Shelley Jackson - Mind-blowing derangement of the senses and a cool display of carefully calibrated literary pyrotechnics

Shelley Jackson, Half Life (HarperCollins, 2006)

"Shelley Jackson's Half Life is a dazzling and amazing book - the first print novel by the author of the hypertext fictions Patchwork Girl and My Body, the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, and the short story "Skin," which is being tattooed one word at a time on the skin of volunteers. Half Life is ostensibly, or overtly, about a pair of conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche Olney, who have separate heads but share a single torso and set of limbs. "Twofers," as they are known, are common in the world of the novel (which in other respects is naturalistically depicted, and indistinguishable from our own). The twofers have been born in great numbers ever since the mid-20th century; they seem to be the result of mutations caused by nuclear radiation. (The novel describes the desert of Nevada, where in fact nuclear tests were frequently carried out in the 1950s and afterwards, as the "National Penitence Ground" - in this account, the US Government staged explosions, destroying simulacra of American houses and towns, as expressions of guilt and remorse for Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Twofers or conjoined twins are sufficiently present and visible that they form a distinct minority group, demanding civil rights and proclaiming pride in their identities - San Francisco, in particular, is a haven for twofers, just as it is in actuality for gays and lesbians.
Half Life is narrated (or, more accurately, written, since the process of writing the text we read is itself narrated within that text) by Nora, who feels alienated both from the twofer community, and from "singleton" (i.e. "normal," unicephalous) society. Her twin, Blanche, has been asleep since childhood (since puberty? this is hinted but not made entirely clear), leaving Nora in sole control of their joint body. But now Blanche shows signs of awakening, and this puts Nora into a panic. She seeks out the shadowy "Unity Foundation," an illicit organization that apparently offers to cut off one of a twofer's heads, thereby restoring the body to singleton normativeness. The narrative follows a double track in alternating chapters: on the one hand, Nora's account of her quest to rid herself once and forever of Blanche; on the other, the story of Nora's and into silence.
Nothing quite goes the way we expect; but plot is not really the point of the novel. It is long (437 dense pages) and expansive; and I found it so absorbing that, when I was done, I only wished it were even longer. Despite the outrageous premise, the surfaces of life (both physical and social-cultural) are naturalistically depicted; the streets of San Francisco and London, and (as far as I could tell) the deserts of Nevada are all recognizably rendered, in loving detail. This is not to say, however, that Half Life in any way resembles either mainstream naturalistic fiction, or the sort of "world-building" fantasy that seeks to create an alternative world as rich and consistent as possible. Rather, Jackson creates a text in which ontological distinctions are abolished. There is no opposition here between the real and the fantastic, between actuality and mere possibility,between fact and fiction, or - most important of all - between language as a description of some extralinguistic real, and language as a dense, reflexive medium that performs and produces itself, rather than referring to anything outside itself.
That is to say, the novel is "postmodern" in the quite literal sense (rather than in the more prevalent extended senses of the word "postmodern") that it doesn't reject these modernist distinctions, nor take one side of them against the other, but rather subsumes them all into itself, and speaks unresolvable multiplicities with one voice - what Deleuze calls the "univocity" of being. We move, in a single paragraph, from, say, a description of London streets, or of the rocks and sparse vegetation of the desert, to a description of twofer anatomy or psychology, to pure linguistic play, to outright, florid hallucination: and none of these is marked out from the others, they all share the same degree of actuality and presence within the world or body of the text.
Half Life is filled - as indeed Jackson's earlier writings were also - with such peculiar objects as dolls and dollhouses, automatons, prosthetic limbs (including prosthetic heads!), and "medical curiosities" and "freaks of nature" (like the two-headed animals and deformed fetuses on display in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, described at great length in the novel). But there is really nothing "perverse" or willfully weird and shocking (a la the "freakshow" films and documentaries which seem almost timelessly popular) about all these - I hesitate even to call them obsessions on the author's part. Because Jackson so powerfully suggests that these strange objects are not exceptions to some pre-assumed "normality," so much as they are themselves constitutive of what we blindly take for granted as "normal." The uncanny strangeness of dolls and automata and freaks - and, in Half Life, of twofers themselves - comes not from their being exceptional, or alien to "us" (however we use the category of we/us), but precisely from being so intimately close and recognizable to "us" - they cause the recognition that the "normal" singleton state - or the state of being hetero-sexual, or male, or white, or whatever else is socially dominant and thought of, by those who fit into these categories, as "normal" - is itself as much a contingency, as arbitrary and "accidental," as inessential, as the "freaks" themselves are, or as anything else. Hierarchy unravels, not only in language (which we post-deconstructionists know to be slippery and unreliable), but in the depths of the body, in "nature," as well.
