EXPLODE from the menu . . . The exploded spaces are all created inside a new writing space, a very well-shaped girl, which I stuffed with cotton-wadding (PG "a single space"). Suddenly subjectivity is about the dynamic connections within the self and not presenting stable coherent identity. |
illustration for "chimera" in Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary (1984) |
from 'my body' - a Wunderkammer & (Shelley Jackson) http://www.altx.com/thebody/vagina.html |
A self so founded
upon mingling contact within difference requires a new relationship with others that
positions encounters with others as a space where lines are crossed and never redrawn in the
same way. Letting the other in, through any orifice, can have interesting effects: One
day, when I fished out the slippery wad, laid it on my desk and teased its folds open with
a pen, I noticed that some of the words seemed changed. I took the stinking page to the
library and confirmed my discovery in the echoing stacks. My vagina had rewritten Joyce.
It was then I knew I was going to be a writer (My Body "vagina").
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