Mallory Blessed
12/1/09
Literature & Composition
Patchwork Girl and its Gaps, Leaps
“You won’t get where you think you’re going.” (Jackson). This is only the first sentence of the paragraph Gaps, Leaps in Shelley Jackson’s article named Stitch Bitch. This paragraph covers the feelings of how people can react to a novel in hypertext form. I personally agree with Shelley Jackson’s interpretation of a hypertext novel in that gaps are problematic and following such a difficult path and network for Patchwork Girl became problematic for me as a reader. To read a novel as a hypertext it “leaves you naked with yourself in every leap, it shows you the gamble thought is, and it invites criticism, refusal even.” (Jackson). I agree that my personal reading experience for my first hypertext, Patchwork Girl, easily became something I did not enjoy because of the gaps and leaps that Shelley Jackson speaks of in his article Stitch Bitch.
“A conventional novel is a safe ride.” (Jackson). I completely agree with Shelley Jackson in that when I am reading a regular novel I am allowed to be taken away to a place of freedom and escape into a world of the plotline and story. With a hypertext your mind is always searching and trying to find and understand the next link and part of the story. “Books are designed to keep you reading the next thing until the end, but hypertext invites choice. The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text. Who wants a numb reader/reader-by-numbers anyway? Go write your own text. Go paint a mural. You must change your life.” (Jackson). Hypertexts are a new and different way of reading a novel and because this is such a different idea many adult readers, including me cannot enjoy a hypertext novel because it is so different. A hypertext does not allow me to follow along with the story or be able to completely understand the plot as the other would like it. There are many different routes that a reader can take and try to read the novel for what it is in the form of a hypertext. But the author then loses control of what the reader actually ends up reading and how hard they try to find the story. It becomes a maze to try and find the plot or if you are reading a part of the novel and accidentally click on a different hyperlink and be taken to a completely new and different part of the novel. Then one story or part of a plot could never be read again and the reader will just continue on and stop reading an important part of the novel that could affect the future of the reader understanding the plotline. This problem of having a novel in hypertext form causes gaps and leaps in the reader’s ability to understand the plotline that the author wants to portray.
Gaps and leaps begin to plague the reader’s mind when it’s a hypertext form, the reader is easily confused by the new hyperlinks that take the reader away from the previous plot or idea that the author was speaking of. Jackson speaks of the gaps and leaps that are caused by the hypertext:
In a text like this, gaps are problematic. The mind becomes self-conscious, falters, forgets its way, might choose another way, might opt out of this text into another, might “lose the thread of the argument,” might be unconvinced. Transitional phrases smooth over gaps, even huge logical gaps, suppress contradiction, whisk you past options.
Hypertexts, like Patchwork Girl, don’t have transitional phrases or ways to allow the reader to understand the words and plotline to a full extent. Instead like in Patchwork Girl I will be reading the Journal and trying to understand the way Shelley Jackson writes the story but instead I will click on a link that will take me to another place to discuss a rock being thrown into water. The way a hypertext works is just confusing and the thought process that has to go into trying to understand a novel becomes completely different from a conventional novel. Gaps begin to fog the reader’s ability to understand the plot and what the author is trying to say and portray through the characters. Many readers of hyperlinks, like me and Patchwork Girl, do not even begin to find all the hyperlinks and links to the plot and story. I am still foggy as to what the hypertext is even about because of the gaps and leaps that the links cause.
In Jackson’s article, Stitch Bitch, Jackson speaks of how he wants his readers to be: “I want piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists, who take what they want from my ideas and knot it into their own arguments. Or even their own novels. From which, possibly, I’ll steal it back.” (Jackson). By having a novel in hypertext form it leaves a lot of room for readers to become numb to the story and give up much easier then a conventional novel. Hypertext takes more effort from readers because there is not an exact site in end and with a numb-reader comes many gaps and leaps in the reader’s knowledge. This problem is one that the author has to accept when putting their novel into a hypertext form. Readers may become bored and give up reading the hypertext and the author may never have all of his or her words read because of the hidden hyperlinks and perhaps uninterested readers. Hypertexts are filled with gaps and leaps because of the form that they are written in.