Part of the novel's univocity is that it theorizes its own allegories and metaphors, without these theoretical suggestions being anything like a master key to the rest of the book - the theories are on the same level as the narrated events and bodies and languages that they theorize. There is much about "transitional objects" (a psychoanalytic term originally from Winnicott - 136) that mediate the exchanges between Self and Other, or Self and World, and whose very presence ought to remind us that Self/Other or Self/World are not resolutely opposed categories,but ones that have overlaps and very leaky boundaries. Half Life also plays at great length with a quasi-poststructuralist theory based on Venn diagrams (those pictures of two overlapping circles, in which the logical relations between two realms - exclusion, inclusion, union, separation - or, the logical operators NOT,OR, AND, and XOR (exclusive or) - are mapped out. The diagrams represent the relation between the two individuals (or the two heads) of a twofer; but we are told repeatedly that such multiplicities - disunities of the self, or overlapping selves and others - are basic to all selves, those of singletons (with or without twins, with or without sibilings) as much as they are to those of conjoined twins. In this way, Half Life's conjoined twins, and specifically the narrator(s) Nora and Blanche, are metaphors for selfhood or subjectivity in general - which is never unified but always sundered, and which is always somewhat fictive, but never able to be definitively discarded. "A cleft passes through the center of things, things that do not exist except in their twinship. That cleft is what we sometimes call I. It has no more substance than the slash between either and or". The slash, the cleft, is barely there; but it is a material presence nonetheless, albeit a rather minimal one. This slash or cleft is something that happens in language, Jackson (or Nora) says, in the doubleness, or the gap, between actual events and their telling. But it is also something that happens in the body, in the foldings of our flesh and viscera, and in the detours and delays of chemical-electrical signals coursing through our neurons. (The subject-as-gap, located in language, sounds rather Lacanian. But this gap is also something physical and visceral,a material barrier and membrane, a physical experience and limit, rather than a "lack"). Another way to put this is to say that, for Jackson, language and body are two sides of the same thing (two sides of a Moebius strip?). The pleasure of reading Half Life comes largely from its playful and extravagant language - a writing that couldn't be further removed from naturalism. In a blurb on the rear jacket of the book, Jonathan Lethem (rightly) praises Jackson's "Nabakovian verbal fireworks"; but in fact, her prose reminded me as much of Lewis Carroll as it did of Nabokov. There's a Carrollian air of gleefully demented logic running throughout, alongside a very modernist/postmodernist metaphorical extravagance. The book is actually quite hilarious, page by page - even as its subject matter mostly involves morbidity, alienation, and a certain inexpugnable sadness.
It is important to note, therefore, that Jackson's prose style is not just self-referential; her metaphors are not just metaphors; even as Nora and Blanche, or conjoined twins more generally, are not just metaphors for (singleton) subjectivity and self-consciousness. For Half Life determinedly literalizes its own lingustic and conceptual extravagances ("literalizes" is not quite the right word, but I cannot think of a better one). Its metaphors and its characters and its situations have to be taken as absolutely given, in the same way as the cleft of subjectivity has to be taken as something inscribed in the body, and not just in language. ("Not just" is again a wording that isn't quite right; because language also has/is a body). And the novel's conceptions and conceits are as powerful as they are because they also and simultaneously work on an affective level - this is the odd mixture (though "mixture" is once again not quite the right word, because it implies the combination of previously independent elements, whereas here the elements do not and cannot exist independently of their combination) - the mixture of gleefulness and melancholy that I have already mentioned. And also a mixture (with the same reservation about the word) of full-fledged delirium with a kind of reserve or detachment, a simultaneous participation and extreme distance. Half Life is all at once a mind-blowing derangement of the senses and a cool display of carefully calibrated literary pyrotechnics. I can only describe the affective impact of the novel (which is also its style) in the terms of these inextricable pairs of gleefulness/melancholy and delirium/cool-detachment.
For all these reasons, I don't find it in the least disappointing that Jackson has moved from "new media" like hypertext (and bodily inscription, for that matter) to the older (or supposedly "more conventional") medium of the novel. I don't see this as in any way a "retreat," but rather as another way to explore the same ramifying conjunction of flesh and language, or of desire and disappointment, or of connectedness and singularity, that has always been Jackson's subject." - Steven Shaviro

"Shelley Jackson's first novel, Patchwork Girl, reconfigured the elements of the Frankenstein myth into a postmodern mosaic. To suggest themes of fragmentation, she composed the novel in hypertext, the link-peppered interface of the Internet. Her second offering, "Skin," a story in progress, is slowly being written on the bodies of thousands of volunteers, each of whom has agreed to have a single word tattooed onto his or her person. Jackson, it seems fair to say, has so far been perfectly happy to labor outside the boundaries of mainstream publishing culture. One can't help but suspect that her biggest fans include plenty of MFA candidates, critical-theory cultists and experimental-fiction devotees who see her as an outré heroine and who privately hope that she never gets gobbled up by the middlebrow establishment.
To those who would prefer Jackson to remain on the lofty banks of the pomo literary fringe, I've got good news and bad news. First the bad: While waiting for the ink to dry on her "Skin" project, she has produced a new novel, Half Life , that for most of its 400-plus pages is a shimmering, dazzling delight, filled with the kind of humor and poignancy that should endear her to thousands of new readers who wouldn't know Kathy Acker from Kathie Lee Gifford. The strange and often touching story of Nora Olney's quest to rid herself of her conjoined twin sister, Blanche, is surprisingly conventional by Jackson's standards. Conventional, perhaps, but never predictable: Jackson combines the imagination of a born fabulist with the wit of a born satirist, and Half Life - for a good long stretch, at least - is a thrilling novel, by turns horrific, heartfelt and hysterically funny. If, toward the end, it can't sustain the rollicking narrative momentum it has built up, Jackson has created such a vividly weird world and populated it with such memorable characters that it's pretty easy to forgive her.
Jackson's alternative universe is much like the one we inhabit now, with a few key exceptions. In it, American remorse over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has led to the creation of a postwar National Penitence Ground in eastern Nevada, a "Proving Ground of American Sadness" where a "despondent American government [has] commenced organized hostilities against itself" in the form of repeated bombings. Among the unforeseen victims of this nuclear self-flagellation are the unborn, who summarily begin appearing in greatly increased numbers as conjoined twins: two heads on a single body. Blanche and Nora Olney constitute such a "twofer," as these twins are known, and grow up in the desert playing, bickering, going to school and trying - like all kids - not to feel like total freaks.
One day Blanche falls asleep and doesn't wake up. And so the adult Nora must continue to carry around the vestiges of her sister, who is not quite dead but not quite alive, either. On the upside, Nora's second head does buy her automatic entry into the ultra-cool, politically active twofer subculture, which is headquartered - where else? - in San Francisco, the historic haven for America's marginalized communities and the city Nora calls home.
When she's not attending twofer film festivals or shopping at Twice Blessed Books, the local twofer bookstore (sample titles from the self-help section: "First Person Plural" and "Thank You for Being Me"), she's fantasizing, morbidly and very privately, about cutting off Blanche's head and starting fresh as a singleton. Such a course of action, however, in addition to being highly illegal, would break the heart of her mother, who in middle age has fallen under the spell of the "Siamystics," a twofer-inspired New Age movement. And she'd never hear the end it from her roommate and best friend, Audrey, an avant-garde filmmaker who thinks she may be a twofer trapped in a singleton's body and who is constantly chiding Nora for her lack of community involvement.
Jackson is so good at so many things that it's hard to say when she's at her best. Is it when she's poking gentle fun at the earnest pieties of identity politics? (Twofers are big on promoting solidarity through sloganeering, manifesto-writing and the like. When she's conjuring up a near-perfect simile, as she does to describe a pack of desert vultures awaiting a woman's death? (They "occupied the rocks around her, looking formal and interested, like a committee.") When she has taken off on any one of many comic flights of fancy? (A list of twofer luxury items excerpted from a Skymall catalogue - microfiber hoods, lightweight vertical pillows and the like - is so funny that it demands to be read a second and third time; it gets funnier with each reading.) Maybe it's when, with Hitchcockian flair, she's skillfully constructing the narrative platform for her suspenseful climax: Nora's trip to London, where she plans to win her own autonomy by having Blanche surgically removed at an underground clinic.
With her obvious gift for storytelling, Jackson deserves to be widely read and critically celebrated. But the good news for fans of her more esoteric work - bad news for the rest of us, I'm afraid - is that she ultimately sabotages her own novel with an ending designed, apparently, to "lift" this novel from a mere great story to a graduate seminar on identity and its erasure. After winning us over with her sharp humor and careful plotting, she flirts dangerously with pedantry and obtuseness when trying to tie things up, as if she's afraid we might not recognize the Blanche/Nora pairing as a metaphor for our own divided natures. But the self-consciously discursive ending isn't enough to ruin the whole novel. By the time things start to unravel, Half Life has already done what great fiction is supposed to do: entertain us a lot, and change us just a little." - Jeff Turrentine

"With every multiplication of the types and pains of man comes more psychology to be conquered, and Half Life's setup pretty much demands a glut of talk, mostly parodic, about identity, choice, deviancy (is it snuff porn or, simply, a way to live?), transitional objects, etc., giving it a hyperbolic, time-stamped feel. Jackson works the lingo, but the book's best and fiercest when at its most elemental. Nature/language conundrum Nora flails between extremes—twofer-pride terrorists the Togetherists and elimination proponents Unity, who liken the word and to a venereal disease—but her anxieties are refreshingly unsophisticated, perhaps because literal. On couples and her "intimacy issues": "Nobody likes to watch the blending of things that should be separate. . . . Why would two people who are free to walk away stand side by side and even hold hands?" But on loneliness: "Sometimes I looked at singletons and asked myself, Were they so much happier than me? No, they did not sail their singleton boats on solo voyages and sing songs about being happy alone; they huddled together and went on short trips to familiar places and often asked one another, Do you want to come too?"
Like Jackson's other fictions, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl and story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, Half Life doesn't—can't—distinguish between the body's revulsion, its lust, and inescapably and fatefully, the grief at its loss. Men get hard-ons "running to help someone in an overturned car or even driving by some horrible sight"; Nora gets wet as she walks to meet Dr. Decapitate. Campily improper and good fun until it's serious, Jackson's new-age western returns for a last act to the empty bluffs of Too Bad, Nevada (San Francisco proves overlenient; London's like slasher Shakespeare with demented twins coming out of the woodwork). In a scene that feels old as dust, as if glimpsed from some lost reel of the motion pictures, the heroine staggers blindly through the desert, having carved two holes into a dollhouse's hinged halves to wear on her heads. When she says, for the first time, "I was alone in the room," it's a heart-stopping sentence that somehow achieves the opposite of the problem of oneness that is existential literature's bread, and is every bit as terrifying.
Give us comedy, gentle and ridiculous—but at this point, late in the game, retreating to that land where heads knock like castanets in swerving taxicabs, Jackson suggests, would be as impossible as re-entering the womb." - Phyllis Fong

“You know, a blurry identity isn’t as rare in nature as you seem to think,” a friend tells Nora Gray Olney, the fiercely independent 28-eight-year-old bisexual narrator of Shelley Jackson’s brilliantly crazed first novel. “In fact, it’s practically the norm”. Much to her chagrin, Nora understands this as well as anyone: she forms half a set of conjoined twins. The other half, Blanche, fell into a perpetual slumber as the result of a childhood trauma, and Nora, who even in the best of times thinks of her sibling as an unnecessary growth, wants nothing to do with her. Citing “irreconcilable differences,” Nora seeks a divorce by decapitation, although she is fully aware this means “that the removed twin will be in a condition nonconductive to life”. In Jackson’s mordant alternate universe—a veritable Siamese doppelganger of our own—this situation turns out to be less odd than it at first sounds. Within six years of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a glum U.S. government, “recognizing the need for a national activity of penance…, had begun bombing itself”, thereby giving birth to the Age of American Sadness. The consequence of the fallout from those nuclear tests is a proliferation of “twofers,” and a culture of liberation surrounding them replete with pride parades, political pamphlets, and such radical organizations as the Togetherists, a new-agey gang that believes conjoined twins signify a post-narcissistic step in our species’ spiritual evolution. Half Life takes the shape of a postmodern parable that explores the body as an unmanageable, amorphous text, and goes on to suggest that every quest for stable identity (or any sort of stable meaning) will fail in the face of an existence that remains wonderfully—if maddeningly, perilously—multiple, fragmented, tenuous, changeable. The “I,” Nora concludes, possesses “no more substance than the slash between either and or”. For her, the world is all both/and. Although Jackson spoofs theoretical gymnastics throughout her novel, Half Life is clearly a theory-savvy book informed by, among others, Derrida’s notion of différance, which holds that at the heart of existence beats, not steady, definable essence, but continual deferral and divergence. Unfortunately, the last fifth of the book strains. Its structure sags and goes baggy. Its pace slows to a shuffle. Even its usually gorgeous language flags for patches. But, in light of the rest, these amount to small quibbles. Comic, smart, and gifted, Half Life is a beautiful investigation into the nature of selfhood and the aesthetics of illuminating unease." - Lance Olsen

Shelley Jackson, The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor Books, 2002).

"The extraordinarily bizarre fever-dream worlds Shelley Jackson imagines in her first fiction collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, are swamped with suet, blood, gametes, guts, malignancy, and the odd sex machine. A town on the Great Plains, for instance, is surrounded by fields of nerves that are harvested like wheat and made into nerve dolls and nerve guitars. An old woman tells her chronicler about the long-ago days when she worked with gigantic tampons as a swabber in the pipes below London through which the city's menstrual flow seeped once a month. In a litany of the kinds and qualities of slumber, a narrator reports how sleep on occasion falls from the sky as a golden rain, on occasion as snow, on occasion as warm dry crumbs, and how, if one wishes to abandon one's current life, one can always mold a substitute for oneself from the stuff of sleep and leave it in one's place; politicians, it turns out, do this all the time.
Reading these stories, one is reminded again and again of the logic of strangeness that shapes Kafka's narrative dimensions, before which his characters evince slight yet persistent perplexity and sadness. The odd, the outré, the outrageous have always-already erupted in our lives without warning; this is the given. Radical metamorphosis has become commonplace. The rest is reaction. One is reminded as well of Calvino's sparkling imagination and his child-like astonishment before the physics of existence and narratology in such works as Cosmicomics -- although in place of Calvino's cool, theoretically angular constructions Jackson provides warm, damp, corporeally amorphous ones. "I am interested in writing that verges on nonsense, where nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the superfluity of it," she asserts in "Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl," her well-known critifictional meditation on the body, femininity, and hypertext. "I would like to sneak as close to that limit as possible without reaching it. This is the old kind of interactive writing: writing so dense or so slippery that the mind must do a dance to keep a grip on it". It is no wonder, then, that her rich, textured language of defamiliarization harmonizes well with Ben Marcus's (she in fact winks in his direction here both by naming him and by echoing his diction and signature disruptions in a long Marcusian passage on "phlegm energy"), or that her literary parentage includes genetic traces of Barthelme's dislocated comedy and the ominous absurdities of Angela Carter's fractured fairytales.
Placing Jackson in such company may seem too brawny an evaluative gesture by half, but I'm confident this is not the case. Her remarkable work not only harmonizes admirably with that lineage, but it also self-consciously grows out of and carries on a flourishing conversation with it. Each of her playful and disquieting fictions - often each paragraph within each fiction - reveals a fresh and starling sense of what story can be. Each, that is, embraces the notion of what Jackson in "Stitch Bitch" calls "disrespectful texts": writing that through the use of skeptical humor, linguistic and structural disorientation, and impurity of form "staggers off the straight and narrow" and thereby "loosens the categories". While nowadays these traits seem the sine qua non of hypertextuality, Jackson has been quick to point out from early on that "some of the best writing in print" has always possessed them . In "Women and Technology, Beyond the Binary," an electronic roundtable discussion in which she participated, Jackson specifically pays homage ("nervously") to the modernist avant-garde in the figures of Joyce, Stein, Woolf, and a "handful of so-called postmodern innovators" who make merry with what she describes as "a proliferation of grammars" designed to continually rethink narrativity in diverse ways.
Viewing "Stitch Bitch" through the lens of The Melancholy of Anatomy, one is quickly tempted to say that the former was never really a theoretical celebration of hypertext at all. Instead, in hindsight, it increasingly appears to have been an autobiographical celebration of the transgressive, the nonlinear, the innovative, the oppositional, and the feminine that has formed a permanent Frankensteinian impulse in fiction's historical dynamics. Apologists' often charged rhetoric notwithstanding, hypertext is therefore simply a fairly recent but by no means wholly unique iteration of that impulse - a lovely emblem of which is the chivalrous, restless, and extremely strong foetus that literally floats into a town one day and renovates it in one of The Melancholy of Anatomy 's most engaging pieces. Each citizen reads the foetus's arrival differently from his or her peers, each is challenged by it in a singular fashion, and each is changed, some for the better, some for the worse, some for a little of both. The foetus becomes a new religion for some, while for others it becomes the manifestation of love, while for still others it becomes a means toward having more intense sex. In each case, however, one's engagement with the foetus - as well as with Jackson's story about the foetus - is transformative:
The foetus is made of something like our flesh, but not the same, it is a sort of über flesh, rife with potentialities (for the foetus is, of course, incomplete - always; unfinished - perpetually), it is malleable beyond our understanding, hence unutterably tender, yet also resilient.
"I think in things," Jackson once told Mark Amerika in an interview. "Complicated ideas come to me in flesh, concrete metaphor with color, heft, stink." Representative of this turn of imagination, the foetus is a metaphorization of foetal fiction. Both are reminders that, as the narrator of another story in Jackson's collection realizes, "This is the real world.... Pay more attention to it". Both engender possibility spaces that urge us to take notice of and wonder and question and enjoy and find ourselves unsettled by the opulent oddness of things, to think about how we read, how and why we make meaning.
What ultimately separates Jackson's art from the art of those I mentioned above, of course, is its abiding fascination with the body. In the brief autobiographical sketch included in the Anchor Books PR package for The Melancholy of Anatomy, Jackson mentions that she became interested in the human form as early as a life drawing class she took while an undergraduate at Stanford: "My drawings were of bodies falling through space; the mood was apocalyptic." Soon the falling bodies became exploding ones; the mood modulated from apocalyptic into "cheerfully macabre, even funny":
In the confluence of the comic and the grisly in these drawings, more than in my early writings, I can see the origins of the work I'm doing now. It also occurs to me that those gaily exploding bodies are the first appearance of the "body in pieces" theme I'm still exploring years later in The Melancholy of Anatomy.
The "body in pieces" theme also informs her two major hypertext projects. In Patchwork Girl (1995), among a handful of the most successful and powerful expressions of disk-based narrative to date, Jackson appropriates, collages, and manipulates Shelley's Frankenstein and L. Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz, as well as various imagined and theoretical texts, to suggest through the extended metaphor of flesh-book bricolage that "all bodies are written bodies, all lives pieces of writing." The consequence italicizes the fact that, as Hayles argues in her essay on Jackson's work, any attempt "to achieve unity (that never was) results in confusion worse than accepting the human condition as multiple, fragmented, chimerical." Both gender and identity enter the realm of what Hayles calls the "flickering signifier" (How We Became Posthuman), a post-Saussurian, deeply Derridean region where randomness and uncertainty -- along with the sense of extreme mutation such notions house - shape the Ovidian nature of signifying systems. Jackson recapitulates these thematics in her web-based hypertext, My Body (1997), where a sketchy diagram of a segmented female form opens onto narraticules of memoir, critifictional meditation, and imagination.
Jackson has been especially interested in the (frequently female) body as a site of monstrosity: sometimes liberating, sometimes devastating, usually some complex and forever-shifting combination of the two. But this inclination has never been so pronounced as it is in The Melancholy of Anatomy. If in Patchwork Girl and My Body Jackson used hypertext's ability to emphasize in literal ways the reality of cleaving subjectivities and the body's existence as culturally constructed crazy-quilt text, here she uses the (relatively speaking, needless to say) concatenated monoplot inherent in print narrative to explore the body as a locus of continual imperfection - not in order to diminish it, but in order to more fully understand and appreciate it, take pleasure in its possibilities for sorrow, amusement, and even enjoyment. For Jackson, as for the protagonist of one of her fictions, "all attempts at perfection are destructive". The well-made body, the well-made self, and the well-made plot are rigid dead zones whose artificial formations imply stasis, circumscription, and the failure of creative freedom. The engaging and the invigorating discover their source in the contaminated, the infected, the mongrel, the ill-defined, the unhygienic, the grotesque, the interstitial, the gigantic, the invasive, the gothic, the gooey. Jackson affirms the freakish because for her freaks are the real survivors in evolutionary, gender, and narratological terms.
If in her hypertexts she investigated the enclosed spaces of the jerry-rigged body, here it is as if the body's poorly sealed seams have split open and the body itself ruptured, its unclean contents - "teeming with life, rich with invention and innovation" - spilling out to embody the world like those comic, grisly, exploding human forms in her early drawings. Black hearts bigger than planets "absorb light, hope, and dust particles, ...[and] eat comets and space probes". After a painful breakup, an anguished woman allows the fat that naturally grows on walls and furniture in her cosmos to amass until she is swimming through the yellowish ooze like an insect in hardening amber. One Thursday, cancer appears drifting in the middle of an old man's living room, "barely visible, a pink fizz, a bloodshot spot of air". It begins growing, and it doesn't stop until it has inundated the protagonist's house and flooded into his yard, its deathly fecundity all the while somehow mysteriously linked to the little girl undergoing chemo next door. A thirty-six-year-old lesbian named Imogen notices a red speck in the corner of her eye and dabs it free with a Kleenex. The speck turns out to be an egg, and the egg, like that cancer, begins to grow. When it begins to attract insects, Imogen hauls it out into the backyard. When it becomes almost as large as she is, she forces herself into it, swimming toward what she hopes will be revelation and psychological revolution--but no such luck. Characters in the world according to Jackson will never locate epiphany or resolution. Their off-kilter existences are about getting on, about continuously adapting to the intricate algebra of change.
These narratives of embodiment slant-rhyme with those of Kathy Acker in Blood and Guts in High School, Bob Flanagan in Sick, David Lynch in Eraserhead, and David Cronenberg in Naked Lunch - and yet there is something existentially lighter about Jackson's versions. They possess a greater wry acceptance of the body and its variable leakages, a greater stylistic appreciation of the body of language. In one piece, for example, Jackson provides us with an alternate reality in which glutinous phlegm produced through a slit in one's throat has become a major form of social interaction:
Turn on the TV and you'll see politicians holding up their gummy fingers, triumphant sports stars stretching a translucent cord between their raised fists, picture-perfect parents leaning over a crib with improbably large bubbles of phlegm hanging from their faces; in tabloids pale starlets battle through green maelstroms to make Opening Night, phlegm dripping between their D-cups.
The protagonist of the piece, who produces an unfortunate excess of the stuff, is stuck caring for her grief-stricken, dull, phlegm-less father. Reminiscent of the patriarch who refuses to die even after death in Barthelme's postmodern parable, The Dead Father, this old man's lack of imagination, need for control, and aversion to the body's fluid self is his daughter's undoing--and yet the narrative's striking prose, fun with form, and resonant comic vision work as an antidote against the father's stifling drive and all it connotes.
Wonderfully varied in structure and voice, Jackson's thirteen stories (a number, by the way, that implies unlucky in-between-ness itself), reminds us over and over again, as Imogen learns by dealing with her huge egg, that we are our bodies, and that our bodies have a perpetual lesson for us: "we are built to slump, trickle, and run". For Jackson, this - along, I suspect, with the profound irony embedded in these fictions and others attempting to engage with the question of the body: that in writing one can never know the slumpy, trickly, runny thing itself, only our disembodied words and metaphors for it - is the melancholy of anatomy. But it is also anatomy's bliss." - Lance Olsen

"Avant-garde artist and author Shelley Jackson has been working on the fringes of mainstream publishing and print culture for nearly 20 years. She is the author of the seminal hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, two print books, and a short story that is currently being tattooed on volunteers, among other projects. Jackson dissects, experiments with, and reinvents ideas about Web- and print-based writing, often focusing on the role of the body and how that space is interacted with “as if each organ, fluid, and membrane... have their own agendas.” Jackson’s career is multifaceted, and she continues to branch into new directions, from static print to hypertext fiction to the literal tattooing of her writing on others.
Due to the amount of mainstream coverage it has received in the past few years, “Skin” is likely the work of Jackson’s that readers of The Quarterly Conversation are most familiar with. Called “a mortal work of art,” it is short story that is being tattooed, one word at a time, on volunteers’ bodies. By the time the project is complete, over 2,000 people will have participated in it, and only those who have a word tattooed on them, which Jackson herself assigns, will ever see a copy of the complete short story.
The project was inspired by a book tour where she scratched words on rocks and fence posts, planning to leave directions to the words online. Realizing that tattooing was already a form of “publishing” on the skin, Jackson connected the idea to her earlier concept, and soon thereafter she put out a call for volunteers in the summer of 2003. Since then over 10,000 volunteers have sent emails asking to participate. “Skin” is a truly mortal work: as participants die over the years, the story will gradually change, with no complete version ever appearing. According to Jackson, some volunteers have even come forward to ask if they could will their word to their children after they die.
Born in 1963 in the Philippines, and now a resident of Brooklyn where she teaches at the New School, Jackson is a graduate of Stanford and Brown University. While at Brown she was taught by Robert Coover and George Landow, two of the leading e-lit advocates in the university system, and it was there that she was first inspired to create hypertext fiction in 1993. During a lecture on hypertext and critical theory given by Landow—author of influential books like Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology and Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization—she began to draw “a naked woman with dotted-line scars” inside of her notebook. This drawing would be expanded eventually into what is now as the exploratory hypertext novel Patchwork Girl.
The first time I engaged with this work of Jackson’s I was reminded of Arthur Danto’s essay “A Future For Aesthetics.” Danto describes some of Robert Hooke’s engravings from the 17th century and comments on how they are an example of one of John Locke’s theories,
in that they are composed of parts which belong to the gross anatomy of more or less commonplace creatures . . . a bit from here, a bit from there, exemplifications of compound ideas fabricated of simpler elements, themselves derived from experience.
Jackson’s focus often lay on “creatures” like bras, scars, dolls, and other coming-of-age domestic or feminine objects. This is done using the memoir genre, very popular in hypertext fiction, or using semi-autobiographical writing. These creatures become the ground with which larger theoretical issues can be explored and closely examined.
Finished in 1995, Patchwork Girl remains Jackson’s best-known e-lit work. Called “important and impressive” by e-lit scholar N. Katherine Hayles, this hypertext fiction reimagines Mary Shelley’s science fiction novel Frankenstein for the Internet age. Combining text from Shelley’s original novel, the writing of L. Frank Baum, and theoretical inspiration from Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and the cyborg manifesto of Donna Haraway, Jackson’s work allows the female companion in Mary Shelley’s famous book to displace Victor Frankenstein as the protagonist, even though in the original story she was torn to bits by Dr. Frankenstein when he imagined his creations reproducing. The companion is rebuilt by Shelley, who then begins an affair with the monster. Jackson writes of the female companion that her “birth takes place more than once. In the plea of a bygone monster; from a muddy hole by corpse-light; under the needle, and under the pen.” She is Shelley (Mary), (Shelley) Jackson, and (Shelley) (Shelley) all at once.
Notable in Patchwork Girl is the running visual and textual metaphor that uses the idea of a stitched-together female body to question ideas about gender and identity. This is a perfect text for such explorations, since in Frankenstein almost every woman dies, whereas the monster is put together and lives. In her creative response to the original, Jackson uses the map of the body as a metaphor for the subjective impression of culture on an individual’s identity. Much like hypertext itself, Patchwork Girl pieces together different texts to create the geographical—but also ideological—space within which the novel resides. This identity is never fixed; rather it is built on what is appropriate as the reader navigates the work.
The narrative and structure are broken into five separate segments for readers to explore, and they brings up feminist concerns, theoretical discussions about authorship, and other issues as readers navigate through the text. “Body of Text” focuses on the monster’s narration and theoretical concerns. “Graveyard” tells the story of those whose parts make up the creature. “Story” includes annotated passages from Shelley’s original text. “Journal” is exactly that, a journal Shelley keeps about her time with the monster. And finally, “Crazy Quilt” contains excerpts from Baum’s “Patchwork Girl of Oz.”
The monster in Patchwork Girl observes that her scars are “the nearest thing to a bit of my own flesh . . . a place where disparate things are joined in a way that was my own.” Via the medium of hypertext links, the relationship that language has with the body—epitomized here by the scars—is given a much more literal metaphorical presentation by Jackson. This “metaphor for the ruptured, discontinuous, space of the hypertext,” as Hayles puts it, reveals the text as a place where postmodern meta characterization clashes and collides with Victorian fiction. Here, the text and body of the monster become a geographic space that comments on both the restrictive, and liberating, aspects of these spaces. Hayles argues later that readers free the text because their link clicking decisions allow the entire work to be a gigantic scar, perhaps a play on Victorian ideas of the text as real estate—or the mammoth castles of the Gothic—where Shelley and Jackson come together and overlap.
Jackson has also written hypertext novels for the World Wide Web. Most prominent amongst those is 1997’s hypertext novel My Body, which merges autobiography, mapped illustrations, and hypertext links. Similar to Patchwork Girl, My Body maps out a body for readers to click through as they read the text. For example, clicking on the hyperlinked illustration “breasts” leads to a long string of text (called a “lexia” in hypertext-speak) filled with many clickable links discussing a young woman’s development:
But the arrival of breasts was traumatic. A few months before they showed up I swam in the river in my cut-offs with no shirt on and nobody cared. Then the area around my nipples began to ache and swell, and my mother gently suggested I keep my shirt on. That summer I was spending a lot of time in a tree house a few blocks from home, over the wall at the back of the parking lot behind the church. One day I needed something, string or wire or a knife, and I started running home. I had to stop; my breasts hurt with every step. I couldn’t run without pressing my forearms to my chest.
To the right of this lexia is a Jackson illustration of a very sensitive looking pair of nipples. Much like Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls and other hypertext memoirs, My Body “an autobiography, plus lies” uses autobiography to consider issues of identity, sexuality, and memory.
The Doll Games, written with Jackson’s sister, Pamela, explores the role of dolls in girls’ development. The work is broken up into 11 sections, each of which offers encyclopedic information about the subject of the section. For example, clicking on “artifacts” leads to a long list of doll accessories, children’s toys, and other ephemera from childhood. The entry for “padded bra” offers a glimpse into the narrative world of The Doll Games, a world:
of molded white gum adhesive covered in white medical gauze, with straps of yellow telephone wire. The practice of building prosthetic breasts and penises out of clay probably arose in response to the needs of the “sexy” games of the early late classical period, rather than out of a more general concern with anatomical correctness. Either way, clay parts were nearly universal in the later Doll Games, as no male doll was originally endowed with a penis, and female leads Aina, Mara and Melanie had the smooth torsos of the pre-adolescent Skipper and Fluff. This removable prosthesis is particularly interesting for the way it highlights the fundamentally theatrical nature of gender, which like this breast-laden bra can be donned or discarded at the dictates of desire and story line.
Unlike previous works that contained numerous hyperlinked lexias that led to other lexias, The Doll Games contains some hyperlinks, but also photos. For instance, clicking on “padded bra” leads to a picture of a doll wearing a padded bra like the one described in the entry.
It is interesting to note Jackson’s progression from focusing on objects like scars and bras that act on the body to actually making fiction that, as a tattoo, acts on the body. This progression makes sense given that literature can, and should, not only leave the bounded text and find a home on the electronic screen but also become immersed in the world around us. “Skin” is one of what New Media theorist Jill Walker-Rettberg has termed “Distributed Narratives,” narratives that “send fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.” 2 These narratives include sticker novels, online games such as Online Caroline, which allows users to interact via email and video with a fictional character being manipulated by a corporation, and writing on the body like “Skin.”
Like her mentor Coover, Jackson has a foot placed in both the print and electronic literary worlds. As Coover transitioned from the static world of print to the more fluid world of electronic literature, Jackson has gone in the opposite direction, publishing two novels with major New York presses after these e-lit pieces. The most prominent of these printed novels is 2006’s Half Life; compared to works by Borges and Nabokov, it tells the story of a conjoined twin, Nora, whose sister, Blanche, has been comatose for fifteen years. Due to radioactive fallout this has become very common; growing remorse over the American destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II has led to the United States repeatedly bombing itself in Nevada starting in 1951.
This fallout leads to an increased amount of conjoined twins, known as “twofers.” Nora has been carrying around Blanche, who is in a sort of persistent vegetable state, for fifteen years while living in San Francisco, where the twofer subculture has become very prominent. Likewise, Nora’s mother is involved with a twofer religious movement. Even Audrey, Nora’s roommate, believes she is a twofer in a “singleton’s” body. After traveling to the United Kingdom to have Blanche removed (an act that kills her), Nora finds that her body begins to act out beyond her control. This leads her to believe that Blanche may be trying to communicate with her from the beyond. Like Doll Games, there are numerous encyclopedic entries including a reference manual for Siamese twins, which includes numerous definitions, catalogs, and information about twofer fetishes.
Half Life is a mostly straightforward novel that has some aspects and influences from Jackson’s previous electronic writing. Between some chapters are entries from “Siamese Twin Reference Manual,” which take on the form of lists, definitions, or encyclopedic entries. The novel moves linearly as characters are introduced and Nora’s story progresses, although Patchwork Girl is recalled in the numerous references to Lacan. Blanche’s acting out and going out of control is similar to the protagonist’s breast development in My Body and the unruliness of distributed narratives like “Skin,” which take writing outside of the book and bring them into the world surrounding us. Radioactivity literally acts on the body in Half Life, causing it to change and mutate much as tattoos change and rewrite the body. Though the book isn’t all that hypertextual, it is highly influenced by the ideas and themes that Jackson has approached previously, and given its acquisition by a mainstream publisher and coverage in mainstream papers, Half Life demonstrates that the aesthetics of electronic literature can potentially crossover into popular culture.
Shelley Jackson has had a multifaceted career that has taken her along the intersections of print and electronic literature, the avant-garde, and into new experimental forms of publishing. She’s influenced an entire generation of electronic writers who continue to dissect and reinvent previous assumptions about the Web, print, and beyond. Among those works influenced by Jackson is Implementation, a work on fiction written on stickers. Implementation, currently being prepared for publication as a coffeetable book, was written in 2004 by Scott Rettberg and Nick Montfort, two of the most prominent authors and theorists of electronic literature. The work was produced in eight installments, each consisting of three sheets of Avery office stickers. Readers were told to print their own copies of the stickers and place them in the outside world, documenting them via photos. Readers then submitted their photos to the Implementation website (nickm.com/implementation) where Rettberg and Montfort curated the photos. Implementation made an important leap off of the Internet, where both Rettberg and Montfort had written hypertext novels and interactive fiction previously, and immersed their literature in the world around them. As a participant in Implementation, I found my own campus flooded by these stickers. Some were placed haphazardly, others used the lexia on the sticker to comment on what it was adhered to. By taking literature off of the screen, the entire world becomes writeable; our surroundings and bodies are a canvas to write on, adhere, and mutate.
No matter what format her writing takes on, her focus on the body continues to push the boundaries of what form literature can take on. Jackson has rewritten canonical texts, taking the crumbs that Shelley left and expanding them into their own world. She has pioneered Web-based hypertext writing, moving from more static CD-based literature to the fluid world of the Internet. Her writing has further broken away from print culture by expanding onto our bodies and into our world, always with an eye on monstrous mutations of the body, whether Patchwork Girls’ literal monster, puberty’s mutations in My Body and The Dolls Games, or the writing on the body, and entrance into the world around us, in “Skin.” Acceptance in print culture world has further mutated her own writing, as she moves from the more fluid hypertext to static print. Hopefully, whether in print or bits or ink, Jackson’s writing will mutate the reader’s expectations and give them a desire to engage with her other writing, be it on a screen, in a bound book, or on their own and other bodies." - William Patrick Wend